Nightcrawlers

by Tim Curran

  His sanity might have demanded that he dismiss it all, but he just couldn’t.

  Something was worn wire-thin in him now and there was no recourse but belief.

  “It seems to me,” he said, “that you people around here have been sitting on a nasty egg for a long time, hoping it wouldn’t hatch.”

  Godfrey said that was true. “Thing is, Lou, we’ve known for years, many years, that something needs to be done, but I think nobody wanted to be the first to initiate any of it.”

  “Well, now we don’t have much of a choice.”

  It would have taken hours to go through the file in any detail, so Kenney just kept skimming, reading over things that caught his eye. Things he figured would come in handy later for nightmares and sleepless nights. He found an interesting clipping from a magazine called Beyond Science, which was apparently some sort of paranormal journal back in the 1940’s. He began to read.

  18

  …And from the upper Midwest comes this elusive and interesting tidbit. Apparently, in Bayfield County, Wisconsin, a most unusual body washed up last summer in the Namekagon River near the town of Haymarket. The body was badly decomposed and had probably been in the water some time, but appeared to be that of a man or something like a man. Sheriff’s deputies and locals that fished the strange cadaver out claimed that it was horribly deformed and subhuman. Its left leg and right arm were missing, and it had been badly worried by fish and local wildlife, but Mr. John Ponce of Haymarket said, “It wasn’t exactly what I would call human…its face was just plain awful and the bones sticking through the flesh were like no bones I’ve seen before.” Ponce went on to say that its face was large and irregular, eyes set in deep, bony hollows and jaws exaggerated to horrible extremes. Officials said the body was merely distorted from decay and gases, but Ponce does not agree. “Now and again,” he said, “some remains’ll turn up in these parts and they’re just horrible to look upon. Whatever they’re from, they’re not men as such.” The entire episode brings to mind a set of bones discovered in Bayfield County some fifteen years previously…bones that were odd and elongated with a skull that was squat and bestial. Bones that local officials claimed must have been those of some sideshow freak, though others claimed that it was from a member of some unspeakable troglodyte race that inhabits the region…

  19

  Kenney took that in, finding revelation. He imagined that most people around the country who read it at the time were either nutty enough to believe it or had too much common sense to give it any credence. He was beginning to feel that he was a mixture of both of those extremes because he had to believe yet his rational mind told him he had slipped a gear, that such things could not be. Paper-clipped to the photocopy was a little ditty from the Journal of the Wisconsin Folklore Society. With a heavy heart and a need born of practicality to dismiss it all, he read it over.

  20

  What is particularly interesting is the age of these tales. There seems to be a cycle of myth extending back over two hundred years in Bayfield and Sawyer counties. A cycle that continues to this very day. An absolute belief among locals of a race of nocturnal underdwellers that apparently come up out of the earth through mud and sinkholes to raid graveyards and feed on corpses. One is greatly reminded of the Arabic folktales of the ghul, which supposedly haunt lonely burial grounds and devour corpses and the unwary…

  21

  Kenney sighed, shoved all the papers back into the envelope and just shook his head. He lit a cigarette, ignoring the signs forbidding such things, and just stared at Godfrey. “Okay, you’ve lived here all your life…have you ever actually seen one of these individuals? I mean in the flesh?”

  “Yes, but only briefly. I don’t doubt they exist, though. There’s no doubt that they’ve been here for a good many years.” Godfrey sighed. “I don’t bother adding to that file anymore and when I told you that cemetery caretakers around these parts tend to hush up grave robbings and the like, I meant it. But I will say that in the past twenty years or so there have been fewer reports of activity from these things. Maybe they’re dying out and maybe they’ve just gotten smarter. I don’t know. Don’t honestly care to know.”

  What kind of attitude was that for a cop? Kenney got to wondering, but then he knew, he honestly knew that if he were in the shoes of Godfrey or any of the other county cops through the years, he would have probably taken the same attitude. What else could you really do? If you started nosing into it, you were bound to face the ire of the locals and you wouldn’t get any help from other cops that knew because they were in denial. Which meant you’d have to go to the state authorities for help…and what did you do after they stopped laughing at you?

  “Elena Blasden was telling some pretty wild tales,” he said to the sheriff. “I guess I’m wondering how much of that is true.”

  Godfrey shrugged. “It’s anybody’s guess. Most of what she was talking about was before my time. But that bit about one of them getting run down by a car…that’s true enough. At least my predecessor, Albert Susskind, seemed to think so. He didn’t actually see any of it firsthand, before his time, but he has the autopsy reports in that file if you care to look.”

  “I don’t care to,” Kenney said.

  So Godfrey told him. “That happened back in the early twenties. Some fellow named Haynes or Hines was on his way up to Ashland on Bellac and something stepped out in front of his car. He hit and killed it…at least one of them.”

  “One of them?”

  “There were two,” Godfrey said with a dry voice. “An adult female and a child. The child was killed instantly, the female only injured. Legs broken, I gather. The child was a male and in its death throes, it vomited up what the coroner later discovered to be human remains…”

  Haynes or Hines suffered a mild heart attack and was taken to the hospital where he made a complete recovery. The body of the child, after the post, was cremated. The adult female was taken away to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, placed in a private, secure ward.

  “She lived almost a month,” Godfrey said. “And then she died during childbirth.”

  Kenney almost fell out of his chair. “You mean that fucking thing was pregnant?”

  Godfrey nodded. “According to Comp, the sheriff at the time, it gave birth to something that looked like a larva…something white and slimy that mewled like a cat. It died within a week. Comp never actually saw the child. But the doc up there, all he would say is that some things were meant to walk and others were meant to crawl.”

  Kenney sucked on his cigarette, realizing that by coming to Haymarket and Bayfield County, he had just opened up the biggest, ugliest can of worms in state patrol history. He had a feeling he’d never get the stink of this one off him.

  22

  Years back, when her sister Mae was still above the ground and not out feeding the worms at the county cemetery, Elena Blasden would get together with her and a few of the other old girls—Mamie LaRoche, Dorothy Palequin—once a month and have themselves what her mother had long ago referred to as a “tea luncheon” and her father had called “a hen party.” Elena always figured it was less of the former and more of the latter because before they were done, the private lives of just about everyone were pecked to death and no dirt was unexposed. Little sandwiches were served, tea and coffee drank, and the local situation was discussed in some detail. When Elena was feeling particularly charitable, she sometimes even invited Renny Fix, but not often because she was of the mind that Renny was a fool as all her people were fools.

  Somewhere during the proceedings, the subject of the Ezrens usually raised its somewhat well-worn head and oft-repeated tales were repeated yet again and usually in low voices as if the ladies were afraid of being overheard. Whenever Renny was present, she would repeat the same story her grandmother had told her so many, many years before when there was still a bloom of girlhood in Renny’s cheeks. You stay away from Ezren field if you know what’s good for you, little miss, Renny
would say, recalling her grandmother’s words and imitating her intonation the best she could after those many long summers and longer winters since her girlhood. Those from below come out under the light of the moon like nightcrawlers after a good rain. They’re always looking for children to take down below into their lairs and barrow pits. See that you’re not one of them or you’ll become like them…creeping in the black earth and feeding on dead things. If you see ‘em looking in your window some windy night, do not meet their eyes or they’ll take you with them and you don’t want that, now do you?

  That was the story she would tell as Elena held court and the old women listened, mouths pursed and eyes wide, the children within them scared again as they had been scared so long before. It was a cumulative effort. Once the subject was broached—Elena figured the only reason she invited Renny was because she was fool enough to broach it every time—it was added to, built upon, framed and finished with a combination of twice-told tales, local gossip, and utter fabrication.

  Mamie would practically drool over every deranged and grisly detail, while Dorothy would need to step out for air because her heart would be hammering so painfully and her head reeling with dizziness. That was to be expected, Elena knew, for she was every bit as dramatic at seventy-four as she had been at fourteen.

  Somewhere during the proceedings, once the cycle of rural myth had grown dull with repetition, all eyes would be upon Elena. Mae would insist that she share those things she knew of and Elena would happily oblige. My grandmother said it still used to happen when she was a girl, usually during long, dry summers when the ticks were bad and the moon grew orange as a pumpkin on clear nights. One of them would be born to a normal family and very often the mother did not survive the birthing. It was a bloody and horrifying affair. My granny said she had caught sight of it one time, just the one time. She had been where she was not supposed to be and looking upon those things she was not supposed to see. Being a farm girl she was not so naïve as city girls were about the birthing process. She had seen plenty of foal, calves, and piglets brought to term and had been present at the birth of two of her sisters. The mystery of life is no mystery to a girl on a working farm. So she peeked in a window where one of them things was being birthed and what she saw set her to running. I asked her what it was she saw and she told me what came out of that poor woman was more of a grub than a human baby. In those days, such things were handled by the midwife, a woman named either Starnes or Sterns, I can’t remember which. When one was born that was more of below than above, it was taken by her at sunset out to the Ezren field and left there. Soon enough, its cries would bring the others up from their holes. Like calls to like and blood calls to blood.

  Long after the sheriff and Kenney had left, Elena sat there thinking on things. Though she was old, very old, and her time left on this earth was short, her memory was still as sharp as her tongue. Those tea luncheons were now fifteen years gone and she was the only survivor of them. Mamie LaRoche had died in a nursing home over in Ashland ten years before, and Dorothy Palequin had preceded her three years before that after suffering a stroke while picking raspberries. Mae had passed six years ago now, going peacefully in her sleep.

  There was just Elena now, aged and tired, so god-awful tired, who spent her days remembering things lost past and faces long gone to ghost. Her body pained her something terrible these days and today her chest felt very tight. Too much excitement maybe and maybe it was simply time to close her eyes.

  Either way, she was accepting of it.

  23

  They held off going back to the Ezren farmhouse as long as they could. Or maybe Godfrey did. It wasn’t that Kenney was starting to call the place home sweet home or anything, but he had a job to do. Godfrey, however, was in no damn hurry. In the sheriff’s cruiser, they drove past the Ezren place and through the high arched gates of Bayfield County Cemetery.

  “There was something else,” Kenney said. “Something that Elena Blasden mentioned. Genevieve Crossen’s child. Something about Genevieve Crossen’s child.”

  Godfrey nodded. “Yeah, that’s quite a tale. But I suppose, since I’ve already bared the county’s soul to you, you might as well hear about that one, too.”

  Godfrey moved the cruiser down the winding dirt road, past newer sections of the cemetery with their russet- and emerald-colored headstones and brass flagholders, then over a low rise where the older areas were. And here, Kenney decided, was where the real cemetery began. It wound off over mounded hills set with oak and hemlock, a crowded city of leaning crosses and tombstones, broken slabs and ivy-covered vaults, a gray and white profusion of marble both water-stained and wreathed in creeping fungi. Family plots atop grassy bluffs were enclosed by rusting iron fences knotted with morning glory and English ivy. Ancient vaults were set into overgrown hillsides like black mouths. Monuments and shafts poked up from thick, congested stands of chokecherry and brambleberry, staghorn sumac and bracken.

  “Somebody ought to clean this place out,” Kenney said. “It’s getting a little wild.”

  Godfrey pulled the cruiser to a stop before the vaulted doors of a stone chapel with dark, hooded windows that were set with the gratings of bars. “Sure, somebody ought to. Got just the one caretaker here, county can’t afford no more than that. He has his hands full, it’s a big place.”

  And it was.

  Godfrey said they’d been burying people there since the beginning of the nineteenth century and longer, really, since just a few years back a group from one of the state historical societies located the old colonial graveyard of Trowden just beyond the back wall of the cemetery. They chopped it free from tangles of hawthorn, ash, and juneberry, exposing the crumbling flat stones to the light of day for the first time in well over a century.

  Kenney sat there, staring at raindrops running like tears down lichen-encrusted markers. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s have it.”

  Godfrey nodded. “If you want to know about Genevieve Crossen, then I suppose I’d have to tell you about a funeral and a murder. The funeral was that of Genevieve’s eleven-year-old daughter, Pearl. And the murder? Well, we’ll get to that soon enough.

  “Now, we’re reaching back some here, back to 1956 in particular, the year I turned thirteen and the year little Pearl drowned out in Deep-Cut Quarry, an abandoned quarry that flooded over as quarries will do. The quarry’s still there, sure enough, though fenced off now and no one swims it anymore. Even back in my boyhood before the water turned green and filled with slime and swimmer’s itch, it was damn deep in spots and you had to know where you could dive and where you couldn’t. See, there’s pilings of limestone rising up and you weren’t careful, you could bash your brains out on them. But the quarry was full of other things, still is. People drove old cars into it, tossed bedsprings and appliances down there. You get your foot caught on some of those things and you’d never break surface again. At least…those were the stories.

  “Nobody really knows the particulars of little Pearl’s death. She was fooling around out there, around the edge and must have fallen in, couldn’t climb back out. No matter. Later that day, Georgy Blasden and his brother, Franny—good kid, killed in Vietnam, April of ‘68—rode their bikes out to the quarry to catch some frogs and saw her floating out there. Georgy told me she looked like a fancy doll someone had thrown away bobbing out there...I suppose she did at that. See, Genevieve used to dress little Pearl up every day in fancy, frilly outfits, take the strap to her if she got dirty. Poor thing.

  “Well, anyway, they fished Pearl out and laid her to rest here, just over aways from where we’re sitting right now. It was a very sad thing, very sad. After that, none of us kids were allowed to swim in the quarry…even though we did, secretly.” Godfrey paused there, the memory of it all filling him, making those lines on his face stand out like crevices in dry earth. “Well, as you can imagine it was all too much for Genevieve. See, that lady had suffered horribly. Her life was nothing but a tragedy from beginning to end.
She’d had a son, too, Randy was his name. I barely remember him. He joined the marines and died over in Korea, October ’52. There was, as you can guess, quite an age difference between Genevieve’s children…but back in those days with no true birth control beyond keeping your legs closed and your johnson zipped up, shit just happened. You never knew when. Regardless, in the end, they both died awful, dirty deaths.

  “Randy’s death had been tough on that family, so tough that Henry Crossen, Genevieve’s husband, started to drink like a fish, trying to wash the taste of his son’s death out of his mouth. But he never did. Two years after Randy came home in a flag-draped box, one December evening in ’54 Henry piled his ’48 Chevy truck into a tree out on Bellac and joined his son. He was hammered, as you can imagine, and after he hit that tree, the truck rolled over, slid down the hillside through the snow and right into Ten Mile Creek. Ten Mile wasn’t frozen over completely that year and the truck went through, coming to rest on its roof. With his injuries, which were pretty massive, I understand, Randy couldn’t get out. And that’s how he died…in a cab full of freezing water. When they found him there the next day, he was frozen solid and I heard they had to use saws and axes to cut him free.

  “Too much, it was all too much, as you can well understand. Genevieve buried her son, then her husband, and finally her daughter and this within an ugly four-year stretch. She went soft in the head and who could blame her? Who could honesty blame her? People kept clear of her and her place, out on Wedeck Road, which is now just called County Road 707. She was just the crazy woman and you kept away like maybe what she had was catchy. Well, about three months or so after they buried Pearl, strange things began to happen. Stories began to circulate and they were damned unusual.”