Nightcrawlers

21

Kenney sighed, shoved all the papers back into the envelope and just shook his head. He lit a cigarette, ignoring the signs forbidding such things, and just stared at Godfrey. “Okay, you’ve lived here all your life… have you ever actually seen one of these individuals? I mean in the flesh?”

“Yes, but only briefly. I don’t doubt they exist, though. There’s no doubt that they’ve been here for a good many years.” Godfrey sighed. “I don’t bother adding to that file anymore and when I told you that cemetery caretakers around these parts tend to hush up grave robbings and the like, I meant it. But I will say that in the past twenty years or so there have been fewer reports of activity from these things. Maybe they’re dying out and maybe they’ve just gotten smarter. I don’t know. Don’t honestly care to know.”

What kind of attitude was that for a cop? Kenney got to wondering, but then he knew, he honestly knew that if he were in the shoes of Godfrey or any of the other county cops through the years, he would have probably taken the same attitude. What else could you really do? If you started nosing into it, you were bound to face the ire of the locals and you wouldn’t get any help from other cops that knew because they were in denial. Which meant you’d have to go to the state authorities for help… and what did you do after they stopped laughing at you?

“Elena Blasden was telling some pretty wild tales,” he said to the sheriff. “I guess I’m wondering how much of that is true.”

Godfrey shrugged. “It’s anybody’s guess. Most of what she was talking about was before my time. But that bit about one of them getting run down by a car… that’s true enough. At least my predecessor, Albert Susskind, seemed to think so. He didn’t actually see any of it firsthand, before his time, but he has the autopsy reports in that file if you care to look.”

“I don’t care to,” Kenney said.

So Godfrey told him. “That happened back in the early twenties. Some fellow named Haynes or Hines was on his way up to Ashland on Bellac and something stepped out in front of his car. He hit and killed it… at least one of them.”

“One of them?”

“There were two,” Godfrey said with a dry voice. “An adult female and a child. The child was killed instantly, the female only injured. Legs broken, I gather. The child was a male and in its death throes, it vomited up what the coroner later discovered to be human remains…”

Haynes or Hines suffered a mild heart attack and was taken to the hospital where he made a complete recovery. The body of the child, after the post, was cremated. The adult female was taken away to the Central State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, placed in a private, secure ward.

“She lived almost a month,” Godfrey said. “And then she died during childbirth.”

Kenney almost fell out of his chair. “You mean that fucking thing was pregnant?”

Godfrey nodded. “According to Comp, the sheriff at the time, it gave birth to something that looked like a larva… something white and slimy that mewled like a cat. It died within a week. Comp never actually saw the child. But the doc up there, all he would say is that some things were meant to walk and others were meant to crawl.”

Kenney sucked on his cigarette, realizing that by coming to Haymarket and Bayfield County, he had just opened up the biggest, ugliest can of worms in state patrol history. He had a feeling he’d never get the stink of this one off him.