“You want to see the bodies again?”
“No. Once was enough, thanks.”
“Good thing. Ain’t had any ice today. Those boys smell to high heaven down there. I tell you, Lucas, you have no idea how difficult it is to keep a housekeeper when you have corpses in the cellar, taking up room where the potatoes ought to be. Think I’ll get me a basket of lemons and cut them open down there. It’s better’n nothing, believe me.”
He grinned, thinking that Webber for all his complaints probably couldn’t sleep at night unless there was a body in the house.
It was Webber’s turn to sigh then. He took his spectacles in one hand and whirled them by the sidepiece. For a moment, in the lamplight, he looked a hundred years old.
“Those men, I know what you mean,” he said quietly, while thunder muttered outside. “I haven’t seen anything so disgusting since Horace Bartlett’s eldest got run over by the train. Jesus God, what a sight.” He inhaled slowly, drew his legs up and replaced his glasses on his nose. “I tell you, Lucas, this is bad business, this wolf stuff.”
“Barrows will get him if anyone can.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
There was no fire in the grate, just a low scattering of ashes; the wind slipped down the chimney and stirred them, danced with them.
“Lucas, you know as well as I a wolf that’s right don’t attack a man. He’s starving, yes; he’s gone out of his head, yes. Otherwise,” and he spread his hands wide, waiting for Lucas to nod agreement, “it isn’t right.”
“So we have a crazed animal, what’s so odd about that?”
Webber sank deeper into his chair. Lucas could see only his thickly veined hands, the long fingers still slightly stained with dried blood under the nails. “The heart, Lucas, the heart. A wolf, like any other creature, eats what it has to. But from the stomach, the leg, anyplace where there’s meat. Lucas, no animal in the world goes straight for the heart . . . and takes it.”
Charlotte Notting was awakened by the thunder; she rolled over in the bed, groaning as she stretched her arms over her head. She was naked. The sheet was damp and clinging, and she allowed a dreamy smile to part her lips as she saw her second lover of the night dressing in the corner, in the dark. It was rather nice, actually, the way he acted so shyly — and sure as hell not like Farley. It made her feel special somehow, as if she were too good to see him without his clothes. The first time, she had taken a match to the lamp wick, and he’d blown it out with a snarl that had frightened her. Then, before she could give him a piece of her mind, he had kissed her, apologized, told her it was his way and he hoped she didn’t mind.
She didn’t.
As long as he left the gold piece on the nightstand tray, he could run out of here buck and shivering for all she cared.
“I didn’t like it when you were gone,” she whispered, levering herself slightly upward so the sheet would uncover the top of her ample breasts.
“I had to go.”
“Not really,” she said. “And when you did, it was for an awfully long time.”
“I’m back now.”
“Oh yes,” she sighed. “Oh yes, you really are.”
He blew her a kiss, and she clapped her hands together to trap it, placed a palm against her cheek and watched as he opened the door, turned for a look, and left her in the dark.
Oh yes, she thought; and one of these days I’m going to be your Missus. Make no mistake about it, I’m going to have all that money and Miss Johanna Pendleton can stick to her pretty police boy.
Jeddy sat in the dark. The hot dark. Over his head the floorboards creaked when men walked through the barn; behind him spiders walked, passing over his neck, his cheek, and he could not stop crying. He could not stop whimpering, so he pressed a fist against his teeth and bit down on his knuckles.
They called his name.
They told him it was all right.
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t all right. There were monsters out there, far worse than the monsters that lived under the floor with him. Monsters that killed his father, that took Elijah away, and the monster had seen him, and looked at him, looked inside, and had shaken its great white head and walked away to kill his father.
He wasn’t going out there.
He didn’t care if his stomach grumbled and complained. Nothing in the world would make him leave his secret place so the monster would get him.
He would rather die.
And then he heard the scratching of the rats.
The Pendleton cottage was on High Street, a few doors west of Fox Road. A single story high, not very wide, yet it competed well with those high brick salt boxes that flanked it on the street. Delia Pendleton dealt in flowers while her husband dealt in misery; her garden was luxurious, her shrubbery rich and green, and she spent as much time pruning and weeding as she did in her kitchen.
Johanna sat on the front porch and watched her now, walking through the rose bed with a lantern in her hand, searching for blossoms damaged by the wind. It was as if Uncle Jerad didn’t exist; and for Delia he did not, much of the time. A pity, because the man wasn’t as bad as he appeared; shiftless, a bit on the lazy side, and prone to bouts of infidelity he was careful not to flaunt. Delia terrorized him, and Johanna by her inaction felt she was giving her aunt permission to do so.
Lucas stood in the dark of an elm and watched her, knowing what she was thinking because she had told him once that when she took to the porch after dark, it was in an attempt to discover what made her relatives behave the way they did, and what made her stay with them though it would not have been difficult for her to find rooms of her own.
The lantern bobbed and dove, hovered and moved on.
A hand rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully, and he supposed that he could stand here all night, just looking at her, dreaming about her, wondering if he could compete with Bartholomew or Lawrence, dangerously wanting to surrender to his son’s campaign to get him a new wife.
“Good lord, Dad,” the boy had said only the week before, “she’s beautiful! Only a lout would let that prize get away. I’m telling you, Dad, if you don’t do it one of the Drummonds will.”
Lucas had stared at him open-mouthed from his chair, blinking rapidly, not believing what he’d just heard. Then the boy . . . no, the young man, had put an arm around his shoulders — the roles reversed, and he knew it — and told him that Mother was long gone, would always be alive in their memories, and how smart was it to bury yourself with her?
Not smart at all, he thought sourly, as he stepped out from under the tree and approached the walk; only I don’t need my son telling me how to run my life.
Johanna jumped to her feet when she saw him, and Delia only waved a ghostly hand as she proceeded to the next rose.
“Have you heard?” Johanna said when Lucas joined her at the railing.
“Not a word, I’m afraid,” he said cautiously, fingering the swatch in his jacket pocket. “I’m not worried, though.”
A blush threatened to color his cheeks when she examined his face closely, shook her head and silently told him he was a liar. “It’s really the boy, isn’t it,” she said, “You’re more concerned about the boy.”
The nod came before he could stop it, the nod and the guilt that he was so damned helpless to banish. “It isn’t right, Jo,” he said, quietly heated. “It isn’t right. Charlie and I searched that place from attic to cellar, tore the barn apart, and the stable where Elijah worked. And there’s nothing. Not a trace, not a print. It’s as if he never was in the first place.”
Johanna took his arm and leaned against him. Soft, he thought; soft and cool.
“Secret places,” she suggested. “All little boys, no matter how old they are, have secret places to hide when they’re scared, or when they think they’ve done something wrong. You know that, Lucas. You had one, and I’ll bet Ned does too.”
“I suppose.”
She slapped his arm playfully, and for a moment the lantern stop
ped moving. “She thinks you’re being ungentlemanly,” she giggled. “A terror she is when you’re not a gentleman around here.”
“I can believe that,” he said, keeping an eye on her aunt.
“You have to find the secret place,” she said with a definite nod. “Find that, and you’ll find Jeddy.”
“Great,” he said. “And where am I to get that kind of information? From the man in the moon?”
Johanna’s dark eyebrows lifted. “Well, don’t ask me, Lucas Stockton. You’re the policeman. You’re supposed to know these things.”
In spite of himself, in spite of the image of Drummond kissing her on the street, he smiled, and looked away in embarrassment when he felt his right arm move around her waist, and felt rather than heard her grateful sigh. You’re doing it, boy, he thought in abrupt panic; you’re doing it, have a care.
“And what about Jerad? Did he have a place?”
“Damn right he did!” Delia said, popping up on the other side of the porch railing. Her angular face, lighted from below by the lantern, put great hollows in her sallow cheeks, canyons in her ridged brow. She wore a scalloped cloth cap that tied under her double chins, and when she thrust her face closer he could smell lavender on her breath. “You go down to the Inn, or you see that wench, Charlotte Notting.” An emphatic nod, and the apparition was gone, back into the roses where her voice rose and fell in a dozen colorful curses.
Johanna began laughing, so hard she had to bury her face in Lucas’s chest to keep her aunt from hearing. Lucas, on the other hand, didn’t think it was funny. The old woman hated him for sins he’d never committed, preferred Drummond and his money, and her mention of Charlie’s wife made him wonder why neither he nor Barrows had sent him word of their progress.
The laughing fit subsided. Johanna daubed at her eyes with a handkerchief from her sleeve, and hiccoughed. Giggled. Sniffed hard once and set her expression to something sober.
“Aunt Delia’s right,” she said, a hint of melancholy in her tone.
“I’ve checked the Inn, so have you.”
“I haven’t gone to Charlotte’s.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “Nor I.”
“You’ll have to, I guess.”
“No,” he said. “He’s not there, Johanna. Charlie’s not on regular duty today. Charlotte knows that; she wouldn’t take the chance.”
“But surely she knows he’s gone hunting for the boy.”
He shrugged; she was right again, and he was stalling because he didn’t want to know. Not for sure. Because if he did, if he caught Charlie’s wife in bed with someone else, his affection for his subordinate might lead him to do something stupid.
Johanna moved, slipping easily between him and the railing.
“Lucas?”
He looked down, tried to appear pleasant.
“Lucas, I was wrong. It’s more than just the boy. You know something, and you’re not telling me.” Her left hand gripped his lapel tightly. “Is it about Uncle Jerad?”
He brushed a hand through his hair, cleared his throat, and told her there was in fact something he had wished to ask her, something he decided was too outlandish to mention.
Johanna jerked a thumb over her shoulder, at her aunt combing the rose beds. “Worse than that?”
A quick laugh covered just as quickly by a cough. “I think not, now that I think about it.”
“Then what?”
He pulled at his nose, tugged at the back of his hair, then shook his head and looked away. “It’s something Maria told me last night.”
Chapter 9
For the first time in his twenty-four years of hunting and tracking in and around the hills of Oxrun Station, Charlie Notting was lost.
One moment he knew exactly where he was, to the inch how far he was from the Tripper farm below Pointer Hill, and the next he didn’t think he could find his ass with both hands and a giant lantern.
It wasn’t frightening, it was humiliating, and if anyone so much as said a single word about it, he was going to blow his stack and turn in his badge. It was humiliating, and it was painful.
He had spent most of the day doggedly trailing after Barrows and his sons, listening to the fat man snap his damned suspenders as he bitched about Stockton, bitched about the drought, bitched about the trees he took as a personal affront slowing him down. It seemed as if the entire world had decided that Donald Barrows was going to be made a fool of, and Barrows had decided that the world was going to pay.
It was hell, but Charlie also listened to the way the man expertly, uncannily read the few tracks they had found, could tell the weight of the animal they’d come across, its direction, its age, all in such an off-handed manner he had initially believed Barrows was making it up. It was a school he’d attended with his own father, but nothing like this; the man was unnatural and made him feel as if he’d never known a thing about the woods, or about hunting.
What made him complain so much was the complete lack of wolf tracks, or anything remotely resembling them.
Not a single one, not even in the field where they found Tripper’s horse.
It was Barrow’s idea to begin on the far side of the crest of Pointer Hill, down near the quarry; if they discovered nothing of interest, and if the Tripper boy wasn’t hiding in one of the caves there, they would sweep up, over, and down into the valley. And if that proved fruitless, he proposed they follow the train tracks to the north rise and start again at the iron mines.
They hadn’t gotten that far.
Barrow’s youngest took a fall at the quarry and turned an ankle so badly Charlie thought it was broken; the next one received a nasty blow to his forehead when in his eagerness to prove himself as good as his father he forgot to duck under a low-hanging branch while running full-tilt down the slope. Two sons to take two sons back, and Barrows called a halt, broke out bread and ale, and they wasted another hour under a hickory, speculating and getting nowhere.
Then the clouds rolled in, and Barrows told him to stick around, he had an idea.
That was four hours ago.
Charlie, in his waiting, was so exhausted he fell asleep. When he awoke, disorientation unnerved him until he remembered where he was, and why. Immediately, he grabbed up his Enfield and started off on his own, calling for Barrows, receiving no answer. His head was still muzzy from the sleeping, his vision not quite as clear as it should have been, and he damned himself for not being more professional. It was the ale, of course. He never could manage ale during the day, and now it was paying him back for forgetting.
Four hours, and with the sun at last gone, the slope of the land changing every twenty paces, he had no damned idea where the hell he was.
Four hours, with thunder stalking him, the wind blinding him, the lightning finally flaring above to turn the trees to giants and the land to dead silver.
But it was only when his legs rebelled in a fierce spasm of cramping that he finally stopped, slumped against a rock and decided he would never be seen in civilization again. It infuriated him more than distressed him. He had been trying so goddamned hard to impress the chief; he wanted so much to be like him, and at the same time knew that there was more than simply size the man had in his favor. There was a bulldog stubbornness, and refusal to believe that things as they appear are always what they are.
The wind died.
Thunder like boulders rolled down on his shoulders.
He shivered in the chill that he’d welcomed when it first arrived, used the carbine as a prop to haul himself wearily to his feet.
That’s when he heard the first of the howling.
Donald Barrows stumbled through a briar patch, lost his footing and fell into a depression hollowed by the departure of a boulder twice his size. His rifle flew from his hand, his hunting knife slipped out of its sheath, and he wasted precious minutes scrabbling on all fours gathering them back.
Stockton, he decided, was going to pay for this, and pay dearly. Not a single damned sign of bear — n
ot to mention that stupid notion of a wolf — for all his hard work. Stockton would say I told you so, and pay no heed to the fact that he’d not found a trace of wolf or bear himself.
Besides, he thought angrily as he headed down the slope for the fields of his own farm, no fool wolf in God’s creation does stuff like he’d seen today. Eating like that, chewing for the hell of it, breaking through bone and muscle just to get to a man’s heart.
Bile rose in his mouth, and he spat quickly.
Thunder and lightning collided overhead; he ducked away instinctively as if expecting a blow, cursed loudly just to hear the sound of his voice as he started moving again. Worse and worse; now that jackass kid Notting was nowhere to be found. Not that he blamed him for not sticking around. If he had any brains at all — which he sincerely doubted — given the chance he was probably off to home, snuggling with his young wife, taking her skirts, taking her blouse. There was no question Charlotte was a ripe one, and no question but that Barrows would someday find out exactly how ripe she was.
What Charlie didn’t know was that beneath all that cotton, beneath all them petticoats, was a highway well traveled by anyone who knew the road.
The hell with him, then.
Barrows would take the wolf, bear, whatever the hell it was, and nail it proper to Stockton’s goddamn door, make that idiot Charlie look the proper fool and get his just reward when Stockton put Notting on the Mainland Road coach to protect the women and the mail.
He wished he’d thought to bring a lantern.
A pause to catch his breath, and he heard it.
Footsteps coming fast behind him.
He turned with Charlie’s name harsh and mocking on his lips, and saw nothing.
The woods were as empty as the sudden hollow in his stomach.
Trees in writhing dark array, the foliage laughing like ghosts above him, the infrequent flashes of lightning to show him the empty path.
But he heard them, damnit, they were still there, and he felt no shame in turning around and starting to walk. Faster. At a trot. Not knowing why he did, only knowing it wasn’t Charlie or any of his sons coming at him from behind; it was someone he didn’t want to know, not out here in the dark.
The Universe of Horror Volume 2: The Dark Cry of the Moon (Neccon Classic Horror) Page 6
