The Bloodspawn

Glancing to his left, along the floorboards, he could see that the metal bar that locked the sliding glass door was still firmly in place, the locking key that kept the bar from budging engaged. There were no wet tracks on the carpet, no snowy outlines of shoes on the floor. The tile was as dry as it had been when he had walked across it only thirty seconds prior.

So how had whatever that was gotten onto his eating bar?

With a sudden revelation, he stared straight up at the ceiling, following it to where it met the wall; bowing outward as it arched away from the house. The glass was all in place, no cracks or openings. It was sealed perfectly, as it had been when he moved in. Taking one step forward, he craned his head around the corner of the kitchen, staring straight down the hallway and into the foyer. There were no footprints on the Spanish tile, and he could tell from the size of the massive deadbolt that it was still engaged.

His blood coursed increasingly hotter through his veins as he fought the urge to inspect the object on the table. There was no way that it could have found its way onto his table as his house was sealed like a tomb, with a state of the art security system mounted on every surface that remotely resembled an opening. If a door or window had opened, there would already be police at the house. But he could see from the panel on the wall that the two green lights were on, meaning that the system was operational and hadn’t been triggered.

Closing his eyes, he tried to steady his nerves. His hands clenched at his sides, opening and closing rhythmically in time with his rapid panting.

Once again opening his eyes, he leaned over the table and inspected the object.

It was an oblong shape, larger at one end than it was at the other. Reaching out carefully, he picked it up between his thumb and forefinger, holding it up above the paper. Small chunks of mud sloshed off of the surface, landing in small splatters on the newspaper. Turning it over and over, he inspected it closely. It appeared to be a hat.

Glancing around the room one last time, he walked it over to the sink and turned on the water. Holding it beneath the rapidly warming stream, he scrubbed at the mud with his left hand, chunks falling into little brown piles on the Formica. Small lines of sand ran from the clusters towards the drain, separating into individual grains as they were drawn away from each other.

It was black and felt as though it was made of canvas. There was a black plastic band along the back with little pegs for adjusting the size. Turning it over, he stared at the front of the hat. The brim was a faded rust color, the thread in the seams peeling back in strands. And right on the front of the hat…

“My God…” he whispered, the hat falling from his hand beneath the running water.

Though it had been more than a decade since he had last seen it, he recognized it right away. After all, he had seen it every day of his life practically, prior to then anyway. There was an abstract bird, the Atlanta Falcons logo, the black bird framed by thin white lines, paralleled by red ones.

Snatching the hat out of the sink, he turned it over in his hands, looking inside the brim. There was a small, fraying tag peering out of one of the seams. He tugged on it, yanking it free of its stitching.

“MP,” he read aloud, the tag falling from his suddenly weak grip onto the floor.

He fell to his knees on the floor, his arms hanging limply at his sides, palms facing the ceiling. His chin rested on his chest, jaw hanging slack. All vital signs seemed to slow at once, the veins in his temples thudding deliberately, echoing in the empty room. Unblinking, he stared down at the tag on the floor, unable to steer his gaze from the small, yellow-stained piece of fabric, its tattered edges jostling beneath the heat that blew down from the vent in the ceiling.

Without even raising his head, Scott half-slid, half-crawled to the edge of the counter, grabbing the cord to the phone and yanking the entire cordless unit off of the counter. The base unit clattered to the ground, the pager button popping off and sliding across the floor beneath the refrigerator. Picking up the receiver, Scott dialed three buttons, the tone resonating within his skull. Pressing the phone to the side of his head, he backed himself along the floor into the corner of the room, flanked by lines of cabinets.

“911,” the voice on the other end of the line answered.

“There’s someone in my house,” Scott whispered, his eyes nervously darting from one side of the room to the other.

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THE BLOODSPAWN

Michael McBride

© 2004 Michael McBride. All rights reserved.

PART FIVE

Chapters 5 & 6

V

Sunday, November 13th

5:30 am

Tim Williams lifted his right foot onto the lid of the toilet, pulling the laces tight on his cross-trainers, and tying them into a knot. Switching feet, he laced up the left shoe. Pulling the cuffs of his sweat pants down to the tongues of his shoes, he paused, placing his fingertips on the linoleum floor and stretched his hamstrings. He bounced once and then stood straight up, leaning backward and placing his hands at the base of his back. Slowly, he rolled his head and shoulders back. With a sigh, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror.

His light brown hair had thinned slightly at the temples, but was still fairly thick throughout. There was certainly visible wear around his light brown eyes, and thin smile lines to either side of his thin, slightly chapped lips. His pale complexion stood out in rugged contrast to the dark blue, zippered sweat suit top.

Lifting up the bottom edge of the jacket, he crunched his stomach muscles and stood sideways in front of the mirror, patting the thin layer of skin atop his almost-rippled stomach. With a sly grin, he tugged the top back down and grabbed the pair of gloves off of the counter next to the sink.

Slipping them on, he walked out of the bathroom into the darkened bedroom. He could barely discern the dark outline of his wife slumbering in the bed, her long, dark hair spread across the white flowered pillowcase. Stopping at the side of the bed, beside the lump in the covers, he leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. She made a muffled grumbling sound and rolled over onto her side, bringing her knees up to her chest. The sound of her light wheezing filled the air as Tim crept out of the bedroom and into the hallway.

Passing his study, the light from the power strip on the floor glowed red. The curtains ruffled lightly as the heater gusted straight up from the floorboards.

The next room on his left was completely empty, save for the stacks of boxes right in the middle of the floor. At some point, that was going to be the baby’s room, but until they were actually able to conceive, they weren’t going to set it up as such. And setting it up for anything other than a baby’s room would be an admission of failure. So, that room was going to sit with a small stack of boxes in the center until they were able to make something happen.

They had only moved into this house about six months ago, after having decided that they were ready to start a family. Tim and Vanessa had been married for close to five years now, having met in college, and married shortly following graduation. The last five years had been devoted entirely to starting their careers. Vanessa had landed a job as an accountant with one of the larger software designers in the area right out of school, and enjoyed the nine to five lifestyle. Tim, on the other hand, found himself in advertising, working for the Gazette. His days began by seven, and he found himself lucky to be home before eight at night. Granted, he had never worked a weekend day, but the weekdays were about enough to kill him; going from one account to the next to the next, setting up appointments, passing out rate cards, wining and dining the big bucks. The way he saw it, they should change his title to “brown noser.” And, unless he started to see more money coming his way, he was going to have to find another job.

It’s not as though he wasn’t making good money, but when you break it down and factor in the twelve or thirteen hour days, it was suddenly a whole lot more difficult to come up with the energy to make a go of it every day. That was why he initially started these early morning jogs.

He had found that with each passing morning, he awoke a little more tired than the day before, and after a couple years on the job, he was barely able to wake up and get out of bed at all. Initially, he had figured that jogging five miles in the morning would only wear him down even more, but he had found out quickly that that was not the case. It energized him. He had quit smoking and devoted more time to his physical maintenance, jogging further and further every morning until he reached the five mile mark and basically ran out of time to run before he had to go to work.

Weekends like today were the best. He was able to jog as long as he wanted, pushing himself harder, knowing that Vanessa would allow him as much time as he wanted, so long as he was home with enough time to shower and change and get them to church by noon.

Bouncing down the stairs, his shoes squeaked on the linoleum in the entranceway as he disengaged the deadbolt and unlocked the door. He stepped out onto the porch. Icicles hung from the bottom of the gutter above him, the driveway covered with an untouched layer of white.

He grinned to himself as he watched the large flakes swirling about in front of him, piling atop the already thick layer of snow. It was a wonderful feeling making the first footprints in the snow. Maybe that was the kid inside of him, but it always made him smile.

Taking a few short, deep breaths, he exhaled a long sigh, his breath freezing in front of his face, lingering for a moment before dissipating into the early morning sky. The dim light of the moon peeked through the cloud cover only momentarily, the street in front of him glimmering as he began to jog.

The snow squished beneath his feet, piling atop the toes of his shoes as he bounded down the center of the street. His nose began to run as the cold nipped at it. Wiping it with the back of his gloved hand, he lowered his head and pulled the hood from his sweatsuit over his already-damp hair.

Turning left at the end of the street, he made his way up the steep slope of a barren culdesac. There were for sale signs every fifty yards to either side of the road, the faces of various Realtors smiling at him in an attempt to peddle the vacant lots. It was only a matter of time before they all were sold and had houses on them, forcing him to change his route, but until then, he was going to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Reaching the end of the street, he leapt over the curb and onto the thin path that wound through the forest straight ahead. He knew these woods like the back of his hand—even before he began his morning jogs—having grown up only about four miles from here. Of course, when he was a kid, none of these houses out here existed. It wasn’t until the huge boom in the economy within the last five years that the houses started appearing out of nowhere. It was one thing to say that they were building them way too fast and tearing down what had once been fairly pristine woodland, but on the other hand, he owned one of those houses.

He had spent a lot of time wandering through these woods with a BB gun as a youngster, bringing down magpies and starlings, leaving them laying on the floor for the coyotes to clean up. There had even been one exciting day when he had come across a rattlesnake. It had been late in the season and the cold fronts had already begun to move through, so the snake was far less than aggressive. He could remember blasting it repeatedly in the head, even lodging one of the steel balls in its gapped mouth so that it couldn’t flick its tongue. But that had grown tedious in a hurry as the snake didn’t ever move, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that he wasn’t doing any real damage.

Later in his teenage years, he and his buddies had hiked into these hills with tents and cases of beer strapped to their backs, setting up parties that would last the entire weekend. He could remember one trip in particular where they had parked at the end of the closest road and hiked for more than an hour to get to one of the most hidden and inaccessible spots that they knew of. That spot, as it turns out, is now buried beneath the recently paved culdesac he just jogged along.

Things had sure changed in a hurry, but he knew for a fact that these woods he now darted through would be here for a long time to come. It was part of a large sector of land owned by the folks who ran the nursing home. They had converted this old Catholic convent into a modern, state-of-the-art nursing home sometime about a decade ago, paving the thin dirt paths through the woods to give the residents somewhere decent to walk and exercise. And he took advantage of that each and every morning without exception.

Branches of trees flew past to either side, grabbing at the shoulders of his goretex-coated suit. The snow on the ground was only a couple of inches deep on the path as the majority of the snow piled in the upper reaches of the canopy, filling the needle-covered branches until they looked like puffy clouds. Gravel snapped beneath his padding feet as he wound past the rows of trunks, heading for the nice, cement paths just a quarter of a mile ahead.

Usually, Tim made two laps around the path that circled the entire acreage of the rest home before returning to the woods once again. There was rarely anyone else out on the paths at this time of the morning—especially in weather like this—so for just a brief moment in time, he felt like the only person on the face of the earth. The only sound was his own heavy breathing, and the birds and small animals darting through the underbrush. It was both his solitude and his sanity. It was his own personal Eden.

The trees peeled back slightly as he hopped up onto the cement path. There were wooden benches on the inside of the track every hundred yards or so, buried beneath a thick coating of snow. Small lumps in the path ahead betrayed the presence of buried pinecones. Small, three-toed footprints covered the ground from the foraging birds searching for anything to eat.

His heart pounded in his ears, his breathing even and paced as he ran through a constant cloud of his own breath. The air was still. Trees blocked nearly all of the wind that wrought havoc across the eastern plains, the snow falling straight down in clusters. Dense patches of scrub oak filled the gaps between the tree trunks, pressing all the way up against the path from his right, the bare branches reaching out like bony fingers. Long since dried out berries clung to a handful of the branches, ice cubes forming all around them.

The sky was still dark, the moon and stars blanketed by the low-lying deep-gray clouds. By the time he finished the first lap, he should be right back where he was right now when the sun began to rise, cresting over the tops of the azure blue, white-capped mountains directly behind him. He always stopped to gaze at the arterial-red sky around the slowly rising orb as it pressed back the blackened sky, every inch of the frosted ground shimmering like white capped waves on a placid sea.

His throat began to dry, his tongue clicking from the roof of his mouth. A dull ache filled his lungs, each inhalation of the freezing air tightening his chest incrementally.

Slowing to a walk, his footsteps hammering on the concrete and echoing in the silence around him, Tim placed his hands on his hips and leaned his head forward, allowing his pulse to slowly resume its normal pace. The cold air stung his teeth as he breathed with his mouth wide open, forcing oxygen into the deprived areas throughout his body. A gust of steam raced out from beneath his hood when he pulled it from his head, letting it fall onto his back so that he could cool down a little.

Slowly, his breathing returned to normal and he prepared to break back into a run. His brow furrowed as something suddenly seemed a little off. He had run this course so many times that he knew everything: every bush, every tree, and every little noise in the forest. But something wasn’t quite right.

He stopped and looked around, the woods completely silent around him. The only thing he could hear was the snow falling from the branches of the trees into clumps on the ground. There was no rustling in the underbrush, no chirping birds…

But there were always birds. He could count on that.

Suddenly, a cold wave of hackles ripped straight up his back, settling at the base of his neck. There was someone, something, out there in the woods with him. He couldn’t see it, but he could tell it was there, watching him from the dark forest, its eyes weighing heavily on him.

A gust of wind ruffled the pines around him, the piled snow on the branches blowing in wet clouds, filling the air all around him. It was cold, very cold, stabbing through his jogging suit and into his flesh. His eyes scanned the underbrush, looking for any sign of whatever was out there.

There was nothing but silence.

“This is stupid,” Tim said, shaking his head. “There’s no one out here.”

He snorted, mocking his own idiocy. Shaking his head, he brought his arms up to his sides and burst into a fast jog. His heart still pounded in his chest, his head throbbing at the base of his skull from the tension. It was all he could do to just focus on the path as he raced on, watching the line of trees straight ahead.

The path bent quickly off to the left, disappearing behind a thick blue spruce, giving the appearance of a dead end right in front of him. He knew the turn well. The path opened up to a straightaway, leading down the slight slope to the frozen lake just off the path and past a tall line of reeds to the right.

His footsteps pounded off the concrete, echoing through the thin, early morning air. Short bursts of steam shot past his lips as he dipped his left shoulder, preparing to make the turn. Rounding the blind bend, his heart leapt in his chest, seizing tightly as it threatened to implode.

There was someone else on the path, standing directly in front of him.

“Jesus!” Tim gasped, shocked, placing his right hand on his pounding chest.

The figure had his back to Tim. A long, tattered brown shroud hung limply from the wide shoulders, cascading down toward the ground, the frayed ends playing gently in the thin breeze. The hood of the cloak was pulled up over the head; the whole body bathed in the shadows cast by what little light filtered through the branches of the trees.

“I’m sorry,” Tim said to the stranger. “You startled me. It’s not often that I come across anyone out here this early in the morning. Do you live out here? You know, at the…”

He was trying hard to find the right words. Rest home certainly wasn’t right, nor was old folks home. His mind raced.

“… Assisted living community?” he finished, pleased with himself.

But the figure did not turn around. He didn’t move in the slightest.

“Uh, yeah. It’s been nice talking to you,” Tim said from beneath his lowered brow. He prepared to resume jogging.

Sliding to his right, he prepared to slip past this person on the thin path, bringing his lightly clenched fists up to either side. He could hear the person’s breathing, more like rasping really. It was a thin, almost wet sound as the air was dragged through the open mouth, rattling within the damp lungs before being released as a cross between a wheeze and a growl.

The acrid stench of decay resonated from this person, riding coarsely down the crisp breeze, accosting his senses. It was the smell of death. Tim recognized it from the days spent volunteering at a nursing home during his senior year in high school, trying to pad his references. It was the smell of stagnant urine and crumbling, flaking flesh. It was how they all smelled when the reaper neared, but none of them could tell.

Wincing and puckering his face, Tim looked down, attempting to dodge the scent without the overtly offensive gesture of covering his nose. His sole goal was to get upwind and leave that smell—that he had hoped never to again whiff—far behind him.

Something caught his attention. Something wasn’t quite right. He couldn’t immediately put his finger on it, but there was something wrong with the pictures he purveyed to his mind. He stared down at the virgin white snow. The swaying treetops cast dancing shadows across the ground. And then, all of a sudden, it just clicked.

There were no footprints.

His eyes raced up from the ground to look at the person, who had already turned to face him. Their eyes locked for one brief moment. Every muscle in Tim’s body fought to spring to life at once. His primal instincts ripped through his mind that wanted nothing more than to run away as fast as he could.

The last thing that he saw was the dry, yellowed eyes, cracking and peeling, with no visible iris, staring straight through him. A cold, dry hand shot from the man’s side, its crusted flesh seizing him by the neck, killing the scream in his chest.

VI

Sunday, November 13th

8:30am

The police had been of no help at all. After finally arriving more than an hour and a half after he called, they had seemed almost insulted that he had broken up whatever they had been doing that morning to come out for that.

“You called us out here for a hat?” the officer had asked, holding the cap on the tip of his pen.

“So let me get this straight,” the other had chimed in. “You found this hat in your house, but you’re sure that it’s not yours. Is that what you’re saying?”

He had tried to argue it the way he saw it, but they couldn’t grasp it. They did the obligatory checking of the house and doors, noting that there were no signs of forced entry and having a private chuckle in front of his security system, glancing back over their shoulders to leer at him every couple of seconds.

The bottom line was that there were no signs of even the slightest attempt to gain entry into the house and the security system, which was truly top notch, hadn’t been triggered. The fact that the hat had belonged to a friend of his that had died more than a decade earlier appeared to be of little consequence to them as they repeatedly asked him if he had been drinking.

The officers had seen themselves out, practically slamming the door behind them as they walked towards the car shaking their heads. Scott had sat at the table, hands clasped in his lap, staring straight down at the hat. He hadn’t even looked up in the half-hour since they had left.

Goosebumps crept up his forearms and onto the backs of his arms. The room felt as though the temperature had dropped ten degrees over the course of the last couple of breaths. The windows slowly frosted over from the inside. Scott finally broke his gaze from the hat and climbed to his feet. He glanced around the kitchen, checking out the thin layer of ice on the windows, his breath coming in plumes from his parted lips.

Crossing the floor and turning into the living room, he popped the faceplate off the thermostat and looked at the digital reading. Shaking his head, he pressed the “set/ temp” button again, but it still displayed the exact same thing.

72 degrees.

He stared down at his arms again, the hackles still standing at full attention. He blew a long line of steam from his lungs, dissipating into the thin air around him.

“Damn thing’s broken,” Scott said aloud, slamming the cover shut and walking towards the stairs.

He ascended to the upper level, turning down the hall and walking toward his bedroom.

Throwing back the closet door, he stepped inside and yanked a Colorado Avalanche sweater from the closet and tossed it across the room, landing on the bed. Yanking a pair of jeans off of another hanger, he tucked them under his arm and walked to the dresser. Producing a pair of boxers and some socks, he quickly slipped out of his pajamas.

Sitting down on the corner of the bed in preparation of donning his clothes, the scar on his right forearm caught his attention as though he was seeing it for the first time. It had been so long since he had been forced to think about it that sometimes it just surprised him. There had once been a birthmark there, a round, brown circle that had been removed for aesthetic reasons rather than medical. The scar was close to two inches long, lined with the small pink dots from where the sutures had once pulled the wound tightly shut to help it heal. Granted it was far better than the mark that had preceded it, but it looked almost Frankenstein-like in the dim light. Running a fingertip along the completely desensitized, purplish scar, he could barely remember the days when he had been embarrassed to wear short sleeves because of the unsightly mark. Snapping from his momentary trance, he rubbed his tired eyes.

Throwing on the underwear and hopping into the jeans, he donned the number nineteen captain’s jersey and sat on the siderail of the waterbed. He tugged on the socks and shoes and hustled out of the bedroom and through the hall.

Opening the closet by the front door, he grabbed the first jacket he could get his hands on. Throwing his arms into the sleeves of the black leather jacket, he passed beneath the archway of the living room and bounded down the stairs to the left into the family room. The darkened big screen reflected the early morning sun that slipped through the gaps in the vertical blinds covering the sliding glass door.

He grabbed his car keys from the corner of the marble wet bar and threw back the door to the garage, pressing the opener as he hopped down the two stairs onto the concrete floor. The wind gusted in from beneath the slowly rising panels, tiny flakes of snow scattering around his feet. Stacked cases of Pepsi lined the wall to the left, partially hidden by the boxes that filled half of the garage, stuffed full of the unimportant junk he had never found the energy to unpack.

Walking around the back of the forest green Grand Cherokee, he slipped up the side of the car and opened the driver’s side door, hopping up into the seat. Thrusting the key into the ignition, he pressed the pedal and brought the car to life, the engine revving loudly as exhaust poured from the back end of the car. Tossing the gear into reverse, he backed out of the garage, closing the door behind him. He stared back at the empty house from the street momentarily before putting it in drive and racing down the white street.

He wasn’t sure exactly what he hoped to find where he was going, but something inside of him told him that he needed to go look.

Following the road as it wound out of the subdivision, he passed several clusters of cars parked in front of the model homes, the big “Open House” banners hanging above the garages. He paused at the stop sign on Woodmen Road, and then turned left, heading into the foothills at the base of the cloud covered Rockies. The windshield wipers batted back and forth, pushing the driving snow into thin piles to either side of the glass.

His neighborhood fell behind him as he accelerated, the road narrowing to wind up into the increasingly thick forest. He hadn’t been up this far on the road in a long time, but it appeared as though nothing had changed. Trunks passed like cornrows as the car rocketed down the slick road until he finally slowed and stared off the road to his left, intently looking for the gap in the trees that he knew still had to be there.

He hadn’t thought about that night in a long time. Repression was, indeed, a wonderful thing. It was amazing how the mind had defense mechanisms that could keep painful memories from haunting a man. His parents had tried to set him up with some therapy after the accident, but the psychologist had been far too concerned with his relationship with his mother, and the psychiatrist had wanted nothing more than to prescribe him pills. He had gone through the motions, obligingly attending the minimum number of sessions. Fortunately, his own brain had taken over, pressing the memory into a tiny little box that it hid in the recesses of his mind, only opening it once or twice a year when he made conscious connections with dates or associated memories. But he had never once, since that night, driven back up into these hills.

He slowed the car, pulling to the side of the road. There was a barren patch directly to his left, on the other side of the road. The scrub oak had grown up around the splintered trunks of the trees, the tops of the new growth of pines barely visible above. The ice-covered lake was barely visible in the field beyond, the powdered snow on the surface glittering beneath the weak light that permeated through the intense cloud cover.

Scanning the road, he pulled a u- turn, parking on the shoulder, the barren limbs of the scrub oak scraping against the side of the new car. He pulled the keys from the ignition and sat there for a moment, turning them over and over in his hands. A dull ache arose in the back of his head, his heart rate accelerating. Closing his eyes, he focused on his breathing, rhythmically drawing the air in and blowing it out, trying to soothe his nerves. Sighing, he opened his eyes and stared down the desolate road in front of him, his left hand pulling on the door handle.

The cold air raced into the car as he climbed out, dropping down into the thick snow. Shaking his keys a couple times, he thrust them back into his pocket and walked around the back of the car to the gap in the trees. He pressed through the rugged brush, the limbs snagging on his clothing as he forced his way through, clambering over the fallen trunks of the dead trees that littered the ground.

Passing through the last row of brush, he stepped out into the field. If he hadn’t known that there was a lake there, he may never have seen it. There was barely a dimple in the middle of the sea of snow that filled the opening in the trees. Trudging into the meadow, his right foot suddenly sunk a good foot into the snow and he tumbled forward, bracing himself on his right hand. Ice-cold water filled his shoe, instantly soaking into his sock and chilling the blood in his foot.

An image of car tires bending outward as they caught on the lip of a thin stream, tossing the car into the air, filled his mind. He could hear his own cries echoing in his head, and the metallic crunch of the crumpling car landing on its roof.

Rapidly shaking his head, he ran his fingers roughly through his snow-covered hair, looking down at his feet for a moment before turning his attention back to the lake in front of him.

They had never found Matt’s body. The car had been pulled from the water early the following morning, but there had been no one inside. Police had hacked the majority of the ice from the lake and had dredged it for four days. They had even sent divers down there, but they hadn’t come up with so much as an article of clothing.

The bottom of the lake consisted of a layer of mud atop thin silt, a very sticky, treacherous surface that would allow for anything to sink deep within it. Matt’s body had most likely fallen out of the car when it rolled onto its side before being pressed down into the soft earth. That’s what the cops said anyway. How the ground had stayed soft beneath the ice cold waters of the frozen surface was a mystery to him, however. But the decision provided him closure, and that was all he needed to begin the arduous process of getting on with his life.

He could hear the gurgling of the river at the far side of the lake as he stared across the sea of ice. Shaking his freezing foot, he began to walk again, moving around the edge of the trees in the nearly circular meadow.

His heart pounded as he fought with the memories that flooded his head. He could see Matt’s face, his eyes pleading, opening his mouth to cry for help, his lungs filling with that first mouthful of the icy water, the panic wrenching his face. He could see Matt reaching out, his fingers spread wide, trying to grab for him, begging for him to pull him from the car. His face disappeared into the darkness, the car slipping from the ice and disappearing beneath the surface.

Sniffing, he wiped a tear from the corner of his eye and continued his walk around the lake. The running water from the river was much louder now, the rippling waves appearing from out of nowhere right in front of him. Ice had formed in triangular shapes behind the tops of the large boulders that cracked the surface from beneath, small clusters of ice floating down the rough surface. It was an intense shade of blue, flowing thick like molasses from the crystallized water.

The river was barely twelve feet across, but it looked to be close to five feet deep. It was connected to the lake from somewhere beneath the ground, the water level of the lake being held static by the influx from the water table beneath.

Loud caws from a group of crows filled the air as Scott rounded the back side of the lake, treading the fifteen foot wide patch of ground the separated the frozen like from the ice-edged river. Lost in his own mind, he walked straight ahead, traversing the flattened buffalo grass beneath the packed snow on his way toward the line of trees ahead. The wind gusted through the open gap, blowing a mist of snow from the dancing branches at the upper canopy of the trees. Ducking his head, he held his hand up in front of his face to attempt to block the onslaught of flakes as he ducked through a thin opening in the trees. Pressing through the bare branches of the scrub oak, he appeared right in the center of a cement path in the middle of the woods.

The calling of the crows was far louder in the middle of the trees, echoing down the snowy path. Following the calls, Scott walked aimlessly, trying to make some sense of what he had seen that morning. He didn’t know for sure what he expected to find out here after all this time. Surely he knew that he wasn’t going to drive up there and find Matt’s body lying on the bank of the lake, or something completely obvious like that which the cops had somehow missed in their hurry to wrap up the investigation. It was gnawing at him from deep within: how had the hat turned up in his house after all of these years?

Whatever the answer may be, and he certainly didn’t have the slightest clue, even more troubling was how had it gotten into his house? He had been sitting right there at the table and had only moved from the paper long enough to start a pot of coffee. He had turned his back for maybe thirty seconds, if that. Who could possibly have skirted his security system and rushed into the kitchen without alerting him and exited before he knew that they were there? No one. And of that fact he was sure. But even more worrisome than that was the question that got to the root of the problem, the reason that he had driven up here and now wandered through the woods. Why?

There appeared to be close to twenty large-bodied, black birds bouncing along the path in front of him, right at the bend. They cawed and flapped at one another, fighting over what seemed to be chunks of food dangling from their long black beaks. Their glossy feathers glittered as they bobbed their heads, frantically trying to tilt their heads back and swallow their meals whole before another wrenched it from them. What looked to be a long dark shadow covered the ground, all of the crows staying neatly within its confines.

As he approached, the shadow appeared to take on depth, cutting through the snow. His brow furrowing, Scott could see that the legs of the crows were dyed a deep red, so dark that it bordered on black. The long strands of meat hanging from their battling beaks oozed with the red fluid, tiny droplets flying through the air as they swung the pieces around their heads in an attempt to gulp them down. As he grew closer the shadow took on the same color as the legs of the birds, the snow melting beneath the crimson stain.

His footsteps padded on the soft snow, startling the birds to flight. They landed in a cluster ten feet back watching him closely as he walked up to where they had been feasting. The red fluid had melted through the snow in a large patch covering the width of the sidewalk and back into the trees beyond. Shreds of flesh and the tattered remains of the insides draped over the bare, bony branches of the scrub oak. It looked as though a large animal had exploded from the inside. The crows couldn’t have brought down whatever this mess had been. They were merely scavenging the remains.

There were no other tracks surrounding the mess, not even the small canine tracks of the coyotes that wandered these hills. Scott had heard tales of mountain lions in the foothills, even coming into people’s houses while they slept, but all of those reports had been far to the south at the base of Cheyenne Mountain. He had never heard of one in this area, and besides, feline tracks of that size would be unmistakable in the fresh snow.

Kneeling in front of the red-drenched bushes, he began to inspect the mess, the pungent stench of the festering sludge accosting his senses. Breaking off a small branch, he pried one of the tattered pieces of flesh from the shrub, dangling it in front of his face so that he could try to figure out what kind of animal it had been. But it was strange; every dead animal he had come across, regardless of the state, always had large sections of fur lying about. But there wasn’t a shred of fur anywhere, nor were there any bones to be seen. He couldn’t think of any animal that could eat the bones, or, for that matter, even make the effort to carry them off to its den without dragging the rest of the carcass.

There was a snap behind him, followed quickly by another, and then the sound of rustling shrubbery. Leaping to his feet, Scott whirled staring into the wall of foliage. A gloved hand appeared, forcing back the barren branches of the oak. A figure, clothed in black, appeared through the criss-crossing limbs, standing there momentarily while he watched Scott from the shadows.

“Hello?” Scott said, craning his neck to try to get a better glimpse of whoever lurked beyond.

The figure just stood there, the whites of his eyes almost glowing from the shadows. Scott could feel the stranger’s stare: inspecting him, sizing him up from the tips of his toes through the top of his head. His stomach began to flutter, the nerves in his lower back tingling. The urge to take flight raced up from the back of his mind, just as the figure stepped forth from the bushes.

It was an older man; his silver hair matted beneath a black stocking cap pulled down over the tops of his red ears. The tip of his nose almost glowed from the cold and he sniffed it constantly. His expressionless, pale face was worn thick with lines, his eyebrows furrowed. A navy blue down jacket covered his torso; his legs swathed with denim.

“I’m sorry if I startled you,” the man said, looking straight through Scott at the mess of innards strewn across the path.

“My fault,” Scott said. “I didn’t have any idea that this was private property until I came across this walking path here.”

“What business do you have back here?” the man glowered.

“You know, I’m really sorry. You must be from the old folks home out there, and I’m…”

“Do I look decrepit to you?” the man asked, his face pinching tightly. Scott thought for a second the old man was going to try to start something physical, but suddenly his face lightened, as did his voice. A thin smile crossed his lips. "I’m not that old…”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“I know, I just had to hassle you a little. You probably startled me far more than I did you.”

“I don’t know about that,” Scott said, shaking his head. He stared down at his shoes, bright red snow crusted over the toes of his sneakers.

“I hope I didn’t interrupt your breakfast,” he said, nodding.

“I was just finishing.”

“The name’s Harry Denton,” the man said, offering his gloved hand. Scott shook the man’s hand, brushing the dampness from his hand onto his pants.

“Scott Ramsey.”

“I thought that’s who you were,” the man said, his smile fading. “From what I’ve seen, there aren’t any coincidences in these woods.”

“What do you mean?” Scott asked, suddenly uncomfortable.

“I pulled you out of that car in the lake years ago. A little less hair and a few new wrinkles, but your face is still the same.”

“Really?” Scott said, flabbergasted. “I never had the opportunity to thank you for that.”

“No thanks needed. You would have done the same.”

“I don’t know…”

“You have to give yourself more credit than that,” Harry said, pausing. “What brings you back here today?”

“I’m not really sure,” Scott said.

“Like I said, nothing’s coincidental around here.”

Scott stared at the man as he walked past, inspecting the remains that littered the path.

“What kind of animal do you think that was?” Scott asked leaning over Harry’s shoulder. “My initial thought was that it might have been a dog or something, but I couldn’t see any bones. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

Harry turned and faced Scott. All of the color had drained from his face.

“I have,” he said softly, turning and pressing through the mess into the scrub oak.

Scott stood there for a moment, watching the man disappear into the foliage as he debated whether or not to head back to his car.

“Sweet Jesus,” he heard Harry utter.

Stepping into the undergrowth, he clambered through the thick mass of branches, popping into a tiny clearing beneath the needle-covered limbs of a cluster of pines. Harry was standing at the base of one of the trunks, inspecting the ground. Walking around him, Scott followed Harry’s gaze to the blood-soaked ground.

A pile of crimson bones rested against the trunk of the tree, stacked neatly. There was no doubt that they were human. A savagely stripped ribcage sat beneath a cracked pelvis; the long bones of the arms and legs laid neatly over the top. The feet rested in the palms of the bloody, cupped hands. All of the flesh had been stripped away, only the severed tendons protruded from their former connections of the hastily-defleshed bones.

“My God,” Scott whispered, his stomach twisting in knots. He turned from the pile, staring off into the woods as he drew in several large, slow breaths.

“God give me the strength,” Harry whispered, staring through the canopy into the cloud cover.

“That’s a person,” Scott said, turning back to Harry, but unable to steer his attention from the pile of bones from the corner of his eye.

Harry just nodded.

“We need to call the police,” Scott said, rational thought finally entering his head.

“It won’t do any good.”

Harry walked around the trunk of the tree, ducking beneath the low-hanging branches. He scanned the ground, looking for something, exactly what, he wasn’t sure, but he knew there had to be something. There would be some sort of message, a calling card that had been left for him.

“Look,” Scott said, following him around the trunk. “Whoever this is… was… was murdered. I’m going to go call the police.”

“Come here,” Harry said, gesturing with his hand. “Look at this and tell me if there’s anything the police can do.”

Scott shoved back a thick branch, the soft needles pressing into the skin on his hand as he followed Harry’s voice. Why was he so trusting of this old man? He didn’t know him from Adam. For all he knew it could have been this guy who had slaughtered this person, why else had he been out there?

Shoving his hands into his pocket, he pulled out his car keys, sliding each of the keys between his fingers, the keychain pressed firmly in the palm of his clenched fist. He stared down at his knuckles; the keys protruding like long, jagged claws. The muscles in his arms tensed in anticipation.

“Stop right there,” Harry said, his back to Scott. He held out his open hand. “Look at this.”

Scott peered past Harry. A thin line of blood traced a line through the pristine, untouched white snow, leading to the center of another small clearing. Right in the center of the patch, Scott saw something that would forever be burned into the backs of his eyelids, something that he would see for the rest of his life every time he closed his eyes and settled into the darkness.

There was a face staring up at him from the ground, the hair matted flat with blood. The eyelids were peeled back, the dark eyes staring up into the upper reaches of the tree. The man’s severed neck had been planted into the snow, and unlike the rest of the bones, the skull was still covered with its original flesh. The mouth hung slightly askew, parted to allow for the swelling tongue. The pale, almost bluish, flesh was littered with spatters of blood like freckles.

Scott inched forward, fixed intently on the face.

“Stay right there!” Harry snapped. His voice lowered slightly and leveled off. “Look at the snow around it. There aren’t any footprints.”

Scott was barely able to shift his gaze from the head even long enough to note Harry’s observation.

“For some reason, we were meant to find it like this. Why else would there still be skin on the face?” he said, turning to Scott. “You know who this is, don’t you?”

“No,” Scott said, snorting, “How the hell should I—”

“Look very closely.”

“Listen, there’s no possible way that I—”

“Look!” Harry shouted, pointing his finger directly at the face.

Scott stared straight at it, studying the eyes, the line of the cheekbones, the curve of the mouth. And all at once, it felt as though the ground dropped from beneath him, the air in his lungs seizing and growing stale as he fought to draw a single breath. His heart raced and his hands began to tremble at his sides, the keys falling into the snow. He collapsed to his knees, his jaw growing slack as he stared with sudden recognition into the face of an old friend.

His hands stung in the snow, the ice ripping into his hot pink flesh. He stared blankly up at Harry, and then back to the ground.

“Tim…” he whispered, his gaze creeping back to his friend’s lifeless face.

“How did you know him?” Harry asked, stepping between Scott and the head.

“I haven’t seen him in years.”

“How did you know him?” Harry asked, placing his hands to either side of Scott’s face and raising his head so that their eyes met. “Was he here that night?”

“What night?”

“The night that I pulled you from that car.”

Scott just stared at Harry.

Harry breathed deeply, trying to collect himself.

“Was he with you that night?” he asked, very slowly, enunciating every syllable.

“Yeah,” Scott said, brushing the man’s hands from his face and easing himself to his feet.

“Listen to me very carefully,” Harry said, his wild blue eyes so wide they looked as though they might pop free from his skull. “It was no accident that I was there when you wrecked that night.”

“What do you mean?”

“He led me to you.”

“Who’s he?”

“It would be far too hard to explain, you’re going to have to let me show you.”

Scott stared at him for a moment, sensing Harry’s anticipation. The thoughts in his head all jumbled together, and the only answer he could muster was a simple nod.

Harry brushed past him, slipping into the shrubbery. Wrenching his gaze from Tim’s blue-rimmed, swelling eyes, Scott pushed himself to his feet and stumbled through the underbrush after him. The tips of the branches ripped at the skin on his hands and face, but he could hardly even feel it, the shock having numbed his flesh. His eyes could hardly focus on anything as he bumbled through the scrub oak, stumbling onto the path beyond. Harry was already well ahead of him, slipping into the brush on the far side of the path.

“Wait!” Scott shouted after him, suddenly remembering that his keys were buried somewhere in the snow back by where the head rested.

Harry turned to look at him as he whirled as scrambled hurriedly back through the undergrowth. Watching his feet, he hurdled the interlaced trunks of the trees, bursting through the final mass of branches and into the thin clearing behind. Following his footprints in the snow, he ducked beneath the low, drooping branch of the pine and scrambled into the small gap where his footprints stopped. He found his hand prints to either side of the large matting of snow where he had knelt, running his fingers along the frozen ground beneath the fresh layer of powder, working in and out of the buried layers of pine needles beneath. His knuckle slamming into his keychain, he bundled it within his palm and hopped back to his feet, his eyes automatically glancing toward the center of the small clearing.

There was nothing there.

He could still see the small line of dripped blood across the white surface, droplets scattered to either side, and the red-stained hole in the center where the neck had been inserted… but the head was gone. And there were no other footprints anywhere close to where it had been. Harry’s tracks were still fresh, but he never got closer than three feet from it, and there was nothing else. Not a single print.

He frantically scoured the area, searching for any sign of whoever had absconded with Tim’s head. Nothing. Not a jostling branch, a broken twig, nothing to betray the direction in which the killer had fled. But he had to be close. Scott had only stepped from the clearing for a few seconds, if that. He had to be close, had to be within his view.

Scott looked up into the trees, searching for any sign that someone was up there, a trembling, bare branch; falling snow; bark that had been stripped from the trunk as someone had rushed to climb it. Still nothing.

“What’s taking so long?” Harry asked, creeping up behind him. “Is everything all right?”

Scott just turned and looked at him, stretching out his arm and pointing his index finger straight toward where the decapitated head had once been.

Harry wore a stern look of understanding, as though he had already known that it would be gone. Nodding, he grabbed Scott by the sleeve of his coat and urged him back through the scrub oak and onto the path. Looking back one last time, Scott checked to make sure that his eyes hadn’t merely been playing tricks on him, before turning and following Harry.

The sky darkened overhead as a dark mass of clouds crept over the tops of the Rockies, threatening to spill down the face of the mountains, burying the front range beneath a new, more ominous looking storm.

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THE BLOODSPAWN

Michael McBride

© 2004 Michael McBride. All rights reserved.

PART SIX

PART VI

Chapters 7 and 8

VII

Sunday, November 13th

Noon

Scott’s Grand Cherokee slowed in front of the small blue house, the gravel of the driveway rumbling beneath the heavy tires. Harry clambered out of the passenger side door as Scott killed the engine, slowly opening the door and slipping from the seat onto the snow-covered red gravel. He stared at the little bungalow as he eased from behind the door, closing it behind him. It was an older house, and one he had never known even existed.

They had opened a small gate in the barbed wire fence at the edge of the road, just barely to the east of the former convent’s property line. Following a long, thin gravel driveway that meandered off into the forest, nearly onto Air Force Academy property, they wound before dipping back down and to the small bungalow.

The freshly-stained porch ran the entire front of the house, its redwood finish shielded from the falling snow by the long overhang, a steel weathervane with a rooster mounted in the center of the crest. Two windows peered down from above the eve like small, watchful eyes. The roof had been recently repaired, as evidenced by patches of shingle that were far lighter in color than the other darker, bowed shingles that were beginning to peel up. The screen door was folded back against the house, the spring from the recoil device snapped, hanging limply from the doorway.

Harry ascended the three steps up to the porch and glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Scott was still following. Producing a set of keys from within his pocket, he shoved one into the door and opened it wide, stepping into the dark house, leaving the door standing open.

Scott crept up the steps, the boards creaking beneath his weight as he crossed the porch and stepped into the house, closing the door behind. He was standing in the middle of the living room. There was a small coat rack with brass hooks mounted to the wall beside him. Ornately framed paintings of Colorado landscapes hung along the walls, the room sparsely furnished with the exception of the lone recliner in the center of the room and the television set on a small, wooden cart in the corner of the room. The floor was covered with long, rust-colored shag carpeting, the wear matting the knap in a V shape coming from the kitchen.

He heard Harry toss his keys onto the kitchen counter. The fridge door opened, bottles rattling against one another, and with a clink, he produced a brown bottle of root beer for each of them, removing the caps with an opener and stepping into the doorway.

With a nod, Scott took one of the bottles from Harry’s outstretched hand, following him into the kitchen. The newspaper was spread out across the table. A small plate littered with crumbs sat beside an empty glass, a small ring of orange juice in the bottom. There were only two chairs at the table, and one was buried beneath many days worth of newspapers.

The freshly-cleaned counters shined from the light that slipped through in arcs from behind the thin white shade that covered the window at the back of the kitchen, a door leading into the back yard in the corner of the room. There was a large trash can in the corner of the room, filled to brimming with what appeared to be nothing but root beer bottles and microwave dinners. The linoleum floor was waxed to a high shine, the white and blue pattern of squares faded from years of wear.

“Follow me,” Harry said, disappearing down the dark hallway to the left with a nod.

Passing the bathroom to the right, its brick-red shower curtain drawn shut, they reached the end of the hallway. In the room straight ahead he could see the foot of a bed, a blue bedspread folded neatly across the base. There was a wooden chest in the center of the floor, and the closet door at the back of the room stood ajar.

Ducking into the room to the right, Harry flipped the light switch and walked toward the back wall. Turning, Scott stood in the doorway for a moment, lingering as he stared into the room.

It was the complete opposite of the rest of the house. Everything else seemed to have an order to it and was nearly immaculate. This room however, was crammed full of everything possible. Newspaper clippings lined the walls, pressed into place with multicolored thumbtacks. They appeared to run chronologically from the left around the room to the right based on the slight yellowing of the newsprint. Stacks of boxes filled the room, all of them labeled by year, stacked in front of the closet so that there was absolutely no way of getting close enough to reach the knob on the door, let alone open it.

The oldest box that he could see was labeled “1966,” but was buried beneath a stack of others. The more frequently accessed appeared to be ’70 to ’74, and a couple from the eighties and nineties that sat open in the center of the floor.

Harry sat down in the armed chair at the heavy, solid oak desk at the back of the room. Stacks of manila folders rested to the left side of the desk, along with a computer; the printer balanced precariously atop the monitor. In the center, there was an ancient tape recorder and an old reel to reel 8mm projector.

The room reeked of age, like the scent that gusts from the inside of an old library book. The air was still as the boxes blocked access to the window; the curtains pinned behind the weight of the stacks.

Scott stared around the room, feeling as though he were in the basement archives of a newspaper, or the obsessive den of a psycho. He was suddenly quite uncomfortable.

“I think maybe I should just go,” he said, the weight of the morning’s events visible in his weary eyes.

“Please,” Harry said, swiveling to face him in the chair. “You have nothing to fear here. I can completely understand how overwhelming this must all seem. Believe me. I was in your shoes once.”

“I’m at a pivotal point with my business and I should really be actively overseeing things right now.”

“Just have a seat on one of those boxes over there, and give me half an hour. If, after that time, you feel you need to go, then more power to you. We part with no hard feelings. But I think… no, I know, that you need to see what I have here.”

His brow knitting itself tightly across his forehead, Scott shuffled into the room, closing the top of the box, and planted himself atop “1972”.

Harry grabbed a file from the desk behind him and opened it, pulling out the top page of the stack of papers within.

“Take a look at this,” he said, handing the page to Scott. “This is what first dragged me into this entire mess. It’s a summary from the State Department of Child Welfare of four children that ended up in the custody of a group of nuns at the convent just down the road from here. At the time, none of the names of the children were made available, just their ages and the condition in which they arrived. It was my job to do a physical inspection of their health and the living conditions.”

He pulled another piece of paper from the folder and handed it to Scott.

It was a photocopied page of an original newspaper article. There was a photo of what looked like a castle, the caption identifying it as the Cavenaugh Convent. He perused the article quite rapidly. The main details of the article that jumped from the page were that both the nuns who staffed the castle and the four children recently placed in their care had disappeared. While no foul play was suspected, the circumstances revolving around their disappearance were suspicious the article stated, but failed to elaborate. The last line caught his attention.

“The last person to have contact with the sisters was Dr. Harry Denton, a physician on staff with the Department of Child Welfare,” he read aloud.

“Right,” Harry said, intently leaning forward in his chair. “I saw three of these children lying slaughtered on a couch, grabbed the fourth and ran away with him. I got out of there just in time to see someone, something, slip into that little house. I can still hear the screams of those nuns when I lay in my bed at night.”

“So you think they’re dead?”

“I know they’re dead.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Of course.”

“And…”

“And I went out there with them the following morning just past dawn, and guess what we found?”

“What?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Harry said, leaning back and lacing his fingers in his lap. “Let me tell you something, when I was in that house, I remember as clear as day the blood of those children that puddled on the hardwood floor. The arcs of blood dripped down the walls and soaked into the couch where their bodies lay. And I tell you this… I could hear those nuns getting slaughtered, their screams gurgling to a sudden halt.”

“But when the police got there, they found nothing?”

“I couldn’t believe it. I led them through the front door of that house and pointed straight into the room, but nothing that I had told them about was there. The floor was dry as a bone and freshly lacquered. The furniture, which had been pushed up against the walls, sat neatly arranged in the center of the room without a single stain.”

“You keep talking about this house. I thought this was all up at the convent.”

“The Cavenaugh house.”

“That little boarded up shack?”

“The same.”

“That’s where we were the night of the accident.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“I walk to that house every night. It’s part of my watch. I saw you kids there. I figured you were just getting into normal trouble, so I thought I’d just watch for a few minutes to make sure that everything was going to be all right. I was just about to leave when I saw him…”

“Who?”

“The same person… thing… that I saw walk into that same house and slaughter those nuns so many years prior.”

“I didn’t see anyone other than the six of us.”

“I was standing atop the hill on the other side of the road, leaning against the trunk of a tree when something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see, but there was nothing there. I could feel him out there with me, though, his cold eyes watching me. I could taste his breath on the wind, feel him in my bones. I had seen him in those woods a handful of times in the interim, a shadow slipping behind a tree, a dark face leering at me from the shadows, but it wasn’t until that moment that I knew that he wanted me to see him.”

Scott stared closely at him. The whole thing sounded like complete and utter hogwash, but he could tell from the man’s face that he believed every word that came out of his mouth.

“I heard shouting, and I turned just in time to see two of you kids come running out the front door, one dragging the other. You got into your car and started to back up. It was at that point that I could feel him standing next to me. There was a certain aura of coldness around him; I could feel it straight through the flesh on my arms, aching in the center of my bones. All I could hear was the sound of his breathing, the sound of razors scraping across flesh. My knees were knocking as I turned to look, but I only caught a quick glimpse of his face, his eyes settled into shadow, his cracked lips pressed tightly over his teeth. The skin on his cheeks was dry and flaking, the purple veins right up against the surface of his pale, blue flesh. I flinched as he raised his arm and pointed down toward the road. I followed where his finger pointed just in time to see someone else racing to his car to follow you. I turned back, but he was already gone.”

“Who’s he?”

Harry rose from the chair and walked across the room, closing the door. There was a large white sheet of butcher’s paper pinned to the back of the door. Stepping through the mess of boxes, he sat back down in the chair and flipped a switch on the side of the reel to reel, a thin line of white flowing right in front of Scott’s face on the way to the wall.

“I’d like you to meet LeRoy Trottier,” Harry said, sliding the clip forward on the camera. The film began to feed through.

“Who?”

“Just watch.”

The scratched and lined, faded color picture appeared on the wall, amidst the crackling of the spinning reel.

A man sat a table in the center of the screen, his fingers laced before him, his head bowed. Slowly, he raised his eyes and stared into the camera, his dark, deep-set eyes staring right through Scott as he sat in the small, darkened room. His wild, black hair was streaked with lines of gray, as was his long, scraggly beard. He had thick, bushy brows and his forehead was heavily lined. Only the bottom row of teeth was visible beneath the long mustache, crooked and jagged. Slowly, his tongue appeared, licking his lips as he prepared to begin.

“So you say you’ve seen him with your own eyes,” the man said, smiling, his deep, guttural voice filling the room.

“Let’s start from the beginning, Mr. Trottier,” Harry said, the old recording stealing years from his voice. “First off, can you please state your name for the camera.”

He grinned, removing his hands from the table and leaning back in the chair, relacing his fingers behind his head.

“Leroy Francis Trottier,” he said, cocking his head. “Welcome to the Canyon City Correctional Facility, where friends and good times come together every single day behind bars.”

He laughed.

“It’s important that you take this seriously, Mr. Trottier—”

“Call me LeRoy.”

“I’d appreciate it if we could keep this interview formal.”

Smirking, he nodded, placing a hairy, bare foot on the table in front of him.

“Now Mr. Trottier,” Harry continued, “Would you please state for me why exactly you are in prison.”

“You already know.”

“Please, Mr. Trottier, I need you to be cooperative. I can always just use your file.”

“You need my words. You’ve already read my file. You’re looking for something that’s not in there.”

“Granted, but I’m also giving you the opportunity to tell things in your own words for posterity.”

His mouth slowly parted as he ran his tongue over his front teeth, staring down into his lap only momentarily before turning back into the camera and nodding.

“Okay,” he said, dryly. “Let’s start from the top. My name is LeRoy Francis Trottier and I am serving four consecutive life terms in the Canyon City Correctional Facility for murder. I was convicted in front of a jury of your peers, on four counts of first degree murder for the slayings of my wives and a police officer.”

“Your wives?”

He smiled.

“I initially had four of them, but one ran off during the night, taking my children with her. The other three pretended that they had no knowledge of what happened to the children, but I knew better. They were all in on it. They lied right to my face, so I was forced to try to get the information out of them using what I call ‘special tactics.’”

“Special tactics?”

“Yes,” he said, dropping his foot back to the floor and leaning all the way forward, the shackles on his wrists glimmering from the light of the camera. “I took a knife, a long, hand crafted blade with a jagged, serrated edge, and forced it into their lower stomachs, just to the inside of the hip bone. Slowly, I dragged it inward and downward, careful not to nick the intestines. You should have seen the way the blood spilled out from down there, covering their legs and staining the hairs of their privates. I gave them every opportunity to talk, to tell me themselves what they had done with the kids, but damned if the first one didn’t lie to me right from the start, telling me they’d taken them to live with her sister in Montana.”

“But they didn’t?”

“She didn’t even have a sister. Can you believe that? I’d have almost believed her if she’d told me they crawled away themselves to join the circus. But no, she had to lie straight to my face. So, I had no choice but to finish the incision and drag her intestines out around the room, draping them over the furniture and around the table. She got to watch for a while, well, until finally she coughed up what looked like a gallon of blood. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she was gone.”

“So you moved on to the other two?”

“Hell, they’d been in the room watching me with the first one. They told me right away what happened to them, squealing like little pigs. They cried and cried and told me how sorry they were that they had conspired against me, told me they’d make it up to me any way that I wanted.”

“But you killed them, too.”

“Of course. They took my children from me. So I gutted them just for fun.”

“Jesus…”

“Listen to me, college boy. My daddy used to say if you’ve got a cow that don’t give milk, it’s called a steak. Same thing applies here. I’ve got three wives who give away my children, knowing that was the only reason that they were brought there in the first place. That means that they’d outlived their usefulness.”

“I don’t understand why the other two just sat there watching as you tortured the first.”

“They were shackled to the wall.”

“Oh.”

“Look, it’s not like I dated these women for years, taking them to the opera and shit like that. I met these chicks on the streets, junkies, whores, what not. They were more than happy to come back to my place. I took care of them. I made sure they had whatever they needed. They just had to do the one little thing for me in the process, and they could live out their lives like they wanted to.”

“And that one little thing was to bear your children.”

He smiled and settled back in the chair, scratching his neck. He stared through the lens.

“You’ve asked enough questions for now,” LeRoy said. “Now, it’s my turn to ask a few.”

“If you will please, Mr. Trottier—”

“If you want me to answer the questions that you’re really looking for the answers to, then you’re going to have to answer mine, or this interview is over. You and I both know that you have no business here. I’ve already been tried and convicted, and since I killed a cop, it’s only a matter of time before I get myself killed in here as well. So if it’s answers that you want, then you just shut your damn mouth and listen!”

His eyes blazed in their darkened sockets. He leapt to his feet and pointed with both fingers directly into the camera. There was a moment of silence as the camera shook. Slowly, LeRoy collected himself and slunk into his seat, staring off to the left before returning his stare to the screen.

“I have two simple questions. You answer them both honestly, and I’ll tell you what you came here to find out.”

He pulled a cigarette from the breast pocket of his orange jumper suit. Forcing the pack back into the pocket, he produced a pack of matches and lit it, tossing the empty book onto the floor. Dragging deeply, he exhaled a large plume of gray smoke and then rubbed his eyes. He began speaking, his voice low and cracking.

“I know you’re not a lawyer or a filmmaker. I can see in your eyes that you know a whole lot more than you’re letting on. Judging from your pretty little hands, I would guess that you’ve never had to work an honest day in your life, but you have soft eyes, which means you were never meant to. My money says that you’re here because you’ve seen the children, helped them in some way, but you saw something that isn’t quite sitting right with you. And from the look in your eyes, I can tell… you saw him.”

Harry sighed from behind the camera.

“Mr. Trottier,” he said slowly. “Who—”

“My questions first!” he shouted, leaping to his feet.

A guard walked in from the left side of the camera, gripped LeRoy tightly by the shoulders and forced him back down into his chair. Seizing him tightly by the neck, he squeezed, the tendons popping out in his arms as he leaned down and whispered something into LeRoy’s ear.

LeRoy looked into the camera, and nodded, the guard slinking back into the corner of the room out of view of the camera.

“As I was saying,” LeRoy said calmly, glancing back into the corner of the room where the guard leaned against the door, holding his baton across his folded arms. “Tell me, where are the children?”

“I don’t know.”

LeRoy looked him up and down, his bottom lip protruding as his dark eyes narrowed.

“You’re lying to me,” he whispered, leaning forward. “Thing is, I already know what happened to those kids, but for some reason, it’s important that I hear it from your lips. I need you to tell me your part in all of this.”

“I found three of them dead,” Harry said, his voice trembling. “I ran off with the fourth and turned it in to the county. For close to a week, they were unable to track down the original parents of the child, but by the time they did, well, you obviously know the rest from that end.”

“So where is my son now?”

“He was placed with an adoptive family.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“That’s how it needs to be done.”

“What do you mean?”

“My second question. What did he look like?”

“Who?”

“You know… him.”

“I guess I’m not sure who—”

“Listen,” LeRoy said, focused intently on the camera. “I’ve felt his presence. I’ve tasted his breath in the darkness. I’ve heard him in my house in the middle of the night. I’ve fallen asleep to the screams of my wives as he raped them. But I’ve never seen him. Do you know how I know that you have?”

“How?”

“It’s in your eyes. The same emptiness that I recognized in those of my wives after they first saw him. It’s unmistakable. Almost like the light in your eyes burns out.”

“Those were his children?”

“My question first.”

“Are you saying that those children are the spawn of—”

“My question first!” LeRoy shouted, leaping from the table and slamming both fists down.

Immediately he looked to the corner to the guard, raising both palms in front of him as he slowly eased back into the chair. His hands shook as he coaxed the guard into remaining in the corner with a look. Turning back to Harry, he lowered his head, looking straight up from beneath his brow.

“Please?”

“All right,” Harry started, resetting the camera on his shoulder. “It was very dark and I was about fifty yards away. I saw him first, kneeling beside the house, barely more than a dark shape against the moonlit snow. Then he rose to his feet. He was tall, very tall. He stood straight, you know, his posture. He wore a long cloak or something along those lines, frayed at the end, the tattered edges flowing in the wind. He walked up the front stairs of the house, onto the porch, where he stopped and looked over at me. His face was dark, but I could feel his eyes on me. I could feel him smiling at me even though I couldn’t see a damned thing other than his shape. He turned and walked into the house, and that was when I ran off.”

LeRoy sat there with his eyes closed, soaking every detail into his mind like a sponge. His lips curled at the corners with a grin and he looked peaceful, if only for the moment.

“Thank you,” he whispered, inhaling deeply. Rubbing his thumbs together, he slowly opened his lids and stared right into the camera. “Now, I’d answer your question, but I believe you already know the answer.”

Silence filled the room.

“Know this,” LeRoy whispered, leaning in close. “That child, wherever he is, will be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people. That is his sole purpose.”

“Time’s up,” the guard said from the corner of the room, once again appearing in the center of the frame. He raised LeRoy to his feet by the back of his shirt, turning him with a shove and leading him out of the room.

The camera ran on for a moment, filming the empty seat across the table before the screen finally went white.

“I don’t understand,” Scott said, turning to Harry, who was already rewinding the film through the camera.

“There’s something else I need to show you,” he said, stopping the film and flipping the switch so that it showed each frame one by one like a slide projector. “Every tenth frame, not so often that you can truly see it while it’s playing, but if you slow it down…”

Scott turned back to the screen and watched the image of LeRoy as he moved just the smallest fraction from one frame to the next. It was the portion of the interview where he leapt to his feet, his face slowly reddening from one frame to the next until…

“Holy shit,” Scott whispered.

This frame was different. It followed the others in their progression, but this one was dramatically different. The skin had disappeared from LeRoy’s face, leaving only the image of his skull; the eyes vanished into the hollow black holes.

The next frame was back to normal, as was the next series in the progression, until he finally sat back down in the chair and stared at the camera, the flesh falling from his face to reveal the skull once again. Harry left the projector on that one image.

“I need to go now,” Scott said, rising from the chair and opening the door, the image of the skeletal LeRoy projected on the back of his coat. He walked out into the hallway.

Passing through the kitchen and into the living room, he headed straight toward the front door, throwing it wide and stepping out into the blowing snow. He bounded down the steps and around the car, hopping into the driver’s side door and shoving the key into the ignition. Bringing the Jeep roaring to life, he glanced back at the house. Harry was standing in the doorway, just staring at him. He dropped the car into drive and headed down the gravel driveway.

VIII

Sunday. November 13th

10 p.m.

Scott stared up at the ceiling in the darkened bedroom, the ceiling fan casting long shadows like arms from the blades. In his mind, he recounted the day’s events starting with the hat he had found in the kitchen. It all seemed surreal, as though he had seen it in a movie. He was distanced from it, somehow. The entire morning was enveloped by some sort of fog, some element that made it all seem as though it had never happened, yet the memories were still there. And they were definitely real.

After he had left Harry’s little house, he had driven straight down through the hills, focused intently on the road ahead, not even glancing to either side of the road for fear of what he might see. Deciding to spend the rest of the day trying to deal with the everyday aspects of real life, the things that he could control, he had stopped by the model home at the front of the development.

There had been a handful of cars parked out front, and he had parked about a half block down the street. He had walked across the street, ascending the front steps of the house and walked right in. He recognized three real estate agents right away, each guiding a couple through the main level. The living room—which had been converted to a sales office, complete with a desk for the agents, and one for the mortgage broker who sat there filling out paperwork with a younger couple, in the center of the room—was nearly shoulder to shoulder with people.

Passing through, he stopped in the kitchen, peering down the stairs in hopes of finding the senior partner in the agency. But, of course, he wasn’t there, most likely vacationing somewhere in the Caribbean or something. His stress level rising through the roof, Scott had decided to try to sell some himself, following the groups around as they were led through the house, pointing out the small details that no one would ever have noticed.

It turns out they had already sold four that morning, so the magic number was down to two. Feeling the smallest bit of relief, he had headed home, settling into the couch to watch the Avalanche take on the Red Wings. The game had gone into double overtime before Yelle had clinched it with a beautiful backhand that slipped past Osgood, right through the Five Hole. It had been incredibly nice, to have lost himself in the game for more than four hours, forgetting, for the most part, about everything that had transpired during the day. But as soon as the goal had hit the net, it had all come flooding back to him, overwhelming him as he sat in the conspicuously silent and empty room.

He walked to the kitchen, pacing back and forth as he stared at the telephone on top of the counter. There was one way to determine for sure whether this whole episode was real, or if it was all just in his head. He had to call Tim Williams’s wife. Surely, if he were, indeed, dead, then they would at least be looking for him.

Everything had just seemed so insane. Was it even possible that he had seen what he thought he saw? He had barely slept a wink over the course of the last week, and he knew that it was all-too-possible that his mind was just playing tricks on him. The old man he had run into out in the woods could just as easily have been some crazed, bordering on lunatic, psycho, but there was definitely a part of him that had been sucked in, mesmerized, by the old man’s story.

Grabbing the phone from the receiver, he stared at the number pad, waiting for the light green glowing numbers to form some sort of pattern in his brain. It had been close to five years since he had called Tim, and he hadn’t actually seen him since the wedding. He had always been far too busy to join the old crew for their Saturday morning golf games, and, truth be told, he wasn’t really a big fan of golf in the first place.

Opening the top drawer beneath the counter, he pulled out a phone book, dropping it onto the table with a loud thud that echoed through the kitchen. Thumbing through the pages, he stopped at the long line of Williams, his index finger tracing down the column of first names until he reached Timothy. There were two of them, but only one that actually lived in the city. Rehearsing the number in his head, he dialed, the phone ringing dully in his ear.

“Hello?” a female voice answered on the other line.

“Hi. This is Scott Ramsey, I was wondering if Tim was around?”

“No,” the voice said, an underriding level of hostility coming through loud and clear.

“Do you know when he might be back?”

“He’s not coming back.”

“Oh… um…”

“Coward just left. He went out for his morning jog, and just never came back. At first, I was really worried. I drove around the neighborhood looking for him, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. It wasn’t until after I called the police that I started looking around in the bedroom. Would you like me to tell you what I found?”

“That’s all right—”

“I found an envelope filled with pictures. Pictures of another woman. There was also a stack of love letters. I only read the first two before I started to feel like a complete idiot.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So do you really think that I care if I ever see him again? I tell you, if I ever see him again, he will rue the day…”

“You don’t think that something might have happened to him?”

“I’m hoping, because of he ever shows his face around here again he’ll wish that it had.”

“Is it possible that—”

“And the least any of you guys could have done was tell me. Don’t you think that I have a right to know if my husband is fucking some little slut?”

“I had no idea. I really haven’t talked to Tim in a long—”

“Well, if you ever do, you tell him that I said I hope he burns in hell.”

She hung up the phone with a crash.

Scott just stared down at the phone in his hand as the dialtone resonated through the kitchen. Maybe it was possible that Tim had just taken off, and everything he had seen that morning had been an illusion, but he knew that he was just grasping at straws. But there was something that was puzzling him even more.

As he lay beneath the swirling ceiling fan, mesmerized by the spinning shadow, he couldn’t help but think about what he had seen at the old man’s house. He was confident that he had understood everything that he had seen, but the question was why. Why had Harry shown him all of that stuff, what bearing did it have on anything at this point? Was the old man trying to say that the devil walked the woods around here?

The thought was ludicrous: the paranoia of the mentally deranged.

Rolling from his back onto his side, he cradled the pillow beneath his right arm. The sudden shift alerted him to the pressure in his bladder. Sighing, he clambered out of the bed and across the plush carpeting that pressed up between his toes. His heavy eyes guided him through the darkness to the open bathroom door.

Dim moonlight filtered in through the window opposite the sink, the lines of light that filed through the horizontal blinds crossing the mirror. Lining up with the toilet, he unsnapped the access hole in his pajama bottoms and stared up at the ceiling as he opened the floodgates. He yawned, his open mouth warping from side to side. Finishing the job, he lowered the lid and flushed, sliding over in front of the sink, his shadow only a black shape in the mirror as it interrupted the lines of light.

Running a thin stream of cold water, he shoved his hands beneath it, rubbing them together. Raising his wet hands, he ran them through his hair, finishing by rubbing his eyes.

He opened his eyes, small particles of water clinging to his long lashes. He glanced into the mirror one last time on his way back to bed.

He froze, his heart leaping into his throat. There was another shadow in the mirror.

The air in his lungs grew stale and he was unable to breathe. Slowly, he turned, his fists clenched at his sides, preparing for whatever might be behind him. His pulse pounded as he raised his eyes, only to find himself staring at the light blue, horizontal blinds that covered the window.

There was nothing there.

He had passed the point of being tired days ago, and maybe this was just his mind’s way of letting him know that it was now officially time to get some sleep. Shaking his head, he shuffled back into the bedroom, his legs still shaking. He was just about to climb onto the bed when he heard something behind him.

Whirling, he stared at the entertainment center, the blackened screen reflecting the thin light that crept into the bedroom beneath the curtains. The top shelf was lined with spare change, his wallet and keys, and a small lamp, a VCR and DVD player stacked on the shelf beneath. But there was nothing else over there.

Turning, he climbed onto the bed on all fours, heading toward the pillow.

The noise came again, this time louder, like the sound of footsteps on floorboards, muffled by a thick layer of carpeting.

Scott whirled, toppling onto his side on the bed and stared back at the entertainment center. There was a large shadow looming over the bed. He could make out the outline of a man, nearly a full head taller than he was. The shadow lingered for only a moment before dissolving into the darkness, the silhouetted visage dripping into a pool of its own blackened form on the floor.

His whole body shuddered at once, the overwhelming reaction to the fear ripping through his flesh, crippling him as he lay on his side atop the mess of blankets on the bed. The breath that had been trapped in his lungs escaped in loud gasps, and he fought with his own flesh to make himself move. His wide, unblinking eyes stared at the edge of the bed, waiting for whatever had been there to materialize once again, but there was no movement in the slightest, not even the sparkling motes of dust reflecting from the moonlight that slipped in through the window.

His trembling hands pried him from the bed, lifting him to his haunches as he inched closer to the edge of the bed. Peering down his nose, he tried to see the floor, to see if there was, indeed, anything there. Rising to his knees, he gazed down at the floor, the light blue carpeting swathed in shadows, but there was nothing tangible there. No swirling pool of darkness as he had expected.

Climbing off the bed, he walked over to the dresser where he had just shed his clothes before donning his pajamas. Pulling off his nightshirt, he flipped on the light, once again slipping into the jersey he had worn earlier in the day. He tugged off his bottoms and climbed back into his jeans, stepping into the rubber bottomed slippers that lay on the floor, side by side, to the right of the oak dresser.

Slowly, he crept through the room, peering deeply into every corner and recess, looking for any clue that might help to rationalize what he had seen. Turning to the left, his eyes still blinded by the sudden burst of light from the overhead fan, he stepped into the darkness in the bathroom, his left hand fidgeting on the wall while his fumbling fingers tried to flip the light switch.

The line of globe lights mounted into the fixture above the mirror suddenly burst to life, the bright yellow filaments burning brightly as he scanned the room. There was the outline of a human form visible through the opaque glass of the shower stall.

But as suddenly as they had come on, the lights in the bathroom burnt out with a loud pop, the glass from all four bulbs showering the floor with tiny fragments of glass. His feet crunching on the jagged shards, he inched toward the shower, both trembling hands open in front of him. Latching onto the handle to the shower door, he yanked it open, the magnetic seal popping before the metal rim of the glass door clanged against the bathroom wall.

His heart seizing in his chest, he stared into the darkness, preparing to lunge at whoever was in there. But all he could see was his bath towel hanging from the showerhead, the long dark blue cotton looking black against the rich blue marble.

Warm air traced the back of his neck, sending goosebumps straight down his spine in waves. He could almost taste the stale air is as it warmed his flesh, stale and reeking of carrion. Whirling, he stared straight into the darkened face of a large shadow, two thin slits glowing amber from the pits of blackness in the face.

Throwing himself backward, he landed on the floor, his lower back slamming into the base of the shower. He stared up at the figure, eyes locked on the thin crescents that glowed in the center of the face.

“There’s something I want to show you,” the figure said in a deep voice, the words tripping icily over his lips as they cascaded down to the floor where Scott lay, trembling.

And as soon as it had spoken, the shape was gone, disappearing into the shadows. Scott was left string into the suddenly blinding glare of the light from the bedroom. He sat there for a moment, his body paralyzed from the shudder that passed over every inch of his skin, stabbing sharply into the tissue beneath. Fighting through the onslaught of tremors, Scott scrambled to his feet and dashed into the bedroom, his frantic stare scouring the room for any sign of the apparition that he had seen, but there was nothing but the humming from the fan as it circled overhead.

The voice played over and over in his head, repeating the lone line that it had uttered to the point that within his brain it sounded as if the voice were all around him in the room, taunting him. There was a familiar intonation in the voice, which sounded as though the words were drawn through a throat full of mud, but he couldn’t quite place it.

He turned towards the bedroom door, which was still closed tightly.

There was a loud cracking sound from behind him. Spinning, he faced the wall of windows. The curtains swelled as a gust of wind tossed them into the air from where they had rested against the cold glass. He bounded over the bed, grabbing the shades and yanking them to the side. A long crack splintered across the center of the window, the sound of splitting glass filling the air as the crack continued to widen, the frigid winter wind seeping through the minuscule gap.

Something caught his eye, a dark shape cast against the snow-covered lawn below. He could feel the eyes from the shadow staring up at him from below, their intense stare burning straight through him, searing the backs of his own eyeballs. Their eyes locked in a captured gaze for only the briefest of moments before the shadow turned, slowly crossing the lawn toward the line of trees at the very edge.

Turning, Scott leapt from the bed, darting across the room and bursting through the closed bedroom door. He hit the hall at a full sprint, leaping down the stairs at the end as he turned and sped towards the kitchen. Slapping the pin that held the door brace in place, he pulled out the stopper and unlocked the sliding glass door, throwing it wide. He bounded out onto the deck. He could barely make out the dark form of the shape against the dark outline of the row of trees, the branches barely even bending as the figure passed through.

Leaping down the snow-heaped stairs, the coldness snapping at his exposed ankles and soaking into the cloth slippers, he pounced onto the lawn. His breath burst from his lungs in plumes that trailed behind him as he sprinted across the virgin snow, focusing on the thin gap in the trees where the shape had merged with the shadows. Throwing up his hands in front of his face, he hit the line of trees without even slowing, the needle-fortified branches grabbing at his clothing.

The skin on the backs of his hands peeled back in lines, fresh blood piercing through the cold, red flesh as the hurdled through the thick undergrowth. Feeling a sharp pain crumple the toes on his right foot, his elbows landed in the snow, his face ramming his hands into the snow as the frosty powder filled his ears and covered his forehead and hair. He floundered there for a moment, fighting through the pain and the cold, trying desperately to regain his feet.

His right foot, the toes bloodied and twisted, fished through the snow for the slipper that had fallen from his foot when he had tripped. Finally slipping his bright red foot into the snow-packed shoe, he pushed himself to his feet and stared into the small clearing in front of him.

The shadow stared at him for the far end of the clearing, watching him for a moment before merging into the wall of branches beyond. The thin moonlight that slipped through the cloud-infested sky made the field in front of him glitter, the carpet of snow uninterrupted by even a single footprint. His eyes scanned the mass of foliage for anything that would betray the fact that there had been something there. But there was nothing. Only the thin wisps of powder that kicked up from the frozen earth, dancing in unison before slamming into the scrub oak, rattling the branches.

Racing through the small meadow, piles of powder kicking up behind his heels, Scott dashed into the next wave of trees, staring down at his feet, his arms covering his forehead, trying not to trip over the twisted trunks of the scrub oak. Only the most ambitious rays of light crept through the dense canopy, the darkness swelling from all sides. The sleeves of his shirt snagged on the barren branches of the brush, the needles from the long, intertwining branches ripping at the bare skin on his forearms.

The frigid night air nipped at his bare skin, his running nose stinging mightily. Slowly his flesh began to numb. His hair, dampened from the falling snow, froze atop his head, the individual strands clumping together as they crystallized. The blood in his feet throbbed, pounding painfully, with each step into the deep snow. But still, his body forced his weary legs to run, his chest burning from the lack of oxygen in the thin, crisp night air.

Bursting through the edge of the forest, he tumbled down a small hill, his body becoming weightless. He slammed down on his right shoulder, his face landing only inches from the freezing water along the icy bank of the river. The stones that littered the bank had torn through the shoulder of his jersey, his lacerated and bloody skin burning like fire, the snow that covered him from head to toe doing little to soothe the screaming wound.

Rising to his knees, he winced back the searing pain and stared down the bank of the river. There was no sign of the shadowy figure. The wall of trees on the far side of the river was unbroken by anything, save the clouds of snow that gusted past, the wind ripping the flakes along the surface of the water. The babbling of the water filled drowned out all other sound but the high-pitched scream of the wind shredding through the branches of the evergreens.

Staggering to his feet, he cupped his right shoulder with his left hand, pulling it free only long enough to inspect the blood that coated the damp surface of his palm before replacing it, cradling his open wound tightly beneath the firm pressure. His mouth hung wide, his lungs fighting through the crisp breeze to attain the oxygen that they desperately needed. His ankles rolled over the stones hidden beneath the snow as he stumbled on, heading upstream toward the mountains.

Every inch of his frozen flesh cried out for warmth, his trembling hands frozen into claws. It was all he could do to force his body to move forward, knowing that his only other option was to slink back home, not sure of the exact direction in which he had run. Contest: I have inscribed copies of both Species and The Legacy (first one in gets their choice) to give away to the first two people to email me at michael@mcbridehorror.com and tell me what they think of The Bloodspawn so far. Really. Now back to your reading… -M

The fierce wind carried with it another sound, a vague, muffled sound that was barely strong enough to draw attention to itself. As he pressed further, straight into the torrential breeze, the sound grew louder, separating itself from the howling of the wind.

It was a voice, a human voice, riding along the flow of air from some hidden location upstream. They were pained, tortured cries, growing more intense with each passing second.

The bank of the river rose higher to his right, leaving him only a thin line of bank to tread between the wall of rock to his right and the raging waters of the half-frozen river to his left. Echoing through the channel, the cries intensified, filling his ears and the noise congealed, forming unmistakable words.

“Someone help me!” the voice cried into the night.

Scott quickened his pace to a gallop, traversing the rocky bank as quickly as he could without sending himself headfirst into the frozen waters from which he knew he might never be able to crawl free. He placed his right hand on the steep bank, the sandstone crumbling beneath his touch, sending miniature avalanches of sand cascading down about his feet. Long, rugged roots broke from the surface of the bank, jutting forth right in front of his face. He barely saw them in time to duck or swat them away from his face. The voice sounded as though it was right in front of him now.

“Help me, please!”

He was right upon it now, the wailing coming from all sides. Ground-level branches from the trees atop the bank above draped down, the long, needled branches covering the surface of the bank, only the bottom portion visible above the snow-drifted ground. The muffled voice called to him from some hidden location. His scraped and frozen hands ripped back the branches, the voice sounding clear as day. Holding back the branches with his elbows, he thrust his face close to the bank, exposing a rusted grate built straight into the bank of the river.

The voice funneled through from the cavernous tunnel beyond, the darkness entombed within so thick that it appeared impenetrable. Beneath the wailing voice, he could hear the padding of footsteps: uneven as they splashed through the ice-covered drainage that slid down the middle of the tunnel into the river.

“Is someone there?” Scott called into the tunnel, his fists wrapping tightly around the grate; his flesh turning a faded color of rust as it flaked off in his grasp.

“Oh, Jesus!” the voice called. “Please, help me!”

Scott could see the faint outline of a darkened form limping toward him, barely discernible from the darkness that surrounded it.

Splish, splash. Splish, splash.

The man within stumbled on, falling to his knees several times before slowly pushing himself back up to his feet, a little slower each time.

“What’s happening?” Scott shouted, yanking on the grate, trying to pry it from where it had been drilled into the sandstone. The grate rocked slightly, lines of sand tumbling down the slope from the secure bolts.

“Get me out of here!” the voice shouted, the figure nearly to the grate.

Scott scanned the ground, finally grabbing a large rock from the bank and raising it into the air.

A hand burst through a hole in the grate, lines of blood streaming over the knuckles as it grabbed for him.

“Stand back!” Scott yelled, slamming the rock down on the top bolt over and over, his fingernails bending back.

“He’s in here!” the voice screamed, quivering. “You have to hurry!”

The sound of the rock landing atop the steel bolt echoed through the darkness of the tunnel as he slammed down the stone over and over. There was a loud ping when the bolt snapped, the gate groaning as it settled backwards into the tunnel, it’s rusted metal edge dragging across the sandstone.

Another hand appeared from the grate, grabbing him by the shirt and tugging him up against the grate. He stared through, into the darkness, the face of the man trapped within only inches from his own. In the dim light, he could only partially make out the features on the man’s face, but that was more than enough for Scott.

“Brian?” he stuttered.

“You’ve got to get me out of here!” he said, releasing Scott’s shirt and turning to stare back into the tunnel.

Scott fell to his knees, slamming the rock atop the bolt that secured the bottom portion of the grate.

“Stay back!” Brian shouted, pressing his back up against the grate. Scott was helpless but to watch. “I said stay back!”

The bolt was bent, the rusted threads giving slightly with each drop of the rock. Just a few more times and it would break.

“Our Father who art in heaven,” the voice cried as the body slumped to the ground, the scrambling legs trying to propel the body backward through the gate. “Hallowed be Thy name…”

The voice trailed off into a gurgle. A wave of warm fluid splashed through the grate, landing on Scott’s back, soaking into his hair as he slammed the rock down one final time, snapping off the head of the bolt. He whirled, facing the grate before once again wrapping his fists around the cold steel. The ground all around him was stained red, the warm fluid trickling down the back of his neck and along the bare flesh that covered his spine.

A scraping sound echoed through the tunnel as the body was dragged away from the grate, the back of the head bouncing off the rocky surface before slipping into the shallow stream that ran down the center of the floor.

“Brian!” Scott shouted, yanking on the grate.

It gave only slightly with each jerk, the bank crumbling to dust around it before he was finally able to pull it free. He nearly fell onto his back beneath the weight of the grate, but was able to push it to the side at the last minute, stumbling to the right and nearly careening into the river.

Regaining his balance, he ducked into the passage, the frigid water immediately covering his slippers and biting into his bare flesh beneath. There was absolutely no visibility. The darkness took on a life of its own, swarming around him. He ran, both hands stretched straight out in front of him so as not to run headfirst into a wall. His frozen toes snagged on something, sending him sprawling forward onto the floor, his hands splashing into the three inches of water after cracking through the thin layer of ice that covered it.

His body landed on something soft, cushioning his fall. It had a warmth to it. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, he was able to make out the outline of a body, lying in the middle of the stream on the ground. The warmth from the chest flowed into his shirt, warming his own frozen skin. He placed his hand atop the body, running it through the thickly flowing blood that covered the chest, the fingertips snagging on the large tatter of flesh that stood out from the wound right in the center. Jagged fragments of bone had torn through the skin from the enormous hole in the sternum, Scott’s probing fingers sinking several inches into the chest cavity of the quickly draining corpse.

Scrambling to his feet, he stumbled forward, catching himself on his hands before finally regaining his balance. He turned, staring down at the corpse of Brian James, the face contorted into the remnants of the last attempt to cry out, only to be silenced by whatever had ripped the enormous chunk free from his ribs.

Wrenching his gaze from the body, Scott stared deep into the heart of the darkness that pulsed down the long tunnel, trying desperately to peel back the shadows to unveil whoever it was that slunk further away from him. There wasn’t a sound, save for the water trickling slowly beneath the thin surface of ice along the floor. He turned to stare out of the tunnel and into the night, to debate one last time whether to run back out into the dim light, or to press on into the tunnel.

Movement caught his attention in front of the hole leading out into the night. The body that lay formerly motionless on the floor was slowly rising into the air, the arms rising out to the sides. The head rested on the shoulder to the right before falling forward, hanging limply against the chest. The flowing blood that raced from the chest of the body spilled past the pants, running over the toes of the shoes and dripping onto the cracked ice set askew atop the water. A groaning sound bellowed from the belly of the body as it hung in midair. The hands hung, palms upward, at the end of the arms, bouncing as the body finally stopped, hanging motionless against the night.

“Help me,” a meek voice sputtered through a mouthful of blood, the crimson fluid flowing over the lower lip and splattering to the floor.

Scott watched in horror, his feet frozen where they stood. Brian shuddered, his whole body convulsing. His eyes rolled back into his head as the unseen hands that held him in the air tore at him from either side. With one swift motion, the body was ripped in two, the insides falling with a sloppy thud to the floor as the shell was tossed to either side, landing in a heap against the base of the walls to either side.

Whirling, Scott raced deeper into the tunnel, his eyes fixed intently on the thickening darkness, his legs churning with a will of their own. He could feel that hot breath of the apparition on the back of his neck as he reached deep down, grasping to find another level to propel him from whatever it was that skulked through the tunnel behind him.

His footsteps echoed through the confines of the shrinking tunnel as his feet hammered on the thin ice, splashing into the frigid water below. He was drenched in the freezing fluid; his slippers soaked through and through, his pants saturated up the leg past the knee. But there was no time to think about that, no time to allow the sensation to cripple his mind. He focused solely on the sound of his heavy exhalations as he urged himself on. His chest, burning from the lack of oxygen, ached immensely, his arms and legs numbed as the muscles pumped over and over, propelling him further into the darkness.

His squinting eyes were useless. There wasn’t even enough light to see his hand right in front of his face, let alone the twenty feet of tunnel in front of him at a full sprint. The smell of the tunnel was getting thicker, the stagnation of mud and whatever lived beneath the still water overwhelming his senses.

In his mind, he tried to figure out how far he had run, and in what direction, but he didn’t have the slightest clue. He was just beginning to wonder if the tunnel stretched out forever when he slammed face-first into an earthen wall, his loosely-closed fists crumpling into his wrists. His legs drove out from beneath him as he became weightless. There was a loud splash, droplets of the freezing water splattering his face. His back landed squarely on the ground, bolts of pain shooting out into his body from his tailbone.

Scrambling back to his feet, he nearly cried out in pain, every inch of his flesh screaming for reprieve, but he was able to stifle it, not knowing how close the creature might be to him. Running his hands along the wall, he found a metal framed hole, the hinges bare from where the grate had been ripped of. Measuring the width with his arm, he took a step back. It was barely tall enough for him to crawl through.

Leaning over, he clutched his back and grabbed a handful of pebbles from the ground. One at a time, he turned just slightly, throwing them away from himself to try to determine if there was another way out. One by one, he tossed them, as they ricocheted off of the cavern wall, coming back at him with nearly the same velocity with which he originally tossed them. Slowly he moved to about ninety degrees and launched one. The immediate crackle as it slammed into a wall right in front of him wasn’t there: a long pause followed before the pebble skipped off the ice, bouncing for several feet before settling.

He placed his right hand on the wall, following it as it appeared to go straight along the same direction he had just fired the rock, running parallel with the river outside. Grabbing one more pebble, he launched it into the darkness, just to double check, as he knew that there was no room for error.

The rock whistled past his ear, soaring into the darkness. He waited anxiously for the sound of the pebble bouncing along the frozen ground, but there was nothing. He waited a moment longer before tossing his last pebble down the invisible hallway. But there wasn’t a sound from this one either.

Scott just stood there for a moment, wondering what the hell they had landed on that would make absolutely no sound. Suddenly, the answer became quite obvious.

The first rock buzzed through the damp air, skipping off of his cheek before clipping his ear and bouncing off into the darkness. The second tagged him right in the back of the head as he had already whirled, his hands fumbling along the wall in search of the tunnel carved within.

Grasping the lip of the hole, he boosted himself up, ducking his head beneath the metal rim. The floor was damp with a thin layer of ice formed over the dirt. His back scraped along the roof of the tunnel, bruising his spine, but not tearing through his shirt. Scrambling as fast as he could, he could feel the dirt pressing beneath his fingernails, building painfully.

His heaving breath echoed all around him, closing in from the slowly lowering ceiling. The pants were the first thing to tear, followed by the skin of his knees; the thin lines of blood smearing across the kneecap.

There was a sharp pain in his right hand, followed quickly by another in his left and he recoiled in pain. He dabbed at his palms with his fingertips. He could feel the wounds, but there was nothing sticking out of the flesh. It had felt like glass piercing the thick skin on his palms. Carefully, he ran his fingers along the ground, trying to find what had cut him so that he could just move it and hurry on his way. There was a rattling sound as his right hand knocked a small stack of whatever littered the floor together. He ran his fingers over the surface, noting the curves and the… fur?

He tapped down the object, feeling the long, hairy tail coming from the back end of the creature. They were rat carcasses.

Running his arm across the floor, he could hear the bones clattering against one another and slamming into the wall, their deteriorated forms falling apart. The floor was positively littered with them. The brittle, aged bones had more than likely snapped beneath his weight, the jagged tips forcing their way into his palms. Using his forearm like a brush, he shoved the skeletons, the tattered flesh and fur hanging from random connections, to either side.

A thin line of darkness appeared in the pitch black ahead of him, a beacon of light coming through the small tunnel. It grew lighter and lighter as he forced himself on, his hand finally grabbing for the floor, but finding nothing but air. He toppled forward out of the tunnel. His hands landed first before his head slammed into the dirt floor, the rest of his body rolling over his neck, his back slamming squarely onto the ground.

Wincing in pain, he forced his eyes open, staring around the dark room. Thin rays of light passed through the seals around the boarded windows. It wasn’t much, but he was able to make out enough of the outlines of objects to figure out what they were. A tall, cylindrical object loomed over him, long pipes issuing straight up and into the ceiling. It was a hot water heater; making the taller, rectangular one a furnace.

Rolling onto all fours, he pushed himself to his feet, the dust and dirt from the floor sealing the wounds on his palms and bare knees. Limping, he followed the dull outline of what appeared to be stairs straight ahead, his footsteps echoing off the rotting wooden planks as he slowly ascended, the shredded flesh on his right palm wrapped tightly around the banister, tugging him upward. Shouldering the door at the top of the stairs, it fell back, swinging with a squeak into the adjacent room.

His heavily falling, weary footsteps pounded on the plywood floor, booming like thunder. The room beyond this small, dark cove was much brighter, light prodding into the darkness from all around the plywood sheets that covered the windows, clouds of dust lingering within the thin rays arching toward the faded wood floor.

Inching forward, his eyes fixed on the door in the wall straight ahead of him. He reached out for the doorknob as he closed the last five feet. The knob was cold within his hand, the brass ball soothing the tears in his palm. He twisted the knob, the breath finally starting to replenish itself within his chest.

The knob wouldn’t budge.

Shaking it, he yanked it backward, but it was sealed in place. He stopped, whirling around the room, and searched for any other way to get out. The windows had been boarded, but they had been sealed from the inside, the bent nails ringed around the boards. Stumbling, he grabbed onto one of them, taking a moment to slide his fingers over the top of the wooden plank, making sure that he had a good, secure grip.

He spun; his heart pounding in his chest. He still clung to the top of the board. There was something in the room with him. He could feel it now: a thin line of ice creeping up his spine, the dust in the room swirling around the unseen form of the body that knifed through the still air.

Turning back to the window, his breath coming fast and furious past his lips, he yanked on the board, the nails screeching as though they were being pulled from metal. It bowed inward, buckling along the middle. Bracing his feet on the wall, he pressed down on the bending sheet of wood, using his own weight to free the plywood from the wall.

Tossing the sheet aside, he leapt onto the windowsill, oblivious to the fragmented glass that gouged into his already sliced palms, rolling out and dropping from the window into the snow. The wind roared through the valley, the snow driving in sheets as he cradled his clawed hands against his chest, staggering towards the road buried beneath the snow in the middle of the field. He looked back over his shoulder, only briefly, but long enough to recognize the house that he had just escaped from. It was the same house that haunted his dreams. The words were barely visible on the sign, the overhanging drift of snow covering the top half of the letters, but he could make them out all the same.

“The Cavenaugh House.”

And there was a shape in the window; the long hair from the head blowing about the darkened head on the swirling wind. He could feel the weight of the shadow’s stare, raising the hackles on his neck and shoulders. And there was one thing that he knew for certain at that instant, if whatever that was had wanted to kill him, it could have easily done so already. For whatever reason, it wanted to play with him, to somehow engage him in its macabre game.

Turning back to the road, he hobbled toward the line of trees, praying for them to shelter him even slightly from the arctic wind.

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THE BLOODSPAWN

Michael McBride

© 2004 Michael McBride. All rights reserved.

PART SEVEN

Part 7

IX

Monday, November 14th

1 a.m.

Harry awoke with a start. The howling wind screamed through the trees, the upper reaches of the bare branches of the elm scraping along the roof. There was a hollow pounding, creeping through the house, barely audible beneath the snow slamming into the wall behind his head like dirt in a windstorm. He rolled out of bed, his bare feet stinging from the cold floorboards, and crept through the darkened room. He stood in the doorway, intently listening as he fumbled along the wall for the light.

Catching the switch, the fixture burst to life overhead just as a loud thump came from the front door. Running down the hallway, he turned into the kitchen, breezing through it and into the living room. He crossed the thick carpeting, heading straight toward the front door. Wrapping the cold knob tightly in his hand, he twisted the deadbolt and yanked the door inward.

A crumpled body fell into the room, landing on the floor. He could barely make out the number nineteen on the back of the snow-crusted shirt, the face lying flat on the floor.

“My God,” Harry gasped.

Reaching down, he placed one hand beneath each of the armpits and dragged the limp body inward, slamming the door shut. He rolled the cold figure onto his back, staring down at the face. Scott’s eyelids were closed tightly, a thin layer of ice having formed on his long lashes. The ice-matted hair was buried beneath a layer of snow, the bright red ears in direct contrast to the white that covered nearly every inch of the body. Ice clung to the stubble on his face, giving him the appearance of having a thick white beard.

Dragging him across the floor, Harry pulled him to the base of the moss-rock fireplace, yanking a cushion from the chair and bracing it beneath Scott’s head. He ran to the hallway, throwing wide the thin door of the closet and tugging down a stack of blankets from the top shelf. Racing back into the living room, he stripped the wet, frozen shirt off of Scott’s chest, and yanked the torn, snow-covered pants off, tossing them into the corner of the room. Wrapping Scott tightly in the blankets, one layer after another, he hurried to the side of the fireplace, pulled several logs from the stack and shoved them into the fireplace, then dashed back into the kitchen for a pile of newspaper.

Shoving the paper beneath the stack of logs, he grabbed the box of matches from the right of the pile of wood and threw back the sliding sleeve of the box, the matches falling all over the floor. Grabbing one, he scraped the white tip of the wooden match along the surface of the rock wall. The flame burst from the tip of the match, a tuft of black smoke filling the air around it. Covering the flame with his cupped hand, he lowered it beneath the soot stained rack, holding it still as the flame ignited the paper. The fire crept up the chimney; the bark on the logs crackling as it slowly charcoaled, the flame rising along the light pine, the individual fibers peeling back as they began to burn.

Satisfied that the fire would continue to burn, he raced to the kitchen, glancing down at Scott, his chest rising and falling very slowly. The snow in his hair had begun to melt, spilling over his forehead like lines of sweat. Harry pulled the teapot from the sink, dumping the water he had been soaking in it down the drain. Throwing back the handle on the sink, he filled the can with water, rushing it to the stove and turning the knob on the burner to high. Throwing back the cabinet door directly above the stove, he grabbed a box of tea, pulling out a couple of bags and dropping them into the pot, closing the small circular lid and raising the wooden handle. He grabbed the small towel that hung from the handle of the oven.

Turning, he walked back into the living room, and knelt next to the cushion beside Scott’s head. He ran the towel over Scott’s forehead, wiping away the cold lines of water that pooled beneath his hairline, dripping toward his brow. His breathing was slow and rhythmic, only interrupted by a wheezing, dry cough every couple of minutes. He couldn’t remember whether he was supposed to bring him back to temperature rapidly, or if he needed to do it slowly. It had been more than fifty years since he had actually practiced medicine, but he knew that prudence was the best course of action when it came to any form of treatment.

The color slowly rose in Scott’s face, the turnip-red, chapped skin fading to a more pinkish hue, the bright blue rings that rimmed his eyes tapering into a more normal brown. Crawling alongside the body, Harry peeled back the blankets that covered the toes, checking the fluorescent-red digits for frostbite. While not obvious at first, as the toes warmed beside the fire, he could tell that they were going to be fine.

“Thank heaven for small favors,” he said, covering the feet and creeping along the floor to where Scott’s head rolled slowly from side to side, his eyelids batting as he struggled to regain consciousness.

“Mmphrm,” Scott groaned, his lips peeling back from his bared teeth. His gums were a sickly shade of gray.

“Try not to talk,” Harry said, stroking the man’s forehead with the dampening towel. “Your body needs to rest.”

With a jolt, Scott’s eyes opened wide, a quick breath bursting through his clenched teeth. He sat upright, his head whipping from side to side as he tried to make sense of the situation.

“Where am I?” he shouted, panting, his eyes threatening to roll back into his head.

“You’re at my house,” Harry said calmly. “You just showed up at the door.”

Scott turned to look at him, his brow furrowing while he fought for recognition. Slowly, his look assuaged, his eyes softening. He laid his head back on the pillow. His eyes closed with a will of their own, and he spoke in a whisper.

“I saw him…”

“Saw who?”

“Don’t know… killed Brian…”

“Don’t talk now,” Harry said. “You need to get your rest.”

“Tore him in half…”

“Shhh.”

Scott slipped back into the unconscious, his lips parting for his open mouth to breathe.

Harry stared at him, wanting to know… no, needing to know more. But he knew that he was going to have to wait, as whatever Scott had been through that night was obviously something incredibly taxing, on both his mind and his body.

The kettle whistled from the kitchen, the ringed lids bouncing up and down as the steam burst past it. Rising, he walked into the kitchen and grabbed a potholder from next to the stove, using it as a buffer between his hand and the scalding wooden handle. Walking it over to the sink, he set it down on the Formica, pulling two mugs from the cupboard above. Pouring the tea into the mugs, he set the kettle in the sink and grabbed the mugs by the handles, walking back into the living room.

He set the mugs on the floor, waiting for them to cool, and walked back toward the kitchen, slipping down the hallway into his bedroom. He opened the closet door and changed into a button-down shirt and a pair of slacks. Stepping into a pair of slippers, he wandered into the hallway and took his first left into his study.

He flipped the light switch and walked straight to the back of the room to the desk, pulling open the top drawer. Producing a thick black leather-bound notebook, a pen lodged in the spiral spine, he walked out of the room, turning off the light. He rounded the doorway, and headed back to the kitchen. Sitting on the floor next to Scott, he opened the book to the most recent entry and brought the pen to the page.

He began to write; his cursive tightly jumbled and most likely only legible within his own mind. He wrote down every word that Scott had said as best as he could recall, glancing up at the clock atop the mantle to note the time.

The whole house moaned as the wind seemed to rock it from side to side, a loud thunk coming from the hall closet where something fell from the shelf to the floor, banging against the closed door. Harry flinched, the noise catching him off guard.

The wind ripped the decaying shingles from the roof, dragging them across the wooden surface like fingernails, before tossing them into the rapidly piling snow in the yard. A shutter broke free from its bracket beside one of the windows off the main room, slamming repeatedly against the side of the house, threatening to break through the glass.

Leaping to his feet, Harry raced to the window, sliding up the bottom pane of glass. He grabbed the shutter, not knowing what exactly he was going to do with it once he had it, but sure that the last thing he needed was for it to shatter the window. He gripped it tightly, the fierce wind struggling to tear it from his grasp. There was a loud creaking noise, and then a metallic snap. The wind tore the shutter from the siding and wrenched it from his grasp. It landed atop the snow, the wind picking it up and tossing it into the air several times before it caught in the cluster of branches of one of the evergreen shrubs.

There was movement out there, in the night. Barely visible behind the mat of flakes that filled the sky, but he could tell that it was there. A dark shape stood in front of the cluster of spruces that lined the back of the yard. It was barely visible, and only for a moment as the swirling snow washed it away, leaving only the emptiness of the night.

Closing the window, he pulled his body back through. Glancing one last time across the yard, he pulled the curtains tight, settling back into his seat on the floor. He had just begun to write in his notebook when Scott spoke.

“How did I get here?”

“You tell me.”

“The last thing I remember, I was wandering down the road, trying to keep my arms across my chest so as not to lose any more heat.”

Harry paused, nibbling the inside of his lip.

“What did you see?” he asked, peering up over the top of his notebook.

“I saw him rip Brian in half,” he said, a puzzled look sweeping across his face. “No, I didn’t see him. Brian just floated up into the air and was ripped apart.”

“Who’s Brian?”

“An old friend from when I was younger. Brian James. I haven’t really talked to him in… well, a long time.”

“Start at the beginning, and spare no detail,” Harry said, raising a mug from the floor and handing it to Scott, who sipped loudly.

Harry wrote in his journal, abbreviating everything that Scott said so that he could get it all down without forcing him to pause. His eyes never left the page as Scott spoke, starting with lying in bed trying to sleep. The lines of wear on his forehead deepened, creasing into furrows of shadow on his pale face cast by the dancing light from the flickering fire.

“… And then I just woke up here,” Scott finished, setting the mug back on the floor and looking at Harry.

Setting the notebook down on the floor and closing the cover, Harry rubbed his eyes and stared at Scott, whose heavy eyelids drooped half way over his irises. Sighing, Harry rose from the floor and walked into the kitchen.

“Get some rest,” he said without turning around. “We’ve got a busy day ahead of us tomorrow.”

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THE BLOODSPAWN

Michael McBride

© 2004 Michael McBride. All rights reserved.

PART EIGHT

Section 8

X

Monday, November 14th

11 a.m.

Scott turned the handles on the wall, the water that steamed from the nozzle slowing to a drip. Opening the opaque glass door, the stepped out onto the blue bath mat and hurriedly dried himself with his towel. Wiping a small spot on the steam covered mirror, he combed his hair and slipped into his boxers, hustling out of the bathroom and into his bedroom.

Harry was waiting downstairs for him to change. After allowing Scott to sleep until close to ten, he had brought him home so that he could change his clothes and freshen up. His body still resonated with a dull ache from the exposure to the cold the night before, the throbbing in his head slowly subsiding. The shower had definitely helped; the hot water soaking through his tender flesh had been nothing short of divine. He knew how lucky he was that he hadn’t been frostbitten, but he felt far more fortunate than that as the image of his old buddy Brian being ripped to shreds right in front of his eyes had burned a permanent scar into his mind, rising up constantly. His brain choked back the image, but it was never very far off, appearing from out of nowhere every time he closed his eyes long enough to blink.

Grabbing a button down shirt and a tie from where they hung in the closet, he slipped right into the shirt, dangling the tie around his neck. Producing a pair if slacks from another hanger, he hopped into them, tucking in the shirt before buttoning them up. He tied the hanging tie, knotting it loosely beneath his chin. Walking over to the dresser, he pulled out a balled pair of socks and pulled them up to his calves, shuffling along the plushly carpeted floor to the closet and slipping into a nice pair of black leather shoes. Running his hands through his hair, he opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hall.

He could see Harry sitting down in the living room at the bottom of the stairs, straight ahead. One of Scott’s large, rolled blueprints from atop his drafting table in the corner of the living room was spread out across his lap, and he was staring down at it quite intently, his eyes squinted as he tried to discern the thin contrast of the powder blue paper. He looked up briefly as Scott bounded down the stairs, before returning his attention back to the page.

“Well?” Scott said, grabbing his coat from the closet in the entryway.

“Just a minute,” Harry mumbled, his brow furrowing. He traced a line on the paper with his right index finger.

“What are you looking at?”

He walked into the living room and looked over Harry’s shoulder at the slightly crumpled blueprint.

“Does this show all of the tunnels beneath this area?” Harry asked.

“That’s just the location of the old mines around here. We have to be careful where we build or any one of these houses could just fall straight into the ground,” Scott said, pointing down at the plan. “You see, all of these mines have been collapsed and refilled—”

“All of them?”

“Everything that you see on this map.”

“So there could be others that aren’t on this map, or tunnels leading from one to the next.”

“Sure, this map has to be close to as old as I am.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt. Go ahead and say what you were going to.”

“All I was really going to say was that we have to be particularly careful where we place any houses or anything else of significant weight, as, even though these mines were filled, the dirt and rock that they used to fill them hasn’t settled quite right yet. The ground could just sink right beneath it, causing a house to crumble, or as you can see in some of the older neighborhoods to the south of here, driveways could fall right in, as could any of the streets. In the neighborhood I grew up in, barely fifteen minutes from here, you would see these driveways where the cement had fallen close to twenty feet into a gaping hole beneath the driveway. There was this one that I remember quite vividly, where the hole just opened up beneath the two cars they had parked in their driveway. You could barely see those things down there in the darkness.

“It was kind of cool as a kid, but as a builder, it’s really nothing you want to mess with. All of our houses were built away from the sealed mine shafts. The only ones on that blueprint in this development we built around so that they are beneath the sidewalks, and the park, neither of which has any reason to have enough weight on them to cause them to suddenly settle.”

“Interesting,” Harry said, rolling the blueprint back up and clambering off of the couch. “Does that concern you at all?”

“It would take nothing short of a seismic event to trigger these things to collapse with that little weight on them. The neighborhood I grew up in, Raven Hills, was basically built onto a hillside, the mines nearly carving the hills hollow, but there were only a few properties that actually ever had any problems. And while those properties seemed to have the same problems every five years, none of the others appeared to settle in the slightest.”

Harry walked across the living room and set the rolled blueprint next to the line of others atop the table, flipping off the switch atop the overhanging lamp.

“I didn’t see that tunnel that you said you were in last night on that little map,” Harry said, brushing past Scott and towards the stairs leading down into the family room.

“Hmm,” Scott muttered, gnawing slightly on the inside of his lower lip.

The two passed through the family room, heading toward the garage. Opening the door, the two stepped down the pair of stairs onto the cement pad of the garage.

“Do you have any flashlights?” Harry asked, staring curiously at the stacks of boxes that filled half of the garage.

Following his quizzical gaze, Scott volunteered, “I didn’t plan on living here as long as I already have. There’s no point unpacking just to have to repack after a year or so.”

“Sure,” Harry said, raising his eyebrows and his hands to his side.

“Oh yeah, flashlights.”

Scott slipped past the tightly stacked boxes and through the small wooden door behind them into the third garage. Flipping the light switch, he headed straight for the makeshift workbench consisting of a four by eight sheet of plywood braced atop three sawhorses. Rustling through the stack of tools and nails and screws, he produced a large, rechargeable flashlight, the adapter still wedged into the slot in the unit, the long white cord running straight up the wall and into the small square plug stuck in the outlet. Slipping it from the charger, he cradled it beneath his left arm, fishing for a second one that he knew was there. After a moment, he produced an old, plastic flashlight. It was nowhere near as modern and nice, just the cylindrical type with the two “D” sized batteries that drop straight down into the shaft, but as he verified by flipping up the white, sliding switch, it worked.

Heading back into the main garage, he closed the door behind him and held up the lights for Harry to see. Pressing the button on the garage door opener mounted to the right of the stairs on the wall, a loud rumbling sound ensued as the garage rolled upward against the ceiling. Harry stepped out onto the driveway, the flakes of snow bouncing into the garage from the blowing wind outside. Pressing the button one more time, Scott jogged to the end of the garage. Ducking his head and raising his left leg to step over the unseen line of the electric eye that would stop the garage if anything broke the laser line between the two units mounted to either side of the garage door, just inches above the floor.

Harry closed the driver’s side door of the old red and white Scout, leaning across to pop open the passenger side door for Scott. Transferring both flashlights to his left arm, he opened the door all the way and climbed up, closing the door with a loud thud that shook the car. His parents once had a Scout when he was growing up, and he had noticed, even way back then, that all of them had a similar smell. He wasn’t sure whether it came from the fiberglass shell of the rear portion roof, or from the black tape that ringed the roll bars, but it always smelled like the cars were thirty years old and had been kept submerged in water and then used to tan leather.

Harry backed out of the driveway, heading through the neighborhood. The Realtors were out there in droves once again, working their tails off for that seven to ten percent commission. That thought was somewhat comforting, but Scott was hardly able to steer his mind from the task at hand for more than a few seconds. They were going to go back into the tunnels he had been in last night. At first it had seemed like a completely terrible idea, but now that he was somewhat used to the thought, it scared him senseless.

Turning out of the development, they headed west on the thinning, snow-covered road. The midday sun peered out briefly from behind the swelling storm clouds, only to disappear even more rapidly behind a wave of dark clouds, the precursor to the line of black that rolled over the rocky peaks to the west.

Pulling off the side of the road onto the snowy meadow, the car idled for a moment as the two stared at the house. With a sigh, Harry killed the engine and opened the door. Reaching into the back seat, he pulled out a dark blue parka, the collar and rim of the hood lined with a thin layer of fake fur. Slipping into it behind the shield of the open door, he stepped back and closed it, the flakes making a scratching sound as they bounced off of the slick material. Following him around the front end of the car, Scott handed him the rechargeable flashlight and the two stood briefly at the base of the stairs leading up to the porch.

Harry turned to Scott, and with a brisk nod, the two ascended the stairs.

“You say you came straight out this door last night?” Harry asked, staring at the lock box engaged on the handle of the door.

“Yeah,” Scott responded, noting the same thing.

“All right then,” Harry said, fumbling for his keys.

Holding out his keychain, Harry flipped through the handful of keys until he found an old, brass key. Shoving it into the lock box, he yanked it off the doorknob with a loud thunk. He set it on the windowsill to the right of the door, which he slowly opened inward.

The stale smell of dust and the water that dripped from the ceiling through the walls and onto the floor, mildewing in the rotting wood, overwhelmed their nostrils. Much of the graffiti that covered the walls in the main room was illegible as the water had dampened the drywall to the point that it appeared like an abstract watercolor collage. The hardwood floor was warping, some of the seams peeling up and inward, the floor sounding as if it could just crumble beneath their weight.

“After you,” Harry said, gesturing with his hand, allowing Scott to pass first through the doorway into the kitchen.

Kicking aside a pile of plaster in the middle of the bowed plywood floor, Scott headed straight for the door leading down into the basement. His heart had begun to race, his lips parting to assist in the panting. Throbbing mercilessly, all he could hear in his head was the pounding of his pulse in his temples. Reaching out with his shaking right hand, he grasped the doorknob, turning to look at Harry.

All of the color had drained from his face as well. His fingers clenched the handle of the flashlight so tightly that his knuckles had turned bright white. A pained expression wore deeply into his face, and he forced a smile for Scott’s benefit, closing his eyes briefly and taking a deep breath. He just nodded, and Scott could tell that meant that he was as ready as he was going to get.

The knob squeaked in his turning hand, the door creaking loudly as he swung it wide. Their straining eyes fought to adjust to the thick darkness, only a thin line of light visible from beneath the boarded window. Dank earth accosted their nostrils as they descended the rickety stairs. Switching on his flashlight, Scott pointed it at the wall of earth behind the hot water heater, illuminating the lip if the darkened hole, halfway up the wall.

“That’s it,” he said, pointing through the shadows as a long ray of light burst from Harry’s flashlight behind him.

The two landed at the bottom of the stairs, the soft ground sinking slightly beneath their feet. With a quick glance back, Scott slipped between the furnace and the hot water heater, setting his flashlight atop the rim of the hole, and pulled himself up, ducking his head, and crawling into the tunnel. Clutching the light in his right hand, he inched forward, flashing the beam all about the ground that entombed him.

Dirt from the slightly damp floor of the tube rose between the fingers of his left hand, covering the knees of his slacks.

“Are you sure you know where this leads?” he asked, craning his head over his shoulder in the tight quarters.

“No, but I’ve got a hunch.”

Shrugging, he turned back to the tunnel. There was something in the middle of the floor straight ahead, right at the point where the light faded into the darkness. Creeping toward it, he slowly became able to discern what it was. Long shadows traced the floor past the pile of bones that he immediately recognized from the night before, the palms of his hands still stinging lightly from where they had punctured the tough skin. The yellowed bones, tattered, fur-covered flesh dangling from appeared to by a series of small ribcages. As he neared, he was able to make out the long, arched front teeth of what had apparently been a large rodent on the sloping, hollowed skull lying askew in front of the pile. He counted at least five more of the skulls as he crept closer. There was something unique about the dried, curling flesh that hung from the decaying bones, something that was suddenly quite obvious. The edges of the shredded flesh were rippled slightly in a series of arcs, and there was no mistaking their origin. They were bites, from a human set of teeth.

Stopping briefly, he flashed the light around. There were long, parallel lines carved into the floor and walls all around him. Reaching up, he placed the tips of his fingers in the niches carved into the ceiling above him. They matched perfectly.

“Check this out,” he whispered as Harry crept up on him from the rear.

Skirting the pile of bones, he worked his way deeper into the tunnel, the muffled sound of the river barely audible as it echoed through the larger tunnel ahead. He could see the metal-rimmed edges of where the grate had been at the end of the stream of light. His breath coming in short bursts; the dirt began to stick to his clammy palms. Shuddering, he paused, poking his head out of the smaller tunnel into the cavern beyond. Flashing his light from one side to the other, he could see the dim light from the outside clear down to the left, nothing but more darkness to his right.

Trying to calm his breathing as it bordered on hyperventilation, he set the light on the ground beside him, closing his eyes only briefly. Wiping his damp forehead with the back of his trembling hand, he swallowed the dry lump in his throat and climbed out of the tunnel and onto the floor. Frantically, he grabbed his flashlight, whirling and shooting the light into every darkened cranny that he possibly could. He heard Harry groan as he slipped down behind him.

“That’s…” Scott started, the words catching in his dry mouth. “That’s where the tunnel starts by the river.”

Harry’s light flashed down the tunnel toward the gray aura of light before turning immediately back and pointing to the right.

“Then that’s where we need to go.”

The thin lines of light darted from the tips of the flashlights in their hands as they pressed on through the tunnel. Small icicles hung from the rocky ceiling overhead, glittering as the lights flashed overhead. Bat guano was crusted to the walls and floor to either side of the shallow stream of frozen water in the center, the icy covering crackling beneath their tread, echoing through the darkness. Small creatures skittered ahead of them, skirting the edges of their dancing lights, clinging to their shadows as they scurried about, cringing against the base of the walls.

Bending slightly to the left, the tunnel stretched on as far as they could see. They had been walking through the blackened corridor with no end in sight for close to a mile already. The air grew increasingly cold around them, their damp breath crystallizing against the flesh on their faces.

“What’s that?” Scott asked.

Harry squinted to see the end of the tunnel. A stone archway appeared at the end of the tunnel in their diffused rays. Nothing more than a roughly stacked series of coarse stones mortared together around an oblongated half circle of darkness. As they neared, their lights bouncing up and down with their strides, they could see that the tunnel bent away at a ninety degree angle to the left, leading, as best as they could tell, to the south.

“This thing has got to be well over a hundred years old,” Scott said, breaking away the crumbling chunks of mortar.

Spider webs floated from the surface of the large rocks, their white ball-like egg sacs nestled tightly in the crevices between the rocks and the cement glue. The archway was stained along the floor, rising waters marking the stones with a light green line as high as chest level.

“I think this is where we need to be,” Harry said, flashing his light into the darkened corridor beyond the arch.

“What do you think is back there?”

“I know there are tunnels underneath the old convent leading to the hot springs. The castle itself used to be a haven for tuberculosis sufferers who were taken to the supposedly therapeutic waters of the springs every day to be cleansed of their affliction. As it was socially unacceptable for people with TB to be moved out in the open during the day, they had to be shuttled back and forth through these tunnels. The guy who used to own all of this land, this Cavenaugh, his daughter suffered from it, and finally died. After burying his only child, it was only a matter of time before he disintegrated himself, but he used it as a sort of hospice for others with TB until he died and left it to the church.”

“Okay,” Scott said, pausing. “I’m familiar with the general history of the area. You’ve explained the tunnels, but what do you expect to find down this hallway.”

“An entrance into the old convent.”

“The old folks home? I’ve got news for you, there’s a much more accessible entrance above ground.”

“Don’t you think that I’ve been there? After the church sold the property to a group of investors, converting it into the nursing home, I tried to get them to let me look around, to see if the nuns had left any records that might help me rationalize what I saw here so many years ago. But they wouldn’t even allow me to stray from the tour. In fact, they were more than insistent.”

“So you want to sneak in the back door…”

“If there still is one. I’ve combed these hills since the early Seventies looking for the entrance into these tunnels, but I hadn’t been able to find anything.”

“But you never looked in that house?”

“Look, that hole in the basement wall wasn’t there decades ago when I boarded that house up. I put a lock on the front door and boarded all of the windows, why on earth would I even suspect that anyone would be digging a tunnel through the wall?” Harry huffed, his face reddening.

“No need to get worked up,” Scott said, looking Harry directly in the face in the dim glow of their lights. He hesitated, formulating his words carefully so as not to offend the older man again. “There is just something about this story that doesn’t quite fit. There are gaps that I am having a hard time making any sense of.”

“How do you think I feel?” Harry said, steering his light into the darkness beyond the archway. “Let’s see if we can find some answers.”

The two left the main tunnel, heading into the thinner, rock-walled channel. The air grew colder with each step, thickening with dust. Cobwebs hung in the air, bouncing as their movement changed in the flow of the stale air. Their flashlights stopped on a thick wooden door, the vertical slats held together by diamond-shaped iron fasteners, the circles of light growing larger and larger on the faded, splintering surface as they approached. A thin line of green covered the bottom foot of the door from where the waters had risen along the base, the slightly sloping ground was slick with the slight covering of slime.

Stepping right up to the door, the side of his head pressed against the slightly bowed wooden surface, Harry listened intently, hoping to hear anything at all if there was someone just beyond the door. Gripping the black iron handle in his right hand, he squeezed it as hard as he could, the small lever crackling as it lowered beneath his thumb. He could hear the bolt in the wall, groaning and creaking as it slowly broke free of the rust that held it tightly within the wall. With a loud crack, the bolt disengaged, the sound echoing wildly through the tunnel around them.

Harry looked to Scott, who held his breath, a pained wince engraved into his face.

Holding a finger to his pursed lips, Harry slowly began to pull the door outward, the bottom edges of the wooden planks scraping loudly on the compressed rock floor. The noise was awful. He could only move the door an inch at a time for fear that they would draw too much attention to themselves, surely even a group of hearing aid laden retirees could hear that noise more than a story above ground in that old castle. It was obvious that the door hadn’t been opened in quite some time, so maybe, even if it was audible on the floors above, no one would know what it was, or even have the inclination to descend into the old cellar to try to figure it out. It was the middle of the day, and surely there was enough activity up there to mask their noise.

Pulling the door just far enough back so that they could slip through sideways, Harry pointed his light through the small gap between the door and the wall, trying to look inside. There was a tightly stretched sheet of plastic covering the entrance into the castle, a tightly packed layer of spray foam insulation pressed against the plastic from the inside. Producing a small pocketknife from within his jeans, Harry slit the sheet of clear plastic right down the center and began to pull handfuls of the almost Styrofoam-like pink insulation from within.

After making a sizable dent in the insulation, the pink stuffing piled around his feet on the cold ground, he could see that there was another layer of the plastic covering, sealing the layer of foam between two airtight seals. Slicing through the far side, the tip of his blade clanged dully off of something large and wooden. Ripping out the remnants of the plastic and insulation, he pressed both hands against the wooden barrier beyond.

Its surface was smooth, not at all weathered like the outer door had been. A thick, almost satiny finish had been applied to the wood, the deep-black, highly-defined grains in astounding contrast to the mahogany stain.

Leaning against it, Harry strained, lowering his shoulder as he spread apart his feet, hoping to bull his way through it. It was heavy, and, judging by the lack of hinges, it wasn’t a door, just something haphazardly stuffed into the doorway to bar access. The base of the wooden creation scraped across the floor within, bouncing and popping slightly as it caught on the floor, Harry’s force then freeing it suddenly.

The stagnant smell of mildew flooded the tunnel from the small opening that Harry had created, small clouds of dust swarming about them, filling their lungs. The two hacked almost in unison. Squeezing into the entryway next to Harry, Scott braced his foot against the outer door, his shoulder against the inner wall and shoved with all of his might. The combination of the two pushing together made the object squeak loudly as it scraped along the floor, opening up just enough of a gap so that they could sneak past and enter the small room beyond.

Two streams of light bounced around the pitch black room, only the thinnest line of gray creeping in from behind the enormous object that had been barring their way. Both of them studied the small circles from their lights, hoping to see anything at all that might help them to illuminate the room further. Their flashlights were barely enough to light more than the thick cloud of dust that hung all around them in the air, shimmering like glitter in the flitting rays.

Arms in front of them as they shuffled through the darkened room, they each headed in a different direction. Scott’s hand rammed into something hard, his fingertips crumpling. Recoiling quickly, he clenched and unclenched his fist, his teeth grinding as he shook off the sudden jolt of pain. Slowly, he reached back out, his bare hand running along the dust-coated surface of a table of some sort. Shining the flashlight directly down upon it, he could see a small, hand blown glass lamp, the kerosene within soaked through the think wick which stood just above a thin metal ring. The ornately decorated glass was thick with dust, his fingers slipping from the surface the first time he tried to grab it, before latching on more securely around the thin ring of metal adjoining the two glass globes that made it look like an hourglass.

Laying his palm into the dust, he slid it from side to side, hoping to smack into a lighter or a pack of matches or something. The cloud of sediment that had been untouched in what could only have been years, floated into the air all around his face, wedging itself tightly into the sinuses behind his eyes and nose, bringing forth a sudden and ferocious fit of sneezing. Holding tightly to the lamp, he rode out the involuntary convulsions, finally sighing loudly as he inhaled a deep breath. Resting his hand on the table, he could feel a long, thin sliver of wood beneath his palm. Fishing it out of the dust, careful not to breathe in too deeply as he did, he held up the wooden piece between his thumb and forefinger. Shining the flashlight on it, he smiled to himself. Setting down the flashlight and the lamp on the table, he held back the flap of cloth that covered the zipper that ran up the front of his jacket with his left hand. He ran the head of the match straight down the zipper, the teeth grabbing at the phosphorous surface of the match. With a burst of black smoke and light, the head of the match flickered to life, the yellow flame hidden beneath Scott’s cupped left hand as he lowered it through the glass top of the lamp and down to the wide wick, the kerosene stinking awfully as it lit. Thick, black smoke billowed from the lamp, the insides of the glass charring with soot. The dancing flame encased within flickered. Settling down, the excess finally having burnt off, the circle of light around the lantern slowly expanded, pushing back the shadows into the corners. At least a portion of the room was now visible.

“Where did you find that?” Harry whispered, his face appearing from the darkness only feet away.

“On this table over here,” Scott responded, looking down through the cloud of dust that still swirled around him.

It was a long, hardwood table, almost resembling a picnic table, only much more elegant. There was a chair to either side of it, a stack of books lined neatly in the center of the table, bracketed by two iron bookends crafted to look like hands that if pushed together they would give the impression of a child’s hands praying. The old, leather-bound books were buried beneath dust. Not even the embossed letters on the spines were visible beneath the wan light and the layer of dust.

Turning, he led the lantern through the room, surveying the area in hopes of finding a way out of the room.

A door appeared from the darkness, a wide, arched wooden slab beneath an ornately carved trim. Grabbing it by the handle, Scott swung the door inward, a cloud of dust kicking up from around his feet. Stepping through, he nearly knocked himself unconscious ramming into the brick wall that had been constructed right outside the doorway. The gray bricks, cemented with a sloppily laid lining of mortar, sealed the room off from the rest of the house.

Turning to Harry, Scott shrugged.

“Well,” Harry said, turning from the sealed doorway. “I guess this is as far as we go.”

Walking back through the darkened room, the glowing ball of light that surrounded them flickered off the walls. A long mantle ran the length of the room along the wall next to the door, dust-shrouded candlesticks lining the wooden beam. Pulling one of the half-melted candles out of its holder, Scott dipped it, wick first, into the lamp, the fuse crackling before finally glowing brightly with the bouncing flame. Pulling it out, he placed the flame atop the other wicks, the dust burning with a deep, thick black smoke. The flames slowly expanded from a small glow on the wicks.

With the flaming wax lining the wall, he turned back to the room, the glow dimly illuminating the small room. A yellowed atlas was nailed to the wall to the left, small, multicolored pushpins pressed through the map and into the wall in apparently random patterns across the continents. A series of black, metal filing cabinets lined the floor beneath the map. All of their drawers were closed tightly and each of them had an individual lock in the upper right corner. A handful of manila folders sat, stacked, atop one of them, buried beneath the years of the dusty accumulation.

A large bookcase sat in the doorway behind them, its shelves lined with books that appeared to be older than time, their splitting spines exposing the thick pages within. For whatever reason, it had been shoved against the door leading out into the tunnels within the hills, and judging from the enormous pile of dust against the bottom shelf from where they had pushed it into the room, it had been there for quite some time.

On the right side of the room there was a roll-top desk, a feather quill pen protruding from a small crystal cube filled with deep black ink. There was a cloth-bound book in the center, lying open, the writing on the pages buried beneath a layer of dust. A hand-crafted wooden chair lay on its back on the floor by the desk, the intricately-stitched seat cover, its loopholes still attached to the frame, sprawled over the back.

The cracked walls littered flakes of paint onto the wooden planks lining the floor, cobwebs stringing clear across the room. Water dripped from the ceiling in one of the corners of the room, splashing lightly into a small puddle of sloppy dust before flowing through the cracks in the floor, dampening the earth beneath.

Harry studied the map on the wall, his finger tracing a line between the numerous pinpoints. Scott walked over to the desk, setting the lantern down on the formerly highly-polished surface. Lifting up the book, he tapped the spine on the tabletop, the dust falling from the pages into a small pile. Holding it to the light in an attempt to read the handwritten words, he stared at the gracefully curving arcs of the ink on the page. The writing and strokes were exquisite.

“Check this out,” Harry said, holding up one of the folders that had been atop the filing cabinet. “These newspaper clippings are from 1889.”

Closing the book and tucking it beneath his left arm, he lifted the lamp from the table and carried it across the room to where Harry held up the file, his face buried within. He strained to read in the dim light.

Something moved in the shadow-filled corner of the room behind Harry. Unable to see much more than a tuft of dust glimmering at the edge of the thick darkness, Scott stopped dead in his tracks and watched, his breath freezing in his chest.

“Harry,” he whispered, the whites of his eyes expanding around his brown irises as his eyelids peeled back. “There’s something over there.”

Whirling, Harry stared deep into the shadows, his eyes trying to penetrate the veritable wall of black.

“I don’t see anything.”

The flames of the candles atop the mantle fluttered, the light flickering throughout the room, changing the shape of the shadows along the walls all around them.

“I think we need to go now,” Scott said, his eyes unable to turn from the corner of the room.

“But I just found these files from—”

“Take them with you.”

“We haven’t had a chance to—”

“Now,” Scott said, grabbing him by the arm and turning to guide him toward the bookcase that covered the entrance back into the tunnel.

A cold gust of wind swirled through the room, the candles flickering madly before fading into a smoke filled darkness. The flame within the glass shroud in Scott’s hand bounced mightily, the yellow flame blowing nearly straight sideways, but managing to stay lit.

There was another sound in the room, just beneath the whistling sound of the sudden and swirling gust of air. It was a dry, scraping sound, almost like the death rattle of the last gasp of air passing through the dry mouth into the lungs as they filled with fluid.

Quickening the pace, Scott pushed Harry in front of him and through the gap between the wall and the bookcase, out into the piled insulation on the damp stone floor. Glancing back, he could see a shape within the shadows, a deep black outline against the swirling, dust-filled shadows. The flame in his lamp flickered, the crackling yellow deepening to a dark red. His fingers burned, seeming to catch fire themselves as the metal handle on the lantern heated beneath his flesh, causing him to drop the lantern.

It shattered on the wooden floor, shards of glass bouncing in every direction. Kerosene splashed out in a large pool on the wooden planks of the floor. The deep red flame swelled like a wave atop the flammable liquid, spreading across the floor at an unheralded speed. Yet still, the shadow pressed further into the room, the flames lapping at its feet as it rapidly closed the gap between them.

Breaking his gaze from the room, Scott slipped past the bookcase and into the tunnel, Harry’s outline barely visible in the tunnel in front of him against the bouncing glow of his flashlight. Fighting for traction on the slick ground, Scott forced his legs to run. Panic began to settle into his chest, nearly causing his heart to pound right through his ribcage, his lungs refusing to draw any air. The red, flickering light from behind the bookcase lighted the thin channel around him, the shadows lengthening all around him momentarily, before the red glow finally dissipated, the flame burning itself out. Watching Harry’s light turn to the left into the main tunnel, he could suddenly feel the palpable darkness, pressing in tightly from the sides as it tried to squeeze the life from him, the sound of the heavy breathing echoing from all around him.

Tears swelled from the corners of his eyes, running in small streams down his dry skin, leaving a trail in the dust that had settled into his stubble. There was no feeling in any of his appendages as he sprinted, his own footsteps pounding the ground. He burst from beneath the stone archway into the main tunnel, the beam from Harry’s flashlight bounding up and down in the hallway ahead.

Following the light, he urged his legs on, faster and faster, sensing that whatever was behind him was gaining. His footsteps pounded on the thin layer of frozen ice in the center of the tunnel, snapping and popping. It was all he could hear as he just focused on Harry’s light ahead of him, slowly gaining in the blackness.

The light stopped ahead of him, fluttering for a moment before pointing straight at the ground. He could only barely make out the outline of Harry bending over, his hands on his knees, as he fought to regain his breath. Coming up fast, the blood in his veins burning as though it would eat straight through the vessels, spilling out beneath his flesh. He reached out, prepared to grab Harry and carry him out of the tunnel if that was his only option.

Stopping, his back leaning against Harry’s, he whirled, shining the light into the darkness behind him, but there was nothing there. He could feel an ice-cold breeze blowing straight into his face from the endless darkness. The frigidity stinging his tearing eyes, he batted his eyelids, fighting to see whatever had been following them before it was upon them. Visions of Brian being torn in half, and Tim liquefied on the path in the early morning sunlight, tore through his brain, his heart pounding in anticipation as he prepared to fight for his life should that be the only way out of the tunnel.

The wheezing sound that came in bursts from his own chest bounced off the walls around him. He tried, without even the slightest bit of success, to silence it long enough to try to listen. Stifling a cough, he flashed the light from one side to the next, over and over, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever was back there. And even though he couldn’t see anything, he knew, with ever fiber of his being, that they were not alone in that cavern.

“We have to keep moving,” Scott whispered without turning around, his chest still heaving mightily.

“I think… I’m ready,” Harry panted.

“Then go. I’m right behind you.”

Standing upright, Harry burst into a sprint, his heavy breathing dissipating into the wind that ripped through the tunnel. Scott stayed a few feet back, glancing over his shoulder as he ran. They passed the small entrance to the tunnel leading back up through the ground toward the Cavenaugh House, but they knew that if whatever was in that tunnel with them caught up to them in the cramped quarters of that small tunnel, that it was all over for them. Their only chance was to run straight through the opening down by the river, and hope, pray, that they made it out into the daylight alive.

The trailing edges of dim rays of light pierced the thick darkness ahead of them, glowing like a gray cloud in the tunnel ahead. Their legs burning and hearts throbbing on the verge of seizing within their chests, they dashed toward the growing mass of light, the overhanging branches of the evergreens on the bank above hanging like arms from the top of the exit to the tunnel.

Bursting out of the tunnel and into the light, Harry stopped his momentum barely in time to keep from tumbling headfirst into the ice-marred water of the river, Scott hot on his heels. His feet skidded on the gravel bank, a mass of pebbles tumbling across the frozen bank and into the deep blue water. He turned around, tears streaming from the corners of his eyes and freezing slowly as they trailed down his cheeks. And although he couldn’t see anyone standing there in the pitch black of the tunnel, he could tell that there was someone there, watching him intently from within that same darkness. The eyes of the unseen watcher weighed heavily on him, tearing straight through his own gaze and into his brain.

“Are you all right?” Harry asked, barely able to form the words through his heavy panting.

“Yeah. You?”

“I’ll live,” he wheezed, a dry chuckle bursting from his heaving chest.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“I’m way ahead of you,” Harry said, heading down the bank to where it lowered enough to climb up the hill.

Scott started down the bank but then stopped. An icy line of goosebumps raced up the back of his arms, settling at the base of his neck. His limbs seemed to become heavier as he slowly turned, the wind ripping the snow in droves straight into his face. He stared through the sheet of flakes into the darkened tunnel.

He could see the outline of a figure, barely darker than the rest of the tunnel, enshrouded in shadows. His eyelids batted back the flakes, keeping them from landing atop the bare surface of his eyeballs. Staring through the darkness, he could see that blackened form standing there, motionless, its intense glare fixed so deeply upon him that it felt as though it singed his flesh.