Vyrmin

by Gene Lazuta

  “Watch out, Daddy!” he wanted to scream. “Watch out for the bad man and the monkey! The monkey’s bad—so, so bad!”

  But instead of screaming, he listened to the crumpling of money as it was withdrawn from his father’s wallet. And the doctor’s breathy sighs. He could hear it all, but he couldn’t see any of it because he couldn’t open his eyes.

  “I gave him something to make him sleep,” the doctor said.

  “No!” the boy howled in his head—because he couldn’t move his mouth.

  “So what’s wrong with him?” his father asked. “He says he sees people die in his dreams. He says that he sees people die, and sometimes, when I look in the paper the next day, the story’s there, just like he said it’d be. What’s wrong with him, Doc? I been all over, and nobody can tell me what’s wrong with my boy!”

  “There’s nothing wrong with him,” the doctor said, and the boy protested again in his mind. “He’s perfectly normal. He has the same nightmares a lot of children his age have. People die every day. It’s inevitable that his dreams should mirror reality at least once in a while. There’s nothing unnatural, or even supernatural about it. Mr. Norris, it’s just coincidence.”

  “But tonight he dreamed that it was me that’s gonna die!” his father cut in. “He said that he saw me with my head split open!”

  “Mr. Norris, please. They’re just a little boy’s dreams,” the doctor lied, gently. “They don’t mean anything.”

  No!

  Don’t believe him!

  They mean everything!

  “Take him home,” the doctor concluded. “He’ll grow out of it. People nowadays think that doctors can cure the little inconveniences that our more primitive forebears knew were simply the unpleasant facts of life.”

  “Then I’m not going to die?” the boy’s father said, the relief almost palpable in his voice.

  “No. You’re not going to die,” the doctor promised.

  So his father scooped up the boy’s limp body, bundled him off to the car, and took him home.

  On the way, he drunkenly swerved their station wagon into the path of an oncoming truck, and died when his head hit the windshield—just as his son had dreamt he would earlier in the evening, when his terrified screams had prompted their visit to the doctor.

  The boy was unconscious when a sheriff’s deputy named Conway pulled him from the burning wreck, and he stayed that way for three days. When he awoke, he didn’t remember anything about the doctor he had seen, or his dream of his father’s death, or even why they had been out riding around at three in the morning.

  All he knew was that the people who told him that his father was dead were lying to him.

  That’s what he told his brother:

  “Dad’s not dead. Mom’s wrong.”

  His brother didn’t understand.

  And, in truth, the boy didn’t understand either. But his conviction was complete. A doctor—a psychologist—who couldn’t seem to take his eyes off his mother said that his denial of his father’s death was “natural” and that it would pass.

  But it never really did…not all of it.

  For the next twenty-five years, even after the psychologist had married his mother, he felt a nagging suspicion that his real father was waiting, out there, somewhere in the trees, for him to grow up. He was waiting, as he’d always waited, for the day that they two, father and son, would do something big…

  Something important…

  Something Wild.

  I

  HARPERSVILLE, OHIO

  1987

  ONE

  1.

  The day Sheriff H.W. Conway was summoned out to Lefty Zimmer’s farm by an urgent phone call, he thought the emergency had something to do with a “calf.”

  “I’m tellin’ ya, H.W., it’s the damnedest thing I ever seen,” was how Lefty explained it on the phone.

  “Leave it be ‘till I get there,” was the sheriff’s only reply.

  Horrence Wiggens Conway—“H.W.” to his friends, and not even his wife knew what the “W” stood for—was a fifty-two-year-old, soft-spoken, steely-eyed American institution of a walking-cliché small-town sheriff.

  At least on the outside.

  He wore his khaki uniform casually, with his shirt’s top button undone, his sunglasses dangling by one arm from his left front pocket. The well-oiled Colt .45 in his holster was the one he had carried in Korea. And when he spoke—with a southern twang that got even twangier when he was dealing with tourists—he stood with his legs crossed and his right hand resting on the weapon’s butt.

  Seeing him for the first time, strolling slowly up to the side of your car with his belly sticking out just a bit and his cowboy boots grey with road dust, it wasn’t hard to imagine him spitting chaw while he looked your northern ass up and down and wondered how much money was in your wallet…

  Which was just the reaction he was looking for.

  Why, there had actually been times when he first got on the department that he had stood in front of his bathroom mirror and practiced saying things like, “Yo in a heep’a trouble, boy,” just to perfect that vocally menacing edge that made the camper kids with their boom boxes and designer drugs piss in their fashionably ragged jeans.

  But in real life, Conway wasn’t like that at all. He was a good guy, friendly with everyone in town, looking out for folks and their property, cruising around in his big old Ford and knowing when a window on a house two miles off the last road before Mist County should be opened or closed. He played the redneck when he needed to, but the rest of the time he was just plain old “H.W.—Come on in and have a cup of coffee—Conway,” county sheriff, and mailman part-time on the side when Don Wooster’s gout acted up and he couldn’t walk his route.

  What Lefty Zimmer was doing with calves was a mystery. He hadn’t done any actual farming since Sunoco found oil on his back ninety, punched in a couple of wells, and started sending him checks once a month. A lot of folks up on the north side had wells like that, and nobody there seemed to do much of anything anymore.

  Lefty was waiting by the fence down near the gravel road when Conway pulled up. His face was a little pale, even in the stiff wind blowing up from the valley, and his eyes locked on the sheriff’s the instant he climbed from his car. Lefty was a small, furtive man, forty years old and a drinker—like most of the men, and even a few of the women, up on this end. He looked haggard, and something else: he was trembling.

  “‘Bout time, H.W.,” he said, practically pulling Conway through the gate. “It’s out back, near the Retreat.”

  The Retreat, as it was called by the locals, was a steep, craggy five-mile drop of woods that separated the Killibrook Valley—the largest single area of untouched wilderness left in the state of Ohio—from the township of Harpersville. In some places, the ground simply ended, forming sheer cliff faces of stone up to a hundred feet deep, while in others it leveled off into flat, oasis-like outcroppings that offered splendid views of the Valley floor. Populated by raccoons, opossums, and stray dogs that conducted nightly raids on the town’s garbage cans before hiding on the slope by day, the Retreat was hard and uncomfortable. And when winter made food scarce, it became dangerous. Children weren’t allowed to play near its edge after the first snow for fear that some starving mongrel might grab somebody; like in the old woodcut prints many town residents—who were of predominantly German decent—had seen of wolves carrying children back to the Black Forest in their grandparents’ terrifying storybooks.

  It was in one such book that Conway had seen the picture that always haunted him when the first animal of the winter was killed.

  The wolf in that picture was a striking beast, with massive jaws, sharp, jutting ribs, and thick, wild hair. Its eyes were cruelly human, and its form was rendered in a stylized, Germanic way that made it appear as if its fur were really flames, and its paws the hands of a man. In its mouth it clutched a tiny bundle of rags that gave no outward clue as to its contents. But the horrified
expressions worn by the frantic, club-waving men and women running behind left no question as to the object of the animal’s crime.

  Frozen forever in this pose: the wolf inches from the safety of the trees, and the town’s people a hopeless ten paces behind, that woodcut was symbolic—in Conway’s mind at least—of the adversarial relationship between man and nature. The artist who had created it must have understood this relationship too, because, as the sheriff found out years later—for his grandmother had called the German text of the story “to disturbing,” and had therefore refused to read it to him—the account to which this particular picture was attached was not that of a fictional wolf, but of a real-life wild-man named Jean Grenier, who lived in France in the early 1500s.

  Grenier—as it turned out—was a cannibal.

  “I told ya it was somethin’,” Lefty said.

  And Conway blinked.

  He was standing not more than twenty yards from the tree line. At his back was the Zimmer farm: flat, grey, awaiting the first snow of the year on this late November morning. Before him lay the Retreat: from where he stood just a wall of trees. Beyond that, though invisible, he knew there was the Valley: that immense bowl gouged into the earth by God knew what, that, even on a sunny morning like this, would have a wispy shroud of mist hanging over it that wouldn’t burn off until noon. The cool air betrayed a hint of ice. And when the wind whistled up from the valley to balloon the back of his tan vinyl jacket, he imagined Old Man Winter, with his icicle beard and frosted hair, grinning in the distance.

  Sighing, he pursed his lips and examined the thing at his feet.

  “Christ Almighty,” he said, his right hand going automatically to his gun. “I thought you said ‘calf’.”

  Lefty shook his head.

  “Half,” he muttered, sullenly.

  “And you didn’t hear nothing?”

  “I told you that already.”

  “Well, Jesus, Lefty…”

  “I know it! Why’d you think I called so quick?”

  “I didn’t even know you had horses.”

  “I don’t…I mean, I didn’t, at least not ‘till a couple of days ago. My girl, Linda, she turned sixteen last week and she’s been chewing on me for six months to get her one. It was a birthday present. Got her Friday. Traded the thresher. Wasn’t using the thing, so I traded it on the mare. Named Ginger. Only been here two days. Prettiest damn thing you ever saw. Had one blue eye. Never saw a horse like that before…with one blue eye.”

  His words trailed off and his attention drifted to the ground.

  “It’s them goddamn Indian Diggers!” he suddenly snapped, his head jerking back up and his eyes flashing blearily. “Tell me I’m wrong! Go ahead…you tell me.”

  The sheriff squinted as he wordlessly stepped between Lefty and Ginger’s carcass.

  The horse was chestnut brown and had white bracelets over the hooves on her hind legs. Her tail was a satiny black, and there was a white splotch shaped roughly like the state of Florida on her rump.

  She’d been cut in half just behind her forelegs, and her front quarters were gone.

  Conway felt a little nauseous as he squatted and thought, They must’a used a chain saw.

  The insides of the animal had been pulled out and were scattered before it in a hideous array. The soft, muddy ground was churned up all around, and Conway estimated that there were at least six separate sets of tracks—maybe more, but six at least—all boots, and all stomped around from every direction. Turning his head, he noticed that there was a line of hoof prints leading from the barn, which was about fifty yards south, and that nearly blocked his view of the back of Zimmer’s house, to this spot. Alongside the horse’s tracks, there was a single line of human prints.

  He stood up.

  “Somebody led her back here to where the rest were waiting.”

  Lefty nodded.

  “What time’d you go to bed?”

  “Midnight…a little later, maybe.”

  “How ‘bout Linda and her mom?”

  “They went up to see Sophie’s brother in Columbus. Left yesterday morning and won’t be back ‘till Sunday, thank God.”

  That explains your red eyes, Conway thought.Wife’s away, and you been really tying it on. Probably explains why you didn’t hear anything out back either: sozzled to the gills and dead to the world.

  “You been having company?” he asked, sliding his hands into his jacket pockets.

  “Nope.”

  “Where’s your dog?”

  Lefty seemed startled by this question, and instead of answering, simply blinked.

  The sheriff glanced back down at the carcass and forced himself to study the thing that had been done to the hind quarters that turned his stomach even more than the gaping maw of the animal’s midsection.

  “Folks that done this are some pretty sick bastards,” he said, absently. “Let me use your phone.”

  “What for?” Lefty asked with a start.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Well, phone is out is all,” Lefty said, rubbing his chin with his hand.

  And for the first time, Conway noticed that the man was wearing gloves. As a matter of fact, he was dressed from head to foot, stocking cap and all. It was chilly out, but not cold enough for a country-born man to bundle up this way.

  Suddenly a funny zip ran through Conway’s guts. He took one involuntary step back, and shrugged.

  “Didn’t pay the bill,” Lefty mumbled, half smiling with embarrassment. “Nothin’ so strange ‘bout that.”

  “It’s okay,” Conway said, the zip in his belly pealing into a full-scale alarm bell. “I’ll ride back into town and take care of things. You just leave Ginger be ‘till I get back. Understand?”

  Lefty nodded. “Just didn’t pay the goddamn bill’s all,” he added, as if to himself. “Ain’t nothing so strange about not payin’ a bill. Don’t see what you need a phone for anyway since it’s them Indian Diggers what done this, plain as day.”

  And Conway forced himself to walk slowly back to his care.

  2.

  “Emil?” he said into the phone at Shaft’s, a dry goods store two miles up the State Route.

  Betty Shaft, the grocery’s bored, overweight, middle-aged widow owner was eyeballing him from behind the counter, shamelessly hanging on his every word.

  “Meet me at Ruggle’s place in half an hour,” he continued, hunching his shoulder up close to his mouth. “No. I don’t wanna have a beer over lunch. It’s business. Tell Samuels you ain’t gonna be back the rest of the day. Maybe tomorrow too. Yeah. And Emil, bring along a couple of dogs, okay?”

  Emil Lockner was Conway’s deputy, and just about the best hunting-dog breeder in the state. He worked as a cop part-time since there really wasn’t enough for a full-time deputy to do, and the town couldn’t afford to pay him that much anyway. The rest of the time he did odd jobs at Sister Samuel’s funeral home while Sister—which was Mr. Samuel’s real first name, and had caused him just no end of grief, especially in the Army—tottered around town, easing through the last of his seventy-nine years and hoping that no one would die and spoil his day. Emil lived upstairs at the mortuary, which was part of his pay. He kept a kennel out back at his folks’ farm.

  At thirty-four years old, he was a great, hulking man, who was still the closest thing that Harpersville High School had ever had to a football star. Making All-State tackle in the Columbus Dispatch three years’ running, he had gone on to Ohio State with high hopes, only to have his chimes rung and his knee broken in this first semester. He finished two years, gave up in disgust, came home, and got his high school sweetheart pregnant.

  Now, while minding his three kids, that ex-sweetheart, present wife, answered the Samuel’s Funeral Home phone with a sweetness in her voice that her husband rarely heard.

  “Somebody led that horse out back and butchered it sometime after midnight,” Conway said over the din of a noisy lunchtime crowd in Lester Ruggle’s bar. As he s
poke, Emil sat across from him, shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth. “Looks like six men. Maybe more.”

  Conway wasn’t eating. He was making a lunch of his fifth cup of coffee.

  “When they were through, they dragged off her head and forelegs, shoulders and all. Lefty’s German shepherd didn’t bark when I drove up. And he hasn’t seen her around. Men who cut horses in half kill dogs too, I imagine.”

  “So what you want me to do?” Emil asked.

  “Take a couple’a hounds out there and see if you can’t get a line on which way they went with that head. And while you’re there, kinda keep an eye on Lefty.”

  “What for?”

  “He’s acting a little peculiar.”

  Emil laughed abruptly, almost spitting potatoes. “That’s ‘cause he is peculiar,” he said, wiping his lower lip on his shirt sleeve.

  “He wouldn’t let me use the phone,” Conway mused, distractedly watching something over Emil’s shoulder. “Didn’t pay the bill, he says. So where’d he call me from this morning? And why would his daughter up and go visiting for a week out of town the day after her daddy gets her the horse she’s been wantin’?”

  Emil noticed the sheriff studying something behind him and began following his eyes.

  “Don’t turn around,” Conway ordered, quickly. “One o’ them Indian Diggers just came in…the one with the beard.”

  “Green?” Emil asked, leaning forward over his plate.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Now that fella’s peculiar.”

  The Indian Diggers, as they were called by the locals, had started drifting into town about a week before. There were twenty of them around by the time Ginger was killed. And their leader was a man named Green.

  They were “scientists,” or so they said, though they didn’t look like any scientists anyone had ever seen before. Ranging in age from nineteen to sixty-two, they were about equally balanced male to female and wore mostly jeans, big hiking boots, and expensive down jackets. Why they had come in November—right before the first snow would fly—to dig up some old Indian burial grounds that hadn’t moved in like nine hundred years, and that would therefore more than likely still be around in the spring (when it was warm), was beyond most folks who took the time to care. But of all the groups that had come nosing around for Indian artifacts over the years, this was the first that had ever purchased all their shovels and kerosene lanterns from the Monroe Hardware Store. So that was something.