by Tim Curran
Snow pulled his gun, a Glock 9mm.
For godsake, don’t shoot Riegan, whatever you do.
No, he wasn’t going to do that. Whatever came out of the fog would not be Riegan. It would not even be human. It would be a dragging, hunched-over shape with a face like a rotten, blackening mushroom.
“Rich!” Riegan called out. “Do you see them? Jesus Christ, there’s three or four of them…hey, do you see ‘em?”
Snow was scanning the fog with his gun and flashlight now, just waiting, shaking and scared and he didn’t know at what, but he was ready. He was ready to face whatever came out at him. He only hoped it would—
A scream tore through the night.
It was Riegan.
He began running toward the tree, and as the fog thickened around him he became disoriented. He wasn’t sure where the hell he was, where Riegan was and where the goddamn road was.
“DAVE!” he shouted. “DAVE!”
Riegan screamed again, only this time it was cut off like his throat had been slit or something had been stuffed in his mouth. Then there was silence. There wasn’t a single noise out there but the sound of raindrops falling from branches.
Nothing more.
Then splashing. Footsteps, slow and dragging, approaching from all directions. He saw an impossible, grotesque shape through the trees. Another darted off into the fog. He knew he should open up or call for help, but inside he seized up. Nothing made sense.
Nothing but running.
He ran, stumbling and fighting until he reached the hill and then he was scrambling up it into the car. Once inside, he floored the accelerator, barely making the twists and turns of the road. Cold sweat poured down his face and a choked whimpering came from deep in his throat.
He only knew one thing: Dave Riegan was dead.
4
In one of the trailers that had been set up for the cops and techs to dry out in, Spivak said, “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, Lou. I’ve seen it all. Maybe not as much as you, but I’ve had my share. I’ve only been in on a few murders and those have been pretty easy to peg—hunters gunned down, jealous husbands killing their wives. The usual. Around here, it’s never anything spectacular.”
“Until now?” Kenney said, sipping his coffee.
“Until now.”
He could have told her all the things he’d seen, but he wasn’t about to. He’d been a cop for twenty years now and he had the look of all seasoned cops—dead eyes, tight face, the grim demeanor. He supped full of the dark side of humanity on a regular basis and you could only swallow so much of that, hold so much of it down, before it changed you emotionally and physically. His job had cost him two marriages. There was always a price to pay.
“Those bodies…those remains,” Spivak said, dread twisting beneath her words like worms considering bad meat, “there’s no point in beating around the bush as to what we’ve got here. They were eaten and we both know it, we only don’t know by what. The questions that plague me concern the bones…those teeth marks—at least what I think are teeth marks—I’ve never seen anything like it and I don’t think you have either and, frankly, it’s getting under my skin.”
Of the bodies disinterred thus far, there was no observable evidence of death: fragmentation to the bone or trauma to the flesh that might have been caused by foul play. And he didn’t like what that suggested at all.
He went to the window, looked out on the fields lit by flood lamps. He saw the collapsing hulk of the barn, the jutting finger of the silo, a few ancient outbuildings gone to kindling. Dark woods pressed in from all sides. The farm and its surrounding grounds—some eighty acres of tangled thickets, overgrown meadows, and swampy basins—was owned originally by a family named Ezren. Long dead now, the holdings were on paper with some relatives from out east. The farm had been vacant nearly thirty years now.
Funny they haven’t sold it off or broken it up into lots or something. The fields seem fertile, how come they haven’t at least rented them out to other farmers?
Spivak stirred some cream into her coffee. “I’m going to make some wild and possibly irrational assumptions here. The first few bodies were fresh. I’m gonna say they’ve been in the ground no more than six months. And what bothers me, really bothers me about them is that I can find no evidence of blood. No lividity, nothing. Some of the others, Jesus, I’m going to say—given the condition—that they died decades ago. Depending upon environmental factors, soil acidity, etc., it looks as if some of those bones are fifty, sixty years old. Maybe even older.”
Kenney swallowed. “That old?”
“It looks like it.”
He, of course, had been thinking some serial crime here, mass murder. But if some cadavers were fairly fresh and others that aged, well that pretty much put the homicidal maniac theory to bed. He couldn’t conceive of a killer whose activities spanned that stretch of time. It just wasn’t feasible.
Spivak went on about dating bones, on rates of excarnation and dissolution. All things he’d heard of or read of and knew by heart, things he wasn’t listening to now. Because beneath her authoritative, clinical demeanor, there was something else. Something trembling just beneath her words.
“Say it,” he said. “Tell me the thing you’re trying like all hell to avoid.”
She stared out the window. “I told you how I found no traces of blood. I think the reason is that these bodies—some of them anyway—have been embalmed.”
Kenney’s face drooped, seemed to brush the floor. “What—”
But he never finished that for the door was thrown open and Chipney stood there in a spray of rain and wind. “Chief, we got a situation here. Seems we’re missing one of our cops.”
5
Out on the back forty, a tall deputy named Snow, just as lanky as a sapling, was going through it again while the fog crawled up from numerous hollows, played around his legs like the family cat: “We…we were just, you know, keeping an eye on the area…policing it…making sure no reporters or curiosity seekers slipped through…”
Kenney walked up, surrounded by what seemed a battery of bobbing flashlight beams. The rain had subsided, but a wet, heavy mist hung in the air. He listened to Snow, though he had been pretty much briefed on what came down already. But he listened, and twenty years’ worth of police work, of gut-sense, told him one thing and one thing only: this kid was scared. Terrified, maybe, like a little boy who’d just come face-to-face with the thing that lurked in his closet. Kenney recognized that and something black spread out in the pit of his belly, something evil and wasting.
He found a cigarette between his lips, had no memory of putting it there. One of the state cops gave him a light. “What’s your name, son?” he said to the deputy.
“Snow, sir. Deputy Snow.”
“That’s not what your mother calls you.”
There were a few forced giggles from the crowd of cops.
“Richard…Rich,” he admitted, relaxing a bit.
Kenney led him away from the others, put an arm around him. “Okay, Rich. Tell me what happened. Just take it slow and tell me everything, best you remember. All right?”
Snow nodded. His eyes were glazed and fixed as if he were looking into some distant room. “Me and Dave…that’s Deputy Riegan, sir…we were out here patrolling the road, making sure no one slipped through. You know how people are, sir…and this farm, Jesus, it’s so big. Goes on forever.”
Kenney dragged off his cigarette. “Sure. What happened then?”
Snow swallowed, letting the memory fill him up like poison. His face in the glow of the flashlight beams was yellow and rubbery, a stiff thing like a mask that was incapable of emotion. “We parked the cruiser on the road up there,” he said, indicating the dirt road above them that cut through a crowded, dark thicket of autumn-stripped oaks.
“Why did you decide to do that?”
“Well, sir, it’s just…”
“It’s okay, son. Just tell me the way it was.”
Kenney listened. He was seeing it all in his mind. Riegan going down the hillside and out into the field, the fog moving in from all sides. Then he called Snow down to join him. He heard something or someone. Kenney knew that Snow was telling him the truth, yet he had that gnawing feeling that it wasn’t all the truth. Something was unsaid here. Something was being carefully avoided.
“I started hearing it, too.”
“What?”
Snow just shook his head. “I don’t know…a splashing, mucky sound like someone was sneaking through the field, through the water. Dave went out there and tried to flush them out. I waited like he said. Then I heard him shouting for them to stop and I heard…I heard him say something, call out to me—”
“What did he say?”
Snow was trembling now, his fingers writhing at the sides of his uniform pants like snakes. His lips were pulled into a pencil-thin line. “He said, he said something like, Rich, Christ, there’s three or four of ‘em out here. Do you see ‘em? I can’t be sure. I couldn’t see a thing, just hear something moving and then Dave screamed. I mean, he screamed!”
Kenney patted his shoulder. “Okay, take it easy.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“He didn’t say what he saw, did he?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know if it was people or animals?”
“Not really. But if it was animals…well, if it was deer or something, he would have said. I’m sure he would have said so. With that damn fog, you just couldn’t see anything.”
“Just relax. We’re gonna find him.”
But Snow was shaking his head with such urgency it looked like it might fly off. “He screamed, sir…I heard him scream. Guys like Dave…like Deputy Riegan, they don’t scream. He doesn’t…didn’t…he’s not the kind that screams. Dave is brave, sir. Jesus Christ, he’s my best friend.”
“He panicked in the fog. It could happen to anyone.”
“Bullshit,” Snow said. “Guys like Dave Riegan do not scream, sir. Not unless…unless they run into something pretty goddamn bad.”
Kenney talked him down, chilled him out. He’d been doing it for so many years to so many cops it was reflexive. The other men started mumbling to each other about what Snow was saying and Kenney told them to can it. Snow was starting to open up, really open up. Those unsaid things were about to be said. He was fighting back the sobs that bubbled in his throat, wanting out. The other cops stood around, feeling uneasy and awkward. They suddenly found the swampy ground and misting fields incredibly interesting. The silence was broken only by their boots in the mud, raindrops falling from tree limbs into the grass.
“What happened then?” Kenney said, his tone fatherly, almost a whisper. “Take your time.”
Snow was breathing hard now. “I guess…I guess I freaked out. I went running around, shouting his name, but I couldn’t find him. I don’t know where he went or what he saw. I mean, I thought…I don’t know, for a second I thought…”
“Tell me.”
“It’s crazy.”
“Son, this whole business is crazy.”
Snow drew in a lungful of air and then exhaled it like he didn’t care for it much. “I thought I saw a…I don’t know…a shape. Just for second.”
“A shape? What sort of shape? A man?”
Snow kept licking his lips. “Kind of…kind of like a man…but sort of hunched over, you know? His arms looked real long kind of…kind of like…”
“Like what?”
“Like an ape…real long and swinging.”
“Oh, come on,” someone said.
“Shut up,” Kenney said. He pulled Snow still farther away from the others. He wanted to hear what he saw regardless of how crazy it sounded. It took some coaxing, but Snow told him again: it walked on two legs like a man, but hunched over, weird, ape-like. Which was crazy, of course. Kenney was not sure what to read into that. Imagination? Hallucination? There were no goddamn apes in Wisconsin and he didn’t believe in Bigfoot or any of that shit. Maybe it was a bear standing up. Hard to say. Fog had a way of distorting things, especially when you panicked like Snow.
“I’m not sure what I saw, sir, I just don’t know. Like I said, I freaked out. I lost my nerve. I guess then I got on the radio and called it in.”
“You did right. We’ll find him.”
But Snow was still shaking his head. “You don’t know this place, sir. You’re not from around here. You don’t know the things that happen out here.”
Kenney motioned for one of the senior deputies to take him away. He needed some rest, maybe a stiff drink. As he was led away and up the hill to the cruiser on the road, Kenney just stood there, thinking about what he’d said. Thinking about it and not liking it one bit.
He looked over at Chipney. “Get everyone moving in a search pattern. Stay in visual contact. We don’t need to lose anyone else in this goddamn soup.” When the searchers were in motion, he turned to Hyder. “What’s the kid talking about with that business? What’s he mean, I don’t know the things that happen around here?”
Hyder just grinned foolishly like a drumming monkey, couldn’t seem to stop. He licked his lips. “He’s worked up, Lou. He don’t know what he’s saying.”
“I think he does,” Kenney maintained. “So let’s have it.”
Hyder managed to stop grinning. “Well, you know this is old farming country and all. But most of the farms, they’re abandoned for years. It’s a pretty desolate area. People make up stories, you know how they are.”
Kenney watched the man’s face, took it all in—the little tic in the corner of his lips, the darting, nervous eyes. The way he seemed filled with a sudden need to get away like a little kid with a full bladder.
Kenney lit another cigarette off the butt of the last. “No, I don’t know how they are. Maybe you should tell me.”
“Well, all these woods and empty fields, Lou. They play on the imagination. And those farmhouses, falling down with rot and neglect—”
“Are you saying this place is haunted?”
Hyder laughed uneasily. “No, not exactly. Not haunted exactly. Bellac Road, you know, people wouldn’t live out here. Said they heard things, saw things. Weird things. Just a bunch of bullshit, Lou. You give these backwoods types some empty land and soon enough they’re talking spooks.”
Kenney was going to push it a little further, get to the root of it all—because there had to be one, and, who could say, maybe in some offhand way it would contribute to the investigation—but Chipney came splashing through the mud, leaves festooned to his pants and boots.
“Lieutenant, come and take a look at this.”
Kenney tossed his cigarette and followed him out deeper into the field. All the rain had turned the land into a sluicing river of slush. The fog parted at his approach. The search party was paused before a wide, smooth stone about the size of an ottoman. On it there was a muddy footprint.
Kenney got in real close so he could see it under the wash of the flashlights.
It was a human footprint…or nearly. The print of a bare foot, but very wide, splayed out. But maybe it was just the splattered mud that gave it such an abnormal appearance.
He looked up at Hyder. “Who in the Christ would be running around out here barefoot?”
But Hyder just shook his head, pressing his lips tight as if maybe he was afraid he might accidentally say something. Something he just did not want to admit to.
6
There were ten of them now, moving through the wet darkness, the beams of their flashlights cutting through the murk like swords. They moved in a lateral line, one arm’s length apart. The country was filled with tall, unshorn grasses and craggy bushes, low swampy dips filled with leaf-covered pools and c
ast-off branches.
“You wanna be careful where you step out here, boys,” Hyder was saying. “This country can be treacherous. We get a lot of rain like this on top of that clay, sinkholes develop…can suck a man down five, ten feet before he knows what’s what.”
“Just keep your eyes open,” Kenney said, something unpleasant beginning to worm in him now.
Hyder’s eyes were wide in his rain-misted face. “Yeah…strange things happen out this way…a funny place. Always has been. Air’s just funny, maybe, got a…a…negative charge to it, I guess.”
Kenney stopped suddenly, unsure.
“What’s the matter, Chief?” Chipney asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
They kept going. No one was saying a thing. The only sounds now those of boots being pressed into the mud, withdrawn. Kenney placed each foot carefully, half-expecting to trip over a log or twist his ankle in a hole. Ten minutes into it, he started getting real good and it seemed he didn’t have to think about where he was walking or what he might be stepping on, because his feet were on autopilot and they seemed to know. Instinct, maybe.
The forest began to press in closer from all sides. It was black and wet and craggy, the wind making the high branches rattle together like bones. Squat, gnarled bushes formed themselves into unnatural shapes that stood high as a man and broke up the grid search. More than once, Kenney thought the bushes moved out of the corner of his eye, and he was struck by a mad, irrational feeling that they were alive and sentient. Moving, erasing the search party’s footprints, turning everyone around and shuffling them like cards so they would never find their way out again.
Thoughts like that left his throat dry as ash.
Crazy thinking, sure, but he wasn’t blaming himself for how he felt or how the others felt, the way their faces were drawn and tight like the skulls beneath were trying to work themselves free. This place got to a man, and try as you might, you could not put a finger on it. But it was there. In your guts and head, crawling up the back of your spine. Maybe Hyder was right: maybe it was the air. Maybe there was something negative about it, as unscientific as all that was.