by Gord Rollo
“What the hell is he up to?” Dan said. “Why would he touch the reverend’s body? This is getting crazier by the minute.”
“No, it’s not…it’s getting more retarded. This is why he painted that message outside. Now all of a sudden the dead guy who looks like a scarecrow is missing. Get it? I told you he’s gonna try to scare us or something. Stupid bastard. If he shows up in a scarecrow outfit tonight, I’m gonna rip his head off.”
“I’ll help you. Think he’s that stupid though? Seriously, don’t you think it’s kind of sick moving a dead body like that? Doesn’t really sound like the kind of thing Pat would normally do.”
“I agree, but you’re forgetting about the Kim factor. There’s a good chance she’s got a lot to do with this. Maybe she’s pissed off at you or Kelly from last night and it’s her that cooked up all this bullshit. Pat’s just being led around by his dick, maybe? Who knows? Wouldn’t surprise me any though.”
“Me neither. Come on…we better go tell the girls.”
Back at the fire pit, with darkness descending on their camp, the news of Joshua Miller’s missing corpse wasn’t going over very well. Especially with Kelly, who hadn’t wanted them to remove the reverend’s necklace, never mind his entire body.
“What’s he thinking?” she asked. “I mean that’s gotta be sacrilegious or something, isn’t it? Tampering with the dead?”
“I don’t know about that,” Rich said. “The dude was murdered, remember. Your great-grandfather tampered with him a hell of a lot more than Pat, I’d say.”
“For sure, but it’s still, I don’t know…disrespectful.”
“Not to mention stupid,” Lizzy said. “Why bother?”
“Rich seems to think they’ll try to scare us tonight,” Dan said. “Sounds about right, when you think about what they painted on the wall of the church. Who knows? I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.”
“I won’t. But I’ll kill the bugger if he wakes me up. Both of them. I’m bloody exhausted tonight.”
“Me too,” Kelly said. “In fact, if you guys don’t mind, I think I might hit the hay early tonight. After partying last night and then working our butts off today, I really need a decent night’s sleep.”
“That sounds like a great idea, actually,” Dan said. “I’m really tired too. Besides, I wouldn’t mind getting up early tomorrow and getting back out there to check that trail. Hopefully it leads to Reverend Miller’s house and we get lucky. If we search it before noon, I vote for going home tomorrow afternoon.”
“Now there’s the best idea I’ve heard today,” Lizzy said. “I’ve kind of had enough of this creepy place.”
“Me too,” Rich agreed. “But what if we don’t find the treasure in Joshua’s house?”
“Not much we can do about it. It’ll either be there or it won’t. There’s nowhere else I can think of to look around here. No sense sticking around if we can’t find it. Least we tried. I can live with that.”
“True,” Rich said. “And hey, we don’t even know if it ever actually existed, right? Least we have the golden amulet. That might be worth a lot more than we think. Not a fortune, but enough to make our trip out here worthwhile, I’d say.”
“Hope so,” Kelly said, yawning. “I like the idea of going home tomorrow too. If we’re getting up early though, I think I’m gonna hit the hay right now then.”
“Right behind you, sister,” Lizzy said, stifling a yawn of her own.
“Let’s all go to bed,” Rich said. “What should we do about Pat and Kim though?”
“Screw them,” Dan said. “If they try to pull some shit, we’ll just have to deal with it. Hopefully they crawl back in their own tent and leave us alone.”
“They will if they know what’s good for them. Okay, come on, Lizzy, get your sweet little ass into bed.”
“My sweet little ass is going to bed all right…into my own sleeping bag.”
“Ooh, you’re cold, woman. I don’t know why I put up with you.”
“’Cause you love me?”
“Nah…can’t be that. I just don’t have any better options.”
Lizzy smacked Rich playfully and they went off to their tent arm in arm.
“’Night guys,” Rich said over his shoulder as they left.
“Good night,” Kelly shouted back, smiling. When they were gone, she turned to Dan and asked, “You coming to bed too?”
“Yeah. I’m tired too. Let’s go.”
Twenty minutes later, it was fully dark out, the moon having hidden behind a thick bank of clouds. All four of the campers had fallen fast asleep, exhausted from their day in the woods. For the time being, the cornfield was dead quiet. Not even the ever-present crows on the roof of the church were making any noise, the birds settling down for the night as well. Only the scarecrow was left awake, hungry and trembling with rage as he surveyed his domain from the front steps of the church.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Midnight.
A light rain falls from the black sky.
He walks through the wet cornfield, relishing his freedom, something short and heavy held in his powerful right hand. It’s part of a tree branch that’s fallen in the nearby woods and he likes the weight of it, the way it balances perfectly in his grip. It’s wood from an oak tree so he knows it is solid, very hard to break even if he were to smash it down on the ground or a rock.
Or a skull.
He exits the field and his eyes search the darkness, easily making out the triangular shapes of the campers’ tents in the gloom. He knows they’re all inside, asleep and totally defenseless. A smile touches the corner of his mouth, but just as quickly it’s gone, replaced with a scowl as the rage fills his mind again. Sometimes it seems fury is the only state of emotion he’s capable of, the ultraviolent thoughts that constantly fill his mind taboo for the vast majority of human beings. Mind you, he’s no longer human so their pitiful rules don’t apply to him anymore.
Not tonight they don’t anyway.
Tonight’s special.
He starts walking toward the tents, fingernails digging into his makeshift club and squeezing it tightly. It’s time to make these troublemaking strangers pay for what they’ve done: trespassing on his land, trying to steal his secret possessions, and defiling his church simply by their mere presence. For those crimes and more, they deserve to die horribly, screaming and suffering as much as possible.
As he approaches the camp, he wonders which one he’ll begin with, a male or perhaps one of the females? Yes, he prefers the idea of killing one of the girls first. No real reason, it just seems like the thing to do. Not knowing who’s sleeping with whom, he chooses the middle tent and carefully unzips the entrance zipper. Silently, he peeks inside and is pleased to see two people snoring on their backs, one the dark-skinned man and the other, his white girlfriend. What better pair to start with than these two? Their shameless mixing of the races sickens him to his core and he looks forward to permanently putting an end to this offensive, deviant union.
First, the girl.
Silently, he enters the tent, moving slowly and carefully so he doesn’t wake up either of them. He doesn’t want to spoil the surprise. Not yet anyway. He’s already picturing the coming death stroke, her head opening up like a ripe, juicy melon, her blood and spongy brain meat splashing in all directions and painting the plastic walls red and gray. Raising the oak branch as high as he can within the confined space, he grits his teeth tightly together and swings with all his considerable strength, the wooden club striking the woman flush between the eyes and…
…and causing Malcolm Tucker to bolt upright in his bed screaming, trembling with panic and gasping for breath in the wake of what had unquestionably been the worst nightmare he’d ever experienced. Certainly the worst he could remember, anyway.
“Kelly!” he shouted, still not fully awake, his heart beating like a jackhammer against the old bones of his chest. He was covered in sweat and for a moment not at all sure where he was. His eyes darted aro
und the dark room, searching for his precious granddaughter, her boyfriend Dan, and the monstrous man who—just seconds before—had been standing here trying to kill them.
“Just another dream, you silly old bugger,” he said to himself, trying to draw in a few deep breaths and calm down. This had been the third such nightmare in as many nights but by far the worst. The others had also been about Joshua Miller and the Grove where he’d grown up, but tonight’s dream was the only one where he’d been forced to sit and watch while Kelly was brutally murdered.
Malcolm’s bad dreams were getting progressively worse and he knew it was his conscience’s way of getting back at him for allowing Kelly and her friends to wander off to a place of absolute evil without putting up more of a fight. The moment the taxi had pulled away from the curb with him in the backseat, leaving Kelly standing there in her friend’s driveway, he’d known he had just made a grave mistake. Sure he’d given her his father’s White Magic ring and made her promise to leave at the first sign of trouble, but that wasn’t enough. Not nearly. That was the problem though. What could he have done any differently? He’d told her everything he knew about Miller’s Grove. Everything he feared about Joshua Miller. Nothing he’d said had any influence on her, and he could have warned her not to go until he was blue in the face and she still would have gone. The only way he could have prevented her from going was to have dragged her kicking and screaming into the taxicab and physically tied her up back here at his apartment. That wasn’t going to happen, obviously, but no matter how hard Malcolm analyzed and justified his behavior he still ended up with the same conclusion.
He’d let his granddaughter down.
He’d put Kelly and her friends in danger.
People might think he was overreacting, a crazy old fool getting himself all worked up over nothing more than some twisted childhood memories that his delusional vigilante father had helped forge into a family obsession to cover up his lifelong shame, but Malcolm knew better. He’d lived in the Grove, felt the Man in Black’s presence every time the sun went down, witnessed his dark hand touch the lives of every family there, not only Reverend Miller’s and his own. No, he wasn’t overreacting or making things up. The danger was definitely real.
The question was what was he going to do about it?
Malcolm climbed out of bed and turned on the light. He put on his slippers and walked out into the kitchen where he had a list of emergency numbers taped to the wall beside the telephone. At the bottom of the list, he had a number for Kelly’s cell phone written in. Middle of the night or not, he picked up the phone and dialed her number, not worrying about what he might say if she answered. He just wanted to hear her voice and hear her say that everything was all right. Maybe then he could let this fear go and start sleeping at night again.
No one answered.
Her familiar answering machine message clicked on right away, but Malcolm didn’t bother saying anything. He hung up and sat down at the kitchen table. He was smart enough to know reception out in the woods would probably be nonexistent, and he also was aware that this late at night, even if her phone had been receiving a signal, she was probably fast asleep and wouldn’t have heard it ring anyway, but none of those facts eased the growing ball of terror growing in his belly.
“I have to go help her,” he said. “There’s no one else who can.”
Being a realist, he knew it was practically suicide for an eighty-four-year-old man to go on a long hike alone in the woods, but such was his conviction that Kelly was in terrible danger, he was willing to try. He was old, sure, but he still had a lot of fight in him yet. He’d kept himself in good shape and he even knew a shortcut to Miller’s Grove that would get him there a lot faster than his granddaughter and her friends probably got there. It would still be incredibly hard for him to get back there, but not impossible.
He stood up and went back into his bedroom. Opening the top drawer on his bedside table, he reached inside and withdrew something else his father had passed down to him when he’d died. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 13 six-shot revolver. Its four-inch blue steel barrel had a fixed sight on top and produced a hell of a kick, firing .357-caliber rounds powerful enough to shoot straight through a brick wall. Malcolm had cleaned the handgun religiously every month for over forty years, but had never actually fired the weapon. Not even once. Until tonight, he’d never had any reason to.
What if you’re wrong? he wondered. What if you barge in there waving your dad’s old gun around and everyone is fine, drinking beer and roasting marshmallows?
He could live with that, he thought. No shame in acting like an old fool. They probably all thought he was nuts already anyway, so what was the difference? At least he’d know for sure that Kelly was okay.
No, there was no problem at all if he was wrong.
He just wasn’t sure what to do if it turned out that he was right.
Chapter Twenty-Five
When Rich Borden woke up on Friday morning and saw daylight filtering in through the thin plastic walls of their tent, he was honestly shocked he’d slept straight through the night without waking up even once. He’d gone to bed dead certain Pat and Kim were going to show up at some point through the night waking everyone up trying to pull some jackass stunt or another but obviously it hadn’t happened. Either that, or Lizzy and he had been so tired from their unsuccessful search of the abandoned village yesterday that they’d both fallen into the deepest sleeps of their lives, nestled so far down the rabbit hole no one or nothing had been able to disturb their comalike rest. Rich wasn’t a heavy sleeper though, so although he’d been extremely tired last night, his vote went for option one—Pat and Kim simply hadn’t shown up.
Leaving Lizzy to let her catch a few more minutes of rest, Rich quietly crawled into his clothes and left the tent. He wanted to check in with Dan and Kelly to see if either of them had seen Pat or Kim sometime during the night. He normally wouldn’t wake people up like this but Dan had said he wanted to get an early start on the day anyway, so Rich supposed it was okay to disturb them. To his surprise, neither of his friends had been rudely awakened last night either, both Dan and Kelly having slept like babies from the moment their weary heads had hit the blow-up travel pillows.
“Well, where the heck can they be?” Rich said. “I was sure they’d show up and do a sneak attack on us. Pretty sure anyway.”
“So was I,” Dan said. “Don’t see any other reason why they’d paint that message on the church and move the reverend’s dead body. Unless maybe they realized it was a lame idea to start with, and changed their mind. Did you check their tent yet?”
“Nope. Was just about to though. I’ll be right back.”
Rich walked over to look inside Pat’s tent but he’d known it was going to be empty the minute he looked at it. The door flaps were spread wide-open and the entrance zipper had been left open all night long. He returned to Dan and Kelly’s tent to let them know what he’d found—or more precisely, what he hadn’t found—and together they decided to let the matter drop. Pat was a big boy and Kim could certainly look after herself as well, so as far as Rich and Dan were concerned, if they were set on playing some silly, childish game of hide-and-seek with them, they were officially on their own. They had neither the time nor the inclination to carry on this craziness anymore, not if they still wanted to find the treasure and get out of here before it was too late in the afternoon to risk not making it to their cars before nightfall.
“What time would we have to leave to play it safe?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Dan said. “Early afternoon. One or two maybe. After that and we might still be wandering around in the woods when it gets dark.”
“Nothing’s set in stone though, right?” Rich said. “I mean…there’s nothing saying we absolutely have to leave tonight. It’s not the end of the world if we have to spend one more night out here.”
“Exactly,” Dan said. “We’ll just have to play it by ear and see how the day goes. Hopefull
y we can go home today, but either way we better get our butts in gear and get moving. We’re already behind schedule and haven’t even left camp yet.”
“I’ll go grab Lizzy then and we’ll be ready to roll in ten minutes.”
“Make it five.”
“Yes, sir, boss man. Just better hope Lizzy isn’t in a romantic mood.”
“That would still leave you four minutes and thirty seconds to get ready,” Kelly said, she and Dan bursting into laughter.
“Oh! Everyone’s a comedian now, huh? Not only do I get heckled by my own girlfriend…now I have to hear it from you too! Nice!”
“Sorry…couldn’t help myself.”
“No worries, kiddo. Be right back.”
True to his word, Rich and Lizzy were packed up and ready to head for the woods five minutes later. Dan and Kelly were set too, so together they headed behind the church to hit the trail that they hoped would lead them to Joshua Miller’s house. Overhead, the crows followed them, keeping a watchful eye from way up high in a cloudy, overcast sky that threatened rain.
At the fork in the wooded trail, Kelly led the group off to the left this time, onto the smaller path they hadn’t had the time or the energy to explore last night. This trail was a lot more overgrown than the other branch leading to the village had been, and there were several places along the way they had to stop and look hard just to determine if they were still on the path. Somehow they managed and within about fifteen minutes they walked out of the dense trees and into a small man-made clearing in the forest. The villagers had obviously cut all the trees down in a large circular area to let the sunlight in, then used the excessive amount of large chopped logs on site to build a massive family-size, two-story log cabin in the center of the clearing for Reverend Miller.
