Nightcrawlers

by Tim Curran

  “No, I don’t want to know about any of that. I’m not about to leave my life so I can pick up the pieces of yours,” she’d say and instantly regret it. “What I mean is…I don’t want to know about that stuff. I can’t live here knowing that…they…those things are out there. I just can’t. Why do you think so many of us leave and never come back? I don’t want to know about Haymarket and its rotten past. I don’t.”

  “That’s the problem with you young people—no sense of tradition, no responsibility to the old ways that are the right ways. If those from below are not seen to, they’ll rise up and—”

  “No, Mother, no more.”

  Yes, that was how those conversations always began and ended.

  As the old woman made her way through the grass out to the edge of the forest, pausing every few minutes because she was feeling her years, she knew that Betty was right about one thing: Haymarket’s past was rotten. The whole goddamn town was built on yellowed skeletons tucked in closets and mortared with secrets. That’s the way it had always been. A great big diseased sore that was now being picked at by the police. They were digging out at the Ezren place and everyone knew you didn’t dig out there. It was bad enough that now and again some bones would be found out in the mud flats of the Pigeon during the August dry spell, washed there by the spring flooding. But you didn’t go digging for them and not on Ezren lands. Now that sore would open up and its foul blood would start running again.

  When she made it to within thirty feet of the trees, she squatted down uneasily and dumped the bag out. The stink of it was appalling but it was what they liked.

  “It’s here!” she shouted in a dry rasping when she’d finally gotten back on her feet, which took some doing. “Come get what’s yours…”

  She could hear them out there, rustling about in the underbrush. Worse, she could smell them. And that made her move back to the house a little bit quicker despite the protesting of her hips and knees and bad back. By the time she reached the stoop, she was dizzy from the exertion. Well, maybe she’d sleep through the night for once.

  And maybe I’ll sleep beyond that right into eternity.

  She turned, expecting to see their hunched, dragging forms, but they were shy. They did not like to be seen any more than she liked seeing them. “Come, then!” she cried out to them. “Take what I’ve offered and go on back with you, back to your slimy holes!”

  As she made it up to the stoop and through the screen door, the smell increased and she heard them crawling out of the woods, hissing and gibbering. One of them was giggling.

  12

  “All I’m saying is that I wish you had practiced some common sense,” Sheriff Godfrey was saying the next morning, his face hard as quarried marble. “Didn’t Hyder tell you how dangerous that might be?”

  Kenney, his bloodshot eyes staring into dead space, said, “That man’s a damn superstitious fool and we both know it.”

  Godfrey just nodded. “Maybe he is at that. But fool or no fool, none of this would have happened had you just listened to him. Now I got three missing deputies and one state trooper. How in the fuck am I supposed to explain that?”

  Kenney just shook his head. He had no answers. After last night, he was clean out. He saw the world in an entirely new way now, divine revelation had been shone upon him in all its grisly splendor, and he did not like it. Not one goddamned bit. You lived through something like that, how did you look yourself in the face again? How did you have any faith in reality? How could you live your life knowing there was madness lurking in every shadow?

  Kenney lit a cigarette and looked around the trailer.

  The muddy footprints on the floor. The rain slickers hanging on their hooks. A gentle rain was falling as it had been falling all morning and on the roof it sounded like popcorn popping. He could hear men outside, dogs. It was just before dawn when Hyder and he and the others had wandered back to the road. They found their cruisers and got the hell back to the farmhouse, though what they wanted and wanted badly was to drive and keep driving until they were far from Bellac Road and its malignant fields and creeping woods and ruined farmhouses.

  Godfrey was sitting at the table, drumming his long, callused fingers and staring into a cup of tepid coffee. He was a tall, lanky man, wizened and scarecrow-thin like vellum wrapped over an architecture of coat hangers. His eyes were gray and stern like polished steel, his face a maze of intersecting ruts.

  He looked over at Kenney, gave him a withering look. “I’m so goddamned pissed off at your fucking lack of judgment, Lou, I could shit in your mouth and make you chew it. You know that? The media’s lined up on the road out there. Only a matter of time before our missing personnel problem reaches their ears and then I’ll have questions put to me I don’t have answers for. Give it a week and we’ll have the FBI sniffing around up here and then what we’ll have is the biggest clusterfuck since your mama spread her legs and pissed you out.” He pulled off his coffee, made a face and set the cup down. “I been sheriff of this county going on twenty-five years, Lou. Twenty-five goddamned years. And I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have the answers to everything. But I’m smart enough to know that there are some things I wasn’t meant to know. Mysteries that were intended to remain mysteries.”

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “Bullshit, is it?” Godfrey shook his head. “I’m telling you right now, Lou, I’m on my last nerve with you. Maybe you’re hot shit down in Madison, but out here you’re naïve and goddamn green. What I should do is tell the press and your fucking superiors how you lost four fucking men in a farmer’s field. They’d get a real chuckle out of that. By the time they were done laughing, you wouldn’t have a damn thing to smile about.”

  Kenney pulled off his cigarette. “So do it. Maybe it’s goddamn time. You people up here have been brooding over something for a long time, haven’t you? Maybe it’s time to blow the lid off it.”

  “And put your career into the shitter along with mine?” Godrey forced himself to pull off his coffee. “Hell, it’s probably already too late for that. But I do owe something to the people of this county that elected me and I plan on protecting them if that’s even possible now. They deserve better than to have this neck of the woods turned into a late-night horror show.”

  Kenney had to give him that one. “I suppose.”

  “You suppose. You’ve stirred up a real hornet’s nest now.”

  Kenney stared at him through a haze of smoke. “Have I?”

  But the sheriff just shook his head. “Oh yes. People from these parts…those that know about Bellac Road and the Ezren place…they know enough to stay away. Most have never seen or heard anything out here, but they’re smart enough to trust their instincts. Every summer, of course, we get hikers lost out here and hunters in the fall. But what can I do about that? The Ezren place is posted private property, but you know these assholes from the city, they don’t listen, don’t respect things. They wander off into the boonies and know about as much about ‘em as I do about menstruating. And, so, the missing persons ratio in this county is way, way above the national average. But sometimes, I guess, folks just vanish.” He sighed and stared at the wet grayness pressed up against the windows. “When I heard Wisconsin Electric had an easement across the Ezren property, I winced. And when their dozer plowed up some remains, I wasn’t surprised. I wanted to ignore it, Lou, pretend it hadn’t happened, but I couldn’t. I had a job to do, so I got hold of the state and they sent you people up here. You’ve got a hell of a team there. They’re good. So…maybe, maybe this is all my fault. Maybe I should’ve bronzed my balls years ago and took care of this. Maybe.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Maybe because I knew better. Maybe I’m smart enough to let things lie. And mostly because my first term would have been my last because people around here don’t like people digging into their past and parading their dirty laundry out for all to see.”

  Kenney had mixed feelings about Godfrey.

&n
bsp; On the surface, he seemed like a good cop, smart and savvy. But to let something like this—whatever in the hell this was—go on year after year was contemptible. Yet, for all that, he almost felt sorry for him. He had been living with this every day for years. Watching more and more people turn up missing and not knowing what to do about it, so he just latched onto the local line and didn’t do anything, looked the other way. It was easy to do, he supposed, but sooner or later your skeletons clawed out of their moldy closets and your demons slipped out of their boxes.

  Godfrey seemed to think he was protecting his flock by keeping their secret and respecting their ways, but in fact he was sitting on the top of one smelly heap of shit and had been for years. Only now, the stink could no longer be contained.

  “What you’ve got out there is a big graveyard, Kenney,” he said. “And we’re not just talking the bodies of people that disappeared, we’re talking things almost worse.”

  “Like?”

  “Like grave robbery.”

  “Grave robbery?”

  “You heard me. Don’t act so damn surprised because I know you aren’t surprised in the least. We’ve had trouble with that through the years. And if you wanna go down to the local paper, you’ll see it’s always been a problem in these parts. And you can only blame so much on wild dog packs and the like. Gets so the cemetery caretakers, they don’t even report these things. They just bury up the hole and forget it happened.”

  No, Kenney wasn’t surprised, not after Spivak told him some of the bodies appeared to have been embalmed. “That village out there…those ruins. What do you know about it?”

  “All I know for sure is that it’s like some epicenter for the trouble here. It has a history, a bad history. It’s the thing that has blighted this part of the county, reason people won’t live out on Bellac Road. Just too many…disturbances.”

  “But—”

  The door opened and Hyder came in. He looked at the sheriff, then he looked at Kenney for a time. He smiled thinly. “How you feeling, Lou?”

  “I’ll live.”

  “Sure you will,” he said.

  For one moment, Kenney was certain that Hyder was going to say, sure, you will, but not them others whose lives you fucking threw away. But he said no such thing. He seemed apologetic and sympathetic if anything. His eyes looked on Kenney with acceptance now, understanding, a knowledge that there would be no more fencing between them…certain things had been brought to light and they had both looked them in the face. Comrades. Brothers-in-arms.

  But I’m not his goddamn brother. I don’t understand any of this shit and there’s no way in hell I would have sat on my hands and did nothing while this problem got worse and worse.

  Despite his bluster, though, he wasn’t so sure of that. What if these were his people? What if he was born and bred in Haymarket and these people were his own, his roots tangled with theirs, and their history his own? Then what? He just didn’t know.

  Hyder cleared his throat and said, “One of the search parties just got back, Sheriff.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. Same as the one I took out earlier today, didn’t find shit.”

  Hyder told them they had tried doing some digging out near the area where he thought the trouble had happened the night before. But it was pointless—every time they got down a foot or two, all that rain just washed the muck back in. Even a backhoe couldn’t cut through that mess, he said. They got near the village and the dogs went crazy, yelping and snapping and whimpering and chasing their own tales. Even the handlers couldn’t get them near to that god-awful place.

  “Let’s take a walk,” Godfrey said.

  13

  They pulled on their slickers and knee-high Sorel boots and walked out in the chill, damp grayness. Rain pissed down from the sky in whipping sheets. The farmyard was a flowing, sucking mire of mud. The drainage ditches at the sides of the dirt drive were threatening to overflow. Saturation point had been reached—fourteen inches of rain in the past week right on top of ten the week before. Rivers and lakes were overflowing and northwestern Wisconsin was turning into a flood plain like New Guinea during monsoon season.

  The crime scene techs labored on in the downpour. Sixteen sets of remains had now been discovered and there was probably no true end in sight. Spivak, the coroner, was out there, lighting from one tarped set of remains to the next like a flower-hopping bee.

  Kenney watched them out there as rain blew in his face and the trees groaned in the wind, tarps flapping like flags and rusty rain gutters creaking on the upper story of the farmhouse. He’d been at countless other crime scenes, but this one was far worse. It was down inside him, gestating, making him feel worse by the hour. He hated the wetness and the muck and the wind and the mist and that horrid, mephitic odor of violated graves that clung to everything and everyone.

  “Come on,” Godfrey said, leading them towards the leaning hulk of the farmhouse itself.

  It was huge and sagging, weathered gray as old bones. It leaned precariously to one side and the porch overhang had been shored up with 4 x 4s, but still it hung forward like the brim of a tipped hat. Shutters had been nailed over the upper story windows as if they were trying to hold something in or keep something out. The siding had popped free, planks nodding in the wind. Bitter seasons of snow and wind had peeled the shingles free and they were spilled over the wild grasses like the scales of prehistoric fish. There were gaping chasms in the roof, the walls. The kitchen at the rear had entirely caved in.

  Kenney thought it looked like a house of cards ready to fall. It hadn’t been occupied in over thirty years, but it must’ve been a real dump even then.

  “Watch your step,” Godfrey told them. “Porch is gone all soft.”

  Kenney saw fingers of moss climbing between the warped planks underfoot.

  They went in. The atmosphere of the place was odious and oppressive. There was a smell of age and rotting plaster, a desiccated stink of ancient animal droppings. It was pungent and almost gagging. Cobwebs were strung in the corners like netting and birds’ nests were visible through great rents in the slouched ceiling. Autumn leaves—brown and curled like the tiny mummified corpses of mice—were blown across the floors. The house creaked and groaned and swayed around them as if it were ready to fall into itself. But beyond that, it was soundless and still in there like the belly of a sarcophagus.

  Hyder looked from the black mouth of the leaning stairwell to a stained archway that led into a deserted parlor. He licked his lips. They were gray and tight, his face grayer yet, constricted and compressed, corded muscles jumping beneath the skin. “Damn place,” he said. “Gets under your skin, don’t it?”

  Godfrey led them down into the cellar.

  It was just as black down there as the inside of a body bag. Kenney forced himself down the steps, flashlight trembling in his fist. He saw the hunched shapes of crates and old nail kegs, antiquated furniture and mildewed cardboard boxes—

  He started, thinking he saw something—some hunched-over figure—hobble away from the light.

  Hyder was breathing hard. “Sheriff, the men…the search parties…they’re concerned about being out after dark. I told ’em you’d call it quits at sundown.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Godfrey said.

  There was a brick cylinder blotched with water stains that rose up from the floor. It stood about four feet high, about twice that in circumference. It looked like an old cistern if anything. A flanged lid of rough-hewn planks was nailed in place.

  “You wanna know about this place, the things that go on here, Lou, but I can’t help you. Later, maybe, we’ll go see an old woman who lives up the road a piece—” he said, staring into Kenney’s grim face “—but for now, I’m gonna tell you a story. It’s a story that I don’t want the others to hear.”

  Hyder looked like he was going to have a stroke.

  “You might wanna call this one a horror story,” Godfrey said, grinning with a mouthful of yellowed teeth, hi
s face ghoulish and shadowy in the reflected gleam of the flashlights. “We’re going back about twenty years now. I’d been on the job a good bit then, long enough to know the sort of shit that pops up out here pretty well. On the far side of Ezren’s property, maybe three, four miles from that deserted town out there, there was a little place called French Village. I say was on account it ain’t there no more. You can find it, all right, but you won’t find no people there. Anyway, it was out on a county fork, stuck straight in the middle of nowhere. It barely passed as a village, more of a hamlet than anything, I guess. Old fellow that lived there—Buckner, I think—called and said he heard some screams coming from a little farmhouse across the way. I was in the area, me and a deputy, so we stopped and had a look. We didn’t find shit. Place was empty. I mean completely empty.

  “It was eerie, I’ll tell you. The evening meal was put up on the table, but no one around to eat it. These were farm people and there was quite a spread—corn and chicken and taters and beans and you name it. Lot of it still warm. A few dinner rolls had been bitten into and some chairs had been pushed away from the table as if the family had gotten up together to take a look at something.

  “And that was it. A family of six had slipped into thin air and all they’d left in passing were a few screams. Even the family dog—a big shepherd—was missing. He’d been chained outside and Buckner said that sumbitch was just as vicious as you please. We found the chain—it had been snapped.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Kenney said, lighting a cigarette. “No signs of forced entry? Blood? Anything?”

  Godfrey let out a long, low sigh. “Nothing like that. We found some muddy footprints in the living room. The front door was hanging wide open in the wind. There was a muddy handprint on it. But these prints…well, they weren’t from what you’d call human feet or hands.” Godfrey looked pained. “I had Buckner go through the whole thing a dozen times. I asked him why he hadn’t gone over there, farm folk being clannish and all. You know what he told me? He said he didn’t go out after dark, not with how things were. Said he locked his doors and windows and slept with a twelve gauge on his lap.”