John Womack was still.
Kyle now wet himself, letting loose in his jeans. His knees felt rubbery. He (somehow) knew that trying to flee Joe was a mistake and yet the idea of just awaiting for Joe’s fury was a prospect almost more frightening than death.
Kyle Cain turned to look at the murdering, avenging ghost of Injun Joe. As soon as his gaze found the ghoul, Joe moved again. The specter walked slowly toward shore, now almost casual in his stride. And a smile was gathering on Joe’s face, the most sinister smile, the grin of a demon.
Kyle was aware of Tom turning heels and running.
Unable to stand it anymore, Kyle did the same. Panic destroyed paralysis.
He ran for his life.
Only as Kyle was passing Tom did he realize Tom wasn’t fleeing after all. He wasn’t trying to get away. He was trying to get to Joe’s hatchet.
Kyle skidded to a stop, looking back at Joe. He then looked at Tom and shrieked, “What are you DOING!”
Only now did Kyle see the tears streaming down Tom’s face. He was shocked. He’d never seen his buddy cry and would have bet he’d never see this.
Of course, he also would have bet he’d never see any of his friend’s brains.
“He killed Drake!” Tom blubbered, not even looking at Kyle as he reached up to grab the handle of Joe’s tomahawk. “He killed John! He killed Lunkhead!”
Kyle screamed, “HE’S GOING TO KILL US TOO IF WE DON’T GET OUTTA HERE!”
Instead of responding to Kyle, Tom grunted as he pulled on the tomahawk. It didn’t budge. The blade was completely embedded in a fat, old oak tree.
Kyle realized what Tom was trying to do. For some reason he’d abandoned his gun, thinking he could somehow turn Joe’s own weapon against him. Kyle didn’t know if the idea was brilliant or insane. Too panicked to say anything else, he wailed, “Tom!”
Tom glanced at him, a wild look in his eyes as he said, “I can do this,” and then he raised a foot and pushed against the tree as he used both hands to try to pull out the tomahawk.
He grunted, then squealed, and then squealed again. Looking at his hand with bulging eyes, he screeched at the top of his lungs, a cry of either pain or terror, Kyle couldn’t tell which.
Kyle saw the reason for Tom’s horror. Tom had let loose of the tomahawk with his left hand and was using that hand to push against the tree, but his right hand seemed affixed to the black handle. Ribbons of energy— a mixture of a blue-white electric current and green will-o-the-wisps— crackled around the tomahawk and up Tom’s arm. Before Kyle’s horrified eyes, he saw Tom’s hand become the handle, melting into the wood until all his fingers were gone.
At the end of Tom Pascal’s right arm was now a black tomahawk that was still firmly embedded in a tree. He pulled on the right appendage, grunting, and then wailed with frustration and fear.
Tom looked frantically at Kyle and yelled, “GO!”
Tom and Kyle made eye contact in the dark. Thanks to dramatic beams of moonlight, they could clearly see each other’s faces. “GET OUT OF HERE!”
“But—!” Tom was trapped. Kyle knew it. He couldn’t leave him here with that evil devil.
He couldn’t leave him here to die!
“GO ON!” Tom yanked and yanked on the tomahawk, wrenching his shoulder in the process. Wincing, grabbing his right shoulder with his good left hand, he collapsed against the tree and cried.
Kyle looked back and saw that Joe had just reached the shore, he was barely ten yards away from them, stalking forward, still grinning, the fog now nipping at his heels. The ghost stepped over Drake’s body, headed toward Tom, but he looked directly at Kyle.
Kyle ran.
Behind him, Tom groaned, “Noooo!”
Kyle knew he was a coward. Even as he ran faster, out of the clearing, into the darkness of the forest, he knew he was a traitor.
Tom needed his help.
“Oh God, no! Please, NO!” Tom then screamed like he’d just received an electric shock.
Kyle lowered his head and ran faster, nearly clipping a tree in the dark.
“No, you can’t! YOU CAN’T MAKE ME DO IT!”
Kyle gasped, “What’s Joe doing to him?”
“YOU CAN’T MAKE ME CHOP OFF MY OWN—” There had been a lot of screaming tonight, enough to fill a lifetime’s worth of nightmares, but the screams which now echoed through Bountiful Woods were the worst yet. Kyle didn’t know how a human throat could make that sound without breaking.
And then there was a cracking sound (a tomahawk striking wood) and the intensity of the screams doubled.
Kyle couldn’t help but wonder what body parts Tom was now missing.
Then Tom’s screams suddenly stopped, cut off with yet another hatchet crack.
Unbidden, Kyle’s harried mind conjured up the mental image of Tom being forced to use the tomahawk-at-the-end-of-his-own-right-arm to lop off his own head. Tripped up by his own imagination, Kyle fell, going down hard. He put out a hand to catch himself and promptly broke his wrist. The pain was immediate, burning up all the remaining alcohol in him that wasn’t already destroyed by adrenalin. He howled, wailed, caught his breath, and wailed some more. He held on to his lower right arm, looking at his wrist, which was now slightly crooked. The break was a bad one.
In agony, he looked back behind him, searching for Joe, but he saw nothing. Motivated by his terror, he made a monumental effort to still his cries so he could listen.
As soon as he was quiet, he heard Joe approaching.
Something big was coming, snapping twigs and breaking branches on its way.
Kyle got to his feet. Still holding his broken right hand with his good left one, he tried to run again. It was difficult. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath.
He ran and he ran. Pain and terror fogged out most of his conscious awareness. His fleeing feet did all his thinking.
But then he came out of the thickest part of the forest. Moonlight found him from above. He thought he might actually make it out of Bountiful Woods alive!
He knew all he needed to do was get to the fence surrounding this accursed place. Once he was beyond that barrier, he would be beyond Joe’s reach.
He thought he was going to make it.
And then he knew he was going to make it. Kyle was going to escape.
He saw the wire fence before him. The metal signs that said NO TRESPASSING on the other side stared blankly at him on this side. He whimpered when he thought about climbing the fence with only one hand. But then he nearly giggled when he thought he was actually going to live.
Relieved, knowing he’d escaped Joe, knowing he’d hear Joe if he was approaching, Kyle turned back for one final look at Bountiful Woods.
Joe loomed over him, three feet away, almost within reach. The Indian’s eye-sockets were now empty, like black holes. There were four different bullet holes in his face, all of them bloody. An ear had been shot off and part of his throat was missing. And as bad as the damage Lunkhead and Drake did to his chest, the wreckage there now was twenty times worse.
Joe was riddled with bullet punctures. A spray of holes cut across his thighs, so many it looked as if his legs were almost severed. Somehow Kyle knew that low pattern of holes was drilled by a Tommy gun, sometime during the 1920s.
He was looking at every wound Joe’s apparition had ever suffered for the last one hundred and eighty years.
Joe’s moccasins were completely submerged in a puddle of blood that just kept growing.
Terror totally transcended physical pain. As Kyle looked up into the dead eyes of this ravaged monster, he again went crazy with panic. He turned and grabbed the fence, intent on climbing it, desperate to get away, oblivious to the agony.
That’s when he felt Joe’s hand come down on his head.
The Indian may have been a ghost but its touch seemed very real. A cold hand that felt absolutely massive clamped down on Kyle’s head and picked him up.
He was certain he was going to die. He imagined Joe cru
shing his skull like an overripe cantaloupe.
Kyle hung by his head for a terrible moment before a rough voice straight from Hell said to him, “Fuck you, Kyle Cain!”
And then he was flung through the air.
He was already unconscious, even before he hit the ground.
When he awoke on the other side of the fence, hours later, as dawn filled a new day with light, Kyle was startled to realize he was still alive.
******
In the days that followed, hundreds of men scoured the area, looking for Bountiful Woods and the bodies of Drake Dupree, Tom Pascal, John Womack, and Roger Luttman. Divers combed Bullet Lake.
After an overnight stay in Middleridge Community Hospital, Kyle Cain returned to the area with Sheriff Carver and his deputies. Not only couldn’t the bodies be found, they couldn’t find the fenced-in woods that Kyle swore had to be there. They spent an entire day looking for that wire fence with its NO TRESPASSING signs and came up empty.
Suspicion fell on Kyle at first, despite his injuries. He was questioned repeatedly by the Sheriff. He always told the same story and he was always met with the same incredulity. Everyone who had grown up in this county— including Sheriff Carver— had heard the Legend of Injun Joe.
Nobody believed it. It was myth.
There was no denying, however, Kyle’s broken wrist. Or the mark Joe left on him.
There was a great deal of talk about drugs. Kyle eventually admitted to not only drinking but also the marijuana. He became indignant, however, when it was suggested that the ‘ghost’ in this story was the product of a hallucinogenic drug.
One week after Kyle barely made it out of Bountiful Woods alive, the body of Roger Luttman was discovered. Lunkhead washed up on the far side of the lake, right near High Caliber Diner in Flagg City. An autopsy was performed but the cause of death was never in doubt. The county coroner confirmed Roger was burnt to death, burnt alive. Evidence of Roger inhaling both fire and lake water was found.
At first, Kyle thought this was a small blessing. It confirmed his story. And yet he was met with even stauncher skepticism. One deputy suggested that Roger was so drunk he fell into a campfire and that Kyle was so drunk, the sight of seeing his friend burn to death so traumatized him, he somehow got the circumstances all mixed up in his brain with the ghost story they’d all heard as children. The deputy related a story about how even he had been once frightened as a kid by the local legend. After hearing the tale one night, he thought the distant light of a combine in the fields was the lantern light of Joe.
In other words: nobody believed a word Kyle said about how a real ghost really and truly murdered his four friends.
Everyone already thought his story was nuts. With the discovery of Roger, everyone acted like they know the reason Kyle flipped out. The part about Roger burning alive was real. The part about a seven-foot-tall ghost being responsible for the preternatural pyre was hysteria.
When talking with Sheriff Carver or his men (or even the reporters from The Middleridge Daily Messenger) Kyle ended every argument the same way. “Okay, so if I just imagined this and there was no ghost, then how do you explain my head?”
No one could explain his head.
At least, not at first.
And always Kyle would say, “You wait and see. Wait until they find Drake and Tom and John. Especially Tom.” He would generally shudder when he said that. He didn’t like imagining what ultimately became of Tom. He promised himself that when they did find Tom, he would avoid all news for several days. He never wanted to know what caused Tom’s screams. “Once they find the others,” he’d say, “then you tell me I’m full of bullshit. When you find Drake’s head cleaved down the middle or John’s shish-kabob eyes, then you tell me Injun Joe isn’t real!”
But the bodies of Drake Dupree, John Womack, and Tom Pascal were never found.
To this day, no one has ever found a trace of them.
During the last conversation Kyle ever had with Trinity county Sheriff Jack Carver, he once again asked the question, “Then how do you explain my head?”
The Sheriff pointed a level gaze at him and said, “The mind is capable of all kinds of things. Ever see those Hindus who can walk on coals without being burned?”
Kyle scoffed. “This is hardly the same thing! Are you saying I made it happen?”
The Sheriff shrugged. “The human mind is amazing. It’s capable of all kinds of things.” He gave Kyle a shrewd look as he finished, “Sometimes it even creates its own reality.”
He knew what the Sheriff was implying.
Kyle had a hard time dealing with his friend’s deaths. At night he was plagued by nightmares (always with hideously shrill soundtracks) and by day he suffered survivor’s guilt. Neither of his parents believed him. They offered to pay for him to go to a therapist but that only pissed him off more, knowing even they thought his ravings about Injun Joe were utter madness.
It was a visit with John’s grandfather that helped Kyle find a means of coping.
John’s grandfather’s name was Wendell Womack. He was seventy-nine-years old and in failing health. He lived on bottled oxygen at the Autumn Meadows Nursing Home in Middleridge. When he called Kyle on the phone, Kyle at first actually believed it was some kind of obscene phone call. Wendell began the conversation with wheezing.
When Wendell asked Kyle to come to see him, Kyle was reluctant. “I don’t know, Mr. Womack. I’m still having a really hard time. I don’t feel much like talking about John.”
“I don’t want to talk about John, Kyle. I know what happened to John.”
Kyle was stunned. He had been doubting his own recollection of things lately. And so he blurted out, “You do?”
“Sure I do. Injun Joe got ‘im.”
Kyle was so startled, he nearly dropped the phone.
He met with John’s grandfather the following afternoon. In his tiny room in the nursing home, Wendell Womack sat in a wheel chair, attached to an oxygen tank, rasping for breath. He had Kyle take a seat and he didn’t mince words. With eyes as sharp as a hawk’s, the old man glared at Kyle and said, “You did see Joe, didn’t ya?”
Emotion choked him. Kyle found it difficult to speak. Since the night his friends died, this was the first person he had talked to who actually honestly believed Injun Joe was real.
As an answer, Kyle took off his baseball cap and turned around to show Wendell the back of his head.
The old man gasped.
Kyle suddenly suspected, “You’ve seen Injun Joe too! Haven’t you?”
A flicker of pain crossed Wendell’s face and he gasped even harder for air. Finally, he nodded.
“What?” Kyle couldn’t believe it. “When?”
Suddenly Wendell was shouting, with far more volume than Kyle would ever imagine he could muster. “I told you the story! I warned you all! I told you the goddamn story time and again! Don’t you remember?”
Kyle was startled by Wendell’s vehemence and had trouble piecing together what he was saying. “But that was—”
“What?” Wendell held his own chest, shouting, “Just a story?”
“Yeah.” Kyle was starting to feel some anger himself. “That story in the 1960s? You said Everybody Died. I remember that part very well. You always said five boys went into the forest but none came out!”
Wendell threw back his head, gasping. He looked as if he was in distress. He panted so hard, Kyle became concerned. “Should I get a nurse or something?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Wendell shouted, “YES!”
For the next couple of minutes, Kyle listened to Wendell pant. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. “You always told that story to entertain us, for God’s sake. I remember you telling it at Halloween time. Yeah, you said it was real but. . . .” He stopped, not finishing the thought.
Wendell finished it for him. “But you never believed me!”
Miserable, Kyle said nothing.
“No, I didn�
��t tell you I was one of the five who went into Bountiful Woods back in 1966. But if I had… would you have believed me?”
Wendell’s cheeks were growing red with anger. “If I had told you I personally witnessed a devil from hell ripping apart my four best friends right before my eyes, if I had told that story, would you have believed me then?”
Kyle didn’t say anything.
Wendell rolled his wheelchair a little closer to Kyle, his eyes bulging, as he demanded to know, “Would you have?”
Kyle had a totally new perspective on all this. After days of dealing with everyone’s disbelief—even his family’s— he had to honestly admit, “No.” He sighed. “I wouldn’t have.”
“But you believe me now, don’tcha?”
Kyle felt tears welling up in his eyes. He nodded.
Wendell wrung his old hands. To Kyle the elderly man’s fingers looked so brittle he was afraid one may tear the other one off (which gave him a chill as he remembered Tom’s hand becoming a tomahawk).
Swallowing hard, Kyle looked down at the cast on his broken right wrist.
Wendell gasped, “You want to know the real kick in the ass? I did tell John. I told him three years ago. I told him the entire truth, including how I was actually committed by my parents. When it happened back in ‘66, nobody believed me. You hear me, son? Nobody!”
Kyle said, “I hear ya.”
“But I told John. I did.”
Wendell gasped so long and hard, Kyle said, “I believe you.”
“I told John even though I wasn’t worried. I thought it was over. I thought we’d seen the last of Injun Joe forever.”
Kyle frowned. “Why did you think that?”
Wendell sighed. “As best as I can tell, for about a-hunderd-twenty-years straight, Joe appeared once a generation, about every twenty— twenty-five years. It happened in my grandfather’s generation, my great grandfather’s generation, even during my great great grandfather’s time.” Wendell reached out a boney hand for Kyle, causing him to unconsciously recoil. “You gotta understand! I wasn’t that worried for my grandson in the new Millennium, for Pete’s sake! I was worried about my son, back in the 1980s!”
Fishing in Brains for an Eye with Teeth (Thirteen Tales of Terror) Page 19
