“I know, Mother. I’m sorry. Of course I’ll do as you ask. It’s only fair. You gave me life. How could I do any less for you?”
Patrick Winter stood before the ground that held his mother’s skull and took off his clothes. He would not need them any longer. His time as a human being had ended.
IV
They worked carefully. They had to. They were, after all, doing their mother’s bidding. It was never wise to disappoint her, and even death wasn’t going to change that.
The sun was up and it was dangerous for them to spend too much time in the open. They were not hurt by the sun, but they were lessened by it. When she’d been alive, Mother had taken care of that little problem with a salve here and an ointment there.
She’d do it again, when the time was right. In the meantime, their preparations were handled carefully, for at this stage, the sunlight would do no good for them or for their project, either.
They were still working in silence—the only sound that of their hands working and sculpting—when Patrick showed himself.
Jack looked at him and frowned, a sure sign that he was disappointed. “What took you so long? You know time is of the essence here.”
“Quit your damned complaining. I’ve been living a life here for the last few years. I wasn’t sure I wanted to give that up.”
Robert looked his way and spoke without words, using his fingers and striking the bones across his broad chest, making noises that would have meant nothing to someone who was not blood of his blood.
“That’s fine for you, Robert.” Patrick’s voice was angry, and there might have been a little guilt thrown in there. “But I had to think about it. I’ve been the one living here, keeping watch all of these years. You’ve been sleeping most of the time and Jack has always managed to be away when everything else had to be done.”
Jack, allegedly the youngest of the three, spat on the ground and sneered. “I’ve had things to do, and not a one of them dealt with trying to hide among the humans.” They would likely have fought then and there, but Bobby stood up to his full height and stepped between them. Only a fool would have considered pissing off Bobby.
The three of them faced off for several moments, each trying to win the squabble with the meanest possible glare. Finally Robert settled down and began working again. Patrick stared at their materials in silence trying to figure out where to begin. Eventually he decided to start with the legs. His mother had always hated her legs. This time around, she’d have a little more choice in the matter.
He settled down and began his portion of the task ahead, carefully choosing the right materials before beginning. Patrick was a perfectionist. His mother would be perfect this time around. She’d earned that at least after all she’d suffered for them.
V
George Burgess looked at Erika Carmichael, Shannon Whitechapel, and Lauren Murphy and sighed. Three bright, beautiful girls, and all they ever managed to do was get themselves into deeper and deeper trouble.
They were adept at looking innocent. It was a side effect of spending years manipulating their parents. The problem was he knew they’d been the ones making the lewd pictures of him. He’d caught them in the act, and that made him less-than-charitable.
“It’s not just that you were vandalizing the school,” he mused aloud. “It’s that I really don’t like being drawn in that particular light.” His voice was, he knew, properly intimidating. He’d practiced his disciplinarian voice for years, and knew how to use it. Shannon and Lauren were properly cowed. Erika looked nonplussed. She was almost as good at keeping her cool as he was at being intimidating. She also had a list of violations that was at least as long as her father’s list of doctorates. “This is going to stop, ladies. This is going to stop now, or you will regret it.”
Erika’s eyes spoke volumes about her feelings toward him. For reasons he’d never understood, the girl had developed a personal dislike for him the moment they’d met. He’d tried being friendly, because, in all honesty, he wasn’t fond of being a hard-ass and that had failed. He’d tried being aloof, and that didn’t work. These days he was just being a bastard when it came to her punishments. That was doing the trick for the most part. Or at least it had been until this little affair.
Erika sneered at him, her pretty face turned ugly in an instant. “Whatever.”
George resisted the urge to just reach out and slap her face black and blue. She had that affect on him.
Instead he smiled, a grin that was worthy of the Cheshire Cat, and nodded. “That’s right, Erika. You just go ahead and play it cool. Just remember that every little snide comment and dismissal is making it worse for you.” He looked away from her to the other two girls, his grin growing marginally larger. “And for these two girls as well.”
That shut her up. She might be at the top of the social strata for the moment, but both Erika and the headmaster knew how quickly that could change. Piss off enough of the other popular kids and she would very quickly discover that she wasn’t as important as she liked to think she was.
Erika looked away first. He’d won this round.
“I think we’ll stick with a few minor extra chores, unless any of you girls have an objection to that.” They didn’t. Or at least they had the common sense not to admit it.
He nodded his satisfaction. “There are five more days of the Haunted Hayride. Maybe you’ve noticed that a lot of the folks coming through have been leaving their trash everywhere.” He smiled thinly, leaned forward in his seat, and formed a steeple with his fingers. “You’ve just volunteered for clean-up duty. Let’s say from seven to nine every night, and from six in the morning until eight-thirty. Failure to be on time or a sudden case of the sniffles that you think will get you out of work will only result in more work.” He could see it, the look on Erika’s face that said she wanted to do something amazingly stupid in retaliation. But he could also see the look that said she wasn’t going to risk it. That was a good thing.
“If you are good about it,” he continued, “I’ll even let you off the hook in time for the Harvest Moon Festival. Screw up in any way, ladies, any one of you, and you’ll be working the booths instead of having fun. Do I make myself clear?”
Erika raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow over her cold blue eyes and nodded. “Perfectly. Sir.”
George leaned back in his chair and nodded. “Wonderful. Oh, and girls? One more thing. I want that little sketch of yours washed off the wall within the next fifteen minutes, or I’ll have you white washing every fence on this property.”
He looked pointedly at his watch, and the girls moved quickly. It felt good to get the upper hand over Erika. Made him feel warm and fuzzy all over.
He kept feeling warm and fuzzy, too, until it was a little too late to do anything about it.
VI
“Yeah, Alan, you could say I’m a little upset.” Craig Gallagher looked down at him and scowled. On a good day, Gallagher was intimidating. On a day like this, when he was still trying to explain the theft of evidence that was crucial to a murder investigation, Alan found the police chief positively terrifying.
“Craig, I swear to you, I have no idea where they went. I was only outside for a minute and when I came back in, all of the papers were gone.”
“I can sort of accept that happening, Alan.” Gallagher looked at him, his brows wrinkled together over a face that was set in simmering anger mode. “But I’m having a little trouble with you waiting for a full day to report it!” Alan looked away from the scowling face and settled on the hands that were balling into tight fists in front of him. They weren’t any more comforting than the face. Craig Gallagher was not the biggest man in town, but he was stocky, and not in a way that meant he was all fat. He was stocky in a man’s-got-a-neck-like-a-bull-and-shoulders-as-wide-as-Texas sort of way.
“I was trying to find the papers! I thought I’d misplaced them.” It sounded lame, even to his ears, but it was the truth. Alan Treacher was not exactly the king of orga
nization. He stacked his notes to himself several inches thick and he filed things in piles, not in filing cabinets.
“What I ought to do,” mused the man in front of him. “What I ought to do, is throw your ass in jail, get a search warrant, and tear your damned house apart until I find those papers.” He jabbed a finger at Alan like it was a dagger. “But I’m going to take this nice and calm. You have until five o’clock tonight, Alan. And if I don’t have those papers on my desk, I’m going to be sorely, sorely pissed.” He leaned in closer, his eyes almost burning under the heavy brows. Then he added words that were, to Alan at least, entirely unnecessary. “You don’t want me pissed.”
Craig didn’t bother to watch Alan leave. He just moved back to his office and slammed the door. Alan left as calmly as he could, which meant he didn’t wet his pants before beating a hasty retreat. Looking over the house wasn’t going to do any good, and he knew that. He’d already torn the place apart himself; desperate to find the papers and solve the mystery of what had happened to them.
He climbed into his ancient Ford Bronco and sat behind the wheel for several minutes before he started the engine. The radio started blaring the Pointer Sisters at him, at a volume that was nearly deafening. He turned it down, not because it was too loud for his comfort, but because he didn’t want to give Gallagher any excuses to yell at him again.
When he finally pulled out of the police station’s parking lot, he turned toward his own house and drove very carefully. A gaggle of kids—he figured them for around ten, which was wrong, they were actually just starting into their teens—waited patiently at a crosswalk for him to drive past. Every one of them looked happy and he felt a twinge of jealousy at the notion. Kids aren’t supposed to be happy. They’re supposed to be working their little butts off and hating school. I always did.
The kids didn’t seem to care what his opinion was, though they might have at least pretended if he’d actually given voice to his feelings. He drove on, lost in thought about what he was going to do with himself. Finding those papers was the most important thing, naturally; that, or finding a potion for making himself invisible. The alternatives all involved Craig Gallagher being pissed off at him, and as the man had said, he did not want that.
Whatever made the noises took the papers.
Alan blinked. He didn’t like to think that way, but the voice was there in his head and it didn’t seem to much care what he wanted. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Think it through. If there was something out there, and it wasn’t just your imagination, it must have been there for a reason. Maybe it wanted the papers.
“Well, okay, but why? What could anyone other than me want with those damned papers?” It didn’t really bother Alan that he was talking to himself. He’d been doing it for years, especially when he was stumped by something unusual. He found comfort in hearing his own voice. Oddly, it also worked for him. Had anyone asked him, he’d have been willing to admit it was also probably one of the reasons he didn’t really date much. Well, that and the simple fact that women scared the Hell out of him.
“So if somebody wanted the papers, they either wanted to hide evidence, which is possible considering the state of the papers, but probably pointless because the police already got any fingerprints or trace evidence from them, or they wanted information contained in the writings.” He turned down the final road leading to his house, oblivious to the numerous decorations on the street around him. Alan Treacher was not a man who’d ever really had time for holiday celebrations. They tended to get in the way of his research. “What could they find in the writings? Mostly it’s the same old history that I already knew about. There might be a few things Habersham found that I didn’t know about, but it would only be a few.”
Alan’s fingers tapped nervously at the steering wheel as he turned into his driveway. He was thinking finally, really thinking about his dilemma, but he wasn’t getting anywhere nearly as fast as he would have liked. “Screw it. We assume it was someone who wanted the papers for their own, or maybe just wanted to hold them ransom.”
He parked the car. “So if that’s the case, I need to see if I can find anyone nearby.” As has already been stated, Alan Treacher was not a brave man but he also had a deep-seated fear of Craig Gallagher that went well beyond respect for the law. Craig had scared him ever since they were both kids, though he couldn’t think of a single reason for the apprehension that Craig caused.
He walked behind his house and started looking for physical clues. He wanted those papers back, if only to avoid another confrontation with Gallagher. He figured he could handle anything short of a bear with minimal effort. The thought made him chuckle. “Yeah, me and my trusty pen. We can handle anything that comes our way.”
The wind rifled his hair as he stepped around the side of his house and looked toward the woods where he’d seen the mysterious figure from the corner of his eye.
It didn’t take long for him to find something. In the soft muddy earth behind his house, there were tracks that led to his house and away from it as well. Though it took effort, he was able to find out where the tracks went. The thick, dead grass of a backyard he had not mowed in months tried to hide the deep prints, but failed. He was not a hunter, nor even remotely interested in animal tracks. But whatever had been wandering in his backyard had weird-looking feet. The prints looked like they’d been made by something with enough toes to fill three or four shoes each. The notion was unsettling, but considering what he was already threatened with, he swallowed his discomfort and followed them anyway. He wasn’t surprised to learn that they led toward the Hollow.
He followed the strange prints, determined to find the paperwork and get it back into safe keeping. Alan had little doubt that he’d still be allowed to look over the notes, but he felt it might be best to do so at the police station, if Gallagher could find a spare room. “I’ll even take a cell, as long as it isn’t locked.”
The area leading to the Hollow was, as with a lot of the land around town, a series of small hills and shallow depressions. The Witch’s Hollow earned its name because of the history associated with it, but also because the particular spot was deeper and more like a true valley than anywhere else around. Between Alan’s small house and the Witch’s Hollow, there were fifteen hills of varying size and shape. Alan was a scholar, not an outdoors type.
He was winded and panting desperately by the time he reached the last hill before the Hollow. The tracks lead him the entire way, clearly evident wherever the ground was soft enough to leave a mark. There hadn’t been a space of more than fifteen feet where he had to look carefully for the indications that something big had passed this way.
Still, as winded as he was, Alan reached the final hill before the Hollow and felt a deep sense of dread wash over him like a sudden wave at high tide. It was the same feeling of fright he’d had blossom the day before, only more so. He looked down at his arm and saw the gooseflesh crawling down from his spine all the way to his hand.
He shivered deep inside, and looked around, almost sensing that he was being watched. The October air held a slight chill, still less than it should have been for the late part of the year, but that did not account for the sensation; nor did the oak trees, now free of their foliage. There was something, damn it all, that was watching him. He just didn’t know where it was, or what it was.
He stared around the area for several minutes while he regained his breath and his courage, so he was there to see it when it happened. From what was a damned near perfect day, both temperature-wise and by way of air clarity, he saw the Witch’s Hollow suddenly grow dark and obscure as a thick fog lifted from the center of the low waters, right around the Victim Trees. The stagnant waters were as still as ever, but the heavy mist that rose from them almost seemed to billow out like steam from a teakettle. In a matter of minutes, the entire hollow was obscured, buried in a thick caul of fog that almost seemed to glow in the sunlight.
And just as quickly, his resolution to get to the
bottom of what had happened to the documents stolen from his house left Alan high and dry. Alan did a sharp pivot on his heel, prepared to hike his ass all the way back to the house and start digging through the files and stacks of papers there again, just in case. He’d let someone else take care of being brave and stupid enough to follow the tracks. Hell, maybe I’ll just call Craig Gallagher and let him do the searching. It’s what he’s getting paid for and he has a gun. I’m not cut out for hiking through fog. Just not what I really find interesting.
He’d made all of five paces before the voice cut through the preternaturally silent woods. “Shame to leave when you’re so close, isn’t it, Alan?” The voice was old and raspy, somewhere between a frog’s croak and a whisper.
Alan stood perfectly still, not certain if he’d imagined the voice or actually heard it. His eyes were the only things that moved, as they sought the source of the words. Even as he looked around, the fog poured over the edge of the hill he stood on and began to wash away the colors of autumn on the leaves and in the heavy grass around him.
“Manners, Mr. Treacher. They are a benefit. I have something you want. The question is simply what is it worth to you?”
“Who are you?” If his voice sounded shaky, it was only because he was terrified.
“I’m someone who can be your friend, Alan Treacher. Or someone who can make your life miserable.” The voice came from his left, near an oak tree that was tall enough to hang a man from. A moment before it had been in front of him and to his right. He tried to take deep breaths to calm himself. It wasn’t working.
“How can you help me?”
“I have information that you want. I have the paperwork. I’m done with the notes and what they could tell me. And I can tell you what the papers don’t. I can tell you the truth of what happened both in the past and with your predecessor, Douglas Habersham.” This time the voice moved as it spoke, until it seemed to be almost directly above him. Alan looked up into the closest tree and saw a man-sized figure looking down at him. He couldn’t make out the features—the fog had grown far too thick—but he could see the shape. “Are you interested?”
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