Only then did he dare to look back toward the house. Nobody was giving chase, but something alarming came to mind that only added to the odd goings on at Nekenhalle.
“Wait a minute,” he said to himself. Hardly able to breathe, he placed his hands in his sides to catch his breath. “If there are no cars parked anywhere and the gate is still locked, how the hell did they get here?”
So many confusing things came to mind that he thought it better not to think at all until he could relax and have a clear mind for the battle. Cecil paced in a tight circle in front of his car in the middle of nowhere, where only God could see him. Yet, it felt as if he was stalked by an unseen agent of something more sinister than a bookie or a loan shark. His question on how the house raiders came to travel here without evidence of any vehicle hounded him immensely. The notion of the alternative terrified him, but he was not ready to make assumptions yet, not until he was safe with people he trusted.
Cecil Harding took one last look at the deserted farm that his father inherited and jumped in his rental car to get the hell away from its insidious atmosphere and black sand. Indifferent to road safety, he raced down the road to the Cockran farm to make alarm. Time was against him. Without realizing it, he had been at his father’s house for over an hour after he started up the road from the gate. It left him with little time to get the police out to Nekenhalle before dark, but he had to try.
Finally he came to the Cockran farm entrance. His car kicked up a cloud of dust that drew his way up towards the house. Just outside the barn, he found Nigel Cockran, crouching over another dead thing.
“Oh God no,” Cecil moaned when he saw the old man’s Rottweiler lying bloodied at his feet. Nigel had his hat off in the burning sub, shaking his head helplessly. In fact, he was so distraught that he hardly acknowledged the veterinarian’s arrival. Cecil barely switched off the engine before leaping from the car to meet up with the old farmer.
“Nigel? How did this happen? Let me see. Let me see!” he said as he made haste to where the dog was lying… or what was left of it. “Gee-zus!” he exclaimed when he came closer. The dog had been dismembered and its neck snapped much in the same manner of the dead sheep.
Nigel was numb with sorrow. “If you can do something to save him, I’ll announce the Second Coming, son.” He looked at Cecil for a bit and said, “Excuse me for being a dick, but you look like shit, Cecil. What did your father say?”
The veterinarian felt utterly drained. Nigel could see the young man was in mild shock, his face flushing maroon and his breathing hard, but he kept to the duties of his vocation and gently examined the animal’s injuries.
“You see what I see?” Cecil asked him.
“Yup,” the old man replied. His voice cracked under the emotion of losing such a beloved pet. “And the other one is in the barn.”
“What?” Cecil gasped.
The old man nudged his sideways to gesture what he said. “In there, same.”
“The other dog was also killed?” Cecil asked. “Did you hear anything?”
“Did you?” the old man snapped. “Christ, Cecil, this happened last night while you were sleeping in my house! If you did not hear anything, how do you expect I did?”
“So they were already dead this morning,” Cecil concluded. “Of course. Otherwise they would have barked at me… or chased me, right?”
“Correct,” the old man concurred. “What did your father say that got you into such a mood?”
“What mood?” Cecil asked, wincing at the mangled body of the animal under his hand.
The old man chuckled coldly. “Well, you drive up here, kicking up the dust like a fucking maniac. If that kind of driving comes from a sober man, it can only be one of two moods — anger or fear. And you mentioned that you and your father did not see eye to eye on much, so I assumed it is anger that has you looking like a baboon’s asshole. No offence.”
Cecil got up from his haunches. “None taken. It was not anger that brought me here.”
The old man’s face sank into a more serious expression. “Fear? How so?”
“Nigel, I don’t know what kept you from going up there with me, but whatever you were hiding?” Cecil said with a dark tone. “There is a good reason for.”
“Why? What happened?” the old man pried with some interest.
“My father and brother are nowhere to be found. Gary’s car is in the garage and my dad’s truck stood where it always does, but they were… just gone,” he explained with a glint of horror in his eye. He leaned forward to keep his voice low, so that Sally would not overhear his suspicions. “But there was someone — something — inside the house. I could not go inside alone to look for Dad and Gary, Nigel. I was a fucking coward!”
“Hold on, hold on,” the old man whispered in the same tone to avoid his wife hearing. “You are not a coward for not wanting to go in there. Did you know who was inside or what they intended?” The vet shook his head, so the old man talked on. “Then you would have been bloody stupid to go in just like that, right? Right?”
“I suppose,” Cecil sighed. “I ran like a scared schoolgirl, Nigel, to your farm to call the police.”
“Listen, I did not even cross that goddamn gate. How do you think I should feel then? No, no, my boy. That is Nekenhalle. By local standards, what you did was a testament to very big balls, son. Trust me. Nobody would have walked up there alone like you did.”
“Why?” he asked the old man, pulling him aside into the privacy, and shade, of the barn. On the far end of the wall he noticed that Nigel had salvaged what was left of the two sheep he had lost. Their skinned and quartered carcasses were hanging from steel hooks to be brought into the house and cut up later. “Do you think something unspeakable happened to my dad and brother? Do you think,” his face darkened with distress, “they could be dead?”
The old man glanced at the back door of his house to make sure Sally was not within earshot. “I hate to be honest about this, son, but something unspeakable probably did happen to them, but I would not jump to the ‘dead card’ so quickly. Nobody knows exactly what it is about that place that keeps the natives and locals at bay, so we can never just assume that your family is dead.”
“Have you ever been up there?” Cecil asked.
“Long time ago, somewhere in 1970, I went up there with my father and a bunch of other farmers to look for some miners that went missing,” the old man recounted. “We did not see anything out of sorts. There were no invisible vandals, no beasts, no bad people or natural disasters, but I tell you, there was a darkness as black as the sand that took hold of our hearts.”
“Miners?” Cecil asked.
“You know that hill behind the house?” Nigel asked Cecil. “Did you see that hole?”
“I saw that, yes,” Cecil answered.
“That was a gold mine in the 1920’s. But it was a very dangerous mine, more dangerous than the others. Let’s just say that we did not need to have a cave-in to lose men to that goddamn hill. The natives said that the place was holy, it’s gold not to be trifled with, and that the mountain swallowed anyone who tried to take her gold.” He took a deep breath and looked up in reminiscence. “They even put up totems to mark the territory as ‘cursed’, but you know money. Money has the ability to make smart men stupid and they kept mining there. Oh, here and there, we would hear of another accident, but it was par for the course. That time in 1970, though, was the last time we bothered to look for missing miners. It had become common knowledge that most men who went into the mountain never returned.”
“You think this is what happened to Gary and my dad?” Cecil gulped.