Into the Mind of the Ghoul
10
When the guy first appeared Phil Banner was leaning against the car outside Izzy's eating a hot mushroom and eggs sandwich he hadn't paid for. Not his fault — he always offered, and Izzy always said no — but it still made him feel a little guilty. Not enough to stop him eating it, though, or to keep from going back most mornings. The sandwich was good and thick and not really designed to be eaten with fingers, and the guy with the blood was probably in view for a few minutes before Banner lifted his head and saw him. When he did he watched for a good five seconds, still chewing and not really sure what he was seeing, before he hurriedly put the food down.
The man was walking right down the middle of the street. The road was empty because it was eight thirty in the morning and very cold but it didn't look like traffic would have changed the guy's course. He looked like he barely knew where he was. He was wearing a backpack that looked both new and tattered. He was lurching like something out of a zombie movie, one leg dragging behind, and when Phil took a few cautious steps forward he saw he was also covered in blood. It was dried, or seemed to be, but there was a lot of it. There was a big bump and a nasty gash on the man's forehead, and innumerable other cuts and scrapes across his face and hands. Dried mud covered most of the rest, and just about all of his clothes.
Phil took another step. 'Sir?'
The man kept on moving as though he hadn't heard. He was breathing hard but steadily, the exhales clouding up around his face. In, out, in, out, as if the rhythm had become important to him. As if it was that, or nothing. Then slowly his head turned. He kept on moving forward but looked at Phil. His eyes were bloodshot and he had a couple days' growth of beard. There was ice in it. It had been a long time since Phil had seen a man who looked so cold.
The guy stopped, finally. He blinked, opened his mouth. Shut it again, looked up the road for a moment. He seemed so interested in what was down there that Phil glanced that way himself, but saw only the short remaining stretch of town that he expected.
'Sir, are you okay?' He knew it was a stupid question. The guy evidently wasn't. But it was what you said. You came across a person with a knife embedded in his head — though in a town like this choking on a fish bone was far more likely — you asked if he was okay.
A slow, uneven change occurred across the man's features, and Phil realized it was probably intended to be a smile.
'This is Sheffer, isn't it?' he asked. The movements of his mouth were cramped, as if his face was almost frozen shut.
'Yes sir, it is.'
The smile broadened. 'No shit.'
'Sir?'
The guy shook his head, suddenly looking more together, as if the shambling had been some habit he'd gotten into to keep himself going past the point at which he thought he'd have to drop. Phil realized he looked slightly familiar.
'That's some sense of direction,' the man said. 'Say what you like.' His face crumpled.
Phil saw that Izzy and a couple of local customers were now standing outside the diner, and that a similar audience was assembling across the street in the market's small parking lot. It was time to take charge of the situation.
'Sir, have you been in an accident of some kind?'
The man looked at him. 'Bigfoot,' he said, nodded, and then slowly fell flat on his back.
— «» — «» — «»—
Two hours later Tom Kozelek was sitting in the police station. He was wrapped in three blankets and holding a cup of chicken soup in both hands. He was in the room they normally used for interviewing, on the rare occasions the Sheffer Police had cause to interview anyone, and for storing coats and wet boots and has-no-other-home stuff the rest of the time. It had a desk and three chairs and a clock. It had previously been the kitchen area before that was moved upstairs to be next to the redone administrative space, and had a partially glassed wall that made it look a little like a room in some much larger and more urban law enforcement facility. At least it would have done had the glass not been home to stickers celebrating the town's Halloween parade. The stickers had been designed each year by the school's most talented art student, which was the main thing that stopped the glass partition looking businesslike: either someone had blindfolded the kids before handing them the paints or Sheffer was never going to host any famous hometown museum. Phil Banner had occasionally expressed the opinion that they should get them done by someone who could draw a little. He had been assured that when he had kids he would feel differently. He was going to wait and see.
Phil was standing with Melissa Hoffman. Melissa lived thirty miles away over in Issaquah and worked at the small county hospital there. Sheffer's own doctor, Dr Dandridge, was well liked but older than God and significantly less infallible, and so lately Melissa's tended to be the number they called. She was in her late thirties, not at all bad-looking, and didn't seem to know it. She was happily married to a thick-set guy who owned a small second-hand bookstore and chain-smoked Marlboro Lite. Go figure.
She looked away from the glass window. 'He's fine,' she said. 'Ankle's a bit messed up. Banged around in general. Little bit of exposure, but no frostbite. He's vague on details but from what he said he got most of his big bumps a couple of days ago: if he was going to get concussion, he would have had it already and probably not be here now. He needs feeding and sleep and that's all, folks. He's a lucky guy.'
Phil nodded. He really wished the Chief was here, and not a hundred miles away visiting his sister. 'But the other stuff.'
She shrugged. 'Said he was okay physically. Mentally is another story.' She turned to the desk where the backpack the man had been wearing had thawed. Cold water covered the surface and had dripped through cracks to the floor. She took a pen from the pot on the corner and used it to poke around, holding the bag open gingerly with her other hand. 'This thing is laced with alcohol, and you say he'd been drinking before.'
Phil nodded. It hadn't taken him long to work out why the man's face seemed familiar. 'He was trying to break into Big Frank's late one night at the weekend. I had to request that he stop.'
Melissa looked at the man through the window. He appeared only dozily awake, and incapable of raising a rumpus of any kind. As she watched he blinked slowly, like an old dog on the verge of sleep. 'Did he seem dangerous? Psychotic?'
'No. More kind of sad. Happened to run into Joe and Zack next morning, and they said some guy had been in there all evening, drinking it up by himself. Sounded like the same person.'
'So four days of drinking, most likely nothing to eat, then a stomach full of sleeping pills. The signs for being in a happy place aren't great. Still, he doesn't come across like a crazy person.'
'They never do.' Phil hesitated. 'He said he saw Bigfoot.'
She laughed. 'Yeah, people do, from time to time. What he actually saw was a bear. You know that.'
'I guess.'
Melissa looked at him hard for a moment, and Phil found himself blushing when she smiled. 'You do know that, right?'
'Of course,' he said, impatiently.
Now was not the time for a discussion of what Phil's uncle had once thought he'd seen — or felt, more accurately — in the deep forest way up over the ridge. No one had ever taken that seriously, except perhaps Phil himself, when he was small. His uncle eventually stopped telling the story. More than a handful of towns up in the Cascades had their own local legends and BF displays, and you could buy lattes and muffins from more than one roadside stall fashioned in the shape of a big hairy creature. Not in Sheffer. Around these parts, Bigfoot was bunk. Or, as the Chief liked to put it, BF was a pile of BS. A wellworn lure for a certain kind of tourist town, that was all, and Sheffer wasn't that kind of town. Sheffer was quiet, genteel, and had once been used in the background of a whimsical television series. It had the rail museum and rolling stock. There were nice restaurants, and only nice people came to eat in them. The town wanted to keep it that way. The Chief wanted it most of all.