by Stant Litore
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Stant Litore
THE DEAD MAN logo is a registered trademark of Adventures in Television, Inc.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
eISBN: 9781477867358
Cover design by Jeroen Ten Berge
For Jessica, heart of my heart
CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
1
4 hours after midnight
Matt could hear the footsteps ahead of him, the crunch of snow beneath dress shoes. Twice the man slid, caught himself, his curses on the cold air. Matt’s own booted feet were heavy, his footsteps loud—this hard snow made silence impossible. Both he and his quarry knew exactly where the other was. Speed mattered; secrecy didn’t. A stitch in his side as he barreled between the tall conifers, through a darkness lit only by the soft sheen of the snow, ducking when a sudden branch whipped at his face, shoving snow-covered ferns out of his way. He was already soaked to the skin, his heavy jacket doing little good. His breath loud in his ears. A few times he caught glimpses of the killer, darting between the cedars in a long duster he’d taken from his last victim. Once, just once, the killer glanced back. Enough for Matt to see his face writhing with maggots in the starlight.
Then they were out of the trees and the killer was running out onto the lake, which, for twenty yards out, was no dark mirror of forest and sky but a sheet of ice.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
For once, why couldn’t it be easy? Most men left their jobs at five, had dinner at home, paid their bills, put their kids to bed, made love to their wives, fell asleep snoring ’til sunup. Not him. Never him. He had to be out chasing psychopaths with messed-up powers across dark ice four hours after midnight.
What kind of a life was that?
But then, technically I’m not alive, am I? And I’ve been dead in the cold before. I can do this. Longing desperately for his ax, Matt took a breath and stepped out onto the ice.
2
2 hours after midnight
The knocking snapped Oscar from sleep as sharply as you might break a twig. His was an old house, and sound echoed through it with a vigor and fury unknown to younger structures. Bolting upright, he sat in his bed, straining to hear over the clamor of his heart.
There it came again: an insistent but light and almost feminine tapping at the door. Oscar glanced at his bedroom window: the shadow of cedar branches faint through a sheen of frost. It had to be ten below outside.
It took a few moments to get his old body moving, into a bathrobe, and treading down the creak of his stairs, but whoever was at the door didn’t give up, didn’t like being left out in the cold. Four quick taps, repeated again and again. Oscar tied his robe, then blew air on his hands as he reached the last few steps. There was an old four-pane window by the door but it was entirely iced. He couldn’t see anything on his porch. The cold floor burned his feet; he hadn’t paused for slippers, and he groaned, wanting his bed and a swift return to the dream he’d been having, of a woman he’d yearned for in college. His sleep had been full of her body pressed softly to him, her gasps in his ear. A stab of regret: he should have asked her out. All those years ago. He should have asked her.
A rattle of the door, then he jerked it open, and then all the breath seemed to leave his body. His hand whitened about the edge of the door.
“Martha,” he breathed.
The woman on his porch smiled, but her eyes were hard and cold. Her graying hair, the small wrinkles about her mouth, the way one corner of her mouth curved higher than the other.
It was Martha.
But she’d been… gone… for years.
His whole body went cold.
“Have you forgotten me?”
“Never,” Oscar whispered.
He had to be asleep. A dream, this had to be a dream.
“May I?”
He just stared at her helplessly. Then stammered, “Of course,” and stepped out of the way of the door.
She stepped inside, her eyes on his. He frowned. Something about her wasn’t quite right. The intent way she was staring at him, unblinking. That slight smile, an unnerving smile—the way one imagined predators smiling from the brush as they watched a deer step down to the creek, just one short leap away from capture.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His hands were shaking. “I never meant to hurt you.”
She lifted her hand to his cheek, and at that soft touch his eyes filled with tears that he fought to hold back. Her eyes glistened too. “I know.”
His brain struggled to catch up with his heart. “Come sit down,” he whispered. “The… the kitchen. I’ll get you something to drink…”
“That would be nice.” Again that smile.
Coughing, he turned and shuffled toward the kitchen, his mind racing. Martha. His Martha. But she was in the grave. And had left his house before the grave ever took her. This couldn’t be. Yet, ghost or dream, she was here. She was going to have a drink with him. Some things were too beautiful to be questioned. Some dreams you didn’t want to wake from.
Pain, violent in the back of his head. The world grayed and then was gone.
“Wakey, wakey.”
A hand slapping his face. Oscar’s eyes shot open. He found himself gazing up at a younger man, probably in his thirties. He had a military cut to his blond hair and a scar just above his left eye. Like a knife scar. A hard, chiseled face. In it, eyes keen as ice. The man lifted a needle and peered at it in the dim light from the lamp on the bedside table. Oscar gasped, tried to jerk upright. Metal cold against his wrists. More around his ankles. His breath went fast and shallow, his heart wild in his chest.
“Who are you?” His gaze locked on that needle.
The man smiled and fitted the needle to a long tube. A black bag—an old-school medical bag, the kind doctors used to carry on house calls—was popped open beside him on the bed. “I’m a doctor. Call me House.” His smile grew, and he lifted the needle near his eyes to look at it. “No, don’t call me House. Call me Lugosi. Doctor Lugosi. More appropriate, don’t you think?”
Without any change in that smile or in his eyes, he bent over Oscar and slid the needle quickly into his neck. The sharp prick of it.
Oscar gasped, kept gasping in sharp, terrified breaths.
“Now, stop that.” Another slap to his face. “Hyperoxygenated blood doesn’t taste nearly as nice. It’s memories I’m after, not oxygen. I can breathe whenever the hell I want. This…” He gave a soft shiver, a movement nearly sexual. His face flushed, eyes dark with anticipation. “This is a rarer feast.”
“Don’t!” Oscar cried. “God. Don’t. What do you want? Why are you doing this?”
“Because you need it.” The man stared down at him, and Oscar realized suddenly what was so strange about his eyes: he rarely blinked.
“You need it,” the doctor said softly. “You’re not a religious man, are you, Oscar?”
Oscar just stared.
“No, I didn’t think so. Not out here, alone. No priest. No wife even, no one to confess to. But you’ve done things, Oscar, regretted things, or you wouldn’t hav
e seen me wearing a mask of the dead.” He ran the tube through a small hand pump and placed the other end of the tube into a small wooden bowl. “But I can help you, because I’m a doctor. A very special kind of doctor.”
The doctor ran his fingers along the tube where it lay across the bed, and Oscar tensed.
“You’ve probably done horrible things, or seen horrible things. Horrible things in your blood. Not to worry. I will take all the bad blood out.” Again that cold smile. The stranger reached into his bag, and Oscar’s gaze followed his hand, his throat dry. His captor pulled out a roll of black duct tape, and Oscar’s eyes widened. The harsh rip of the tape, then, even as he sucked in breath to scream, the stranger shoved the heel of his hand against Oscar’s chin, clacking his jaw shut, hurting him. Then the tape was warm and sticky against his lips, his cheeks, sealing his mouth shut. Almost gently, the stranger smoothed down the tape.
A small, lost whimper in Oscar’s throat.
“Yes,” he crooned. “Empty you out. Leave you dried out and clean and pure. In the old days, I would have covered every inch of your body in leeches. Let them do it the slow way. They used to call us that. Medical people. They called us leeches. These aren’t the old days, though. No, they aren’t.”
He tapped Oscar’s cheek twice with his fingers, then reached for the little pump.
The duct tape muffled Oscar’s screams. Only the face-changer heard them, the face-changer and the mice that lived in the wall behind the old armoire that had belonged to Oscar’s wife. No one else. Outside Oscar’s house, the snow fell soft, silencing the whole world, erasing footprints, muffling all sounds, even the dreams of small lives living in burrows or inside of trees, and concealing all mankind’s secrets.
3
The hunt
Over the past three days Matt had tracked the killer from Stanwood to Arlington, then up into the Cascades to tiny settlements that had no real road. He didn’t know the murderer’s name or his motive or whose house he would visit next, but Matt Cahill did know one thing.
The man had been touched by Mr. Dark.
His face—
It had been a long time since Matt had seen a face that terrible. It was as though even the man’s bones had been eaten away by the maggots beneath his skin. Matt had glimpsed him by chance in Anacortes, across a busy street, the day before the killings had started across the water in Stanwood.
Matt had found Stanwood buzzing with word of an elderly couple who lived with their niece in a trailer just off the county road. The two elderly ones had been drained empty, the blood sucked right out of their bodies. The niece had been nowhere to be found. In Arlington, it had been a youth pastor whose wife had been trying vigorously to divorce him after his arrest on charges of molesting children. The pastor had been out on bail for a week when a neighbor reported the pastor’s front door swinging open and shut in the wind. The cops found him in his bed, a puncture wound in his throat, his lips white and bloodless.
Matt spent an afternoon at Arlington’s public library Googling for any clue that might help him anticipate and track this killer. He’d nearly been ready to give up when he stumbled on a news story of a similar killing six months earlier, two hours’ drive south in King County. A little more hoofwork, and he found three more killings from that same month, all of them in King County. The police had never caught the killer; he’d cleaned up too well after the kill, left the crime scene too pristine. And stopped after several victims.
On impulse, Matt looked up a map of the county. He noticed something immediately.
The towns the killer visited made a straight line, from coast to mountains, like an arrow aimed at the pass. The killer hadn’t crossed over. He just murdered his way right up to the mountains, until he reached some place quiet and without people. Then stopped.
Matt stared at the computer a few moments. All around him the hushed murmurings of patrons in a small-town library. Then his fingers clattered over the keyboard.
Six months ago, King County. Two months before that, a string of towns in the grain fields near Chehalis. Again, an arrow aimed at the Cascades. That time, there had been eight murders. The killer’d had a longer way to travel before he reached the silence of those high peaks.
Matt leaned back, fighting the onset of a headache. Thinking.
He pulled up a map of Snohomish County, a topographical map overlaid with roads and towns, and printed it. Got a pencil from a librarian who peered at him over her glasses with a “You’re not from here” look, then went to sit against one of the low glass windows near the children’s books. A mother sat with her back against the stacks, a small girl in her lap, reading to her. Two boys flipped pages in an illustrated guide to dinosaurs. Another girl with two pigtails ran back and forth, back and forth, across the carpet, from one end of the children’s stacks to the other, her arms spread, making muted airplane noises. A young woman, blonde, probably in her early twenties, stood at the windows looking out, a frown written deep into her face. Her features were vaguely familiar, but Matt couldn’t put a name to her. After a moment he ignored her, and the children, and peered at his map. He penciled in Xs over the towns that had been hit in the past few days. Then drew a line through them.
Almost a straight line.
An arrow pointing east.
With gathering excitement, Matt followed the old county road with his finger, noting towns: Oso, Trafton, Darrington. Elevations appeared near them in tiny print, telling the story of a narrowing road climbing steep foothills.
Matt folded up his printed map, stuffed it in his jeans pocket. Slipped out the back door.
Matt hitched a ride up to Darrington on a logging truck, listening to the driver grouch about the state of the lumber industry, old complaints that he knew quite well. He gazed out at the thickness of cedars to either side, marveling at the riot of ferns and underbrush crowding the road’s narrow shoulders. Years spent harvesting timber, yet he hadn’t thought there were this many miles of old-growth forest left anywhere in America.
Matt arrived less than an hour after the local police found the body. He didn’t risk getting close enough to look, but from the astounded faces of the cops at the door of that house, he was sure it was the same as the others: a tiny puncture wound in the throat, the victim bled dry. No sign of breaking and entering.
Matt watched the police put up crime tape from the window of a ma-and-pa coffee shop a couple of blocks down the street. He’d hidden his ax behind a rusted dumpster out back. The barista stood by his table, watching too. She was a round, middle-aged woman, and possibly the owner—there were no other customers at this hour, and no other staff. Looking out at that house and the flashing police lights parked outside it, she shook her head. “Old Grettinsen,” she said quietly. “Always knew he’d come to a bad end.”
Matt sipped from a ninety-nine cent mug of black coffee and tapped the pencil lightly against the 8 1/2-by-11 printer-paper map he’d spread out on the table, flattening its creases. He was feeling the fatigue of the chase, and the tiny inked lines of that picture of this corner of the world were blurring, but he was unwilling to crumple it up and toss it in the trash by the door. There were people dead, and he’d seen the murderer the day before they began dying. Had seen the maggots in his face. That made this his responsibility.
But here he’d found only yellow police tape, and no sign of the killer. Probably already skipped town.
To go where?
There were no more towns labeled on that map, and the county road clearly ended here. In the Chehalis and King County murders, the killer had stopped once he reached the mountains. Matt glanced out the window at the giants of ice and snow that stood against the eastern sky. Surely he couldn’t have lost the killer. Not after three days of pursuit. He’d banked on getting to Darrington before the killer struck. What he would do when he got here, he hadn’t been sure. Watch faces, he supposed. The town wasn’t large; he could have just rambled through, trusting to luck, alert to any scent of rot on the
chill air. But he hadn’t been quick enough. Someone else dead, one more life eaten away, a prey to the dark need of one man to overpower and destroy others, to own their lives and their deaths, if only for the briefest of hours.
If there were no more victims to the east, then Matt had lost his quarry. He had no idea where, or when, the killer would loose his eastward arrow again.
Glancing up from his map, Matt saw two cops talking outside the house of the dead. He recognized one’s face from the Stanwood PD and looked down at his coffee quickly—though the chances of that cop glancing his way, or even knowing he was from out of town, were unlikely. He reached for his wallet, plucked out a dollar and loose change for a tip, while he thought about what it meant that the Stanwood cop was here. It must mean the police knew—and had probably known before he did—that this killer had a history and an MO that followed the compass east each time. Yet the cop’s face had been full of frustration, the face of a man who had run out of options. He probably didn’t know the killer’s face or his name, and he hadn’t saved this last victim.
Nor had Matt.
He stood up to leave. He was probably the only person for miles who wasn’t from here, and if someone other than his taciturn barista noticed him, there’d be questions and suspicion—the last thing he needed when there were dead bodies around. He shrugged his jacket on. Something was chewing at the edge of his mind, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. Something about the killer’s vector of travel. Thing was, killers were always predictable, just as Mr. Dark was predictable. Evil was simple, good was complicated; that was what Matt had come to realize in these past years of bloody ax-work. Serial killers and supernatural horrors liked to see the world in easy patterns, see human lives in easy patterns, easily defined, easily sorted, easily eaten. Real people weren’t simple, and the real world defied patterns. Real events—births, marriages, deaths—were like rocks thrown against a sheet of ice, creating a wild chaos of cracks around them, a geometry of beauty and destruction that might hold all winter or shatter at a touch.
