The Menace: A Thriller

Chapter 6

The Doberman, Buster, was tied up outside the wall to act as an overnight guard dog along the line of trees from which the strange footprints had led and returned. The chain had enough length to allow the animal to get right up to the edge of the wooded area, and at the moment the animal was sniffing around a certain Southern Magnolia.

The four officers on duty patrolling the Ryan grounds tonight were divided up in teams of two on either side of the fieldstone wall. They walked patrol separately and only occasionally checked in with each other. None of those four were near Buster at the moment, who had not barked to alert them and even now the animal’s growling was low and rumbling. Mostly Buster was sniffing, as if looking for somewhere to lift a leg.

So no negligence on the part of the officers added to what happened next...

...when a black shape with long arms and clawed splayed fingers dropped down like a big blunt rock on the back of the dog, surprising it, eliciting only a single yipe before those clawed digits dug into the Doberman’s throat, turning a dangerous adversary into a quivering helpless mass and powerful hands gripped and twisted and choked and finally snapped bones as if they were nothing more than brittle sticks.

Out in front of the house, at the bottom of the steps up onto the porch, the two cops who earlier had carted the crate upstairs were comparing notes and grabbing smokes and complaining about their very long day, with less than half an hour before the next shift of four officers came on.

Skinny Fred frowned, looked up, saying, “What the hell was that?”

Pudgy Lou, exhaling Marlboro smoke, said, “What the hell was what?”

“Didn’t you hear anything?”

Lou blew a Bronx cheer. “Birds and bugs and beasties in the woods, kiddo. What do you expect in the boonies?”

Fred was looking toward the wooded area, treetops visible over beyond the wall, a mass of leaves shimmering in night breeze, catching some moonlight and throwing it around.

“Guess you’re right, Lou. Anything moves out there, Buster’s sure to let us know.”

Lou grunted affirmatively. “We got four guys on foot patrol, and Cutter added two cars to work the highway and the back roads within a few miles, either side. Nothing’s getting past us, kiddo. Nothin’.”

With a sigh, Fred pitched his smoke sparking into the night. “Yeah, but we’re all gettin’ punchy. That’s a lot of long hours for everybody. We’re back on at eight tomorrow morning.”

“No rest for the wicked,” Lou observed, grinning like he just thought that up.

The terrible hands drew away from the animal’s throat. The human creature, though low to the ground, nonetheless hovered over the limp bag of fur and flesh and bones that had been a living breathing and dangerous creature moments before.

He faced the fieldstone wall and his head went back, his eyes lifting to the attic window.

A light was on.

That boy was up past his bedtime.

Bad boy. Bad boy.

The human creature patted the dead dog.

Good boy. Good boy.

In his pajamas, Roy — the buzz of the two highballs wearing off, embarrassed about how things had deteriorated in his guest-room conversation with Helen — thought he’d better check on his son before hitting the sack himself.

Yet not only were the boy’s lights still on, and the bed still made, Richie wasn’t there! But some light bled from under the door to the attic.

Shaking his head, Roy went up.

Richie was kneeling at the seated desiccated corpse, listening at its chest with the stethoscope. The thing in the faded Aztec collar and thin white tunic seemed to grin at Roy, as if to say, You can’t compete with me, you pitiful human daddy.

“Son,” Roy said.

Richie didn’t hear him, the ear tips of the stethoscope in place.

“Son!”

The boy swung his head around, startled. “Uh. Oh. Hi, Dad.”

“Yeah, hi. It’s way after your bedtime, your know.”

Richie shrugged, smiled. “I know. I kinda lost track.”

Roy’s fists were on his hips. “Well, you need to get back on track. What are you doing there, anyway?”

Richie bobbed his head toward the seated mummy. “Playing doctor.”

Definitely not the way Roy had played doctor when he was a kid.

The father went to the boy and knelt, the mummy nearby, wearing its mocking expression.

“Listen,” Roy said, “you can’t be up here. Not at this hour. And you know how your mother feels about your... your friend here.”

“I know, but you don’t feel like that. Do you, Dad?”

He put some firmness into his voice. “I should have put a stop to this before. It’s disrespectful.” He gestured to the grinning corpse. “This was a human being, son. You don’t ‘play,’ not ‘doctor’ or anything else, with an actual dead person.”

Richie was shaking his head. “But, Dad, he’s not dead, he’s alive.”

Roy frowned. “I told you, Richie. Your friend here died hundreds of years ago.”

The boy winced in thought, obviously confused. “So is he still alive? Or is he alive again? Like Dracula or Jesus?”

Right now Roy could really use another highball.

But instead he just got to his feet, pointed toward the stairwell, and said, “Never mind any of that. Out. Oh-you-tee. No more talk! And stay out of this attic.”

The boy appeared to be on the verge of tears. “What about the Olympics? I’m in training!”

The father closed his eyes, sighed, opened his eyes and said, “You can come up here when it’s daytime... but stay down at the mini-gym end, okay?”

“Okay.” Then Richie came back and spoke with a heart-breaking earnestness: “But I’m trying to tell you about my friend.”

“What about him?”

“That he’s alive! Dad, you need to listen.”

“I am listening.”

“No!” The boy lifted the stethoscope around his neck by the chest piece. “You need to listen through this.”

Roy shook his head. Pointed to the stairs. “Out!”

The boy frowned. “Boy! Some doctor you are...”

Officer Fred Dickson, making his final sweep of the night of the exterior wall, got to thinking — that yipe had sounded canine. Not some bird or bug or “beastie,” either...

Maybe, the slender cop thought, I better check on Buster...

Flashlight in hand, he went to where the metal stake held the animal’s chain in place, finding no sign of the dog. And Buster wasn’t over at his water and kibble dishes by the wall, either.

Yet the chain stretched toward the trees, pulled fairly taut.

Working his flash’s beam on the ground, Fred followed that chain as if it were a pointing finger. And that pointing finger led to the Doberman, sprawled on its side at the edge of the woods under the overhanging leafy branches of the big Magnolia tree. The dog’s eyes were open but unseeing, its tongue draped out of its mouth like a slice of rare meat.

The officer crouched by the beast, inspected it, found it dead all right, not just sick or drugged, but with its neck at an impossible angle — good Lord, could hands have broken that sinewy neck? — and then rose and stared into the timber. Seeing nothing, he craned his neck and sent the beam up the trunk and into the leaf-thick branches and a dark shape came down on him, like a one-boulder avalanche.

The flashlight flew from Fred’s fingers as he hit the ground hard, where he tried to get the thing off him, off his back, trying to squirm out from under, and when that didn’t work, he bucked and bucked and finally the thing rolled off. Then huge hard savage fists were pummeling his knees and thighs, and he swung fists down into what appeared to be a torso and bushy-haired head and not much else, getting grotesque glimpses of his opponent as the bizarre fistfight traveled in and out of the fallen flashlight’s beam.

And in one horrible moment Officer Dickson got a good look at the half-man’s face and it froze him just long enough for his fierce, stubby opponent to go scrambling off into the darkness of the wooded area.

Lou Rawley came running up, the pudgy cop breathing hard by the time he got to his partner, who’d fallen to his knees.

“Fred! What in hell happened?”

His partner was panting. “That... that thing came right down out of that damn tree and landed on me!”

“What thing?”

The officer shivered. “I don’t know... I really don’t know... Just... it was some kind of a... hell, I don’t know what it was!”

The pudgy officer helped the skinny officer to his feet and asked him, “Are you okay? You need me to rustle up the doc? Or get you to an emergency room...?”

“I’m... I’m fine. Well, not fine, but... just bruises and some nicks and, Lou, I am freaking out!”

Lou slipped a supportive arm around his partner’s shoulder. “Take it easy, boy. Now. Describe what attacked you.”

“It was big. And small...”

Lou made a face. “What?”

“Look, I just caught glimpses of it. I dropped my flashlight, right at the start, and mostly we fought in the dark. But he was no bigger than this.”

Fred held a hand up to his mid-thigh.

Then the young cop went on: “Came down on me from that tree. Dropped right on me!”

Lou grinned, but an uneasy grin. “Musta scared the living hell out of you — that’s natural, even as light-weight a little guy as he must’ve been.”

“Oh, but he wasn’t light — he was heavy as a ton of bricks, man. Shoulders out to here! He flattened me. Whatever it is, it’s a strong son of a bitch. Take a look at Buster and see.”

Lou did that.

The older cop came back with all the blood drained out of his face. “It must be strong if it could do that to a Doberman.”

“He has to be.”

“‘He?’ You said ‘it’ before.”

“That was no animal. No monkey or ape, either. That was some kind of person.”

Somehow Chief Blake Cutter wasn’t even surprised finding himself in the middle of the night seated on the couch at the Ryan place with Helen Ryan perched between him and her husband. The woman was in a pink dressing gown and, even at this hour, woken from bed, with no make-up on at all, her hair a blonde tangle, she was strikingly beautiful. That doctor ought to get his act together and woo this doll back.

But that wasn’t any of Blake Cutter’s business — the murderous attacker terrorizing this place was.

Helen had a nine-by-twelve-inch sketch book in her lap and a charcoal pencil in her right hand, acting as police artist while the still somewhat shell-shocked Officer Dickson described what he’d seen.

The lanky young officer had already received a post-attack check-up from the doctor, who found nothing but some contusions and a few scrapes — nothing, anyway, that some soap, water, Bacitracin, and a few bandages couldn’t handle.

Helen turned her sketch in the pad around toward the young cop, who sat nearby in a straight-back chair. What she’d drawn was an excellent depiction of something terrible — a figure with long stringy yet bushy black hair, a round, grooved, flat-nosed, scruffy bearded face with dark eyes under a shelf of forehead where big shaggy black eyebrows dwelled. Wide mouth, irregular teeth. Broad shoulders and a well-developed torso all in black — a sweater possibly, large bare feet, toes spread out, hands the same, splayed and sharp-nailed.

Helen asked the officer, “Is that about right?”

“Yes... I only saw flashes of it, but... yes.”

“No sense of legs?”

“No. Feet, but no legs.”

Cutter leaned out and, speaking across Mrs. Ryan, asked Dr. Ryan, “Does that tally with what you saw, Doc?”

A fire was going in the fireplace and all of them were serving as screens for the reflections of flames making abstract art of them.

Ryan nodded slowly but repeatedly. “The officer here got a better look than I did, but... yes. What Helen has drawn is an accurate representation of what I saw.”

“What about this lack of legs? Feet and no legs? How is that possible?”

The doctor flipped a hand. “If it’s an amputee, perhaps prosthetics, unusually small, compact... hidden by the tugged-down garment. If a dwarf, stubby legs that the sweater might hide or simply be unseen, the individual being so close to the ground. We’re talking low lighting, the officer under assault from a low-lying attacker.”

The chief leaned back. “All right, then. You’re a doctor. If you were to see something, someone, like this — a patient maybe... what would you call it?”

“I’d call it ‘him.’”

Cutter raised a palm in mild surrender. “All right. Him. We’re not dealing with a creature or a beast, but I never thought we were. This is a human being. Do you know of cases of deformed human beings like this?”

The doctor’s shrug seemed almost in slow motion. “I know of them. And we’re only guessing about what precisely these birth defects might be.”

Cutter thought about that. “Might someone burdened by severe birth defects blame those defects on the doctor who delivered him?”

Ryan nodded. “It’s possible. And the parents, of course.”

“Or maybe... doctors in general?”

“Perhaps.” Ryan thought a moment or two. “Or more likely — as Helen theorized earlier — specifically specialists in pediatrics. And you’re looking for links between the three murdered medics, aren’t you, Blake?”

Cutter nodded, once. “We are. But if you feel we’ve established that the assailant who struck here is in fact a deformed individual, that narrows the search.” He took the sketch book from Helen and held up the nightmare image. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to locate someone who answers to this description, should it?”

“No,” Roy said. “They’d require special training, specific therapy... but there could be a hitch.”

“Like how?”

The doctor let in and out slowly. “It’s not as bad as it once was, but in the old days, particularly? A family might never let it be known that one of theirs bore the ‘sin’ or ‘embarrassment’ of congenital deformities such as these. Cruel, backward thinking might lead to hiding a child away — think of the gothic horror stories where some poor twisted member of the family was sequestered away in an attic or institution.”

A quick look passed between husband and wife.

Then the doctor went on: “A child raised under such restrictive, hurtful conditions could itself become twisted. If you tell someone they’re ugly long enough, they may become ugly... inside.”

No one said anything for a while.

Finally, Cutter said, “Thank you, doctor, for your insights. And thank you, Mrs. Ryan, for sharing your artistry. We’re quite fortunate to have an artist as talented as you right at hand. We’ll get this sketch circulated to all medical facilities statewide.”

The young cop asked, “Chief — what about distributing that to the media?”

Cutter frowned. “You want to start a panic, Dickson? And if the national media gets a whiff, there’ll be a fleet of TV trucks down here and we’ll be crawling with reporters. ‘Halloween Comes Early to Southern Hamlet!’ Not a word, get me?”

“I got you, Chief.”

From behind the couch, Richie suddenly leaned over, a wide-eyed child in Six Million Dollar Man pajamas. “Boy, does that guy look weird!”

Helen turned the sketchbook face down on her lap. “Roy, get your son out of here! I don’t want him seeing this.”

Of course he already had, Cutter thought.

But Richie was leaning across the back of the couch even more. “If that’s a bad guy you’re after, Chief Cutter, and you put him in a cage or something?” He looked at his mom eagerly. “Can I have that drawing for my room? I’ll put him up by the Incredible Hulk!”

She ignored that, though the boy’s sideways face was next to her. She turned away, toward her husband, and said, “Roy, deal with this. It’s bad enough Richard saw that other horrible thing upstairs!”

“Ah, Mom. He’s my friend. He’s not hurting anything. He’s just sitting around.”

Now she swung round to face the boy. “You get back to bed. Right now!”

The child’s expression grew pouty. “You guys were making a lot of noise down here. You woke me up. It wasn’t my fault.”

“I don’t care whose fault it was,” she said, “you get back to bed.”

Richie repositioned himself on the other side of his mother to address his father. “Dad, don’t I have any rights?”

“You have the right to remain silent,” he said, “and go to bed. Or maybe get a swat of my right hand across your tail.”

The boy raised his hands in surrender. “I understand those rights.”

And he went slowly up the stairs.

“Where’d he get that?” Helen asked her husband.

“TV,” he said. He turned to Chief Cutter. “This makes two attacks in two days. What do you suggest we do now?”

“You double-check all windows and doors,” Cutter said. “Both floors. I’ll get a support team from the Atlanta suburbs and cover a wider swath, including that wooded area our intruder came out of both nights.”

Helen asked, “Is there any chance that it... he’s... gone now?”

Roy picked up on that. “Our visitor knows we’ve increased security and that he’ll really be up against it here on out. Maybe that’ll be enough to scare him away.”

Cutter looked from the husband’s face to the wife’s and back again. “Doctor... Helen... whatever it is we’re after has killed before. We know that now. We also know we have a shrewd adversary whose motives are irrational and yet focused. I’m afraid it will take a bullet... probably more than ‘a’ bullet... to stop him. He has specific targets and the next two on his list are you, Roy, and... I’m sorry... but your son.”

Ryan was frowning deep. “What are our odds in this, Chief? As you see it?” He glanced at his wife. “We have a right to know.”

Cutter got to his feet. “In our favor... as long as we can keep you isolated, and covered.”

And everybody went off to catch a few hours of sleep.

Or at least try to.