Paskagankee

by Alan Leverone

  The texture of the branch was spongy and for the first time Professor Dye actually gave it a look. Seconds later his coffee came up, gushing out of him in a rush of stomach acid and unidentified, partially digested food, splashing onto the frozen ground as Ken Dye retched and vomited. The acid burned in his gullet and he fought another round of nausea.

  He didn’t want to look at it again. He refused to look at it again. He couldn’t stop himself from looking at it again, from glancing down in horrified fascination. This time, in an unexpected display of self-control, he managed to avoid puking up anything else, not that there was much left in his stomach, anyway.

  Lying on the dirty snow, where he had dropped it in his initial burst of panic and fear, was a severed human arm.

  49

  MIKE KNEW RIGHT AWAY it was bad. He hadn’t known Professor Dye very long, but it had been enough time that he could detect the barely contained panic in the man’s voice. It sounded unnaturally loud as he called out, and Mike thought the professor might be on the verge of bursting into tears.

  Icy fingers of dread clamped onto Mike’s internal organs as he walked slowly into the woods where Ken Dye was standing bent over, hands on his knees, a string of yellowish gunk hanging from his open mouth and stretching elastically toward the ground. It was a pose eerily similar to Harley Tanguay’s from a couple of days ago. Mike tried to imagine how he would react when he saw Sharon’s lifeless body lying on the forest floor, battered and torn apart just as the other victims had been.

  This feeling was identical to the despair that had gripped Mike on that fateful Revere evening eighteen months ago. The weather then had been the complete opposite of today—a sweltering afternoon under a relentlessly blazing sun—but he had felt the same frozen lump in his gut he could feel forming right now.

  He steeled himself for the worst and shouldered past Professor Dye, looking down onto the dirty snow. It wasn’t Sharon. In fact, it wasn’t a body at all. At least, not a complete body.

  Rust-colored dried blood speckled the snow and mud a few feet from Professor Dye. A lot of rust-colored dried blood. Lying in the middle of all the blood, looking small and incongruously out of place was a human arm. Or at least what was left of a human arm.

  Mike breathed deeply. He hadn’t even realized until now that he was holding his breath. The sense of relief he felt from not discovering Sharon Dupont’s corpse in the forest was tempered with the knowledge that there was now at least one more victim to add to this awful killing spree. It was technically possible, of course, that the person to whom this arm belonged was still alive, but that was unlikely in the extreme and Mike knew in his heart it was not the case.

  He kneeled in the muddy, bloody snow to take a closer look, careful not to disturb the scene. The arm had been torn out of its shoulder; the ball-like portion of the humerus wrenched free, with stringy muscles and stretched-and-torn ligaments trailing on the ground, serving as grisly testimony to its owner’s last agonizing moments.

  Covering the appendage—more or less—was a light blue shirt sleeve and the sleeve of a heavy winter coat which had been torn off its owner along with the arm. The sleeve looked familiar, and Mike began to feel queasier. He looked up to see Professor Ken Dye standing alongside him, apparently done puking, at least for the time being. Mike had to give the man credit for not taking the easy way out and abandoning the mess here in the forest for the open spaces of Warren Sprague’s field.

  “You know who it is, don’t you?” the professor asked.

  Mike nodded, swallowing hard. He was determined not to let his stomach get the best of him. He was a law enforcement professional, for crying out loud. “It’s Detective O’Bannon.”

  “O’Bannon? But he left for Portland last night.”

  “No,” Mike reminded him. “You assumed he left for Portland when we didn’t see him after that first meeting at the bonfire around seven p.m.” He looked back down at the gruesome evidence. “Obviously, that was an incorrect assumption.”

  Ken Dye was silent for a moment, then said, “But that means—”

  “Yes, I know,” Mike interrupted. He couldn’t bear to hear the professor say it. “Shaw must be here somewhere, too. If something had happened to O’Bannon and Shaw was uninjured, he would have contacted us by now. He would have let us know something was wrong. Obviously, he’s unable to do that.”

  Mike stood slowly, his knees cracking and popping. He felt like he had aged fifty years in the past week. “We need to search the area. Now. These two men could still be alive,” he said without much conviction, knowing it was not true.

  Professor Dye shook his head. “They were men, not women. They’re not still alive, Chief.”

  “We can’t assume that,” Mike snapped. “We owe it to them to at least canvass the surrounding area.” He looked deeper into the tangle of thickly forested woods where a narrow path had been beaten down, presumably by the lethal monster that had caused the devastation. Ignoring it for the time being, he told the professor, “We stick together. Don’t wander more than five feet from me.”

  The older man chuckled. The sound came out thick and raspy. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have no intention of wandering off into this haunted forest by myself.”

  50

  TWO HOURS LATER, SWEATING and exhausted, Mike abandoned the search of the area surrounding the severed arm. The men had worked in a steadily enlarging concentric circle around the gruesome discovery. They found broken tree branches and evidence of a violent struggle nearby, along with more blood, plenty of blood, but nothing else in the way of immediately useful evidence.

  Mike knew a more thorough search was called for, with teams of police investigators as well as dogs, but that would have to wait until he could get his men here. In his heart he knew what Professor Dye said was true, that both O’Bannon and Shaw were dead, victims of another violent and horrific attack. His priority now was to find Sharon. If there was any chance whatsoever she might still be alive, as Dye seemed to believe, then Mike was determined not to rest until he found her and rescued her.

  He would not be responsible for the death of another innocent human being, as he had been that terrible day in Revere. Mike knew he was damaged goods and had been since the moment he fired the bullet that killed that little girl. His ex-wife had known it too, which was why she eventually moved on, unable to continue living with a brooding man, a man filled with darkness where once there had been light.

  Mike didn’t think he could survive if Sharon died because of him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  ***

  THE TWO MEN TROOPED out of the woods and back into the enormous clearing, perspiration soaking their clothes. The day was cool and damp but the physical exertion of fighting their way through the thickly tangled overgrowth had caused their bodies to overheat. Sweat covered their red faces, dripping off their noses onto the snow.

  They sat on their waterproof packs and rested as Mike pulled a thermos and two small cups out and poured still-steaming coffee into them. Their breath rose into the moist air, floating away on the light breeze. Professor Dye reached into his pack and grabbed two ham and cheese sandwiches, passing one to Mike and biting greedily into the second.

  As a professional educator, Ken Dye led what was essentially a sedentary existence and hadn’t had this much physical activity in years, maybe decades. In a strange way it felt good to be moving and doing instead of sitting and thinking, theorizing about a problem and considering it in the abstract. It brought him back to his days in the field living with the Native Americans he had come to love so much, in the years before he wrote his book and became a pariah in the academic community.

  Then Ken remembered why they were here, the utter destruction and devastation that had led to this moment and the horrors that likely lay ahead, and he no longer felt quite so invigorated. Rather, he felt exactly like what he was—an aging academic risking his life and the life of Mike McMahon, as well as the lives of all the citizens of Paskag
ankee on his theory; a hypothesis he had felt much more confident about sitting in his living room with a glass of Chivas.

  Now that they were getting close—and they were getting close, Ken could feel it—he found himself wondering how accurate his theory really was, and whether he would be able to summon the courage to face down the monster when the time came. If he was wrong or if he found himself unable to do what must be done, the tragedy that had already begun unfolding in this tiny town was just the beginning and would seem like child’s play compared to what would follow.

  Professor Dye found himself staring at his reflection in the small amount of liquid left at the bottom of the Styrofoam cup. The face looking back up at him was lined and haunted, barely recognizable. He splashed the remainder of the now-cold black coffee onto the muddy ground and looked up to see Mike McMahon gazing at him thoughtfully.

  “Well,” Dye said weakly. “This isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?”

  Mike smiled sadly and shook his head. Together the men stowed their supplies back into their packs without another word and prepared to make their way back into the dark and foreboding forest. Neither spoke; there was nothing to say.

  51

  MIKE SAT WITH PROFESSOR Dye on a fallen log deep in the forest and shook his head in amazement at the scene just a hundred yards in front of them. In the diffuse, failing light of the late-November afternoon, a light made even more unreliable by the ever-present fog and the thickness of the trees and vegetation, they could see a log cabin, obviously of recent construction, with a thin plume of smoke rising from the red-brick chimney on the northern side of the house.

  “Is it possible someone is living here?” the professor whispered to Mike.

  He shrugged. “As unlikely as that seems, I don’t know what other explanation there could be,” he answered, trying to reconcile the Currier and Ives scene with the remote location and the horrific events of the past few days. The contrast was jarring.

  It had taken more than two hours of constant hiking to reach this area. Progress had been slowed by Professor Dye’s age and his inability to move quickly through the thick brush, but Mike knew he would not have been able to make much better time even if he had been alone—the terrain was simply too rugged to allow for anything more than a plodding, deliberate pace unless you were willing to risk a broken ankle or worse.

  Following the trail had been easy, even for an unskilled tracker like Mike. The monster, or whatever the hell it was, had smashed its way through the woods, presumably carrying at least one body and possibly making more than one trip. It made no effort at covering its tracks. Whether the lack of stealth was intentional or not Mike had no way of knowing, but it would have been a simple matter for them to find this location even without the aerial photographs Professor Dye had obtained through his research earlier this morning.

  Now, sitting in the forest under what Mike hoped was sufficient cover to prevent them from being seen, the two men studied the original village of Paskagankee spread out before them in a huge clearing. Mike and Ken could see crumbled and broken-down remains of stone and granite foundations that had supported the homes and outbuildings making up the tiny village more than four hundred years ago. Looking through high-powered binoculars, the layout of the village was clear.

  The new house, the one that had taken them quite by surprise when they first glimpsed it, had been built only within the last few years; that was obvious. The cabin had been constructed on the eastern edge of what had once been the village proper, built from native timber felled almost right on the spot where the home stood. Huge slabs of granite formed the foundation, just as they had with the original buildings.

  Atop the granite lay a small but apparently well-constructed single-story home, maybe fifty feet long by twenty feet wide. Mike wondered how many people were living here—probably no more than two in a home this size, but there was no way to know for sure.

  The front door had been constructed precisely in the center of the home and was accessible by a short stairway leading to a farmer’s porch which spanned the length of the house. On either side of the door was a double-hung window. Ratty-looking mismatched curtains had been pulled across each window and blocked any view of the cabin’s interior. The side of the house featuring the fieldstone chimney faced Mike and Professor Dye and was windowless.

  Mike could see Ken studying the building as well. The professor looked pale and wan, even more so than usual, and Mike hoped he was feeling all right. It had been a grueling hike out here after a difficult morning, and it was plain the man wasn’t used to a lot of physical activity. The trip, although probably not much more than two miles from Warren Sprague’s big open field, had taken more than two hours, thanks to the rough and unspoiled terrain.

  Now, sitting in the failing light staring at an incongruously modern-looking cabin constructed in the middle of nowhere, Mike considered how to proceed. He had his service weapon and a spare, tucked into a holster above his right ankle. Professor Dye was unarmed. Mike suspected two weapons would be no match against whatever had unleashed the onslaught of death and destruction on his little town.

  The temptation to retreat and return tomorrow with more personnel—bringing the entire Paskagankee Police Department along with as many State Police reinforcements as he could wheedle out of Portland—was strong. An early-morning return would allow them the luxury of time to formulate a plan, whereas anything he decided to do now would be hurried and ill-conceived, with nightfall approaching rapidly.

  Working against a return tomorrow, though, were two factors. First, the professor had told him that bringing more people into the pending confrontation would only succeed in putting more people in harm’s way. The professor seemed to be one hundred percent certain he could put a stop to whatever was happening in Paskagankee, and for better or worse, he had convinced Mike he knew what he was talking about.

  Secondly, and much more importantly to Mike, Sharon might be here somewhere, maybe in that log cabin just a hundred yards away, possibly alive and probably injured, most likely gravely injured. He knew that if she was now still alive, she probably would not be by tomorrow morning. He couldn’t risk it. He couldn’t take the chance that Sharon Dupont would die overnight while he developed the perfect plan and waited for the perfect conditions to attempt a rescue, especially considering he had little idea what might even constitute the perfect plan.

  So waiting was out of the question. Whatever was going to happen here was going to happen tonight, within the next couple of hours. Mike wondered if he would survive to see another sunrise and found he didn’t really care. The only thing that would make tomorrow worth seeing would be finding and rescuing Sharon. He tried to convince himself he needed to rescue the rookie officer because she was his responsibility, and although he knew that to be true, he also knew he was lying to himself if he thought that was the only reason.

  He was falling in love with the young woman, and he strongly suspected she felt the same way about him. Love was an emotion Mike had given up on ever feeling again after Kate packed up her things and left, and the fact that he had found a spark with this beautiful girl—who was damaged, as he was, just in a different way—made it that much harder to accept that she could be dead. If Sharon was dead, then he didn’t care whether he lived or died, either.

  Mike’s mind was racing. He wondered whether the search team he called in to canvass Warren Sprague’s field had found any evidence regarding the O’Bannon and Shaw situation. He had radioed back to dispatch just before beginning the long hike into the forest, requesting as many officers as possible for a thorough search of the area surrounding the severed arm. Hopefully there were no more gruesome surprises awaiting the team.

  Mike shook his head to clear his mind. Time was running out, and daydreaming about the scene at Sprague’s farm wasn’t going to get anything accomplished. He looked around and the clearing seemed noticeably darker than it had been just a couple of minutes ago. He glanced at Ken Dye and fou
nd the professor gazing back at him unblinkingly, waiting for guidance on what to do next.

  “Wait for me right here,” he told the professor. “I’m going to get a closer look at that house and when I do, hopefully we’ll find out exactly what we’re up against.” Mike waited for the professor to argue, to say that he needed to approach the house as well, in order to do whatever mysterious thing he needed to do.

  Instead of a protestation from the professor, though, Mike saw the man’s eyes widen in terror. A moan escaped Dye’s lips. Mike turned his attention back to the cabin and froze in utter amazement. His jaw dropped as his brain attempted to process what he was seeing. It was horrifying and exhilarating at the same time.

  52

  CANDLES WERE FLOATING IN front of Sharon’s face. Simple, white, three inch tapered candles with brightly burning wicks. And they were floating. She knew what she was seeing was impossible, but the evidence was hard to ignore, suspended as it was in midair a few feet in front of her.

  She blinked her eyes rapidly and the candles disappeared, only to be replaced by a decapitated human skull, skin torn away to reveal a bone-white death mask, a terrifying rictus suspended inches in front of her face in the very same space the candles had occupied until seconds ago. She tried to scream and found she could not. Her throat was parched and sore and she was unable to produce even a squeak.

  Sharon blinked again, now close to panic, desperate to make the awful grinning skull disappear. When she re-focused her eyes she was relieved to discover the death mask had vanished and in its place was a hazy darkness, with a tantalizing sensation of movement just beyond the edge of her vision. She strained to hear the sound of footsteps to correlate with the perceived motion and could hear nothing.