Under the Overtree

by James A. Moore

  4

  Cassie stirred in her sleep, moaning with suppressed passion. They had to be very careful with the ways in which They altered her; She was not as completely under Their spell as was the Chosen. She might awaken abruptly if They were careless, she might see Them before They were ready to be seen by Her. Slowly, with great delicacy, They made the changes.

  “Soon,” They whispered in her mind, “soon all will be ready.”

  The changes in the Mate were not as severe as the changes that were needed in the Chosen; They could take Their time with Her. The worst of it was the changes in Her mind; She had a much more fearsome will then had the Chosen. She liked herself the way She was, that always made it harder to perform the Changes…

  5

  Crowley walked down the road, whistling tunelessly between his teeth and knowing that his life could well depend on the next few moments. He hated it when people followed him, especially when he couldn’t figure out who the followers were. The moon, directly above him, striking his crown of hair made him look older, the light changing the bland brown hair to something closer to its true color. The shadows that covered his face made the hollows of his cheeks seem more like the high proud cheekbones of a skull minus flesh; made the thin hawkish nose hide itself when viewed from the front. The overall effect was slightly sinister. He smiled at the thought.

  He listened carefully, seemingly indifferent to the slight scuffling noises from behind him. Unless one knew him well, he would seem completely at ease, ignorant of his pursuer. No one alive knew him that well.

  With casual easy moves, he picked a handful of gravel from the side of the road, looking at the sky and tossing the small stones at easy targets, normally missing them. He kept the larger stones in his jean pocket, secreting them there, using a few old tricks he’d learned from an even older prestidigitator. By the time he’d gathered the third handful, he was ready to do battle. Just the same, he kept walking, gathering stones, tossing them at targets and missing for the most part. He hated missing, especially when the targets were so damned easy to hit. Still, he mused, it’d be a shame to drive off what was hunting him before he’d had a chance to view it properly.

  After another ten or so minutes of playing with his opponent, he decided it was time to change tactics. With the same casual whistle from the teeth, the same slow, easy stride, he looked for the right place at which to make his move. Just ahead was the spot he needed, a little puddle of darkness that was ideal for his purposes.

  He counted to ten, pacing himself to make it take that long and stepped from the road. The footsteps from behind him faltered almost immediately, grinding to a complete stop in a matter of five paces.

  He could envision the sudden paranoia, the cold certainty that something had gone horribly wrong that must now be on his tracker’s face. The whistling was gone, the man was gone, not even a leaf disturbed to show where he might have gone into the woods. Crowley had to bite lightly at his lips to prevent snickering.

  Slowly the footsteps started up again and in less than a minute, he saw the powerful figure of Sheriff Hanson walk into view. He was impressed. The man had sounded much lighter then he should have. Crowley had almost convinced himself that he was being followed by a girl; perhaps that silly little parapsychologist that they had imported from out of town.

  He notched his respect level for the sheriff up one more spot. The man could probably sneak up on a deer. But then, deer were, to his experience, almost as deaf as humans.

  Crowley waited patiently until the man had passed him by about fifty yards and then he started to follow after him. Hanson continued on his little trek for easily half a mile before deciding that his prey had eluded him.

  Cursing under his breath, the sheriff turned back towards his car, ready to call it a night. The sight of Crowley directly behind him damn near caused him to shit his pants. “Jeezus Christ!”

  Crowley smiled thinly, doing absolutely nothing to help Hanson’s heart go back to its regular pace. “I don’t believe,” the man started dryly, “that I’ve ever answered to that particular name.” He crossed his arms casually, looking at the sheriff with a devilish twinkle in his eye. “Was there something you wanted to ask me, Sheriff Hanson, or were you, perhaps, following me with some diabolical scheme in mind?”

  At the look of shock still on his erstwhile pursuer’s face, Crowley laughed out loud. It was not a pleasant laugh, despite Crowley’s being so very pleased with himself.

  Crowley then grinned, patting the sheriff on the back, fondly. “Well, come on then, I imagine this is something we should discuss like adults, hmm? Perhaps over coffee?”

  Hanson decided to play the way Crowley wanted it played. Not because it was the proper thing to do, or because he’d been caught in the act of tailing the man, but because he hadn’t even heard a single footstep from behind. After sixteen years as an officer of the law, he hoped and prayed that he was only losing his hearing; because if he wasn’t, then the only possible answer was that he was losing his touch or losing his mind. And if it wasn’t his hearing, he’d have to fear it was his mind. That thought was almost as scary as the man walking next to him. Almost.

  6

  The sun was set to rise in little over an hour and Hanson had just finished filling Crowley in on all of the nasty little details that he had; he wondered if the man would have believed him, if not for the confirming voices of Rick Lewis and Jackie Rosenquist. Normally, he suspected that even with the addition of two doctors the information would have been ignored or scoffed at by a person; Crowley was anything but normal.

  The man grinned ear to ear, looking for all the world like the cat that had swallowed the canary; Hanson still couldn’t bring himself to like the man. Crowley gave him a terminal case of the creeps. Jonathan Crowley leaned back in the battered wooden chair from Deputy Alan Fisk’s desk and placed his muscular arms behind his head. Hanson managed not to hit him in the face with an effort; he was the first person to use that chair since Alan’s bizarre death and the look he had shot when he so casually pulled it away from the desk seemed to goad and ask for violence. The look practically screamed the challenge, “Well, it’s not like the old corpse has any use for the damn thing, is it Chuckie-boy, hunh?” Chuck forced his hands not to ball into fists, if the man took that as a threat, the sheriff would be forced to back the threat up and he wasn’t certain that he was up to it. Damn, but the man scared the hell out of him. There was no one thing about him that could be said to be wrong; his face wasn’t deformed, his teeth didn’t have sharp points, his eyes didn’t burn with the fires of hell or anything like that, but he was scary just the same.

  Jackie Rosenquist didn’t seem to think so; Hanson would have bet money that if he so much as crooked a finger in her direction, the woman would have crawled into bed with Crowley right then and there. The smile on her face and the moist glow in her eyes all but promised to give him endless pleasures if he but asked. Crowley didn’t seem to notice, or if he noticed, he didn’t seem to care. Crowley was staring at Lewis with amused eyes, like a man waiting for the punch line to a very long and humorous joke.

  “So,” Crowley started, “what made you wait so long before trying parapsychology as an answer?” The tone of voice was off-hand, casual. But, there was an underlying sound of threat to the question, a subliminal warning not to step too hard on any toes.

  Rick seemed not to notice. He shrugged his shoulders as he reached for his coffee cup. “I was trying to find the answers all on my own. I figured it was something that could win big awards if I found some new and unique natural enzyme. I wasn’t really thinking at all, I guess.” Hanson was stunned. Never in a million years would he have expected so straightforward an answer. Rick never admitted to being wrong, unless he was pinned to the wall either figuratively or literally. Now, as if it were no great admission, he stated the cold facts almost as casually as Crowley had asked the question. While he sat with his jaw all but hanging open, Rick continued with his answer. “Tel
l the truth, I probably still would be trying it on my own, if Chuck hadn’t opened my eyes to the lack of progress I’d been making.”

  He sounded almost too at ease, he could have been discussing the weather with a good friend. To Hanson, he acted like a man drugged, which simply wasn’t possible. He knew Rick better than that. With a small shrug, he put the information in his mental To Be Filed Drawer and listened for what was next.

  Crowley smiled thinly, showing obvious disapproval for Lewis’ attitude and responded, “How many lives do you suppose that might have cost you? Hmm? Two, Three? What a waste.”

  Hanson started to defend his friend, setting himself to bark angrily at this stranger to his town. One look from Crowley quieted his anger before it could erupt from his throat. Yep, he thought, I’m scared in a big way. No doubt, no lack of explanation, no fuckin’ way. This man scares me.

  Crowley stood up, walking over to the map of the county on the wall not far from where he’d been seated. “Sheriff Hanson, would you mind locating the spots where you found the different bodies for me?” he asked, gesturing at the map with a simple sweep of his hand. Hating himself for it, Hanson stepped forward and made light pencil marks at all of the proper locations.

  Crowley stared for a long time, looking for all the world as if he were contemplating which tie to wear with which suit. He nodded a few times and pointed to where the sheriff had indicated the remains of Pete Larson. “Here’s where the Larson kid died,” his finger drew a line to where Andy Phillips had hidden the body of Tanya Roberts, “here’s where the Phillips boy told you to find the body.” He looked for a moment longer, before moving his hand again, this time he moved it to Lake Overtree. “Over here you found the Blake boy,” his hand moved on one last time. “And here is where the one that is still alive got…injured. Scarrabelli wasn’t it?” He acknowledged Hanson’s nod with a nod of his own and jabbed his finger harshly at a small area of buildings on the map. “What are these, houses?”

  “Yeah, the Red Oaks subdivision.” Before he said another word, before Crowley had a chance to respond, Hanson realized what the man was leading up to. His eyes must have shown his shock, because Crowley nodded like a teacher to a slow student finally seeing the answer to a painfully simple question.

  “Just so, Sheriff Hanson, just so. The subdivision is right in the center of this little storm of activity. You even had one unexplained death in the complex proper, did you not? Evan Wilder, I believe you said, rats or something…” Hanson stared at the man as if he’d lost his mind; Lewis and his new partner simply stared, awestruck. “I suspect the answer to your questions lies somewhere near this complex. Can you tell me who lives in there?” Hanson nodded, numb at the thought that he could have missed so obvious a picture.

  The sheriff sorted through file after file pulling every name that he could think of that belonged in the Red Oaks complex. As he did so, he answered easily two dozen questions about various residents; did they know any of the victims? Naturally, it was a small community. Did they have any reason to wish the victims harm? In a few cases, probably, but nothing solid. Did the sheriff think any of the people capable of murder? Oh, yes. He could think of one or two. And the one that finally seemed to strike a memory or two; were any of the residents new to town.

  Mark Howell’s name popped up like a rabid Jack in the box. There had been rumors about how the boy had managed to get that nasty scar on his face, rumors about some of the school toughs taking a walk with him after school. There was bad blood between him and at least one other boy, enough that Howell had come to explain he thought he might have had to do with the boy’s disappearance and death; Hanson remembered dismissing the idea as ludicrous at the time, but then again, there seemed to be more connections between him and most of the people who had ended up dead. The only exceptions would seem to be the deputy—Hanson choked for a moment on that one—and Evan Wilder. The Sheriff even had a newspaper shot of the boy and his parents, kept on file since the family had moved into town. Bill Waldsburg over at the Summitville Press made it a habit to get a shot of any newborns or strangers moving into town, it helped fill space on his little monthly rag. Bill hadn’t covered any of the murders; his was a GOOD news magazine nothing sour for the people of Summitville, that was for the real papers.

  The picture was over a year old and Hanson noted that the boy looked a lot different these days, taller and a good deal less pudgy and explained about the scar on his face, from a fall in the woods the boy had claimed. That garnered an in depth explanation from Rick, who had been the one to attend to Howell on both the occasion of his facial injury and the day that he got himself shot by Wilder.

  Through it all Crowley listened intently, asking questions only when necessary. He gleaned from the discussions that Howell was an only child and that he had most likely been assaulted in the woods the day his face had been injured, the boy’s parents had been utterly convinced of it. The boy had refused to give names; saying only that it was something he could handle on his own.

  After a good while of such conversation, the bleary eyed sheriff pointed out that there was absolutely no solid evidence of any wrong-doing on Mark’s part, in fact the boy had almost always been out of town or with other people during the occurrences. Crowley seemed entirely undaunted, pointing out that if, in fact, the cause were paranormal in origin, the boy could have been in Texas with a thousand witnesses and still be responsible for a crime that took place in Summitville.

  Hanson frowned over that one. “I don’t quite get you. How could he have influence over events here if he’s off doing whatever with whomever in another area entirely? Are you trying to tell me that Mark Howell is a Voodoo doctor or something?”

  Crowley grinned that dangerous grin of his, the one that made him look like a wolf with bared fangs and responded as if he were talking about the way that birds migrate, or some other mundane and essentially useless subject. “Not at all, sheriff, I seriously doubt that the young man would even be aware of his involvement.” When the sheriff and Rick Lewis both looked at him in bewilderment, he continued. “It sounds more like a case of poltergeist activity, or even a case of demon possession than it does like a conscious effort to get rid of his enemies. If that is the case, the Howell boy is as much a victim as anyone else.” Crowley thought for a few minutes while those around him stared at the floor or the walls or anywhere that was not Crowley. The man was compelling, seductively fascinating to observe, but he was also scary in a way that could not be defined. He was a man that just gave off bad vibes, the kind that made people think of someone stepping on their grave.

  When he spoke again, the sudden sound startled all of his listeners. “Do you know who he hangs around with? Who his good friends are, maybe even a girl friend?”

  Without warning, the memory of his own little visit from a ghost popped into his mind; the name that his dead deputy had spoken fairly leapt past his lips before he could stop the words. “Tony Scarrabelli. The…The ghost of my deputy Alan, he told me that Tony Scarrabelli was at fault. I’d forgotten all about it until just now.” He looked down at the ground. “At least I’d been trying to.”

  Crowley looked at him as if he were looking at a lab specimen that didn’t agree with his stomach. Abruptly he stood, looking around for the briefest of moments before starting towards the door. “Well then, I believe I’ll have a chat with the boy.”

  Hanson watched him leave, a large part of him relieved to see him gone. But a larger part of him, a part he would never really let see the light of day had other thoughts. That hidden part was convinced that Crowley meant serious trouble and whispered in his mind’s ear to look out.

  Because, whether he liked it or not, there seemed to be a new sheriff in town and there didn’t seem to be a damn thing that Chuck Hanson could do about it.

  7

  P.J. absolutely hated hospitals. The only thing he could think that he possibly hated more, were sick people. The exception being his niece. It hurt him to look at he
r, lying so thin and wasted on the bed with tubes and tape and bandages covering most of her angelic face. P.J. desperately wished to hear her voice again; even if it was just to hear her bitch about her father.

  It wasn’t going to happen; he knew it deep in his heart, the same way that a mother knows her son won’t come back from the front in a war. It made no sense, her vital signs had actually showed small signs of improvement, but he knew she would never be the girl that she had been. It must have shown on his face, because Cassie was there in a flash, hugging him fiercely and murmuring nonsensical platitudes meant to give him some kind of comfort, some sense of hope. The words failed, but he forced a slight smile to show his appreciation just the same.

  Mark was bitterly silent in the corner, fidgety and almost angry at the still figure on the bed, as if she were to blame for what had been done to her. P.J. knew that wasn’t really the case, just as he knew that all of Mark’s anger was directed at whomever it was that had done this to his niece. Mark wanted desperately to find the man responsible for the latest development, just as P.J. himself longed to find him.

  She might recover enough to awaken from the coma; it looked better and better for a full recovery almost daily. But the pregnancy was a very different story; abortion was completely out of the question, too many risks in her present state. The shock to her system would like as not kill her.

  Tony had gone over the edge upon hearing the news, as had Antoinette and Antonio. The other girls had seemed shocked, but remained, for the most part, lost in their own lives. Antoinette hadn’t done a very good job of raising her other children; she had never seemed to care before the twins were born. The others didn’t matter the same way as the twins did. The twins were all the children she had room for in her heart. Sometimes, P.J. really hated his sister.