The Collector 03 - The Big Reap

by Chris F. Holm

  I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “She what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You sure she’s not a nut?”

  “That’s what the authorities believe, of course,” she said, “but they’re wrong.”

  “And you think there’s Brethren mojo behind her aging act?”

  “Do you recall what Jain said to you?”

  I narrowed my eyes at her in puzzlement. “Jain?”

  Lilith shook her head subtly – more to herself than to me – and clarified. “The one you killed in Mexico.”

  I thought back. “If I could be killed,” I quoted as best as I could remember, “my mountain cousins would have found a way. They begrudge me my appetites, as if their method of procuring sustenance is any more humane.” Realization dawned. “You think the mountains are the Rockies, and the humane methods are sucking her life-force dry bit by bit but leaving her alive?”

  “I do indeed.”

  I looked around. Slammed closed the book that I’d been poring over. A plume of dust that smelled like dried vanilla poofed out of it and pricked at my sinuses, daring me to sneeze. “Then fuck this place,” I said. “Let’s find me a new meat-suit and head to Colorado!”

  “Excellent,” said Lilith. “As it happens, I have just the candidate.”

  The police combed the woods, of course, aided by countless volunteers from as far afield as Fort Collins and Durango, sweeping through the brush in dotted lines of men and women with only ten feet in between. But despite the fact the area surrounding Colorado Springs was too dry for any significant snowfall to accumulate the terrain was steep, uneven, and tough to navigate, and there was just too much of it to cover with any degree of confidence. After a week spent trudging back and forth along a grid two square miles centered on the spot the woman had been found, the police called off the search.

  Lucky for me, the Monster Mavens hadn’t, and who could blame them? Their fifteen minutes of fame had brought them endorsements, late-night talk appearances, even the promise of a book deal. They were gonna milk it for all that it was worth, and with a YouTube audience now numbering in the hundred-thousands, that meant trying to find the mysterious cabin of which the old woman spoke. And, of course, the strange, subhuman creatures within.

  Did they believe the woman to be Ada? Hard to say. Nicholas, based on what little I could glean from the not pot-dulled bits of memory I’d been able to access, didn’t, but Topher and Zadie seemed earnest enough. Lord knows they played it up whether they believed it or not. And the internet gobbled it up like so many McNuggets. The old woman had her own Wikipedia entry, and the comments section of the Monster Mavens’ blog was chock-a-block with speculation. SCULLY58008 was betting, against all odds, on some sort of hillbilly brainwashing cult, while LilMsGlinda was leaning toward a coven of witches looking to fatten up the old lady Hansel-and-Gretel style so they could eat her. VanH3llsing, predictably, guessed vampires. And Area69 said dollars to donuts it was aliens, or a government cover-up of same.

  If they only knew how much weirder the truth really was.

  It was six days in to the Monster Mavens’ search – our search, I should say – that we’d found the cabin.

  We’d been hiking in a haphazard zigzag – something Topher (never Christopher, a rule even Nicholas-not-Nicky obeyed, though neither Topher nor Zadie extended him such courtesy) cooked up between sips of Early Times straight from the bottle as he hunched over our maps beside the fire at camp one night. “The cops don’t know what the eff they’re doing, man,” he’d told me conspiratorially, the sheer paint-blistering offensiveness of his whiskey breath making me wonder whether it might be prudent to be sitting farther away from open flame. “The sorts of things we’re looking for, they don’t follow lines or grids, you get me?”

  I didn’t. Luckily, Topher was too drunk, and too comfortable in his role as alpha-male to require – or even expect – a response.

  “We gotta, like, listen to our souls, bro. They’ll lead us true, you wait and see.”

  And as stupid as that sounded, it kinda sorta worked.

  We’d been on the trail for hours. Lungs hoarse in the thin mountain air, Topher and Zadie snapping at each other all day in the benign way all couples do when their company runs brittle. They’d been pushing hard to find some scrap of fame-stretching evidence ever since the calls started drying up a few days after the discovery of the old woman, and they were both haggard, tired, and grumpy as all get-out. Not that I had a ton of sympathy for them. They had each other, after all, while I had no one, and on a pettier note, they got to walk all day with those ski-pole-looking thingys that helped with balance or whatever, while I was stuck pretending to be their cameraman. That meant hauling thirty pounds of camera around on one shoulder and maneuvering by viewfinder, which in turn meant I’d experienced several days of stumbles, backaches, and motion sickness. But I’d gotten my revenge, I guess. I was supposed to be editing and uplinking the footage of our mystical snipe-hunt every night from camp, but in fact, I’d been doing no such thing. Wouldn’t even know how, to own the truth. Hell, there was a pretty good chance this camera I was carrying wasn’t even on. Not like I could tell the difference either way. Best I could hope for was to remember to take the lens cap off.

  But that goddamned camera was good for one thing, at least: it could see the fucking cabin. Which is more than I could say for the three of us. Though whether we couldn’t, or just wouldn’t, I’m not entirely sure; Lord knows how Brethren mojo works. The sensation was not unlike the one I’d experienced when I’d first arrived at the shuttered public bath house Magnusson had been using as his laboratory. But while that building simply resisted looking at, causing my eyes to slide right off it with nothing more than the scantest of impressions, the cabin flat-out would not show itself to my – or Topher’s, or Zadie’s – naked eye.

  I’m getting ahead of myself. First I should tell you about the almost-murder.

  We’d been trudging along for what seemed like forever, on jagged nerves and terrain to match. The afternoon was getting on, and the long shadows cast by the mountain ridge to our west bathed us in chill gray half-light like crushing depression, dulling colors, numbing limbs to sluggishness, and settling creaky into our every weary joint. My feet were blistered. My camera-shoulder ached. And my head was throbbing, on account of Topher and Zadie’s bickering, which had begun as the occasional potshot a few miles back, only to escalate to a vicious barrage as the afternoon wore on.

  Topher, early on, all brittle false-cheer: “C’mon – pick up the pace back there, woman! We got monsters to catch!”

  “Quit hogging the water!” Zadie, later, whining.

  “What’re you, stupid? We’re not going that way, it’s too steep.” Topher, evening the score a few paces later. And then they were off to the races.

  “You’re the one who marked the route, dumbass. Can’t you fucking read a map?”

  “Better than you can read a fucking sonar readout.”

  “Jesus, does it always have to come back to that bullshit in Loch Ness?”

  “Bullshit?” Topher got up in Zadie’s face, all pointy and indignant. “How can you stand there and call it bullshit? That sonar image was definitive.”

  “Definitively a piece of driftwood.” As Topher got closer, Zadie made a face, squinching up her nose and eyes. “Holy hell,” she said, “when’s the last time you washed that shirt? It smells like gym socks soaked in Patchouli and bong water. I’m gonna lose my fucking lunch here.”

  “More like both our lunches, the way you’ve been packing it in.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m just saying, I thought I made it pretty clear I packed the ostrich jerky for me.”

  “Well then maybe you shouldn’t have put it in my pack. Oh, wait! You needed room in your pack for that goddamned travel guitar, because God forbid I go one night without having to hear your horrible playing. You’d think in seven years, you would have learned one chord.” />
  “You never complained before.”

  “You sure about that? Or is it that you couldn’t hear me over the fucking racket you were making? Long as you insist on torturing me with that thing night in and night out, I’ll finish the goddamn jerky if I goddamn well feel like it. And you’re one to talk about putting on the pounds; your gut looks like fucking cookie dough pouring out over that stupid-ass belt buckle of yours.”

  “You sound just like your mother. And you told me you liked this belt buckle!”

  “I swear to Christ, Christopher, if you tell me I sound just like my mother one more time, you’ll be bunking with Nicky, you hear me? And believe you me, there’s plenty of stuff I’ve said I liked that I’m mostly just enduring.”

  “You know I hate it when you call me Christopher! Christopher is my dad’s name. And anyways, it’s fucking rich, you teasing me about my name – your given name is Susan. You stole Zadie off the cover of a book, one you never even finished, for shit’s sake.”

  At that last, Zadie looked directly into my camera, worried that she’d been outed to the world. (No chance: it wasn’t recording, and anyway, I’d been zooming in on a cool-looking bird some twenty feet behind her.) Then, after one stricken moment of paralysis, she wheeled on Topher, and smacked him square across the jaw.

  I was surprised. In my time with Topher and Zadie (Chris and Susan?), I’d seen ’em bicker plenty, but nothing ever came of it. They were peas in a pod, or whatever the hippie drum-circle equivalent would be. Macho and hembra bongos, I guess. (What? That’s what they call the big bongo and the little one, respectively. Or maybe it’s the little and the big. Okay, I may’ve been spending way too much time with these two.) Point is, I’d never gotten a whiff of violence repressed in their prior interactions. Which made the slap surprising, and what came next goddamn terrifying.

  Topher looked at her a moment, shocked silent. Then he shrugged out of his pack in one quick motion and tackled her, his hands around her neck.

  Zadie let out a squeal that became a gurgle as his thumbs pressed against her trachea. I belted out an involuntary “Hey!” and moved toward them to stop Topher from killing her. In my astonishment, I clung stupidly to the camera on my shoulder. It had become so much an extension of this meat-suit in my mind – so accustomed was Nicholas to carrying it – I simply never thought to drop it. It was a stupid move, because the weight of the equipment slowed me down, and could have cost Zadie her life, but in retrospect, my idiocy proved helpful. But not before we three tumbled down the embankment.

  It happened like this. I leapt onto Topher’s back, and tried to ride him to the ground. He would not relinquish his grip on Zadie, who was already off-balance from his attack. My weight plus the camera made him top-heavy. He tumbled forward onto her, me still on his back and then rolled into an awkward somersault, taking me along. His hands released her neck, too late to prevent her from tumbling after us. So the three of us rolled down the steep decline, maybe twenty feet all told, but the pitch was such it was more falling than rolling.

  We hit bottom and scattered like jacks. I landed flat on my back with a hollow whumph and a plume of breath like a pair of bellows being squeezed. For an agonizing second, new breath just wouldn’t come, and then finally my diaphragm listened to what my lungs were telling it and got back to work.

  I found my feet and looked around, disoriented. Heard a shuffle of nylon ripstop, caught a glimpse of matching winter jackets through the trees, one following the other in hot pursuit. I had no idea what the hell had come over these two today, but I figured I ought to join in the parade. And so I did, the camera dangling behind me from its strap, its choking weight slowing me down enough I thought I might never catch up. But they weren’t running for long.

  Up ahead, I heard a scuffle, and then a sickening crack. Like a gunshot. Like broken bones. I worried it was Zadie’s neck and put on whatever little speed I could with the camera pulling back on me like a yoke. In seconds, I spotted them, and breathed a sigh of relief. It wasn’t Zadie’s neck that snapped. It was her walking pole, which had apparently just broken in half. Unfortunately for Topher, said walking pole broke in half because she brought it down atop his head.

  Topher, who’d been grappling – buck knife drawn – with Zadie when she cold-cocked him, wobbled a moment on his feet. His eyes rolled back, his face went slack, and his buck knife tipped slowly in his loosened grip, eventually falling to the forest floor point-down. Its handle wobbled back and forth as it stuck, in imitation of its owner, perhaps. Then Topher’s knees buckled, and he went down.

  I looked at Zadie, who was still holding the handled end of the walking pole like a baseball bat, its lacquered surface now terminating in a jagged metal O, and then at Topher’s crumpled form. Zadie looked back at me, wild-eyed and panting. Then she threw the pole away from her in disgust, as if it had transformed into a writhing snake, and whatever malevolent urge had come over the two of them evaporated. She dropped to her knees beside her unconscious lover, and called to me, voice pleading: “Nicky! Nicky, get over here, and bring the camera. I can’t tell if Topher’s breathing!”

  I did as she asked, struggling out of the camera strap as I approached. She snatched the camera from me like a desert wanderer might a canteen. Then she held the lens up to Topher’s nose and mouth, her face splitting into a manic grin of relief as it plumed with rhythmic condensation.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I thought I’d killed him. Hell, for a minute there, I thought he was gonna kill me.” She chucked Nicholas-not-Nicky’s camera aside without a thought. It bounced off a jutting shoulder of exposed mountain rock, and its oversized viewfinder swung open on its hinge. Somewhere deep inside his own psychic prison, Nicholas-not-Nicky let out a wail of sheer gearhead angst. But I wasn’t paying him any mind. Nor, if I’m being honest, did I care much that Topher had regained a sort of swirly-eyeballed consciousness, thanks possibly to Zadie’s gentle if insistent slapping of his cheeks.

  But I did care about what he was pointing at with one unsteady hand as he blinked his eyes into focus, his face a mask of punch-drunk confusion. “Nicky!” he stage-whispered with awed incredulity. “Nicky, are you effing seeing this?”

  And as I said some time ago, Nicky wasn’t. But I was, and once Zadie followed the trail of Nicky’s arm down past his pointing finger toward the camera, she was seeing it too.

  The camera, propped crooked on the rock a few feet from us, aimed at a gentle, treeless patch of upslope, gray and barren as the moon, and as empty, too. The camera’s viewfinder was open. And in it was that same patch of barren, empty upslope, though in the viewfinder it was neither barren nor empty.

  On it sat a small log cabin, rough-hewn and lichen-scabbed. It sat a quarter-turn away from facing us, its front windows staring blankly into the middle distance from beneath their brow of covered porch as if indifferent to our presence. A thin wisp of oily smoke twisted skyward from its chimney. A patch of tilled earth arranged in furrows – a garden not yet growing – rested on its southeastern edge, now deep in sunset’s shadow. The cabin was still and quiet beneath the waning light. No light shone from within. And though for our entire hike the forest had teemed with life, it had apparently abandoned us now, for all was silent and still as a crypt.

  “The fuck is that?” Zadie muttered.

  “That,” I told them, “is proof.”

  “Of what?”

  “That the world’s a weirder place than even you two yahoos realize.”

  And then, before they knew what hit them, I attacked.

  9.

  “Ow! That pinches!”

  “Does it?” I asked, giving the nylon line another tug. Topher wailed a little louder than was strictly necessary in response, if you ask me. But after the racket we made stumbling upon the cabin in the first place any attempt at a quiet approach was shot anyways, so I figured let him yell. “Good.”

  We were huddled in a cave some three hundred yards from where the cabin stood. More a dep
ression in the rock than anything. Not quite deep enough for a bear to settle down in, but not so exposed to the wind and elements that these two would freeze to death if I didn’t come back until morning. Probably. I mean, I’m not a nature guide or anything. But either way, I figured they stood a better chance of surviving hog-tied and tucked away somewhere than if I let them storm the cabin with me. I’d lost enough lives taking on the tunnel Brethren – three shit-bags and one innocent – to learn my lesson. The only hide I’d be risking today was Nicky’s – er, Nicholas’s – and even that was one more than I’d ideally prefer.

  “What the fuck, Nicky!” This from Zadie, who, near as I could tell in the failing evening light, was giving me the scowling of a lifetime. “I thought you were our friend.”

  “If we’re such good friends,” I said, figuring I’d throw the consciousness who, when I left, would once more be driving this meat-suit a bone, “then you’d know I hate being called Nicky. And besides, this is for your own good.”

  “Yeah? How you figure?”

  “Well, for one, believe me when I tell you, you want nothing to do with what’s in that cabin. And for two, let’s not forget whatever nasty juju they’ve enacted to keep folks from stumbling across it damn near made you two kill each other. But worry not, once I head in there and do my thing, you won’t have either to contend with.” I hope, I added mentally.

  “Since when’d you go all Venkman on us?” asked Topher. “I thought you didn’t even believe in this shit.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Venkman hunted ghosts,” I told him, “and was a huckster besides. If you’re gonna drop a reference, think I’d prefer Van Helsing.”

  “You mean that shitty movie by The Mummy guy where Wolverine wears that dumbass hat?”

  “You know what?” I said. “Never mind.”

  “Nicky,” Zadie said, only to shake her head and close her eyes by way of self-chastisement. “Nicholas,” she corrected. “You don’t have to do this.”