“Can you reach the metal clips holding the rope?” Dr. Grant whispered.
Preston willed his numb fingers to move. After several attempts, he shook his head.
“Try harder. We don’t have much time. He could come back at any second.”
Preston strained against the cuffs, but his best efforts barely made his fingers twitch.
A hollow tapping sound echoed from far below.
The professor looked up at him, a wide-eyed expression of sheer terror on his pale face. He released Preston’s legs, leapt from the cairn, and sprinted out of sight.
“Wait…” Preston rasped. His newfound momentum caused him to swing around again.
The tapping noise grew louder and louder. He heard heavy breathing, the clatter of stones, and then the old man appeared, the naked body of Maggie Dandridge draped over his shoulder.
Preston sagged and nearly drifted off into unconsciousness again. There was no longer any doubt in his mind that the little girl was dead. He had never stood a chance of saving her. The old man had been in control every step of the way. All that remained now was to die himself. Undoubtedly, the sheriff had already been killed, and the professor was probably running for dear life into the forest. That left him alone, strung up like a deer waiting to be gutted.
It was all over now. A part of him resigned to his impending demise, while the rest of him became incensed at the thought of losing his one opportunity to avenge his daughter.
The cuffs ratcheted tighter on his wrists. His gun tugged against its holster and his keys shifted in the pocket of his pants. He started to turn in circles, but he had made no movement and felt no breeze.
Several minutes passed, during which the dizziness caused him to drift in and out of awareness. The old man reappeared below him, scaling the short wall. That awful wrinkled face looked up at him and flashed a foul grin, then, with a wink, the man descended into the darkness. His clanging footsteps eventually faded into silence.
Needles shivered loose from the branches surrounding Preston and spiraled toward the ground.
The air around him rippled.
He tasted metal in his mouth.
Pressure mounted in his sinuses, which released a trickle of blood from his nose with a loud snap.
Droplets swelled from his lips and chin, fell away, and swirled down toward the cairn.
II
As soon as the old man was out of sight, Les raced back out into the clearing and straight toward where the man in the suit hung. He had nearly abandoned the man to his fate when the old man emerged with the corpse of the young girl, but after watching the care with which the monster had brushed her hair from her face and posed her almost like a Precious Moments figurine, he had reached the conclusion that if he left now, he wouldn’t be able to live with himself. There was something truly evil about the old man that went beyond the act of killing the children. The old man needed to die, but he certainly wasn’t the one to do it. He had zero skill with a gun and couldn’t even determine if the blasted pistol had a safety or not. Surely the sheriff was already dead, which left the man suspended above him as his last hope.
The stones shivered as he climbed the wall. He struggled to find any sort of balance until he again grabbed the man’s legs.
“I can’t find anything to cut the rope,” he said, hoping the man could hear him over the humming sound, which seemed to intensify with each passing minute. He didn’t dare speak any louder. “So I’m going to try to pull you down. Maybe our combined weight will be more than the rope or the carabiners can support.”
He glanced down into the mouth of the pit. The sunlight stretched nearly to the bottom now, casting both of their shadows clear down the cement chute to the point where he could vaguely discern the circular outlet of the tunnel and the bottom of the iron ladder.
There wasn’t much time left before the sun aligned as it did in the petroglyph. Maybe nothing would happen, but with the way the ground shuddered and appeared to radiate heat that he couldn’t feel, he wasn’t willing to take that chance.
He hugged the man’s knees and jerked, tugged, pulled.
The man groaned in pain above him.
Les couldn’t afford to stop now. The earth trembled. The air shimmered. Even his vision shivered.
One of the flat stones wiggled loose and toppled out from under him. He fell forward, grasping the man’s slacks to keep from falling.
A shout from above him as their amassed weight was transferred to the man’s wrists.
With a snap, one of the ropes that formed the network in the trees split and dropped them several inches.
Les slid down the man’s legs and clung to his ankles, arms tight around his shoes.
He looked into the tunnel directly beneath him, no more than four feet down. If he fell, it would take some serious acrobatics to keep from plummeting straight down the chute. A figure stepped into view far below. The sunlight caught his wrinkled face and their eyes met across the distance. A momentary expression of confusion crossed the old man’s features, and then he smiled.
Les felt a surge of panic and tried to swing his legs back to the rock wall.
The old man raised his arms out to his sides as the sunlight enveloped him.
Les turned away. Golden stars appeared in front of the cairns in the outer ring, rising from the patches of turned earth where the DVDs were buried. The bodies of the uncovered children shook and almost appeared to raise their heads toward the blossoms of light.
His belt buckle pulled him downward.
His keys tugged against his pocket.
The force was too great. His arms slipped and he grabbed for anything within reach.
Blazing light below.
The golden sunspots around him, now circling around the cairn in tightening spirals.
Dead children, shaking, trembling.
Intense pressure in his head, a sensation of displacement, of something reaching inside of him and forcing out his every conscious thought.
Laughter in his ears, originating from the core of his being.
A smile on his lips.
He tasted blood, felt warmth pour over his chin.
Another rope snapped overhead, dropping them with a lurch.
His arms closed around nothing but air and he watched the pair of shoes rise above him against the blinding glare of the sun.
Falling.
Weightless.
Les was swallowed by darkness as he plummeted down into the tunnel.
III
Preston felt the ropes release him, and then he was falling. He caught flashes of movement all around him as the ground rushed up toward him. Small stars, like the sun reflecting from so many shards from a shattered mirror, rising from the earth and swirling around him. Movement throughout the clearing, stones tumbling away from the cairns, the bodies already exposed trembling and raising their desiccated faces to the heavens.
His torso flopped forward and he caught just a glimpse of Grant’s face before the professor vanished into the tunnel, staring directly into his eyes, reaching for him. There was no fear in his expression, no panic. Only a smile that appeared wider than his face could accommodate. A golden reflection from his eyes, and Grant was gone.
Preston’s chest struck the ring of stones, knocking the wind out of him. Ribs cracked. Pain exploded through his whole body. He barely managed to grab onto the rocks and drag himself over the rim just enough to keep from toppling backward into the hole.
The stone wall collapsed and toppled outward. Preston slid down the cascade of stones and struck his head.
He pushed himself to all fours, blood flowing from the gash across his hairline, barely able to gasp for breath through the searing pain in his chest, and crawled over the mound of stones to the hole.
Arms throbbing, the returned circulation flowing like lava through his veins, he eased down into the chute, found a tenuous grip on the iron ladder, and began his arduous descent.
IV
Dandridge
staggered toward the end of the tunnel and the main chamber beyond. A blinding light forced him to shield his eyes. The old man was silhouetted in the heart of the glare, arms raised to his sides, back arched, staring upward with his mouth open in a soundless scream.
The sheriff leveled his pistol with the man’s knee.
Before he could squeeze the trigger, a dark shape appeared from above the old man and slammed him to the ground. There was a loud crack like a board breaking. A tangle of bodies rested on the floor in front of him.
Still. Unmoving.
Dandridge crept closer, weapon trained on the shadowed forms in the brilliant column of light.
One of them started to cry.
“Where am I?” a meek voice sobbed. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
As Dandridge neared, the intensity of the sunlight waned and details came into focus. The professor was crumpled on top of the old man, the back of his head resting on that filthy suit jacket. Grant’s knees stood from the ground at severe angles, his fractured fibulae poking out through his flesh, his tibias bent sharply. His eyes were closed. Dandridge couldn’t confirm that the professor had survived the fall until he was close enough to see the subtle rise and fall of Grant’s chest.
The crying intensified, filled with pain, fear, sorrow.
Dandridge felt no sympathy. He stared down into the old man’s face. Tears rolled through the wrinkles on his cheeks from milky white eyes. His shoulders shuddered, making the ends of the broken clavicles that had ripped through his jacket twitch.
“How did I get here?” the old man moaned. He pawed tentatively at the sharp bones protruding from his upper chest and turned to face Dandridge. “Help me. Please. Please help me…”
The sheriff leaned over, grabbed the old man by the collar of his jacket, and dragged him out from beneath the professor, whose head fell to the ground with the clack of teeth. He hauled the old man up and dropped him to his knees.
The old man fell forward and caught himself with his arms before his face could hit the ground. He screamed in pain and sobbed even harder.
“Look at me,” Dandridge said.
The old man hung his head like a beaten dog, his whole body shaking.
“I said look at me!” Dandridge pressed the barrel of his pistol against the bone protruding from the old man’s jacket. Hard. He wailed and raised his eyes to meet the Sheriff’s.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” the man whimpered.
Dandridge grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair, jerked his head back, and shoved the barrel into his right eye. He heard an irregular clattering sound and looked up to see Preston struggling down the ladder. Their stares locked for a long moment.
The old man cried and tried to pull away, but Dandridge pulled his hair even harder to hold him in place.
An understanding passed between the agent and him. Preston released his stare with a lone, slow nod.
Dandridge looked back at the old man. He committed the expression of fear on that sagging face to memory.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” the old man whined again.
Dandridge pulled the trigger. The crown of the old man’s skull came away in his grasp with a handful of hair and scalp. Blood splashed across the floor and drained from walls pocked with chunks of bone and spongy gray matter. The body toppled awkwardly backward, legs crumpled beneath it.
A cloud of gunpowder smoke hung in the air.
The gun fell from his hand with a clatter.
Dandridge shambled across the room. He barely glanced at Preston as he shouldered past and started up the ladder on numb arms and legs.
The ground now barely shivered. By the time he reached the top, it was completely still.
He climbed out of the hole under the baking sun, clambered over the fallen rock wall, and crossed the clearing.
In his mind, he saw a beautiful twelve year-old girl kneeling on the ground, hair like spun gold blowing in the breeze. She smiled up at him and he took her in his arms for the last time.
Barbed wire tearing his uniform shirt, gashing his skin, he cradled his daughter’s lifeless body to his chest, and cried softly into her neck.
V
Preston studied the ruined corpse at his feet. It looked so frail, so weak. A wave of repulsion, of unadulterated hatred washed over him. In his final moments, the old man had cried like the children he had slaughtered without remorse. He hadn’t defied his fate with his final breath. There had been no epithets. Only a meek, pathetic old man who preyed on children because they were weaker than he was, because they were helpless against him.
With a bellow of rage, Preston raised his heel and drove it down onto what little remained of the man’s face. Over and over. Bones snapped. Blood dripped from his foot. The dead face became a bruised and bloody pulp. A smoldering paste poured out of the exit wound.
Everything he had worked for, everything he had sacrificed over the last six years to bring him to this place in time…and now it was over. This monster would never hurt another soul again. It was of little solace, however. His daughter was still gone, and she would never be coming back. She had died down here. In the darkness. In pain. His name on her lips. His Savannah, the light of his life, had called the only name that had ever truly mattered to him with her dying breaths.
Daddy…
He closed his eyes and imagined he could sense her presence with him, smell her, hear the precious sound of her voice.
She was free now. As he knew that she would want him to be as well.
Preston turned away from what was left of the old man.
The professor groaned and attempted to sit up.
“Don’t try to move,” Preston said. He walked around the mess, knelt beside Grant, and placed a hand on the professor’s chest to dissuade him from rising. “Just try to relax. We’ll find a way to get you out of here, but you won’t be walking on those legs for a while.”
Grant moaned and rolled his head to the side. He stared at the carnage for a long moment. Preston was sure he saw the ghost of a smile on the professor’s face before Grant again looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes.
Preston clapped the professor on the shoulder in silent thanks, and started back up the ladder toward the clearing, where the solstice sun shone down on the shattered remains of his broken heart, and on the daughter to whom he could finally bring peace.
Chapter Six
June 22nd
I
22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming
By the time the sun set, the clearing was again crawling with law enforcement officers. The FBI had airlifted in portable generators and enough sodium halide domes to light up a football field. Cords duct-taped into bundles the size of Preston’s arm ran everywhere. They snaked through the forest, along the stone spokes of the medicine wheel, and down into the hole, from which a column of light shone up into the night sky. Field agents from every available government agency sifted through the aftermath of the day’s ordeal. Nearly the entire staff of forensics investigators had been flown in from the Bureau office in Denver.
Preston could only stare in awe at the intricately choreographed dance.
All of the stones had been unstacked from the outer cairns and meticulously tagged, photographed, and dusted. The bodies inside had been laid bare and photographed. It turned out the barbed wire that had bound them was a single continuous piece, run between the cairns under the outer ring of stones. They had unraveled it, divided it into sections, and tagged it with the victim number that corresponded to the body it had been wrapped around. The remains had been bagged and now rested off to the side where they awaited thorough evaluation by a team of medical examiners who were prepared to drop their current case load and devote their full attention to the children, whose remains, after being missing for so long, would need to be returned to their families, who would now have to mourn the loss of their sons and daughters.
Preston knew how they would feel, for he had already spent the majority of the
afternoon saying goodbye to what little was left of his baby girl. He had always hoped that finding her would bring a measure of closure, to at least allow the wounds to begin to heal, but the hole in his heart remained. He now knew the pain would never pass.
What kind of person would that make him if he allowed it to?
Dandridge had spent the better part of the evening consoling his wife, who now rested comfortably in a pharmaceutically-induced sleep under the watchful eyes of the physicians at Lander Regional Hospital, where Dr. Lester Grant would soon be placed in recovery following the orthopedic surgery that had replaced his tibial shafts with titanium rods. Preston owed the man a debt of gratitude. At some point, he was going to have to swing by the hospital and express his thanks. It was the least he could do for the man who could have left him strung up in the trees for Lord only knew what to happen.
That’s why he was still here.
There were too many unanswered questions. He needed to know what the killer had expected to happen, and he needed to be able to rationalize what he had felt and seen. The glowing lights, the mirror-like reflections without visible sources. The humming sound. The magnetic pull that had affected his keys, his pistol, even his fillings. He needed to know why the killer had told him about the electromagnetic properties of the decomposing children, if that was even true. But most of all, he had to know why. Why had his daughter been stolen from him, and why had she needed to die?
He looked over to where Dandridge stood at the edge of the clearing with a blank expression on his face, staring somewhere in the middle distance. Both of his hands were in splints. Preston hadn’t seen him return. After everything they had been through, the sheriff should have stayed with his wife, where he could console her, and, in turn, allow himself to be consoled. Preston envied him that luxury. Soon enough he would have to tell Jessie, who would close the door on him and seek comfort in the arms of her new husband and continue to live through her new child. His obsession to find Savannah had consumed so much of his being that it was all he knew now. Without the hunt, what was he supposed to do? There was no life left for him to resume.
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