Nightcrawlers

13

They pulled on their slickers and knee-high Sorel boots and walked out in the chill, damp grayness. Rain pissed down from the sky in whipping sheets. The farmyard was a flowing, sucking mire of mud. The drainage ditches at the sides of the dirt drive were threatening to overflow. Saturation point had been reached—fourteen inches of rain in the past week right on top of ten the week before. Rivers and lakes were overflowing and northwestern Wisconsin was turning into a flood plain like New Guinea during monsoon season.

The crime scene techs labored on in the downpour. Sixteen sets of remains had now been discovered and there was probably no true end in sight. Spivak, the coroner, was out there, lighting from one tarped set of remains to the next like a flower-hopping bee.

Kenney watched them out there as rain blew in his face and the trees groaned in the wind, tarps flapping like flags and rusty rain gutters creaking on the upper story of the farmhouse. He’d been at countless other crime scenes, but this one was far worse. It was down inside him, gestating, making him feel worse by the hour. He hated the wetness and the muck and the wind and the mist and that horrid, mephitic odor of violated graves that clung to everything and everyone.

“Come on,” Godfrey said, leading them towards the leaning hulk of the farmhouse itself.

It was huge and sagging, weathered gray as old bones. It leaned precariously to one side and the porch overhang had been shored up with 4 x 4s, but still it hung forward like the brim of a tipped hat. Shutters had been nailed over the upper story windows as if they were trying to hold something in or keep something out. The siding had popped free, planks nodding in the wind. Bitter seasons of snow and wind had peeled the shingles free and they were spilled over the wild grasses like the scales of prehistoric fish. There were gaping chasms in the roof, the walls. The kitchen at the rear had entirely caved in.

Kenney thought it looked like a house of cards ready to fall. It hadn’t been occupied in over thirty years, but it must’ve been a real dump even then.

“Watch your step,” Godfrey told them. “Porch is gone all soft.”

Kenney saw fingers of moss climbing between the warped planks underfoot.

They went in. The atmosphere of the place was odious and oppressive. There was a smell of age and rotting plaster, a desiccated stink of ancient animal droppings. It was pungent and almost gagging. Cobwebs were strung in the corners like netting and birds’ nests were visible through great rents in the slouched ceiling. Autumn leaves—brown and curled like the tiny mummified corpses of mice—were blown across the floors. The house creaked and groaned and swayed around them as if it were ready to fall into itself. But beyond that, it was soundless and still in there like the belly of a sarcophagus.

Hyder looked from the black mouth of the leaning stairwell to a stained archway that led into a deserted parlor. He licked his lips. They were gray and tight, his face grayer yet, constricted and compressed, corded muscles jumping beneath the skin. “Damn place,” he said. “Gets under your skin, don’t it?”

Godfrey led them down into the cellar.

It was just as black down there as the inside of a body bag. Kenney forced himself down the steps, flashlight trembling in his fist. He saw the hunched shapes of crates and old nail kegs, antiquated furniture and mildewed cardboard boxes—

He started, thinking he saw something—some hunched-over figure—hobble away from the light.

Hyder was breathing hard. “Sheriff, the men… the search parties… they’re concerned about being out after dark. I told ’em you’d call it quits at sundown.”

“Sounds good to me,” Godfrey said.

There was a brick cylinder blotched with water stains that rose up from the floor. It stood about four feet high, about twice that in circumference. It looked like an old cistern if anything. A flanged lid of rough-hewn planks was nailed in place.

“You wanna know about this place, the things that go on here, Lou, but I can’t help you. Later, maybe, we’ll go see an old woman who lives up the road a piece—” he said, staring into Kenney’s grim face “—but for now, I’m gonna tell you a story. It’s a story that I don’t want the others to hear.”

Hyder looked like he was going to have a stroke.

“You might wanna call this one a horror story,” Godfrey said, grinning with a mouthful of yellowed teeth, his face ghoulish and shadowy in the reflected gleam of the flashlights. “We’re going back about twenty years now. I’d been on the job a good bit then, long enough to know the sort of shit that pops up out here pretty well. On the far side of Ezren’s property, maybe three, four miles from that deserted town out there, there was a little place called French Village. I say was on account it ain’t there no more. You can find it, all right, but you won’t find no people there. Anyway, it was out on a county fork, stuck straight in the middle of nowhere. It barely passed as a village, more of a hamlet than anything, I guess. Old fellow that lived there—Buckner, I think—called and said he heard some screams coming from a little farmhouse across the way. I was in the area, me and a deputy, so we stopped and had a look. We didn’t find shit. Place was empty. I mean completely empty.

“It was eerie, I’ll tell you. The evening meal was put up on the table, but no one around to eat it. These were farm people and there was quite a spread—corn and chicken and taters and beans and you name it. Lot of it still warm. A few dinner rolls had been bitten into and some chairs had been pushed away from the table as if the family had gotten up together to take a look at something.

“And that was it. A family of six had slipped into thin air and all they’d left in passing were a few screams. Even the family dog—a big shepherd—was missing. He’d been chained outside and Buckner said that sumbitch was just as vicious as you please. We found the chain—it had been snapped.”

“Jesus Christ,” Kenney said, lighting a cigarette. “No signs of forced entry? Blood? Anything?”

Godfrey let out a long, low sigh. “Nothing like that. We found some muddy footprints in the living room. The front door was hanging wide open in the wind. There was a muddy handprint on it. But these prints… well, they weren’t from what you’d call human feet or hands.” Godfrey looked pained. “I had Buckner go through the whole thing a dozen times. I asked him why he hadn’t gone over there, farm folk being clannish and all. You know what he told me? He said he didn’t go out after dark, not with how things were. Said he locked his doors and windows and slept with a twelve gauge on his lap.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing I could do. Not really. A week later, another house in French Village was emptied and nary a clue as to why. Just them muddy prints again. During the course of the next month, two more families vanished in the dead of night. No screams, no nothing this time. Other than that muddy spoor, the only thing that remained constant was that in every case there were clear indications of very recent occupancy—beds that had been slept in, coffee poured and never drank, cigarettes burned down in ashtrays. In one case, a shower had been left running as if someone had stepped out to grab a bar of soap. Then, quick as it had all started, it stopped. People were plenty scared by then. Those that were left moved out. Only Buckner stayed… all alone out there in that ghost town. And one night, well, he went missing, too.”

“What happened?” Hyder asked.

“Not a damn thing. The investigation continued for years in one form or another, but finally we closed it. We didn’t have a thing to go on. But that wasn’t the end. About two months after the town emptied, a public works electrician over in Haymarket was down in the sewers where the mains were run and he found something. It was the partial skeleton of a dog, a length of chain still hooked to its collar. It had tags and they placed it as being the missing shepherd of that first family. The state crime lab boys went over the remains and came to the conclusion that the dog had been eaten and had died sometime during the process. There were teeth marks in the bones and the marrow was missing. They never identified what sort of animal had done it. Not to this day. Of course, what I’m telling you never made it into any newspaper. Sometime later, a couple boys were hiking along a Wisconsin Central spur in the Pigeon River Forest about two miles from here and they found a bone. They thought it was part of a bear or deer. The police ended up with it. Crime lab said it was a human femur.”

Hyder swallowed uneasily. “Was it—”

“Eaten? I don’t know. I don’t think I honestly want to know.”

Kenney stood there in the musty gloom, dragging slowly off his cigarette. “So what are we dealing with here, Sheriff? Let’s get our hands out of our shorts and get to it—what the fuck is out there?”

But Godfrey just shrugged. “Who really knows? All I’m saying is that this place has a history, Kenney, a bad history, and things happen out here and sometimes reason doesn’t exactly hold up or throw any light on it. This is one of those dark corners of the world you hear about, a place where things are distorted, askew. This place has been like a cancer for far too long and maybe we’ve been afraid to cut into it for fear it would spread. Well, that’s done now. We don’t have a choice. But you’re the guy with the knife and, brother, you can have it. Because once you start slitting this ugly mess open, I don’t envy you what you might find. Some logs, Lou, they just weren’t meant to be rolled over.”