Primal Fear

by Boucher, Brad

  There were bound to be more of those, but he wasn’t ready for them.

  Not just yet.

  Chapter Eight

  The intercom buzzed again, distracting Dr. Morris for the third time in twenty minutes. He reached out and punched down the receiver switch.

  “Yes?”

  “Dr. Morris? Sorry to bother you again, but something strange is going on with the John Doe.”

  He put down his pen, the report he was working on suddenly forgotten. “The old man?”

  “Yes. He’s in some sort of . . . I don’t know what to call it . . . it’s almost as if he’s asleep, but the monitors are giving us some pretty odd readings.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  He left his office immediately, heading down the long corridor that would take him to the elevators. His nerves felt as though they’d been pulled taut, stretched to their limits by the recent changes in the patient’s condition.

  He’d warned John that the old man might slip away at any time. His survival so far was probably due just as much to an incredibly strong power of will as to the modern medical care his staff had been able to provide. And will power, no matter how strong, could not last forever.

  John had become quiet and cryptic the last time Morris had talked to him. He’d insisted that keeping the old man alive was of vital importance, no matter what might be required. Morris had replied that he considered the preservation of anyone’s life to be vitally important, but was curious as to John’s sudden overwhelming concern for their elderly John Doe.

  The young Eskimo’s reply had been less than comforting.

  “I wish I could put it into words,” he’d said. “It’s just . . . what’s going on here is much more complicated than it seems. It’s all wrapped up in Mahuk’s past, in his ancestral line. If I can trace that back and see where it leads, I’m hoping I’ll have more to tell you.”

  And that had been all. Morris had decided not to press John any further. If the young man had known more, Morris knew he would have shared it. In the time they’d known each other, one notion more than any other had impressed him about John: he was a young man who was true to his word, who seemed more concerned with truth and self-reliance than with any other aspect of life.

  Now, making his way to the old man’s room, Morris hoped he could hold up his end of the bargain. He would do his best to keep the shaman alive, but there was simply no way to tell if his best would be good enough.

  Nurse Gower, the unit’s supervisor and a woman Morris had worked with for almost a decade, was waiting for him just outside the door to the intensive care unit.

  “What’ve we got?”

  She frowned, handing him a copy of the latest monitor readings. “I wish I knew. He’s in a state I would normally associate with deep coma, accept that his vital signs are almost non-existent for minutes at a time. I was ready to order an emergency team in here just before you arrived. I thought he was going into cardiac arrest. But then all his vitals came back strong and leveled off at the same time.”

  “And what about now?”

  “Now they’re all almost undetectable again. It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.” She paused, reading his reaction. “I think we should start emergency procedures.”

  Morris eyed the chart for another moment and then nodded. “Agreed. Let’s get a team in there. I want to be ready if—”

  A second nurse pushed through the ICU door, her face a study in confusion. “His vitals are back up. I don’t understand how, but everything seems normal again.”

  Morris followed the nurse down the hall and into the observation area. From every indication, the patient seemed to be sleeping peacefully. He was just about to turn away when the old man suddenly raised his arms, his hands twisting into what Morris might have believed was common sign language.

  But there was something vaguely frightening in the motions of his fingers, something strangely alien, as if the words they formed were not meant for human understanding. As if such understanding might be in some way dangerous. The feeling passed quickly as he turned his thoughts back to the earlier motions the old man had performed. These motions were different, in an entirely new configuration, one that he hadn’t seen yet.

  Nurse Gower was still beside him, watching the performance with the same mixed expression of wonder and confusion.

  “Is this the first time he’s done this tonight?” Morris asked, unable to tear his eyes away from the spectacle of movement, watching in awe as the patient’s hands formed shapes and gestures that should have been impossible for human hands to create.

  “As far as I know.” She hesitated, her voice unsteady. “Should I still request a trauma team?”

  He nodded. “Have them stand by, just in case.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this in my life,” Nurse Gower murmured, moving off to carry out her orders.

  Morris pushed his glasses further up on his nose. “Neither have I.”

  Beyond the glass, in the stuffy silence of his room, the old man began to whisper in his sleep.

  “Ben? You there?”

  Harry tightened his grip on the phone and tried to control his impatience. It had been Ben who’d picked up the phone at Slater’s house, and Harry had asked him to get his hands on the suicide note and to hurry back to the phone. That had been more than five minutes ago and the young deputy still hadn’t picked up again.

  “Hey, Chief.” It was Charlie’s voice that came down the line now. “Where are you?”

  “I’m out at Del’s office. We just got through going over some of the details of Marty’s autopsy. Listen, I really need you to read me that note again.”

  “The State Police team wouldn’t let us walk off with it. He told us it was evidence; guess he thought we might go and lose it on him.”

  Harry sighed. “Jameson?”

  “That’s right. He’s heading things up over here. Good guess.”

  “It was easy. Jameson thinks he’s the only guy who ever did anything right in the history of law enforcement.”

  “That’s him. Anyway, he let me jot down a copy of the note as long as I promised not to leave his sight. I copied it word for word.”

  “Great. Let’s hear it.”

  He heard a rustle of paper through the line, could imagine Charlie leaning on the kitchen doorway, the receiver in one hand and the note in the other.

  “Okay,” Charlie said, “here it is: ‘To whoever it is that finds me. Please understand that what I’m doing here is for my own good . . .’”

  A shiver ran through Harry’s body as he considered yet again that he’d lived so close to a man with such a dark secret. How many nights had Harry worked late, sometimes past midnight, leaving Laurie alone at home, never knowing that Slater—just a stone’s throw way—had been so unbalanced?

  Charlie cleared his throat and pressed on.

  “Let’s see . . . ‘I wish I could stop myself, or take it all back, but I know it’s too late for that now. I only hope God will forgive me for what I done and for what I’m about to do. I can’t say I didn’t have a hand in what happened, but I never wanted it to go this far. I hope someone someday will believe that. In my heart, I know it’s true. But they wouldn’t leave me alone—’”

  Harry’s ears perked up. This was what he’d been waiting for.

  “‘. . . they wouldn’t let me be. I tried to say no, tried to shut them out, but it didn’t make any bit of difference. Now I know there’s only one thing left for me to do. God give me the strength, and forgive my sinning soul.’”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Just one more thing,” Charlie said. “He signed his name. Martin L. Slater.”

  John Artaqua stiffened in his seat, his limbs going suddenly tense, his fists closing around the padded armrests. His head lolled against the cushion, eyes pressed tightly closed and his brow furrowed in what might have been an expression of great pain.

  He’d boarded the flight an hour before in Mon
treal, still feeling as though he might be acting too impulsively. Was he behaving foolishly, putting too much faith in the words of a dying old man? Or was it merely fear, inspired by his knowledge of the ancient legends and heightened by the grotesque artifact he’d discovered in the shaman’s bag?

  During take-off, he’d felt so tense and uncomfortable that twice he’d earned a sympathetic smile from the passenger across the aisle. He was sure his distress had been mistaken for a fear of flying, and he gratefully nodded in response to his fellow passenger’s attempts to calm him.

  Soon after they were airborne, a wave of intense fatigue had washed over him and, unable to even keep his eyes open, John had given up, falling into a deep and restful sleep.

  The dreams had begun immediately.

  At first they were of no consequence, just a seemingly harmless cascade of images from the last forty-eight hours. His first glimpse of the old man; the startling sight of the ritual of summoning that the shaman had been performing in his sleep; the grisly vision of the artifact, half wood and half bone, somehow more obscene in this dreamed remembrance than it had been when he’d first plucked it from the bottom of the bag.

  But then the images began to lose cohesion, to break away from their reflections of reality and become more ambiguous. A prickle of fear touched him, even in sleep. But all he could do was watch as the dream unfolded before him, an unwilling hostage to his own subconscious mind.

  A confusing jumble of images flashed behind his eyes, flicking by at strobe speed, most of them lost to memory as others rose to take their place. A frightening merging of light and shadow, of faces both familiar and unknown, thrown before his sight for the fleeting duration of a heartbeat.

  Other sensations touched him as well, sounds and odors that were as varied and fleeting as the visions. They began to slow down now, though, each one drawn out just a second longer than the one before it, each new sensation more defined than the last. And when it seemed that the catalogue of imagery had reached some crucial, predetermined point, the sights themselves converged into one coherent vision. The details were so rich, so sharply rendered in his mind’s eye, that he felt sure he could reach out and touch any of the objects in his immediate vicinity.

  He felt a bite of coldness, a chill so complete it seemed to come from within his own body. A foul odor filled his nostrils, a chemical aroma so sharp and pungent it sickened him to breathe it in.

  The edges of a doorway loomed in his vision, a short hallway beyond, walls painted white with the bare sterility of a hospital or clinic. He moved along it, his limbs moving on their own, a puppet following the commands of an unknown master. To his right, another doorway appeared, its wood-panel door open wide. A deep, authoritative voice emanated from within.

  He couldn’t make out what the voice was saying, couldn’t quite string the words together into a single, sensible sentence, but he seemed to understand it was the speaker himself that was important, not the words coming from him.

  He moved closer, reaching a point just outside the door.

  A sudden blackness filled his vision, shutting out everything else, pushing every other sensation away. Searing pain invaded his body, and a feeling of terror more intense than he’d ever known possible. Worst of all, though, was the impression that he was being studied, picked apart from within, as if the watchful blackness was searching for a way out.

  The darkness vanished as quickly as it had come, the feelings of fear washing away like sands in the tide. The second doorway swam back into focus, just as he reached it and began to turn.

  There was a man inside, seated on the corner of the desk, his back to the door. A telephone receiver was cradled between his head and shoulder, its cord pulled taut from the far end of the desk.

  John tried to get a look at the man’s face, sensing that identification was vitally important, but not completely understanding why. But the stranger had his back to him, his face turned away, and John could only rely on whatever details he could manage to take in.

  A khaki shirt covered the man’s back, some sort of patch or insignia sewn onto the sleeve just below the right shoulder. A policeman’s uniform? Is that what he was looking at?

  Confirmation came quickly enough as he spotted the gun at the man’s hip, a police issue revolver, and beside it a small leather case attached to his belt that would undoubtedly contain a pair of handcuffs.

  Again, the feeling of movement commanded his limbs and he took another step forward, stepping into the office itself.

  “There’s something else I want you guys to look for,” Harry said, the phone still pressed to his ear. “I want you to poke around, see if you can turn up a screwdriver, or a pen—something blunt like that—it’ll probably have blood on it. You may not find anything, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a look.”

  Charlie muttered an affirmative and asked Harry to hold on a moment as someone approached him. The muffled sound of Charlie’s voice came through the phone as he exchanged a few words with the visitor.

  Harry waited, rubbing his brow, wanting nothing more than for this day to be over.

  A floorboard creaked behind him, from a spot just inside the office door.

  Hughes, he assumed, already back from his jaunt upstairs. He was about to murmur an apology to Del for using the phone for so long, but Charlie came back on the line before he could get the words out.

  “Sorry about that. Ben was looking for some more evidence bags. Anything else?”

  “Only that I appreciate what you guys are doing out there. I haven’t been able to raise anybody to relieve you yet, but I’ll have Dana keep trying.”

  “No problem. Talk to you later.”

  Charlie broke the connection, a hollow click that reached Harry as he leaned across the desk and set the receiver back into its cradle.

  “That was Charlie,” he said. “He read the note to me and—”

  He stopped short.

  He’d caught a glimpse of Hughes in the polished surface of the mahogany desk top, reflected from his position beside the office door. Just behind Harry. There was something terribly wrong about the blurred features Harry could make out, something horribly off-kilter, as if Hughes had met with some disfiguring accident on his way upstairs.

  Harry began to turn, his eyes once again taking in the distorted reflection in the desktop beside him. He’d been mistaken, he realized. It wasn’t Hughes who’d stepped up behind him. It was someone else, someone who seemed familiar to him in some way, but whom his mind refused to identify.

  A smell reached him then, a sharp chemical odor that suddenly seemed to fill the entire office.

  Realization came in a whirlwind of sudden fear.

  The identity of his visitor slammed home, the name rising in his thoughts even as he turned to confirm his suspicion. His hand upended the framed photo of Del and his father. He dimly heard the crash as it shattered on the hardwood floor, but the sound barely registered in his thoughts.

  Marty Slater stood in the doorway, his single eye centered intently upon Harry, his dead hands rising to clumsily form some mysterious pattern in front of his chest. The chemical reek in the room had grown even stronger and a sudden chill seemed to permeate the air around them.

  Harry wanted to scream, but the sound caught in his throat. He felt paralyzed by fear, and it was all he could do to take a single, staggering step backwards.

  Marty moved forward, advancing stiffly into the office, his mouth lolling open while his fingers continued to flex from one odd configuration to another. He was naked, a ragged incision traversing his chest and belly in the shape of a wide letter Y. Hughes had stitched the body up following the autopsy, of course, using the standard metal staples of his trade. But the impossible rising and movement of the body had loosened several of them and the flesh was once again beginning to open up at numerous points along Slater’s midsection.

  The damage to Slater’s face was even more unsettling. With the overhead lights glistening across Slat
er’s ghastly features, and the obscenely stiff motions of his body as he stepped once again towards Harry, the terrible wounds caused by the shotgun seemed even more devastating.

  Harry stepped back again and felt his shoulders brush the wall behind him. There was no place left to run.

  The corpse advanced another step, a soft breath passing between its lips, little more than a whisper. The dark orb of its right eye was still fixed on Harry. There seemed to be a faint glimmer of life deep within its pupil, a hint of intelligence completely alien to the body that had shambled in from the hall.

  Slater’s lips moved again, this time forcing out a single guttural sound, one that might have been a word. “. . . jhuk . . .” His hands stopped moving, one of them rising to stretch towards Harry, its index finger extended crookedly in his direction.

  “. . . jhuk kata . . . iti huttut . . .”

  The words seemed to come more easily now, as if through ceasing the strange movement of his hands, Slater had gained greater control of his lips and tongue. Still, his voice was weak, the words riding on a breath he should not have been able to produce.

  “. . . jhuk atae . . . katta atae . . . iti huttut . . .”

  Harry shook his head, as if the simple gesture might be enough to rid him of this vision forever. A part of his mind that had been stricken helpless by the sight of Slater’s walking corpse suddenly freed itself, pushing aside a bit of the fear that had paralyzed him. He reached for his gun, as if he’d just remembered he was carrying it. His fingers fumbled at the strap, trying desperately to unsnap it. But the fear had not departed completely, and had left his fingers weak and clumsy.

  A tense five seconds passed—seconds that seemed to stretch themselves into an eternity—before he was able to manipulate the holster’s strap and tug it out of the way. His eyes never left Slater’s the entire time, riveted on the dim spark of intelligence that still seemed to burn there.