“I don’t know. A squirrel probably bit him or something.” Ralph too was concerned. It was a lame joke and Oy sounded hurt.
Kitty dismissed her husband’s poor sense of ill-timed humour and yelled out to her distressed pet. Her focus was on getting through the branches in front of her and seeing if Oy was all right. She wanted him back, safe on the lead.
Ralph pushed aside the last of the branches and they both stood in a small clearing. The clearing looked a mess with clothes strewn across the ground. An expensive-looking trainer lay on its side near where they stood. The clearing was eerily quiet. Nothing moved except for the leaves on the trees and a red-painted mannequin that swayed slightly, hanging from a branch. They had not yet linked the two together. It was inconceivable to think of the mannequin as anything else but an elaborate prank staged by intoxicated kids with too much time on their hands, the empty bottles and cans consumed somewhere else, not here.
Their concern was for Oy. They both saw a dark shadow slumped on the ground close to the hanging mannequin, at the stump of the tree, horribly still.
Something, many things, did not feel right. They moved slowly toward the shadow. Ralph paced to the left of his wife.
Ten feet away, the dark shadow took shape. Five feet and there was no mistake. It was their beautiful Oy. The distinctive pattern of the coat was the same, although ruffled. His neck twisted back on itself, eyes open wide as if taken by surprise. His tongue extended out of his mouth, touching the dirt on the ground.
“Oh my God!” Kitty gasped, cupping her hands over her mouth.
Ralph froze a couple of feet behind his wife, close to the mannequin, peering down at his dog, disbelief masking his face. The red-painted mannequin suddenly came to life with an abrupt shudder and a sharp bubbling cough. Ralph stumbled backward a few feet. The back of his heel caught a dead branch lying on the ground and he hit the dirt with a thud that knocked the wind out of him.
Kitty’s eyes flickered like the shutter of a camera away from Oy and toward the red mannequin that jerked from the thick branch. She knew it wasn’t the mannequin she had supposed, or an elaborate hoax of a dummy strung up and made to preform like a puppet on string, manipulated with intricate pulleys and wires hidden behind the trees for the kids to amuse themselves and frighten those who happened to come across it. She saw the red paint for what it was: blood trickling from several lacerations in a young girl’s head and torso. The clothes scattered around in the clearing belonged to her. Kitty looked back at Oy, and her husband on the ground struggling to get up.
There was no time for either to act, to catch their breath and think about what happened next, figure out how to free the young girl from the branch and take the weight of her saturated body off her crippled arms, call or shout for help, confirm that their beautiful dog, Oy, was indeed dead.
The growling put a stop to any of that.
The obscured horrific sound came from behind the trunk of the tree. Low at first, then more intense, ferocious, angry, like a snarling big dog. Kitty imagined it might be one of those big black dogs, often depicted in movies as the devil’s protector.
Ralph was still in the dirt, bent over in the foetal position, trying to get some much-needed air into his depleted lungs. He turned toward the irrational noise but his wife obstructed his field of vision. Ralph would have sworn it was the sound of a big bad wolf.
A shadow of a “thing,” visible to Kitty only, moved between the trunk of the tree and the hanging frame of the young girl. Kitty now knew it not to be a dog; it was too tall and moved on two legs. Panic began to take hold of her. She wondered if Ralph could see what she did, but dared not turn away for that second.
Then it showed itself.
Kitty saw it first as it came between the trunk and the bloodied body of the young girl, just the head, initially. She stared in horror as a main of thick dark hair appeared, followed by a furrowed forehead and sunken, deathly jet-black eyes. The growls grew louder, too, as the snout came into view. Large, bloodstained teeth with dirty fangs were clearly visible, as was the smeared blood that soaked the sideburns around the lower jowls and on the breast of the white shirt it wore.
It moved swiftly toward Kitty. Its arm stretched out, pushing the bloody young girl in the side of the ribs as it past. Her toes left the earth as her body swung to one side then scraped back to the dirt and dangled still once more. The thing hunched down in an ape-like posture and bounded straight toward her.
Kitty let out a scream that belied her elder years when the werewolf charged toward her.
That was when Ralph got his first glance of the “thing.”
A monster, of sorts, charged toward his wife, snorting in frightful pitch. He watched his helpless wife scream and cower backward then fall to the ground with a solid thump that must have broken something within her. He watched the beast stand over her, its feet planted firmly on either side of her frail chest. Her hands came up to cover her face. One arm looked bent out of shape. It didn’t make it and fell back down to her side. The thing pushed its face closer toward her, snarling with malicious intent as though it wanted to devour her. Both arms were open wide, the backs of the hands hairy and hinged, about to swipe down on her chest and rip it wide open. Thick, salivated blood dripped onto her as it bared its gruesome teeth.
Kitty no longer screamed. She was quiet, lips trembling, staring at the monster above her. Her hand slipped from her mouth to her chest, grabbing at her flak jacket. Her breath was erratic, she struggled to breathe, her eyes were wide open. Her head nodded off the dirt, then fell to the side in her husband’s direction, away from the beast above her.
Ralph’s look of desperation was no help. She was staring at him with wet, sorrowful eyes from a strained neck. Her buckled arm left her side, fingers creeping over the dirt, desperate for any part of her to reach him. He stretched his arm and extended his fingers to touch hers. Her eyes acknowledged his efforts and a semblance of a smile changed the shape of her mouth, but it was all too late. He watched his wife’s body loosen. Her hand slipped off her chest. Her neck retracted and her cheek lowered onto the dirt with a single tear free of fear. The pain in Ralph’s chest was unbearable. He stared helplessly at the vacant eyes of his beloved wife and knew his soul mate had left him forever.
The Beast turned to Ralph to signal he would be next. It stepped over his wife but did not move forward. It looked at him on the ground, intimidating and ferocious but quiet. Its arms lowered wide to its sides with its chest puffed out. It raised its head toward the canopy of trees and howled.
Ralph’s will to live left with his wife. No longer afraid, he waited his turn.
The howling stopped. The werewolf lowered its head and faced him.
Ralph looked it in the eye with hatred in his heart, and the werewolf smiled. The wink that followed confirmed it.
20:
“Granny, someone gave me an awful fright,
“It was a woman down by the traffic light.”
Something was not right.
“She should’ve been back by now,” Kate told herself.
She was beside herself with worry, pacing between the kitchen and the living room, making cups of tea without thirst, sitting down for short periods, standing up, sweeping the floor, wiping the kitchen counters down with a damp cloth for the third time in as many minutes. Keeping busy and drinking tea didn’t stop her thoughts. It had been over two hours since Helen had set off on her run.
“She should have been back by now. Something bad has happened. How could I have been so stupid and let her go?”
Common sense bade to put her at ease. She incubated another cup of hot tea with both hands back at the kitchen table. What niggled her most was she did not know if this bad feeling was forewarning that something bad was about to happen, or had happened, or she was just being an overzealous parent.
“He
len would argue the latter if she was here, but she’s not. Where is she?”
Had this scenario happened in the past, Helen would have been kept from going on her run, no ifs, buts, or ands about it. She would have accused her mother of overreacting and ruining her chances of doing well, which was fine, Kate could have dealt with that.
In her younger days, Kate had had the uncanny ability to see another person’s energy through the colour it projected; different colours represented a person’s different personas. She believed she also attracted positive and negative frequencies through the atmosphere that manifested thoughts and pictures in her mind. Few took her seriously. She omitted terms like clairvoyance, premonition, precognition, and telepathy when explaining the phenomenon to her sceptical husband, Fran, and daughter, Helen, so when she found an article in the national newspaper that scientists had a name for this energy, she duly presented it to them with I-told-you-so enthusiasm.
“And here it is, ladies and gentlemen,” Kate said one evening at the dinner table. “We have a winner. Scientists are taking a closer look at an area that was once dismissed. Ring any bells?” She looked at her husband and Helen in turn.
“Okay, get on with it, here she goes again,” Fran said and winked at Helen.
“Get on with it, Mum,” Helen agreed.
“Okay, okay, but this is serious, Bio-electro-magnetics, the science of natural and applied electromagnetic fields in biology, and”—she scanned the article, running her finger down the page—“wait for it. Yes, here it is: ‘human bio-fields,’ the technical term for auras. And you two thought it was all in my head. Humph. Admit it: There must be something to it if scientists are getting funding to research these things further. This is the field of energy, for reasons I don’t understand, I’ve been able to harness.”
“So I suppose you have a humble pie in the fridge for dessert,” Helen said.
Kate was smiling but hadn’t finished her rant. “My mother couldn’t do it but my grandmother, your great-grandmother Helen, did have the ability. God rest their souls. Gran once told me the ability skips a generation and moves to the first born, so come the day when you have a beautiful little girl or boy all of your own, he or she will probably inherit the gift, too. Don’t be surprised when you find out I’m right.”
“Yes, Mum. I can’t wait.” Helen looked to her Dad, who returned the smile.
“Now there’ll be no rush for any of that behaviour,” he reminded Helen.
“Oh, Dad, don’t be silly, give over.”
Nowadays, the thoughts and misty images had all but faded and colours subsided to mere flickering around the edges if she looked hard enough. Now, sitting at the table, gut feeling was all she had to go on this morning and she questioned whether there was a semblance of the gift left. She kicked herself for letting Helen go. Not trusting her gut feeling filled her with regret. Gran had been right, the senses did diminish the older she got.
She recalled the day she realised she had the gift, and although it happened in difficult circumstances, she hoped it could enlighten her senses now when she most needed it.
“Come in, my dear,” Gran had said as she answered the front door and saw her granddaughter looking up at her. “I was just thinking about you. You look upset, Kate, are you okay?”
“Not really.” Seeing her grandmother was enough to keep her from crying. “Something bad just happened.”
“Are you hurt? Are you sick? You are as pale as a ghost.”
“No, nothing like that.”
Gran was visibly relieved. “Well, don’t worry about a thing then, come in here and tell me all about it. I’ll make you a nice cup of tea and we’ll soon put everything back to rights. Is your bike locked?”
“I locked it already.”
Gran put her arm around Kate as she stepped inside, and closed the front door.
Kate sat in the middle of the well-worn but comfortable sofa, piecing together what had just happened and deciding how to tell her gran. She could tell her gran anything, but this was a little different, difficult to explain and get the words out. It sounded naughty somehow, like it shouldn’t be told, kept secret.
Gran came back into the room carrying a tray with tea and biscuits. She put the tray on the coffee table and poured the tea into two cups. She handed one to Kate, so lovely, and settled into her favourite chair beside the lit fireplace.
“Thanks, Gran,” Helen said in a sombre voice.
“Here, have a biscuit; they’re your favourites. I always keep a pack handy for when you come to see me.”
Kate sipped the tea to wet her mouth and took one of the biscuits but made no effort to eat it, instead placing it on the saucer and putting it back on the table. “Thank you,” she said again. Her mind was clearly elsewhere.
Gran followed suit, took a sip of the tea and placed the cup and saucer back on the coffee table. It was clear by her granddaughter’s posture that she must give her full attention. “Okay, dear, take your time and tell me what happened. Start from the beginning.”
Kate started hesitantly, unsure of where to begin, but soon found her voice. She took in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Well, I was cycling back from school after hockey practice.” She tugged her green hockey skirt to point out the obvious and smiled half-heartedly.
Gran smiled acknowledgment and waited for Kate to continue.
“When I got to Tenner village, I don’t know why I noticed her but I saw this woman. It was just at a glance but she seemed to stand out above everything else. It was really strange. She was on the other side of the road. I thought it was a man at first, not doing much at all, just standing in front of one of the shops with a nice-looking bike in front of her, a red one with a cross bar, a man’s one. At least I think it was red, I definitely remember seeing a lot of red. She looked like a man, too, wearing a white tee-shirt and green combats and her hair was long blond and spikey on the top, like a truck driver’s.
“I can’t remember if she was looking at me or just at passing traffic, I suppose now she was looking at me but I was more concentrated on passing the cars coming up to the lights and went by her quite fast. When I think back now, I remember her standing there with the bike in front of her, both her hands resting on the crossbar, and I knew something wasn’t right. I never looked back again, but it was as if something ran down my back, a weight or force. It was a strange feeling. I could feel it on my back, and it was not my sports bag. Then I had a bad thought.” Kate looked up for the first time at her gran, half expecting her to think she was mad. On the contrary, Gran looked interested.
“Go on, dear.”
“Well, it wasn’t until I turned the corner and cycled down the hill to the crossroads, just before coming up here, that I got stuck at the lights. They stay red for quite a while.”
“They do, indeed. So something happened at the lights?” She sat slightly forward.
“Yes, that’s where it happened. Again, I don’t know why I did it but I felt safer moving in front of the second lane of traffic toward the middle of the road. The next thing was I heard the woman’s voice; she was a couple of feet away from me. She was asking me something. I couldn’t really hear what she said. I looked at her and said, Sorry? She was a lot older than me and I wondered for a moment why she would need to talk to me in the first place. She said it again but it was more like a mumble through the noise of the traffic behind me. I still couldn’t hear her. This time, although I really didn’t want to, I struggled to move the bike closer with my sports bag on my back. I knew there were many cars behind me but I still felt uneasy.
“I was only a foot away from her, too close, and she said it again, but this time I heard it and I couldn’t speak. She just stood looking at me waiting for an answer. She appeared so calm. I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. My throat just closed up but I managed somehow to say
no, and then the lights turned green.”
Gran really wanted to find out what the woman had said, but knew to let Kate finish.
“She stared at me as if I was going to change my mind. I just wanted her to go. I turned away from her and stayed where I was, holding up the traffic, and then she cycled toward the hill. I couldn’t move for a minute; I just sat there on my bike and the cars started beeping behind me. I didn’t care, I stayed there as long as I could and watched her as she cycled toward the hill in the same direction as I was going. I only moved when she was far enough away. No one asked if I was okay. I took it as slowly as I could and kept watching her to make sure she was getting farther away from me. Then I had to stop when I saw her stop. For a moment, I thought she was waiting for me to catch up with her. She scared me.
“Instead, I saw her lean off her bike and say something to another girl who was walking on the path, she was a young girl, too, maybe a couple of years older than me. I was sure she was saying the exact same thing to her because I saw the girl shake her head and move back toward the wall away from the road. Then the woman cycled off again. I thought about saying something to the girl when I caught up with her but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to say it. And that’s when I came here.”
“And what did she say at the lights?” Gran could see Kate was struggling with this part, looking down at her hands, unsure how to phrase it.
“She asked me about my private bits.” The words sounded childish, almost funny and not at all frightening. She paused and looked up to Gran.
Gran tilted her head slowly down, holding Kate’s gaze, letting her know it was okay to tell her how it was.
Kate looked back down between her legs, embarrassed to look at her when she said, “She said to me: ‘Can I suck your pussy?’”
Gran nodded again and pondered the thought. “My God, well that’s not right, is it? Kate, look at me, my dear.” Kate looked up. The look in her eyes matched her voice, sombre. “You have nothing to feel bad about. That sounds like a very sick woman to me. What she said to you was very wrong and you had every right to feel scared of her. You did the right thing coming to see me and telling me about this.”
The Ice Scream Man Page 12
