by Emby Press
“What’s that sheriff?”
“That ain’t pudding in there.”
*
Davenport leaned back in his rocking chair, his feet propped against the wooden railing skirting the wraparound deck. At midnight, he could see the small cluster of lights that delineated Daquwa’s modest borders from the surrounding darkness. The Nantahala National Forest deceived people during the day, its range seemingly limited to the verdant tracts visible through car windows from paved freeways. Only when viewed from an adequate vantage point by night did the forest truly reveal its scope. Then, its endless stretch of shadows mocked the insignificant outposts of civilization making residents feel as isolated as the distant stars scattered through the twilight.
Just like the illusory woodland that surrounded it, Daquwa had both a public and private face. Beneath the façade of small town respectability, rustic righteousness and Southern charm, a seething cauldron of pent up anxiety, acrimony and alienation brewed. The townsfolk had no one to blame but themselves for an underlying bitterness that had been festering for years. Their floundering economy, for instance, could have benefited from tourism, but their collective contempt for outsiders excluded the possibility. Recognizing the inflexibility of their elders, most members of the younger generations left home at the earliest convenience, seeking broader horizons beyond the borders of the quaint, terminally melancholy community.
Born and raised in Daquwa, Davenport had spent the better part of four decades staring down into the valley from his family’s cabin. His grandfather purchased the land from the logging company he managed. When the lumber industry pulled out of the region, his father found work as a lineman. His mother taught grammar to disinterested high school students.
They were gone now, tucked neatly into their graves in the family plot at the edge of the property. His younger brother – his only sibling – had joined them prematurely. The local doctor sent him off to some New England cancer treatment center hoping modern technology would afford him a few extra years. He returned home a week later in a hearse, packed unceremoniously into a cheap pine overcoat.
Davenport sipped whisky and Coke from a sweaty glass, hiding from the one image of death he had never been able to fully dismiss.
Across the valley, atop a facing summit, a flickering light appeared in the midst of the abyss. He watched the distant flame dance beneath the heavens, its brilliance barely brighter than the most radiant stars. Hikers often camped atop the nearby mountaintop, along a spur of the Appalachian Trail.
As a child, he had enjoyed similar outings into the wilderness. He never knew whether the school or the church sponsored the camping trips, and even now he could not remember the supervising adults who must have acted as chaperons. Still, many Daquwa boys had shared the experience, telling chilling tales about headless horsemen and fiendish witches and freakish monsters lurking deep in the woods.
Considering the real horror that had befallen the town in recent days, Davenport hoped today’s children would be able to restrict their fears to the fabricated witches, ghosts and ghouls of mountain folklore.
Either fatigue or inebriation or a combination of the two sent him spinning down the years to the days of his youth. Unconsciously, he mouthed the words to one of the songs they had sung time and time again as they circled the raging bonfire:
Trillium and bishop’s cap worn in the witch’s hair,
Will keep her safe when she ascends her twilit lair;
Where whispered words will fly through space
Summoning up an ancient race;
And on the peaks where fires once burned,
The wicked, welcomed, shall return.
That the chant had secreted itself in his memory only to be rediscovered on such a somber evening left him speechless and on edge. He gulped down the remainder of his drink, hoping to drown out any other pesky recollections.
*
“See it more than I’d like to admit.”
“What’s that?” Davenport spread cream cheese across a toasted pumpernickel bagel. Weeks had phoned him at 5 A.M., asked if he would be willing to participate further in the investigation.
“Needless, brutal death. Torture. Degradation.” Weeks sipped chai tea and stared out the window of the trendy coffee shop. Gray clouds swirled, sweeping the crests of nearby mountains while dawn cowered out of sight. “There’s so much wrong with the world today, like we took the wrong path and we can’t turn around.”
“I’d think you’d be used to murder in your line of work.” The photographer regretted his candor almost immediately, recognizing his unintended insensitivity. Though he had grown accustomed to seeing death, it still took its toll. “I’m sorry,” he said, fumbling through an apology, “I just meant that with time, you develop a thick skin.”
“Agreed – run-of-the-mill murder doesn’t faze me at all. It’s these ritual killings, motivated by God knows what, that bother me – makes me really question where we’re all headed.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You’ve been around long enough, looked death in the eye – snapped pictures like a tourist at Disney World. Did you ever feel like you did yesterday in that bathroom? Did you notice that darkness – that malevolence – that seemed pinned to the crime scene? Like something that had been there had fouled the place, literally and figuratively; like something had contaminated the area, left its taint of depravity as if marking its territory.”
“I guess,” Davenport said, hesitating as he searched for an adequate response. He frowned on engaging in deep discussions about religion and philosophy with either friends or strangers. “I guess I have a hard time seeing anything I can’t capture on film.”
“You an atheist, Davenport?” Though intended as a question, the word had been so unconditionally demonized both by Bible-thumpers and conservative politicians that it always sounded more like an accusation. “You don’t have to answer,” Weeks quickly added, discerning the photographer’s growing restlessness. “Doesn’t matter. Sometimes evil can be nothing more than a chemical imbalance, or a sequence of regrettable episodes distorting an individual’s perception of right and wrong.”
“Seems some people are born without a sense of good and bad, too.”
“Some are,” Weeks agreed. He watched through the window as a local truck driver argued with a woman in the parking lot. The quarrel culminated in tears, shouts and abandonment. As he drove off down the business route deeper into town, she gathered her scattered belongings from the pavement, stuffing them arbitrarily into a duffle bag. Other than the crime scene investigator and the photographer, only a few patrons took notice of the incident. None felt compelled to offer assistance. “Apathy can destroy a civilization. Societal indifference is an invitation to all those with criminal and otherwise immoral aims.”
“You’d think that in a small town folks would have more compassion,” Davenport said, turning his gaze from the woman. Scrawny as a raffle turkey and terminally disheveled, she plopped down on the curbside to take inventory of her possessions and to ponder her predicament. “Maybe we would, if it was one of our own. But strangers – well, as a community, we’ve never been too eager to embrace strangers.”
“So I’ve noticed.” Weeks offered no evidence to suggest locals had treated him in a less than friendly manner, but Davenport did not doubt the implication. Although Sheriff Choate understood the need for expertise, other members of the small town police force routinely viewed outside assistance as an intrusion and an insult. “It’s the same pretty much everywhere, big city or small. People are too wrapped up in their own lives to take notice of anyone else’s troubles.” The stranded woman appeared to be counting money in her wallet just before she pushed herself from the sidewalk. She waited for a break in traffic and crossed the highway, slipping into the shadows inside the office of a seedy motel. “You have to wonder if someone could have helped that poor guy at the Pump and Pay.”
“Have you identified him yet?”
&
nbsp; “No – probably a transient.” Weeks put a five dollar bill on the table and finished his drink. “We’ve got another victim, now, though. Another minor tragedy to compound the mystery.”
“And you need a photographer.”
“Yeah, I need a photographer. More importantly, though, I need someone with an intimate knowledge of this town – someone who won’t get squeamish at the sight of carnage.”
“You clear all this through Laird?”
“I’m afraid the sheriff isn’t in any position to clear much of anything right now.” The somberness of Weeks’ statement worried Davenport. The investigator looked vexed and exceedingly fatigued. He seemed to take the case personally. “You have a gun, Davenport?”
“No, I don’t see a need …”
“Well, I do,” Weeks said, restricting any further debate. “If you’re on this case, I’d prefer you have a firearm for your own protection. I’ll push the paperwork through this morning.”
As they exited the establishment, the abandoned woman met them at the door. In the few minutes she had been out of their sight, she had shrugged off all evidence of her exasperation, recomposed herself and applied an adequate amount of makeup to conceal her emotional state.
Weeks smiled and nodded, fumbled a “good morning” before realizing it was clearly not for her. Davenport, meanwhile, admired the flowers in her hair. One contained a dozen cup-shaped white blossoms blooming along an elongated sprig; the other, more readily recognizable, consisted of three crimson petals.
The woman smiled at the photographer as if she remembered him from some encounter years earlier.
*
Choate’s children had grown, left town and disappeared into big cities scattered all over the globe. They rarely corresponded. His wife had committed suicide a dozen years earlier, a victim of loneliness and apprehension and despair. The sheriff lived alone in a studio apartment above the town’s police station. He read tacky crime dramas he bought at a used paperback store on Wishing Willow Way. When he ran out of things to read, he watched reruns of ’70s cop shows.
Davenport buried his face in his hands. The butchery did not disturb him as much as did the violation of privacy. In all the years he had known him, Choate had never invited Davenport upstairs to his humble accommodations. He never invited anyone inside his sanctum. Outside that door, he was a servant of the public – and everything he did fell under the scrutiny of the population. He understood his place as a peacekeeper, an enforcer, a guardian and an ideal. On the streets, he welcomed the attention.
Inside, though, he had created a refuge not meant for prying eyes.
Beneath the spatters of blood, the drab walls resonated with life. Dozens of framed images of his children at various stages of development filled the room. They had been meticulously aligned, positioned symmetrically and carefully ordered to depict chronologically Choate’s cherished past. They revealed smiling faces, carefree summer days and the warmth of family life. They offered a glimpse at the good years, the interval between his own difficult childhood and the days when everything he held dear unraveled. They reminded Choate daily of everything he had lost.
The sheriff’s detached head lay on its side on the far end of the sofa-bed, its gaze fixed on photos fastened to the opposite wall. Davenport wondered if he had hoped to escape the massacre by accessing a window into the past.
“Shame,” Weeks said, limiting Davenport’s movement. “Seemed like a good guy, a good lawman.” Weeks had already done some preliminary work, marking off bits of evidence, numbering the largest chunks of flesh and viscera strewn across the living room floor. “The crime scene extends from here, through the hall and into the bathroom. Appears as though the victim was in the shower when first attacked – put up a struggle, ended up out here. Probably trying to retrieve his weapon.”
“Does anyone else in the community know?”
“Deputy Bowman found him. Agents Mason and Routledge are taking his statement downstairs right now.” Weeks tapped the camera dangling at Davenport’s chest. “Best start taking pictures. Right now, it’s just another assignment. There’ll be time for grieving later.”
Pushing aside his despair, Davenport followed Weeks’ instructions, snapping pictures in predetermined order, following the numbered tags fastidiously placed to illustrate a hypothetical timeline. The most grisly aspects of the first murder had been confined to the small space of a bathroom stall; this time, the butchery had spread through half an apartment. Compared to the scene at Cappy’s Pump and Pay, this seemed sloppy, unsystematic and poorly planned. Either the killer had grown clumsy or he had shed his few remaining inhibitions in favor of gratuitous bloodshed.
“Just like before, there’s more missing than there is left,” Weeks said, sensing Davenport’s comparison of the two crime scenes. The investigator had told him that analysis of the remains of their John Doe revealed that only about 20 percent of his body had been recovered. That unpalatable fact led the FBI to add the term “sexually motivated cannibal” to their detailed profile of what they estimated must be an emerging serial killer. “Same types of symbols on the wall – be sure to get plenty of pictures of that. The boys from the bureau haven’t had any luck identifying the writing. I’ll do some digging myself.”
Davenport took his time, looking for anything that seemed out of place. Having never stepped inside Choate’s place made it difficult to pinpoint anomalies. One aberration immediately caught his attention in the kitchenette. Stacked on the counter beside the sink were dirty dishes – a skillet, two dinner plates and two glasses. Choate had invited someone up to dinner.
For the time, he kept his discovery to himself.
“What was used to sever his head?” Davenport stared through the lens of his camera at the jagged, gory stub of neck beneath Choate’s head. At the Pump and Pay, most of the victim’s head remained out of sight beneath murky toilet water. Davenport had envisioned a clean cut executed with some oversized blade or even an axe. The tattered flesh and blood before him told a different story. “It almost looks like something ripped his head right off…”
“Same with the other,” Weeks said, kneeling on the floor in front of the sofa. “That’s what’s got those feds stumped.” He rubbed his eyes and stood, joints popping as his aging body struggled to overcome gravity. As Davenport completed the assignment, capturing a few more images, committing them to digitized memory, Weeks drifted around the room restlessly like a bulldog scratching at the door, sensing a nearby threat. “I’m not here by coincidence, you know. The FBI has plenty of capable investigators, pathologists, forensics teams.” He paused, watched the photographer immerse himself in recording the moment in time. “They’re good at what they do – good a tracking and apprehending society’s deviants.”
“Why are you here, then?”
“To find the architects of some crimes, you have to look beyond traditional sociological precepts. Sometimes, you have to embrace another definition of evil.”
*
Davenport stood in front of a small cottage perilously perched on a precipitous bluff overlooking Daquwa. Vines cuddled it like a child of the forest, lent it some semblance of balance to keep it from spilling down the steep ridge into the wooded hollow far below. He had left his car parked just off the pavement a half a mile back alongside Baskin’s Creek Bypass, hiked down the rutted dirt path that led beneath soaring oaks and spruce trees. A carpet of mosses, ferns and oak twigs pressed against either side of the path, threatening to overwhelm it.
He had no reason to be here. He had no real wish to remember anything.
His father once called the old woman who lived in the primitive shack a mystic, a sage. Legends said the blood of Cherokee and Choctaw shamans ran through her veins. The last descendant of an ancient clan of pioneers who colonized the region, she had lived by herself in the wilderness as long as anyone in town could recall.
“There’s doin’s,” she said, her voice more full of life than he had expected. She spoke
through a crack in the door, showing only one wild eye and a tangle of gray hair. Her declaration so surprised Davenport that he stopped in his tracks. “Awful things what slinks through the dark wood. She brings ’em, she do – she a conjure woman.”
“You don’t know me,” Davenport began, taking up permanent residence several yards away from the dilapidated cottage. The stench of stewing vermin hovered in the clearing as dingy brown smoke seeped from her chimney. “My father used to bring you gifts – he called them offerings.”
“A good man.” Her head tilted revealing a toothless smile. “Many good men used to come, used to bring me things in thanks. I ask for nothing, but they saw fit.” Her knotted fingers wriggled against the wormy door frame. “No more – no more.”
“I came to ask to about the witch fires – the camping trips.” Davenport searched his faltering memories. Though he had participated, he could only recall fragments from the events. He believed it to be some kind of custom, its roots perhaps centuries old but its purpose long forgotten. Apparently no longer practiced, his inquiries in town had yielded no explanation and no admission of complicity. It seemed as if townsfolk for generations had followed some instinctual impulse, trekking up a mountainside and performing some pagan ritual. At some point in the recent past, though, the tradition had been abandoned. “I don’t understand …”
“Keep the fires to burning,” she sang, chanting as if summoning an old hymn from memory. “It has always been the way. Keeps the wicked ones away. Only a few remember why – and when they go, the flames will die.”
“Who remembers?”
“Only a few,” she repeated, cackling. “She knows some, not all. She’ll try to find ’em all, ya’ let her. She’ll kills ’em, she will.”
“Laird – he knew.” Clear as one of his digital photographs, Davenport pictured Choate as a young man presiding over one of the fire ceremonies. Other faces began to emerge, other memories began to surface. As if awakening from a dream, the pieces of his childhood began to reassemble. The ritual, shrouded in mystery, had been passed down from generation to generation. It dated back to the earliest pioneers, perhaps even to the tribes inhabiting the Appalachians before the Europeans arrived. Performed on different dates of celestial significance, the rite served to discourage bad spirits from returning to the valley. Should the townsfolk relinquish the practice, the supposed consequences could be dire. “Are you saying someone is killing people connected to the ceremony?”
