The Hunter Inside

by David McGowan

Her legs continued mechanically. One foot placed itself in front of the other and on she went, almost carried away several times by the wind as she waited for a message from Shimasou. By now she fully expected that it would contact her through her mind. It was just a matter of when.

  The small community seemed like a maze that was filling up quickly with water, and she had to escape from that maze. She had to find the building. But she also had to stop. She had to get her breath back and gain a short respite from the punishing storm, and, despite feeling guilty and being desperate to carry on, she was forced to halt under a bus shelter.

  The stone frame held the wind at bay and she leant on the cold, damp wall, sucking in air and shivering all over. She was already completely soaked, and she couldn’t have gone more than half a dozen blocks from the motel. She wiped her hands across her face and closed her eyes. The roar around her faded instantly, and was replaced by a feeling of tiredness that crowded her mind. How could tiredness be crowding in on her now, when her pulse was racing and she was caught in a storm, looking for a monster that had killed her parents and taken her boys? She didn’t know. But it was there all the same, and she could lie down and fall asleep within two minutes if she would allow herself to do so. She remained with her eyes closed as sleep toyed with her mind, a comforting sensation that spun gently through her, upwards in gentle ripples from her stomach. Then the storm was behind her and above her. She was inside the building again. It was showing her what was happening at this very moment, and it was so real that she could be forgiven for thinking that her journey was over and she had reached the place where her future would be decided.

  She looked at the walls around her. Water dripped down the red brick and huge holes were present at intervals as her eyes followed a stream of water back up the wall from where it came. The roof was half missing, and the building was being further ravaged by the storm that raged around and above it; reaching inside with its rain and wind and further weakening the already desperately weak structure. This was a dangerous place to be. But her boys were there. And she wasn’t.

  Sandy looked to the left and saw what remained of the staircase inside the building. Huge sections had fallen as termites had ravaged the wood, and she saw that it only began about ten feet from the floor. The weight of a person, she feared, might be enough to bring it down. Her gaze followed up the staircase, and she saw that it stretched up four floors. Other parts were missing, probably due to the floors in between being taken away, and she knew that if she were to try to climb up the failing structure, she would be putting her life at risk before she met Shimasou for real.

  All was quiet inside the building and Sandy closed her eyes. When she had done so earlier, she had seen her parents. She had also seen Arnold, and she had seen herself standing, alone and afraid, inside this building. Now she knew the significance of that vision, and she waited for the next one to come to her.

  It came instantly. They were there, and they were alive. Three floors up on a ledge that kept them just out of Sandy’s view as she looked upwards from ground level, their small frames hugged each other for warmth and comfort, and she was struck by how small they looked next to the beast that sat and watched them. Their whole life she had looked at them and been amazed by the speed of their growth. Now it was the speed of the growth of Shimasou that struck her. Even sitting down it was still huge – the same size as Arnold standing up.

  It must be twelve feet tall, she thought incredulously. The children were completely dwarfed by it, and she imagined the fear they must be feeling as they tried not to look at the still not fully formed face of Shimasou.

  She opened her eyes. The Atlantic Beach Herald, she thought, and she knew where it was. With the name came the knowledge of the place and its surroundings, and she knew exactly where she needed to go. She knew that the knowledge was not her own. It was that of Shimasou. But she ran towards it anyway, because she did not know how much time she had left, and she did not know whether her boys would live.

  38

  ‘But I told you not to let her move.’ O’Neill shook his head as he spoke, not sure whether he was cursing Mayhew and Arnold who stood in front of him, Joe Myers who stood behind him, Sandy, himself, or their collective luck. He certainly felt that they themselves were cursed, and he couldn’t understand why Sandy Myers would want to go it alone against this thing. He couldn’t understand how the others had let her go.

  ‘We didn’t let her move.’ Mayhew said. ‘She moved herself. We went outside because of the signal on the phone. When we came back in, she’d gone.’

  ‘Hang on, though.’ Bill Arnold had a thoughtful tone in his voice as he continued. ‘The more I think about it, the more I don’t think she could have overheard our conversation from inside this room.’

  All three men turned their attention towards Arnold’s thoughts. ‘Explain,’ O’Neill said, willing to hear any theories or explanations that might be forthcoming from Arnold.

  ‘It must have shown her something. It must have shown her that is has the kids, and that’s why she went to them.’

  ‘My kids,’ Joe Myers groaned. ‘Those kids mean everything to us. You gotta help me.’

  O’Neill thought he was probably still in shock. He had been unable to drive back to the motel, and O’Neill had had to get behind the wheel of his car. These were the first words he had spoken since they began their journey back, and it was Mayhew who placed a comforting arm on his shoulder and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to help you.’ He was defiant, despite seeing a quality in the fear and distress of Joe Myers that was similar to the one he had seen in Paul Wayans on the night of his death. He was defiant because he saw that same distanced and desperate expression. An expression that meant he had been touched by Shimasou. But they had all been touched, and if the Myers family was not saved from Shimasou, then Mayhew feared that everyone might be touched, destroyed even, by its growing strength.

  ‘Come on then, let’s go,’ Myers said, now fully back in the land of the living and het up by the immediate seriousness of the situation in which he found himself.

  ‘Did you call Hoskins?’ Mayhew asked.

  O’Neill winced. He had forgotten to call. But he had been distracted by the arrival of Joe Myers and the unexpected turn of events. Hadn’t he? No. He knew that it shouldn’t have been unexpected, and he knew that he should have remembered to call. They couldn’t beat it if they didn’t know the information.

  Jeez, he thought. It’s as if something’s playing with my mind. He definitely wasn’t his usual self. In fact, he wondered just if he was losing his touch. Maybe Hoskins will get his promotion sooner than he thinks, he thought.

  ‘We’ve got to make another phone call,’ Mayhew said, more to Joe Myers than to Bill Arnold, who quietly contemplated his position.

  The feeling of guilt that Arnold harbored left a bitter taste in his mouth. It felt almost as if Sandy was reaching out to him from somewhere, calling for his help, but his fear had turned him to ice. Would anybody else in his position want to face Shimasou? He didn’t think so. But he knew that if he backed away from fighting it, everybody else probably would have to face it. Mayhew, it seemed, was ready to fight. O’Neill, while being puzzled by the events, did not appear to be frightened of Shimasou. He had a duty to do, and to Arnold it looked as though he were trying hard to do that duty. He just wasn’t having much luck.

  ‘Phone call?’ Myers asked. His feet jiggled up and down excitedly on the threshold to the room as he waited to get moving. He looked to Mayhew like a six year old who really needed to pee, but Mayhew did not smile. He understood his anxiousness, but the call had to be made.

  ‘Phone call,’ he said. ‘We can’t just go after this thing, Joe. If we shoot it, it probably won’t have much effect. It’s a spirit that we need to invoke to beat it, and we need to know the order in which it took its victims before we can evoke that spirit.’ Joe Myers’ face resumed its earlier perplexed look as he absorbed Mayhew’s words. His brow wri
nkled as he thought about what Mayhew said. The old man turned away from him to face O’Neill. ‘The battery on the phone died when you rang before.’

  ‘Have you left it switched off since then?’ O’Neill asked.

  ‘Yes. But why?’

  ‘Sometimes I can get some life out of it. The battery’s fucked in that thing. It doesn’t know whether it’s full or empty.’

  Mayhew handed the cell phone to O’Neill. He looked at its blank screen for a moment, before pressing the power button and holding it down, hoping desperately that he would get some power and not just a beep followed instantly by the same blank screen as before. The beep came and the phone stayed on. The battery on the display began to flash immediately, but if he was quick he should be able to call Hoskins.

  O’Neill accessed the address book of the cell phone and scanned through, finding the name of Hoskins and pushing the send button. As it began to ring at the other end of the line, he walked towards the door of the motel room. Joe Myers flopped down onto the bed, head in hands.

  O’Neill turned the door handle with his left hand, keeping the phone at his ear with the right. He took half a step out of the door before retracting his foot and sticking his head out over the threshold. The phone at the other end of the line rang six times before Hoskins picked it up and said in a weary voice, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hoskins, it’s me,’ O’Neill said, expecting a thunderous response to hit him like a fifty foot wave hitting a surfer and flipping him over and out of sight, obliterating him. He wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘O’Neill, where are you? What’s going on?’ Hoskins normally called him ‘chief’, or ‘boss’. The fact that he had called him by his surname meant only one thing to O’Neill: mud was flying around the office and, although he was not there, managing to stick firmly to his character. It was a wave of plain impertinence from Hoskins that hit O’Neill. He wouldn’t normally let it go, but he didn’t have the time to play games right now. Neither did Hoskins, whether he knew it or not.

  ‘Hoskins, I don’t have the time right now to…’ Hoskins cut him off mid-sentence.

  ‘But Lineker’s balls are bursting here. He’s got officers out looking for you, and…’ This time it was O’Neill who cut Hoskins off mid-sentence.

  ‘I need you to do me a favor. I need you to find out some dates for me. But you gotta be quick because the battery on my cell is almost flat. Okay?’ He didn’t want him to know about the situation he was in. If he did, there would be a hundred agents flooding in from every angle. That wouldn’t be good. There wasn’t enough time to organize such a response, and brute force would not have much effect on Shimasou. Between them he thought they could beat Shimasou. All they needed was the dates of the murders and then they’d be meeting not one, but two ancient spirits. It was something he didn’t expect Hoskins to be too impressed by. So it was the battery he blamed, while the others listened to him and watched the back of his head.

  ‘Okay, I’ll get you your dates. But I don’t want you to forget this, Sam. I’m putting my balls on the line too.’ It was a comment that surprised O’Neill; he didn’t expect support from Hoskins, just compliance with his orders. And here he was, trying to make friends with O’Neill. Things were getting weirder by the minute.

  ‘The dates are murder dates,’ he said. ‘Check a June Riley for me.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hoskins said, and O’Neill listened to his clumsy, one-finger typing as he inputted June Riley’s name into the database. ‘Just waiting for the match now, Boss.’

  Ah, that was better. Boss was much better. O’Neill turned to face Mayhew. He jammed his hand into his still soaking pocket and withdrew the small, blue biro he had used to write Hoskins’ number down before walking through the ocean of rain to find a phone booth to call, infuriatingly, Hoskins. Now, here he stood, in the motel room, calling Hoskins.

  Mayhew understood his intent and grabbed a Sleep-Easy welcoming brochure from on top of the dresser. The back page was almost fully blank, just the motel’s contact details covering the bottom half of the page, and Mayhew scribbled the pen in the top-left hand corner of the paper to make sure it was working okay. Then he wrote the name of June Riley in block capital letters.

  ‘May 25th 1991,’ Hoskins said from Brooklyn.

  ‘May 25th 1991,’ O’Neill repeated. Mayhew wrote the date down hurriedly and O’Neill looked at Bill Arnold.

  Arnold nodded. ‘June 15th 1991.’

  Special Agent O’Neill looked at the pale, expressionless face of the man who may have lost his whole family to Shimasou. He didn’t have the information he wanted, and it was just out of the reach of O’Neill’s memory, but he hadn’t forgotten the names of the Carsons.

  ‘Next is Fred and Betty Carson. They died on the same day, but I want to know who died first.’ The phone couldn’t have much energy left now. It wouldn’t matter if he could find out in what order they died. He knew that Riley had come before Wayans, and he pretty much knew in what order Shimasou had taken the others. He just needed to know which Carson was first. Then the cell phone could die and go to hell for all he cared.

  ‘Okay,’ Hoskins said. ‘They died on May 18th 1991. Betty died first. It was estimated by the coroner that there was somewhere between…’ Hoskins’ voice was abruptly gone. He never got to finish his sentence, but O’Neill wasn’t too bothered about this. Not until he looked up and saw the face of Todd Mayhew, that was.

  ‘What’s up?’ He asked.

  ‘Paul Wayans’ grandmother. You didn’t find out her name.’

  ‘Shit, you’re right. I’ll have to call back.’ O’Neill thrust both hands into his pockets. The number, he thought. What did I do with the number? Nothing except the paper with Melissa Dahlia’s address on. O’Neill slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand.

  ‘What’s up?’ Bill Arnold asked.

  ‘I left the paper in the phone booth when I saw Joe.’

  ‘Aww…shit,’ Mayhew moaned, allowing his shoulders to slouch as if he had been punched in the stomach while off his guard. He didn’t know what was wrong with O’Neill, but he didn’t seem to be doing much right. His attempts at concealing his glare from the Special Agent were unsuccessful, and O’Neill tried to defend himself.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault. Well, it was, but it could have happened to anyone. If it’d been you that saw Joe running around frantic, you might have done the same.’ He cast a guilt-ridden glance across at Joe Myers. It was the fact that he didn’t have any change that had annoyed and distracted him, making him leave the booth without picking up the slightly torn piece of paper. Joe Myers now wore the expression of a haunted man, his pale face nearly as white as the teenage goths O’Neill seemed to see everywhere nowadays.

  Though not in Atlantic Beach.

  The minutes were ticking by, and now they would have to go back to the phone booth, hoping that the raging wind had not eaten up the paper in its fury. While Joe Myers’ whole family sat in the grip of Shimasou, they might have blown their one chance of beating it.

  He, O’Neill, might have blown it.

  He figured they had little prospect of guessing the name of Paul Wayans’ grandmother. He lifted his chin in the direction of the other three men, his jaw jutting out and spoke defiantly, ‘We’ll just have to go back and find it.’

  39

  Water ran over Sandy Myers’ skin like ants swarming across the bark of a redwood. It busied itself in little streams that raced down her neck and across her back, meeting in what seemed to Sandy like a million places, and forming a shivery blanket that she found herself wrapped up in. The clothes she wore were no defense against the hammer of the storm. She was like a contestant in a wet t-shirt competition, her breasts outlined by the sodden blue cotton. The denim jeans that she wore held the rain, doubling their weight and tightening against her skin.

  The rain had not let up during her fifteen-minute journey. In fact, it seemed to have gotten stronger, heavier, surrounding her and trying to drive her into the ground. S
he had trouble seeing further than ten feet in front of her, and the continual streaks of lightning and cracks of thunder seemed to be inside, not outside, her head. She had struggled onward, her journey a laborious, energy sapping slog, semi-relieved at not needing to see too far ahead of herself; she knew where it was that she was going.

  Now she was here. The Atlantic Beach Herald headquarters.

  Sandy stood outside the four-story building, looking up at the darkened, empty windows on its front. I see holes like eyes, she thought to herself, remembering a line from a Stephen King novel she had once read. What was it called? Desperation, that was it. It was certainly a fitting title for her current situation.

  The windows were large and dark. The glass had been destroyed long ago, leaving them gaping at Sandy as she stood looking up at them, a sense of foreboding warning her not to enter the old redbrick building. She calculated quickly that there were nineteen of these windows on the front of the building, sixteen on either side of the tower that stood out slightly from the rest of the building, and three on the actual tower itself that stretched up fifteen feet above the roof, looming over Sandy in a way that made her think about the creature inside, looming over her terrified children. Casting a shadow over her in the same way as Shimasou was casting a shadow over her children.

  She closed her eyes. Inside, water ran down the walls of the building and the half-collapsed roof lurched precariously in the howling wind. Through the hole in the roof the rain poured in, peeling off what little paint was left on the walls. Shimasou stood, revealing to Sandy its amazing height. The old wooden floorboards creaked under its weight as it moved toward the children, and Sandy feared that the floor would give out, sending them to certain death below. The floorboards too must be riddled with termites taking a tasty meal, unaware of the drama that was soon to be played out all around them. Sean and David gripped each other tighter, trying to melt into one another and disappear to a place that was far away from Atlantic Beach.