Richie was shaking his head. “But, Dad, he’s not dead, he’s alive.”
Roy frowned. “I told you, Richie. Your friend here died hundreds of years ago.”
The boy winced in thought, obviously confused. “So is he still alive? Or is he alive again? Like Dracula or Jesus?”
Right now Roy could really use another highball.
But instead he just got to his feet, pointed toward the stairwell, and said, “Never mind any of that. Out. Oh-you-tee. No more talk! And stay out of this attic.”
The boy appeared to be on the verge of tears. “What about the Olympics? I’m in training!”
The father closed his eyes, sighed, opened his eyes and said, “You can come up here when it’s daytime... but stay down at the mini-gym end, okay?”
“Okay.” Then Richie came back and spoke with a heart-breaking earnestness: “But I’m trying to tell you about my friend.”
“What about him?”
“That he’s alive! Dad, you need to listen.”
“I am listening.”
“No!” The boy lifted the stethoscope around his neck by the chest piece. “You need to listen through this.”
Roy shook his head. Pointed to the stairs. “Out!”
The boy frowned. “Boy! Some doctor you are...”
Officer Fred Dickson, making his final sweep of the night of the exterior wall, got to thinking — that yipe had sounded canine. Not some bird or bug or “beastie,” either...
Maybe, the slender cop thought, I better check on Buster...
Flashlight in hand, he went to where the metal stake held the animal’s chain in place, finding no sign of the dog. And Buster wasn’t over at his water and kibble dishes by the wall, either.
Yet the chain stretched toward the trees, pulled fairly taut.
Working his flash’s beam on the ground, Fred followed that chain as if it were a pointing finger. And that pointing finger led to the Doberman, sprawled on its side at the edge of the woods under the overhanging leafy branches of the big Magnolia tree. The dog’s eyes were open but unseeing, its tongue draped out of its mouth like a slice of rare meat.
The officer crouched by the beast, inspected it, found it dead all right, not just sick or drugged, but with its neck at an impossible angle — good Lord, could hands have broken that sinewy neck? — and then rose and stared into the timber. Seeing nothing, he craned his neck and sent the beam up the trunk and into the leaf-thick branches and a dark shape came down on him, like a one-boulder avalanche.
The flashlight flew from Fred’s fingers as he hit the ground hard, where he tried to get the thing off him, off his back, trying to squirm out from under, and when that didn’t work, he bucked and bucked and finally the thing rolled off. Then huge hard savage fists were pummeling his knees and thighs, and he swung fists down into what appeared to be a torso and bushy-haired head and not much else, getting grotesque glimpses of his opponent as the bizarre fistfight traveled in and out of the fallen flashlight’s beam.
And in one horrible moment Officer Dickson got a good look at the half-man’s face and it froze him just long enough for his fierce, stubby opponent to go scrambling off into the darkness of the wooded area.
Lou Rawley came running up, the pudgy cop breathing hard by the time he got to his partner, who’d fallen to his knees.
“Fred! What in hell happened?”
His partner was panting. “That... that thing came right down out of that damn tree and landed on me!”
“What thing?”
The officer shivered. “I don’t know... I really don’t know... Just... it was some kind of a... hell, I don’t know what it was!”
The pudgy officer helped the skinny officer to his feet and asked him, “Are you okay? You need me to rustle up the doc? Or get you to an emergency room...?”
“I’m... I’m fine. Well, not fine, but... just bruises and some nicks and, Lou, I am freaking out!”
Lou slipped a supportive arm around his partner’s shoulder. “Take it easy, boy. Now. Describe what attacked you.”
“It was big. And small...”
Lou made a face. “What?”
“Look, I just caught glimpses of it. I dropped my flashlight, right at the start, and mostly we fought in the dark. But he was no bigger than this.”
Fred held a hand up to his mid-thigh.
Then the young cop went on: “Came down on me from that tree. Dropped right on me!”
Lou grinned, but an uneasy grin. “Musta scared the living hell out of you — that’s natural, even as light-weight a little guy as he must’ve been.”
“Oh, but he wasn’t light — he was heavy as a ton of bricks, man. Shoulders out to here! He flattened me. Whatever it is, it’s a strong son of a bitch. Take a look at Buster and see.”
Lou did that.
The older cop came back with all the blood drained out of his face. “It must be strong if it could do that to a Doberman.”
“He has to be.”
“‘He?’ You said ‘it’ before.”
“That was no animal. No monkey or ape, either. That was some kind of person.”
Somehow Chief Blake Cutter wasn’t even surprised finding himself in the middle of the night seated on the couch at the Ryan place with Helen Ryan perched between him and her husband. The woman was in a pink dressing gown and, even at this hour, woken from bed, with no make-up on at all, her hair a blonde tangle, she was strikingly beautiful. That doctor ought to get his act together and woo this doll back.
But that wasn’t any of Blake Cutter’s business — the murderous attacker terrorizing this place was.
Helen had a nine-by-twelve-inch sketch book in her lap and a charcoal pencil in her right hand, acting as police artist while the still somewhat shell-shocked Officer Dickson described what he’d seen.
The lanky young officer had already received a post-attack check-up from the doctor, who found nothing but some contusions and a few scrapes — nothing, anyway, that some soap, water, Bacitracin, and a few bandages couldn’t handle.
Helen turned her sketch in the pad around toward the young cop, who sat nearby in a straight-back chair. What she’d drawn was an excellent depiction of something terrible — a figure with long stringy yet bushy black hair, a round, grooved, flat-nosed, scruffy bearded face with dark eyes under a shelf of forehead where big shaggy black eyebrows dwelled. Wide mouth, irregular teeth. Broad shoulders and a well-developed torso all in black — a sweater possibly, large bare feet, toes spread out, hands the same, splayed and sharp-nailed.
Helen asked the officer, “Is that about right?”
“Yes... I only saw flashes of it, but... yes.”
“No sense of legs?”
“No. Feet, but no legs.”
Cutter leaned out and, speaking across Mrs. Ryan, asked Dr. Ryan, “Does that tally with what you saw, Doc?”
A fire was going in the fireplace and all of them were serving as screens for the reflections of flames making abstract art of them.
Ryan nodded slowly but repeatedly. “The officer here got a better look than I did, but... yes. What Helen has drawn is an accurate representation of what I saw.”