And he instantly recoiled.
The smell struck his nose like a hammer, and he pulled his head from the hole and rolled to his back, sucking in the cool beach air, gasping for it as if it were only going to exist for another second or two.
“Samuel!” Sokwa called, her voice a loud, breathy whisper that carried through the night as clearly as a church bell. “What is it?”
Samuel didn’t answer, and instead lay stricken with sickness and curiosity, searching his imagination for what dying thing existed beneath him.
Another scream.
Samuel rolled back to his stomach now and pushed himself to his feet. He stared at the hole again and then moved his gaze to the next one that lie just beyond it.
He walked slowly to the second hole, approaching it as if he were attempting to steal a nestling bear cub from its mother’s paws. He stopped a couple of paces short of the perimeter this time, trying to lean forward without moving his feet, hoping to get a glimpse of the contents of the hole without damaging his olfactory nerves. But he could see only dark emptiness from that distance.
Reluctantly, Samuel took two steps forward until he was standing next to the rim, and then he inhaled deeply. There was an odor there, but from that distance, it wasn’t nauseating, so he dropped to his belly again, placing his face near the top of this hole, a hand’s width outside the perimeter.
There was a smell again, awful but less assaulting this time, and beneath this hole he thought he could now hear something. He tilted his ear toward the hole.
Yes! He could definitely hear something below. It was a shuffling noise, perhaps. Groaning, as well, maybe.
Then, suddenly, the sounds stopped.
One beat of silence. Two beats.
Samuel could feel a sense of dread arise in his chest, and his mouth watered with fear.
Then the sound of shuffling started again, low at first, erratic, and then building to a steady crescendo. Samuel wanted to pull his face away, but his eyes stared wide into the blackness, spellbound with anticipation.
The scurrying suddenly stopped again, and Samuel held his breath waiting.
Nothing.
Samuel exhaled, closing his eyes for a moment.
When he opened them again, the face of a monster was staring back at him, toothless and smiling, crusts of hair strung down across the round, wild eyes of female madness.
The woman put a hand up and grabbed Samuel by a tuft of hair at the top of his head and pulled his face to hers.
And then she screamed.
Chapter 23
Danny and Samantha sat at a round, wrought iron table on the porch of Fat Boy Sam’s. An unseasonably warm breeze gave a summer feel to the night, as did the acoustic guitarist playing Buffet tunes just inside the door.
Danny told the story of the Ocean God, starting with that first day at the beach and his swim in the morning ocean. He spoke low and quickly, checking the vicinity for eavesdroppers every few moments, backtracking to certain points that he remembered along the way, careful to leave out certain incriminating details of the story.
The biggest omission from Danny’s story was that of Tammy’s death. As far as Samantha knew—or needed to know—his wife had simply left Danny, just as he had recounted to the police, just as women had done for centuries before her. Danny assumed Samantha still had her doubts about this convenient tying of an otherwise loose end, but she was in no real position to challenge it.
What Danny did not hide were the details of Lynn Shields and her death. He felt no need for discretion as far as she was concerned. The woman had attempted to kill Danny, after all, more than once in fact, first as a sacrifice to her deity and later with a barrage of gunshots, one of which left him lying in the rain gasping for life. It was Sarah and Tracy who had found him on the beach that day, who had saved his life, and whom he had repaid by planning several nights of unsuccessful sacrifices in which they were to be offered.
Danny was careful to leave this part of the tale untold as well.
Samantha was glued to Danny’s face as he talked, her wide eyes peering over her wine glass with each sip of pinot grigio, swallowing in fear and disgust at the appropriate points and shaking her head every so often at the miracle that was Danny’s story. She didn’t speak a word until the last sentence of the yarn was spun, which concluded with how Danny had followed the reports of drowning deaths in Wickard Beach and wound up in her town.
When Samantha was sure Danny had finished, she asked, “So what are you going to do? You know they’re going to try to pin the death of that boy’s father on you.”
Danny gave a half shrug and nodded. “I guess that’s right. They don’t really have any evidence, but I’m starting to think in this town that might not matter.”
“I don’t know. I think the sheriff might be okay. A hard ass maybe, but I don’t think corrupt. If you can show evidence otherwise, I think he’ll listen. And if not him, then his deputy. She’s young but sharp, and I think he’ll listen to her.”
“How do you know so much about the police force?”
“I don’t really, but I do make it a point to get to know people who can help me. Or who might be a problem.”
“Is that why you ‘got to know me?’” Danny threw out a pair of half-hearted air quotes, not really interested in the answer either way. Clearly Samantha had used him the other night, but it didn’t make much difference now.
Samantha smiled weakly and looked away for a beat. When she turned back to him she began to speak and then stopped, as if considering whether the question she was about to ask was even appropriate or necessary. Instead, she addressed the elephant. “You think it was the creature, right. This Ocean God? That killed the guy on the beach.”
Danny took a sip of his beer. “Of course. But...” he broke off his sentence.
“What?”
“The better question is: why was Gerald DeRose on the beach to begin with?”
Samantha shrugged. “Taking a walk?”
“In the middle of the night? No. I mean, maybe, but I don’t think so.”
“So what then?”
“Do you think it’s a coincidence that the man whose arm I found on the beach is the father of the boy I saved in the ocean a day earlier.”
“Is that not possible?”
Danny frowned. “Did you hear any of the details about what happened out there in the water?”
Samantha shook her head. “Not really. Just that some kid decided to take a polar bear swim and then someone—you, it turns out—saved his life.”
Danny took a breath and leaned in. “This kid—Shane—had his baby brother with him out there. In a backpack. Towed him out into the frigid water like a chum line?”
“Jesus! What?”
“Yeah, I noticed they’re not talking about that part too much.”
“Wait, you think..?” Samantha didn’t finish the thought, but she didn’t have to.
“Of course, I think. He brought the baby out there to sacrifice it to the god. And I think he lured his father to the beach to do the same thing. Only this time it worked. He brought him to my house because he knew that I’d been attempting to lure it out, so he probably thought—correctly, it turns out—that the thing would emerge at that point on the beach.” Danny paused. “And I’ve had some time to think about this part too: I think he set me up.”
“Set you up? Come on, Danny. What’s the kid, like seven?”
“He’s nine or ten. And I’m telling you, he did. How else would he have gotten his dad to come out to the beach in the middle of the night?”
Danny allowed Samantha a moment to consider the question, genuinely wanting to know if he had, perhaps, overlooked something. She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Danny nodded. “Exactly. I’ll bet you he told his dad that I...I don’t know, told him to come meet me or something. That I threatened him. That if he didn’t come to my house so that I could carry on with whatever crime I promised to commit, then ...I don’t
know...I’d harm him. Or his mom or dad. Something like that.”
“That’s pretty devious thinking for a nine-year-old.
“All I know is that kid’s father—his arm—was found on the beach in front of my house.” Danny paused. “And there was something else.”
“What? What else?”
“I saw him this morning. The boy. I saw him leaving the beach just before I went down and found the arm.”
“What? Well that changes things a bit. Did you tell the police?”
Danny tilted his head back and rubbed his chin. “Okay, so I didn’t see him see him, not his face, so I guess I can’t know a hundred percent it was him. But it was him.”
Danny and Samantha sat in silence for a couple of beats, taking in all that had been spoken and implied over the last few minutes. They ordered another round and listened to the singer do a double-time version of ‘Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?’ just before he took a fifteen-minute break, giving the restaurant some much needed white space of quiet.
“So, again, what are you going to do?” Samantha asked. “You’ve got a couple of days, I would think, before they come at you with a murder charge. So you have a little time to figure it out.”
“I guess the only choice is to find this thing once and for all. Lure it out and kill it. And then hang its body in the public square for all to see. What other choice is there?”
Samantha smiled and nodded, approving of the plan. “Sounds like a plan Danny Lynch. But how the hell are we going to do that?”
Chapter 24
Samuel recoiled his head back and the thin, gnarled fingers that gripped his hair released easily. But the hand continued grasping at the air, desperate to regain its clutch, reaching as far up through the hole as it could stretch. Samuel could still see the face of the woman, but that was the only other part of her body visible in the blackness of the pit.
Samuel knew instantly what he was witnessing now. These holes weren’t just pits, they were cells. The woman was a prisoner.
The mad lady continued to scream as she clutched desperately for some part of Samuel, her voice hoarse and dry, like the croak of a dying cow. Her mouth was void of all teeth, save one or two rotting remnants that somehow remained in the back of her gums, and her nose and cheeks were wrinkled and pock marked with large sores that looked to have been opened and healed a thousand times.
And she was speaking. The words were wild and shrieked, but they were words, and though Samuel couldn’t understand their meaning, they sounded like the language of the Algonquin.
“Sokwa!” Samuel called, turning his head slightly at first and then fully, peering into the dark forest at the location where he had left his companion. He waited anxiously for her to appear, and when he called her name again and she still didn’t come forward, he was sure she had left him.
Sokwa’s abandonment would have been crippling to Samuel’ plan, especially since he was counting on the girl to be able to exchange at least basic words with the woman, if not full sentences. He rued that he had never learned the Algonquin language as so many of them had learned his. There were a few colonists who were fluent, but they were either traders or preachers of the gospel. Everyone else thought it the language of savages, and this attitude was now disabling Samuel’s quest.
But he had found the woman. There was at least that. And he would simply have to figure some other way to communicate with her, through drawings or hand gestures, perhaps.
But just as Samuel had begun to accept this new strategy, Sokwa emerged slowly from the darkness into the light of the beach. Her eyes shifted nervously at the sights and sounds of the screaming woman, and she moved in tentative, uncommitted steps as she neared the hole.
“Sokwa, come here! Quickly, please!”
Sokwa took a few more steps but stopped well short of Samuel, maintaining several paces from the hole that was currently producing these awful sounds of torture and panic.
“Listen!” Samuel whispered. “Listen to her words. They are yours, yes?”
The woman had modified her vocabulary so that she was now screaming the same word over and over. It was a word Samuel had heard spoken many times in the village, a word he knew. He looked at Sokwa as he confirmed it. “Water,” Samuel said. “She is screaming ‘water.’ In your language. Am I right?”
Sokwa blinked several times and swallowed as she nodded, and then took a curious step forward as she stared into the hole.
“Look at her face, Sokwa. Is she someone you know?”
Sokwa shook her head, never taking her eyes from the screaming face and clawing hand. “Even if I knew her once,” she whispered, “she looks barely human now. She is so...frail and old. The dirt and disease has brought her to a point beyond recognition.”
“Ask her name?”
Sokwa licked her lips and asked Samuel’s question to the woman, but the prisoner only responded with her screams of water.
“She needs to drink, Samuel. She is mad with thirst.”
Samuel gave an aggravated sigh, but he nodded and reached down to the leather bladder tied around his waist. He unplugged the wooden stopper and took a small swig of his own before looking at Sokwa. “Give me your hands, Sokwa. Cup them and I’ll pour the water there. And then allow her to drink from your palms.”
“I’m afraid, Samuel. What if she—”
“Cup them!”
Sokwa squatted near the hole and cupped her hands as instructed, and as Samuel went to pour the water, the weather-beaten hand from the pit shot forward like the tongue of a chameleon and snatched the bladder from Samuel’s hands.
“No,” Samuel uttered, his voice a gasp of disbelief. “My water!”
Samuel studied the hole for several beats, his mouth hanging wide with anticipation. But there was only cold silence from the pit. Stillness. Samuel thought to call for her, but he knew there was no point. The woman was gone and not returning.
He stood up next to Sokwa and continued to stare incredulously at the hole beneath them. The opening that was a volcano of madness seconds ago was now an empty void in the ground.
“I have water, Samuel. We’ll be fine. And I heard the rustle of a fresh brook on the path from the village, back by the fallen trees. We’ll find more there if we must.”
“I should follow her down,” Samuel said. “Perhaps—"
“No! No, Samuel. You will never get back out. You see the depth.”
“You can pull me. We’ll use the roots from the trees.”
“She is dangerous. Likely.”
“She is an old woman. I should follow.”
“For what purpose, Samuel? We have water and we’ll find more.”
“Not for the water!”
Sokwa looked away for a moment and then back to Samuel’s face. “Then what? You think that crazed beast knows anything of Nootau?”
Samuel had forgotten all about his friend and the pretenses under which he had lured Sokwa. He was reaching a point in his journey where the lies he’d told to persuade her were becoming unnecessary. But he wasn’t there yet. He had to keep Sokwa close, a willing participant in his quest.
“I suppose that’s right,” Samuel agreed. “We’ll move on. But you believe me now, yes? That there is a woman who knows something about Nootau?”
“I don’t know what she knows, but I believe in this place. I believe what I have seen. It is a horrible place, Samuel, and if Nootau is here, we must find him soon and bring him home.”
Samuel frowned and nodded solemnly, and as he looked forward down the beach, his eye was caught by a soft glow coming from the side of the cliff, at the point where the sheer wall met the ground. It was at the point on the beach where the shoreline curved sharply around an invisible bend.
“Look there!” he said.
Sokwa was already staring in the direction. “I see it. It’s a fire.”
A fire.
Suddenly the thought of a burning flame ignited Samuel’s desire to find the woman, as if his hunger to
see the Croatoan related somehow to the heat of the fire itself. He walked alone toward the flickering light, passing the third, unexplored, hole without giving it a glance.
He had almost reached the base of the cliff, perhaps twenty paces from the entrance to the light and the dancing shadows of the fire, when he heard the ring of laughter float in from somewhere north.
Samuel stopped in his tracks and scanned the beach, searching for the sound beneath the cliff row, past the cave where the fire lived.
The laughter came again, hysterical this time, and Samuel shifted his gaze west toward the water, the direction where the sound was born. He could see the black outline of each rock extending into a long formation that jutted out into the western sound. He squinted toward the rocks, and as his eyes adjusted further to the darkness, he could just make out a thin black shadow rising from the very edge of the last rock in the sea. The shape was human, not much taller than a child, he estimated, and as Samuel studied it, it appeared the figure was facing him. Watching him.
The laughter came again, and with this laugh, Samuel could see the figure shaking with the sound, and he knew beyond a doubt it was the source of the laughter.
“I see it too, Samuel. It is a person.”
“It’s her. It’s the woman.”
The laughter and quivering of the shape gradually stopped, and as Samuel and Sokwa continued to watch the woman in frozen fascination, she suddenly began moving. The motion was slow to start as she began to make her way over the rocks and back toward the beach, but when she took the wide leap from about the fourth to the fifth rock in the thirty-rock formation, she landed in a heap, as if the impact from the fall had left her injured, dead even.
And then she stood tall. And began to run.
Samuel breathed rapidly as he watched the figure scale the jagged rocks, in awe of her ability to move so quickly across the craggy, unpredictable surface of the wet stones. She had probably traversed them a thousand times, he figured, increasing her speed with each year that passed, returning from what was certainly a daily call to the sea god. The thought of her disappointment each day that passed without a sighting frightened Samuel. He couldn’t imagine a life such as this. A life where his god refused to appear to him. A life devoid of the majestic destruction it levied upon the world.
The Origin (The Sighting #2) Page 14
