Ragged Man

by Ken Douglas

  “ Wait a minute.”

  “ Let me finish, Sheriff, then ask me whatever questions you want.”

  “ Sorry.”

  “ We buried them off the road and took the Jeep. For reasons I can’t explain, we decided not to tell anyone about the old couple. That may not have been the right thing to do, but that’s what we decided.

  “ While we were driving back to civilization, a pack of dingoes started following us. We lost them and that night, when we were sitting by the campfire, they found us. I got up to protect Ann and one of the dingoes attacked me. It dragged me down and I was knocked unconscious. The rest of the story I learned from Ann.

  “ She told me that after I was knocked out, she was afraid that she was going to be killed. One of the dingoes lept into the fire and danced. The fire had no effect on the animal and, when it stopped its dance, it glared at her with glowing red eyes and saber-tooth teeth. She called it a ghost dog and she thought it was going to kill her.”

  “ The Ghost Dog,” J.P. said under his breath.

  “ Then the Ragged Man came out of the night. He was wearing foul, dirty clothes and she said she could smell his breath from twenty feet away.

  “ The Ragged Man told her to smell her fear.”

  “ That’s what the voice told us. I heard it from through the door,” J.P. said.

  “ But before the evil man or his ghost dog could harm her, another man entered the glow of the fire and saved her. This other man healed my bleeding head and arm with his touch and stayed with her till morning.

  “ When I came to I was fine. No head wound where my head crashed on the ground. No gashes in my arm where the dingo dog ripped my flesh. Not even any bruises. Something happened that night. I don’t know what, but something happened.

  “ Sheriff, I can’t tell you who or what was responsible for everything that happened the day the Donovans were killed, but I can tell you what Ann would have said.”

  “ Go on.”

  “ It’s a story of shamen and sorcerers, good and evil, magic, sorcery and ghosts that walk the land-and it’s very probably not relevant. You still want me to go on?”

  “ Yes.”

  “ Do you know what a shaman is?”

  “ A kind of witch doctor.”

  “ You’re not too far off. The Aborigines have a traditional healer, a shaman, a marangit in their language. It’s his or her job to protect the clan from the evil of the galka and, if possible, to undo whatever evil the galka has done.”

  “ Galka?” the sheriff asked.

  “ The Bogeyman. The Galka are sorcerers who use their power for evil. They’re strangers who travel the land to seek out and kill. They like to ambush their victims in secluded places, where they kill them and mutilate their bodies.

  “ Galka is one of the first words a child learns and he is taught from infancy to fear it. ‘Don’t stray from camp or the galka will get you,’ ‘Don’t go in the water or the galka will get you.’ Sound like the bogeyman?”

  “ Yeah,” J.P. said.

  “ But it’s not only children, adults fear the galka, too. The galka is the reason a woman won’t go to the river alone and why a hunter won’t hunt out of eyesight of another. No one strays from camp at night for fear the galka will get them.”

  “ Why does it want to get them?” J.P. asked, captivated.

  “ The Aborigines believe that people have two souls, a true soul and a false soul. When a person dies, the true soul goes to the clan’s waterhole or their version of heaven, while the false soul goes into the bush where it turns into a bad spirit called a mokuy. Sometimes, if it’s a strong spirit, and if a suitable human is present when it’s released, it will turn that man into a galka and give him evil powers. The mokuy then becomes the galka’s spirit familiar.”

  “ Like a witch’s black cat,” Judy said.

  The sheriff remained silent.

  “ Yes, only mokuy don’t appear as anything so lovable. They usually take the form of deformed large animals that are sent out by the galka to kill and maim. The mokuy can’t live without the galka, they make him what he is and then they do his bidding.”

  “ Can anything stop a galka?” J.P. asked.

  “ Yes, two things, the first is a marangit. They get their power from the true soul. Sometimes, if a good person is present at the time of death, the true soul will touch him on its way to the waterhole, turning him into a marangit with the powers of good. Marangit use their powers to heal and protect.

  “ The marangit has a small dillybag or box that contains the ten healing stones which he uses to treat the members of his clan. Each stone has a different power. One, when placed in a glass of water turns the liquid into a healing potion for the stomach, liver or kidneys. Another heals internal sores, another, external sores and wounds, another is an X-ray stone letting the marangit see inside the patient. Oh, yeah, and one stone tells him the identity of the killer after a murder has happened.”

  “ The sheriff could use a stone like that,” J.P. said.

  “ I sure could.” Sturgees turned to Rick and added, “Are you finished yet?”

  “ Not quite. There is a never-ending battle between good and evil, between marangit and galka. The galka causes illness and kills. The marangit heals and protects. A galka will never stop trying to kill the marangit and even though it’s possible for a marangit to kill a galka, it almost never happens, evil usually wins.

  “ The power of both the marangit and galka is passed on after death, usually to one of their children, however if they die away from their family and anyone else is present, the power and personality is transferred to that person, and that brings me to the crux of the situation.”

  “ I don’t get it,” Judy said.

  “ The man that chased away the galka had one of those dillybags. He opened it and let Ann look inside. She said that she saw the past, all of her lives, that is, all the lives of that old woman. She believed the old couple we buried were marangit and that they transferred their power to us and that the dingo with the canines was a mokuy familiar and the man with the bad breath, a galka. That galka won’t rest till he kills both Ann and me in such a way that we are not able to transfer our powers.”

  “ Who was the man that chased away the galka?” J.P. wanted to know.

  “ Remember I said there were two things that could stop a galka?”

  “ Yeah.”

  “ The other is a wongar. The Wongar are the creators of the Dreamtime and all mankind. They live in the sacred sites and aren’t dangerous unless they’re offended.”

  “ So the man that chased away the galka and fixed you was a wongar?” J.P. said.

  “ Bullshit,” the sheriff said.

  “ I agree, Sheriff. In our lives together, it was the only thing that ever came between us. I don’t know what happened that night, but whatever it was, it scared Ann so much that it scarred her mind and somehow she came up with that fantastic story to deal with it. We never talked about it after we got back to the States, but I always knew she never shed that belief.”

  “ So why are you talking about it now?” the sheriff asked.

  “ You wanted to know about the Ragged Man.”

  “ It was kids that left the note. Trust me.” The sheriff got up and walked toward the door. When he reached it he turned and said, “I’m going to go back to the office and try and get a little work done.”

  The three of them saw the sheriff out and watched as he drove down the hill and out of sight.

  “ Are we going now?” J.P. asked.

  “ J.P., maybe Rick wants to straighten up first. He just got back.”

  “ No, that’s all right. I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”

  “ I’ll be ready,” J.P. said over his shoulder as his mother pulled him along back to their house. “Then you can tell me more about the Ghost Dog,” he shouted, just before his mother dragged him inside.

  He watched them till Judy closed her front door and, for a brief instant, he had th
e feeling that he was being watched, but he shrugged it off and went back into the house, unaware of the large dark animal watching from the forest at the edge of the clearing. An animal whose low rumbling breath sounded like the pump in a little girl’s fish tank.

  Chapter Ten

  Judy’s clock radio clicked on minutes before the sun. She rolled out of bed, glancing in the mirror as she passed it on her way to the bathroom. She was secretly pleased. She’d been dieting, doing aerobics and running for the last two months and she’d dropped ten of the twelve pounds she’d wanted to lose.

  She passed into the bathroom and bounced on the scale. She looked at the digital read out and squealed with delight. One-fifteen. She’d lost the last two pounds. “And I’m gonna keep them off,” she told the scale.

  She rushed back into the bedroom, shut off the radio and donned her sweats and running shoes. She was in a hurry to beat the sun.

  Happier than she’d been in months, she tiptoed to J.P.’s door and eased it open. Satisfied that he was still asleep, she closed it and went down the stairs. She unlocked the deadbolt and went out the front door to meet the crisp morning.

  She smiled into the cool breeze and glanced up at the sun starting its morning peak through the pines. She loved sunup and the birth of a new day. For her, every dawn signaled the beginning of another twenty-four hours away from the bad times and another day closer to the good times that she knew were coming.

  She worried about J.P. Lately he’d been spending most of his time in town. She knew there were one or two children his age that he played with, but what she gathered from her conversations with him, was that he was spending a lot of time with the older boys at the park. She didn’t know if that was good or bad, but it wasn’t like him to spend so much time away from her. They were a team. Now it seemed like the team was breaking up. She didn’t like it, but she could understand why a boy would want to get out and play with other children.

  If that’s all it was, maybe she shouldn’t worry, but he was neglecting the birds. He’d always enjoyed them and now it was like they didn’t exist. She didn’t mind taking care of them herself, she’d been taking care of pigeons all of her life, but it wasn’t the same without J.P.

  Something was different. She wanted to sit down with him and talk it out, but she was afraid. Afraid that she was the cause, afraid that she was different.

  She did feel different. She was more determined. She’d lost the weight that had been bugging her since J.P. had been born. She was getting up every morning and running, something new for her. She was taking more care with her appearance, trying to look her best. She bought new clothes. Clothes with bright colors, the opposite of the dull tee shirts and Levi’s she’d been wearing for the last ten years.

  Now that she thought about it, she was different, but a good different. She couldn’t see why any of the recent changes she’d made in her life would drive J.P. away from her.

  This morning, she resolved, when he wakes up, I’ll talk to him and we’ll work this out.

  She continued fifty yards through the pines to Clark Creek, a slim stream of water that ran year round behind the two homes. She hopped over the slow flowing water and continued into the forest, listening to the sounds of the early rising birds. She wished she could tell which ones made which sounds. She would have to buy a bird watcher’s book.

  She intended to wander through the forest until she came to a steep path that led down the hill to the beach below. She’d discovered it on one of her walks and she doubted that anyone else knew about it. She called it the sluice, because it was vee shaped, like a sluice. She had no idea what or who had carved the path through the trees. Maybe it was a former owner of one of the two houses, or maybe the creek overflowed in winter and this was a water path down to the sea, or maybe it was caused by animals seeking a way out of the woods, but she was grateful to what or whoever was responsible for it. She enjoyed the tricky, steep descent that provided her quick access to the beach, where she did her morning run.

  But this morning, as she reached the beginning of the sluice, the forest turned quiet. She was instantly alert. She had become used to the various bird and insect sounds and their absence sent an eerie chill up her back. Go home, she told herself, and she slowly turned, trying to make as little noise as possible, and started for home. She was afraid.

  She cringed at the crackling and crunching dried leaves under her feet. With every bird and creature silent, she was an elephant tramping through the woods and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Winding her way through the trees, back toward the stream, she felt a presence behind her, something bad, maybe a bear. She picked up her pace, no longer concerned with the dead leaves cracking under her feet. Then she heard something and turned. She thought she saw movement behind, movement not caused by the soft, silent breeze brushing her sweating skin. She turned back toward the stream and home-and ran.

  She saw the stream. She put on a burst of speed and flew over it. The forest noises picked up as soon as her feet hit ground on the other side. A bird or two at first, then the insect sounds followed by more birds. She slowed to a walk and chided herself. She had undoubtedly panicked over nothing. She felt foolish, like a little girl out after dark for the first time, but she wouldn’t have felt so foolish if she hadn’t been spending so much time alone up on the hill, with only her son and the pigeons for companions.

  If she had been more in touch with the town, she would have heard the stories.

  J.P. woke the instant the forest went quiet. Unlike his mother, he had spent time in town and was familiar with the stories, stories about the strange happenings. They started shortly after the day of the murders, the day his cousin Janis disappeared.

  That same day, the murder day, the sheriff’s two German Shepherds, Woodruff and Dandy, failed to show up for dinner and everyone assumed they had been stolen, or worse, poisoned. Sheriff Sturgees was in the habit of letting the dogs roam free around town. They were friendly, tame and everybody liked and fed them, but they would roam no more and now J.P. and a lot of the other kids were sure they knew why.

  Two nights after the Shepherds vanished, some of the junior high school boys were playing baseball at the park, when Dick Rainmaker, out in left field, saw an animal across the street, running along the beach. He said it looked like a black cougar with a wolf’s head.

  The next night the Johnson’s cat vanished and then the stray cats around town started disappearing. Then Johnny Miller’s collie didn’t come home.

  The kids that played at the park credited the mysterious disappearances to the Ghost Dog, and they had taken to calling it Black Fang, because Johnny Miller was half way through Jack London’s White Fang when his dog went away for good.

  “ Black Fang,” J.P. thought, when the forest went quiet. He shuddered, despite himself, because he didn’t want to believe in the Ghost Dog any more than he believed in Santa Claus or Green Lantern. But there was a lot of ground covered between the man with a bowl full of jelly and the Guardians of the Universe. Things like vampires, werewolves, Superman and aliens, and the more he thought about it, the more he was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t something to the stories, because yesterday Dick Rainmaker’s dad took one of their horses out for a ride and never came back.

  The grownups said that old Andrew Jackson Rainmaker was plain tired of his nagging wife and kids. So tired that he saddled up and rode away. The sheriff wasn’t even going to look for Mr. Rainmaker till he’d been gone at least two days, but the boys that played at the park, Dick Rainmaker included, knew that it would make no difference. The sheriff would never find him, and he’d never be back. Black Fang got him, sure as shit.

  J.P. got out of bed, went down the hall to his mother’s room and knocked on the door, expecting her to invite him in. When she didn’t answer, he pushed it open, then he remembered that she had started running in the mornings.

  He wished she believed him about the Ghost Dog. Dick Rainmaker believed
. Dick was scared, and Dick was fifteen.

  He’d wanted to talk to his mom about the Ghost Dog last night, but when he got home, she was in one of her moods. She hadn’t eaten all day and was cranky. He didn’t know why she wanted to get skinny all of a sudden. He thought she looked fine and he hated it when she was cross with him for being a few minutes late, even though she apologized to him minutes later. He wished she would just eat and be her old self.

  So last night he forgot about the Ghost Dog and went to his room and watched television till after midnight. It was the latest he had ever stayed up by himself. Now, still sleepy and staring at his mother’s empty bed, he had the sudden feeling that Black Fang was after his mom.

  He ran back to his room and swiftly changed from his pajamas into jeans, tee shirt and high top tennis shoes. He didn’t waste time with socks. He was in a hurry to get outside and find his mom. He wished he had told her about the Ghost Dog, because all of a sudden he was afraid his mom was going to disappear like Dick Rainmaker’s dad.

  Dressed, he ran from the bedroom. If he wasn’t too late, he thought, he might be able to warn her and save her. He would tell her not to go running on the beach anymore. She should stay inside. It was safer inside.

  The forest noises stopped again, as suddenly as they had started. She quickened her pace. Something was moving behind her, something that frightened the forest creatures into silence, something bad. She started to run, but before she hit her stride, she tripped over a fallen branch. She thrust her arms out to break her fall, skinning both hands on the hard ground. She felt a sharp stab of pain in her right arm as it buckled under her, but despite the pain, she lay still, afraid to move and afraid not to. She listened to the silence.

  There is nothing there, she told herself. Then she rolled onto her side and saw the reddened swelling midway between her elbow and her wrist. Pushing off with her left hand, she stood. White hot pain shot through her arm. She tried to think through the haze of panic and pain.

  The forest remained silent. Her skin was alive. She felt a cold chill as a vomit-like smell assaulted her. Nearby, bushes moved. She knew it wasn’t the wind. The morning had calmed. She heard something behind the bushes. There was something there, scraping against the ground. The only audible sound in the forest, save for the sound of her heavy breathing. There was definitely something in there, and she felt like it was stalking her.