“What did you do?”
“Nothing I could do. Not really. A week later, another house in French Village was emptied and nary a clue as to why. Just them muddy prints again. During the course of the next month, two more families vanished in the dead of night. No screams, no nothing this time. Other than that muddy spoor, the only thing that remained constant was that in every case there were clear indications of very recent occupancy—beds that had been slept in, coffee poured and never drank, cigarettes burned down in ashtrays. In one case, a shower had been left running as if someone had stepped out to grab a bar of soap. Then, quick as it had all started, it stopped. People were plenty scared by then. Those that were left moved out. Only Buckner stayed… all alone out there in that ghost town. And one night, well, he went missing, too.”
“What happened?” Hyder asked.
“Not a damn thing. The investigation continued for years in one form or another, but finally we closed it. We didn’t have a thing to go on. But that wasn’t the end. About two months after the town emptied, a public works electrician over in Haymarket was down in the sewers where the mains were run and he found something. It was the partial skeleton of a dog, a length of chain still hooked to its collar. It had tags and they placed it as being the missing shepherd of that first family. The state crime lab boys went over the remains and came to the conclusion that the dog had been eaten and had died sometime during the process. There were teeth marks in the bones and the marrow was missing. They never identified what sort of animal had done it. Not to this day. Of course, what I’m telling you never made it into any newspaper. Sometime later, a couple boys were hiking along a Wisconsin Central spur in the Pigeon River Forest about two miles from here and they found a bone. They thought it was part of a bear or deer. The police ended up with it. Crime lab said it was a human femur.”
Hyder swallowed uneasily. “Was it—”
“Eaten? I don’t know. I don’t think I honestly want to know.”
Kenney stood there in the musty gloom, dragging slowly off his cigarette. “So what are we dealing with here, Sheriff? Let’s get our hands out of our shorts and get to it—what the fuck is out there?”
But Godfrey just shrugged. “Who really knows? All I’m saying is that this place has a history, Kenney, a bad history, and things happen out here and sometimes reason doesn’t exactly hold up or throw any light on it. This is one of those dark corners of the world you hear about, a place where things are distorted, askew. This place has been like a cancer for far too long and maybe we’ve been afraid to cut into it for fear it would spread. Well, that’s done now. We don’t have a choice. But you’re the guy with the knife and, brother, you can have it. Because once you start slitting this ugly mess open, I don’t envy you what you might find. Some logs, Lou, they just weren’t meant to be rolled over.”
14
Kenney, of course, had more questions and wasn’t too polite to voice them, but he got nothing from either Godfrey or Hyder. They hopped in the sheriff’s cruiser and took a ride maybe a mile down the road past a few abandoned farms and their requisite decaying buildings until they found a small farmhouse with a wisp of smoke coming from the chimney.
They stood on a dilapidated porch that groaned and creaked, pounded on a door that shook and trembled. Tarpaper flapped in the wind. A crow cawed mournfully in the sky. The door finally opened just a crack and then exploded wide as if it had been kicked.
“What in the name of Christ do you want here?” an old woman’s shrill, grating voice demanded of them. She couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred pounds dripping wet and probably not even that much. Even though she was as frail as a bag of twigs, she was grizzled and hard, her face a toothless maze of wrinkles. Two yellowed, bony claws held a twelve-gauge Ithaca pump nearly as big as she was. “You’re on private property, you sonsabitches, so get on your way and get now!”
Godfrey said, “Miss Elena… it’s me, the sheriff.”
She scowled, adjusting the spectacles on the plug of her nose. The shotgun lowered maybe an inch. “So it is, so it is. And that there… yes, it’s Daniel Hyder, Carolyn’s boy. And not one stick brighter either.” She looked to Kenney. “And you… hmm… nope, you ain’t from around here. You don’t have the look of a local. I can smell the city on you, son.”
They followed her into a cramped, but tidy living room. An ancient Jungers double-burner oil stove percolated in the corner. The air was warm and greasy. The furniture in there had been old forty years before. To call any of it “antiques” would have been gracious.
“How you doing, Miss Elena?” Godfrey asked, because with old people you always had to ask that even though you very often regretted doing so.
She offered him a very stark laugh. “How am I doing? Shall I catalogue for you the ways this old body has shat on my doorstep in recent years?” She laughed again. “How am I doing, he asks. What a thing to ask an old bat like me.”
He swallowed. “Well… how are you doing?”
“I’m doing for shat, you idiot. But every day above ground is a good day, my father always said. And I’d rather be looking at the dandelions from above than the tree roots from below.”
“That’s funny,” Hyder said.
“Well, sit the hell down,” she commanded. “You fancy a drink? Something hard and hairy?”
Kenney was going to say, no, not on duty, but the sheriff’s look told him it wasn’t wise to decline what hospitality the old woman could provide.
“This is Lou Kenney,” he told the old lady. “He’s the chief investigator with a crime scene unit from—”
“I don’t give a fancy shat if he’s your goddamned lover, Mathew Godfrey,” she said, leaning the shotgun in the corner by a stack of yellowed papers and surveying the lot of them with an evil, impatient look like the devil deciding on whose soul to harvest first.
“Lou, this here is Elena Blasden.”
Kenney was just looking at her, thinking this old girl was really something.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said.
She scowled at him. “Like hell you are.”
There was a smell of wood smoke in the air, a sharp and bitter odor ghosting just beneath it. Kenney watched Elena Blasden cross the room and pull aside a set of dark curtains he assumed led into a bedroom. But it was no bedroom. Just an alcove with stacked, fresh-cut kindling and… a still. It sat atop a homemade rock firebox, a capped iron boiler with coiled metal tubing leading into a wooden barrel. There was a drain tube at the bottom of the barrel, a quart milk jug under it filling with a steady drip. The old lady took out four jelly jars and put about two fingers in each.
“Have a taste, gentlemen,” she said. She took a good pull off her own and color swam into her pale cheeks. “Good stuff. A little weak, I’m supposing, but it’ll put iron in your pants.”
Kenney raised his glass, studied it. The smell was enough to peel paint from metal. He took a swallow and his stomach badly wanted to throw it right back out, but he held it down deep while it burned there in a knot of acid, sending out hot fingers in all directions. And the longer he held it, the better he felt. It was like a broom inside him, cleaning up, sweeping away anxiety and uncertainty and fear. It did a body good.
Hyder gagged and the sheriff winced like something with teeth had hold of his privates.
“We’re here,” he managed, “to, to—”
“I know why you’re here, Sheriff. I might be old, but I ain’t blind and I surely ain’t deaf nor stupid. Soon as I saw that tractor plowing a line through Ezren’s fields, I knew there would be trouble same as you did. Progress.” She turned and spat into a bucket by the stove. “That’s progress for you.”