Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  The figure was less than ten feet away, kneeling down by the gun—only inches away from the great, steaming carcass of the dead bear. At this close proximity, Grove could see the man’s quiver of arrows hanging off the back of his ragged nylon raincoat, the hunting bow dangling, the hooded face partially obscured in shadow, a pale, creased visage of teeth and crow’s-feet. The man’s head shivered convulsively as cryptic words spewed out of him very quickly and very softly, echoing in the darkness: “Aaahhh-baal-sssahh-geeee-utu-utu-ssssuh-hoooolnamm-nin-ssssahhh—”

  Grove tried to say something else, but his words got clogged suddenly when he saw Ackerman pick up the gun. Grove’s mind raced: I’m not going to look away, I’m not, I’m not going to cower for the son of a bitch, he can damn well kill me now, but I am not going to look away!

  Across the cave Ackerman stood up, brittle knees cracking. He raised the gun and aimed it at Grove.

  Lightning flickered again, and Ackerman tossed his head in victorious, primal bloodlust, reminding Grove of a wild dog in a feeding frenzy. The cave flashed. All at once the hood slipped off Ackerman’s cranium, and for a brief instant the killer’s face was visible—a ruined map of wrinkles and leathery skin, eyes shimmering like glass embers.

  Grove was gagging on his own blood, simultaneously weeping and roaring: “Go ahead and do it! Do it already! Get it over with!”

  Something unexpected happened then: in that terrible split second of flickering light, Grove saw the man’s face spontaneously transform—the flesh sagging like an air bladder shriveling, all the fire immediately going out of his eyes. The brutal rictus of a grin melted into mortified horror. “Ohhhh—G-Gawd—n-no—” the killer stammered suddenly, trying desperately to communicate something to Grove.

  “What! Talk to me, Ackerman, what? What the hell do you want!”

  The gun wavered, the tall man flinching as though inner forces were battling over control of his body, and Grove instantly recognized the signs in some deeply buried compartment of his embattled mind: the classic dissociative movements of an MPD, a multiple personality disorder. But something deeper, something more significant lurked beneath the realization like a vast, black, underwater leviathan.

  “D-don’t l-let him,” the killer stammered, a tear like a diamond on his cheek, the gun hanging at his side now, eyes furrowed in utter agony.

  “Don’t let him—what! Do what!” Grove boiled in rage and pain, his legs deadweight, glued to the stone. The dark returned, deeper now. Absolute blackness. Grove gasped for breath, tried to see his assailant.

  The broken voice in the darkness: “Don’t let him k-kill you . . . y-you’re the one he wants . . . it’s you . . . it’s always been you.”

  They reached the edge of the clearing—two tactical guys from Portland SWAT who had arrived only minutes earlier, as well as an ATF agent from the Olympia field office—at the precise moment another volley of lightning lit up the place. Simms, the older of the two SWAT guys, took the right flank, his assault rifle gripped tightly in his gloved hands, eyes squinting into the flickering rain. The younger gentlemen, Karris, top-heavy with Kevlar and rain-soaked tac gear, took the left, signaling the ATF guy, Boeski, with a quick downward jerk of the fist, to bring up the rear and suppress as needed. Then Simms and Karris, like armored ballet dancers, simultaneously hopped over the stone lip and crouched on the rainy plateau. The downed special agent—the one called Zorn—was immediately visible to Simms, who signaled Karris with a quick, flat slicing motion of the hand. Karris, the less experienced of the two, gritted his teeth in frustration, slamming his boot down on the moss, livid that they could lose the subjects in the woods so easily, the place lousy with tactical operatives, all messed up by the storm and the weird way sounds carry in the woods. But the luxury of feelings quickly passed because they were in a red-zone situation at the moment, and the clenching and pointing gestures from Simms twenty yards away on the windswept precipice told young Tactical Sergeant-Second Class Anton Karris everything he needed to know. Simms had made a quick trundle over to the body and discovered that the one named Zorn was gone, S-O-L, but the other one, Grove, as well as the suspect, remained at large, armed, and judging by the way Simms was wildly gesticulating toward the adjacent woods, both remained dangerously close and hot and immediately threatening. And all this happened in the space of instants—a few seconds, actually—before a piercing noise rang out from the nearby columns of spruce and tamarack, making both officers duck involuntarily down into the muck, their backs up like startled animals, their weapons snapping up into the ready position drummed into their muscle memories. But neither could move because the sound—the clarion noise that bellowed through the rain—was virtually unrecognizable to human ears, and therefore had no precedent in any SWAT manual or training scenario.

  The New Richard roared in the darkness of the cave.

  He had vanquished the last shred of the Old Richard inside him as though shitting out a parasitic bug, and now his victory cry erupted in the dark like a chorus of hellish voices as he raised the weapon and aimed it at the brown man on the floor of the cave.

  The first shot sounded glorious, lighting up the cave with a flash of radiant yellow fire.

  The hollow-point struck Grove in the hip, gouging a two-inch capsule of muscle and cleanly passing through the meat of his buttocks, imbedding itself into the moldering stone of the cave wall behind him.

  Grove let out an involuntary gasp, jerking sideways in a thundercloud of cordite and dust, his body slamming facedown into the corner. The blast had just the disabling effect the New Richard had calculated—a preamble to the ritual he had learned in dreams.

  “Get it over with!” Grove moaned on the ground, his face pressed against the cold stone, his tortured breaths raising little puffs of dust in the darkness.

  The killer tossed the gun to the ground, the weapon clanging as it bounced across the stone floor. He reached up and, with one brittle movement of his right arm, plucked an arrow from the quiver, pointing the shaft heavenward as though it were a lightning rod.

  “Laahhh-nahh-hammmmaahhhhh-nam-silig-akaaaahhh-sssu-zeeee-sahh-mahhhhh!”

  The New Richard sang out the dissonant howl of words, secret phrases taught to him in nightmares, and the voice rose and ululated like a mad cantor in a register that strained Ackerman’s vocal cords to the breaking point.

  Grove, on the ground, in the dark, bleeding to death, face in the dust. He knew what was coming next, he just knew, the realization materializing in his brain like a photograph in a developing bath. He thought of Hannah, and then, for a brief instant, he thought of Maura County, and all that could have been. Then he closed his eyes—

  —because the iron vise of a hand was around his right arm. The pressure was enormous, as if a machine were grasping him around the forearm. Then a quick, terse yank . . . and now Grove’s right arm was positioned in the familiar pose.

  Next Grove felt the cold pointed tip of the hunting arrow kissing the back of his neck.

  Karris saw the granite maw of the cave first—a dull, sandy facade in the jungle of foliage, obscured by sheets of rain and columns of hemlock. A moment’s hesitation, crouching down behind a fat spruce, wiping an arm across his wet face, realizing the howling noise had come from the cave, Karris clucked his tongue at Simms, who was duckwalking through the undergrowth thirty yards away. Simms froze. The two tac officers traded frantic hand gestures. Then Karris trundled toward the cave, Simms close on his heels, an Ingram M-10 assault rifle ready to rock, its thirty-round magazine locked. The two officers—their training ingrained—slammed up against either side of the stone doorway. More hand gestures. Deep breaths. Muscles coiled. Wet fingers on the triggers. A lot of information still missing, a lot of questions flashing in their midbrains over the course of that brief instant: what kind of a cave were they about to enter? And maybe more critically: was it one of those old abandoned zinc mines that Karris had read about once—the interminable kind that went all the way through to
the other side of the plateau?

  Grove opened his eyes in the darkness. Still alive? I’m still alive? Paralysis gripped the entire left side of his body, which was wrenched into the telltale position of the Sun City victims—a cruel joke played by a cruel god. His vision blurred, essentially useless in the shadows of the cave. But he sensed something happening behind him, something happening to Ackerman. The sound of halted breathing echoed faintly, barely audible to Grove’s ringing ears, a deeper shadow trembling in his peripheral vision.

  He tried to crane his neck around, tried to see what was going on. He felt as though he were nailed to the deck of a sinking ship, the gravity of pain and blood loss tugging him down into the black depths. Shuffling footsteps echoed behind him. Ackerman was gasping.

  Gasping?

  Grove made one last heaving effort to lever his head around far enough to catch a glimpse of the killer. Searing hot agony shot down his spine as he peered over his shoulder, the pain forcing a yelp out of his lungs. Finally he managed to get a fleeting glance at the silhouette looming over him with the hunting bow and arrow still cocked in its cross-brace.

  Ackerman had frozen—mid-strike—the arrow still poised only centimeters away from Grove’s neck.

  Tremors bolted up Ackerman’s spine, straightening him as though a steel rod had just been thrust up his vertebrae. He shivered and winced. His facial features contorted. One eye began to blink fitfully, his jaw clenching as though high voltage were passing through him. Grove, delirious with pain, wondered if Ackerman’s head was going to start spinning.

  It was the penultimate thought that passed through Grove’s conscious mind before the delicate black membrane drew down over him.

  Ackerman began gasping for air, the tip of the arrow wavering away from Grove’s neck. The gasping mixed with a moaning noise, an almost musical sound, squeezing out of Ackerman as he staggered backward now. One of Ackerman’s big, gnarled hands grasped suddenly at his chest—a purely involuntary action.

  On the cold stone floor, in the dark, Grove’s last conscious thought before fainting dead away was one of relief, perhaps even disappointment. He had remembered something Helen Ackerman had said, and all at once he realized what was happening, and the realization brought with it an unsettling wave of dread that the course of events were being channeled by nothing more mystical than sheer coincidence and the vagaries of the human circulatory system.

  The son of a bitch is having a heart attack.

  Grove was unconscious by the time Karris and Simms penetrated the darkness of the cave. A pair of halogen beams pierced the shadows and landed on the profiler, who was slumped in a puddle of blood against the damp stone wall thirty feet inside the tunnel. The great pile of black fur and gristle that was once a bear lay against the opposite wall. By that point the New Richard had shambled away into the black depths of the cavern, dragging his numbed left leg along behind him like a rotted log.

  The tactical agents made no immediate moves toward Grove. They didn’t even bother making a visual assessment of the fallen profiler’s vital signs. Procedure dictated that the officers secure the area first, which was problematic in such a confined space with such an absence of light. Was the bear dead? Apparently, yes. Frantic hand gestures and pinpoint choreography sent both men on a diagonal along either wall, barrels raised, aims fixed, muscles tense, fingers on the triggers, slender shafts of halogen light slicing through the motes of filth, the beams sweeping the empty reaches of the cave. The tac guys paused and listened, and heard no audible evidence of the cardiac arrest case lumbering through the uncharted shadows of the mine shaft.

  By then Ackerman had reached the narrower channels fifty yards away—dragging along in a monstrous, shuffling gate that would have reminded Michael Okuda, were he present, of Karloff’s mummy. Another moment of searching the darkness, and Commander Simms finally felt satisfied that the apparent struggle of a few moments earlier—and whatever had precipitated that god-awful howling sound—had dissipated. Another hand gesture sent both officers over to the profiler. It didn’t take them long to discover that Grove was still clinging to life. Neither Simms nor Karris had much medical training, but they knew enough paramedical procedure to recognize that Grove had lost a lot of blood, was probably in shock, and was indicating a very weak, very slow pulse-ox rate. They knew that the next few minutes were critical if they wanted to save the profiler’s life, so they improvised a makeshift gurney out of a pair of flak vests and a couple of collapsible reachers, and they got Grove’s limp form onto the fabric as quickly and gently as possible, then dragged him out of the cave, leaving a leech trail of blood on the stone while simultaneously making emergency calls on their headset radios and bellowing at the top of their lungs for assistance from the idiots still nosing around the deep woods along the periphery of the hill.

  By the time Simms and Karras emerged from the mouth of the cave, the woods were alive with SWAT guys, fanning out through the undergrowth, scanning the rain for a ghost. A pair of Olympia PD officers with tactical training rushed over and helped with the “package” while Simms called for the closest evac chopper and Karras wrestled jury-rigged pressure bandages around Grove’s mangled neck and midsection.

  Grove remained unconscious through all of this—his mind manufacturing its own secret tumult—and all the noise and vibration of four untrained rescuers jostling his body could not penetrate the storm in his brain.

  18

  A Hole in the Picture

  “No!”

  Grove awoke in a paroxysm of sweat and aching muscles. His head jerked on the pillow, his arms flexing against the metal rails of the hospital bed, making the hardware creak. His hands were heavily bandaged, a diastolic pressure clip pinching his right forefinger.

  He slammed his head back down on the bed and lay there for a moment, winded, as if he had just run a sprint. He crackled all over, as if he were wrapped in cellophane, and half his body felt as though it had been amputated. He swallowed his panic and licked his dry, chapped lips. He gazed around his darkened room and realized he now lay in some kind of subterranean cavern or catacomb, his bed pushed against the stone wall of some forgotten tunnel that stretched as far as he could see in either direction.

  What kind of hospital was this anyway? You would think they could afford some fluorescent lights, maybe a few chairs. Hell, this place didn’t even look like it had indoor plumbing. Grove swallowed acid and took deep breaths in a futile attempt to ease the terror that was suddenly constricting his heart. He gazed around the tunnel and realized just exactly what he was seeing. The moist stone walls, leprous with mold and decay, rose maybe ten feet over Grove’s hospital bed. Dimly illuminated by faint torchlight, the ceiling was capped with gray stalactites of human bone. Skeletal feet and brittle gray icicles of femurs and knuckle joints dangled down from the rotting sediment overhead.

  To Grove’s immediate right stretched a row of mummified human remains, each embedded vertically in the wall, emulsified like sardines in files of human sarcophagi. Emaciated hands and shoulder joints stuck out here and there. Partially fossilized skulls lay congealed in rotting limestone, their empty eye sockets gaping up at the nothingness. At their feet, nestled in little crumbling baskets, were desiccated offerings. Grove recognized the powdery remains of injera bread, Sudanese beads, katanka stones. Icons from Grove’s childhood, from his motherland. The sight of them pierced his soul, flooded him with sorrow.

  He closed his eyes. He could hear a terrible sound in the darkness, and he knew it was coming for him. Faint, shambling footsteps—approaching with a monstrous certainty that touched some inchoate nerve ending at the base of Grove’s skull. He kept his eyes shut, willing the vision away. Please. Please not yet, not now. The footsteps were nearing him, the rancid-sweet smell of the tomb in Grove’s nostrils. He opened his eyes and saw the figure in the dark blue nylon raincoat emerging from the depths of the tunnel.

  It was maybe fifty feet away now, coming for him, and it was no longer hum
an. Its long, cadaverous face—still obscured by that oversized hood—had transformed into a masque of putrid, rotting death. The long patrician nose had curved into the monstrous ulcerated beak of a demon, the dull gleam of its teeth elongated into eldritch fangs. Grove was paralyzed because the thing in the hood was lifting its arm toward him, a black skeletal hand jutting out, inviting Grove to clasp it in supplication, to make contact, to touch it.

  No, not yet, not now!

  The deep, guttural voice that growled suddenly from the depths of that horrible hood was like the shifting of tectonic plates: You’re the one!

  Grove slammed his eyes shut then, slammed them as tight as rivets welded shut by his tears.

  Now unfamiliar noises filled his ears. Watery beeping noises, metallic clicking sounds. He heard a breathy noise like a bellows breathing in and out, and finally he found the strength to open his eyes again.

  All at once he found himself in an ordinary hospital room, his pulse racing, his chest rising and falling rapidly. He lay back against the pillow and breathed through his nose, struggling to calm himself, struggling to steady his heart rate and get his bearings back.

  At last he managed to glance around his bed: he now lay in a small private room with rubber drapes drawn across its single window. The only illumination came from a bank of pilot lights and indicators next to his bed. The soft ticking of a pulse-temp monitor provided the only sound. Grove turned his head far enough to glimpse a digital clock on a bedside cart: it said 4:07. Judging from the stillness and the dark, it had to be a.m.

  He found a Call button on the end of a cable hanging off a bed rail, and awkwardly pressed it with a bandaged thumb.