At another time Adam would have marveled at the emotional reaction from the normally reserved Olivia. The closest he had ever seen to a reaction like this was when she spotted the Spider People’s totem next to his door at the hotel. But at the moment his attention was riveted to the monstrosity hanging between the trees. It reminded him of something.
Something bad.
Adam focused on the wood and vine sculpture. For the second time today he tried willing his mind to give him the answer. And for a moment, he got nothing.
But then it came.
“Oh no,” he moaned. “David.”
He turned to see the pair behind regarding him with both wariness and concern. The look on their faces was all the confirmation he needed. Still, he needed to see for himself.
“Olivia?” Adam managed to choke out. “Do you have a copy of the last photograph David took with you?”
Olivia’s look was unreadable. She glanced up at Antonio, who stared at Adam thoughtfully for a few seconds before nodding to her. Her fingers danced across the tablet again, then with a final gesture she brought up the photo and enlarged it to fill the entire screen before handing it over.
Adam took it without a word. Now armed with the experience of the night before, he looked at the photo again. This time he saw it. This time he truly saw what his brother had been looking at and talking about in that last desperate message.
It was a monster.
“She is called the Matriarch,” Olivia’s soft voice cut into his horrified reverie. “Up until ten days ago, when we got this picture, we thought her the stuff of legends. Now we’re desperately trying to figure out which parts of those legends are true. We have no idea what she is capable of. She might merely be a giant…or she may be intelligent, with formidable psi powers, and the oldest living creature on this planet.”
###
Sheriff Wiley Prescott turned his cruiser into the driveway of the Morlin farm, and let it idle up the gravel pathway toward the house. The slow approach allowed him to size up the place once more. He chewed a toothpick as his weathered eyes scanned the lonely homestead, hunting anything to explain why two people in their seventies would simply vanish.
And the sooner he could figure this case out and wrap it up, the better.
He never really felt comfortable in this corner of Cole County. The people here were extremely clannish, and he felt like an outsider here even though he had lived in this county his entire life. Everybody else around here called them the ‘Weyrich people,’ a name he learned as a kid himself growing up in Hallisboro. They seldom left their own little neck of the woods, and their relationships with any outsiders were polite but distant at best.
Fortunately, they never seemed to cause trouble and Sheriff Wiley couldn’t remember a time in his long career that he had ever gotten a call for a disturbance out here. Either the people in this area were the best behaved bunch on the planet, or they settled matters between themselves. Either way, it never involved county law enforcement and the only time Sheriff Wiley or any of his deputies were out this way was to patrol the highway just enough to satisfy regulations.
But now two people had vanished, and that had to be investigated.
The forensics team from the State Police hadn’t turned up anything of much use. There had been no blood, no bodies, and no damage to anything other than the horse pen attached to the barn. The one thing—the only thing—indicating foul play was the presence of Curtis Morlin’s shotgun lying in the middle of the driveway behind his house.
It had been fired twice, then apparently dropped or discarded where it lay. Other than that, it was as if Curtis and Abby had simply gotten up and walked off into the woods down the hill behind the barn. The forensics team had been professional and thorough, but in the end they had shrugged and told him this was the way these things sometimes turned out. Science had taken its turn at bat and struck out.
Now Wiley had returned to look over the place without the benefit of anything but his own experience and instincts.
It wasn’t much of a place as farms went these days.
It featured a small, four-room house that had stood on this hill for the past seventy years. A fairly recent paint job and new layer of shingles barely kept it from being recognized as the shack it would otherwise be. On the other hand, the barn out back presented a weathered gray look showing its true age. Only the fact that Curtis Morlin had been something of a handyman when it came to repairs kept this place standing.
Wiley pulled the cruiser around behind the house to where the driveway made a small circle, and used it to turn around and get himself pointed back toward the road. Then he pulled to a stop beside the house and stepped out of the car. The crunch of gravel under his boots was accompanied only by the creak of the swinging barn loft door as he started to pace a slow circle around the small farmhouse. To the west, the sun had already started to set over the distant trees and the golden light seemed to heighten the loneliness of the place.
From the front, the little house wasn’t much to look at. The Sheriff backed up a few paces and studied the structure for a few seconds before shaking his head in exasperation. The view from the road certainly didn’t offer much that would have attracted any passing thieves. Besides, as far as either he or the forensics team could tell, nothing had been stolen.
Nothing gone but the Morlins themselves.
After another few minutes’ examination, Wiley continued his circuit around to the east side of the little residence. At first there appeared to be nothing to see. The only feature this side of the house possessed was a small window to the bathroom and a larger one looking in to the bedroom. Still, Wiley hesitated to move on as something nagged at him. Trusting his instincts, he simply got comfortable and continued to look at the house until it finally came to him.
The TV antenna on the roof was bent.
“Now that’s odd,” he muttered. “This place ain’t much but old Curtis kept everything repaired.” And as he said it, another memory rose in his mind.
There had been a couple of shingles lying in the grass next to the wall at the back of the house. Both he and the State Police had ignored those as probable extras from a recent reshingling job, but now another possibility rose in his mind.
Had there been somebody on the roof? Was that what Curtis Morlin had shot at? They hadn’t found any shot embedded in any of the nearby surfaces the old man could have been firing toward, causing some of the forensic people to speculate he might have simply been shooting into the sky. But what about the roof? He didn’t remember anybody checking up there.
Wiley turned this scenario over in his mind as he resumed his stroll around the small abode. He fully intended to check those shingles. If they had nothing but dirt beneath them, then they were most likely from Curtis’ reshingling job. But he now had a hunch he was going to find flattened and yellowed grass beneath them instead. If so, he would be calling the forensic team back first thing in the morning to check the roof for shotgun pellets.
The sheriff was already grumbling about the shortcomings of city raised lab geeks as he stalked around the corner of the house…and came to an abrupt halt.
There was a man standing in the open doorway of the barn.
And that man was Curtis Morlin.
Wiley Prescott’s eyes narrowed at the sight of the old man standing framed by the weathered entranceway, nothing but the blackness of the building’s interior behind him.
Morlin didn’t seem to react to his appearance around the corner at all. Instead, the farmer didn’t say anything, but simply watched the sheriff with a look devoid of any identifiable expression. He had no weapon, or anything else Wiley could consider dangerous in his hands, but something about the still figure struck the lawman as “off”… other than the fact the man had been missing for days.
“Mr. Morlin?” The sheriff took a couple of slow steps toward the figure in the large doorway. “You are Curtis Morlin, right?”
For a few seconds the o
ld man didn’t respond. He simply continued to stand there with his arms hanging at his side. Then he tilted his head and slowly spoke, frowning in concentration as if testing the words.
“Curtis Morlin?” he echoed.
“Yes, sir. Your name. It’s Curtis Morlin, correct?”
Wiley had only bumped into the man a couple of times before this, but he never forgot a face. Besides, he had been investigating the Morlins’ disappearance and had photos of both in his cruiser. At the moment, he was simply trying to ascertain the old codger’s state of mind and get a feel for the situation. Morlin seemed confused, and Wiley had needed to retrieve old people who wandered away before. Still, something made him slow to a stop before crossing the back driveway to the barn door.
“Name,” the old man muttered. He seemed to be mentally working his way through something with slow deliberation. “This time it’s different…it’s not Karen this time… it’s Curtis.”
“Sir?”
“Sir?” the farmer mimicked. He looked puzzled for a second then understanding seemed to dawn. “Oh, it’s because he was a male. It’s not a name. It’s just a form of addressing males.”
“Riiiggghhht,” Sheriff Prescott eyed the man with suspicion.
Alarm bells were starting to go off, although he couldn’t see any threat posed by the elderly farmer. Morlin appeared unarmed, and at his age and health hardly seemed likely to launch any physical assault. Besides, he seemed disoriented to the point of being barely aware of who he was. Still, thirty years of experience had honed Wiley’s instincts for trouble to a fine degree.
And for some reason those instincts were telling him to run like hell.
“Mr. Morlin,” Wiley pressed while trying to get a grip on this sudden case of the creeps, “where is your wife?” He tried to see past the farmer and into the barn, but the building’s interior was black as ink. Both doors to the entrance hung open, but it was as if a curtain of darkness hung behind the old man.
“My…wife?”
“Your wife, sir. Abigail Morlin.”
“Oh…yes. It’s a…title. Like ‘sir,’ but more specific. Abigail is a wife…a mate that allows the male to stay without threat of consumption.”
“Oooookaaaaaaayyyy,” the Sheriff breathed aloud. There was disoriented and then there was weird. This definitely belonged in the latter category. “Mr. Morlin? Has something happened to Abigail? Is she alright?”
“Abigail is here, too.”
The old man said it as if it was self evident, but Wiley could see no sign of her. At the same time, that sense of impending danger hung in the air like an electrical charge. Something was badly wrong here.
“Where is she, Mr. Morlin?” He focused on the task at hand. “May I speak to her?”
“If you wish,” Abigail Morlin replied.
Sheriff Wiley Prescott did an astonished double take.
Abigail Morlin stood framed against the blackness in the doorway as big as life…exactly where Curtis Morlin had stood a split second earlier. There had been no chance for Curtis to step back and allow her to take his place. There had been no motion at all. The old man had suddenly become Abigail Morlin.
“Oh shit!” Wiley took a stunned couple of steps backwards.
“Why?” The old woman frowned at him in confusion. “Oh, you didn’t mean that. It was just something you said because you were startled. I see transition is important.” She ‘hung’ there against the blackness in the same manner Curtis had, even though her feet were on the ground, too.
“Transition?” Sheriff Wiley backed a few further steps away. “What the hell are you talking about? What the hell are you?”
The figure in the doorway tilted its head and changed again.
“You might say I am ‘legion,’” Karen Sellars now intoned, “but I am one. I am Death, but I also preserve.”
Things had now gone from the weird to the unreal. Whatever was going on here was way, way outside his normal line of duty, and he had the gut feeling he should be running for his life. He sensed something lurked in the blackness behind “Curtis/Abigail/Whoever”—something utterly inhuman and alien—and that something couldn’t care less about things like badges or “respect for the law.”
And whatever it was, Curtis Morlin had emptied both barrels of a 12-gauge shotgun into it and then vanished.
“Do you really think you would make it to your car, Sheriff?”
Wiley inhaled through clenched teeth and took another step backward. The question unnerved him further. Not only because the presence hiding in the barn suspected his intent, but the tone of the question itself. It wasn’t as much an implied threat as it seemed to be asked in honest curiosity…which made it ten times as threatening. It was as if this thing could read his mind, but was too inhuman to truly gauge all its meaning. He struggled to imagine what could possibly be behind this and failed.
“You want to know? You want to see? Would you like to see the real me, Wiley Prescott?”
Right then, he decided that was the last thing he really wanted.
He could still see nothing but the missing Sellars lady standing against the darkness, but the instincts screaming at him to run now warned that death loomed only seconds away. The thought occurred that if he actually beheld whatever hid in the barn, it would be the final thing he ever saw.
He was halfway to the car before he finished the thought.
Wiley’s legs pumped like pistons, and he flew toward the cruiser at a speed his fifty-year old body hadn’t achieved in decades. His ragged gulps for air drowned out whatever sounds of pursuit might be coming from behind, and he didn’t dare look back. The Sheriff managed to brake and slid the last five feet to his cruiser while staying erect, before grabbing the handle of the passenger side door and yanking it open in one fluid motion. He dove across the front seat toward the driver side, just as something hit the door with enough force to slam it shut behind him.
He scrabbled into his seat behind the wheel, and twisted to look behind him. He almost screamed at the sight meeting his eyes.
Abigail Morlin stood at his passenger window, as if she had always been there.
“There are different forms of immortality, Sheriff.” Her voice cut through the glass as if it didn’t exist. “What I offer is less…symbolic…than most. It doesn’t have to hurt. All you have to do is die.”
The Sheriff drove the keys into the ignition and twisted in one panicked motion. He prayed to whatever powers were above that the usually dependable engine kept its streak of instant startups one more time. Just one more time…
Apparently, somebody up there liked him.
The large motor roared to life without hesitation. Wiley almost whimpered in relief at the sound of the 400 big block revving under the hood. He slammed the stick into gear and stomped on the gas, causing the big motor to howl. Gravel sprayed, and the car rocketed down the driveway. Then, as he reached the end of the gravel, he slammed on the brakes and skidded the car to a sideways halt out on the highway proper.
Breathing hard, he peered across the seat and out the window.
Abigail Morlin still waited up beside her house in the driveway. She stood there unmoving, watching him leave. An ordinary looking old woman in an empty driveway. But as he scanned the area for anybody else who could have been with her, he saw something that made his blood run cold.
In the lowering sun, her shadow stretched from the driveway on to the wall of the nearby farmhouse—but it was all wrong. It was enormous, and inhuman, and would feature prominently in his worst nightmares for the rest of his life.
And then it was gone.
Abigail…the shadow…everything.
Sheriff Wiley Prescott had seen enough. As he clenched the steering wheel in a death grip he took one last look at the Morlin farmhouse, hunting any sign of the madness he had witnessed. Nothing. He didn’t see anything but the little house and the weathered barn in the now orange light of the setting sun.
He didn’t look again.
/> Wiley stomped the gas pedal and accelerated away from the lonely homestead at a high rate of speed. His breathing still came in tortured gasps and he fought to regain control. He didn’t understand what had happened, but had no doubt as to its reality. All he knew was he had just experienced a close brush with something that lay far outside both the rules and regulations of the law, and those of any reality he was familiar with. Whatever it was, it was a lot deadlier than drug runners or criminals of any other nature, and that something had come within seconds of killing him…or worse.
And even as Wiley realized it, he also knew he could never report this. It would sound insane. And even worse, he had no evidence to prove any of it. The video camera in the cruiser had been pointed in the wrong direction since his car had faced toward the highway. People would think he was drunk, or crazy, or both.
And with early retirement only five years away, appearances mattered. Not to mention, that retirement suddenly looked attractive as hell.
Five years, and then he could find some quiet little seaside town in need of a constable. Maybe somewhere with a cheap condo and a view of the beach. His retirement wasn’t large, but with a little supplement a lot of things were possible.
It could work.
Until then, he silently vowed to keep as far away as possible from the southwest corner of Cole County. The Weyrich people could damn well take care of themselves.
###
“Get some rest, Adam. Olivia and I will be back in the morning. If you need us, you have my cell phone number.”
Receiving no answer, Antonio closed the hotel door on the reclining figure with a sigh.
That could have gone better.
The combination of shock at discovering the nature of his brother’s death, combined with the strain of whatever Grandma Lilah had done to his metabolism, had sent Adam into a state of near collapse. The engineer had turned bright red and started gasping for breath, and only swift action on Antonio’s part had prevented him from hitting the ground. Even worse, his obvious distress caught the attention of pretty much everybody in the park clearing.
Spiderstalk Page 28
