Primal Fear

by Boucher, Brad

  “Hey, it’s a theory, right?” Harry asked. “And it’s more than I got. But that note of his doesn’t come off like a goodbye to friends and family. Sounds more like a man trying to get on the good side of his maker, if you ask me. And other than being a bit rough around the edges, I don’t know what it is Marty Slater had to be so guilty about.”

  Hughes reflected on this, watching in silence as Charlie and Ben made their way slowly down the cellar stairs at the far end of the kitchen.

  “Careful down there, guys,” Harry called out, and then, more softly, he said to Hughes, “I don’t think Marty ever threw anything out in his life. Can only imagine what his basement looks like.”

  Hughes reached out and gave Harry a slap on the shoulder. “Got your work cut out for you on this one, friend. Come to think of it, I guess we both do. I’ll let you know what I come up with, just as soon as I can.”

  “Ditto,” Harry said, his eyes falling to the track of dirt on the kitchen floor. “I’ll relay whatever we find here over to you. Maybe between the two of us, this thing will start to fall into place a little easier.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Hughes said, but his tone didn’t carry much hope. What a dead man couldn’t tell him on the autopsy table, he’d once confessed to Harry, would never be known. “Well, gotta clear out of here. Take care, Harry.”

  “Will do. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Hughes made his way slowly out the back door and closed it behind him, cutting off the cold bite of the wind.

  Harry crouched beside the trail of dirt, reaching down to run his gloved fingers through one of the smudges. It was still slightly tacky, not yet completely dried, and his fingertip came away dirty, caked with the grayish-brown mud. Whoever had left the trail, they had done so recently, most likely that very morning.

  Thinking back, Harry recalled seeing the same shade of mud caked onto the bottom of Slater’s boots, indicating that it had been the home-owner himself that had marked up his kitchen floor. But where had Marty gone so early in the morning? The ground in his backyard was frozen solid; this mud was fresh.

  He lifted his fingers to his nose, slowly ground the dirt between them as he sniffed at the sample. It smelled chalky, more like the residue of cement than of mud; its texture confirmed this, rolling like grit between his fingers.

  Rising, Harry brushed his hands on the leg of his pants, letting the mud flake off and fall to the floor. Could this be a hint to Slater’s demise? Was it possible that this pre-dawn stroll could have something to do with his eventual suicide?

  He was about to move back into the living room to see what he might have missed upon his first investigation, when Charlie’s voice reached him from the open cellar doorway.

  “Hey, Harry? Shit, I think you’d better come and have a look at this.”

  He descended the cellar steps carefully, not at all encouraged by the creaks and moans that punctuated every step. They were steep and narrow, and his wide shoulders brushed the walls on both sides until he reached the bottom.

  Dimly lit, the air musty and smelling of stagnant water, the cellar was even worse than Harry had first imagined. Every available space seemed to be filled with junk, from broken furniture to stack after stack of water-logged magazines. One long set of shelves opposite the stairs was filled to bursting with what seemed to be a complete back-issue collection of the local Glen Forest Weekly News.

  “Jesus,” Harry murmured, stifling a cough. The bare soil of the floor crunched beneath his feet as he negotiated his way cautiously along the narrow path that wound its way in the direction of the basement’s far end.

  “Back here, Harry,” Ben called out, and the beam of a flashlight cut through the gloom ahead. Dust motes swam in the light, hanging in the air like moths around a lamp-post. “Watch your step.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” he called back, “I’ll do my best. You guys are still wearing your gloves, right? I don’t need anything that might be evidence contaminated here.”

  Charlie’s voice floated back to him. “Yeah, we got it covered.”

  “Glad to hear it.” A long row of boxes lined the wall to Harry’s right, stacked from floor to ceiling in haphazardly placed piles. He stopped and peered into two or three of them at random, peeling back the damp cardboard to reveal their contents.

  Kindling. Box after box of scrap wood, scavenged, he assumed, from the wood bins of a hundred different lumber yards. When Slater had planned to use this much kindling, Harry had no idea, but he was certain Marty would have never run out.

  Ben had called out to him from what appeared to be a small alcove set into the eastern wall of the stone foundation, somewhere ahead and off to Harry’s left. “I always knew Marty was one hell of a pack-rat,” he called out, “but I never knew he was this bad. Looks to me like he held onto everything he ever laid his hands—”

  Harry broke off as he rounded the corner of the alcove and found himself facing another stone wall. The tight passageway broke off again to the left, doubling back on itself before spilling out into what Harry assumed to be a separate storage area. Five concrete steps descended from where he stood and he moved down them slowly.

  Something didn’t feel right about the layout. The wall at his right was the foundation wall. Another area beyond that wall would have to have been dug out underground.

  As if to confirm this, Charlie leaned out into the narrow passage and waved Harry towards him. “Looks like Marty had himself a little bomb shelter hidden away down here, Chief.”

  Harry ran his right hand along the cold stones of the foundation wall. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Marty had been a pack-rat and—after his wife had left him—a loner. Was it possible he’d seen himself as something of a survivalist as well? And now that Harry thought about it, the eastern wall of Slater’s house lay lower to the earth than the rest, the ground sloping away steeply from the high mound that comprised his side yard. It was conceivable that a bomb shelter could have been carved out somewhere beneath that huge mound.

  Harry was struck by the absurdity of the situation, but any hint of a smile that might have risen on his face was swept away by Ben’s grim voice from within the shelter.

  “Holy shit.” The words had only been muttered, but it didn’t make any difference. There was no mistaking the fear in them.

  Ben stumbled out of the shelter to stand behind Charlie. His face was very pale, twisted into a grimace that Harry didn’t like at all.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Ben swallowed hard. “I think you’d better see for yourself, Harry.” He was leaning on a rusted iron door, what would have been, many years ago, the secure entrance to the bomb shelter. It stood against the wall now, twisted on its hinges, the intervening years and its own weight conspiring to leave it hanging at an odd angle, one which would never again allow the door to close completely.

  Harry could see a trace of horror in Ben’s eyes now as he quickened his pace to squeeze past him into the shelter. It was brighter here, illuminated not only by Charlie’s flashlight but also by a small lamp that had been set up in the far corner of the room. Its shade removed, it had been placed on top of an overturned milk crate, and by its garish light, Harry examined the strange interior of the tiny secret room.

  The shelter had been constructed of cinder blocks, its area roughly twelve feet long and ten feet wide, its ceiling only six feet high. Harry had to crouch to enter, the top of his head grazing the door frame as he pushed his way inside.

  Along one wall, a low table had been set up, a single battered chair placed before it. A tiny bookshelf stood alongside, its three available shelves crammed with ancient canned foods and supplies. Most disturbing, though, were the walls themselves. They had been literally covered with pornographic photos.

  From floor to ceiling and from end to end, each wall was filled with them, an X-rated collage of naked women, their images torn from countless adult magazines throughout the years and taped helter-skelter into place. Many of
them were curling and tattered, but some—presumably those that had been hung more recently—stood out as bright and glossy newcomers amid the sea of flesh. Some of the pages had been applied in layers, four or five thick in some places before the wall behind them could be glimpsed through some tear or fold in the paper.

  He let his eyes wander aimlessly over the immense collection of photographs, taking note that the majority of them seemed harmless enough—the same sort of photo you could tear out of a girlie magazine that any convenience store in the county would sell you over the counter. There were also a great number of them that had clearly been purchased from an adult bookstore. These were much more graphic, depicting their subjects in all manner of actual sexual activity.

  Harry was on the verge of wondering aloud how many years it would have taken Marty to amass such a huge collection of images, but the words stuck in his throat. Because his eye suddenly detected a sudden similarity in all of the photos, a single bit of connective tissue in the wide varieties of positions and activities.

  And he felt his stomach take a nauseating lurch.

  All of the girls in the photos, every last one that he took the time to train his eyes on, had been chosen for a single similar trait: their innocent, youthful appearance. Small-breasted and thin-hipped, many of the girls had been made up to appear even younger than they obviously were. Ponytails and barrettes appeared in abundance, girls posing with a gleam of innocent curiosity in their eyes, sometimes clutching teddy bears or sucking on lollipops, but always achieving the same result. The overall impression of this collage was that each of its subjects was a juvenile; for all intents and purposes, a child.

  But surely they couldn’t be. For a minor to be photographed in such a manner would be an act of child pornography, and no newsstand magazine in the country would ever dare to stoop that low. But that certainly didn’t mean they would shy away from suggesting it.

  Harry knew for a fact that many of those same publications made a concerted effort to appeal to every sort of fetishist they could. An extra touch of make-up to strengthen the illusion of youth was just as much a carefully calculated strategy as a photographer moving his model into an overtly evocative pose. Such a strategy would fire the reader’s imagination, allowing him to fantasize more easily about whatever sexual act it was that brought him the most pleasure.

  But this . . . this went well beyond harmless. Harry knew enough about psychology to understand that a collection this massive—and one displayed so prominently, spread out as though to surround its creator—could no longer be considered an outlet of one’s personal preference. This collage of images spoke of something that was nothing short of an obsession, one whose very subject matter hinted at a very disturbed and possibly dangerous mind.

  He moved towards one of the walls, taking a closer look at a number of the photos. He couldn’t be sure, but he felt fairly certain that none of them were the real thing. A good number of them had achieved an impressive level of illusion, but a close look into the model’s face gave away her true age in every picture he took the time to examine.

  He thought about Ben’s reaction and wondered if his deputy understood that the photos were all just fakes. The idea of such a depraved obsession was chilling, of course, but surely not horrible enough to send one of his best deputies stumbling from the room.

  He turned to Ben, who was still in the corner by the door, apparently unwilling to re-enter the room. “What is it? What’s the matter with—”

  Harry broke off, finally picking up on the direction of Ben’s stare. It wasn’t the walls themselves that Ben was looking at, it was something beneath the table set up opposite the door. Harry let his own gaze fall there.

  A number of cardboard boxes had been pulled partially out from under the table, probably while Charlie had been guiding Harry down the steps and into the room. Harry moved toward them, his heart beginning to beat faster.

  He pulled the covers off of the first three boxes, peering carefully inside. They were filled with what looked like old blasting equipment, the caps and detonators thrown into each box in a careless heap. Reels of red wire lay on top of everything else, apparently the only new addition to the contents of the carton.

  “How the hell do you suppose he got his hands on all that?” Charlie asked from behind him.

  “Most likely it’s all from the quarry. But I don’t know how he got out with so much of it. What’s bothering me more is what he was planning on doing with it.”

  “It’s in the other box,” Ben muttered. He sounded as though he was about to be sick, his eyes still downcast. “Harry, I—”

  Harry took a deep breath, reaching towards the last carton. A sudden instinct sparked within him, a deduction based in part on the photos that lined the walls, kindled by Ben’s strong reaction.

  And a part of him suddenly knew what he’d find inside.

  He tried to deny it, as if a simple act of denial could negate the truth. It was whatever Ben had seen inside of the box that had forced him from the room, and Harry held his breath as he tugged it out into the light.

  He hoped he would be wrong, that his suspicions would be proven untrue, but he couldn’t deny the gut feeling that was already gnawing at him. And all the hope in the world couldn’t change what he saw inside the box, and never in his life had he felt so poorly about his instincts being so right.

  The cardboard box was filled with articles of clothing, some of them torn, some of them in perfect condition, as if they’d just been plucked off of the rack at a local department store. But old or new, each piece of clothing had two things in common: they were all the garments of a child, and all of them had been designed for a girl.

  Harry pulled one of them out, his stomach churning. It was a small red dress, tiny white hearts printed up and down the sleeves, its collar torn and pulled out of shape. A dark stain had dried upon the back of the dress, a stain Harry knew at that moment would turn out to be blood.

  “Oh, no,” he whispered. “Oh, dear Jesus, no . . .”

  It all added up, everything he’d seen this morning coming together in a sudden thunderclap of realization. Slater’s note, his pleas for forgiveness; the thousands of pictures of young women that had been carefully selected and pasted to the walls of the shelter; even the silent privacy of Slater’s life, his reputation of living almost as a hermit.

  It all made terrible, tragic sense.

  And pushing it all home was the State Police update Harry had received only three days before, a report that had come in from the police barracks in Concord. Five missing children, all of them female, all of them between the ages of nine and thirteen, all of them reported missing within the past three weeks.

  And all of them within a two-hundred mile radius.

  There had been no indication that the epicenter of activity had been Slater’s house, and Harry began to wonder even then whether he’d missed some tell-tale remark or action on Marty’s part that would have tipped him off.

  “Call the state boys,” he ordered quietly, not daring to make eye contact with either of his deputies. He knew his own expression would betray his fear, his revulsion; he felt no desire to share such apparent weakness with his men. “Tell them to high-tail it out here. I think we might have found their kidnapper.”

  He let the tiny dress fall back into the box, and when he raised his empty hand to wipe away the cold sweat breaking out of his brow, he noticed with some dismay that his fingers had begun to shake.

  Chapter Five

  John zippered his duffel bag and cast a final glance around his apartment, hoping he’d remembered everything.

  He thought about calling Dr. Morris again, but how could he explain why he had to leave so suddenly? In the end, he understood that Morris would never believe him, not completely. Hell, he’d barely come to terms with it himself.

  Could he even really call it belief, if it was founded on the dreams he’d had the night before, dreams he was convinced had been somehow planted in his
thoughts by Mahuk? He wished he could be certain that the dreams had really been revelations, confirmations of the facts Mahuk had told him the day before. Because if he was wrong, and this leap of faith he was taking turned out to be a wild-goose chase . . .

  Well, then so be it.

  He would slink back to the university with his tail between his legs, looking like a fool. But the chance to find out the truth about the old legends, to know for sure whether they were real or not . . . that was something John could not afford to pass up.

  He hadn’t told Morris all of the things the old man had said in their second conversation, despite his promise to share everything he learned. Holding back hadn’t been an intentional attempt at deception, but rather a cautious decision to protect Morris from danger. Because if the legend did come to pass, if the prophetic sequence of events that the old man had shared with him had truly occurred, then the less people involved, the better.

  And of course there was still a nagging doubt—even now—after all he’d seen and felt, both at Mahuk’s bedside and in the dreams he’d had. It was the same stubborn skepticism that had made him question the beliefs of his people for so many years at college. He supposed it would always be a part of him, a part of his nature. He’d always wanted to believe in himself and his modern knowledge, to deny the possibility that his father had been right all along.

  But it had all come back to him with the arrival of the old man at the hospital. All of the guilt, all of the uncertainty. Worst of all, all of the same questions that had first arisen to challenge his own faith.

  In the cold sterility of the hospital room, John had listened intently to a story that hadn’t been told in generations, a tale only an Eskimo shaman could know. His own studies had never revealed the second legend to him, making only vague references to its existence, and he’d never placed any credence in it. But now, after hearing the old man whisper fearfully of those same beliefs, John understood he could no longer sit idly by and let his own faith slip away to die forever.