by Chris Capps
"Chance Cooper..."
Every eye in the room, summoned by an unspoken tension, came to rest on another sheet resting on one of the drawers pulled out from the refrigerator. The form beneath it was far more substantial. It looked as though the shape itself had barely been touched by the fire. At least not the top half. Finally, the pastor spoke up, breaking the tense and inexplicable silence. He pointed his finger at the prone corpse shrouded beneath the ivory sheet,
"That one's Chance Cooper."
"How do you know?" Jessica asked, walking toward the shrouded figure. Felix and the pastor were still looking at one another, dumbfounded. Finally, it was Felix who shrugged and said,
"Because it is him. He wasn't burned that badly."
Jessica lifted the sheet from the corpse and looked. It was definitely him. He had been burned, but the burns snaked up from his back, leaving his core and front largely untouched. Even to her untrained eye, the bruises and scrapes to his elbows and knees suggested that he may have fallen forward during the collision, sparing his front largely from the flames. Aside from a large cut running diagonally on top of his scalp, he was surprisingly untouched. In particular, aside from simple bruising, his face was easily identified. She looked down to his left knee to see a large decade-old surgical scar.
Chapter 5
Molly Nayfack hadn’t aged a day in ten years. She stood there, leaning with her back against one of the long gnarled trees staring at the two men, Mayor Clayton Sugarhill and Sheriff Paul Rind. She took off the thick glasses resting on her nose, breathed on the lenses, and rubbed them clean on the blue polyester of her shirt. It was unmistakable. She was alive.
Clayton once again retrieved the pill box from his jacket and let his gun lay slack against his knee. Paul raised his 12-gauge, positioning it neatly against his shoulder and staring down the barrel at this girl risen from the dead. Curiously, he stepped back to allow himself a glance down into the grave. The skeleton was still there, jaw unhinged, staring up with nothing in those voided eyes but an accusation.
“I always wondered,” Molly said, “But why did you do it? What did I ever do to you?”
“You should know. You were there. It was an accident,” Rind said, struggling to control his breathing as the gun barrel threatened to drift away from her in his shaking hands, “A mistake. I never meant to hurt you.”
At this range, and with the buckshot he had loaded into the shotgun, he was unlikely to miss her completely if he pulled the trigger. With one squeeze, the sleeping full ounce of lead balls would be awakened, tearing through the front of his weapon through anything in a wide cone. He could have another cartridge housed and set it off in a matter of seconds. Rind was a crack shot with a variety of personal firearms, having put decades of practice in at the shooting range. He might still miss. Anything was possible, but that didn't make it likely.
But then, what would happen if he did shoot her? Would the bullets pass through the air, bouncing harmlessly off this girl? Would she suddenly become insubstantial, closing in on them with a phantasmal grip that touched only their souls? Anything was possible now, it seemed. Ten years of being dead had neither caused her to rot nor age.
Except there was that skeleton in the box.
“An accident?” Molly said walking in a wide arc around them. She let her hands gently slap against the roots of the short ad-hoc fence surrounding them, “That’s a good start. So you weren’t meaning to hurt anybody.”
“Not at all,” Mayor Sugarhill said picking up his own rifle with an off-put smile, “You clearly know what happened that night. You were prowling around. I’m glad to see you’re alright, though.”
“I was prowling around,” Molly said in her quiet voice, “Looking in people’s windows. Someone might have mistaken me for a burglar or something worse.”
“Yes,” Rind said with a desperate, forced emphasis, “I’m sure you know as well as anyone how suspicious something like that is. And the look on your face, the screaming.”
In the middle distance, just beyond the long flashlight shadows, a chorus of howls broke steadily across the fog. It was quiet at first, quiet enough to ignore or allow their minds to disbelieve with enough willpower. And then the howl rose, slowly in pitch and volume, until it was the only thing in their ears.
The two didn’t move, at least not enough for Molly Nayfack to see. The movement was in their hearts, a trembling that threatened to creep into their voices if they dared speak, or even breathe. And then the howls left a vacuous silence in their wake. It was a black silence at the edge of their flashlight beam, dark as the hole in a skeleton's eyes. Sheriff Rind glanced uneasily at the mayor, saying,
“Make no mistake. Those are people out there.”
“People,” Mayor Sugarhill said, raising his voice to speak over the sound of blood rushing through his ears, “How many?” The Sheriff just shook his head. He couldn’t tell. Instead, he addressed Molly,
“Who is that out there?”
“More prowlers,” she said. If there was any irony to her statement, she wasn’t going to let it seep into her voice. More prowlers. More to shoot, more to bury, maybe prowlers with a sense of kinship to their slain friend - ready for revenge after ten years under the yoke of sweltering hate. And whatever phantasm had sprung from the darkness to bring Molly Nayfack, or this apparition of Molly, back to life, it had already chosen a side.
“Molly,” Mayor Sugarhill said, forcing every muscle in his body to take a step forward toward her, “Come back to town with us. If you’ve been out here all this time, you’re probably curious what’s been happening these past few years. Please, I don’t quite understand what’s going on here, but let’s go back together and put this business behind us.”
“That’s a politician talking if ever I heard one,” Molly said, her eyes lighting up with an unapologetically arcane mirth, “I may not have been to town personally for some time, but I know what’s going on there. You’re all dying.”
“We’re leaving, Molly,” the Sheriff said, “We don’t have to explain ourselves to you. If you don’t want to get shot again just stay out of our way.” Sheriff Rind pushed his way over the grave, his shoulder hitting Mayor Sugarhill square in the chest as he hissed, “Keep moving. I don’t know what this is, but keep moving.”
“Stop!” Molly cried out, but the echo of her voice soon mingled with a second round of howls erupting from the woods. The howls were closer now, and very loud. They were coming from the other side of the hill - the hill that the sheriff and the mayor were about to cross. As their footfalls died, and their breathing became short, the two men came to the same realization at once. They were cut off from town. Mayor Sugarhill suddenly had an image in his mind. It was a deep and unspeakable terror that awaited them on the other side of that hill. Ancient, obscene, it seemed to poke through the very fabric of the night into his memories. That sound knew him.
Sheriff Rind too stopped dead in his tracks as the hill itself seemed to come alive with hands pushing out from the dirt and the leaves. They were people, much like people, but obscured by the darkness. And behind them, at the rear of their simple congregation there was something else. Not human - at least not in any way he could recognize.
It walked with long legs covered by the shed skins of the forest, bark and twigs and mud. Where its face should be there was a feathered statue, a long beak and jet black eyes. It was much like the birds of these woods, the way it twitched and stared into them. And yet it wasn’t a bird either. It had been built, a living creature crafted with time and careful hands, an idol made animate by some unknown lapse in reason. And in front of it, unidentified people. They stood with hands drawn over ivory faces, closing on them, blind and obscured. There could have been a dozen, or a hundred. It was difficult for mayor Sugarhill to tell.
He was running full tilt away from the scene. Sheriff Rind didn’t run fast enough. His screams reached through the darkness over the hill, and for only a second turned mayor Sugarhill's legs to what felt like ston
e. Choking on his own scream, he ducked behind a tree and looked over toward the flashlight, with the specter of his own voice mocking him in his head.
Your hands are empty. You're in the dark.
He saw Sheriff Rind standing at the edge of the grave. It was too dark to see the shapes - the light was ruining his night vision. All he could do was watch as dozens of hands reached out from beyond the flashlight beam, grasping toward him as a uniformed howl rose from the congregation. Only now it wasn’t the howl of people imitating wolves, it was the chorus of all that is flesh, screams dotting the spectral landscape of emotion competing to occupy the mayor's thoughts. And the Sheriff was screaming with them as they dragged him into the shadows.
Mayor Sugarhill closed his eyes, and breathed. He was pressing his whole body against the trunk of the enormous tree as he waited, listening to the parade gradually diminish. Rind was being carried into the distance, into that vast enigma that encompassed the whole planet beyond their town. The Sherriff didn’t stop screaming for several minutes as he was carried away. It just kept coming, refusing to die even when Sugarhill grimly wished it would. The last gust of sound before Rind’s voice disappeared altogether was cut short by the sound of fluttering wings.
A crow had landed back at the grave where the flashlight was. It flashed onyx eyes, twitching them around before finally glaring into the light ahead of it. It pecked at the glass lens of the flashlight twice before once again taking flight.
You're lost now. The words ran through Sugarhill's mind as he listened to himself breathe. How long will it take to get back to town without that light? And look at what else it's illuminating. Your rifle.
He had to go back. He would never survive without his flashlight and his gun. He would have to trust that they all left with that statue - that idol - into the distance with the Sheriff. After all, they would have reason to want Rind. He was the one that shot Molly Nayfack. What would they possibly have against a simple politician?
I helped with the town beautification initiative. I practically invented the fourth of July parade. Alcohol awareness... Youth reading plan. All me.
What use would those people have with him? What grudge could they possibly hold against him after all these years? In a brief moment of what he became sure was honesty, Sugarhill plunged the depths of his mind, waiting for an answer.
“Who are they?” was the only thought he could come back with. And he covered his own mouth when he realized he had said it aloud to the dead night. In the vast unexplored expanse of this world there was only one town that he knew of.
Decades of helicopter trips and ground expeditions had uncovered nothing - no signs of more communities. And even if there were, where would they have come from? There was only one tunnel leading back to DC, only one way through - and that had been shut down ten years prior. Little comfort in the sudden stillness of night. The mayor realized he still hadn’t walked to the grave of Molly Nayfack to retrieve his flashlight and his rifle. He watched them with avarice from that distance, fantasizing about how their weight would feel in his hands.
And then other thoughts entered his mind. He thought about reaching the grave and triumphantly picking up the objects only to turn around and have the congregation suddenly appear once again, grasping at him from the darkness to share whatever fate his old friend Sheriff Rind was no doubt enduring. He imagined that man-sized horror made of sticks and mud, with its feathered crow mask staring into his soul, charting his fate according to some ancient and unknown savage text.
He quietly walked until he got to the trees at the edge of the flashlight’s beam. Then he crawled, grinding the mud into the knees of his dress pants. He was close now, nearly close enough to feel the heat of the flashlight on his outstretched fingertips. And then he heard that voice again. It was close, nearly touching his ear. It was the voice of Molly Nayfack saying,
“Come with me.”
***
“Irresponsible. And illegal, by the way. I should have you locked up,” Jessica said, following Pastor Ritzer and Felix, “Breaking into a morgue isn’t something you want to explain to your parents. I know. I’ve met them, Felix.”
“I must protest. We have a right to know these things,” Ritzer said, sitting on a dusty bank of chairs, “And if our actions were unconventional, I assure you our intentions were pure.”
Jessica gingerly tapped at her own forehead, trying to come up with the right words to say in this situation. There were lots of people in town that didn't wake up every morning to make her life hell. They had given it up shortly before being buried.
She knew both Pastor Ritzer and the McCarthy boys. Felix was as much of a rebel as she had been when she was his age, maybe a little less. He wasn’t the type for this sort of trouble. The thing that had driven him here was simple curiosity - something Jessica had grown to hate more than domestic disturbances. The offense wasn’t necessarily that bad. It was the sort of thing she could overlook if she knew it wouldn’t interfere with her investigation or Felix’s future.
Pastor Ritzer was a well-meaning man without much to do these days. He had probably been conned into the whole thing.
She was about to pardon them both when Dr. Rosario came in. He was peeling gloves off of his hands, shuddering visibly. He turned to Jessica, his surprising grip pulling her by the elbow a step away from the two trespassers,
“We have a problem. The two sets of bodies are the same.”
“You mean,” Jessica said, a condescending but perplexed correction in her voice, “They both died the same way.”
“I mean they are the same people. Two sets. Identical twins.”
“Please,” Jessica said taking the old man by the shoulder and sitting him down on the nearest row of chairs bolted to the floor. She breathed steadily, “Explain what you mean.”
“Distal femoral pins inserted on the medial side to avoid the femoral artery, then removed and placed on the opposite side. Two of those. Two operations performed only once in the known history of medicine. Attached to those knees, bodies, attached to those bodies, faces and teeth. The dental features of both were examined, both were a match. Comparisons were made between the two in a number of ways. Shoulder width, cranial dimensions, that sort of thing. There are two bodies in that morgue who were at one time Chance Cooper. There are two bodies in there that were at one time his co-pilot Robert Howell. Same cirrhotic liver, exact same blotches on the inside. Same previously undetected pre-cancerous tumor in the stomach. Robert Howell and his duplicate were even in the process of suffering from the same heart attack.”
Jessica waved her hands in the air momentarily, as if to ward off some specter that had followed them into the waiting room. She knew she was going to sound dense for saying this, and she hated it,
“I don’t understand.”
“You do understand,” Dr. Rosario said gravely, “It’s just what I’m saying is impossible. That’s the part you’re having trouble with. It’s simple. As simple as it is unlikely. There are four bodies in that morgue right now. And if they suddenly got up and started walking around, we’d have two Chance Coopers, and two Robert Howells.”
Pastor Ritzer, who had been listening with open mouth, stood up, “How could something like this happen?”
“That’s an unknown,” Dr. Rosario said, shaking his head, still staring at Jessica, addressing her as if she had asked the question, “But I think we should assume the helicopter they arrived in came from the same place too. The helicopter itself might be a copy as well. That’s not much of an explanation, but I’m just a doctor. You’re the police officer.”
“I’m trying to imagine how something like this could happen,” Jessica said.
“Yes,” Rosario said quietly with a sympathetic stare a hundred yards into her eyes, “Me too, but I don’t dare speculate. Everything I can come up with is too far removed from my area of expertise to possibly say it aloud.”
They stood there in the waiting room, each faced by this new fact. Non
e knew how to internalize it. None knew how to make themselves believe it.
It was Dr. Rosario who turned to pastor Ritzer in that moment of silence and asked,
“What do you make of all this?”
The pastor didn’t have any answers, only more questions. Knowing better than to doubt the prodigious skill of the old doctor, he just shook his head and exhaled with a long sustained hiss.
“I don’t want to use an old detective movie cliché, but I can't think of another way to describe it. This is crazy,” Jessica said, “Nuts. And yeah, that’s my professional opinion.”
Something touched Felix, something from far beyond his field of perception. Perhaps if he had been dreaming he would have understood what it meant - if only for a moment. All sound in the room blew out like a candle. He was staring into a paper cup dispenser, understanding that there were others talking, but not quite hearing them. Was this conversation really happening? Could someone exist simultaneously in two different places?
His mind drifted to the collapsing tree in the woods. Though it was benign compared to the problem that now faced them, it spoke the same truth. Something was terribly wrong. It was that force, that unknowable thing in the woods that watched him. Maybe it watched everyone.
Was reality about to unravel and plunge them into a world of nightmares? Or was it just one thing that was different - while everything else remained precisely as it was before?
“Someone is out there,” Felix said quietly, letting the silence that followed calm him. He wasn’t alone in thinking it. He could tell from the expressions both Dr. Rosario and Pastor Ritzer gave him. It was a common question, a prospect they hadn’t shared but were independently intimate with. Each of the men in that room were hesitant about something. Jessica calmly disagreed,
“No, they aren’t. There never has been and there isn’t now.” She seemed certain of it as she continued, “Furthermore, you’re not here to figure out what happened at the airfield. Sheriff Rind appointed you as an informer, someone to listen and watch. And when you find something of interest, share it with us. You and your brother.”
