Nightcrawlers Read online

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  Nightcrawlers © 2014 by Tim Curran

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  1

  The spades sinking into wet earth sounded like axes into soft necks. They rose and fell, shoveling out dirt and exposing roots, stones and worse things.

  As the rain kept coming down, Kenney leaned under the overhang of the old farmhouse and watched the crime scene techs in their dark utilities and yellow rain slickers poking the earth, prodding it, digging into it like farmers working some grim harvest. He dragged off a cigarette and felt the chill and hated everything about it.

  He thought: Eight of ‘em so far, eight goddamn bodies.

  They were laid out under plastic tarps next to the holes they’d been pulled from. Five women, two men, one child. So far. So far. Those two words kept ringing in his head. Eight bodies and here in a rural Wisconsin farmyard of all goddamn places. When he closed his eyes, he saw their ravaged faces that sometimes weren’t faces but discolored, fleshless canvases of bone. And that was all bad enough, mind you, until you factored in the condition of the bodies, the marks on them, and then it became considerably worse.

  Chipney trod through the muck, said, “Eh, Chief, don’t take it so hard. I was supposed to get married tomorrow. I had the week off. You think I’ll get it now?”

  “Not likely, Chip,” Kenney said, blowing smoke into the wind. “Way things look, none of us are gonna be seeing any time off here.”

  Rain ran down the plastic bonnet of Chipney’s hat, dripped off the tip of his nose. “Lieutenant…Lou, shit, I didn’t see the bodies and I don’t plan on it either. But, you know, people here are talking. They’re saying things.”

  “What things?”

  “You know, about the bodies.”

  Kenney flicked his cigarette away. It died in the rain like a shooting star. “What about ‘em?”

  “Well, that they’re not…whole.”

  Kenney looked dire. “They’re not.”

  “And that they look like they’ve been eaten.”

  Kenney felt bile bubble up his throat. “Chip, we’ll discuss things later. For now, just get back out on that road. Keep an eye on those cops. Any goddamn newsies make it in here and I’ll personally shove ‘em up your ass.”

  “I think you might at that,” he said.

  It was a personal joke and they both smiled.

  Chipney stalked off into the rain, the night and wind.

  The area was cordoned off. So far, nobody was really paying attention…but come morning?

  The cops and techs raced around out there like spiders, backlit by flood lamps; the air reverberating with the diesel thrum of the generators.

  Kenney stood there, thinking, thinking. Six hours before he’d been planning on a typical night—a takeout pizza and Monday Night Football—and then the phone rang. Wisconsin Electric had an easement from the county to run a new set of power lines to replace the old string that dated from the 1950s. This new run would cut right through a western fork of the Pigeon River State Forest outside Haymarket and continue across a stretch of abandoned farmland out on Bellac Road. Bellac was a lonesome stretch of abandoned fields, thickly wooded hollows, and gray ramshackle farmhouses and barns falling into themselves, all long abandoned. As the big dozer cleared a path through one particularly blighted field, the blade began to turn up bodies.

  And that’s when Kenney was dragged into it.

  2

  “Hey!” a voice called out. “We got another one over here!”

  Kenney felt his heart drop into the swill pit of his stomach. Of course they did. Before this was over, God only knew how many there would be. Rain in his face, he started over there. The field was a hive of activity, and hour by hour the search perimeter was being widened. Fifty people here now. Seventy by tomorrow…and by next week? Kenney didn’t want to speculate; it made his ulcers flare.

  Rain fell down and cold mud sluiced and the crime scene was a misty, wet envelope of muck. Contact zones were staked and tarped with black plastic sheets. They snapped in the wind, the rain speckling them. Evidence techs were muttering amongst themselves and dropping tagged body parts into cold cans. Photographers were taking still pictures and videos of the carnage. Forensic specialists were collecting dirt and leaves and scraps of material that might have been clothing from the graves, sealing them in evidence bags. It was cold, wet, thankless work.

  Kenney felt something like grease surge in his belly as he approached the young sheriff’s deputy who’d sung out. He was one of about twenty state and local cops who were making a systematic grid search of the area for evidence. In a lateral line, using metal rods, they walked and sank them into the earth until they found a hole or depression.

  Kenney got there quick as he could; wondering why the novelty of discovery hadn’t worn off by now. Moving through that mire was like crossing quicksand. The ground sucked your feet in and if you hit a low spot, you’d go right up to your knee in the mud.

  Spivak, the county pathologist, beat him to the scene.

  Used to suicides and car accidents, Spivak was like a kid in a candy store. A small, sparse woman with auburn hair going gray at the roots and a pale face spattered with freckles, she looked outlandish in her rubber hip waders and black rain slicker.

  When Kenney got there, she was carefully removing mud from a rib cage and pelvic girdle. Wearing plastic gloves, she worked carefully and meticulously, a tech assisting her. There was a dank smell in the air like rotting leaves.

  “What do you got?” Kenney asked after she was pawing in there ten or fifteen minutes.

  “Incomplete,” she said. “No skull, missing vertebrae. I don’t see an ulna here or a clavicle.”

  Kenney squatted down by her.

  She held a grayed femur in her hands like a precious antiquity while the tech measured the zones. She rolled it over with her fingers. It was only partial, shattered at midline. Kenney could see the indentations in it like somebody had been working it with an awl.

  “Teeth marks?” he said, before someone else did.

  She nodded. “The smaller marks…could be rats. It’s really hard to say. But these larger ones…well, I’ve never seen dentition like that before. Not animals in my experience.”

  “Human?” he said, a sickness rising in him.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Human teeth couldn’t gouge like that, at least I don’t think so.”

  Kenney didn’t ask any more questions because he already had the answers. The marks were not from any animal she was familiar with. And she’d seen human bones gnawed and pawed by most predators and scavengers in this region—there was something about a human corpse they couldn’t refuse.

  Kenney wiped cold rain from his face. “Pe
ople are gonna be asking questions,” he said in a low, even voice. “Do you have anything? Even something preliminary?”

  She gave him a blank stare, almost as if she was afraid to say what she was thinking.

  Kenney sighed, staring off in the distance, at the cemetery crowning those low hills across Bellac Road, and thinking that there were more bodies here than over there.

  It was not a very comforting thought.

  3

  The fog held.

  Stirred up by the rain, it drifted in gaseous plumes and near-phosphorescent blankets of white, moving through the fields and forests, spreading and encompassing. An hour after it started, it was thick and almost suffocating and nobody could see ten feet in any direction.

  “You gotta love this soup,” Deputy Riegan said, guiding the patrol car down a twisting, wooded lane, the headlights like glimmering white swords stabbing into the mist. “Can’t see a thing.”

  In the passenger seat, Deputy Snow laughed. “Yeah, and we’re supposed to keep the newsies and the nosy out. That’s great.”

  Riegan moved the cruiser slowly, the front wheels dipping into puddles and potholes that made the whole car rock on its springs. The road wasn’t much, just two dirt ruts with a barrier of unshorn grass between. So far, they had not seen a single newsie or nosy. They did, however, see three deer, several rabbits, and a large meandering porcupine. But that was the extent of it.

  As Riegan drove, Snow stared out his rain-beaded window into the fog.

  Below them was pastureland, mostly overgrown, the forest encroaching from all sides. Now and again, the fog would lessen and he could peer down the grassy hill edging the road and see flooded fields, heaps of rocks, and a broken section of fence or two. There was little else out there.

  “When I was a kid,” Snow said, “we wouldn’t come within a mile of this place.”

  Riegan, not a local, said, “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Spooks, I guess.”

  “Spooks?”

  “Kids’ stories, Dave. That’s how it is out here. You get an abandoned farm and pretty soon kids are saying it’s haunted. You know how it is.”

  “Sure.”

  Snow wanted to elaborate on some of it, but he didn’t dare. He knew Riegan pretty well by this point, but there were some things you just didn’t talk about with outsiders. Not without looking damn foolish or damn backward in your thinking. Riegan was not from Haymarket and he would never think like someone from Haymarket.

  “It was like that growing up in Cleveland,” Riegan said as if he didn’t care too much for the silence in the car. “Every neighborhood had a vacant house and every kid who lived nearby was sure it was haunted.” He laughed. “Kids. That’s all, kids.”

  “Yeah,” Snow said.

  He didn’t believe that for a minute because he was a local and he had been tit-fed the local gossip since he was a child. Very little of it had a place in his life anymore, and his cop’s hard-nosed practicality laughed it off, but it was still there clinging to the underside of his mind. And especially when he woke from nightmares at three in the morning.

  Don’t you dare bring any of that up, he cautioned himself.

  “Piss break,” Riegan said, pulling the cruiser over.

  “I could handle that. Goddamn coffee goes right through me.”

  They stepped out into the chill air and each found a bush to his liking and watered it. Snow had a hell of a time getting his flow to start because inside he was clenched tight as a fist. Though it was cool and damp, he felt warm. His scalp was prickling and his heart was pounding. It was all those childhood tales come back to haunt him. He knew they were all bullshit because they had to be bullshit, yet he couldn’t get them out of his mind for never, ever had he ever thought he would be out here…especially not after dark.

  “Damn that fog,” he said. “Can barely see my dick.”

  “You couldn’t see it anyway,” Riegan told him and they both laughed, nervously, but they laughed. It felt good. For Snow, it was like fingers massaging the kinks out of his neck.

  Riegan lit a cigarette. “Christ, I can’t see doing this all night.”

  “No.”

  “Something bothering you, Rich?”

  “No, I’m okay. Just tired.”

  “I hear you.”

  Snow watched the ground mist gathering around them. It was white and flowing like the steam from a pot, had completely swallowed his legs beneath the knees and was draped in the trees like garland. It made the dark forest beyond seem that much darker, that much more menacing.

  Riegan chatted on about mundane subjects as he finished his cigarette—something that seemed to take forever—and Snow had the oddest sense that he was apprehensive, as if this place was somehow seeping into him, too.

  “Hell was that?” he suddenly said.

  “What?”

  “Down there. Something moved down there.”

  Snow grabbed a flashlight from the cruiser and joined him at the side of the road. He clicked on the light, almost afraid of what he might see, and it reflected back at him. He played it around, a white beam spoking in the whiter mist, but there was nothing really to see. The hillside and its attendant grasses and wild growth descended into the soup. It was like a fog sea down there. Now and again, they caught sight of the shadowy forms of trees, but not much else.

  “Probably a deer or something,” Snow said.

  “No. It was walking upright.”

  Snow felt a chill creeping up his lower belly. The fog subsided gradually and he could see the field down there, still misty and obscure, but visible. Riegan grabbed another flashlight out of the car and started down the hillside.

  “Hey!” Snow said. “Christ, if that fog closes back in, we won’t find our way back to the road.”

  “So you stay there and call out to me.”

  Shit and shit. Snow did not like this. Despite the obvious dangers, he just had a very bad feeling about it that made his stomach do the flip-flops. He watched Riegan go down the hillside, nearly slipping on the wet grass more than once and cussing under his breath. He made it to the bottom and waded out into the fog. He became indistinct and then disappeared completely.

  Snow breathed in and out to calm himself.

  After a few minutes of silence, he called out, “You okay down there?”

  “Yes, mother!” came the reply.

  Smartass. Now and again, he could see his light bobbing around down there, or he’d catch a quick glimpse of a shape moving behind it, but not much else. Shit. He took out his radio and let dispatch know that they were out of the car and what their general location was. In case they got to come looking for us. He waited, pensively, his hand feeling oily on the barrel of the flashlight. C’mon, c’mon, I’m about to have fucking kittens here. The waiting was killing him.

  Then—

  “Hey!” Riegan’s voice came floating out of the fog. “Get down here!”

  “What?”

  “Get down here!”

  Shit, shit, shit.

  Snow started down the hillside, watching his footing, his flashlight beam jumping about as he did so. The only good thing was that the fog appeared to be dissipating some and he had no trouble tracking Riegan down. He was standing on a little grassy mound between two ancient black stumps.

  “Well?”

  Riegan scanned his light around. “There’s somebody out here, Rich. Whoever it is is being real quiet.”

  Snow put his light out there. He saw only the mist, the weird dark shapes of heavy undergrowth and the boles of dozens of trees that seemed to have fallen against one another in a good windstorm sometime in the past. For a second, he thought he saw a hazy shape duck behind one of them.

  “There’s nothing. Let’s go. We should—”

  “Shut up,” Riegan said.

  He panned his light around, turning on his heel in a perfect circle, trying to get a look at something. He was clearly listening and Snow listened with him. For what, he did not know. He
was all for calling this off and getting back up to the cruiser. Enough of this Hardy Boys shit. If there was anyone out here—and God, how he hoped there wasn’t—then there was no way in hell they were going to find them. They could have been hiding just about anywhere. And, hell, it was probably just a couple kids anyway.

  You know better than that. Kids around here would not come out here after dark. They all know better.

  Riegan stopped.

  There was a splashing off to their left. It could have been a bullfrog leaping into a pond for all they knew and it could have been something far worse. Riegan had his light over there. Snow heard a stick break over near the trees. Then another farther off into the fog. Another splashing noise followed by something like the quick drag of a foot through the underbrush or leaves.

  He wasn’t thinking it was kids now.

  He was remembering all too well what was said about this place.

  Riegan came over. “Somebody watching us over by those trees,” he whispered. “I’ll sneak around behind them and flush them out.”

  “There’s more than one,” Snow said. “We better—”

  “No, just wait. I’ll flush him.”

  Before Snow could object, Riegan darted off into the fog behind them. He was going to circle around. This was fucking bullshit. This wasn’t deer season. This wasn’t flushing game on a crisp November afternoon. This was…this was…

  God, he just didn’t know what this was.

  Only that it was bad. So bad that it felt like his entire body was creeping, moving with the consistent hammering of his heart. Any moment now, Riegan was going to make contact with what was out there and he was either going to regret that or Snow himself would.

  The fog seemed to be creeping in, moving in flowing white ghost sheets. Sticks cracked. There were splashing noises. Then something off to the left. The sound of someone walking through the muck in his direction with slopping, mucky sounds like a man walking in hip waders.