She had tried to use Danny for this same sacrificial purpose, and instead, Tammy had lost her life in the crossfire.
And ultimately, Lynn Shields fell victim to the creature as well, devoured right before Danny’s eyes by the being she had sustained for so many years.
Danny rubbed his shoulder at the location where the scar from his bullet wound rose from the skin like a hill of flesh, the itchy, everlasting reminder of that deranged year of his life. “The name sounds familiar,” he answered.
Samantha frowned and nodded. “Yeah, I’m sure it does.”
Samantha obviously knew something about the history of his and Lynn’s relationship, but Danny didn’t offer anything.
“Anyway, when she disappeared a couple of years ago, it struck me that there were, what, maybe two lines devoted to her disappearance in the Rover? I thought that was strange, of course; grown adults vanishing into thin air is normally a thing a reporter in a small town would jump on. Even if it turned out to be nothing, I would think stories like that are hard to come by.”
Danny remembered his first meeting with Sarah and how she had told him almost the exact same thing.
“So I made a few calls to the police and the paper—and I even visited the town once or twice—just trying to get some kind of handle on what might have happened, you know?”
Danny swallowed hard and felt the blood rush to his face. It felt as if this woman who was a total stranger only days ago was suddenly able to peer into his memories and read his darkest secrets. He was tempted to ask why she cared so much about the disappearance of an apparent stranger—and the lack of reporting on it—but he assumed she was coming to the point, so he listened instead.
“I even went to her house looking for her,” Samantha continued, “and that’s when I found out that Lynn’s niece was living there. Tracy is her name. She didn’t remember me; she was just a kid at the time and we only met once or twice.”
“Didn’t remember you?”
Samantha shook her head. “But I remembered her. I asked her about Lynn and she told me she went to visit her one day and that Lynn was just gone. Didn’t know when she left or why or how long she’d been gone. Nothing. And, as luck would have it, she had left the house to Tracy free and clear. There was some type of living will that had apparently been written, and she was the only living relative.”
Samantha stopped for a beat, as if considering some new point she hadn’t explored, but then she shook her head and frowned as if it didn’t fit with another hypothesis she had already formed.
“Anyway, the woman just split. Left town for...well, I don’t know where? Do you know, Danny?”
Danny felt like he’d been smacked to attention. “What? Why would I know that? What is your interest in her anyway?”
Samantha ignored the question and studied Danny for a few beats, searching for the lie in his eyes that Danny was sure she would detect.
“It’s fine, Danny, really. The truth is, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Lynn Shields anymore, other than I hope she’s dead and died painfully.”
If you only knew, Danny thought.
He kept his eyes focused on Samantha, trying to suppress the image of the Ocean God on that morning of Lynn’s death. But he’d seen the events play out in his mind so often that they appeared there automatically, like the lyrics to a song from childhood that had been committed to memory.
The creature had materialized behind Lynn that night as if by magic, the darkness of the storm veiling the thing as it emerged invisibly from the water and slogged up behind the mad woman like some ancient, two-legged dinosaur. Danny could again see the rupture of Lynn’s eye sockets as the god squeezed her face at the temples with its ogre-like claws. That unnatural narrowing of the woman’s face, elongating like a roll of dough as the beast pulled her to the water, would live in Danny’s memory forever.
Women! she had screamed to the night.
It was the last word Lynn Shields ever spoke, one that revealed her last theory about the behavior of her god, believing that it had drawn a taste for female victims and thus had reappeared during the cycle despite having already been fed.
That theory may have been true, Danny considered, but he had never gotten the chance to verify it. Thank God for that.
“So I’m not going to ask you about her, okay? I’ve made my peace with Lynn over the years. Or at least have come to terms with the fact that I’ll never know for sure what happened. There was never any evidence that she murdered my father, and I finally stopped pursuing it a few months ago.” Samantha paused and looked Danny in the eye. “And then you arrived.”
Danny had followed the story up until about two sentences back, and the confusion suddenly brought him back from the reverie of the creature, sobering him to the present. “What are you talking about? Who is your father?”
“Does the name Lyle Bradford ring a bell?”
Danny recognized it immediately. It was the name of the man who died back in 2006, the one Sarah had written the article about that first captured Danny’s attention. He was Lynn Shields’ boyfriend at the time of his supposed drowning. Sarah had been skeptical of the drowning story at the time, and there was little doubt now that he had been offered as a sacrifice by Lynn, one of her many victims.
Danny nodded. “That was your father? Lyle Bradford?”
Samantha nodded. “Yep.”
“So was Lynn Shields—"
“No! No, of course not.” Samantha sighed and ran her fingers slowly through her hair, tilting her head up to the sky reflectively before setting her gaze straight again. “But she probably would have been my stepmother one day.”
“What happened? With your parents, I mean.”
“I don’t know, really. I thought my mom and dad were fine. They always seemed that way growing up. Not madly in love, I guess, but fine. And then one day he just left her. I already had my own place by then, was in and out of junior college, doing that whole early twenties thing, and then my mom calls and says my dad met someone and was...gone. Just like that. Packed one small suitcase and walked out the door.”
Samantha shook her head, as if still disbelieving the event she’d just described had actually happened.
“But the worst part, the part that pissed me off the most, was that he never called me to let me know what he was planning to do. It’s irrational, I guess, to think that he would have done that, but my dad and I were best friends for most of my life, and then he just abandoned us—abandoned me—without a word.”
Danny let the weight of Samantha’s parental trauma settle in, giving her a moment to repel the wave of tears that was no doubt building somewhere behind her eyes. “Did you ever talk to him again?” he asked.
Samantha nodded. “Yeah. He finally called me about a month later. Said he was in some small town called Rove Beach. I’d never heard of it. He told me he was sorry about my mom but that they hadn’t been in love for years and he needed someone to love again. You can imagine. Yahda yahda yahda. Anyway, he said he was still getting settled in his new place—Lynn’s place—but that he would call me again soon and I could come and visit him. And I could meet Lynn.” Samantha gave a hearty laugh. “Can you imagine?”
“So I’m guessing you weren’t very receptive to the offer.”
“I told him to fuck off. Used those exact words.” Samantha chuckled. “I had never cussed in front of my dad, let alone at him.” She shrugged and a wry smile drew across her face. “And then I hung up the phone. The last words I ever said to my dad were ‘Fuck off.’”
Samantha’s face morphed from the smile into a pressed wrinkle of despair as she tried unsuccessfully to keep her tears back. They flowed in huge, silent drops, coating her face in seconds.
Danny moved in to console her, but she put her hand up and shook him off. Instead he watched her for a moment, waiting for her to compose herself. When she settled, he asked, “So you never met Lynn?”
Samantha shook her head. “There was a funeral for
dad and she wasn’t there. At least I didn’t see anyone who fit the profile. But I saw the story in the local paper about dad’s drowning and it sounded like the reporter thought there might be more to it.”
Danny knew the article almost by heart now, and the cryptic mention that ‘No foul play is suspected.’
“I saw the police report and dad’s new lover’s statements about the drowning, and it never sat right. Maybe I let the article sway me, but it just seemed like there might be more to it.”
There was a moment of awkward quiet and then Danny said, “I’m sorry.”
Samantha wiped her face with both hands, cleaning up the residue beneath her eyes, preparing her face for the stare of hate that she shot at Danny. “Are you?”
Danny raised his eyebrows and lifted his hands as he shrugged. “Yes, Samantha, I am. What does that question even mean?”
“It means I think you know what happened to my dad.”
“I don’t.”
“Bullshit!”
Danny stayed quiet.
“You might not know exactly what happened to him, but you know something. More than you’re telling me now. You and your reporter friend. Sarah Needler, right? And I’m guessing Lynn’s niece, Tracy. She knows too, I suppose?”
“Why do you think that? Know what exactly?” Danny was close to giving up the game, but he wanted to find out what Samantha thought she knew first.
“Oh, I don’t know. Ms. Needler writes the story about my dad, which she implies is not the real story, and then ten years later she pens some item about a sea monster appearing on the beach near where my dad died. I don’t think that is a coincidence, Danny, but tell me if I’m wrong. Please, I dare you to tell me that.”
“Nobody believed that story about what I saw. People called it sensational. Irresponsible and gossipy. Every negative word you can think of to describe journalism. Sarah has to write under a pen name now because of that piece.”
“So am I supposed to feel sorry for you? For her?”
“No, Samantha, I’m wondering why you believe it.”
Samantha took a deep breath and frowned. She shook her head slowly and said, “I didn’t at first. Of course not. The only reason I knew about the picture at all was because the day the Rover had their tiny report of Lynn’s disappearance was the same day they had two pages of reader responses to the sea monster article.”
Danny recalled the issue and section of the paper to which Samantha was referring. The responses to the photo and the story on the Ocean God had been vicious, and most of the letters ended with vows by readers to cancel their subscriptions.
“I probably would have had the same disparaging opinion most of the readers had about the article too, but when I saw it was written by the same woman who had reported so conservatively on my dad’s death, I became intrigued. I followed up on her. And on you, since you were the source of the photo. And nothing about either of you seemed scammy. You never popped up on any fringe podcasts, never wrote a salacious book. You were just normal people, normal people who didn’t seem to have anything to gain from espousing a hoax like that.”
“Couldn’t that be said of most of the people who see a Chupacabra in the desert, or claim to have been anally probed by some tiny green star traveler?
“I suppose so, yeah, but you didn’t seem to belong to that class either—off your rockers, that is—which is the category I think most of the people you’re talking about belong to.”
“So that was it? You believed us because of our untarnished reputations?”
“I was still skeptical of the picture, but I believed you believed it, and that Sarah believed you believed it, which meant you must have been pretty convincing. Either that, or she already suspected the thing in that photograph existed. Whatever it is.”
Danny didn’t confirm or deny Samantha’s inferences, and instead circled back to an earlier statement. “You said you were following it, too. Is that what you think I’m doing? Following it?”
Samantha sniggered. “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”
Danny looked away.
“It’s not a big mystery, Danny. You came to the wrong place. From what I know of Rove Beach, the people there kept to themselves. That’s not Wickard. You were on the radar the minute you signed that lease.”
Danny narrowed his gaze as a new thought entered his mind. “So you just happened to be here? In this place? The town where the...where I’m living now? How could that be?”
“I told you, Danny, I’m following it, too. Ever since that photo appeared in the paper, I’ve done nothing but investigate this thing. I had a hunch about this place too. Guess I’m just a little quicker than you are.”
“Yeah, except between the two of us, I’m the only one that’s seen it.”
Danny had given up the ghost and it felt good to finally reveal the secret to someone who hadn’t been a part of the original story.
Samantha gave a satisfied grin. “So there we are then.”
Danny pinched his lips and cocked his head once. “There we are.”
“Well then, Danny, since I’ve already showed you mine, how about you show me yours.”
Chapter 22
What started as a faint, high-pitched chirp was now the unmistakable scream of a woman. The sounds came in erratic spurts, and with each wail, Samuel and Sokwa adjusted their course, taking one step to the left, two to the right, and so on, until they were homed in on the direction.
And they were close now, frighteningly so, as they could hear that the cries were coming from just around a sharp bend in the wide shoreline of the western sound.
Along the coast, centuries of erosion had created an earthen barrier of rock and dirt, forming a short cliff wall that ran along the beach, mirroring the shape of the water. Samuel could make out the large rocks at the base of the wall, as well as the exposed roots of the trees that sat atop the cliffs. They hung like the leaves of a willow above the boulders, desperate to find the dirt that would continue giving life to them and their sprouts towering above.
“What is happening?” Sokwa asked. “Where are we?” Her voice was quivering, close to tears. “Who is that screaming, Samuel? Is it the woman you seek? Is she in pain? Dying?”
“I don’t know, Sokwa.” Samuel snapped, once again sounding irritable. But he was no longer concerned with placating his companion; his only purpose was to find the woman. “How could I know the answers to your inquiries? Let us just find the source of the sound. It may only be fifty paces from us now. Even less.”
“But why is—”
The scream erupted again, and this time it sounded close enough to touch. It came low through the air, not in pitch, but in location, as if it had been projected from the ground just in front of their feet, maybe twenty steps or fewer.
Samuel nearly choked on his breath, and he instinctively jumped backward, as if he’d stepped on a snake. He stood as still as glass, scanning the beach, peering into the dark sand, squinting his eyelids as if the sound itself were some tiny physical form that could be identified with close enough inspection.
Sokwa froze as well, not from curiosity, but from true petrification. She had a thought to move a step backward, but her body wouldn’t allow it, as if the step itself would set the ground on fire.
They were here. Samuel and Sokwa had made it to the western shore, and they were close enough to the water now that the shine of the moon on the white grains of crystal in front of them allowed them to see all the way to the next bend in the cliff wall.
“What is this place?” Samuel whispered to himself. “These cliffs of dirt and stone? The trees standing atop them like castle guards? It is so very different than the eastern side of the island. Or anywhere else I’ve seen in this land.”
Sokwa shook her head, fear glowing in her restless eyes. “I have never been here either,” she answered, her voice taking on the same sense of wonder. “I was always told it uninhabitable in this section, but I suspect now the warning was to do wi
th this woman you seek.” She paused. “And the screams.”
The children remained unmoved for several moments, taking in this new, foreign landscape. It reminded Samuel of his first few weeks after arriving to this New World, when his family crossed the sound and began their colony on the small island between the Great Western Sea and the unruly continent to the west.
Yet during those first days, Samuel’s feelings were laced with a constant drone of fear. It was as if his soul was constantly being stung with the nettles of a jellyfish.
But no longer. Now, in this moment, standing in this new western world of screams and fear and pain, he felt like the king of the land.
“What is that?” Sokwa said. She took a small step toward where the cliff wall began, craning forward.
“Where?”
Sokwa raised her hand slowly, barely lifting the end of her index finger in a pointing motion, as if reluctant to find out the answer to her question. “There, Samuel. Do you see? Thirty paces out from where you stand and ten from the base of the cliff. There is a...dip in the earth. And then three more dips beyond that one, each spaced equally down the length of the cliffside.”
Samuel couldn’t see it at first, but as he focused on the distances Sokwa described, his eyes eventually found them. “I see it.”
He took a tentative first step toward the shapes, and then he picked up his pace until he was marching slowly but confidently toward the shadowy indentations in the earth, emboldened with the promise of new evidence that would help uncover the secrets of the Croatoan.
He came to the lip of the first dip and saw instantly it was the mouth of a wide hole, perhaps four paces across. The ground was silty but hard, an extension of the forest that snaked out in front of the cliffs and buffered the stone walls from the sand of the beach by about five paces. Loose sand from the beach had crept in and formed a yellow border around the hole, disguising it.
Samuel slowly went to his knees and then his stomach and, with little thought of what might have made such a hole, placed his face inside the perimeter.
The Origin (The Sighting #2) Page 13