Supernatural--Joyride

by John Passarella

  Okay, then, jump in the deep end. “You’ve been in the department for a while,” Gruber said. “Here in Moyer.”

  “Since my rookie days,” he said with a quirked smile. “Used to be Gurevich. Though never that fainthearted.”

  “So, you were on the force during the commune days.”

  Hardigan frowned. “Commune?”

  “The Free Folk of the Fields.”

  “Oh, that.” The last trace of the nostalgic smile vanished. “Look, Gruber, in case you haven’t noticed, I don’t have time for a trip down memory lane. If that’s all, I suggest you get back to—”

  “That’s not all, sir,” Gruber interrupted. “I’m following up on a lead.”

  The frown deepened. “A lead on what, exactly?”

  “Everything,” Gruber said. “I believe all of the pranks and vandalism and violence are related.”

  “I admit, the timing is suspicious,” Hardigan said. “But how can any of this relate to a nonexistent cult?”

  “But it did exist,” Gruber said. “At one time.” Gruber took a deep breath before he insinuated the presence of evidence he couldn’t be sure Tench and Blair possessed. “The FBI agents found a link between an incident at the library and something that happened at the commune.”

  Hardigan’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What sort of link?”

  “Something related to the fatal explosion.”

  Defensively, Hardigan came out of his seat, leaning over the desk with his knuckles resting atop it. “The accidental explosion?”

  The body language screamed intimidation. Gruber realized with surprise that Hardigan wanted him to drop the topic altogether. He’s hiding something.

  “Was it an accident?”

  “Of course, it was an accident,” Hardigan said, pushing off his desk and turning around to look out his window at the parking lot in front of the building, refusing to meet Gruber’s gaze. “They stockpiled dynamite to blow up tree stumps, expand their planting area. And it went bad, blew up during one of their woo-woo communal ceremonies. Simple as that. Was in all the newspaper accounts.”

  Hardigan clasped his hands behind his back. They were trembling. Even with his buzzcut of white hair, like a steel brush, the chief had always appeared younger than his age, not exactly trim, but energetic, powerful and forceful. Now, standing there with his back to Gruber, Hardigan visibly sagged, his shoulders hunched instead of held at attention. All at once, the man seemed out of his depth.

  “I’ve read the articles,” Gruber said.

  With a dismissive wave of his hand, Hardigan said, “Well, there you go.”

  “They’re hiding something,” Gruber said. “I need to know what that is.”

  “You’re grasping at straws, Gruber,” Hardigan said. “Conspiracy theories? None of it matters now. Hasn’t mattered in a long time. Just… let it go.”

  “Want to know the last incident report I read?” Gruber said, anger blooming inside him. “One of our patrol officers pulled over a motorist for rolling through a stop sign.”

  “As he should.”

  “He nearly beat the man to death!” Gruber said. “Our citizens are assaulting and, in some cases, killing each other. And it’s happening to us now. Nobody is safe from this. And somehow, it all leads back to that damn cult!”

  Hardigan sighed, turned from the window and returned to his desk. After a moment, he dropped into the executive chair in resignation. “What’s happening here, Tom?”

  “I don’t know… sir,” Gruber said. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “You want to know the truth?”

  “Of course.”

  “It won’t help,” Hardigan said. “Trust me.”

  “Let me be the judge.”

  Hardigan arched an eyebrow. “All high and mighty now, Gruber?”

  “I… need to know,” Gruber said. “Anything could be helpful.”

  “Was there a cover up?” Hardigan said. “Yes. But not in the way you suppose.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Bullshit,” Hardigan snapped. He pointed an index finger at Gruber. “You stand there, all self-righteous, thinking we murdered those cult members and covered it up.”

  Gruber stared at him. He prided himself on having an open mind. Maybe he had suspicions about what had happened back in 1968, but he hadn’t made the leap to mass murder committed by the Moyer police department.

  “Admit, it,” Hardigan said. “I might even think the same thing—if I hadn’t been there.”

  “So, what did happen?”

  “Dynamite and an explosion,” Hardigan said. “But the explosion was intentional, engineered by Caleb Fells, the cult leader, along with some of his high council members. Dynamite hidden around their entire gathering area, on timed fuses to blow at midnight.”

  “But…”

  “Why?” Hardigan asked and Gruber nodded. “We’d heard rumors that part of Caleb’s message included the end of the world. Today, I guess you’d call the Free Folk a doomsday cult, choosing mass suicide. We’d also heard rumors of drug experimentation, but we thought it was contained to the hippy-dippy group. And not worth rooting out. They seemed mostly harmless and we had no complaints about them. But we miscalculated. We had no idea they had a thriving drug business catering to tourists and…”

  “What?”

  “And just how many loopy bastards lived on that land.”

  “Papers said twenty-three were killed.”

  “Twenty-three,” Hardigan nodded. “That was a good number. Less than two dozen, but more than a handful. Believable. That was the main thing.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “We found more than three times that number.”

  “But how?”

  “This was years before Pangento propped us up,” Hardigan said. “Moyer’s lifeblood depended on our tourist trade,” Hardigan said defiantly. “When we found out how wrong we were about the extent of the drugs, the sheer number of them… Let’s just say an unfortunate accident involving an isolated group played better than… the reality of the situation.”

  “Who knew about this?”

  “Everyone,” Hardigan said. “Anyone who mattered. The nature of the commune gave us the idea. All their secrets, their cultivated anonymity. We lived right next to them and we missed it. How would anyone outside Moyer know any different? The mayor, the chief, the town council and chamber of commerce, along with the cooperation of the local press… we decided on a narrative that would hurt Moyer the least.” He took a deep breath and seemed relieved by the confession. “You could say we respected the cult’s right to privacy.”

  “But the bodies…” Gruber had so many questions, but at that moment, all he could focus on was the discrepancy in the number of dead. He grabbed the armrests of one of the two chairs in front of Hardigan’s desk, and lowered himself into it. “The articles talked about returning the remains of the twenty-three.”

  “Mass grave for the rest,” Hardigan said. “Pauper’s funeral under cover of night.”

  “But next of kin?”

  “Anonymity,” Hardigan said. “Most of them rejected the conventions of regular society. That included paper trails and bureaucracy. Changed their names to Moonglow and Starshine and Shepherd. Nonsense basically. We looked for IDs, ran prints. If they weren’t in the system, they stayed that way.”

  “Everyone went along with this plan?”

  “We had to think about the living,” Hardigan said. “Our livelihoods. We reported what we needed to report. Nothing more. Everyone moved on. Don’t look at me that way, Gruber. Most of those people disappeared from society voluntarily long before we made it permanent.”

  Hardigan stood again, resumed his position looking out the window, hands clasped behind his back. But they no longer trembled. “History is written by the victors, Tom,” he said. “The survivors. We did what was best for the town.”

  Gruber sat silently, trying to understand how the past tragedy and cover-up
could be responsible for the chaos happening in the present.

  “I told you,” Hardigan said. “The tourists are gone. We have Pangento. The other stuff was long ago. None of it matters now.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Ethan stared down at the display of his father’s locked cell phone, guessing one random six-digit number after another, while his father—or rather the boogeyman who had flowed inside his father’s body to take control—tried to kick in his bedroom door. The wood around the lock had begun to splinter. With each thunderous impact, Ethan’s student desk, which he’d pushed in front of the door, wobbled.

  Clutching his arm, Addie whispered urgently, “What’s taking so long? Call somebody!”

  “Can’t. Don’t know the code.”

  Another violent kick and the door broke free of the doorjamb. The legs of the desk squeaked an inch across the hardwood floor. Addie shrieked in panic, scrambled up onto the bed and pressed her back to the wall. “Hurry!”

  Daniel Yates pushed hard against the edge of the door, causing the desk to rumble across the floor, on the verge of toppling over.

  Grabbing Addie with his free hand, Ethan pulled her toward the far side of the room. One glance through the window revealed a second-story drop to the stone walkway circling the back of the sprawling house. Not a good option. But it was their only option.

  With the door half open and the desk pushed aside, Daniel Yates stalked into the room triumphant, a fevered gleam in his eyes. A wide, sick grin was plastered on his face as he raised the butcher knife in his white-knuckled hand.

  We’re out of time.

  Ethan turned to his sister and whispered, “Addie, I need you to be brave! Okay?”

  After a heart-stopping moment, she nodded.

  Ethan shoved open the window, trying not to think about the two-story drop. It’s the fall or the knife, he thought. It’s gonna hurt bad, but we gotta take our chances with the fall. “Follow me!” he said. “Climb over the ledge, hang there and then let go!”

  “I don’t wanna fall!”

  “Be brave, Addie!”

  Shoving the phone in his back pocket, he urged Addie onto the ledge. A quick glance back at his father—what only looked like his father—revealed that he was enjoying their fear. Could’ve rushed them with the knife, but he savored the moment, creeping forward, running his index finger along the bloody blade.

  His father spoke in a voice not his own, a deep voice intended to intimidate. “Some need to fall in line,” he said, tapping the blade against his palm. “But some won’t listen.”

  Though she shook uncontrollably on the windowsill—clutching Ethan’s arm so hard it hurt—Addie yelled, “Leave my father alone!”

  Even she realized what looked like her father was something else now, something that enjoyed hurting and scaring people. Ethan hoped she knew their father would never hurt their mom. None of this was his fault.

  “Addie, we need to go now,” Ethan said, his voice quavering despite his efforts to sound brave for her. “Okay?”

  She pinched her lower lip between her teeth, eyes wide, and nodded at him.

  “Ready, set—”

  At that moment, another shadow, smaller than the one that controlled Daniel Yates’ body, flew through the doorway and slammed against and then into his back. Yates staggered forward and fell to one knee, as if from a physical blow.

  Ethan clutched Addie to prevent her from falling, and braced himself against the windowsill. His father looked at them and his eyes again flashed momentarily red. A moment later, his body trembled and shook violently. More importantly, the butcher knife fell from his hand.

  A croaking, gasping voice rose from his father’s throat, completely raw and unlike the threatening voice they’d heard moments ago. The words came out as if every syllable was a struggle. “Run… Ethan, run! Can’t… hold him… long…”

  “Barry!”

  Ethan grabbed his sister’s hand and pulled her down from the windowsill, urging her past their shaking father, around the desk and through the doorway. As they ran down the stairs, he heard the scary voice shout in rage, “You need… to fall in line, boy!”

  Somehow, Ethan knew the bad shadow voice spoke to Barry, not Ethan. And that Barry, who had promised safety to Ethan and his family, was losing the fight against the evil shadow.

  “Fall—in—line!”

  Ethan heard a crash from his bedroom, almost certain Barry had lost the battle for control of Ethan’s father.

  He pulled Addie along, toward the front door, but too many shadows slipped in and out of the doorway, some through the doorjamb, others underneath the door, and a few through the keyhole. Instead, he reversed course and ran through the back door and out into the wide yard.

  After they’d first moved into the house, his father had discovered buried lengths of wood, some charred black from fire, and narrow underground chambers topped with trapdoors secured by padlocks and chains. They were hidden under layers of grass and dirt to conceal their existence.

  Ethan remembered his father talking to his mother at breakfast one day, saying those narrow chambers may have been root cellars. But Susan Yates had been skeptical. “Who makes root cellars barely wide enough for one person to stand in?” she’d asked him. “And why dig so many instead of one large one?” Dan Yates had no answer. He’d simply shrugged and said, “Guess we’ll never know.”

  One day he’d gazed down into some of the underground pits, which was what he’d decided to call them, and he agreed with his mother. They hadn’t been dug to store produce. Something about the padlocks and chains unsettled him. For several nights, he’d had bad dreams about someone—a stranger whose face remained hidden in shadow—throwing him into one of the pits, slamming the trapdoor shut and locking it with an old padlock and chain.

  His father had been concerned with the pits closest to the house, and most of those had crumbled as the charred wooden walls disintegrated. Safety hazards, he’d said, and started to fill them in.

  Ethan, however, had become morbidly fascinated by the pits hidden all over the backyard. He’d taken pages from his sketch pad and made a reverse treasure map of sorts. Instead of a map with one X indicating the location of buried treasure, his map had multiple Xs on it where he could someday hide something valuable. What sort of treasure he might want to hide in one of the pits never occurred to him, other than the standard pirate’s chest of gold coins. Because of the nightmares, he’d never considered hiding himself in one of the pits. Until that moment.

  The pit located farthest from their house, almost where the planting fields began, had been in good shape. His father had snipped the padlock from the chains with a bolt cutter, looked inside to make sure it was empty, before closing the trapdoor again.

  Ethan envisioned his sketchpad map and zeroed in on the pit he remembered. Kneeling, he brushed off the dirt, shoved the rusty chains aside and pulled open the trapdoor. The wooden sides stretched down into shadows and darkness. To Ethan, it looked like a coffin lifted onto its end and dropped into a hole in the ground. When cemeteries become too crowded, will they save space by burying people standing up?

  For a fleeting moment, a chill ran down his spine. He imagined that he had brought his sister to their actual grave. That they would wait at the bottom together, trapped in the pit, until the boogeyman controlling their father arrived and killed them. He wouldn’t have to stab them. Just fill the pit with dirt until it covered their mouths and noses. Kill them and bury them in one step.

  Addie backed away, her eyes wide. “I’m not going down there!”

  “It’s the only way,” Ethan said urgently, trying to convince himself as much as his little sister. “We have to hide. At least until I figure out the phone code.”

  With that, he pulled the cell phone out of his back pocket and stared at the stupid lock screen prompt.

  Reaching for the phone, Addie said, “Let me try.”

  “This is serious!”

  “I know,” she said, r
eaching again.

  “Then leave it alo—!”

  “I know Daddy’s code.”

  THIRTY

  Something had been bothering Dean since his encounter with the shadow person at Gyrations. The lore had been woefully lacking in any information about how to defeat shadow people, so he’d been forced to examine individual encounters with them in Moyer. First, Sam’s hunch had paid off. The Winchesters knew shadow people triggered the EMF detector. Made sense, because spirits of dead cult members ticked the paranormal spectrum checkbox. Second, Maurice Hogarth had accidentally discovered black light made them more substantial—and physically dangerous—while blocking their ability to possess humans. Third, based upon Gruber’s apprehension of the possessed orderly who snapped the neck of a disgruntled patient, a taser hit expelled a possessing shadow from its human host. Fourth—and useful only as a worst-case scenario—burning the host’s flesh also expelled shadows from their hosts. But what had Dean learned from the Gyrations encounter?

  A possessed human with a knife intent on launching a killing spree had balked at the last moment. With the host relegated to the back seat of his own consciousness, the shadow person had aborted the assault. Normal light had no effect on shadow people. Couldn’t even penetrate their shadow form. That ruled out the tracking spotlight at the dance club, since it was simply a bright light. If Dean discounted his somewhat biased opinion that EDM might have sent the spirit packing, that left one possibility.

  When Dean described the Gyrations encounter to Sam for the third time, looking for clues, he’d mentioned that when he moved toward the dance floor the shadow had frozen before recovering and darting away. The shadow had stopped at the edge of the conversational nook, beneath an overhang, right before it would have been exposed to the barrage of strobe lights. Dean figured strobe lights were simply normal lights, blinking fast and wouldn’t work as a deterrent. But Sam made a good point.

  “People with photosensitive epilepsy have seizures triggered by flashing lights,” Sam said. “Strobe lights definitely qualify.”