Revenant

by Allan Leverone

  “Oh my God,” Mike muttered under his breath.

  “What is it?”

  “Earl Manning—that’s the name of the revenant—is in control of the stone. He somehow managed to kill his master and gain possession of the box containing the stone and his heart. We believe he still has it in his possession. How do we stop him in that scenario?”

  “The revenant is controlling his own actions?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “Then, may your God help you, Chief McMahon. To my knowledge, that scenario has never occurred. I don’t believe it will be possible to stop the revenant now, short of dropping a bomb on his head, and I’m not even certain that would do it. The blood will flow, Chief, and lots of it. You are going to have a virtually unstoppable killing machine on your hands very soon, if you don’t already.”

  Again the silence dragged out, sadness and regret evident on Kai Running Bear’s end of the line, desperation and fear on Mike’s. “I just have one last question for you, Mrs. Running Bear, and then I’ll let you go,” he said softly.

  “What is it?”

  “If your husband knew how dangerous this stone was, why didn’t he get rid of it? Why didn’t he bury it somewhere in the desert where it could never be found? Why take on this enormous responsibility?”

  “We don’t always choose our responsibilities, Chief.” She paused. “Sometimes they choose us.”

  38

  The plan had been for Sharon to wait at the hospital. Mike would put Pete Kendall in charge of the investigation at the scene of the murder as soon as he could and then drive to Orono to interrogate their prisoner.

  It was a simple plan.

  But the way Sharon saw it, there were two problems with that plan: 1) There was no way of knowing how long it would take for Kendall to get to the crime scene, and thus no way to know how long it would take Mike to leave for Orono, and, 2) She could not stand the idea of cooling her heels away from the action while there was real police work to be done.

  A young, movie-star handsome doctor had examined Raven Tahoma and informed Sharon that while the young woman’s injuries did not appear life-threatening, she had suffered a fairly serious concussion and per hospital policy would be admitted overnight for observation. Sure, Sharon thought, looking the man up and down cynically. I know how this works. She batted her eyelashes at you and complained about how the bad old police were out to get her, and now you’re playing knight in shining armor.

  The last thing Sharon wanted was to sit here accomplishing nothing. But she knew someone who wouldn’t mind hanging out in Orono doing guard duty for their beautiful and sexy prisoner: Paskagankee Police Patrol Officer Harley Tanguay. While Tanguay was a marginally capable officer, Sharon knew he would have no problem sitting inside the comfortable confines of Mercy Hospital, camped outside their prisoner’s door reading a newspaper, sipping coffee and flirting with nurses.

  She knew she should have checked in with Mike and gotten his okay before calling Harley. But the chief had plenty of things on his plate right now, all of which were higher on the list of priorities than swapping out officers assigned a boring duty like babysitting their witness/suspect while she dozed in a hospital bed.

  Besides, asking permission meant giving the boss the opportunity to say no, and Sharon had long subscribed to the theory that it was better to apologize later than to ask permission now. So she had called Harley, and he agreed to take her place outside Raven Tahoma’s room, just as she had known he would. Forty minutes later, about the time the patient was settling comfortably into her bed, TV remote in one hand and plastic cup of ginger ale in the other, Harley came strolling into the hospital and Sharon was free.

  Now she piloted her cruiser north, anxious to get back to Paskagankee but thankful for a little time to think. The story told by Raven was a wild one, one she would have dismissed out of hand just a year ago as the nonsensical raving of a drugged up or delusional idiot. Now, thanks to the benefit of personal experience, she knew events of a paranormal or supernatural nature actually could happen; that the world was far from being as cut-and-dried as most people were comfortable believing.

  She left the Orono city limits behind and the road gradually began to narrow, funneling from a wide, well-maintained avenue inside the thriving college town, down to a crumbling testament to overtaxed state and municipal budgets before she had made it halfway to Paskagankee. Thankfully, though, vehicular traffic also began to dry up, leaving Sharon free to drive without having to worry too much about the conditions around her, giving her the opportunity to scrutinize their prisoner’s bizarre account.

  A sacred Native American stone, bestowing on its owner the ability to reanimate the corpses of the recently deceased. A shocking betrayal, allowing a power-hungry con man to steal the stone and then attack and kidnap one of the richest men in the world. The law of unintended consequences, rearing its ugly head and allowing the reanimated corpse to strike back against his tormentor, killing the man and then escaping with a hostage.

  It was a bizarre story, as far-fetched as it was horrifying.

  And Sharon believed all of it. Why wouldn’t she? She had known Earl Manning for a brief period in her life when, as a teenage girl, she was adrift and rudderless, using alcohol and drugs to escape a reality where she felt unwanted and unloved, her adoring mother dead and her uninterested father too lost in his own grief and his own struggles with addiction to care for a confused daughter.

  She had lost her way, growing into the prototypical wild child, trading sex for drugs and booze, concerned only with scoring her next high. She knew now it was a miracle she hadn’t died or been infected with HIV or some other communicable disease. She had been saved from herself by Paskagankee Police Chief Wally Court, a man who had seen something worthwhile inside her, giving her guidance and setting her on a path which would eventually lead to her present career in law enforcement.

  She looked back on those years with a mixture of shame and disbelief, struggling to reconcile the person she had been back then with the person she was now. But it was during that period in her life that she had come in contact with Earl Manning, trading a night of sex for alcohol in what had been one of many one-night stands. Her recollections of that night were fuzzy, thanks to more beer than a petite high school junior should ever drink, but she felt certain she would have gotten some sense of the man’s innate evil if Manning had been comfortable with committing murder.

  She remembered him as unmotivated and unclean, a typical small-town loser willing to ply an underaged girl with liquor to get into her pants. Her impression of Manning was as negative as her memories of that night, as her memories of most of her teen years, but still she had a hard time believing he was the type of person who would wind up involved in kidnapping and murder, at least not of his own volition.

  Of course, people could change. Sharon knew that; she was a living, breathing testament to that fact. But morphing from a lazy, unmotivated drunken slob to a cold-blooded, calculating killer in the space of just a few years struck Sharon as too unlikely. She could believe he might get so trashed at the Ridge Runner he would drive off the road and kill himself or someone else—that was definitely believable, likely, even—but the scenario she had seen at the rental home, Max Acton lying in a pool of his own blood, throat torn out like he had been attacked by a rabid dog, just didn’t fit.

  She remembered a discussion with Mike last fall, when she was instrumental in convincing his relentlessly logical mind to accept the possibility of a paranormal aspect to the murders plaguing Paskagankee. The clincher had been a line from a Sherlock Holmes story that seemed to fit here as well: Eliminate the impossible and whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.

  Manning had been missing for well over a week, his whereabouts a mystery not just to his mother, but to his drinking buddies at the Ridge Runner, where no one could remember him going more than two consecutive days without holding down a barstool. A mysterious couple show up in
town around the same time Manning disappears, renting a crumbling home whose only redeeming value is its remote location. Manning resurfaces at the scene of a grisly murder, and the only available witness tells a tale of the paranormal.

  And the smell, that was the kicker. The stench of death permeated the basement of the home where Raven Tahoma had been found and where she had rescued Mike from the freezer. ton’s body could not have been responsible for such a smell, his corpse was fresh and had barely begun to decompose, and no other bodies had been discovered.

  But a man who had been killed and then frozen a week before, only to be reanimated a couple of days ago, could certainly be responsible. And Sharon found herself believing that was exactly what had happened.

  Her cell phone rang and she jumped. She glared accusingly at the phone lying on the seat next to her, then snatched it up and punched the “Send” button, seeing Mike’s name on the caller ID.

  “Yeah?” It came out harsh and scratchy.

  “Sharon, it’s Mike. Our witness-slash-prisoner resting comfortably?”

  She thought about telling him she had switched places with Harley and was on her way back to town, but decided it would be too easy for him to send her back to the hospital if she mentioned it now. She would wait until she arrived at the crime scene to let him know. He might be angry—probably would be, in fact—but at least she would avoid babysitting duty.

  “Yes, she’s fine,” she answered. “Is Pete there yet?”

  “No, he should be getting here any minute.”

  “You sound preoccupied.” Sharon had learned to read Mike’s moods pretty effectively over the last few months and it was clear to her that something was eating at him.

  “You wouldn’t believe the conversation I just had.”

  “Try me. You called Don Running Bear, didn’t you?”

  “Yes and no. Don Running Bear is dead; he didn’t survive the raid Raven’s psycho boyfriend made on their home to steal the sacred stone. Acton either never told Raven her father’s friend was dead or he didn’t know. Either way, the guy’s gone and unless there’s a second sacred stone we don’t know about, he’s not coming back.”

  Sharon’s heart sank. “So you didn’t get any answers to your questions about the stone.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly true. It turns out Don had confided many, if not most, of the secrets of the stone to his wife over the years. She seemed to have extensive knowledge of it. Unfortunately, none of the information she passed along was encouraging.”

  “What did she say?”

  “A lot. The gist of it is that if we plan to stop Manning by waiting for his body to decompose, we’re going to have a lot more corpses on our hands. Apparently one of the capacities of the stone is that it slows the decomposition process of the revenant.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “It gets worse.”

  “What could be worse than that?”

  “There’s no way to stop him. Mrs. Running Bear told me the only way to control a revenant is to control its master. There’s never been a case to her knowledge of a revenant gaining possession of the stone and thus controlling its own actions. To top it off, Manning’s brain function is deteriorating rapidly, making him more aggressive and unmanageable, and he is basically unstoppable because you can’t kill him since he’s already dead.”

  An icy feeling of dread washed over Sharon. This was far worse than the situation last fall. At least when the renegade spirit was terrorizing Paskagankee, Professor Dye had had a plan to stop the madness. This time there was no plan. Only madness. “What’s the good news?” she said weakly.

  “Be sure to tell me if you think of any.”

  “What do you suppose the odds are Earl hasn’t killed Brett Parker yet?”

  “After talking to Mrs. Running Bear, I’d have to say slim. Maybe if Manning thinks Parker can help him he’ll keep him alive, but it sounded to me like any ability for rational thought Manning still has will be gone soon. He’s going to turn into a mindless killing machine if he hasn’t already. Those were Mrs. Running Bear’s words, by the way, not mine.”

  “And we don’t know where he is.”

  “Nope. He could be anywhere within a fifty mile radius of this town by now, and it’s widening rapidly. I’m going to have to alert law enforcement agencies all over the state, and I don’t have a clue what I’m going to say to them. Who’s going to believe a reanimated corpse is running around Maine killing people? Someone’ll send a psych team up here and take me away to a rubber room, which may not be such a bad idea along about now.”

  Sharon’s heart went out to him. Despite the fact she had ended their relationship, she loved Mike McMahon and always would, and the situation he found himself in right now could not help but end badly. He had beaten himself up endlessly over the death of a little girl during a hostage standoff a couple of years ago in Revere, Massachusetts, and then his career had nearly ended last fall during the Wally Court mess. He clearly recognized this situation was spiraling out of control, and if dozens of lives—or more—were lost in this situation, she felt he might never recover. “What are you going to do?”

  She pictured him sighing and shaking his head. “Stick to the plan, I guess. I’ll have Gordie send a BOLO out to all law enforcement agencies in Maine—maybe all of New England just to be safe—and then finish securing the murder scene and hand the scene over to Pete for a while when he gets here. Then I’ll drive up to the hospital to interrogate Raven Tahoma. Maybe something will shake loose that will help us get this thing under control, or at least narrow down where Manning may have gone.”

  The plan sounded pretty thin to Sharon, and she knew if she recognized that fact, Mike must as well, but she didn’t mention it. What would be the point? “Good luck,” she said glumly.

  “Thanks. There is one small thing to be thankful for,” Mike added.

  “I can’t imagine what it might be.”

  “At least you’re not in danger. It seems pretty unlikely a lunatic Earl Manning would show up at Mercy Hospital in Orono. I know you’re not happy being stuck there, but it’s a load off my mind knowing you’re safe.”

  Sharon gazed out the windshield as the trees whipped by on the narrow road. She hadn’t been paying much attention to the deserted thoroughfare as she talked and realized she was once again driving dangerously fast. She eased her foot off the gas and the cruiser began to slow.

  “Uh, yeah,” she said, feeling guilt and shame for misleading him. She was lying not just to the man she claimed to love, but to her direct superior as well. “Right. Safe.”

  Mike didn’t seem to notice. “I’d better go,” he said. “It’s time to begin making a fool of myself and my department around the state.”

  “Okay. I know I said it before, but good luck.” She wanted desperately to end the conversation with, “I love you,” but she had thrown away the right to do so, hadn’t she? “Talk to you later,” she said instead, and disconnected the call.

  Sharon tossed the phone back down on the seat. She was miserable. The Earl Manning she had known in the past may not have been capable of cold-blooded murder, but that individual was disappearing if he wasn’t gone already. He was devolving into a killer. An unstoppable killer.

  She rounded a corner, anxious to arrive at the crime scene in Paskagankee, anxious to offer an in-person apology to Mike for ignoring his orders, and slowed instinctively, stepping on the brake harder than she intended, stunned at the sight directly in front of the car in this deeply forested, remote location still miles from Paskagankee, miles from anywhere.

  Walking along the side of the road—stumbling, really, staggering even—with his back to the cruiser, was a man dressed in rags, skinny to the point of emaciation, clothes tattered and filthy, fluttering in the light breeze. The man seemed to be struggling to match the pace set by another man, who, while dressed in much nicer clothing, was also filthy and covered in blood.

  Sharon slowed further, now moving forward a
t barely more than a crawl. The rumble of the cruiser’s engine finally alerted the trailing man to her presence and he turned and grinned, and Sharon gasped in shock.

  It was Earl Manning.

  39

  Earl had guessed he wouldn’t have to wait long for a car to pass by, and he was right. He had lived his entire life—and death, now that he thought about it—in Paskagankee, haunting these out-of-the-way back roads and fire lanes as a drunken teen and impaired adult, and one thing he knew for sure was that even way out here in the middle of nowhere, in the mole on God’s butt-cheek, as he liked to think of his home town, people with nothing better to do would be out driving in the afternoon. Nighttime was a different story, but as long as the sun was out, townspeople would want to go to the store or to the movies or to any damned place.

  He turned at the sound of the engine noise and instinctively took a couple of steps back when he saw the blue and white Paskagankee Police cruiser moving slowly along the crumbling pavement behind him. A lifetime of run-ins with the law, drunk-driving busts and petty scrapes with authority, had burrowed into his consciousness, and his first reaction upon seeing the Pigmobile was to look for an escape route.

  Then he remembered. He was untouchable. He couldn’t be killed—Max the Fucking Devil Acton had taken care of that problem quite effectively—and he couldn’t be hurt. Hell, even if they shot his skinny ass, all that would happen would be he’d get knocked for a loop and another ventilation hole would open up in his body. Not ideal as far as aesthetics were concerned, but Earl had never been too concerned about appearance even in the best of times, and his current situation certainly didn’t qualify as the best of anything.

  So he smiled, baring his teeth at the pig driving up behind him, glancing at his traveling companion to make sure the software geek didn’t get any bright ideas about using the distraction to take off running. No worries there. Brett Parker stood rooted to the spot, staring at the police cruiser like a starving man eying a turkey dinner. For a genius, the guy sure didn’t have much common sense. Parker should have known a fucking cop wasn’t going to be able to help him.