A triumphant roar to the rear announced the predator had found his trail.
Careful not to splash, Carl pushed harder with his legs and moved deeper into the lake. The low fog almost completely blinded him, but it didn’t matter now. Actually, he hoped it meant his head would not be visible to the shore…especially since the sound of the wendigo storming into the water reached his ears.
Carl closed his eyes and moved onwards, praying the monster hadn’t spotted him. Hopefully it had just charged blindly into the water after finding the place he went in. It sounded like it did that very thing. The problem was he had pretty much headed straight out from shore, and if his pursuer did the same then the odds were good it would get close enough to spot him.
He could hear it thrashing its way through the water in his direction. At least the act of wading seemed to be slowing the thing down some as well. The creature grunted with each slosh and he could hear it draw nearer. It sounded like it moved with purpose, determined to finish this thing once and for all.
And then he heard the gunshot.
A bright beam of light stabbed though the night overhead, and he heard the horror howl in rage and confusion. Another gunshot rang out…and then another. The thing roared again, and the thrashing sounds increased. Two more shots echoed across the water, followed by another massive bellow and more thrashing.
Then, to Carl’s surprise, everything went quiet.
Nothing. No sound at all.
The sheriff pushed forward a few more steps, then stopped and tried to make sense of the sudden silence. He couldn’t see anything in the low mist, other than a bright spot of light through the fog and its beam lancing overhead. He settled for straining his ears to make out what was happening. It took almost a full minute, but his patience finally bore fruit.
“Sheriiiiffffff!!! Where are you!”
It was Pete. And he sounded fairly close.
He wasn’t exactly shouting, more like yelling in a soft voice. It sounded like a man not sure of the situation, nor confident in what to do. Carl tried to figure out what the hell could be going on, and whether the threat had ended or not. He hated not knowing, but at the same time reasoned if Pete found it safe to yell for him, it must be okay for him to answer.
“Over here!” he called back, discovering his own inner qualms caused him to have the same tone of voice as Pete. What the hell was going on out there?
“Okay, good” the rookie answered, He sounded relieved but scared at the same time. “Look Sheriff, I’m a little nervous about coming in any closer, so if it’s possible for you to come this way it would be a whole lot better. Trust me on this one, okay?”
Something in Pete’s voice told the sheriff it would be a good idea to do things the deputy’s way. Somehow the kid may have just saved his bacon, so it didn’t bother him to trust his judgment on this one. He oriented himself toward the bright spot of light and started moving in that direction. Caution still forced him to move quietly, but now he moved swifter than before.
In almost no time he reached the craft, and used his good arm to take Pete’s outstretched hand. It hurt like hell, but he fought through his injuries and managed to finally lever himself over the side and into the floor of the boat. For a moment he just lay there gasping, then realized the deputy still had the spotlight pointed toward the island with a tight look on his face.
Carl struggled to his knees and looked out across the fog layered water to see what the deputy stared at.
It was the wendigo, and it stood thigh deep in the water about sixty feet away.
“What the hell?” Carl whispered, “What is it doing?”
“I don’t know. It was coming at me, then it just stopped. Since then it’s just been staring at me like it wants me for lunch, but it hasn’t come any closer.”
With the foggy lake as a background, the stygian giant stood out sharper than ever. Its shoulders hunched under the great spread of antlers, and its chest heaved as it glared in their direction. Even at this distance, the thing seemed massive. And it radiated malevolence in their direction like a palpable breeze.
Carl gazed in both fear and wonder at the monstrosity, and felt it see him as well. Predator and prey gazed across the distance at each other one final time. And as the sheriff met the phantasm’s stare he understood the hunt was finally over. He had won.
He was the one that got away.
“I don’t think he can come any closer, Pete. I think it’s standing at the edge of the mound, or burial ground, or whatever the hell Deerhunter Hill really is.”
“Huh?”
“It’s still a ghost…whatever the hell else it is…and it can’t leave its hauntin’ grounds.”
Pete looked at the sheriff in disbelief then stared back out at the towering black form in the lake.
The black apparition raised its head to the sky and gave one last, long, earth-shaking howl. It rose in pitch as it continued—a long wailing note of frustration and fury. And as it went on, the monster itself seemed to blur against the white background. Its edges appeared to fade as if the thing were evaporating right before their eyes.
Shreds of black floated off the shape and drifted up into the sky. The once sharp outline of the predator began to round, then lost all semblance of its former shape as more and more of it dissipated into the night. The howl faded along with it, becoming fainter and fainter as it disappeared.
Thirty seconds later it vanished.
Silence returned, leaving the two men staring at an empty spot on the fog shrouded lake.
“Holy hell,” Pete muttered in awe, “It really was a ghost. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”
“Yeah, how ‘bout that,” the sheriff agreed weakly then slumped back into the floor of the boat. “How ‘bout that.”
The world began to spin and Carl fought to keep from passing out. Fainting now would be just one indignity too many. And the thought of maintaining some shred of appearances brought one more thought to mind.
“Hey Pete, you might want to think hard before telling Les what happened here tonight. I’m not quite sure how he would take giant, man-eating ghosts.”
The deputy seemed to chew that over for a second, then shrugged.
“Not my problem, Sheriff.”
Carl looked in surprise at the young man as he bent to start the outboard motor.
“Not your problem?”
“No, sir.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” the deputy grunted as he gave the motor cord the first of several yanks, “as soon as I get back to the shore…I quit. I just decided to listen to my mother and be a plumber.”
***
Two weeks later Sheriff Carl Gartner leaned on the door of his squad car and gazed out across the choppy waters of the newly filled Lake Hallisboro. The recent rains had accelerated the rise of the waters, and now the lake stretched unbroken from shore to shore. Carl found it a beautiful sight.
“Moonshiners, huh.”
The sheriff sighed and glanced over at Les, who leaned on the other door and returned his look with a calculating expression.
“You read the reports,” Carl shrugged, then winced at the pain it caused his shoulder. They couldn’t put a cast on a cracked scapula, so he was forced to simply wear a sling and not use it much. At least his knee turned out not to be broken, just badly sprained.
“Yeah, I read them. Those were quite a work of art.”
Carl chuckled at his deputy’s skepticism.
He knew Les had probably found about a hundred different holes in his report about a surprise encounter with moonshiners, then an accident prone retreat through the woods after a short gunfight. The deputy was just too sharp not to smell the fish in that story. But he would be damned if he would start blabbing about ghosts, wendigos, and haunted mounds. He doubted Les would want to hear that kind of story either.
And it didn’t matter anyway. Pete had already left for some plumber’s school in Hous
ton, Luther Cole’s body now rested in the small county cemetery that bore his own surname, and Deerhunter Hill lay submerged under twenty feet of water. It was over and the threat had passed. Telling the truth now would serve no purpose other than to move up his retirement by four years.
Nope, things worked out pretty much the best way they could.
“Well, Les, sometimes art is truth.” Carl smiled out at the new lake. “Especially when it needs to be.”
A Memory of Me
“I am so sorry.” Will whispered into the night.
He gazed out from his place on the bluff, across the moon washed river bottom, to the tree line that marked the Brazos itself. He could hear the sounds of the river from here. The song of frogs reached up from the shadowed banks, just as they had from time immemorial. Somewhere down there, steamboats had dropped off supplies and picked up bales of cotton from the long vanished town that once topped the ridge where he now stood.
It must have been a grand time when the steamboats arrived. Imagining the celebration and bustle of those long ago arrivals filled him with nostalgia for a time he never knew. It also helped him ignore the travesty his friends were committing in the graveyard behind him.
Port Sullivan had boasted more than fifteen hundred people, a sawmill, a college, and numerous stores and motels. All of that vanished long ago when the railroads bypassed the town, and river travel became obsolete. Now only a brush choked graveyard, which few of today’s locals knew about, remained hidden in a thicket of trees along the top of the bluff. Most people in nearby Hearne or Bryan had never even heard of the city which once represented the important northern edge of river travel on the Brazos.
Will stumbled onto its existence while researching a term paper for his history class at Texas A&M. The idea that such a large town once existed nearby without leaving a trace surprised him, and he felt compelled to investigate for himself. Of course it never occurred to him to go on this excursion without letting Jack and Rowley in on it, and now he had the smell of the burning grave marker to remind him of that error.
“Hey, Will! C’mon back and stop being a stranger.” Jacks cheerful voice called from the darkness behind him. “I’ll toast you a snack.”
Will choked on his own anger.
He knew full well he wasn’t going to say anything. It wouldn’t do any good. So he consoled himself with the thought that making a big deal out of it would only cause Jack to do something more outrageous.
Turning his back on the moonlit vista below, he clicked on his little flashlight and made his way back into the darkness of the trees. Laughter came from the yellow glow ahead, just visible through the hanging vines. He picked his way forward, careful not to catch his foot on a briar or an overgrown tombstone, while shining his light around to avoid spider webs and hanging sticker vines.
Tromping out into the clearing, Will spotted his companions in a small section of the graveyard surrounded by a decrepit wrought iron fence. Their faces illuminated by the small fire, Rowley leaned against the fence while Jack lounged on a low stone sarcophagus.
“The lone wolf returns.” Jack grinned broadly across the clearing. “Pull up a grave and join the party.”
“That’s history you’re burning,” Will sighed, “Not to mention, what might be the last evidence of a real person who once walked this earth.”
“Exactly! And that’s the whole point!” Jack pulled back the stick he had been holding over the burning marker and extended it toward Will. “Marshmallow?”
“No thanks.” He averted his face from the offering, “What is the whole point?”
“Historical clutter.” Jack gestured at the burning grave marker, its rounded top carved to look like the stone versions that more affluent people could afford back then.
“What?” He couldn’t help the shock in his voice. Even after knowing him for two years, Jack’s views on life still had the power to surprise him.
“What do Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Attila the Hun have in common?”
“I…uh…I give up. What?”
“None of them have tombstones.”
“So?” Will tried to grasp the connection. He was far from slow, but Jack’s thought processes often left him floundering to catch up.
“They didn’t have tombstones. Hell, they were buried in secret. But everybody knows who they were. They mattered. This on the other hand…” he waved dismissively at the source of their illumination, “…is a vanity. It’s a pitiable cry for something undeserved.”
“Remembrance?”
“Beyond her own circle, yes.” Jack took a bite of the marshmallow. “And a pointless gesture on the part of whoever put it there. They didn’t need it to remember her, and she has no use for it herself. Hell, it’s cleaner to finish the job of sending the poor wretch off to oblivion”
“So you just erase her?” Will felt a bit queasy at the thought. The smell of the marshmallow hung fetid in the night graveyard air.
“There is no ‘her’ to erase. There is at most a spongy collection of bones about five to six feet beneath us. There is no such thing as a dead person. There is a person, and then there isn’t. People get hung up on residues, and confuse constructs of their own imaginations and memories with the present. They give life and feeling to a delusion created from their own recollections. You have to cut through those illusions, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“By burning somebody’s grave marker?”
“Yes!” Jack stood up and pointed at the charring stump. “Don’t you see? Working it out through intellect isn’t good enough. Even knowing that there is no ‘dead person,’ you still refer to that piece of wood as ‘somebody’s’ marker. There is no ‘somebody’. And by burning that piece of wood, I’m cutting my own Gordian knot here. I’m overcoming the illusion of death. You can’t accomplish that by reason alone.”
“Oh.”
It seemed an underwhelming response on his part, but he could think of nothing else to say. One got used to being underwhelming in Jack’s presence. Standing a powerful six foot two inches tall, with Teutonic good looks and a ferocious 140 IQ, Jack Strauss embodied the word “impressive.” He possessed a cheerful assertiveness that dominated the atmosphere around him. Sometimes Will wondered if Nietzsche had somebody like Jack in mind when he posited his ubermensch.
And since Will was not in the mood to argue Jack’s “overcoming of Death,” he felt it would be more productive to just try and not provoke any further damage to the site.
“And that’s why you want to spend the night out here too. As an act of defeating death?”
“Well yeah,” Jack laughed, “and how many people have actually ever camped in a graveyard? Seriously, name one. At least when you’re old, you can tell your grandkids you really did it.” He stretched out on top of the concrete sarcophagus, hands behind his head.
“You are unbelievable.” Will groaned.
“Yeah, but you gotta admit he’s pretty cool.” Rowley chipped in.
Shaking his head, Will turned toward the sleeping bag he had earlier laid out right outside the rusting wrought iron fence. He patted his hands down the length of it, making one last check for hard lumps that might be stones or roots. Finding nothing, he unzipped the top two feet of the bag in preparation to crawl in.
“My grandkids are going to think I’m a complete dumbass,” he grumbled to himself. Taking off his shoes, he slid into his bed for the evening and turned his back to the fire.
“Good night, you guys.”
“Good night, John Boy.”
With a sigh, Will shifted and tried to get comfortable on the still knobby ground. Failing that, he gave up, closed his eyes, and tried to dream of steamboats.
***
The dream that came had nothing to do with steamboats.
Will found himself standing by his sleeping body, and looking over the slumbering forms of his companions.
He saw that Jack had fallen asleep on the concrete sarcophagus. He lay in the exact
same pose Will had last seen him. Hands behind his head, Jack snored in the deep untroubled sleep of a man completely at home with wherever he was. Dappled moonlight, filtering down through the trees, made him look like a carved bas relief on the lid of the sarcophagus. Rowley huddled in his sleeping bag at the foot of the tomb, tossing and fidgeting in more fitful slumber.
And as Will looked down on them, he realized they weren’t alone.
People stared at them from all corners of the graveyard. Silent people. People in old style clothing who stood motionless, waist deep in the ground, each at their own gravesite. Men, women, young and old, all staring in frozen wordless reproach at the trio sleeping near the charred gravemarker. Many were barely visible due to the brush. Some others were just presences he could feel watching from their overgrown graves in the black thickets of the trees.
The air hung heavy and still, as if weighted by the combined gaze of the graveyard’s inhabitants. The song of crickets lent the lone sign of life to the tableau. From his position at the foot of his own sleeping bag, Will found his gaze drawn to the figure beside the charred grave marker that had furnished Jack’s fire.
Unlike the others, she stood completely out of her grave.
He could definitely make out a woman’s figure, with long dark hair. She wore an old turn of the century style dress with a hat or bonnet of some type. She stood with her back to him, due to the fact she gazed down on Jack and Rowley from her grave’s position by the low stone sarcophagus.
Up until seeing her, Will’s feelings about being under the scrutiny of the cemetery’s occupants amounted to a certain sense of shame. He knew that he and his friends had committed the intrusion here. He struggled to speak, for he felt the overwhelming urge to apologize to these people whose peace he had disturbed. Paralyzed in the grip of the dream, just the faintest of sounds managed to escape his throat.
Apparently that sufficed.
Some sixth sense told him that he had caught the woman’s attention. As if moving in slow motion, she started to turn toward Will. At that same instant, his instincts screamed of danger for the first time. This ghost felt different from the others. Instead of the sense of reproach he felt from the other specters, this shade emanated menace.
Shades: Eight Tales of Terror Page 9
