The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus

by Al Sarrantonio

  The moon was partially hidden by a thick tangle of trees on the far bank of Martin’s Creek, which made shafts of gray-white light on the ground. Jody splashed into the water before he knew it was in front of him. His hurt foot slid down nearly to his shin into icy tumbling water and lodged between two rocks.

  Jody cried out in pain. For a moment he couldn’t move, and panicked — but then, suddenly, one of the stones upended in the water and rolled over, and he was free.

  Now, both sneakers were in the water, and the slight current tugged at his legs.

  He tried to turn around, but the water hurried him out further.

  He sank another half foot.

  The current was trying to make him sit down, which would bring his head under water.

  He gave a weak cry as he lost his struggle — and then there was water in his mouth and he could see nothing but the blur of moving wetness.

  Almost immediately, his body pressed up against something long, dark and solid, and his forward progress stopped.

  It was a half-submerged log.

  Jody clung to it, and slowly pulled himself up.

  To his surprise, the creek was only two feet or so deep here; the whooshing sound of water angrily churning around the log filled his ears.

  He held onto the dry part of the log, and coughed water out.

  He wiped his eyes with one hand, and had another surprise: not only was the water shallow, it was not half as wide as it had been just a few yards up-creek.

  Holding the log, he pushed his way through the shallow water to the far bank.

  He sat down, and his eyes filled with sudden tears.

  I want to go home, he thought.

  He stared out at totally unfamiliar territory: the creek, he now saw, twisted and turned, and he could not make out the spot where he had descended the slope, which was nearly a hundred yards away, and impossibly wide. At the top of the ridge, reflected in moonlight, were the green-vined tops of a few elongated pumpkins.

  He turned, and saw that the line of woods was close, and darker than it had looked from the other side of the creek.

  The trees were nearly nude, a carpet of yellow and red fallen leaves at their bases looking light and dark gray in the moonlight.

  A few late leaves pirouetted down as he watched.

  Deep in the woods, he heard the Pumpkin Boy move.

  Jody looked once again behind him, and then back at the woods.

  He got painfully up and hobbled toward the trees.

  It instantly became darker when he entered the woods, a grayer, more sporadic light.

  Almost immediately, Jody lost his bearings.

  There were many strange noises, which confused him. He thought he heard the Pumpkin Boy nearby, but the sound proved to be a partially broken oak branch, creaking on its artificial hinge. There were rustlings and stirrings. Something on four legs scuttled past him in the near distance, and stopped to stare at him — it looked like a red fox, bleached gray by the night.

  Jody tried to retrace his steps, but only found himself deeper within the trees, which now all looked the same.

  Jody’s ankle hurt, and he was beginning to shiver.

  He stopped, even hushing his own frightened breathing, and listened for the Pumpkin Boy.

  The sound of the Pumpkin Boy’s movement was completely gone.

  A soft wind had arisen, and now leaves lifted from the forest floor, as if jerked alive by puppet strings.

  It had turned colder — above, the moon was abruptly shielded by a gust of clouds.

  The woods became very dark.

  Jody sobbed again, stumbling forward, and stopped in a small clearing surrounded by tall oaks. Again he heard scurrying in front of him and felt something watching him.

  The moon blinked out of the clouds, and Jody saw what was, indeed, a red fox, regarding him with wary interest.

  The fox became suddenly alert. As the moon’s nightlight was stolen again by clouds, the animal bolted away, seeming to jump into the gray and then darkness.

  Jody stood rooted to his spot, trying not to cry.

  Something was out there.

  Something large and dark.

  The bed of leaves shifted with heavy, creaking steps.

  Something ice cold and long and thin brushed along his face in the darkness.

  “I want to go home!” Jody blurted out in fear and despair.

  The cold air was suddenly steamed with warmth.

  Cold braces closed around Jody’s middle from behind.

  He shrieked, and wrenched his body around.

  He was blinded by something larger and brighter than the moon — a face staring down at him made out of a jack o’lantern, warm wet fog pushing from its triangular eyes and nose and impossibly wide, smiling mouth. A slight, mechanical chuff issued along with the sour, oily-smelling steam.

  The slender mechanical steel arms tightened around Jody.

  He shrieked again, a mournful sound swallowed by the trees and close night around him.

  As he was carried away he saw, as the moon broke forth from the clouds again, on the forest floor, caught in gray light, the smashed leavings of a dropped pumpkin.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Another damn Halloween.

  Len Schneider was beginning to work up a deep and real hatred for holidays in general and this one especially. Halloween, he knew, meant nothing but trouble. He’d moved to Orangefield for lots of reasons — among them the fact that it had a real town with a genuine small-town feel — it was only place he’d lived in the last twenty years that didn’t have a Wal-mart and wasn’t likely to get one. The people seemed friendly enough, but he’d found, as a police detective, that people were pretty much the same everywhere, from the inner city to Hometown, U.S.A. “People Are Funny,” Art Linkletter used to say, and one thing Len Schneider had learned after eighteen years in law enforcement was that they were anything but.

  And now this thing came along — the thing he’d left Milwaukee to get away from…

  “When was the last time you had a missing kid case?” he’d asked Bill Grant, the other detective on Orangefield’s police force. Grant had been at it a long time, too, but all of it in this town. In the year and a half Schneider had been here, he’d found Grant polite but almost aloof. No, aloof wasn’t the right word — it was almost like he wasn’t completely there. The two packs of cigarettes a day he smoked didn’t seem to help, and the emphysemic cough that went along with them, along with the booze he drank, had turned him almost sickly.

  Schneider thought he was haunted himself, by what had happened back in Milwaukee — but this guy was even worse.

  He’d tried to get Grant to open up a few times, once over a bottle of Scotch, but all that had happened was that he’d opened up himself, letting his own bile and anger out. He wondered if Grant even remembered, though he had a feeling he did. Behind the hollows of those eyes the cop-mind still worked — and Schneider had been told that Grant was very good at his job.

  But Grant had really gotten weird after a case a week ago involving a local children’s book author, Peter Kerlan. Something about both Kerlan and his wife being killed by insects…

  Grant was leaning back in his chair, his fingers idly drumming the neatly arranged desk in front of him. The man’s skin looked almost jaundiced. Just as Schneider was about to repeat his question, Grant said, without moving his eyes or head, “We’ve had a few over the years. They almost always turn up.”

  “Ever anything in Orangefield…”

  “Like yours in Milwaukee?” Grant almost snapped. The confirmation that Grant not only remembered The Night of Scotch but had absorbed and catalogued everything that had gone on, startled Schneider.

  “Yes, like mine in Milwaukee,” Schneider replied evenly.

  “Not unless you go back a long way. Long before you or me.”

  Schneider waited for elaboration, but there was none.

  “Any chance you’d like to give me this one?” Grant said.
/>
  Another silence hung between them, and then Schneider replied, “None.”

  Schneider was swiveling toward his own desk when he caught Grant leaning forward, his eyes finally giving him attention. He swiveled back, his hands on his knees.

  Grant was staring at him, a bit too intently. His own yellow fingers had stopped drumming, and lay perfectly still on his desk blotter. Schneider suddenly saw the intelligence in the sunken light blue eyes.

  “I know you want to make good on what happened in Milwaukee,” Grant said, carefully. For the first time his gaze fell on Schneider as something more than a concept — Grant was actually looking at him. “I don’t blame you. It’s just that this one has that… aura around it. Like the one last week.”

  “You mean the Kerlan deaths—”

  “Yes,” Grant shot back. “Around this time of year weird things always happen in Orangefield, but this is different. And I want to find out why.”

  “The Wendt case is mine,” Schneider said, with finality. He moved to swivel back to his desk, but Grant’s eyes held him.

  “There are worse things than a missing kid,” Grant said.

  Sudden anger flared in Schneider, but he saw that Grant seemed to be looking inward, not at him anymore.

  Grant seemed to catch himself, and his sallow neck actually reddened. He fumbled with the small notebook laid neatly on his desk, opened and closed it.

  “I’m sorry, Len,” Grant said, his voice lowered almost to a whisper. “I can imagine what that case of yours was like in Milwaukee. That kid’s parents, especially his father going insane. He was some kind of genius or something, right?” He shook his head slowly from side to side; the flush of color had left his features. “There are some things you never forget. Sometimes I think about myself too much…” For a brief moment his neck reddened again. “Sorry…”

  Then Grant leaned back in his chair again, his fingers drumming lightly on the neat desk.

  The interview was over.

  There are worse things than a missing kid…

  “No, there aren’t,” Len Schneider said to himself, and loud enough for someone else to hear.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The kid might have been eleven or twelve. Without a face, it was hard to tell if he had been good-looking or not — sometimes by that age, you can tell how the features will set through the teen years. He looked like he was sleeping when they dug him up — resting his hand under his head; the face, or where it would have been, was turned into the dirt so that it looked like he had nuzzled into a pillow. The hand was covering a ragged hole in the boy’s head where his brains had literally been beaten in. He was still fully clothed, except for his shoes and socks — later they found that he had been undressed and then redressed by Carlton, who had kept the footwear — along with one of the boy’s toes — as souvenirs.

  Jerry Carlton had almost boasted about it at his trial — his shaggy hair had been cut and combed, his red tie knotted, his eyes covered with mirrored sunglasses which, thank God, the judge had made him remove. He smiled through the whole proceeding, and played with his watch. He could fix a tractor, a television set, could build just about anything, and had murdered five boys in three states calling himself Carlton the Clown. He’d worn a different clown costume for each murder.

  Len had never forgotten that: Carlton the Clown.

  He’d wanted only three minutes alone with Jerry Carlton, but they wouldn’t give it to him.

  Just three minutes…

  And nearly every night, because he made a mistake, Len Schneider dreamed of a kid with no face, turning his head from where it was nuzzled into his pillow and staring at him with empty eye sockets, trying to speak without lips…

  This time, Len Schneider vowed to himself, he’d get his three minutes.

  And he wouldn’t make any mistakes.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Schneider was convinced the Wendt kid was not merely missing. Everything pointed to it. The kid’s mother (another thing that made it worse: there was no father, he had died in a construction accident four years ago) swore her son had never left the house by himself before. Which led Schnedier at first to conventional lines: that whoever had taken the child had learned the house routine, and knew that there was a window of opportunity every once in a while when the child was alone for a half hour, between his afternoon sitter leaving and his mother getting home from work.

  But there were no signs of forced entry, which led Len automatically to the next line of enquiry: that the child had unlocked the back door himself and let the abductor in.

  Which could have happened — although, again, there was no evidence that anyone had been in the house. It had been a quick snatch, if that had been the case — which meant that the boy had probably known the assailant.

  Which was possible, up to a point — the point being a weird one. It had rained most of the week before the abduction, and because of that and the recent freak autumn heat wave which had prevented the ground from getting cold and hard, the ground had been fairly soft — but there were only one set of footprints in the backyard, leading away from the house to the back fence.

  Indicating that someone had lured him over the fence — something he had never done before — without actually stepping into the backyard himself.

  When he asked Mrs. Wendt for a list of people, with the emphasis on males, who might be enough of authority figures in her son Jody’s eyes to entice him to do such a thing, her face went blank. There were no clergy, no relatives, no real male role model who he would follow over that fence, she was sure.

  He told her to think about it, and if anyone came to her to let him know right away.

  At that point Schneider did the conventional thing: he followed the child’s footprints as far as he could. And it was quite a job: behind the Wendt property was a patchwork quilt of pumpkin fields owned by various farmers. He nonetheless was able to follow the boy’s movements through four of these fields to the edge of a fifth, which then dropped off down to a shallow valley and a thin ribbon of water known as Martin’s Creek.

  From the marks he found, it looked as though the boy had slid or fallen down the embankment.

  There were indications that he had crossed the creek at one point.

  For a moment Schneider’s heart climbed into his throat, when he saw how deep the creek was at the point the boy entered. He followed the line of water downstream, fearing that the boy’s drowned body might turn up at any moment.

  But he found markings on the other side of the water at a shallower area where a fallen tree bridged the creek (perhaps the boy was in trouble until he came up against this spot) and these fresh marks led into the tangle of trees on the other side of water.

  The odd thing was that there were only the boy’s tracks. He broadened his search, and discovered that, a second, oddly-shaped set of tracks led from the pumpkin field behind the Wendt house down the embankment into the woods, but they were nowhere near the boy’s.

  Which led him to believe that, perhaps, the boy had been following someone?

  Out of breath and sweating a little, his slight paunch only one indication of how out of shape he was (thirty years old and already starting to look like an old cop), he found himself at a spot in the patch of woods marked by a broken pumpkin where both sets of tracks converged.

  It was here, obviously, that the boy was abducted.

  There were signs of a struggle. And then only the second set of prints — which were very odd indeed, not shoe or boot prints but large flat ovoids, which made him think that someone had worn some sort of covering over his shoes, to disguise the prints — led away.

  And then, abruptly, in the middle of nowhere, among a gloomy stand of gnarled trees, so thick and twisted they blocked all light from above, they stopped.

  At that point the hair on the back of Schneider’s head (where there still was hair, a good part of the top of his head being bald) stood on end. He looked at the clearing he stood in, covered wit
h leaves and dead branches.

  Where…?

  He brought in dogs, of course, and along with two uniformed policemen he brushed the area of leaves and twigs, looking for an underground opening. But there was none. Even the dogs, who had been given a piece of Jody Wendt’s clothing, had stopped at the same spot Schneider had.

  One of them threw back its head and bayed, which, again, made the hair on the back of Schneider’s head stand on end.

  Jody Wendt had disappeared into thin air.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The poster, which read: UNCLE LOLLIPOP LOVES YOU! was upside down. He was glad his mom had taught him to read. There was more writing at the bottom of the poster, but he couldn’t make out what it said because it was too small and it was also upside down. So was everything else. The sign was in bright colors, red and blue and yellow and green, as if the colors had been splashed on or finger-painted — they ran over their borders and looked still wet. The room smelled like paint, like the time his mother had painted his bedroom in March and left all the windows open. He’d slept on the couch in the living room that night (sneaking the television on at three in the morning, but there had only been commercials on for exercise equipment — some of which Mom had — and for calcium and vitamin supplements — he had soon tired and turned the TV off; even out here he could faintly smell the paint on the walls of his room) and when he went back to his room the next night he got sick to his stomach, even though the paint was dry and the windows had been left open a crack. A week later all his own posters and his bookshelf with Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (his favorite book) and The Wizard of Oz were back, and the smell was gone. He’d forgotten his room had ever been painted.

  But the smell wasn’t gone here — it was stronger. It had a curious burning odor underneath the paint smell, as if someone was heating paint in a pan.

  That was funny, heating paint in a pan…

  He felt light-headed, and suddenly wanted to throw up.