Riverwatch

by Joseph Nassise

  She decided to make her move before he could.

  She flew overhead and began to circle the group. Below, the cattle swiftly pulled in their ranks, moving to form a large circle with the weakest in the center and the strong on the rim, just as the Elders had taught them.

  It would do them no good.

  She spotted a straggler, an offspring by the size, tens of yards away from the group and moving slowly. She smiled, her tongue flicking across her teeth. That would be the one.

  She folded her wings and dropped toward the earth.

  Her victim was twenty feet from the group when she struck.

  Unfolding her wings, she used the resistance of the wind to slow her descent abruptly, so she seemed to appear out of nowhere directly in front of it. As expected, it froze in place for a moment.

  That was all the time she needed.

  She swung one of her arms around in a blinding fast arc, the talons on the end of each finger extended.

  She shrieked with satisfaction as flesh tore, blood flew, and the stench of pain rose into the air…

  *** ***

  Katelynn awoke screaming in her bed.

  She knew instantly she’d had a nightmare; her heart was thundering in her chest and her body was soaked with sweat.

  She had only a fleeting recollection of what it had been about, however, and that quickly slipped away as she tried to get herself under control.

  She got up and went into the bathroom. Using a facecloth soaked in cool water, she wiped her upper body down and splashed some water on her face. Her heartbeat slowly returned to normal.

  By the time she climbed back into bed, the dream was no more. It had slipped away as swiftly as the morning dew under the summer sun.

  Five minutes later she was fast asleep.

  It had been the first of the dreams, but it would not be the last.

  *** ***

  Across town, the beast turned in his sleep, his dream disturbed by an unwanted presence.

  It lasted no more than a moment, however, and the creature never fully awoke, preferring to sink back into his memories of another time and place.

  He gave the presence not another thought.

  Chapter Thirteen: Gruesome Discoveries

  The ringing of the phone jarred him awake.

  "Wilson here."

  "Sorry to disturb you, sir. But we’ve got a bad one."

  Damon listened for a few moments and then hung up. He was dressed and out the door in less than ten minutes, using both the sirens and lights as he climbed the hills into Harrington Falls. As he made his way down Chestnut Street, it was easy to see the activity that surrounded the house at the end of the block.

  The house was a beacon, shining in the darkness, calling out to him, demanding the justice which he could supply, commanding him to avenge those who lay still and silent inside.

  Though he was still half a mile away, he could see the house clearly. It stood out from the rest because it was the only one on the block with every window bathed with electric light, like a blazing torch in an empty field, and he moved toward it reluctantly.

  The unspeakable had occurred. For the first time in over twenty years, there had been a murder in Harrington Falls.

  Damon didn’t want to see what lie waiting inside those four walls, didn’t want to smell the freshly spilled blood or see the wounds, didn’t want to stare into lifeless eyes and wonder what they had seen in those last few precious moments before death.

  Despite his resignation he continued on, if for no other reason than it was his job. There was no one else to do it.

  He’d only gone to bed moments before the call had come, and as he put down the receiver he realized he hadn’t been surprised to learn that someone had been killed. All evening since leaving the office he’d been nervous, watchful, unable to relax and settle down the way he usually did after a day’s work, his conversation with Strickland replaying over and over again like a Top Forty record in his mind. It was almost as if he’d been expecting something to happen.

  When he arrived he could see the house was set back from the street on a thickly wooded lot. In the drive were several police cars, their blue lights flashing, giving the house’s white paint a sickly glow. Two ambulances were parked at the curb.

  The house was a split-level, as were many of the others in this neighborhood, though some work had been done to subtly alter its appearance. There was a small addition, probably a den or TV room, jutting out from the rear left corner, and from this a wide latticed porch extended around to its opposite corner on the front. The original windows facing the street had been taken out, and two large bay windows had been installed in their place, looking to Damon like the bulbous eyes of some giant fly.

  The Sheriff looked away, suddenly uncomfortable.

  For just a moment, he’d been struck by the uneasy feeling that he was being watched.

  His attention turned to the thick row hedges that lined the path from the front door to the drive, and the manner in which the pines in the back yard crept across the rear of the property. Both areas would provide fine places for concealment for anyone trying to approach the house undetected, and he made a mental note to have the boys check them for any sign that the killer had indeed been there.

  Deciding he couldn’t postpone the inevitable any longer, Damon resigned himself to what lay ahead and walked to the front door.

  Inside was chaos.

  The living room was in shambles. A recliner had been overturned, its leather upholstery slashed. Cushions from the sofa and loveseat were strewn about the room, ripped as well, their white foam interiors spilling out around the jagged tears. It looked as if someone had taken the same knife to the heavy drapes too as they now hung in ragged strips. The floor was littered with chunks of ceramic and glass; all that remained of what Damon guessed had once been a pair of table lamps.

  Two technicians were moving about the room, pausing now and again to scoop some object into one of the many clear plastic envelopes that jutted from their pockets.

  One of them looked up and waved a hand in the direction the hallway was leading, and Damon followed it to a stairway that led to the second floor.

  At the top, Deputy Frank Castiglioni stepped out of the shadows to greet him. Frank was a ten-year veteran of the force, and one of Damon’s most hardened and experienced officers.

  "Sheriff," he said in greeting.

  "How’s it going, Frank?" Damon noticed his fellow officer was pale, his voice slightly off key. Behind the man’s back, where he obviously hoped Damon wouldn’t be able to see it, Castiglioni’s right hand was shaking violently.

  "Is it bad?" he asked.

  The other man swallowed once, hard, and then nodded. He tried a weak smile but failed to bring it off.

  Damon laid a comforting hand on Frank’s shoulder, and then moved past him. He stopped at the entrance of the room just beyond, his bulk framed in the narrow doorway.

  What he saw in front of him made the bile rush to the top of his throat, and for a moment he thought he might be sick at a scene for the first time in many years, but after a moment or two the sensation passed.

  "Holy Mother of God."

  What he saw here was far, far worse than what he’d expected.

  The room was a slaughterhouse.

  Blood was splattered everywhere; on the floor, on the ceiling, on the walls. It was as if someone had taken buckets of the stuff and merrily splashed it around.

  Pieces of bloody human flesh were likewise cast about, scattered across the floor and atop various pieces of furniture.

  A hand, with only three fingers intact, dangled from an open dresser drawer, the missing digits ripped off at the first knuckle.

  A foot, still clad in a blood-stained slipper lay in the middle of the floor, the shinbone was shining whitely through the torn and bloody flesh.

  Many of the other pieces were unrecognizable as to what part of the body they had originated from, a fact which Damon found increasi
ngly disturbing as his gaze kept returning to them repeatedly, his mind trying to discern what they once might have been, so as to give order to the chaos.

  What he took to be glistening lengths of rope dangled about the curtains that concealed the surface of the king-size bed, reminding him of the tinsel he used to decorate his Christmas tree every year.

  Curious, he stepped closer, only to realize with rapidly escalating horror that they were actually human entrails.

  In the back of his mind an evil little voice began singing, "A Slinky, a Slinky, a wonderful, wonderful toy, a Slinky, a Slinky, they’re fun for a girl and a boy."

  Vomit surged back up into his throat, and this time he barely managed to choke it back down, leaving a foul taste in his mouth that matched nicely with the reek of death that hung in his nostrils.

  In all his years of police work, he had never seen anything so vile.

  So twisted.

  So undeniably evil.

  Conflicting emotions ran through him as he stared down at the carnage before him, the sickness he felt warring with his need to study the scene and understand just what had happened.

  Anger reared its ugly head, and he let it come, knowing it would help calm nerves that were dangerously close to the breaking point. Anger would get him past his revulsion, would allow him to look at the situation objectively. He clung to it, wrapping it around him the same way a child might envelope itself in a comforting blanket on a cold winter’s night.

  I’ll make the bastard who did this pay, he vowed to himself, and felt a little better for the thought.

  For the first time Damon noticed a police photographer was in the room with him, had indeed been clicking away the whole time Damon had been standing there, ignoring his presence, wanting to finish up and get the hell out of there.

  Damon didn’t blame him.

  "There’s more, boss," a voice said from behind him. "The rest is worse, if that’s possible to imagine."

  Damon didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just turned to look at Frank. The rest of it? Worse? What the hell could be worse than this?

  Castiglioni motioned the Sheriff towards the bed and Damon followed, his feet as heavy as cement blocks. He didn’t want to get any closer, didn’t want to see what his fellow officer had to show him, but duty compelled him to follow. Frank ducked under a low hanging piece of intestine, and drew back the hanging curtains, exposing the bed itself and what lay atop it.

  Damon felt the breath sucked from his lungs at the sight.

  A human corpse was on the bed, and from its musculature Damon could tell it had been a male. From its chest gaped a savage wound, and it was from here that the internal organs had been pulled and stretched forth to the canopy around them. If that wasn’t enough, the body had also been dismembered.

  And beheaded.

  The sheer brutality of the act was sickening. Damon hoped to God that the victim, whoever he had been, had been dead long before the killer had performed his grotesque artistry. To even contemplate what the man might have endured had he been alive was unthinkable; his mind balked at the very concept.

  When he had recovered sufficient breath to speak, Damon asked, "Where’s his head?" He noticed his voice trembled when he spoke, and wondered if Frank had noticed it, too.

  Frank laughed, a strange eerie chuckle. Wilson instantly recognized it for what it was; the type of laugh you make to chase away the willies when you’re alone in an empty house in the dead of night. It was the sound of a man doing his best to reassure himself.

  And miserably failing.

  It was anything but comforting.

  "In the bathroom," Frank replied. He hesitated, clearly considering how much to say, and then decided against saying anything at all, for he merely indicated once again that Damon should follow. The two of them crossed the room, to where a door stood next to the bureau.

  It was not the extravagant master bath Damon had expected. An oval-shaped mirror hung over a marble sink. A toilet stood to his left, a claw-foot tub to his right.

  Frank nodded at the open toilet.

  Damon stepped over and looked down, peripherally aware that Frank had moved back out of the room.

  The man’s missing head was stuffed in the toilet bowl, the once blue-tinged water a sickly purple hue from the blood that had been spilled into it from the leaking head.

  The man’s white hair writhed about his head like living seaweed. His ghastly dead face was frozen in an expression of horror; his mouth open wide in a silent scream of pain, his empty eye sockets still leaking blood.

  For just a split second, Damon’s mind told him it wasn’t real.

  But it was.

  And deep down inside, he knew it.

  He turned away, unable to face that eyeless, accusing stare a moment longer, only to find he could still feel its gaze burning into his back.

  "You poor bastard," he muttered under his breath.

  Numbed by all the destruction, he stood there for a moment, seeing himself in the bedroom mirror, his eyes reflecting the questions that were rushing around inside his head.

  This was worse than anything he had imagined. That he was the best man to be in this position was beyond a doubt; the rest of the men on the force had never dealt with any type of violent crime. They were good, yes, but something like this was beyond the scope of their experience. They were police officers in a small town, and things like this just didn’t happen in a place like this. In the city it was different, and Damon knew that from too many years of personal experience.

  Now he wondered if those years would be enough.

  And then another, more chilling thought occurred to him.

  What if the bastard killed again before they could stop him?

  The thought of bodies piling up around him while the investigation floundered sent a stream of sweat rolling down his back, dredging up all the old concerns and self-doubts. The mountainous weight of responsibility settled about his shoulders like a cloak, and he was suddenly more scared of failure than he’d ever been.

  What if my best just wasn’t good enough? he asked himself.

  What then?

  He forced his doubts away, knowing he needed to concentrate in order to get the job done. Frank was waiting for him in the bedroom.

  Now that the initial shock had passed, Damon found he could think a bit clearer. He asked the first, obvious question, "The radio call mentioned two bodies. Where’s the other?"

  Frank glanced away, uneasily. "Look around," he directed, waving his hand about the room.

  Damon did. All he saw were bits and pieces of flesh everywhere.

  The implication of his officer’s words sank in slowly.

  He turned to face him. "You mean…"

  "Yeah. There’s not enough flesh missing from the male’s corpse to account for all this mess, so most of it had to come from the guy’s wife. We can’t find the rest of her body though, so we think maybe whoever did this took it when he left."

  "We got an I.D. on the body yet?" Damon asked.

  "Yeah, but its still unconfirmed. Some of the pictures in the house match this guy here, near as we can tell. George Cummings. We have to wait until the coroner does the prints to be sure, but I’d bet next week’s pay on it. We’ve got an A.P.B. out on the wife, just to be sure she isn’t the cutter and that it wasn’t some young bimbo that got chopped up with him."

  "Anyone call Strickland?"

  "Yeah. Should be here any minute now."

  Damon nodded approvingly. The officers were doing their jobs despite the atrocity around them, and of that he could be proud. "Okay then, let’s get out of here and let the techs do their jobs." He waved Frank out of the room before him, and the other man seemed more than happy to oblige. Damon didn’t blame him, if he had to spend another moment in that room he thought he might scream. Back downstairs, the two of them gathered the other officers who weren’t currently involved in securing the sight from the crowd that was beginning to show up, and assembled them
in a loose huddle by the patrol cars.

  Damon began giving out assignments, doing his best to get the situation under control and the investigation rolling. There was no time to lose. He knew the cardinal rule of homicide investigations; most killers will be caught in the first forty-eight hours of the investigation, if they were going to be caught at all. When he was finished, one of the men raised his hand.

  "What do we do about the press?" the officer asked. "The local papers have got people already out there, mixin’ with the crowd and tryin’ to get inside. The TV crews can’t be that far behind."

  Damon swore under his breath. He knew he couldn’t contain this for long, but letting it out now would just cause panic in the streets. He thought hard for a moment. "Okay, listen up. I want all of you to keep your mouths shut on this one. If they get one hint about what we got upstairs, I’ll come down on every one of you, you got that? At the moment we’re the only ones who know how bad it is, and we’ve got to keep it to ourselves until the P.R. people can assemble a press conference in the morning. We don’t know if this is a one-timer or not, and we don’t need any other loony out there starting to act like a copycat. Keep the details to yourselves. If anyone asks, let ‘em know we got a suspicious death, and leave it at that. If anyone gives you any trouble, you send ‘em direct to me, got it? Questions? Okay then, get to work."

  The men moved off to follow their orders, leaving Damon alone for the moment. He slumped against the side of his vehicle, suddenly drained. He stood there and stared out into the night, wondering about the killer.

  Who was he? What did he look like?

  More importantly, where was he now?

  At the moment, Damon didn’t have any answers.

  But he would discover them in time.

  He had to.

  Chapter Fourteen: A Summons in the Night

  Midnight.

  The night was still.