Kelto had situated himself in the darkest corner of the room with his back to the wall and his hands stuffed into the pockets of an old army issue fatigue jacket. He was leaning indolently against the wall.
"What the hell are you doing in here?" I barked.
"Bert said you were looking for me."
On balance, I tend to be a somewhat placid individual with an incredibly high threshold for the inconsiderate vagaries of the human species; there are a couple of things, however, that tend to send me right off the charts. One is loud noises; the other is the invasion of my cherished privacy. In other words, I was tired, a trifle cranky, and pissed over the fact that young Kelto had let himself in unannounced. "That was twelve hours ago," I said testily. "Now, I know it's an absolute bitch out there, so why don't you go get lost in it? There can't be anything either of us has to say that can't wait until tomorrow."
Kelto held up his hand in a halting motion. "You've been asking questions about me, Mr. Wages, so I asked a few questions about you."
"Just who the hell are you?" I snarled.
I don't like indolent people, but I like the word indolent because it perfectly describes the demeanor of people like Kelto. He was sleek, constructed like a greyhound, with the natural grace of a dancer, yet here he was with his perpetual pout lowering himself slowly, almost clumsily, into a chair. He had no intention of leaving. "I know what you think," he whispered huskily. "I know you're wondering what I found out about you." He paused, all too aware of the stress level. "I learned quite a bit. Would you like to know what I learned, Mr. Wages?"
I was still trying to get my temper under control. I walked over to the dresser and strapped on my watch, then sat down on my bed. "You've got five minutes. Say whatever it is that you've got to say and get the hell out of here."
"You're E.G. Wages," he began in his malevolent voice, "a writer who writes stories about things like this. You make people uncomfortable with your focus on the bizarre and supernatural."
"Four minutes and counting."
"You came to Chambers Bay because you suspected that there would be a repeat of a series of atrocities that began forty-four years ago. You are many things, Mr. Wages, but you most certainly are not a casual tourist."
I didn't have to ask for the source of his knowledge. My files were all too casually stacked on the top of my dresser and all too carefuly labeled. I glanced at my watch for effect.
"You see, Mr. Wages, we, you and I, share a common interest in these unsavory episodes from our history."
"All right, I'll bite. What kind of common interest?"
"I too have been following these events. The difference, you see, is that I have been doing it far longer than you."
"How much longer?" The little bastard was beginning to intrigue me.
"Twenty-two years." There was no hesitation in his voice, only the element of something haunted and mysterious.
"That would have been about the time of Battle Harbor."
"I was at Battle Harbor," he said evenly.
It's strange how some words or statements or admissions can zero right in on your personal gyro. Kelto just had. I was off balance with a funny taste in my mouth. I did a couple of quick calculations; if he was actually at Battle Harbor, he was older than I had him pegged. "You were," I repeated in amazement, "at Battle Harbor? You mean you actually saw what happened?"
Kelto nodded somberly. "I not only saw it, Mr. Wages. I lived through it."
The funny part about it was that I halfway believed him. I pushed myself forward. "Tell me, what did you see?
"If you mean you want me to describe what I saw, I'm afraid I cannot."
"Why not?" I insisted.
"I was seven years old at the time, Mr. Wages. I had pleaded with my mother to let me go on that retreat. At first she was reluctant, but my sister, Jenna, was attending and good old Reverend Bell was there in the capacity of both a chaperone and a spiritual advisor — so she relented. It was only a two-hour journey from the church to the retreat site, and there were games and singing. I remember only that I felt very grown-up. It was to be a whole new adventure for me."
Kelto's story began to unfold, and as he told it, his voice developed into something quite different from the grainy, almost tortured rasp of our first meeting. Now it seemed as though it was detached, almost apart from him, speaking through images coming back through the shadows of his mind.
"I remember that I was sitting next to Reverend Bell, who was driving the bus. He had wisely kept the smaller children to the front because there were three boys in the back who were being quite rowdy. When he pulled off of the main road and began to head down a rather narrow lane back toward the retreat site, we all heard a loud noise. It sounded like something exploded. Quite suddenly, the left front end of the bus pitched down. The Reverend got out of the bus and studied the situation. When he got back on the bus, he broke us up into two groups. The first group consisted of mostly the younger children, and he put Jenna in charge. I can still recall how the Reverend instructed us to stay close together and follow the path. He kept the older boys with him. We were several feet from the bus, walking down the path, when he called out to us that he would be along just as soon as the problem was solved."
Kelto had also accomplished something else. His story forced me off my self-imposed one pack a day limit. I got up, poured myself another drink, opened a fresh pack of cigarettes and returned to my perch on the edge of the bed.
"I have no way of knowing how far we had walked or how long it had taken us, but I suddenly realized that Jenna was alarmed. She had us huddle together and hold hands. We could all hear strange sounds. The trees there are mostly scrub, not much height to them; the soil is pockmarked and cluttered with large boulders. I was holding onto a little girl named Anita, and she was crying.
Suddenly Jenna screamed, and I saw something in the thicket. I was terrified," he said softly.
"Go on," I pushed, now disregarding his time limit.
"To this day, I don't know what it was that came out of that underbrush. I was petrified, a frightened little boy with his eyes shut and praying. Apparently I got knocked down, and that must have been the thing that saved me. They found me three days later, wandering around in a state of shock." He recited the events without emotion, as though it had happened to someone else.
"Why isn't any of this in the official record?"
"It's quite simple, Mr. Wages. Everyone thought I was dead. There was no way for the authorities who conducted the investigation at Battle Harbor to identify one child from another. In most cases they were dealing with little more than mutilated bits and pieces of my classmates. When I was discovered, they decided to keep my survival quiet. They didn't know what they were dealing with and they were afraid of what the maniac would do if he knew that someone had survived. They thought he might even come after me."
There have been no more than a handful of times in my life when I was speechless, but this was one of them.
For Kelto, the floodgates of his mind were open. "My mother was a widow. The experience broke her heart. I know that she loved me, but Jenna was her chosen, the very reason she lived. She died shortly after that, and I was shuttled off to an orphanage."
I'll admit to having been around for a while and over the years having observed a good many men describing and living through all kinds of personal hell. It is unusual for a man to relive a traumatic experience of the nature and magnitude that Kelto had just described without some sort of inadvertent demonstration of the fires that kindle that emotion. Yet there he sat, describing an atrocity of shocking proportions, and his face, his manner, his speech pattern were all devoid of passion. I kept thinking that what he was telling me was unreal, nothing more than a horror story. There would have been more. It was, after all, the cathartic ramblings of a tortured soul.