by Jeff Strand
She had responded to the details of the halophile about as he had expected, as he was sure he would have had their roles been reversed. Had he not seen it with his own eyes, he would have shared her disbelief. They had left the conversation in such a way that he still didn’t know exactly what she thought. Whether the microorganism had once originated on a different planet or not was irrelevant anyway. It was merely a tool to help them locate the bodies. Maybe once he was able to formally close this chapter in his life, he would be able to convince the university to write him a grant to study it in the field. Or perhaps he would be happy enough to never return to these godforsaken mountains again.
There was a scratching sound, faint at first, like a bare branch raking the siding outside the window. But there weren’t any trees within ten feet of the cabin.
He pulled down the covers to better hear. Even over Cavenaugh’s snoring, he could discern it, louder now.
It stopped abruptly.
Gabriel sat up and craned his head to listen. Was there someone outside the cabin trying to get in? His heart was pounding, his breaths coming shallow and fast. He leaned over the side of the bed and grabbed his flashlight from the floor.
Thump.
The hollow sound originated somewhere behind a wall, or possibly under the floorboards. It was hard to tell. He could only be sure he had heard something bump a wooden board in some sort of recess.
A minute passed. Then two. The sound didn’t repeat.
Gabriel climbed out of bed, slipped on his boots, and shrugged into his jacket. He switched on the flashlight and directed it around the room. Nothing. Mustering his courage, he exited the bedroom, passed through the living room and kitchen, and opened the back door. The wind buffeted him with a swarm of snowflakes as he stepped out into the night. He swept the column of light across the glimmering white mat, spotlighting large flakes that cast strange, shifting shadows. Easing along the side of the building where the snow had begun to drift, he continued moving the beam from side to side until he was nearly directly under the window, and stopped.
There were tracks in the snow.
He knelt and examined them. They belonged to some sort of animal for sure. The prints were too deep to clearly see the imprint of the paws, but he could tell it couldn’t have been more than a foot tall based on the uneven sweeping marks the fur on the animal’s belly left atop the snow between the tracks. They probably belonged to the fox he had seen earlier.
The snow had been cleared away from the base of the cabin wall, where there was a small, dark opening between the ground and the siding. He flattened himself to his stomach and shined the light into the hole. Weathered planks, upon which the wooden interior floors were braced, stretched off into the darkness beyond the reach of the flashlight. The ground beneath was bare, leveled dirt. He smelled mildew and turned earth, and underneath, a foul organic stench that suggested something had crawled under there to die.
He pointed the light to the right and caught a flash from twin golden rings. There was a hissing sound and something slashed his cheek. Dropping the flashlight, he rolled away from the hole in time to see a furry orange animal dart across the clearing and disappear into the storm.
“Jesus,” he whispered. He dabbed his left cheek with his fingertips. They came away damp, and only caused the pain from the wounds to intensify. He retrieved the flashlight from the snow and shined it on his hand to confirm what he already knew. His fingers were covered with blood and he could feel it beginning to run down the side of his neck.
Did that thing bite him? All he remembered was the reflection of eyes and a blur of movement. He had barely managed to close his eyes before it struck his cheek.
At least that accounted for what he had heard from inside.
Cautiously, he shined the beam back into the hole, half expecting to see an entire litter of those monsters waiting to tear off the rest of his face. There was only a small burrow worn into the dirt, a shallow cavity filled with short, knobby sticks. He tipped the light down just a touch and gasped.
Those weren’t sticks in that nest.
He took several deep breaths to steady his nerves, reached under the house, and closed his fist around the first object he felt. Rolling away from the hole, he directed the light onto the object balanced on his open palm.
Three small bones, articulated with rotting knots of cartilage. No sign of the flesh remained, and the cortices were scarred by grooves from an animal’s teeth.
There was no mistaking what he held.
It was a human finger.
November 14th, 2010
Sunday
“Ouch.” Gabriel winced as Maura swabbed his cheek with alcohol. It felt as though he’d been attacked with a series of dull, rusted razorblades. Fortunately, the lacerations were fairly superficial, but that didn’t mean they didn’t sting like hell.
“I may not be a doctor,” Maura said, “but I think you’re going to live.”
She opened the medical kit Cavenaugh had had the foresight to bring and taped a couple squares of gauze over the side of his face. It was frightening how well-stocked the kit was. Not only were there bandages, but syringes, splints, vials of lidocaine and epinephrine, and enough needles to make an acupuncturist jealous. What kind of trouble did Cavenaugh anticipate they would get themselves into up here?
Again he pondered what Cavenaugh might know that he hadn’t divulged.
Maura closed the kit, took it back into the kitchen, and set it on the counter. Gabriel remained seated in the doorway, oblivious to the snow blowing in his face as he was too busy watching the others where they crouched beneath the window. They had widened the hole under the house substantially, and were now excavating the small recess. Cavenaugh wore a pair of non-powdered latex gloves, and wriggled in and out of the orifice. Each time he returned with a few more small bones, which he set on the pillowcase Kelsey held stretched open in front of him. Will pointed the flashlight over Cavenaugh’s back and directed the beam under the floorboards, while Jess stared intently at the growing collection of skeletal remains.
“Hand me another baggie,” Cavenaugh said.
Will passed him a sandwich-sized Ziploc bag, and a moment later Cavenaugh scooted all the way back out of the hole and stood. He grimaced as he stretched his back.
“Let’s get out of this snow,” Cavenaugh said, leading the others toward the back door of the cabin.
Gabriel rose to allow them to pass and followed them into the living room, where Maura had the fire stoked to a roaring blaze. Cavenaugh opened the grate to light the room and gestured for Kelsey to spread out the pillowcase on the floor in front of it. Will shined his flashlight at the collection for good measure. Carefully, Cavenaugh began to separate the bones by species. There were thin rib bones, beaks, leathery claws, and wings that still bore feathers, which he moved all the way to the right. Other smaller mammalian bones, a hodgepodge of rodents, were placed to the left. The remainder, in a jumble in the center, all appeared to be human. There were more than a dozen phalanges, most of which appeared to be from fingers, while the shorter ones were obviously from toes. Some were still articulated with cartilage that had long since turned black, but the majority were loose and disjointed. They were all scored with the same teeth marks in the manila surface, and there wasn’t even a hint of flesh.
“Do you think…?” Will asked.
“No way to know for sure,” Cavenaugh said, “but I think so. Unless there are more bodies hidden in these mountains. Without DNA analysis, we can only work under the assumption that they are.” He sighed and turned to Gabriel. “What kind of animal did you say it was?”
“I didn’t get a very good look at it.”
“Do you think it’s possible it might have been a cat?”
“A cat? But we’re in the middle of nowhere and…” His words trailed off as realization dawned.
Cavenaugh produced two clear plastic bags, the first of which contained an assortment of whole finger and toenails. He s
et it aside and held up the second for Gabriel to examine. It was filled with a mess of hairs: some of them were long and stiff, others shorter and slightly curved. There were even pinches that appeared to have been shed in clumps. Some were white, but most were a subdued orange.
“Oscar,” Gabriel whispered. “How could he have survived out here all this time?”
“You’re missing the big picture,” Cavenaugh said. He dropped the baggie on the floor beside the bones. “This cat knows where at least one of the bodies is hidden.”
***
They had all followed the tracks through the snow and into the woods until the prints had vanished in the detritus beneath the heavy pine canopy where the snow couldn’t reach, at which point they had split into three pairs and headed in different directions. That had been close to an hour ago now, which was the designated time to turn around and head back to the cabin where they would all meet for an early breakfast. While Maura and Will had branched left and struck off to the north, and Cavenaugh and Kelsey had continued east in the direction the tracks had been leading them, Gabriel and Jess had veered south. They all understood that the tabby knew this forest better than all of them by now, and if it didn’t want to be found, then they didn’t have a prayer of finding it. But they had to take the chance. If Gabriel had startled Oscar badly enough, Lord only knew when he might return to his home.
Gabriel had given up calling for the cat. Oscar certainly wasn’t going to scamper out of his hiding place at the sound of Gabriel’s voice, but it had at least made him feel like he was doing something productive. Now he and Jess walked in silence, with only the crackling sound of dead pine needles, broken branches, and festering aspen leaves between them. They swung their flashlight beams ahead of them, making the tree trunks cast shadows that simulated movement, as though dark figures ducked behind them as soon as the light neared.
Jess wore the same look on her face that Gabriel had seen earlier in the night. They weren’t close enough for him to try to coax out whatever was bothering her, so he waited for her to voice her concerns.
“It’s time to head back,” she finally said. A cloud of her breath hung around her head. Her cheeks and nose were bright red, and she had begun to sniff every few seconds. She looked him in the eyes, then turned quickly away. “We aren’t going to find him regardless. Not like this anyway.”
Gabriel pulled a bottle of water out of his jacket, took a long drink, and offered it to Jess. She took it with a grateful nod, and tipped it back.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” Gabriel said. “I’m pretty sure the remains have to be fairly close for the cat to have been able to find them. If Oscar’s still living at the cabin after all this time, then he can’t possibly be roaming too far.”
“That’s why we need to find him.” She passed back the water and he tucked it into his coat. “Maybe he can lead us to them.”
“I don’t think so. By now, the flesh would have rotted and sloughed from the bones. There would be nothing left for him to eat, or at least nothing he would want to eat. I’m confident he gathered those…parts not long after they died, and has been living off of birds and ground squirrels since.”
Jess nodded. It obviously wasn’t what she had been hoping to hear.
They started walking back to the north. Several minutes passed before she blurted out what was really bothering her.
“I think we should call the police. Maybe finding these new bones would light a fire under their butts and get them back up here. We could always use the help.” She paused. “And the bottom line is now that bones are beginning to turn up, they should stop looking at this as a missing persons case, and start investigating it as murder.”
“They came out here after discovering Nathan’s femur, and that accomplished nothing.”
“But we know more now than they did then. They could bring dogs up here to track the cat, and maybe figure out where it came across the remains.”
Gabriel shook his head. By all rights, new evidence should be turned over to the police, but Cavenaugh was a cop, and seemed to think that calling in the authorities now would be a waste of time. At least at this juncture. He had suggested they use the next several days to search on their own before reporting the evidence. Besides, the police and FBI had both scoured the countryside over the prior two days and had found nothing. The appearance of a pile of phalanges wasn’t earth-shattering news either, at least from their perspective, and any subsequent search would be halfhearted, undermanned, and sloppy at best. It would be a self-fulfilling prophesy. If they expected to find nothing, then that was exactly what they would find.
Gabriel agreed with Cavenaugh’s assessment and the plan to buy themselves just a little more time, but he didn’t particularly care for the idea of withholding their findings any longer than that.
“You agree we should wait,” Jess said, making no attempt to hide her disdain.
“For a couple of days. That’s all.”
“Doesn’t it make you wonder why Cavenaugh—Detective Cavenaugh—would not want to call it in?”
“I…don’t know,” Gabriel said, but he clearly understood what she implied, which brought him right back to his suspicion that Cavenaugh was indeed hiding something.
“Look at it this way.” She took him by the arm to stop him and met his eyes when he looked at her. “The bones were scarred with teeth marks, but none of them were broken. That tells us the cat was unable to break through the cortex to get to the marrow. What makes you think it would be able to bite off an entire finger? Think about it.”
Gabriel pictured the phalanges that had remained articulated. None of them had still been attached to the metacarpals or metatarsals, nor had there been any residual cartilage on the bases of the proximal phalanges. Cavenaugh must have recognized it right away.
“Christ,” Gabriel whispered. “They were severed before Oscar found them.”
***
Fueled by the lack of sleep, the manner in which they had awakened, and the task at hand, the tension in the main room of the front cabin was palpable. They had eaten their soggy oatmeal in silence, and now the dirtied paper plates hung in a plastic trash bag by a nail from the back of the northern cabin in hopes that the smell would entice Oscar to return. The coffee wasn’t percolating nearly fast enough to keep up with the demand. Will had joked that this was probably the only place in the world where there wasn’t a Starbucks within a block, but none of them had found it remotely amusing.
Cavenaugh, Kelsey, and Gabriel scrutinized the satellite maps while the other three played the daily video blogs on Cavenaugh’s laptop, making notes of anything the ghosts on the screen said that sounded like directions. They only narrowed the search to a ten mile radius for fear of being too aggressive. The last thing they wanted was to miss the right hot spring based on a faulty assumption. The springs were hard enough to spot on the maps as it was. With the dense forest and ragged cliffs, they could barely discern the river cutting right through the center, let alone smaller ponds. They guessed the maps were made in roughly March or April as there were still shaded slopes white with snow, while others showcased evergreens and aspens already beginning to sprout leaves. Details were relatively sketchy, but they had managed to locate several small creeks and a dozen larger bodies of water. They eliminated the lakes fed directly by the streams and those where they could see the wooden arch of beaver dams. Those were obviously freshwater, and they were looking for isolated pools without current or significant runoff, which narrowed their prospects to four. Two of them were within three miles of the cabins, one just under five, and the last barely within their radius. Considering they were only visible as faint reflections through the overhanging treetops, there were no guarantees they were actually bodies of water and not some stray piece of corrugated aluminum from an elk hunter’s blind, but they needed to explore every viable option.
All four possibilities were just below timberline, nearly hidden by the final surge of pines. One was on the
southwestern slope of Mount Isolation, and there was another on the northern side. The third was on the northern slope of Mount Haverstam, roughly four miles south of Mount Isolation, across a valley bisected by a small stream. The fourth and farthest, was nearly ten miles to the northwest, on the northern slope of Mount Cranston. It was the least likely candidate as the rocky face was carved with eroded trenches above the pond, which potentially suggested that it was fed by seasonal runoff from the melting snow, but as they couldn’t entirely exclude it, they would save it for last.
“Listen to this,” Maura said. She sat on the middle cushion of the couch with the laptop on her thighs while Jess and Will leaned in to see the screen from either side. “This is from the book of Isaiah, chapter fourteen, verses twelve through fifteen: How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.”
“Three of the four are on the northern slope of the mountains,” Kelsey said, “but I don’t feel we can eliminate the fourth based on its proximity. It’s the closest to the cabins, and looks like it’s one of the larger springs. What else do you have?”
“Here,” Jess said, pointing down at the binder in which she was taking notes. She traced under the words as she spoke. “This is Ephesians, chapter six, verses eleven and twelve: Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”