by Alex Bledsoe
Then she realized she heard it outside her head, too: faint but clear, somewhere in the darkness, audible over the noise of the tow truck.
She walked to the edge of the gully and used the flashlight on her cell phone to scan the bottom. The light was too dim to see any detail. Nothing moved except the water slowly seeping into the hole left by the truck.
She turned away, and then heard, high and keening enough to penetrate the tow truck’s idling, “Didn’t leave nobody but the baby.…”
She hadn’t imagined it.
“Hey!” she called to the others. “Hey, I hear somebody down here!”
Jack, Bliss, and Mandalay rushed over. But the voice had fallen silent.
“I don’t hear anything,” Mandalay said.
“Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?” Jack asked.
“I’m sure,” Janet snapped, trying not to sound defensive.
“Do any of the rest of you hear anything?”
Mandalay and Bliss both shook their heads. “Maybe Doyle had the radio on in his truck,” Bliss suggested.
“Look, I’m not making this up,” Janet said. “I heard someone down there singing.”
Jack shone his flashlight down into the gully. It was much brighter than Janet’s phone, and showed the torn and trampled ground in much more detail. But there was no sign of anyone.
Bliss leaned close to Mandalay. Very softly, she said, “Could it be a haint?”
Mandalay shrugged. “Hell, maybe. I don’t know.”
“I don’t see anything,” Jack said as he turned off the light.
“I swear I heard it,” Janet said, but she sounded far less certain now. Had she imagined it?
Mandalay touched Janet’s sleeve to get her attention, then nodded for the girl to follow her. They walked away from the adults, outside the area of light.
“I’m not making it up,” Janet insisted.
“I believe you,” the younger girl said quietly. She stepped close and took Janet’s hands. “Close your eyes,” she said calmly.
“Not again.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Just trust me, like you did earlier. Listen to what’s around you. Then, when I tell you, open.”
Janet did so. She heard the grinding of the tow truck winch and its chugging diesel engine, and the trilling of insects and animals awakened by the noise in the cold spring night. The wind blew in the background, and for a moment she dreaded that omnipresent whisper that had spoken to her in the cave. But it never came, and she heard no other voices, until Mandalay said, soft as a breath, “Open.”
She did.
And she found herself in the air, floating on the night winds, looking down into the ravine with a clarity she’d never experienced even on the brightest, sunniest day.
Every twig, every bud, every insect and animal stood out in sharp relief, their life forces producing a spectrum of colors that no human words could ever describe.
And there were people, too: of all ages, sizes, and eras. They were ethereal, passing through the trees and rocks, even occasionally through each other. The shades wandered aimlessly, not singing or speaking, showing no sign that they saw each other, or her watching them. These were spirits still tied to the ground by unfinished business or a sense of belonging. “Haints,” they were called in local parlance, and Janet could only stare in sympathy and dread.
But it was the sounds that overwhelmed her. The haints were silent, but everything alive, and even the rocks themselves, sang to her. Even with her laser-sharp musical memory, she knew she wouldn’t be able to recall and reproduce these melodies, so all she could do was let them wash over and through her.
She drifted, like a feather or a dandelion seed, held aloft by the merest current. She wanted to look everywhere at once, absorb all the beauty around her, but then she heard a woman’s voice, clear despite all the other sounds.
Go to sleep, you little baby.…
And she saw the woman, then, too, as plain as anything. She huddled against the muddy wall, far down the gully, curled up so small that no one would spot her until morning, and maybe not even then. Her face was hidden by her muddy black hair. And somehow Janet could tell that she was hurt, and sick, and dying.
“Come back down,” Mandalay’s voice said gently, and at the next blink, Janet was back.
Surprisingly, her knees didn’t wobble and she didn’t fall over. Instead, she just stared into the younger girl’s eyes. In a whisper, she said, “Was that what riding the night winds is like for you?”
“I don’t know,” Mandalay said honestly. “What did you see?”
“Everything. And I heard—”
And then the pain struck.
She grabbed either side of her head. “Oh shit! Oh, fucking hell—”
“Did you see any sign of Duncan or Renny?”
“Not so loud! My brain feels like it’s having a baby.”
Mandalay rubbed Janet’s temples. “Shh, it’s okay. You went a little farther into it than I expected.”
“Renny’s down there,” Janet said as the pain eased a little. “Or at least, I think it was her.” She forced her eyes open and said, “How can you stand it?”
“Bliss! Mr. Cates!” Mandalay called. To Janet she said, “Can you show them?”
“If we go slow.”
“She knows where Renny is,” Mandalay told the two adults.
“You do?” Bliss said.
“Yeah,” Janet said.
“Are you all right?” Jack asked.
“No questions, please. They make my brain baby kick.”
Jack and Bliss exchanged a puzzled look. Mandalay tried not to giggle.
“Never mind,” Janet said. “Follow me.” She led them away into the darkness. After several minutes, Mandalay heard her say, “There! Look!”
Mandalay let out a long breath. Sharing her vision with Janet was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and one she’d have to remember not to try again. Janet didn’t have a lot of Tufa blood in her family, but even a pureblood like Bliss or Bronwyn would be unable to bear the full intensity of the night winds for long. Above and beyond the girl’s musical talent, she was tougher than anyone thought. Because of that, her future would be, as the apocryphal Chinese curse said, interesting.
She was tired, and she wasn’t needed here any longer. When she was certain no one was watching, Mandalay closed her own eyes, and a moment later, she was gone, the night winds carrying her wherever she wanted to go.
32
“I won’t keep you in suspense,” Janet told the storytelling festival crowd. Then she stopped noodling on her guitar and paused for a drink of water. A few people laughed as they got the joke; the rest sat riveted. She deliberately put the cap back on the water bottle and placed it on the floor, before leaning close to the microphone.
“They found the lost girl, and she was fine. Her baby was fine. They gathered her round and rushed her to the hospital in Unicorn, where they patched her up. And they found her newlywed husband dead at the bottom of a cliff near the old moonshiners’ cave. The official story was that he wandered over the edge while trying to get help. But most folks knew the truth. And now you do, too.”
She began to strum again. The tent was silent, the crowd almost afraid to breathe too loud, lest they disturb the fragile spell. The sea of sweaty faces hung on her every move, every inflection.
“That wasn’t quite the end, though. There was still the matter of the monster. Only that didn’t end how anyone expected, either.…”
33
Jack walked around the carcass. The pig had died sometime during the winter, but Dolph had only just discovered it deep in the undergrowth of Half Pea Hollow. Not much was left: most of the bones, some leathery strips of skin, and of course, the massive skull. The rest had been processed by nature’s garbage disposals.
“Been dead about a while,” Dolph said.
“Not enough left to tell what killed it,” Bronwyn observed.
“Look closer,” Dolph said. “Check out the skull.”
Jack knelt and turned the huge cranium. There was a round hole, obviously from a bullet. “Somebody shot it in the head.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the interesting part. Look closer.”
Jack gave him an annoyed look, then bent close to the skull. “We’re not in a biology lab. You could just tell me.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Dolph said. He caught Bronwyn’s amusement, and winked.
“Hell, I can see it from here,” Max said. “There’s new bone tissue around the edge of the hole.”
“It had started to heal?” Jack said.
“Bingo,” said Dolph.
“So somebody shot it in the head and it didn’t die?” Jack asked.
“At least not right away,” Max said.
“At least it can’t hurt anyone else,” Jack said. He turned to face his team. “Thank you, folks, for staying so motivated on this. I’ll sleep easier, knowing that this monster, at least, is gone.”
“Not exactly a win for WHOMP,” Bronwyn said.
“Not a loss, either,” Max said. “It’s a draw, like Vietnam.”
“What do you know about Vietnam?” Dolph said sharply.
“Hey, I wasn’t trying to offend anyone. Sorry.”
“Don’t make jokes about what you don’t know.”
“Wonder where it came from originally?” Bronwyn said, trying to change the subject. As a veteran of the Gulf War, she knew that nothing good came from bringing up military conflicts. “I mean, it can’t just have magically appeared, can it? Obviously it crossed paths with someone else.”
Jack turned to Bronwyn. By now he understood that she, like Bliss, carried pure Tufa blood, along with everything that implied. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I still think that a pig like this couldn’t grow that large in the wild. But anything’s possible.”
“It didn’t start out in the wild,” Max said. “See its bottom incisors? The way they’re spread out? You only see that in pigs raised domestically.”
“He’s right,” Dolph said. He tossed something small through the air to Jack. “Found this with the bones.”
Jack caught it and looked at it. The implications ran through his mind like lightning. He pocketed it and said, “Well, that helps.”
* * *
Jack rang the doorbell at the old farm. The house was run-down, in need of both a new roof and a paint job. In that way, it looked like many other farms trying to eke out a living in the mountains, using the few nearby acres of relatively flat land to grow corn, squash, or beans. There was an equally decrepit barn, with a small corral and a pen for pigs. Only one pig, small and mottled, nosed around in it.
Heavy steps approached, and then the inner door opened. A bearded, bleary-eyed man of around fifty looked out through the screen. He wore old coveralls and heavy boots. He looked at Jack, and at Trooper Alvin Darwin standing beside his car. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Dale Bolander?”
“Who’re you?”
“I’m Jack Cates, with the state wildlife office. I’d like to talk to you about Bruce.”
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called.
“Vacuum cleaner salesman,” the man answered.
Jack’s voice turned hard. “This is official law enforcement business, Mrs. Bolander,” he said, loud enough for the woman to hear. “I’d like to ask you and your husband some questions.”
“She don’t know nothing,” the man said. “And I don’t know no one named Bruce.” He started to shut the door.
“Then I’ll have my friend back there go round us up a warrant.” He looked back at Darwin, who touched his hat to show he’d heard everything. “Is that what you want?”
The man opened the door again, but didn’t invite Jack inside. Instead, still speaking through the screen, he said, “So what makes you think I know this ‘Bruce’?”
Jack held up the ear tag Dolph found with the hog’s remains. An identification number was stamped into it above a bar code, and the word BRUCE had been written on a piece of duct tape on the other side. “Apparently Bruce is running around with your address on his ear.”
He saw the fear in the big man’s eyes. “I don’t know—”
“Look, we know you raised him, and we know you must’ve sold him. How big was Bruce when you did that?”
He looked down, scratched under his beard, and said, “Right at a thousand pounds.”
Jack nodded. “And who did you sell him to?”
“That fella over at Fast Creek Farms. Runs them, what do you call ’em, pickled hunts?”
“Canned hunts.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“You ever been there?”
“Naw, I can’t afford that fancy shit. I just sold the man a pig.”
Jack asked a few more questions, but he already had the information he needed. He walked back to Darwin’s car. “You get what you need?” the trooper asked him.
“Yep. Got another stop to make. You up for it?”
“Hell, you couldn’t keep me away with a rabid polecat,” Darwin said.
* * *
“It’s all legal,” Freddy Bourgeois said with a smile so smug, it took all Jack’s self-control not to punch it through the back of his head. “I’ve got all the paperwork on file. I’ll get my lawyers to send you copies if it’ll help you sleep better.”
“It’s not legal when one of your animals gets out and kills people,” Darwin said.
The three men stood on the porch of Bourgeois’s beautiful ranch house that looked out over his immaculate lawn. Flower beds marked the corners of the long drive, and a mailbox in the shape of cartoon revolver stood watch. Two enormous pickup trucks, each recently washed and shining, were parked near the house. The view, from halfway up the slope of a mountain, was spectacular. Like Bruce’s former owner, Bourgeois had not invited Jack inside.
“That’s not possible,” Bourgeois said. “You’ve got the wrong hog.”
“How do you figure that?” Jack said.
“Well, the hog I bought from ole Dale was killed before any of those attacks.”
“Yeah? When?”
“Oh, last year sometime. I’d have to look it up.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d do that,” Darwin said.
“Who killed it?” Jack asked.
“A twelve-year-old boy from Cookeville. Birthday present from his daddy. It shoulda been in all the papers, but the boy got all upset afterwards, and the daddy wouldn’t let me publicize it. He didn’t even want the meat. But word got around; when that kind of thing happens, it always does. I sorta count on it,” he added with a chuckle.
“What did you do with it, then, after it was killed?”
“We just buried it.”
“You didn’t have it butchered?” Darwin asked.
He laughed as smugly as he smiled. “Good Lord knows I got enough pork in the freezer to do me till doomsday.”
“Show us,” Jack said.
“Show you my freezer?”
“No, show us where you buried it.”
He gestured down at his polo shirt and pressed khakis. “Mr. Cates, Officer Darwin, I ain’t dressed to go traipsing around the woods today. I got clients coming, and—”
“Show us, or we’ll come back with a warrant, and we’ll make a bigger mess than you, or your lawyers, probably want,” Darwin said, and imitated his smug smile.
“Is that a threat, Officer? You’re standing on my porch, threatenin’ me?”
Jack recalled the cave where he’d recovered Adam Procure’s remains. He’d had about enough of this smug bastard, and said, “Mr. Bourgeois, for the slightest provocation, I’d beat you senseless on your porch.”
“And I won’t see a thing,” Darwin added.
Bourgeois saw that they meant it. “Excuse me while I get some boots on, then.”
“You do that.”
Bourgeois had them climb into one of the big trucks. He drove them out to th
e spot where the hog was buried, at the far edge of his property, behind a stand of pine trees and near the perimeter fence. They startled a herd of “wild” pigs on the way, scattering them from the rutted path.
“How many pigs have you got?” Jack asked.
“Not sure. Changes depending on how many hunts we have.”
“Any ever get out?”
“Of course not,” he said with the diffidence of a practiced liar.
The burial site looked legitimate; the ground had clearly been dug up and refilled in a size appropriate for a pig as large as the one they’d found. They got out and looked around.
“Why’d you bury it way out here?” Darwin asked.
“This is where that boy killed it. It’s too big to drag to my dump or anything, and I didn’t want it to attract coyotes or bears.”
“What did he use?” Jack said.
“The boy that killed it? One of them Smith and Wessons with a laser sight on it.”
“A handgun? How many times did he hit it?”
“Nine or ten.”
Jack’s rage must’ve shown on his face, because Bourgeois backed up. “Hey, now, he was just a kid, can’t blame him if he ain’t much of a marksman.”
“And there was nobody with him?” Darwin asked.
“Sure, his pappy, a guide—”
“Not you?”
“I don’t generally go out on the hunts.”
“Why didn’t someone finish the damn thing off?” Jack demanded.
“The pappy wanted the boy to do it.”
“So you let that pig run around hurt and bleeding for how long, exactly?”
“A few hours. Like I said, I wasn’t here.”
Jack walked around the grave, then stopped. “What happened over here?”
Bourgeois and Darwin joined him. “I don’t know. It looks like—”
“I know what it looks like. Do you have a backhoe?”
“Yes, why?”
“We’re going to open this grave.”
“What, now?”
“Yes, now. Either you do it, or we do it. And we’ll be a lot messier than you, and it’ll take us a long, long time.”
It took the better part of the morning to get the backhoe out to the location and then dig up the grave. Jack wasn’t surprised at what he found: an empty hole. But clearly something had been buried there once, even if it wasn’t there now.