Nightcrawlers

12

“All I’m saying is that I wish you had practiced some common sense,” Sheriff Godfrey was saying the next morning, his face hard as quarried marble. “Didn’t Hyder tell you how dangerous that might be?”

Kenney, his bloodshot eyes staring into dead space, said, “That man’s a damn superstitious fool and we both know it.”

Godfrey just nodded. “Maybe he is at that. But fool or no fool, none of this would have happened had you just listened to him. Now I got three missing deputies and one state trooper. How in the fuck am I supposed to explain that?”

Kenney just shook his head. He had no answers. After last night, he was clean out. He saw the world in an entirely new way now, divine revelation had been shone upon him in all its grisly splendor, and he did not like it. Not one goddamned bit. You lived through something like that, how did you look yourself in the face again? How did you have any faith in reality? How could you live your life knowing there was madness lurking in every shadow?

Kenney lit a cigarette and looked around the trailer.

The muddy footprints on the floor. The rain slickers hanging on their hooks. A gentle rain was falling as it had been falling all morning and on the roof it sounded like popcorn popping. He could hear men outside, dogs. It was just before dawn when Hyder and he and the others had wandered back to the road. They found their cruisers and got the hell back to the farmhouse, though what they wanted and wanted badly was to drive and keep driving until they were far from Bellac Road and its malignant fields and creeping woods and ruined farmhouses.

Godfrey was sitting at the table, drumming his long, callused fingers and staring into a cup of tepid coffee. He was a tall, lanky man, wizened and scarecrow-thin like vellum wrapped over an architecture of coat hangers. His eyes were gray and stern like polished steel, his face a maze of intersecting ruts.

He looked over at Kenney, gave him a withering look. “I’m so goddamned pissed off at your fucking lack of judgment, Lou, I could shit in your mouth and make you chew it. You know that? The media’s lined up on the road out there. Only a matter of time before our missing personnel problem reaches their ears and then I’ll have questions put to me I don’t have answers for. Give it a week and we’ll have the FBI sniffing around up here and then what we’ll have is the biggest clusterfuck since your mama spread her legs and pissed you out.” He pulled off his coffee, made a face and set the cup down. “I been sheriff of this county going on twenty-five years, Lou. Twenty-five goddamned years. And I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have the answers to everything. But I’m smart enough to know that there are some things I wasn’t meant to know. Mysteries that were intended to remain mysteries.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Bullshit, is it?” Godfrey shook his head. “I’m telling you right now, Lou, I’m on my last nerve with you. Maybe you’re hot shit down in Madison, but out here you’re naïve and goddamn green. What I should do is tell the press and your fucking superiors how you lost four fucking men in a farmer’s field. They’d get a real chuckle out of that. By the time they were done laughing, you wouldn’t have a damn thing to smile about.”

Kenney pulled off his cigarette. “So do it. Maybe it’s goddamn time. You people up here have been brooding over something for a long time, haven’t you? Maybe it’s time to blow the lid off it.”

“And put your career into the shitter along with mine?” Godrey forced himself to pull off his coffee. “Hell, it’s probably already too late for that. But I do owe something to the people of this county that elected me and I plan on protecting them if that’s even possible now. They deserve better than to have this neck of the woods turned into a late-night horror show.”

Kenney had to give him that one. “I suppose.”

“You suppose. You’ve stirred up a real hornet’s nest now.”

Kenney stared at him through a haze of smoke. “Have I?”

But the sheriff just shook his head. “Oh yes. People from these parts… those that know about Bellac Road and the Ezren place… they know enough to stay away. Most have never seen or heard anything out here, but they’re smart enough to trust their instincts. Every summer, of course, we get hikers lost out here and hunters in the fall. But what can I do about that? The Ezren place is posted private property, but you know these assholes from the city, they don’t listen, don’t respect things. They wander off into the boonies and know about as much about ’em as I do about menstruating. And, so, the missing persons ratio in this county is way, way above the national average. But sometimes, I guess, folks just vanish.” He sighed and stared at the wet grayness pressed up against the windows. “When I heard Wisconsin Electric had an easement across the Ezren property, I winced. And when their dozer plowed up some remains, I wasn’t surprised. I wanted to ignore it, Lou, pretend it hadn’t happened, but I couldn’t. I had a job to do, so I got hold of the state and they sent you people up here. You’ve got a hell of a team there. They’re good. So… maybe, maybe this is all my fault. Maybe I should’ve bronzed my balls years ago and took care of this. Maybe.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Maybe because I knew better. Maybe I’m smart enough to let things lie. And mostly because my first term would have been my last because people around here don’t like people digging into their past and parading their dirty laundry out for all to see.”

Kenney had mixed feelings about Godfrey.

On the surface, he seemed like a good cop, smart and savvy. But to let something like this—whatever in the hell this was—go on year after year was contemptible. Yet, for all that, he almost felt sorry for him. He had been living with this every day for years. Watching more and more people turn up missing and not knowing what to do about it, so he just latched onto the local line and didn’t do anything, looked the other way. It was easy to do, he supposed, but sooner or later your skeletons clawed out of their moldy closets and your demons slipped out of their boxes.

Godfrey seemed to think he was protecting his flock by keeping their secret and respecting their ways, but in fact he was sitting on the top of one smelly heap of shit and had been for years. Only now, the stink could no longer be contained.

“What you’ve got out there is a big graveyard, Kenney,” he said. “And we’re not just talking the bodies of people that disappeared, we’re talking things almost worse.”

“Like?”

“Like grave robbery.”

“Grave robbery?”

“You heard me. Don’t act so damn surprised because I know you aren’t surprised in the least. We’ve had trouble with that through the years. And if you wanna go down to the local paper, you’ll see it’s always been a problem in these parts. And you can only blame so much on wild dog packs and the like. Gets so the cemetery caretakers, they don’t even report these things. They just bury up the hole and forget it happened.”

No, Kenney wasn’t surprised, not after Spivak told him some of the bodies appeared to have been embalmed. “That village out there… those ruins. What do you know about it?”

“All I know for sure is that it’s like some epicenter for the trouble here. It has a history, a bad history. It’s the thing that has blighted this part of the county, reason people won’t live out on Bellac Road. Just too many… disturbances.”

“But—”

The door opened and Hyder came in. He looked at the sheriff, then he looked at Kenney for a time. He smiled thinly. “How you feeling, Lou?”

“I’ll live.”

“Sure you will,” he said.

For one moment, Kenney was certain that Hyder was going to say, sure, you will, but not them others whose lives you fucking threw away. But he said no such thing. He seemed apologetic and sympathetic if anything. His eyes looked on Kenney with acceptance now, understanding, a knowledge that there would be no more fencing between them… certain things had been brought to light and they had both looked them in the face. Comrades. Brothers-in-arms.

But I’m not his goddamn brother. I don’t understand any of this shit and there’s no way in hell I would have sat on my hands and did nothing while this problem got worse and worse.

Despite his bluster, though, he wasn’t so sure of that. What if these were his people? What if he was born and bred in Haymarket and these people were his own, his roots tangled with theirs, and their history his own? Then what? He just didn’t know.

Hyder cleared his throat and said, “One of the search parties just got back, Sheriff.”

“And?”

“Nothing. Same as the one I took out earlier today, didn’t find shit.”

Hyder told them they had tried doing some digging out near the area where he thought the trouble had happened the night before. But it was pointless—every time they got down a foot or two, all that rain just washed the muck back in. Even a backhoe couldn’t cut through that mess, he said. They got near the village and the dogs went crazy, yelping and snapping and whimpering and chasing their own tales. Even the handlers couldn’t get them near to that god-awful place.

“Let’s take a walk,” Godfrey said.