The Totem

by David Morrell

  Dunlap turned the reel and read more of the microfilm. Once again, except for how events were slanted, this was much the same as what he'd read in files back in his New York office. The roundup, the expulsion, and the slowly settling peace. Then there was a difference, local items on how much it cost the town to clean the garbage from the park, to put in new windows, and to scrape the slogans off the walls. There were letters praising how authorities had handled things, attempts to understand a strange and changing world, confusion and bewilderment. Only one dissent, no name, saying that the town had been too hasty, that "instead of beating on those kids we should have tried to understand them." Maybe so, but if there had been others who agreed with that, there was no published sign of it. The overwhelming sense was of a town that still had not recovered from its shock. Weird beaded costumes, long hair, beards and what all, they were one thing, although Dunlap guessed that local people with their cowboy clothes and gingham dresses had seemed just as strange to all those West-coast hippies as the hippies seemed to them. Dope and shiftlessness and filth, though, they were something else, something that the town could neither understand nor tolerate. A woman wrote in, angered by two infants she had seen, dirty-faced and crying, diapers unchanged, while the mother stretched out on the grass and looked away. Another woman wrote that all she'd seen some children eat was half-cooked rice and moldy cheese and milk which with the specks of straw inside had clearly not been pasteurized, and where on earth they'd got that kind of milk she didn't know, but what was going on? The dope had really done the trick, though. They had evidently smoked it clear out in the open, almost flaunting it, and Dunlap, going through the items in the paper, was surprised that no one was arrested. Sure, he understood that too, he guessed. To pick up one, you'd have to take them all. Otherwise you punished one and let the others get away. The jail was likely far too small, the trouble just not worth the cost of feeding them. Better just to clear out the lot of them. Which is what they did.

  Then Dunlap read some issues of the paper where there wasn't any mention of what happened. Things were getting back to normal. So the townsfolk were pretending. That was just about the time the newsmen and photographers decided that the story was played out and started leaving. They weren't present for what happened next, the murder, headlines straight across the page. At last.

  THIRTEEN

  The door creaked open. Dunlap swung. A man stepped into view, outlined by the hallway light that spilled in. He was tall and gangly, wearing suspenders, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his white hair haloed by the light behind him, the man in charge of microfilm whom Dunlap had talked to earlier. "I'm sorry, sir. We close at five." The words were hushed as if this truly were a morgue, the almost-empty room echoing.

  Dunlap stared at him and breathed. Then he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his temples. He looked at his watch. Ten to five. He'd started shortly after two, so taken up by what he read that he hadn't realized how quickly the time was going.

  Abruptly he felt tired.

  "What time do you open in the morning?"

  "Eight o'clock. We close at noon." The room echoed again.

  Dunlap lit a cigarette and nodded. "Thanks." He'd been afraid that the newspaper's office wouldn't be open on Saturday. He stood and put his jacket on, glancing at the notes he'd made, surprised that there were so many of them, unaware he'd made them. He put the microfilm back into its box, stacked it on the other boxes, snapped the light off on the reader, picked the boxes up, and walked across the room to hand them over. 'Thanks," he repeated, and with his camera, tape recorder, and his notes, he went out past the man and down the hall.

  On the street, Dunlap had to squint again. The sun was low, descending toward the mountains, but the glare was as bad as earlier. In contrast with the air-conditioned building he'd just left, the air out here was close and humid, and he started sweating almost immediately. There were people going past, walking home from work, lots more traffic on the street. He glanced at several women, young and tall with soft, loose-fitting dresses that nonetheless suggested hips and breasts, and shook his head. He turned and walked up toward the right. As much as he remembered, that was where the two big buildings with all the trees had been when he'd arrived on the bus at noon. He looked and saw the trees in the distance, and he kept walking. The trees seemed five blocks away at least, and he was wondering if the effort would be worth it. Mostly he was hot and tired, and his hands shook so bad that he knew he'd have to stop soon for a drink. But reading through that microfilm had perked his interest, and he didn't want to stay here any longer than he had to, so he'd take a chance, and if the office up there were still open, maybe he could save some time. Maybe, but the trees seemed just as far away, the more he walked, and several times he almost weakened, glancing at the bars.

  Then he stood across from all those trees, the big, stone, pillared courthouse, and the brick, three-story building that he guessed would be the police station. He crossed the street toward them, reaching the shadow of the trees and feeling cool beneath them as the siren started wailing and a cruiser shot out from the corner of the building, racing down a side street, emergency lights flashing, barely stopping at the main street as the big man in there swerved the cruiser sharply to the left and, tires squealing, rushed down through the center of the town.

  Dunlap watched him go. This was more like home. There were people all along the sidewalk stopped and watching. There were cars that pulled close to the sidewalk while the cruiser wailed quickly past. Then the cruiser was so far along that Dun-lap couldn't see it anymore. He heard the siren rising, falling, becoming fainter. Then he couldn't hear it, and after he noticed that the traffic and pedestrians were going on about their business, he started up the sidewalk toward the police station's entrance.

  There was rich, well-tended lawn on each side of the walkway. From the shadow of the trees, he guessed. The sun could not get in and scorch it. He was thinking of the brown grass on the rangeland, thinking of the cruiser, what in this small town would merit such commotion. Probably an accident, he thought. A bad one, rush hour and all that. He reached the stairs that led up to the entrance, brick just like the portico and walls, old and dark and weathered. He went in. There were stairs that led down to the basement, stairs that led up to a vestibule, wide and tall and spacious, treelike plants in pots along the walls, doors that led off on each side. The place gave off the not-unpleasant must that comes with many years. He saw a door wide open, saw the sign on top, police chief, nathan slaughter, and he entered.

  The room was bright: white walls, lights across the ceiling. To the left, he saw a heavy, gray-haired woman at a desk that supported a bulky, two-way radio. At first, she didn't notice him. All she did was sit there, staring at the radio. He moved, and then she turned to him.

  "Yes, sir, may I help?"

  Dunlap glanced across the empty room and doubted it. "I'm looking for the chief."

  "Sorry. He's not in." The woman stared at the radio again.

  "Well, my name's Dunlap. Mr. Parsons sent me over."

  "You're the reporter from New York?"

  He nodded.

  "Mr. Slaughter had a call about you, but he couldn't wait. Something came up, and he had to get there."

  Sure, the cop who raced out in that cruiser, Dunlap thought. As the woman stared at the radio yet again, he couldn't tell if she was being rude or was merely preoccupied. "I don't suppose you know when he'll be back."

  The woman shook her head. "Tomorrow morning."

  Swell, Dunlap thought. "Then maybe you can do something for me."

  "That depends."

  "I need to see some files."

  The woman shook her head again. "You'll have to ask the chief about that."

  Swell, Dunlap mentally repeated, and abruptly a call crackled from the radio.

  "Christ, he's dead, all right," a man blurted, his frenzied voice distorted by static. "Lord, he hasn't got a-"

  FOURTEEN

  Slaughter skidded to a
stop behind the other cruisers. He was getting out and putting on his hat even as he reached to turn the motor off. His siren faded. Over to his right, he saw them standing in a circle in the middle of the field, staring down toward what appeared to be a hollow: several members of his force, a few civilians, and the medical examiner. They looked at him as he hurried around the cruiser. Then they turned and went on staring. He was stepping onto the curb, rushing through the stiff brown grass, looking at the stockbarns over to his left, smelling cattle droppings, mounds and mounds of them, the one thing out here that he still wasn't used to, cattle milling in the pens, brought in to be force fed and then shipped. He was almost running as he came up to them and looked down in the hollow. No one spoke.

  "Jesus," he said and turned away and then looked back again. "You're sure that this is him?"

  Someone nodded to his right, the husky blond policeman who was Rettig.

  Rettig handed him a wallet. Slaughter opened it and read the driver's license. Clifford, Robert B. It was him all right, unless somebody had made a substitution. All those times his wife had called and said that he was missing, afraid that something had happened to him, when in fact he'd just gone out to have some drinks and get away from her. And this time, damn it anyhow, her fear was justified.

  What made Slaughter think about a substitution, what made him read the license, was the body splayed out stiffly in the hollow. The body had no face. Its eyes and lips and nose and cheeks and chin and forehead, everything was ripped and mangled, as if somebody had shoved the face into a wood shredder. There were bits of chin and cheekbone showing, sockets where the eyes had been, but mostly what was shocking were the teeth, bared, no flesh around them, white against the dark, dirty, scab-covered flesh. The ears were gone as well. No, not gone exactly. They were mixed in, bits and pieces, with the other mangled flesh, tufts of hair stuck where his eyes had been, the illusion that the hair had grown in the sockets. Slaughter was almost sick and had to turn away.

  He took a breath. "Okay, what have you got so far?"

  Rettig stepped a little closer. "Well, he was drinking last night at that bar down on the corner."

  Slaughter squinted down the street. The Railhead. Where the stockyard workers went for lunch and after five. He nodded.

  "He was drinking quite a bit. He stayed till closing, bitched a lot because they wouldn't serve him. Then he left."

  "Was he alone?"

  "That's what the bartender says."

  "No one saw him after that?"

  "Nobody I can find."

  Slaughter glanced once more at the wallet in his hand, searching through it. "Two fives and a one. We know he wasn't robbed, at least." He brooded and turned to the medical examiner. "So tell me what your guess is."

  "I won't know until I get him on the table."

  "Hell, it's obvious," a man nearby them said.

  Slaughter turned. He saw a young policeman. Red-haired, bothered by what he was staring at. His name was Hammel. Slaughter had hired him several months before, and now he guessed he'd have to start to teach him. "No, it isn't obvious. There are just three ways this could have happened. One: he was already dead when something came and ripped at him. Two: he fell unconscious, and it happened. Three: he got attacked while he was walking. Now if he'd been dead already, then we have to know what killed him. Someone might have slit his throat, and then an animal came by and smelled the blood." Slaughter kept staring at the young policeman who was red-faced, blinking, looking one way, then the other. Slaughter knew that he had shamed him, that he shouldn't press it anymore, but he was powerless to stop. "In case you haven't noticed, there's a difference between a dog attack and homicide. If that's what kind of animal to blame." He turned toward the medical examiner again. "Is that what you think did this?"

  "I don't know. I'll have to measure all those lacerations. You can see there aren't any claw marks on the body. That rules out a cat or something like that."

  "Cat? You mean a cougar?"

  "That's right. Sometimes mountain lions come down here to the stockpens where the cattle are. But not too often. And certainly not lately. Not in twenty years. There aren't many cats around here anymore."

  "You think it was a dog then?"

  "That's my guess. I'll have to check to see, though, as I said. One thing that I want to look at are those pant cuffs. You can see where they've been torn. It could be something nipped at him and brought him down."

  "Could be. On the other hand, they could be old pants that he didn't bother changing when he left the house. I'll send them to the state-police lab and in the meantime go around and see his wife about them." Slaughter was thinking that he'd have to go and see her anyhow, and then he didn't feel like talking anymore. He turned and saw the young policeman who continued to look flustered, his cheeks red, blinking.

  "-never saw a thing to beat it."

  "I did," Slaughter told him, trying to make up for how he'd spoken to him. "Back in Detroit, working homicide. Bodies one and two days old, bite marks all over their arms and legs, their faces and their necks. Rats in tenements. We got so we expected them. If we weren't out there fast enough, we sometimes didn't find too much. Just take it easy. A thing like this can throw you. Come to think of it, a thing like this can throw me too."

  The young man nodded.

  Slaughter nodded back. He turned to Rettig. "Go down to those houses on the corner. See what people know. Screams. A dog that's loose. Any thing they might have noticed."

  "Right." Rettig hurried away.

  Slaughter faced the medical examiner again. "We'd better call and have the ambulance brought out." He paused and watched as Rettig moved across the barren lot. "You know what I've been thinking?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "I'm thinking of that chewed-up steer we found by old Doc Markle."

  "Some connection?"

  "I don't know. But I can't shake the feeling something's wrong."

  PART TWO. The Compound

  ONE

  His name was warren. he was nine, old enough to sneak out from the house when it was night, but too young for the trouble he might get in. Now he waited for his mother and his father to stop talking in their bedroom. He crouched beside his partly open door, watching for the light to go off underneath the door across the hall. Once he almost panicked when his father came out toward the bathroom, walking back and stopping as if he might look in and check on him. Warren knew he couldn't make it to the bed in time. He crouched and trembled, but his father shrugged and went in to his mother, and the light went off, and Warren was fine.

  He waited quite a while, or so it seemed to him, at least. He heard no noises in the room across there, and he guessed that they were both asleep. Cramped from crouching, he gently closed the door and straightened, his legs stiff, groping through the darkness toward the window. It was open, crickets sounding out there in the grass and among the bushes. He was just about to free the catches on the screen and set it to one side when he remembered. Here he'd gone to all the trouble making up a plan, and now he'd almost climbed out and forgotten. He turned to the right to touch his bed and pull the covers back and slip a pillow under there to make it look as if he was sleeping. He'd seen that trick several times on TV, and it seemed a good idea in case his mother or father peered in to check on him. Then he reached beneath the bed and felt around to grab the sack of crackers. He moved toward the window, took off the screen, and crawled out, his legs still feeling cramped as he eased down onto the porch and put the screen back in the window.

  But it kept falling off, and he was forced to tilt it so the bottom angled out, the top part leaning on the frame. He studied it a moment. Then he turned and walked across the porch, climbing onto the rail and hanging down, fearful that his parents might still find him, letting loose and dropping, his stomach scraping against the wood that stuck out from the porch. He huddled in the bushes, rubbing his stomach. He wore the pirate top his mother had slipped on him when she brought him in to bed, him waiting unt
il she left, then taking off the pirate bottoms, putting on his jeans and running shoes. He felt beneath the top and touched the welted skin across his stomach, tensing from the sharp, biting pain. That's all he would need is for his mother to see marks across his stomach in the morning. Well, he couldn't do a thing about it. He was out, and he might just as well keep going.

  All the same, he crouched among the bushes several moments longer. He groped for the sack where he had dropped it when he'd slipped down from the rail. Then he had it, paper crackling beneath his fingers, and he froze. He glanced around to see if any lights came on inside the house, but nothing changed in there, and he was certain he was being foolish. If they hadn't heard him climbing off the rail and landing in the bushes, then they surely wouldn't have heard the noise when he touched his sack of crackers. What had really bothered him, he knew now, were the crickets. They had stopped their squeaking. That was how his mother had explained their noises to him.

  Crickets made that sound by squeaking one leg across the other, and they'd stopped as soon as he had landed. In the darkness, every noise seemed extra loud, and now the silence frightened him. Well, if that was how this expedition would turn out, then maybe he should go back in the house. He'd been brave enough when he was planning this. Now that he was outside in the dark, he started getting scared. Maybe he should go back. No, he told himself. He mustered his resolve and straightened, the sack bunched in his hand as he stepped from the bushes.

  Where he lived was in the older section of the town- between the business district and the new homes along the outskirts. There were trees and shrubs for cover and a shaded lane that stretched behind the houses. Wary of the streetlights in the front, he crept toward the murky lane, his sneakers soaked with dew from the grass as he reached the lane's rough, dusty gravel. Back in here, away from all the streetlights, it was blacker than he had expected. He moved slowly, working up his nerve. Over to his left, he saw an object huddled by a shed. He froze again and almost turned to run before he realized that it was a garbage can. His eyes adjusted, and he recognized what in the daylight would have been familiar sights, the swing set in the backyard of the house next door, the old well that was filled in and that he sometimes hid behind, the wooden wheelbarrow from the old days that the man in back put flowers in. He took a breath. The moon emerged from clouds, and he started walking again.