The Hunter Inside

by David McGowan

  Something wasn’t right.

  He wondered if the woman was maybe a little mad. She certainly looked a wreck, and the man had not seemed to respond when she hugged him.

  ‘You two old friends?’ He offered the question cautiously, with a tone reflecting hesitancy in his voice.

  Sandy – he had overheard her name spoken – half-turned to look at Monty. Her cheeks flushed, a blotchy red the color of raspberry sauce on top of an ice cream, and it was Arnold – or at least it sounded like she’d called him Arnold – who answered the bartender’s question.

  ‘Yeah, but we haven’t seen each other for maybe five, six years.’ He smiled broadly, flashing his golf ball white teeth, before cutting the bartender dead by ushering Sandy away from the bar and over towards the table where she had earlier sat. Her drink sat waiting on the wooden tabletop, and she picked it up swiftly enough to spill a quarter of its contents.

  Monty won’t be happy, she thought, and glanced over to make sure he wasn’t watching or attempting to eavesdrop on the conversation that they were about to have. He wasn’t. He had stooped to continue whatever it was he was doing under the bar.

  ‘I know who you are, and I know what you’ve been going through,’ Sandy said as she put the glass back on the table.

  ‘What do you mean? How do you know me? More to the point, how do I know your name when I can’t remember ever meeting you before?’ She was obviously drunk or on the way to being so. Bill himself felt drunk with the surreal quality of the sudden meeting.

  He had only wanted a beer.

  Now it looked as though he was going to have to plunge headfirst back into a lake in which he didn’t want to swim. The surroundings of the bar faded as he fixed an inquisitive stare on the woman’s face and waited for answers to his questions, the beer forgotten and left on the bar.

  ‘I’ve been getting the letters too.’

  Bill Arnold froze. The letters. The letters that he hadn’t had to think about since his arrival in Atlantic Beach. And the photograph of the corpse. He hadn’t told a soul, yet here was someone sitting in front of him who said she knew about the foul threats.

  What’s more, she said she’s a victim. A victim like me. Like my father.

  ‘How do you know I’ve been receiving letters?’

  She didn’t look like a killer. She wasn’t particularly strong looking, but he was cautious nevertheless. She had a mother’s cast to her face, sort of like a dripping out of youth. The blue in her eyes looked faded to Bill, and she looked like she needed a damn good rest. Underneath her jaded eyes were dark rings, testament to a lack of proper rest, which stood out and were made more apparent by the pale cast of her face. Her hair was unkempt; frizzy and dirty looking, and rearranged by the wind and rain that had left Bill damp while tempering his more optimistic mood of earlier in the day.

  ‘Listen, I know all of this is weird. I think we might be the only two left to fight this thing. We’ve got to work together.’ Sandy stared hard into the eyes of the man in front of her.

  Bill stared back, and something told him that what she was saying was true: she was on his side. ‘Yeah, okay. I have been getting letters. But not since I arrived in Atlantic Beach. Whoever it is, they don’t know I’m here.’

  She had said fight. She obviously hasn’t seen the photograph, he thought. Or she wouldn’t want to fight; she’d want to run.

  ‘You’re wrong, Bill.’ She paused in acknowledgement of the fact that she had known his first name without being told, by him at least. ‘It does know you’re here. It’s here, and that’s why I’m here, because it brought me here. It brought me here in the same way as it brought you here.’

  ‘What do you mean, Sandy?’ He had known her name the moment she had spoken his, but his continuing unwillingness to accept the peculiarity of the situation had made him attempt to put this voice out of his head. ‘I don’t understand you. Nothing brought me here; I brought myself here. It was a free choice.’

  ‘It wasn’t, Bill. Believe me, I wish that were true but it’s not. It knows where we are, all of the time.’ Sandy could see that the big man in front of her was struggling against the reality of the situation he was in. She knew he had to accept the fact that it was real, like she had been forced to do, before they could think about fighting it.

  ‘Did it take someone else from your family, Bill?’ She didn’t want to evoke bad memories for him. Telling him about her own parents was the only way of proving to him that she wasn’t just empathizing with him, but was actually sharing his experience, and had done so for a long, long time.

  Bill Arnold reeled at her words. The link that he had made had been spoken in conversation for the first time. And by someone else. ‘Yeah, it took my father, the fucker. Sorry.’

  ‘Huh? Don’t apologize Bill. It is a fucker. It took both my parents.’

  ‘Jesus, Sandy, that’s tough.’ He paused and looked around for his drink. Realizing that it was still on the bar, he decided it could stay there for now – he had more pressing matters to consider.

  ‘I suppose it took both of mine too. My mother left two years after my father died, and I haven’t seen her since.’ He didn’t like to think of the possibility that whatever was hunting both of them had killed his mother. Rather that she had gone somewhere where she could put the murder of her husband, his father, behind her.

  ‘Do you know what’s going on, Sandy? Do you know what this thing is?’

  She saw fear in his eyes. She knew they couldn’t run much longer. It was more a sensing than actual knowledge, but she knew she had to have Arnold totally on board if she were to stand any chance of surviving and seeing Sean and David again. And Joe. But there were only so many answers that she could give, her own head was full of enough questions to fill an encyclopedia. ‘I don’t know what it is, no. But I know it’s not human.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come on, Bill. It can read your mind and tell you things. It’s even showed me things, in dreams. It has the power to put thoughts in our heads. It has the power to take us through its mind and actions, though our bodies don’t actually move. It’s trying to control us.’

  ‘What d’you mean, dreams?’ This was one experience that Bill Arnold had been spared.

  ‘I’ve had two dreams. I had the first last night. I saw it hunt down a man and kill him. I stood right there in the room and watched it butcher him.’ She paused, self-conscious in the telling of something that hadn’t seemed real to her at first, wondering how long it would take for him to accept what she had told him. It was evident to her that she knew more than he did.

  ‘But that’s just a dream, Sandy.’ He stated the obvious to her, knowing by the concentrated look in her eyes that she believed what she had said to be true.

  ‘I know. I thought it was just a dream. The second dream proved to me that it was real. You proved to me that it was real.’

  ‘What? How?’

  Sandy decided to tell him the second dream from the beginning. She knew that he would believe her when he heard of the journey on which she had been taken.

  ‘At lunchtime today I had the second dream. It was different to the first. This time I was seeing the world through its eyes, watching as it delivered its last letter to me, and then to you.’

  Bill Arnold held onto his question.

  ‘The reason I knew your name was because I saw it on the front of the envelope it delivered to your motel room.’

  ‘My motel room?’ He shivered.

  ‘Yes. Thirteen B at the Sleep-Easy Motel, right?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. But what makes you think it was real?’

  ‘During the dream I closed my eyes and saw you walking near a lake. Did you walk near a lake this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, but…’ She could have watched me. It could be a trap. He was pretty sure the subconscious voice that spoke this time was his own; his paranoia was growing.

  ‘I’m on your side, remember,’ Sandy said, raising her voice enough to m
ake Monty look across.

  Both Sandy and Bill smiled at Monty, and he resumed his wiping down of the old wooden bar-top. Sandy waited a moment before continuing, ‘Just listen, Bill. I promise you, if you just listen you’ll believe me.’

  Bill nodded. He would listen, but he would reserve judgment until she had finished recounting the dream.

  ‘It went to your motel room, and it pushed the envelope under the door. I was terrified that it was going to kill you. I thought I was going to be forced to watch it kill you. But it had another envelope, one with my name on it. Everything blurred. When it cleared it was standing outside my friend’s house; where I lay asleep. It posted the envelope with my name on it through the door of the house, and then it went around back. I could see myself through the window, Bill. I was powerless. It stood and looked through the window. I thought it would kill me. I thought about my boys. But it didn’t. It stepped back and I saw its reflection in the glass.’

  Her grimace showed that she held a powerful image of what she had seen in her mind.

  ‘It was hideous. It looked as though it wasn’t fully formed. And it had sores on its face and hands that seemed to heal as my terror grew. It looked like it had been in a head-on car smash. I recoiled away from it. When I did I was standing in the garden, behind it. But I woke as it turned around.’

  ‘And was it there, watching you through the window?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was too scared to look. I crawled to the side of the sofa. It felt as if my heart would burst, and I just wanted to get away from it. I knew I couldn’t hide, because I knew it was inside my head as much as I had been inside its head. But I was just so shocked.’

  ‘So how do you know it was real if you never actually saw it?’ He had failed to consider the obvious link, and Sandy knew that this was the detail that would make him believe the rest of her account.

  ‘The envelope. It was in the hallway when I checked, and when I opened it there was a photograph of the man from the first dream, dead.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Arnold uttered.

  The time had come for him to believe. But first of all he would have to see if there was an envelope waiting in his motel room. Then he would have no choice but to believe she was telling the truth. The only other possibility was that his paranoia was correct. The way she had told him about the dreams made him feel that she was either speaking the truth or going mad; he didn’t think she could be the killer. That didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be on his guard around her. He didn’t want to trust anybody, not with a killer pursuing him.

  ‘So, there’s an envelope waiting for me then?’

  ‘Yes. But we can’t go there, Bill. It might be a trap. It could be setting a trap for us.’

  ‘It’s the only way, Sandy.’ He felt a nervous excitement in his stomach, kneading away like a baker’s hands in dough. From a feeling of calm and tranquility had sprung a threat of maybe almost immediate action, and he felt as he had when undertaking surveillance of the area surrounding his house the previous day.

  Sandy nodded and rose from her seat. Bill did the same. Both walked towards the door that separated them from the storm, which continued to punish the roof of the bar, and Monty the bartender looked up at them as they passed hurriedly.

  ‘See you again soon, I hope.’

  Both raised a hand and Bill pulled open the door, stepping aside to allow Sandy through and into the unknown. The bar had felt like a safe haven to him, and he resolved that if he got through whatever was going to happen unscathed, it would be the first place he would go.

  For Sandy, nowhere felt safe.

  *

  ‘Come on. Let’s get moving. We don’t want to stay out here for too long.’ He was fussing as they half walked, half ran towards the parking lot that now resembled an Olympic sized swimming pool. She was alone, in a strange place, and being hunted by what she thought was some sort of demon. She had nobody, except him, to look out for her. That was what he wanted to do. By looking after her the danger to him might, in some strange way, seem less. It didn’t appear as though the ball was in their court, but he was pretty sure that whoever, or whatever, was stalking them; demon or no demon, it was not choosing the weather.

  The rain continued to fall in sheets that were pushed across the parking lot by the wind, turning and billowing as they stung anything in sight, and making Bill and Sandy gasp for breath as they continued on through the storm towards the nearby motel.

  By the time they paused under the same eave that Sandy had earlier used for shelter, wisps of hair were stuck to her face in a stream by the rain. Bill’s scalp showed through his short hair, and a drip fell from the end of his nose every few seconds as he stood, trembling under the wind’s power.

  ‘Looks okay,’ Bill said. Sandy nodded. It did look okay. Maybe it looked too okay, if there could be such a thing.

  They walked towards the room, being careful not to make a lot of noise on the wooden boards that served as a walkway, separating the small rooms from the tangle of branches in which Sandy had hidden while waiting for Bill to return earlier.

  The irony of their tiptoeing towards the room was not wasted on Sandy. It was somewhat akin to the irony of hiding amongst the branches earlier; and she knew that they might as well have tracking devices strapped to their bodies.

  It knows where we are.

  Holding the key with both hands, Bill managed to turn it and unlock the door. His heartbeat rang in his ears above the wind. He looked at the frightened woman who stood drenched in front of him and swung the door open quickly, holding his breath in an effort to deal with the tension that made his heart skip a beat, as he waited to be floored and set upon by whoever was hunting him.

  Instead, he saw a white envelope lying on the deep red rug behind the door and stooped to pick it up, the small of his back complaining with a dull throb that felt like a groan.

  Then it hit him.

  A bolt of lightning flashed inside his head and he saw a face hovering in front of his eyes as he touched the envelope. He recoiled instantly, letting go of the envelope and almost knocking Sandy off her feet as she attempted to prevent him from falling onto the wet boards outside the room.

  ‘Bill? Are you okay?’

  ‘Err…yeah. Yeah, I’m okay,’ he mumbled. The face was gone from in front of his eyes, but it would never be gone from the inside of his eyelids; whether he lived for one minute or a hundred years. It was hideous.

  ‘What happened? Did it speak to you?’ Sandy knew something had happened. She knew the reaction as the same one she herself had experienced when she had seen the beast’s face reflected in the glass at Melissa Dahlia’s home.

  ‘Shit, I saw it. I saw it Sandy.’ Bill Arnold was pretty certain that he now believed Sandy’s assessment; this was some sort of demon. The contents of the envelope could not make him any more afraid than he already was. Picking it up was the problem, and once he had managed to do so without any more flashes of light or hovering faces in front of his eyes, he tore open the top without regard for patience or care.

  Sandy placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘This isn’t going to be nice, Bill,’ she said, displaying a grimace that showed only a single percent of the feelings she’d had when she had seen the photograph.

  He peered inside the envelope before extracting the photograph. He ignored the piece of paper that accompanied it, and looked at the photograph directly.

  ‘That’s…’ he trailed off. It was the man from the police station. The man he had seen right here. Right here in Atlantic Beach. ‘I saw this man when I arrived here. At the police station. Damn, what was his name? I think it was Paul something…’ He trailed off as he tried to pull the previously insignificant seeming piece of information from somewhere near the back of the vault of his brain.

  ‘Wayans. His name was Paul Wayans.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘The same way I knew your name and you knew mine. The same way I knew that this envelope was sitting waiting for you
to come back from your walk.’ She pointed at the discarded envelope as she spoke. Now he’s got to believe me, she thought.

  ‘I think I believe what you said. But what are we supposed to do? I mean, look at the damage it does to the people it kills.’ He held out the photograph.

  ‘I’ve already seen it, remember? First hand.’ She didn’t want to see the man whose death had terrified her in the dream, and whose corpse had made her weep when she had looked at the same photograph. She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. Or how we’re supposed to beat it. But I know we can’t run anymore, Bill. We’ve got to face it. I’m ready to face it.’

  ‘How can you be ready to face this, Sandy? Jesus, how are we ever going to beat it?’ He asked the question more to himself than her, and she remained silent. He walked into the room and she followed, sitting down on the king-size bed next to him.

  ‘Bill, there’s nowhere left for us to run. I have a family. They’re my everything, and if I don’t get back to them then my life’s not worth living any more. Running didn’t do either of us any good. There’s only one way.’

  ‘But…what was that?’ The hairs on the back of his neck stood to attention.

  ‘What?’ Sandy replied, realizing that if the killer barged into the room right now she was not ready to stand and fight. Physically, she was certain she never would be. She followed Bill’s gaze towards the door.

  ‘I heard a noise. Outside. I heard footsteps. Where can we hide? Shit, where can we hide?’

  ‘There’s no use in hiding, Bill.’ The tone in his voice somehow matched the gut feeling that she had.

  ‘Sandy, go into the bathroom. Quickly. We’ll listen from there.’ He felt under the bed for his gun. He had placed it there so he could grab it quickly if anything happened in the night. As he did so, Sandy ran into the bathroom. The footsteps were getting louder now, and were headed in the direction of the room. He found the gun where he had left it and fished blindly in his carryall for more bullets. He didn’t know why he did this. He expected he would only get one shot at this thing; and he was not certain one shot would be enough. He located the bullets and grabbed half a dozen of the cold metal capsules before following Sandy into the bathroom, dropping one on the way.