Incidentally, in the gloom Walter didn’t notice the unknown green Subaru parked directly across the road from where he reentered the forest.
On he went, at a faster pace now that he wasn’t pausing frequently to scan the river banks for dead bodies. He did check once or twice, to be fair . . . maybe in case the corpse had decided to double back and swim upstream, or, maybe because he was growing paranoid, thinking that the night was somehow getting darker the farther he trekked from Nigel’s house . . .
The distressing silence of the trees and the lane of slow water, combined with the heavy, encroaching shadows, all held a minor benefit. They helped Walter ignore how bitingly cold it was that night, even as he alternated which bare hand was burdened with holding out the flashlight and which hand recovered feeling in a jacket pocket. However, the overriding major benefit also persisted: this was keeping Walter fully dislodged from his normal, pitiful frame of mind.
So, on he went.
The river, the forest, Walter’s numb feet, and time moved along uneventfully.
The dark, tree-enclosed landscape didn’t vary as he went. The forest on this side of the bridge was mostly pine, and the heavy layering of pine needles on the forest floor permitted only moderate undergrowth. With the terrain not requiring careful navigation, and because his flashlight couldn’t show much beyond his next few footsteps, Walter’s focus wandered for a time as he willingly lost himself in unsettling thoughts relating to the night of horrors.
When it finally occurred to him that he had been treading briskly along for a considerable while, Walter stopped and pulled out his phone. It was five-till-midnight . . . but, he realized foolishly, he hadn’t checked the time when he had left, so he had no way to gauge how long he’d been hiking. He saw that he had one bar of signal, which, after a moment of indifference, told him that he had already made it beyond the mouth of the valley. The field should be close by, then.
He started walking, and then stopped again. How far beyond the mouth of the valley was he? How long had he been walking? It seemed possible, all of a sudden, that he had already passed the field in his absentminded march, helped in no part by the weak flashlight, nor by the fact that his knowledge of the terrain was mostly just an outline based on knowing the layout of the surrounding roads.
On a whim, Walter took a couple steps away from the river and held the flashlight up to the night. All he learned, though, was that the field was not twenty feet ahead of him, which was the light’s maximum range. He took a couple more steps away from the river, and a tiny slit of light appeared and then vanished in the dark, far beyond the range of his flashlight.
Walter stopped; there was no sign of the tiny line of light. Had he imagined it? He took one more step forward, and it reappeared in the distance, out from behind a large pine tree that his flashlight now—faintly—touched.
It was a slight crease of vertical light, the kind that might escape from a barely-ajar door in an otherwise dark house.
Whatever it was, it was a considerable distance from where Walter now stood, and—joining the multitude of additional chance factors that had led Walter there that night—he probably would never have seen it if his flashlight had had fresh batteries and his eyesight hadn’t needed to compensate for such inadequate lighting.
Walter now began walking towards this line of light cautiously, curiously. He couldn’t have made it all the way to Timothy Glass’s house yet . . . could he have?
The chink of light disappeared behind another unseen tree, but Walter side-stepped and it reappeared.
In that moment, in his mind, he only meant to confirm whether it was or was not Timothy’s house, so he could regain his bearings on that cold, dark night . . .
Closer he crept. Soon, thinner perpendicular slits of light appeared at the top and bottom of the larger shaft, making the initial impression of a cracked door seem all the more probable.
A dozen more careful steps.
The form maintained. It was light escaping from a doorway, Walter now concluded. A yellow glow on a cluster of trees a few yards to the right of the cracked door appeared to be coming from an unseen window on another side of the building.
With just a couple additional steps, the flashlight was able to touch the structure. Walter stopped and traced the outline. It wasn’t Timothy’s house. It was too small—like a tool shed, or a hunting cabin.
Walter noticed the chimney and astutely thought of the river nearby . . . maybe it was a sauna cabin? He wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Paul Stanley had built one for himself. Paul was an outdoorsy fellow, and he owned a large amount land in the area for his seasonal maple sugaring business.
Walter switched off his light, slipped it into his coat pocket, and snooped around to the side of the house that was casting a glow on the nearby pine trees.
It was like he was a mischievous young kid again. The nostalgic feelings were powerful, the adrenaline was strong, and the thrill was mostly harmless—if very juvenile—and Walter saw no good reason to stop.
The light was coming from a window, as he had guessed. A single, tiny, reinforced window that meshed well with his sauna speculation.
Slowly—while his heart accelerated—Walter brought an eye up to a low corner of the small window.
The glass was heavy and grungy—it probably hadn’t been cleaned since it’d been installed—but with his face so close Walter could see through well enough.
The single room appeared to be empty, he noticed first and foremost. It certainly looked like a sauna cabin, he perceived second: there were no sleeping or storage facilities, just two long benches along adjacent bare-wood walls, and a woodstove with a large metal container resting on top. Lighting everything was an industrial orange light fixture hanging by a heavy extension cord, which was looped over an exposed rafter.
Paul Stanley probably had just forgotten to switch the light off earlier that night, Walter now decided. It was very late, and there was no sign of any recent fire through the open hatch on the small woodstove. His excitement ebbed.
Less concerned about stealth now, he made his way back around to the front of the cabin, up to the door. The light inside was bright and serving no purpose, so he figured might as well slip in and switch it off, to spare Paul’s electric bill . . . and, moreover, to extract one last ounce of excitement out of this spontaneous, juvenile excursion.
Walter found the doorknob and gave it a slow twist. The door creaked louder than he would’ve liked. He put his head inside and his eyes pulled shut reactively: the window had been coated with a heavier layer of grime than he’d realized, for the glare from the light bulb, unfiltered, was blinding to his large, dilated eyes.
A few anxious seconds of squinting and blinking passed before Walter could confirm that the cabin was empty. He stepped up over the high threshold and allowed the door to creak shut behind him. He walked over to the light fixture, and, after locating the flashlight in his pocket, he reached with his other hand for the knob at the base of the fixture.
Except for an orienting glance or two, Walter left his gaze trained on the floor—averted from the glare—as he found the knob.
He had just pinched his fingers tight and begun to twist when his downward gaze fell on something curious. He released the tiny knob.
The light’s heavy extension cord dangled straight down to the floor, and then disappeared under one side of a loose floorboard.
Where was the cord going? Come to that, Walter now thought, where was the power coming from in the first place? The cabin couldn’t have been close enough to Paul’s for him to run a power line all the way here. Walter had helped maintain his sap lines a few years ago, and he knew that Paul’s house was about a mile from the river. Maybe there were batteries below the floor, hooked up to a generator somewhere outside? Really, though, why go to such lengths to light a sauna cabin? Many years ago when one of his dad’s friends had built a sauna, Walter remembered that they’d only ever used flashlights in it.
W
alter knelt down to the loose floorboard where the power cord disappeared. There was a chink along the unfastened board, through which Walter could see something. Something imprecise . . . not a dark dirt foundation just a few feet away . . . there was a sense of distance, of depth . . .
He latched a few fingernails into the highest protruding edge of the suspicious board and found that it lifted easily. He grabbed the tilted edge of the board and began to lift it out of the way. Walter froze, holding the board suspended in midair when what it had been concealing shifted into view.
There was a large opening in the ground framed by intersecting two-by-fours, probably eight feet deep. A makeshift ladder had been nailed together along one of the dirt walls, and, out of an obscured opening across from the ladder, a new source of light leaked into what was evidently the entranceway to some sort of secret room.
His heart jumping faster than it had all night, Walter set the board down, though not quite as gently as he’d intended.
He was grinning. He could think of only one thing that this could be: A growing room for marijuana.
Was this is how Paul supplemented his maple-sugaring income? Walter grinned wryly.
The opening created by the one dislocated board was not wide enough to fit through. Walter was not surprised to find that the board next to it was also unfastened and lifted freely.
This was exactly the type of thing he and his friends would’ve died to find when they were young ruffians engaging in roguish adventures around town. That night, for reasons already covered, Walter was more than happy to regress into the mindset of his former, happier self.
There was almost no chance Paul was down there in the middle of the night, Walter felt sure. The light below was for the plants, and the light overhead was presumably just an oversight. So Walter twisted around, got to his knees, and, heart drumming along merrily, probed with a foot until he found the first rung of the ladder. From there he descended steadily into the hole until his feet met dirt.
Walter turned around, gasped, and lurched backwards, knocking his head against the ladder.
There was a man down there in the hidden dirt-floored room. He stood facing Walter, backlit so as to appear like the blackened cutout of a man . . . a man clutching a large hunting rifle, pointed squarely at Walter’s chest.
As weakly lit as his front was, it was a wonder that Walter’s eyes still found the three narrow lines along the man’s left cheek. It was almost as if, deep down, he had expected them.
“Walter Boyd,” said Timothy Glass.
His tone, Walter thought wildly, was itself almost expectant.
Chapter 8 – The Paper Scrap
Tracking was Braylen Taylor’s number one hobby.
It had been ever since he’d been introduced to the skill while in the Boy Scouts, many long summers ago. The course, as part of a weeklong summer camp, had been taught by a young, charismatic Navaho man, which alone would’ve been enough to impress young Braylen. Thanks to a timely obsession with corny adventure books, however, Braylen directly associated the ability to discern a man’s trail from footprints in dirt, trampled undergrowth, and broken twigs with the rugged but suave outdoorsy characters that he had come to idolize. So, he was instantly hooked.
Besides sometimes giving him a small edge in outdoor hide-and-seek games with friends (a small edge that he would always overstate), the skill really only became practical later in life. That was when Braylen became a volunteer firefighter, and, once every year or so, when a hunter or hiker went missing in the woods around southern Vermont, Braylen would enthusiastically join the manhunt, giving valuable tips to anyone who would listen.
This, however, was—by far—the strangest, most unsettling manhunt that Braylen had ever been a part of.
Being a resident of a town that shared a boarder with Sutherland, he had had no hope of avoiding all the gory details pertaining to the four other victims. He knew, then, that the man he was looking for was not only long-dead by now, but possibly horribly mutilated, too.
Another difference between this and most of the other manhunts Braylen had participated in—not a horrific difference this time, just an inconvenient one—was that this man had been swept down a river, as opposed to wandering lost and frightened through the woods, leaving behind a predictable trail of minute clues.
While this did invalidate a large slice of Braylen’s skill-set, he still maintained a very meticulous and thorough manner of scanning terrain: a trained talent that can’t be underestimated.
Braylen had been part of the first organized group that had set out down the river, the day after the infamous night. That search had been called off after covering somewhere between two to three miles. At the time the cars in the field hadn’t been found yet, so the picture of the night hadn’t begun to fill out. Everyone understood, then, that the search was only being conducted because of what one shaken man, in the dark and in the rain, had purportedly seen.
Braylen was aware that other—more thorough—searches had been conducted since the evidence boosting Walter’s claim had come to light, but due to personal obligations he hadn’t been able to assist in those, nor in the prior search that had turned up Victim Number Five. Upon learning that the latest river searches hadn’t turned up a body, Braylen had set aside today to conduct his own more thorough search. He was not so arrogant as to think that he alone stood a better chance than a full search party, but he felt he owed it to himself to try. At any rate, he had always liked working alone at his own pace.
It was around midday when he pulled his green Subaru off the road near the bridge, not far from where Walter had been slammed by the Jeep and the man best known as Victim Number One. Dressed fit for a man planning on being out in the cold for most of the day, carrying a backpack which held ample water and a lunch, Braylen started down along the river at his usual measured trot.
After a minute he reached the bend in the river and saw the mess of tracks along the sandy inner bank: the evidence of the other trackers that Walter would see later that night, before choosing to continue upstream, a choice that will change his life forever.
Braylen, however, saw the tracks and merely shook his head contemptuously, and then continued on downstream.
He hadn’t made it far when he saw something else, something far more irksome. There was a pale scrap of trash caught in a downed pine branch on the forest floor, some distance from the river. He started for it.
It was a folded piece of paper, he saw as he closed in.
His assumption being that one of the previous trackers had dropped it, Braylen grumbled aloud, “Come on, show a little more awareness and respect for the land, guys.”
Pulling it out from its pinch between two twigs, Braylen noticed that the paper was badly water-stained. This told him that it must’ve been dropped during the first manhunt, as it hadn’t rained since the more recent ones.
He unfolded the warped and stiff paper, curious to see if he could identify the owner, who would certainly be in line for some only half-playful grief.
It was a computer printout. However, nothing beyond that was so clear, as the rain had run all but a small, centralized block of smudgy text into watery oblivion.
Braylen had to go over a few words and sentences twice or more, using context to fill out some of the less intelligible letters. What he ultimately read was as follows:
“ . . . closest load-in point is about a half-mile from the sauna, so it will be a substantial hike through the woods with the firewood and the generators. Additionally, I work late on weeknights, so this will all have to be done well past nightfall, further complicating the task. However, I will gladly provide hot coffee and donuts, and, as indicated in the title of this listing, the pay is two-hundred dollars flat, CASH, up-front. This for what should only be two or three hours of labor! There is NO catch—time has become an unexpected factor for this project, and this has to . . .”
From there the text meandered into puddles of faded grey ink. An inch below t
his there were three final lines of comprehensible text:
“RE: One night of labor, immediate need, will pay $200 CASH, up-front!!
From: [email protected]
Hello. I saw your listing for urgent labor and I’m interested. I have two questions. One, are . . .”
Although a whole half-page unfolded beyond this, nothing more from the printout remained in a state that anyone could hope to decipher.
Braylen cocked his head to one side, mouthing the name to himself, “F. Gross . . . F. Gross. I think I know him.”
He mentally ran down the names of those present for the first manhunt, holding the place of each name by tapping a finger to his chest. He knew all of them well enough, he discovered, and none of them even had a first name starting with F, let alone the surname Gross.
“Wait a minute,” Braylen spoke aloud. “Franklin Gross!”
An avid reader of the daily regional paper, Braylen had read a snippet yesterday morning which identified two victims from the “Night of Horrors” (as the media had now officially dubbed it, capital letters and all), and one of them—he now assumed it to have been the driver of the Jeep—had been named Franklin Gross.
This paper scrap, Braylen guessed with some excitement, must’ve fallen out of Frank’s Jeep when the police had gone through it, and blown some distance into the woods before being caught by the branch.
He reread the legible block of text again with renewed interest. There was nothing strikingly suspicious about any of it, not on the surface—not beyond showing that a supposedly masochistic, suicidal lunatic had been looking for extra cash on the side, which was odd. Though, the paper wasn’t dated, so there was no telling how long it’d been sitting in Frank’s Jeep. And, to be fair, just about anything a supposedly masochistic, suicidal lunatic did on the side would probably seem odd. It was an odd personality type, to say the very least.
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