Night of the Wendigo

by William Meikle

  First Edition

  Published by:

  DarkFuse Publications

  P.O. Box 338

  North Webster, IN 46555

  www.darkfuse.com

  Night Of The Wendigo © 2012 by William Meikle

  Cover Artwork © 2012 by Zach McCain

  All Rights Reserved.

  Copy Editors: Steve Souza & Bob Mele

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Sue, who puts up with me.

  PROLOGUE

  No lights showed at the dig site when Dave Jeffers got back from the diner.

  That in itself wasn’t unusual. The generator the university had so gracelessly provided was well past its sell-by date and prone to sudden cut-outs, usually at the most inconvenient moment.

  “Hey guys, coffee’s up. Get it while it’s hot,” he called. No one called out in reply.

  That was unusual. Archaeological dig sites run on liquids; beer usually, but coffee will do at a pinch.

  “You’d better not be swinging the lead,” he called. “Or Dick North will chop off your balls and make them into a soup.”

  All was still silent. As yet Dave wasn’t worried. The team had a habit of playing practical jokes on one another in moments of tedium. This could well be one of those times. The digging had been slow all day. It looked like they’d brought all of the good finds out of the site already. Now they were just shifting the mud, hoping against hope that there was some other gem, some new treasure, at the bottom of each bucketful. Diggers get quickly bored in such circumstances.

  The tray of cups jiggled as he descended the ramp to the bottom of the old dock. He almost toppled one of the cups as he pushed through the thick tarpaulin sheet that protected the site from the elements, but a quick shimmy of the hips saved the situation.

  “The old quarterback body swerve never fails to save the day.”

  Dave waited for the laugh that was bound to follow. He was one of the most unlikely candidates for the football team you’d ever see. His team knew it. It was unlike them not to comment, but there was no giggling, no stifled laughs. The dig lay quiet.

  Now he felt the first twinge that something might be wrong here.

  “Come on guys. The coffee’s getting cold.”

  He stood just inside the tarpaulin, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. He knew there was a series of planks laid over the dig site as walkways, but, here in the dark, he couldn’t yet make them out.

  “Olly olly oxen free,” he shouted.

  He laid the coffee tray down on the ground at his feet. There was no way he’d be able to navigate across the site while carrying them. And besides, he felt just about pissed off enough to kick the cups over and stomp them into the mud.

  “Okay guys. Fun’s over.”

  They all knew him well. And they’d recognize the tone of his voice now; the tone that said that playtime was over and the serious work needed to be done.

  Still silence.

  His eyes adjusted to the dim interior under the tarpaulin. He could make out the faded yellow bulk of the generator in the far corner of the site. It might be a heap of crap only one level above a nine-volt battery, but it was his only hope of getting the lights back on.

  He headed out gingerly, watching his feet, trying to keep to the planks. The wood squished, forcing liquid farts from the mud underfoot.

  And still there was no noise.

  There was no one here; that noise alone would have sent the little kids inside of them squealing with delight.

  He made it halfway across. He stood at just about the darkest point of the site. The heavy tarpaulin rustled behind him. Something tumbled in his stomach, the same giddy feeling he got when he had to talk in front of an audience for the first time.

  “Who’s there?” he called, turning. There was a noise that could only be the coffee tray being kicked over. A dark shadow moved, fast as a cat, between him and the tarpaulin.

  “That’s it. I’ve had enough.” Dave shouted. He walked quickly back to the entrance.

  The coffee cups were strewn over the ground, the brown liquid seeping into the dark soil.

  “You inconsiderate bastards!” he shouted. “That’s the last time I get anything for you.”

  It got suddenly colder. Much colder. Dave’s breath steamed, icy against his cheeks. The spilt coffee at his feet froze, a hard sheet of ice crackling as it formed, faster than a blink.

  Off to Dave’s right something moved and the tarpaulin rustled again, louder this time.

  Screw this, Dave thought.

  He put out a hand to push the tarpaulin aside. When he tried to draw it back, the tarpaulin came with it. His hand had frozen solid to the heavy plastic sheet.

  Bone-deep cold drove through his palm, up to his wrist. A layer of frost ran over his knuckles up over the back of his hand.

  Dave whimpered, but the noise seemed too loud. He covered his mouth with his free hand.

  The darkness shifted. Heavy footsteps echoed along the planks.

  The board Dave stood on bounced and vibrated in sympathy.

  There’s somebody behind me!

  He tore his hand away from the sheet, leaving a layer of skin behind. There was no pain…his palm was too cold for that. There was only a chill that speared all the way through his body.

  Adrenalin kicked in and got him moving. He hit the ramp at a run. The old planks they’d used for the makeshift pathway iced up even as he stood on them. His feet slipped away from under him.

  He landed face down on an icy patch. He left the skin from his top lip behind as he tore himself free and scrambled up, skidding and slipping all the way towards the dockside.

  “Help,” he called, but his voice came out as little more than a feeble squeak.

  When he breathed in, it felt like he was swallowing razor blades. Icy needles pierced his tongue and his mouth. Finally it found his throat. His next breath felt like trying to breathe through a snowball.

  I’m drowning.

  He staggered away from the dig, his face reddening as he gasped unsuccessfully for air. In the distance, the old timber yard was lit up in green and yellow lights. As snow fell around him Dave had time for one last thought.

  It’s Christmas!

  An icy hand gripped his heart. It squeezed, just once.

  Dave Jeffers was dead before he hit the ground.

  CHAPTER 1

  From TheComingApocalypse.net

  At 2:00am EST this morning there was a noticeable temperature dip across a wide zone of the harbor area of New York. Does anybody else find it peculiar that this happened EXACTLY 23 minutes after a ten second high intensity burst from HAARP in Alaska? They say they’re not working on any weather modification systems, but after Katrina and the purposeful way they cleared out New Orleans, who knows what city they might choose next?

  From alt.archaeology.north_america

  Anybody heard from Dick North recently? Wasn’t he supposed to be reinventing the history of the east coast for us? Last I heard he was up to his bollocks in cold river mud over in the Big Apple trying to prove that Scotsmen were on Manhattan Island before the Dutch. Come on, Dick, where are you? We’ve been waiting so long now for this one that our asses are getting tired. Put up or shut up, Dick. I seem to remember I bet you a beer on this one. I’m feeling thirsty.

  From a rejection letter

  Dear Mr. Barter. While your prose style is sturdy and robust, your subject matter leaves much to be desired. The market for UFO-based conspiracy theories died with the X-Files. I might have looke
d more favorable on your theories if you had been able to offer even the slightest hint of proof for any of the points you have tried to make. Come back to us when you’ve got something more substantial. Irrefutable photographic evidence would be a start. Photos always help sell books, and can hide any stylistic issues with the text itself.

  From alt.prophecy.dreams

  It’s Tessa from the Big Apple here. Don’t know what it means, but last night I dreamed of snowballs. I was looking out over the city from a high vantage point. Giant snowballs fell from the clear sky. They destroyed everything they landed on, smashing the city into a pile of slushy rubble. Anybody else getting this weirdness or is it just me?

  * * *

  The sun came up on another day. The streets were quiet, almost calm.

  It was an illusion. Mike Kaminski knew that. Under the surface bad shit was going down…it always was. But on this particular morning, if the city wanted to pretend to be a pussycat, Mike wasn’t going to argue. Last night had been one of the best nights of his life. Nothing would wipe the smile from his face for a while yet.

  He was only two blocks from his apartment when the call came through, on his way home. He’d spent the night at Mina’s place, but he hadn’t yet got around to leaving any clothes there. If he went into the squad-room in the same clothes as the day before someone was bound to notice…and Mina wasn’t ready for the publicity just yet.

  “Possible homicide on Hunter’s Dock,” Vicki said on the squawk box.

  That was enough to get Mike on the case. Nobody died on his old stomping grounds without him knowing it. He did a U-turn at a quiet junction and headed for the shore.

  Driving down towards the dock felt like taking a journey back in time. He spent his first five years on the force here, walking these streets. He knew them intimately. There was the liquor store where he’d made his first arrest, there was the bar where he’d had to use his gun for the first time, and there on the corner just outside the gates were the hookers waiting for the boats to come in. They hadn’t changed much over the years; different girls, same old job.

  Old Tom stopped him at the main gate of the dock and asked him to wind down his window.

  “What’s the rush, Mikey?”

  Tom had been sitting in the same guard room since Mike joined the force. He looked to be about eighty years old, but he’d looked that way to Mike for the last twenty years. Local rumor had it that he was over ninety, but Tom himself pleaded ignorance.

  “Hell, by the time I started counting, it was too late to know,” he said. This was usually accompanied by a lopsided grin and a disgusting movement of false teeth over his lower lip and back in again. The harbor company employed him because he knew more about these docks than any man alive. Mainly though, they used him because he was cheap. He used to be a dock-hand himself, but an industrial accident—a fact of life down here—had pensioned him off to guard duty. He might not be fit enough to tackle any wrongdoers, but he knew everybody that had legitimate business out on the docks…and most that had illegitimate business as well. Mike knew there was a sawn-off shotgun, kept out of sight inside the guard room beside the gates, just in case.

  “I caught a call,” Mike said. “One of the beat cops called in a possible homicide on Hunter’s Dock. I was in the area…”

  “And you couldn’t keep away.”

  “You know me, Tom. Like a bloodhound on the scent.”

  “You always were too nosy for your own good,” the old man said.

  “Am I first on the scene?”

  “A youngster went over there on his rounds half an hour ago or more.”

  “I’d better get over there then.”

  The old man cackled.

  “You’d be better off crawling into this guard box here and keeping me company. Leave the running about to younger men…they’ve got more energy for it.”

  Mike laughed.

  “Maybe so, Tom, maybe so. But the dock’s embedded deep in my blood…I couldn’t let a call to investigate down here go.”

  “There was a time when you were pretty quick in running off this dock rather than onto it,” the old man said.

  He cackled, and did the thing with his teeth again. No matter how many times Mike saw it, it never ceased to disgust him.

  “I don’t need reminding of my misspent youth, Tom. I remember it well enough.”

  “That’s more than I can do of mine,” Tom said. “You really should do more drinking.”

  “Maybe so Tom. But I can’t sit here jawing with you…I’ll come back later if I’ve got time and you can fill me in on what I’ve missed in the past couple of months.”

  “Same old same old,” Tom said. “But I’ve got a hip flask here that helps with that. There’s a slug for you if you want it…”

  Mike had already sped off across the docks.

  He reached the dock still doing thirty and realized, too late, that the whole area was a pan of matte black ice. Somehow he managed to control his skid, missing the young beat cop by an inch.

  The officer was bent over, peering at something on the ground. He barely moved, even as the car screeched past him and slid to a halt just feet from the twenty foot drop down into the dark water below.

  Mike sat, white knuckled, gripping the steering wheel, willing his heartbeat to slow, telling himself it was all right to breathe. It was several seconds before he could take his hands from the wheel, turn his head, and look at the cop.

  He didn’t recognize the kid, but that wasn’t out of the normal…beat cops got rotated around fast down here. No one liked this beat, no one wanted it. Mike shivered at his own memories, even though they were years old. He pushed them back to where they’d come from, to a place where he never had to look at them again.

  It was time to go to work.

  He got out of the car gingerly, planting his feet firmly before moving. The memory of the skid was still big in his mind. When he spoke his breath steamed. The cold gripped at him through his leather jacket.

  “What have we got?” he said, showing the beat cop his badge.

  The cop didn’t speak, just pointed at the bundle at his feet.

  Mike walked gingerly over. The whole dock was frozen with a thin layer of ice. It was like trying to walk in normal shoes on a skating rink. He put his arms out from his side and tried to maintain his balance, taking only small steps and approaching cautiously. As he got closer he could make out what was at the cop’s feet.

  It was a body. The last time Mike saw anything like it had been in the refrigeration unit of a butcher’s shop. The victim hadn’t just been lying in the cold night air…they had been frozen solid, as if dipped in liquid nitrogen.

  Mike bent for a closer look.

  “Don’t touch it,” the young policeman said. He peeled off his left glove and showed his fingertips…they were red and puffy, as if badly scalded.

  “I felt for a pulse,” the cop said. “Next think I know my fingers are stuck. I left skin behind trying to pull away.”

  The young cop couldn’t take his eyes off the body.

  “At first I thought it had fallen off one of the meat wagons…I found a side of pork last week. But that looked better than him. Far better.”

  “When did you find him?” Mike asked.

  “Ten minutes ago.”

  “Is this your first body?”

  The cop nodded.

  “It was. For all of five minutes. There’s more, over at the dig site.”

  Like everyone in the area, Mike had heard of the dig. It had been on the news a month ago. A four-hundred-year-old boat had been found under the old dock when they started taking it down to rebuild it. Somebody had called it the single biggest find ever in the history of US archaeology. To Mike it had looked like a muddy dock.

  “More dead?”

  “Not just dead,” the young cop answered. He went suddenly pale. His eyes showed white all around the pupil. He swayed, suddenly unsteady.

  Mike put a hand on his shoulder.
r />   “Easy, kid. Take deep breaths. If you are going to chuck up, do it well away from the crime scene,” Mike said.

  “Too late,” the cop answered ruefully. “But I hope you haven’t had a big breakfast, Detective.”

  “Son,” Mike said softly. “Nothing is going to surprise me any.”

  “Would you like a bet on that?” the cop said under his breath.

  Mike walked towards the dig site. The young cop made to follow. Just then a squad car pulled onto the dock, brakes squealing. It did a 360 degree spin that took it even closer to tumbling into the water than Mike had come.

  “Stay here and warn the troops,” Mike said. The cop nodded. He looked grateful.

  “They couldn’t pay me enough to make me look at that again.”

  As Mike walked towards the dockside and the ramp heading down to the dig, a warm wind got up. The ice underfoot melted like a piece of time-lapse video, so fast that by the time he walked down the ramp, the sun at his back felt almost warm.

  That changed as soon as he descended into the shadow afforded by the old dock walls. Going down into the bottom of it felt like climbing inside a fridge.

  The dig site was covered with a heavy tarpaulin draped over a framework of wooden piles. The tarpaulin crackled. Large chunks of ice fell from it as Mike pushed it aside. He let the plastic sheet fall back into place, and noticed the red palm print, with flapping scraps of skin frozen solid onto the sheeting.

  Just how cold did it get down here? It’s late March!

  He walked farther into the dig itself. There were four disturbed coffee cups on the ground by his feet. Frozen liquids had been spilled over a large area. He stepped over it, knowing that Mina’s wrath would be explosive if he was to be the one that screwed up the forensics. He walked out onto the wooden boards that led across the dig.

  The first thing he found was the already partially frozen remains of the beat cop’s breakfast.