Blood Moon

by Ed Gorman

  "Them," he said, sounding miserable. "I told them they were going to get in trouble. And now they have."

  "I still don't know who 'them' is."

  "My wife and Mindy, who else?"

  "What are you talking about? Why would Mindy and your wife get together?"

  He smirked. "I spent a few nights with Mindy myself—before I learned that she'd once been a man. But it wasn't me Mindy wanted, anyway. It was my wife. And it was their idea for the porno movies. All I did was sell them while I went around the midwest with my religious program."

  "I suppose that makes you clean?"

  "No, it doesn't. But at least I didn't exploit those little girls myself."

  I startled both of us by hitting him hard across the mouth with my Ruger.

  He sank to his knees, blood bubbling through his fingers.

  He was crying, and somehow the idea of him crying sickened me, and so, again startling myself, I kicked him hard in the ribs.

  He fell over on his side and got into a fetal position.

  "Why does everybody go out to the old Brindle farm?" I said, standing over him.

  He made the mistake of not answering.

  My foot sliced into two more of his ribs.

  He started blubbering, blood pouring through his fingers again. He was crying again, too. "That's where they set up the new studio."

  "So McNally and Lodge were blackmailing Mindy and your wife?"

  He shook his head. "Don't know anything about blackmail." He groaned, holding his ribs.

  I remembered the two black men saying that they hadn't seen the white Lincoln in a long time. "A trapdoor in the barn floor." He looked up at me and said, "Don't hurt me anymore, all right? I really can't take pain. I really can't."

  But I didn't believe him. I raised my foot and kicked him again, this time in the chest.

  But I guess he was right after all, the way he started sobbing. He really couldn't take pain. He really couldn't.

  I left him there and walked back through the house and out the side door to my car.

  I drove down past the church, past Kenny Deihl's pagan guitar licks, and out into the country.

  It was time for me to visit the old Brindle farm.

  12

  Fog wrapped round and round the old brindle farmhouse, a snake squeezing its victim to death, and glowed silver and opaque in my headlights as I glided down the gravel driveway. Distant and unseen, animals on the neighboring farm bayed and cried, like children calling out for help in the blind and smoky night.

  I cut the lights when I pulled even with the farmhouse, and coasted several more feet before shutting off the engine, my tires making the gravel crunch and pop loudly in the oppressive and spooky silence.

  Fog had swallowed up everything; I couldn't even see the ornament on the hood of my car.

  I did a check of my tools—Ruger, flashlight, knife. The rest would stay behind.

  I got out of the car, closing the door softly, almost afraid of another sharp noise in the gloom, as if I might awaken some lurking monster.

  In the fog, the shape of the near barn was virtually impossible to see, only the gambrel roof having any real form to it.

  I stopped, listened.

  I'd heard something, or thought I had.

  I was sweating again, and trembling. I kept thinking of how vicious I'd been with Roberts. Unlike me, usually; and not a side of myself I wanted to see.

  I listened intently. Nothing.

  Shoes scuffing gravel, I walked down to the east door of the barn and let myself in.

  Barns retain their odors for decades, all the milk and waste and hay and mud and rotting wood like wraiths on the deserted air.

  I shone my light around. There was a bullpen and two wide stalls on the west end; and several narrow cow stalls on the east end. On the walls hung old bridles, the leather coarse and cracked; and rusted pitchforks and shovels and rakes; and half a rusty Schwinn bike that had probably been fine and shiny and new about the time John Kennedy was becoming president, the front wheel missing.

  I found a wobbly ladder angled against the upper floor and climbed it, splashing my light around on the hayloft above. Except for a rotting bundle of hay, the loft was empty, stray pieces of the stuff shining like fool's gold in the gleam of my flash.

  Downstairs again, I found a small room that had probably been used for storing feed, and a milkhouse just outside the back door.

  Rain fell through the holes in the roof and made hollow pocking sounds as they struck the floor far below.

  It took me twenty minutes to find the trapdoor, concealed as it was beneath several boards in one of the narrower stalls.

  I thought of what Joanna Lodge had told me about how people in this part of Iowa had dug subbasements and root cellars to hide runaway slaves.

  I got down on my knees, set the boards aside, wrapped my hand around the ringbolt and gave it a yank. It was three feet by three feet, plenty wide enough for carrying things down. I remembered what Peary had said about the killer suddenly disposing of the bodies differently—and about what the FBI had told me about the Brooklyn man who'd started burying his victims.

  Cold and fetid air, the air of the grave, rose from the room below, and I was rocked back on my haunches. I sat still a long moment in the dark and damp barn, letting the gaseous odors subside.

  I angled the beam of my flashlight down into the room below. A ladder that looked much sturdier than the one leading to the hay loft stretched down into shadow.

  I started climbing down.

  The air grew colder, the smell more fetid, as I descended the ladder. Just from the air currents, I could tell that this was a much larger room than I had expected. A few times the ladder rocked, threatening to dump me off, but for the most part, I had no trouble.

  I reached the floor of hard-packed earth and turned around.

  The room was at least ten yards long and at least as wide. On the end where I stood, the wall had been clumsily bricked over. But at the opposite end, some trouble had been taken setting up wallboard and pouring a good stretch of concrete floor.

  I walked down there, still shuddering from the chill, still trying not to take the unclean odors too deeply into my lungs.

  On the far end was where the videos were filmed.

  My light played over a bulky black portable generator that would be adequate to run a few lights and a camera. In this same corner was a bed, now mussed. I found streaks of blood on the white satin sheets and splattered across the wall. A pair of handcuffs hung from the brass bedpost. Blood had turned one of the cuffs dark. I touched it. The blood was dry, old.

  For Mindy Lane and Betty Roberts, this subterranean room would be much safer than a rented store in Cedar Rapids. There would be nobody here to note the comings and goings of your white Lincoln.

  And then I heard it, or thought I did, that faint mewling that had stopped me a few minutes ago when I was walking down to the barn.

  What was it? And where was it coming from?

  I took a last look around at the room, trying to imagine what it was like for little girls of eight or nine to be dragged down here and forced to perform sex acts. It would scar them, spiritually if not physically.

  I went up the ladder, glad to be climbing out of this place.

  Up top, I closed everything up, carefully replacing the boards, so that no stray cat or dog would hurt herself by falling down the rabbit hole to the very perverted Wonderland lying below.

  And just as I was finishing up, my flashlight lying atop a stall ledge and giving me sufficient light, I heard it again.

  Even above the chill rain and the cold soughing wind—that faint cry that I could only liken to the sound of a young animal crying for help. The fog made the sound even fainter.

  I took my flashlight and went back outside to see if I could locate the source of the sound.

  I got drenched for my trouble, rain even filling my shoes.

  Where was it? What was it?

 
This time, when the tattered solemn plea came again, I turned back and realized that the cry was coming from the barn. Not the main barn I'd just been in but the much smaller and older barn to the east.

  I walked down there, stumbling once through the fog on the foundation of some long-gone silo. They were ideal for tripping dumb human beings who didn't take extra care in the fog.

  The closer I got, the clearer the sound was, and by now I could recognize it for what it was: a woman screaming and screaming and screaming.

  I wanted to hurry but the fog made that unwise. I carefully picked my way down the sloping hill, my head starting to go numb from the steady drilling force of the rain, my sinuses getting themselves ready for a good long siege.

  The barn door hung skewed badly left, thanks to the fact that its only support was a lone rusty hinge. I eased it creaking open and shone my light inside.

  No stalls in this one, no rooms for storing feed, no small round milkhouses or high shadowy lofts, just a square storage box, maybe four feet deep and three feet wide, built along the back wall of the aged barn—that and the rolling ancient dust and the smell of axle grease and motor oil. A 1952 Ford fastback, the kind of car small-town high-school boys drove well into the seventies, was up on blocks. A long time ago somebody had put a lot of time and care into it. But now, in the harsh eye of my flashlight, it looked abandoned and corroded, rust taking its eternal toll, the giggles of the high-school girls seduced in the backseat long ago flown away, like beautiful butterflies on the last day of summer.

  The scream came from the back of the barn, past the Ford, past a shadowy stack of firewood.

  I drew my Ruger and went back there, still trying to figure out how the sound could be so muffled.

  And then I thought, If one barn has a basement room, why not both barns? Didn't Joanna Lodge say that a lot of buildings had such hiding places?

  I went to the west comer of the barn, dropped to my knees and began clawing through some bricks and loose hay that looked suspiciously neat, as if somebody had carefully contrived it to look messy.

  I found trapdoor and ringbolt in seconds. This door was as wide as the other but looked as if it were heavier. I took the ringbolt in my hand and tugged but it didn't budge. By now the woman below had heard me, and her screaming was constant. She was also sobbing and blubbering and crying out, "Hurry! Please hurry!"

  It took several tries before the door even budged; three more tries before I got it open.

  There on my knees, I clutched my throat, touched my stomach and vomited into the scraps of hay next to me. The odor from below was that foul.

  The woman continued to scream but I was afraid to lean back toward the opening and shine my light down there, afraid of what I would see. The reeking odors told me it was something beyond comprehension.

  But I had no choice but to crawl back there and play my light below.

  I can't tell you how many of them there were—a hundred at the least, perhaps two hundred at the most—enough to entirely cover the floor of the small basement, some the size of small fat puppies, others barely past the infant stage when rats are blind and deaf. And over all was the mad chittering of their hunger and zeal as they swarmed over what was left of Mindy, who lay on her back on the ground. Half her face had been eaten away so that an eyeball hung on a bloody cheek, and her gnawed and bloody arms shone white with bone. Her stomach was a bloody hole excavated by dozens of hungry rats. She was still screaming, but she wouldn't be screaming much longer. She was very near death.

  I thought of the few things I knew about black rats, how they'd originally come from the deserts of southern Asia but then stowed away on the ships of the returning Crusaders, to help bring bubonic plague to Europe, which ultimately killed millions. And how rabid rats had been known to rip apart animals as big and formidable as horses.

  Next to Mindy lay the remains of Betty Roberts, the reverend's wife. Her face had been torn away, as had most of her torso, but I recognized the short, frosted hairdo. At the moment, a rat sat on her shoulder bone and picked the last of the flesh from her nose.

  And as I trained my light back and forth across the floor, I saw the picked white bones of young girls, no doubt the runaways who'd done the porno movies. Done with, they'd been thrown down here as feast for the rats.

  I fired two shots straight into the dozens of rats still massing around Mindy. They scattered briefly, the report ear-numbing as it echoed below, but it was too late. They had gotten the top of her head open enough to begin eating her brain.

  I leaned to the side and vomited again. I would never be able to forget what I'd just seen. Never.

  And then I sensed somebody standing at the back of the barn, a silhouette in the gloom, and I raised my flashlight and saw Kenny Deihl standing there in his Western getup, smiling at me.

  "Pretty impressive, isn't it?" he said. "How fast they can totally rip somebody apart?"

  I didn't need to ask who he really was, the monster who was Tolliver's son, who had sent photos of his victims to his mother and father.

  "But then, you're going to find out all about my friends for yourself, Mr. Hokanson. I'm going to put you down there with them."

  I had made the mistake of dropping my Ruger while I was vomiting.

  Kenny Deihl had made no such mistake at all. He kept a Magnum trained on me all the time he talked.

  13

  He had killed them all, he told me, Mike Peary, Nora and Vic, Lodge and McNally, Mindy and Betty Roberts. They had all uncovered his secret—or he thought they had, at any rate—and so he was forced to kill them. Eve McNally he'd beaten up when she couldn't tell him where the tape was that her husband had.

  As he would now be forced to kill me. He'd tried it once already, on that first day. God, it seemed so long ago. After Mike, he'd gotten nervous about how much Nora knew, and followed her for a while.

  "How about Melissa? You took her so McNally and Lodge would give you back something they were blackmailing you with, right?"

  He nodded.

  "Very creative, those two. They hid out here and watched the taping in the barn over there. I always told Mindy and Betty that I'd drive the girls back to Cedar Rapids and drop them off. But I never did. I brought them over here and fed them to the rats." He smiled his improbably boyish smile. "You know the funny thing? Those're the only animals I've ever liked, those rats. Hated everything else." He shrugged and moved in closer to me. My flashlight was on the floor. He bent over, picked it up, shone the beam in my face. "So good old Lodge and good old McNally videotaped me killing one of the runaways and stuffing her down with the rats. They made me pay them $6,000 a month. I have some money I diverted from Eleanor before I left her—but I just didn't like the principle of paying somebody blackmail money."

  He was silent for a time. Rain plopped from the roof to the ground in front of me. The old hay smelled sour-sweet in the darkness. I avoided looking at my vomit.

  Suddenly, he turned off the flashlight. "Don't say anything or I'll kill you on the spot."

  I said nothing, just eased myself quietly to my feet. He could see me with no problem. And could kill me with no difficulty.

  At first, I didn't know what he was so agitated about. There was just the hissing rain and wind and the far-distant midnight trains.

  And then I heard it, an almost inaudible squishing sound.

  What was it?

  I had to hear it for a time before I recognized it. Then—footsteps. Yes. Somebody was outside the barn, sneaking up.

  In the doorway I saw nothing but the fainter darkness of the night. And then somebody was there, peering inward.

  Rain hammered the roof; wind rattled the back door.

  Inward came the person; one, two, three cautious steps.

  Whoever it was carried a shotgun.

  Four, five steps now.

  "Watch out!" I called, pitching myself to the right and the hard earthen floor.

  As I did so, I saw a yellow eruption of flame and smoke a
s Kenny's gun fired in the darkness.

  He caught the person; there was a thrash of old hay as, wounded, groaning, he fell to the floor.

  "You sonofabitch," Kenny said in the gloom. "You're going to regret coming in here, believe-you-me."

  As I scrambled back to my feet, he turned the flashlight on again and found the person he'd wounded.

  The blood from her shoulder wound ruined the nice starchy look of her blue uniform shirt. She lay on her back, holding a bloody hand to the wound. The injury looked serious.

  "Stay right where you are!" Kenny shouted at me above the din of rain and wind.

  But I didn't pay any attention to him.

  I went over to Jane and knelt down beside her.

  "Thanks for warning me," she said.

  "Least I could do," I said, touching my fingers to her wound, trying to see how bad it was. Awful bad.

  "You shouldn't have followed me," I said.

  She grinned her girly grin. "Least I could do," she said.

  Kenny came over. "Help her over to the trapdoor there."

  My reaction was to spring to my feet and start to swing on him but all he did was raise his Magnum and push it into my face.

  "Don't worry about being noble, Hokanson. You're both going to die. I'm too much of a gentleman to let her die alone."

  Just before he hit me hard on the side of the head with his Magnum, I heard a kind of faint bleating sound from the storage box near the back. I wondered if an animal had been trapped in there. But then I didn't wonder about much at all because when the gun cracked against my skull, I felt my knees start to buckle.

  He brought his knee up between my legs and caught me hard and straight in the groin.

  Pain blinded me momentarily; he pushed me to the floor, next to Jane, and said "Help her up."

  "Do what he says, Robert. C'mon."

  But I must have moved too slowly—because he took two more steps toward me. This time he hit me so hard my knees buckled entirely and I dropped to the floor. I was dizzy, and everything was getting faint and fuzzy.

  I pitched forward into the deeper darkness of my mind where pain and fear lay like shameful secrets.