I started to ask him a question, and he again held up his hand in that halting gesture.
"When I was fifteen, I ran away from the orphanage. The nightmares were unbearable. I couldn't make it through the night without reliving those few terrifying minutes and suffering through the agonizing days that followed. I kept seeing it over and over in my mind — that horrible foul-smelling something, plundering, destroying."
"When did you realize that what happened at Battle Harbor wasn't a singular event, that it was actually one in a continuing…?"
"I was twenty, working in the cannery in Saint John's. A friend, named Concha, told me about a sister that lived in a small commune in Quebec. She said the commune was decimated by a madman. Somehow, Concha's description of what had happened to those gentle people catapulted me back into my own memories, and I saw similarities. I wondered even then if this madness would continue. I began to read, and it wasn't long till I came to the same conclusions that brought you here. You see, Mr. Wages, I too knew that they would return, and like you, I know the time is now."
"Are you aware that they killed a man this afternoon, a local fellow by the name of Percy Kramer?"
Kelto accepted' the news stoically. "I find it interesting that you refer to them as 'they'," he offered evenly. He sighed and closed his haunted eyes. "You see, Mr. Wages, I did not come here to solicit your help. Quite the contrary, I came to ask you to stay out of it. I understand now. I know what I must do." Satisfied he had said all he wanted to say, he pushed himself erect, offered me a wan smile and turned toward the door. He paused just long enough to button the collar of his jacket, quietly opened the door and turned back to face me again. "Tell them to stay out of it, Mr. Wages. I know what must be done. If others become involved, the situation will only worsen."
He stepped silently out into the empty gray stillness of the night, and the door closed behind him.
It took longer than usual for me to slip into my world of troubled sleep. And even when I did, the images that danced in the shadowy world of my subconscious were little more than amorphous and half-born nightmares. I saw Kelto's stoic and somehow unreal face and the unforgettable sight of Percy Kramer's violated fat white body hanging from the dead tree. Woven throughout were frightening and forbidding glimpses of the vast cold and barren polar plains. I was in total synchronization with a tortured psyche, yet I had no idea what it meant. Finally, there was the young woman, slim and yet somehow pregnant with hate and fear. She was laughing, and she had a knife. She was holding the knife out… no, at me.
I woke up twice, sweating, each time groping my way to the dresser in the darkness to grab a cigarette. Each time I returned in a kind of halfway world between awareness and fear.
Outside my door, veiled by a cold gray curtain of choking fog, was an indescribable homicidal maniac, a pathological, knife-wielding creature, a marauding, unthinking thing that terrorized. It had returned. I shuddered, closed my eyes and hoped against hope that the frightening images would not return to haunt still more dreams.
It was later, in the early hours of the morning, that I felt it. There was the slightest movement next to my bed. I felt the covers pull back as B.C. slid in beside me. She pushed her slender body up close to mine, and I heard her sob softly. Protege of Cosmo Leach or not, I curled her sweat-dampened head in the crook of my arm and pulled the sheet over her. She mumbled incoherently and curled her hand into mine. "Sleep tight, little lady," I whispered. "Maybe we'll make it through this night yet."
I used to refer to it as the curse of the Wages; my father and his father before him, in fact all of us, were always up at the first light of the new day.
It was dawn, I was certain of that. Eventually I would look at my watch to verify it, but for now it was enough to just know that I had made it through another night. I slipped my arm from under B.C.'s head and inched my way toward the edge of the bed. By the time I made it to the window to make my ritualistic assessment of the new day, I knew it was pointless. The heavy gray pallor still choked the landscape. I could see to the edge of the concrete walkway, but that was as far as it went.
I gathered up pants, shoes, socks, and my favorite golf shirt (the dark blue one with Harbor Springs embroidered on the left sleeve), slipped into the bathroom, got dressed and managed to slip out of the room without waking her. I had a hunch Brenda Cashman wouldn't have awakened if a bomb had gone off.
The horizontal visibility was still what the boys who run the weather bureau call "condition totally obscured." Suffice it to say that I could see large objects, if they weren't more than ten feet or so in front of me. Keeping to the sidewalk in front of the units, I groped my way down to the office. Bert was there, feet propped on a waste can, chair tilted back, watching the early morning news. When I knocked, he waved me in.
"You're up early," I observed.
"Had to. Polly had a rough night. I got up to draw her a hot bath and couldn't go back to sleep." Bert pointed to a lime-crusted Mr. Coffee and invited me to help myself. I did, laced it with a powdered cream substitute and dropped into the chair beside him. "Did you ever find Kelto to talk to him?"
"Last night," I muttered, hoping the curt response would satisfy him. It did. Bert wanted to talk about other things. When he started in on the fog, I knew that Jake had been at least partially successful. It was obvious the word on Percy Kramer hadn't yet made it as far as the Chambers Bay Motel.
"Ever see fog like this before?" Bert groused.
I shook my head. To be honest, I wasn't really interested in casual conversation; Bert's only real attraction for me was his coffee. I fully intended to hit him up for a second cup, get my still snoozing brain in gear and begin formulating plans for the day. There were two things uppermost in my mind. One was a second go around with the mysterious Mr. Kelto, and the second was a chance to look into this person they called the Widow Austin. During the course of the long night I had tried repeatedly to reason out how and why these attacks seemed to be occurring in both a chronological and geographical pattern. I had taken for granted that our creature or thing was one in the same — that is to say, the same individual. But somewhere along in the dark hours, between fitful hours of half-sleep, I realized that I might be guilty of jumping to one very erroneous conclusion.
It might not be an individual at all. What if it was a cult, or some Satanic society working to some sort of other-world calendar that dictated that mutilations and murders be carried out according to some sacred order? Under most circumstances, I would have reached over and turned on the light and uttered this new thought into my voice recorder, but with B.C. just finally drifting off into an untroubled sleep, I was afraid it would wake her. Luckily, the fringe-area thought stayed with me till the dawn.
All of which leads to the lady they call Widow Austin. How, I asked myself, would this cult or group or whatever know what was going on? Given that, how did they select their victims? Or was it a random thing, mere vagaries of fate? In the cases of both the incidents at Battle Harbor and the Coalition commune, they were able to perpetrate their crimes because they were able to isolate their victims — in both cases, youngsters without adequate supervision. But the question still remained, did they have some sort of advance notice about where these children were going, or were these nothing more than terrible coincidences when the victims stumbled into their grasp?