by B. E. Scully
“That part of the stories is true,” the Hound said, rummaging even deeper in the cart. “Any funny business, and they refuse to stay quiet. Plain and simple, you can’t make them stay quiet. Eventually, they’ll start talking, and the shit will hit the fan.”
The Hound stood up and went still, sniffing the air. The word was right on the tip of his tongue—a strange word, a foreign word from back before the Hound was the Hound, when he spent his days reading important books and learning all kinds of important things from wise and learned scholars.
“SEHNSUCHT!” the Hound shouted.
That was the word, all right—a German word. The Hound squeezed his remaining eye shut, remembering. One of the learned scholars had said that it didn’t have an exact translation in English, that the closest meaning was “longing, yearning, craving,” or even “intensely missing.” The Hound had never forgotten that frosty December morning. He’d been watching an icicle drip-drip-drip outside the classroom window when suddenly the word had come to him in the drips, as loud and clear as if the icicle was speaking-dripping right into his ear: sehnsucht. To the Hound, the word sounded like an icicle, like the winter wind—cold and sharp, barren and beautiful. The professor went on to say how sehnsucht represented the unfinished or imperfect nature of human existence, and the longing for an ideal, unattainable alternative. That morning, the Hound felt like he had been let in on a giant universal secret.
Not long after that, they released the Iceman. Next came the voices. “And the Great White Aliens have been a nervous wreck ever since,” the Hound said.
A gust of wind grabbed hold of the plastic tarp the Hound used as a shield against the rain. He grabbed hold of the edges and tucked them beneath the wheels of his cart, but he knew the rain would get in just the same. It always did, rain and voices, voices and rain. The Hound never understood how most people could just ignore the voices as if they weren’t even there.
“Rain knows all about sehnsucht,” the Hound said. “It’s the ones that don’t get to finish their stories that won’t leave. Some of them never even get to start telling let alone finishing. So they stick around until someone finally listens.”
The Hound always listened. He just wished someone else would help out now and then. He’d been listening since 1991, ever since they pulled the Iceman out of the ground and the Great White Aliens woke up. Ever since the voices came.
“Came in on the rain, that’s how,” the Hound said.
He reached up and pressed hard on the wad of rags covering his right eye socket. It always flared up in the rain, throbbing more like the puss-filled wound it had once been than the coiled mass of scar tissue it was now. They’d given him one of those pirate patches to wear, but the Hound couldn’t get used to it. Felt too stiff and formal. Besides, he’d never even known a pirate. So he’d rigged up a system of his own with ties to secure in back and everything. Nice and soft and non-pirate. That had been a long time ago, in the desert, after that wily ol’ hijacker D.B. Cooper had shown him where some of the lost ransom money was.
“Government’s been looking for that money for over forty years,” the Hound said, cackling in pleasure. “But our government never did know where to look for things that want to stay hidden.”
On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a plane in Portland, Oregon, demanding $200,000 and four parachutes. Somewhere in the pitch-blackness of a storm-soaked night, Cooper jumped from the plane. Neither him nor his $200,000 dollar ransom money were seen or heard from again. Despite extensive searches, the government had turned up less than $6,000 of the original ransom money. They had even less luck with ol’ D.B.
The Hound had read all about it in a newspaper article, even though putting something in a newspaper article didn’t automatically make it true. The Hound thought about that a lot, which stories were true and which ones weren’t. He’d thought about it ever since he was a little kid sitting in the bath tub, trying to work out what his mom was saying about Santa Claus not being real.
“Not really real,” his mom had struggled to explain. “More like an idea. Like a symbol that stands for something else.”
“Like the Easter bunny?” the Hound had asked long before he’d become the Hound.
“Well…yes, I suppose,” his mother said, gradually warming to the idea. “Like the Easter bunny! So all the good things Santa Claus stands for are real. But Santa Claus himself isn’t real.”
“Ho, ho, ho,” his older sister had said, sticking her head into the bathroom. “Now if you’ll please hurry it up in here, the Tooth Fairy has to use the toilet.”
Real, not real. Believe this, not that. The Hound would soon discover that Santa Claus was just the first chapter of the never-ending human storybook. Stories, he had since decided, were always part true and part not-true. The trick was figuring out which was which.
For instance, most of the stories said that D.B. Cooper couldn’t have survived the jump, that he was long dead by now. But the Hound had a different story.
It was summer then, at the Washington-Oregon state border. The Hound had set up camp near a quiet little lake not too overrun by tourists and hikers. One afternoon when the Hound had just drifted into a nap, D.B. Cooper appeared out of nowhere, black sunglasses on his face just like in the “Wanted” posters from the F.B.I.
Cooper didn’t say one word, not even after the Hound introduced himself. Cooper just silently made his way to the bottom of a steep drop-off where three soggy bundles of $20 bills were hidden beneath twelve inches of accumulated landslide debris. The outer layers of money were too disintegrated and tattered to save, but once the Hound had carefully peeled away the layers one by one, like an onion skin, he had over four hundred twenty dollar bills totaling $8,740.
The government said he should have turned all that money over to them, but the Hound knew better. He’d lived well for quite some time off D.B. Cooper’s money. Some of it had even taken him to Arizona, to the desert, where there wasn’t any rain. No rain, no voices. The Hound had decided that’s why people lived in bright, sunny places—no voices coming in with the rain, no faces coming in through the fog.
Only he hadn’t counted on the sand.
“Find a way to come in about everywhere, I guess,” the Hound said.
He dug down to the bottom of his cart, where the rags and stuff too dirty for anyone to touch hid the real treasure, the one even better than the blue bag—the dented metal box with the pistol inside. The Hound put his hand into the bag and counted out each cool, smooth piece of metal, lingering over each one. He knew exactly how many were left, because once a week, on worship day, he took them out and counted them.
Seven more bullets to go.
Which is why the Hound had come to the edge of town, to the abandoned lumber yard with its secret corridors of plywood and stacks of forgotten tree corpses. The Hound had been there many times before, and so knew which areas were off-limits or belonged to someone else. He had his own place marked out in the far back corner of the lot where someone had leaned a giant piece of plywood against a fence and just left it there, as if knowing the Hound would need it someday.
“Someday is today,” the Hound said, rummaging around in his cart for something sharp. He found a broken coffee cup that would do the trick and knelt down to dig. It didn’t take too long to excavate a hole big enough for the metal box. The Hound buried it and carefully smoothed the dirt over, covering the spot with clumps of moss and old scrap lumber just to be safe.
“Never find it now, even if the voices find me,” he said.
The Hound was just grateful he lived far, far away from the Iceman. He had enough problems to deal with right here in Oregon territory, U.S.A.
Edouard Chambreau was one of them. The Hound peered at the rain, thick as knives, hoping Chambreau wasn’t out there somewhere, waiting for him. The Hound knew all about Chambreau—hell, the man had even supplied his nickname, taken from “The Hounds,” the gang of toughs and ruffians Chambreau us
ed to terrorize union men and rivals all up and down the coast until he “reformed” in 1874 and became a Christian temperance man. Chambreau was a gambler, a thief, and a bold-faced liar, but he’d once told the Hound something that had changed his life: “You have to kill at least one man before you can be anybody.”
“Once a scoundrel always a scoundrel,” the Hound spat. Killing a man hadn’t made the Hound into anybody. In fact, killing a man had made the Hound into even more of a nobody.
He pressed hard against the bandaged eye socket. “Can’t get much more of a nobody now,” he told the rain.
Finally, the rain answered back.
Yes, you can.
An ice pick went straight down the Hound’s spine and stayed put, pinning him to the ground. The Hound didn’t have to ask whose voice was coming out of the rain. He knew that voice as well as his own. He hadn’t heard it for years—too many years now for the Hound to keep track of. But he knew it just the same. That voice belonged to the Bone Man, a man a thousand times worse than Edouard Chambreau. After all, Chambreau had told him how important it was to kill a man, but the Bone Man had shown him how to do it.
The Hound had been running from the Bone Man for years, but he’d always known that walking skeleton would find him again someday. Maybe that’s why he’d come back to Oregon in the first place—to get on with the inevitable.
“Run to the desert, run to the sea, run as far as D.B.’s money would take me. But even a hound has to stop running someday.”
He stood up, pulled back the plastic tarp, and stared into the rain. Sure enough, there was the Bone Man, pale and thin as ever.
Bone Man took a step toward the Hound. He was wearing a three-piece suit, just like always. He had on a raincoat, but he wasn’t carrying an umbrella, which meant he was drenched from hat to boots. Not that he seemed to mind the weather one way or another. Weather didn’t bother a man like Bone Man. He had more important things to consider.
The Bone Man was wearing that same rictus grin, the one that was always in place whether he was kissing a baby or killing a man. “How have you been, Mr. Packard?”
The Hound jumped at the sound of that long-ago name. No one called him mister anything anymore let alone Mr. Packard. But that’s the way Bone Man was—always perfectly polite, perfectly well-mannered. Formal, even.
“Wolf in gentleman’s clothing,” the Hound mumbled to himself, hoping Bone Man wouldn’t hear. The Hound wouldn’t pretend for one second that he wasn’t scared to death of this walking, talking skeleton masquerading as a man.
“It’s been a long time,” Bone Man said. “Eleven years, to be exact.”
“Eleven, a magic number!” the Hound shouted. If he didn’t protect himself now, it would be too late. The Bone Man would hypnotize him just like he always did. “Smallest positive integer requiring three syllables, largest prime number with a single-morpheme name! Goes into ninety-nine exactly nine times, atomic number of the element sodium!” The Hound’s mind raced, trying to keep up. “Remaining apostles of Jesus, number of players on the field…”
But the Hound couldn’t keep up, even with magic on his side. Bone Man took another step forward. Desperate, the Hound pulled out his most powerful weapon. “World War One ended on November eleventh, nineteen-eighteen, at eleven a.m.—the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year!”
But the Bone Man just smiled that ghastly grin. “You know why I’m here, don’t you, Mr. Packard? I had some unfinished business before I left town, and I never leave business unfinished. You didn’t think you’d seen the last of me, did you?”
If the Hound left his cart here, no one would mess with it. No one, that is, who didn’t know the secrets it contained. It was a long way to the police station, but he’d be safe there. Without so much as glancing at Bone Man, the Hound tucked the plastic tarp around his cart and secured the edges. He stole a sideways glance at a place in the fence where he knew there was a hole cut big enough for a man to slip through. Bone Man was still standing there, hands neatly tucked into his pockets, grinning away while the rain knifed down at him.
“Knife storm can’t kill Bone Man,” the Hound mumbled. “How do you kill a skeleton?”
He’d have to make a run for it. Without giving it any more time for consideration, the Hound put his head down and took a deep breath. Then he raced right past Bone Man before he had a chance to stop him, slipped through the hole in the fence, and ran all the way to the police station without stopping even once to catch his breath. Which is why when he finally got there, he practically collapsed inside the door, convinced a heart attack would take him out before the Bone Man got the chance.
But the heart wasn’t ready to quit just yet.
The Hound staggered over to the young kid at the in-take desk. “I want to report a murder.”
The kid frowned and fiddled around with some papers. “Okay, if you just have a seat over there in the reception area I’ll make sure you talk to someone—”
“No! I need to talk to someone right now.” The Hound whipped around to scan the entryway. For all he knew, Bone Man could be coming through the door right this second.
“Right now,” he repeated, leaning toward the kid and putting on his most serious face in order to show how important it was.
But that only seemed to make the kid more nervous. She took a step back from the desk and asked, “Okay, um, where did the murder take place?”
“It didn’t…” The Hound pressed hard on the empty eye socket. He couldn’t lose his train of thought now. He had to stay focused. “It didn’t take place yet. It’s going to take place. Soon. That’s why I’m here. To stop it.”
“Okay, who’s going to be murdered?”
“I…I don’t know his name.”
Was the kid smiling now? The Hound didn’t see anything the least bit funny, but the kid cop was definitely smiling.
“It’s going to be kind of hard to—”
“There!” The Hound shouted. The eleven number magic must have paid off after all, because right there on the wall behind the kid cop’s head was a great big picture of the man about ready to be murdered, in a nice redwood frame and everything, above a row of pictures of other men and women.
The Bone Man never knew it, but the Hound used to follow him around the city whenever he spotted him out working. The Hound knew he was supposed to keep everything about the Bone Man secret—that was one of the first, most important rules!—so he never tried to speak with him or even approach him. In fact, the Bone Man never even knew the Hound was there. The Hound knew a thing or two about being invisible by now. So the Hound knew that the Bone Man had a partner, a man that went with him almost everywhere.
That man was the same man in the redwood picture frame.
The Hound might not always remember things very well, but he’d never forgotten him for one simple reason—the Bone Man and his partner were so similar that when they were together, they looked like twin walking skeletons.
“That’s him,” the Hound said, pointing at the picture. “That’s the man who’s going to be murdered.
The kid turned around to look. When she turned back to the Hound, she wasn’t smiling anymore. “That’s Lieutenant Mickelson you’re pointing at. He’s in charge of the homicide division, so that’s a pretty serious accusation you’re making—”
“Not an accusation,” the Hound said, leaning forward again, desperate to make himself understood, to not frighten anyone or cause any harm. “Not an accusation, a fact. Like in the newspapers—some facts, but not all of them. Like the Iceman. Like the Great White Aliens.”
“Listen, if you’ll just wait here a moment—”
The cop was picking up a phone or intercom or something and talking into it. The Hound just had to be patient, had to wait. But how could he be patient with the Bone Man right outside, coming in on the rain? And it was set to rain for days to come.
“Aren’t you going to make an arrest?” the Hound asked, too lo
udly, too urgently, he realized too late. If he wasn’t careful, they would ask him to leave. They always asked him to leave eventually. Only this time, he couldn’t leave. Wouldn’t leave, no matter what.
The kid cop looked at him steadily. “We can’t make an arrest for a murder that hasn’t happened yet. But if you know who is making threats against a police officer then—”
“I know!” the Hound said, lower this time. He had to stay calm. “I know, all right. In fact, I have him right here.”
The Hound leaned over the desk and whispered, “I’m the murderer. I’m the one who’s going to kill your police officer, the one right there in that picture. That’s why I came in tonight, so you could arrest me.”
The Hound held out his wrists, waiting for the handcuffs. Two more officers arrived, but they didn’t handcuff him. Instead one of them said, “Come with us, please,” and led the Hound through a door and into a maze of inter-connected corridors and rooms. In one of them, a great big open space with desks and police officers everywhere, the Hound stopped dead in his tracks.
He thought he’d be safe here, but he’d been wrong. In this room, there were more pictures, way more than in the front lobby. In fact, there was a whole wall full of pictures, rows of them, only these were framed in jet black. A big plaque above the rows read, “The Wall of Honor.” Even though the Hound wasn’t close enough to read the names that went with the pictures, he would have known that face halfway across town.
Three quarters of the way down the Wall of Honor, third from the bottom in the seventh row, was the unmistakable skeleton head of the Bone Man. He was staring straight at the Hound as if to say, “What the hell took you so long?”
