by Peter Nealen
“We're as much in the dark as you are, Sheriff,” I admitted. “All we knew, coming here, was that a friend of mine is in trouble. When we couldn't find him here, we were supposed to find Chrystal Meek. Well, we found her, and then all hell broke loose.”
He eyed me. “Your friend in the same business?”
“Yeah, he is,” I said. No point in denying it. “So yes, the fact that there's some Otherworldly weirdness going on here isn't all that surprising. I just have no idea exactly what we're dealing with.”
Baker nodded toward Chrystal. “Does she know?”
“We haven't really had time to find out,” Tall Bear put in. “We'd barely gotten to her trailer when the mob showed up.”
“Well, then, let's go talk to her.” Without another word, Baker stalked over to Eryn and Chrystal. Tall Bear and I followed. “Miss Meek?” Baker asked, crouching down to bring himself face to face with her. “I'm Sheriff Baker. I know you've been through a lot, but I've got some questions.”
Chapter 6
It took a fair bit of snuffling and several false starts before Chrystal could get a good head of steam going and start telling the story.
“I'd been having a hard week, between my mom and Spencer,” she said, staring at the ground. I gathered that Spencer was one of the abusive boyfriends that Craig had mentioned. “I'd just had a fight with Spencer, and was running out of the house, trying to get away from him, when Blake showed up. He wasn't there for me, but when he saw me running across the lawn, crying and bleeding from a cut on my head, he stepped in. He almost put Spencer in the hospital.” I could imagine. Blake was a hard man, and a ferocious fighter. He also had a notoriously short fuse, and I could easily see him deciding to get mad when he saw a pretty girl all busted up and being chased by an angry boyfriend.
“He was nice to me,” she said. “He wanted to make sure that I was okay. He even let me stay with him, even though he didn't seem to want anything from me.” I filled in the blanks in that statement without comment and let her drive on. “I was too scared to stay by myself, so he let me ride along with him while he worked. He only said that he was looking for someone, someone very dangerous,” she said. “He didn't want me to come along at first. He said it was too dangerous. But I cried, so he let me come with him.
“I really didn't understand a lot of what he was looking for. He told me to stay in his truck when he was out asking questions or checking on things. We went to a few old houses on the edge of town, and up to the cemetery on the hill. I asked what he was trying to find, but he only said that he'd know it when he found it.” That was probably accurate enough; the Otherworld can be slippery. Of course, if he was after a sorcerer, then it might have been a little more straightforward, but then, the skilled ones can be devilishly hard to find if they suspect that there are Witch Hunters on their trail.
“It really wasn't that bad at first. He got stonewalled by a lot of the people in town; they've never liked outsiders or anybody who seems like they might be a cop.” She glanced at the deputies nervously, then looked back down at the ground. It seemed like it was easier for her to focus on the grass and asphalt than to look anyone in the eye. “He said some of them got really hostile, but I told him that he should just accept that that was the way it's always going to be in Coldwell if you come around asking questions. But then one night, about three weeks ago, everything changed.
“At first there was a storm. It didn't rain, but it just kind of hovered over the town. There was lots of lightning, but not a lot of thunder. I can't be sure, but some of the lightning looked strange, like it was different colors. Then, at about three in the morning, every dog in town started barking, and every cat started yowling. It was so loud that I had to cover my ears. At the same time, as I looked out the window to try to see what was going on, I suddenly had the most intense feeling of dread. I just knew that I didn't want to look up at the hill.” She pointed to the high ground to the northeast of the town. “Just the thought of what I might see up there was so awful that I just curled up on the floor and cried.”
Eryn looked up at me suddenly, frowning. “You know, I haven't heard a single dog bark since we came to town,” she said. I thought for a moment, then shrugged. I honestly hadn't noticed. There had been a few other things going on at the time that had rather commanded my attention.
“None have since that night,” Chrystal said quietly, sending a bit of a chill up my spine, even though I was still sweating from the fight and the run through the woods. “They all stopped at just about three thirty in the morning, and I haven't heard a single one since.”
“Well, that doesn't bode well,” I muttered.
“Is this ringing any bells to you?” Eryn asked me. “Because it's pretty far outside of my little bit of experience.”
I shook my head. “I've never run into anything quite like that,” I said. “There are plenty of things out there in the dark that animals don't like, but for them all to go silent for a week or more? That's scary. It tells me that either something very significant happened, that impressed itself on them in a way that usually isn't possible with animals, or that there's something here that they're so scared of they don't want to make any noise in case they attract its attention.”
Almost just as I said that, a storm of barking suddenly erupted from the direction of the town. Every eye was drawn that way. “Well, now,” Sheriff Baker said. “That's interesting.”
“That's the first time they've done that since that night,” Chrystal said insistently, finally looking up at us pleadingly. “I'm telling the truth! They haven't made a sound until just now.”
“It's all right, Miss Meek, I believe you,” Baker said. “Believe me, I've seen enough crazy stuff in the last half hour that I'm not going to dismiss anything out of hand. I just find it a little intriguing that the mob stops chasing you folks, then the creepy feeling back under the trees goes away, and then the dogs start barking again.” He looked at me. “You got any new ideas, mister?”
“Offhand, I'd say that whatever was back there in the woods has left,” I ventured. “As for why?” I shook my head. “I've got nothing.”
“Can you track it?” Tall Bear asked.
“If I knew what it was, maybe,” I replied. “But we have no idea. Whatever it is, it's probably old, powerful, and is obviously extremely dangerous. And I'm just going by what we've seen.” I looked over at the scattered corpses in the trees. I took a deep breath and turned back to Chrystal. “Did Blake say anything about his work? Anything that might give us a clue as to what he was looking into, or where he was going? If we know what he was after, we might get an idea of what this thing might be, if it's connected.”
She shook her head. “Like I said, he didn't want to tell me much. All he told me was that he was going to Bowesmont next.”
I looked over at Tall Bear and Baker. Tall Bear spoke first. “Next county over,” he said. “It's a small farm town, and a loading point for the railroad. A bit more...respectable than Coldwell.”
Eryn didn't say anything, letting me take the lead. We may have been a partnership, but I was a lot more experienced at this sort of thing than she was. I looked Baker in the eye. “I guess it's decision time, Sheriff,” I said. “Do you need to keep us here, or can we go to Bowesmont to try to find my friend, and see if we can get to the bottom of this?”
He squinted at me, chewing his bottom lip. His eyes strayed back to the bodies in the woods. His deputies were helping the paramedics bag and carry the corpses, now that any remaining wounded were taken care of. It was one hell of a crime scene, and if he hadn't witnessed what he had, we probably would have been going straight to jail until he could sort it out.
But he'd seen the mob, seen the strange way they had simply stopped, and had been back there in the smoke and the murk with us. He knew something was very, very wrong, and the wheels were turning behind his narrowed eyes. Did he risk letting us go, in the hopes that his hunch was right? Or did he need to lock everything down u
ntil he found some answers?
Frankly, I wasn't sure at the time what the right answer was. I was a little leery of going straight to Bowesmont, myself. Running wasn't Blake's style, but whatever was happening in Coldwell, it obviously hadn't stopped when he'd left. But the truth was that without some kind of groundwork, it got really, really hard to nail these things down. An Otherworldly creature that doesn't want to be found can very well make it almost impossible. And it was looking like this thing didn't want to be found. I wasn't sure if it had seen my crucifix—it had come out of my shirt during the run through the woods—or if something else had made it decide not to play anymore, but if it had fled, learning something about what it was might be the only way to go after it, or at least make sure it didn't cause this kind of chaos again.
It was Tall Bear who broke the silence. “If the guy who might know what's going on is in Bowesmont, I think we should go find him,” he said. “If something even a fraction as screwy as what happened here is going on in that town, it's going to be a lot bigger deal. If nothing else, we should probably link up with the county sheriff over there, let him know something bad is going down. If it's already started, they may well need help.”
Baker scratched his chin. “Sheriff Wexler and I don't exactly get along. I doubt he'd welcome one of ours.”
“Then I'll go low-profile,” Tall Bear said.
“Don't take this the wrong way, Frank,” Baker said, a faint smile curling one corner of his mouth, “but a six-foot-three Nez Perce isn't exactly going to be 'low profile' in Bowesmont.”
Tall Bear just raised an eyebrow at him. “Nobody from out of town is going to be 'low profile' in that case, but I meant going in in plainclothes. We haven't had a lot of contact with that department, so I doubt I'd necessarily be recognized as anything but an outsider.”
Baker didn't say anything more at first. He was obviously thinking it over. It can't have been an easy decision, but I think Tall Bear's confidence helped him along. “Fine.” He looked at me. “You and your wife can go. Deputy Tall Bear is going with you. If you have to take Miss Meek along, you've got my permission, as long as there isn't anything else she can think of that we need to know here.” He looked questioningly at Chrystal, who just shook her head. “Well, if you think of anything else, call me. Frank will have my number.”
Tall Bear looked over at me. “I've just got to swing by my place real quick, to change and grab a couple of things, then we can get on the road.”
Eryn hesitated though. I'd gotten to know the look on her face, and after the first few times, I'd learned not to dismiss it. “What is it?” I asked.
“I'm not sure,” she said slowly. “Something's just...nagging at me.” She looked around. “I know you're worried about Blake, but...I just don't think we should run off just yet. I'm afraid we might miss something, something vital. We've barely had time to look around here, and most of that time we've been running for our lives.” She looked straight at me. “Whatever was here, it managed to make an entire town come howling for our blood. What if we're so eager to run off to Bowesmont because that's exactly what it wants? What if that's why Blake left in the first place? Can we be sure, just based on the last eight hours, that the problem isn't here after all? What if it's trying to direct anyone who resists it to Bowesmont so it can have a free hand here in Coldwell? Our lead could be misdirection.”
That gave everybody pause. She was right—she usually was. “I just have a bad feeling that there's still something really wrong here,” she said. “We can't be sure it's gone until we've looked.”
Tall Bear, Baker, and I looked at each other. The fact that none of us had thought of the possibility that the same thing that had mind-controlled several hundred people in order to turn them into a mob of killers might be affecting us in a more subtle manner was, frankly, as chilling as anything else that had happened so far. We just hadn't had time to think about it. Maybe we'd been too busy; maybe my wife is just more sensitive to such things than I am. Well, she is, no doubt about it. The point remained.
“Well, do you want to go to your place and then catch up with us in town?” I asked Tall Bear.
He shook his head. “I don't live in Coldwell,” he said, in a tone of voice that added, Do you really think I'm that stupid? “I live about fifteen minutes up the road, in Barnes' Creek. We'll have to stop on the way to Bowesmont, unless we find something here and end up staying. Let's go.”
We went back to the truck first. The firefighters had managed to put out the car fires, though there was still plenty of smoke and steam turning the woods into a murky, throat-constricting hell. But the feeling of malicious attention was still missing. Whatever had been there was gone. At least for the moment.
Tall Bear, Eryn, and I went back toward where I thought I'd seen something, where I'd been heading before things had gotten weird enough that we'd left. Baker and Craig stayed back at the truck with Chrystal. I'm afraid the poor girl was out of her element and obviously dearly wished she was somewhere, anywhere else. I don't think she'd looked up more than twice since we'd headed back in.
We couldn't find anything. No marks, no prints, no strange patterns of discoloration. There was no trace that there had ever been anything there. I was increasingly sure that I'd seen something, but whatever it was, it had vanished. I looked around the campground in frustration. “Where else do we look?” I wondered.
“Chrystal mentioned the hill above town,” Eryn pointed out. “If this thing was anywhere, it had to have been up there. Otherwise, why should she have been afraid to look up in that direction?” She looked back toward the truck, where Chrystal was sitting against the tire, staring at the ground.
“Should we ask her to show us?” I suggested.
Eryn shook her head. “I think she can just give us directions at the moment. She's been through a lot; I don't want to drag her up there if she's still terrified by what happened. Today's been rough enough, and if she is coming with us, things are only going to get rougher. Let's ease her into it as best we can.”
I eyed the girl, who seemed to be withdrawing into her own little world. “I think you'd probably better be the one to ask her,” I ventured. “She'd probably take it better from you than from me or Deputy Tall Bear here.”
Eryn crossed the distance and crouched down next to Chrystal, speaking to her softly. Tall Bear and I stayed where we were, giving the girls some space while still trying to see if we could pick anything out. There was one spot that looked like some of the vegetation had inexplicably wilted, but that was it. No strange smells, marks, or any other traces.
Chrystal was shaking her head, but Eryn kept talking, quietly and gently. Then, after a long pause, the other woman nodded slowly. She'd show us the spot.
It was less a hill than a bluff, the grassy slope cut off by a sheer cliff just above the town. And right there, on the edge of the cliff, we'd found our sign.
An irregular oval of grass was completely dead. Not brown with lack of water like all the other grass around it, but brittle, black, and rotten, like it had been turned halfway to mulch already. Whatever had stood here and looked down at the town, it was big, bad medicine.
I looked down at the run-down, ramshackle meth town. The wind was plucking at our jackets up on the bluff, but the chill I was feeling didn't have much to do with the breeze.
“That doesn't look good,” Tall Bear said, looking down at the dead spot.
“No, it doesn't,” I replied. “Unfortunately, it also doesn't tell us much.”
“There isn't some kind of manual that tells you what kind of creature kills all vegetation wherever it stands?” he asked.
“Not really, no,” I said. “I can name a half a dozen creepy-crawlies that can have that effect, but I don't know of any of them that can exert the kind of mental compulsion we saw down there. As far as I know, the list of things that can do that is pretty short.” I looked around again. “But if this is the only sign it left, we're going to have a hard time tracking
it.”
“You still think it's gone?” he asked.
“Pretty sure,” I replied. “But we'll still have to do some thorough searching to make sure it's not just lurking somewhere nearby, hoping we'll leave.” I doubted that was the case; I'd never run into even the weakest of monsters or spooks that just hid or ran at the sight of one or two Witch Hunters. Usually, these things only left when they were made to leave, and it wasn't ever an easy thing. The only other option I could imagine was that it had been in Coldwell for a specific purpose, and had deemed that purpose fulfilled. Either way, it wasn't good. I didn't know what was going on here, but it was far from normal, and I didn't like it.
It took the rest of the day, and almost two whole circuits around Coldwell, somewhat interfered with by the cordon that Sheriff Baker had thrown around the town, before I looked at Eryn and said, “Whatever it was, I'm pretty sure it's not here anymore.” I stared down the single main street, frowning. There was still something deeply unsettling about the town, and our search hadn't made it much better. There's something about a run-down, crumbling meth town that seems to lend itself to the feeling of being watched by hidden, unfriendly eyes, even in those that hadn't turned into a supernaturally-instigated bloodbath. Of course, after what had happened, there were going to be all sorts of supernatural scavengers descending on the place soon. That kind of violence leaves marks. “I don't get it,” I admitted. “I've never seen something that mean just vanish. Sure, things from the Otherworld can be capricious, but this is just weird.”
“It's almost as if...” Eryn began. “No...maybe not.”
“What?”
She took a long moment before answering, similarly studying the town and its ramshackle buildings with their peeling paint and not a few broken windows. When she spoke again, she spoke slowly, almost hesitantly. “It's almost as if there was a specific goal in mind. As if whatever it was had a definite reason for turning the town murderous, and, for some reason we can't figure out, decided that the mob had served its purpose. Like it had been here for a certain task, and decided that the task was done, so it left.”
