Mosquito Man

by Jeremy Bates

  Tabitha studied one photo labeled “Happy Fifth Birthday!” In it, Rex sat at the center of a table, attempting to blow out five candles atop a chocolate cake. His friends sat to either side of him, some smiling shyly for the camera, others making funny faces.

  Who would have ever thought that little kid would end up flying airplanes through the sky? she thought sentimentally.

  Rex had once told Tabitha that he’d always known, for as long as he could remember, that he wanted to be a pilot. So perhaps he had known this even when this picture had been taken. Perhaps when his mother, or his teacher, had asked him that age old question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he had confidently answered, “A pilot!”

  She smiled at this, proud of him for seeking out his dreams, even as a shadow of displeasure spread within herself.

  Because becoming a flight attendant had not been her dream.

  Tabitha liked that her job afforded her the opportunity to travel, to see different places, and to meet new people. But the work itself was hardly glamorous.

  Tabitha supposed she became a flight attendant the same way a recent college graduate with an Art degree becomes a human resources administrator or a fast-food restaurant manager: the position was available, previous experience wasn’t necessary, and it paid all right.

  So what had been her dream? she wondered.

  The scary, yet truthful, answer was that she never really had one. She had never been inspired or impassioned to do any one thing with her life particularly well. She had always been content with mediocrity. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. The products of this mediocrity were two beautiful daughters, a loving family, great friends, and a fantastic boyfriend.

  She should have been very happy.

  Only she wasn’t.

  Because mediocrity was no longer enough.

  She had started feeling this way during the divorce proceedings with Jacob. That was when it dawned on her that she was getting old. When the divorce was finalized in a few weeks’ time, she would be a single mom with no house she could call her own, a ten-year-old car, and zero savings. This was not the life she had envisioned for herself. And she no longer had limitless time for the pieces of the life she had envisioned for herself to fall into place. She was almost forty. In another ten years or so she would be fifty.

  Yes, she loved Ellie and Vanessa with all her heart and couldn’t wait to watch them grow up, and, yes, she was over the moon with Rex and couldn’t wait to see how their future unfolded together.

  But something was missing from her life that had never been missing before.

  Personal fulfillment.

  She needed to know she was not simply waking up each morning to pay the bills and to get through the day.

  She needed a dream.

  Swallowing hard, Tabitha closed the scrapbook and set it back on the shelf.

  Her eyes fell on the policeman, and her breath hitched in her throat.

  His eyes were open, and he was looking at her.

  She crouched next to him. “Oh God, hi,” she stammered. “Are you okay?”

  He worked his mouth but didn’t answer.

  “Water?” she asked, but he shook his head.

  He worked his mouth again. “Rex…?” he said.

  “Rex is my boyfriend. But he’s not here. He went to get the car. We parked way down the road and—”

  “Need…t’leave.”

  “Yes, we know that, we’re trying,” she said, still rambling. “But why? Who’s out there? Who attacked you?”

  “Need…t’leave.” He licked his dry lips. “Now.”

  ***

  Paul Harris knew he was cut up in a bad way. Fire burned in his stomach. He could feel copious amounts of blood drying on his skin and clothing. But his injury wasn’t what frightened him. It was what was out there in the night.

  It exists, he thought, cold with horror, while at the same time a part of his mind admonished himself for not accepting this conclusion years earlier, given the abundance of evidence that had piled up right in front of his nose.

  In the fall of 1989, eight years after the Chapman family went missing without a trace, and two after the Peterson family followed suit, Maddy Greene, a sixty-three-year-old widowed pensioner who lived on Highway 99 five kilometers from Pavilion Lake, called the police station in a panic late one evening, saying somebody was lurking around outside her house. She changed her story when Paul arrived to investigate, saying the interloper wasn’t someone but something. She came to this epiphany, she said, when she saw it pass by her kitchen window not two feet away from her glass-pressed nose. She described it to Paul as having gray or black skin, and long, skinny limbs covered with coarse hair that, in her words, “was nicely combed, like with a brush.” Its height, she guessed, was roughly seven feet (“tall enough I was looking way up at it, Paul”), and although it walked on two legs like a human, its movement was jerky, its arms raised like the raptorial forearms of a praying mantis. Most surprising was her description of its face. “Hideous eyes, Paul, big like softballs, and a needle-like nose like some of those fish have, those swordfish.”

  Paul searched outside the house for footprints, but he found none. This wasn’t necessarily saying much, as the ground had been hard and dry, and he was no expert at identifying tracks of any sort. He told Maddy that some kids from town had probably been playing a prank on her, and to lock the doors and windows and get some sleep.

  Paul didn’t give the incident much more thought until the following summer when Jenna and William Jannot, who lived about ten minutes down the highway from Maddy, reported that a half-dozen of their chickens had been slaughtered during the night. Chickens fall prey to foxes, bobcats, and cougars in these parts all the time. After such attacks, however, nothing usually remained of the bird except a few feathers. Yet on this occasion the carcasses of the Jannot’s chickens were scattered all around the roofless coop, each one emptied of blood and featuring a well-defined puncture wound in either the neck or the hindquarters.

  “Looks like you got yourself a vampire problem,” Paul had told William lightheartedly.

  “Ayuh, a vampire with one goddamn tooth,” William had replied.

  “So what do you want me to do, Will?”

  “I want you to find out whoever done this, Paul. What the hell were they using, a giant syringe?”

  “It’s weird, I’ll admit that.”

  “Weird ain’t the half of it, Paul. Their blood’s clean gone! Jenna’s scared shitless. Someone with enough screws loose to do this, who knows what they might try next? I bet ya it’s that Jameson girl. She’s a bit retarded, ain’t she? Always walking up and down the roads at night time by herself, sometimes half-dressed and talking to the moon.”

  “She’s got schizophrenia, Will.”

  “Exactly! Reason enough to do something like this.”

  “You’re a good twenty kilometers from town. She’s never come this far before.”

  “Maybe last night she did?”

  “I’ll have a word with her.”

  Paul never did speak to Penny Jameson. He was pretty sure the culprits were the same kids who had dressed up in a Halloween mask to scare Maddy Greene. In a small town like Lillooet, where the only things the kids had in plentitude were a lot of time and little to do, they could get very creative with the mischief they got into. Throw alcohol and drugs into the mix, along with someone who had their driver’s license and access to a beat-up runaround, and nothing was off limits.

  Life in the Lillooet Country continued as usual for the next while. The days were quiet and uneventful until the latest local scandal spiced things up every few months or so. Like when Alexis Dempsey, a twenty-five-year-old bank teller, was outted for moonlighting as a prostitute in Whistler Village on weekends. Or when an out-of-towner opened a sex shop on Main Street across from the supermarket (it shut down one month later largely due to the righteous efforts of crossing guard Marjorie Cooper, who sat out in front of it on a fold
ing chair every single day it was in operation, shaming any man who dared to enter). Or when Pastor Joe at the Anglican Church had a heart attack during a Sunday morning mass, croaking in front of the fifty-person congregation that included a dozen children who were told the pastor was such a good man that God had wanted to take him before his time. Or when sycophantic Lewis Edevane, the high school biology/human anatomy teacher, broke into the house of the school’s vice principal to steal her supply of anti-depressants.

  But nothing else unexplainable happened in the remote mountain community again. Not until the spring of 1992, at any rate. It was late April, and the region had just experienced an unseasonal cold snap, along with a foot of snow. On a morning Paul had planned to spend sitting in front of the police station’s fireplace with a pot of hot coffee and copies of The Toronto Star and Vancouver Courier, Billy Nubian rang up, asking Paul to come out to his property but not saying much more than that. When Paul arrived at Billy’s forty-acre farm located equidistant between Lillooet and Pavilion Lake, Billy met him at the front door, where he lit up a cigarette and said, “Come around back, Paul. I want to show you something.” He led Paul to the pen where he kept his goats, only now there was only a single goat in it, and it was lying on its side in the snow. “I moved the others in with the sheep so I could put this one down.”

  They stopped before the animal’s lifeless body, and Paul frowned at the grotesque wound that disfigured its belly.

  “What the hell happened to it?” he asked.

  Billy flicked away his cigarette and immediately lit another. “Something spooked them in the night. Me and the wife could hear them bleating all the way up in the bedroom. I threw on a jacket and came out…” He shook his head. “I swear, Paul, I’m not making this up…but there was…something…in the pen with them.”

  “Something?”

  Billy shrugged. “Some sort of bug thing. I know how that sounds, but…” He shrugged again. “I mean, it had these big, buggy eyes.”

  Paul thought of Maddy Greene’s alleged trespasser and said, “Tall and thin?”

  “Yeah, I guess it was. It was crouching froglike over this goat. Like maybe it was getting ready to pick it up and carry it off or something. But yeah, I’d say it was tall and thin.” Billy raised his eyebrows. “You’ve seen this thing before, Paul?”

  “Not me. But Maddy Greene claimed to have seen it last year.”

  “Claimed? I ain’t making this up, Paul. I ain’t claiming anything. I saw what I saw.”

  “I’m not doubting that, Billy. Wrong choice of words. I believe Maddy saw it too—only, I don’t think we’re talking about an ‘it.’ What she saw were probably some kids playing a prank on her. Maybe you did too? One of them wearing some kind of mask or—?”

  “Look at that goat’s belly, Paul,” he said, jabbing a calloused finger at it. “Torn clean open. No kids did that. Besides, I saw the thing, goddammit. It might’ve been dark out, but I saw it.”

  When Paul wrote up the incident report, he paraphrased what Billy had told him, mentioning only that an “unknown animal” had attacked one of his goats, along with the rest of the admittedly sparse and inconclusive facts of what happened that night.

  And that was that. The world kept turning, and Lillooet went right along with it.

  Eighteen-year-old Hunt Fischer was drafted by the Edmonton Oilers and, in recognition, had his mural painted on the wall of the local McDonald’s PlayPlace. Lewis Edevane got into trouble again when he hosted a student party at his house that involved a copious amount of pot and alcohol. Lewis’s friend and coworker in the high school’s math department, Michael Finnegan, resigned after he slept with a female student a week after she graduated (they ended up marrying a few months later and divorcing a few months after that). Notoriously cranky Clyde Johnson had his tractor stolen from one of his fields (it was found two days later in a culvert without its tires and painted purple). And when Pat Florio’s namesake son, Pat Jr., came out as gay in the first week of school in the fall of 1996, Father Dempsey excommunicated him from the Catholic Church (public backlash forced the priest to welcome him back into the flock in time for the following Sunday’s morning mass).

  On July 4, 1998, Paul had been celebrating Independence Day out at Hangman’s Tree Park, named so because it was the resting place for William Armitage, who had been convicted and hanged for the murder of a fellow gold seeker in 1863. Standing amongst the revelers next to Hangman’s Tree (which had long ago died and was now nothing but a six-foot-tall dead stump), Paul was eating a hot dog and listening to the cover band play CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” when his cell phone rang. It was his wife, Nancy. Eve Holleman who had a summer cabin on Pavilion Lake had called the station to report screams and gunshots coming from next door.

  Paul pulled into the Ryerson’s driveway half an hour later. Their potato-brown station wagon was parked in the driveway. Eve Holleman was not there to greet him. More than likely she was hiding inside her cabin with the window blinds drawn and the doors locked.

  Paul put the cruiser in Park, got out, and withdrew his Glock from the holster. He had never met Rick Ryerson, or his wife, Sue, though he knew of them, as he knew of every local and summer resident in and around Lillooet. Rick was a dentist from Vancouver. He bought this property five years ago, tore down the shabby hunter’s cabin that had stood on it unoccupied for years, and put up the tidy, four-bedroom cottage that Paul was approaching now. The couple had one teenage daughter.

  The front door to the cabin was closed. Ignoring it, Paul moved down the side of the building. He came to a large deck that offered unobstructed views of the lake, which dazzled blue in the afternoon sunlight. He crept up the three steps, passed a gas barbecue with marble bench tops, and quietly slid open the glass patio door.

  He stepped inside, holding the gun in front of him with both hands to keep it steady.

  The large room featured cathedral ceilings, pastoral artwork, and expensive French country furniture—the latter of which was in complete disarray. A floor lamp with a mauve-colored shade lay on its side, next to an overturned ottoman and smashed vintage desk. A heavy oak dining table was shoved pell-mell to one side, toppling some of the chairs that had surrounded it. A mirror lay facedown on the floor on a bed of jagged pieces of loose glass.

  Blood was everywhere.

  There were two main stains, one on the floor near the dining table, the other in front of and on a three-seater sofa. Both had been stepped in. Crimson footprints created anarchic patterns across the floor, alluding to the bedlam that had taken place here earlier.

  Trying not to gag on the sweet, metallic stench permeating the air, Paul stepped over the floor lamp and rounded a Provencal two-drawer dresser that stood incongruously in the middle of the room, as if it had been dragged there to serve as a buffer against an attacker.

  “Police!” he called out in an authoritative voice, not expecting an answer and not getting one.

  He spent the next ten minutes poking around each room, not touching anything. Then he returned to the back porch and called the Whistler detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He remained outside while the forensic guys documented the crime scene before beginning the laborious task of collecting fingerprints, blood samples, and other physical evidence. By the time they wrapped up it was after dark. Most of the other lake residents had gathered out in front the cabin to rubberneck, looking scared and worried and maybe even a little excited by all the commotion.

  Naturally the next day Lillooet’s rumor mill went into overdrive, and it wasn’t long before the townsfolk were connecting the disappearance of Rick Ryerson and his wife and daughter to the fates of the Chapmans and Petersons. Top-secret government experiments and alien abductions were favorite topics of speculation. So too were legends from the gold mining days involving vengeful spirits and black curses and all that hocus-pocus.

  One tale in particular captured everyone’s imagination.

  In 1904 a man named Dumb John Dagys
fatally shot a Chinese miner named Ah Shing on the shores of Pavilion Lake. Six months later, after bragging about the murder during a game of poker, Dagys was arrested. According to court documents, the prosecution described Dagys as a mountain man who would show up every now and then in Lillooet with a pocketful of gold nuggets, spending all of them on booze and whores before heading back into the wilds. The general consensus at the time, and the eventual conclusion of the court, was that Dagys had discovered a goldmine amidst the mists, thick woods, and rugged terrain near Pavilion Lake—and had murdered the Chinaman, who had discovered the mine’s location, to keep it secret. Dagys was hanged in March 1905, and his final words (garbled on account that he had no tongue) before the gallows trap door sprung open, were: “Anybody goes looking for my mine will wish they didn’t, God have mercy on their soul.”

  Which begged the questions: Did Troy Chapman find Dagys’ mine in ’81? Did Marty Peterson find it in ’87? Did Rick Ryerson find it most recently?

  And did they, and their families, fall victim to Dagys’ curse?

  Most people Paul talked to seemed to believe this, even if they didn’t come right out and say so. And with the RCMP’s forensic lab report failing to unmask any terrestrial suspects, the ghost of Dumb John Dagys became the go-to natter whenever talk of the missing families came up

  Until the summer of 2009.

  While the rest of the world was dealing with the fallout from the US subprime mortgage crisis, the residents of the Lillooet Country were being terrorized by an unknown creature. It was first spotted in the sky out east over Cariboo Road by Tom Eddlemon, who later described it to the local paper as something “about the size of an ape but with large transparent wings.” That same week Steve Krugman snapped a photograph of what he believed to be the same creature perched on the roof of his barn (though it had been dark out, and the shape in the photo had been far from conclusive). The final encounter that eventful summer came on August 1. Before going to bed, George Long found his wife, Heather, passed out in their backyard in her pajamas and housecoat. When she came round, she claimed to have come face to face with a “half-man half-bug.” The last thing she remembered was it scooping Sadie, her Jack Russell terrier, into its arms and flying off into the night (the dog has never been seen since).