“Thank you.”
Albright sat down again and took a pull from the bottle. “Now, maybe you can tell me just how you became a…what was that term they used in the documentary?”
“Enigmalogist. Well, in my case you start by reading every ghost story you can get your hands on when you’re very young and warp your mind in the process. Then you supplement that with Stranger Than Science. And then you start actively searching out real-life enigmas. It wasn’t anything I planned, really—I just fell into it.” Logan shrugged. “A hundred years ago, there were lots of sensational mysteries written about ghost-breakers and occult detectives and the like. Today, it’s kind of a specialized field.”
Albright nodded, took another sip of beer.
Logan had made up his mind to be a little coy with the poet, but realized he was dealing with a shrewd, intelligent man and that the best course would probably be to level with him. “I’ll tell you exactly why I’m here. A friend of mine—a forest ranger—heard that I was staying at Cloudwater. He asked me to look into the recent deaths of the two backpackers over by Desolation Mountain. He doesn’t seem convinced by the official account that the two men were killed by bears.”
Albright nodded again. He didn’t look surprised.
“I’ve talked to the residents of the nearby town, Pike Hollow. They don’t believe bears were at fault, either. They seem to blame the Blakeney clan. And—I’ve been told—they believe the Blakeneys are…well…werewolves.”
Albright’s expression didn’t change. He merely studied the label on his beer bottle.
“And then I heard about you. You were somebody who had grown up here, an Adirondacks native, knew the backwoods like the palm of your hand. But you’d also lived away long enough to gain some objectivity.” Logan hesitated. “In my field, I’m supposed to keep an open mind about everything. But to be honest, I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around this. Werewolves…Anyway, I just wanted to know what your opinion was.”
“My opinion.” Albright put the bottle of beer on the floor beside his chair. “I guess I can sum that up easily enough, too. Logan, I can understand your skepticism. I’ve heard some pretty outrageous tales myself in the twenty years since I’ve moved back. But I’ll tell you something—something you may already know, given your particular line of work. Many times, legends—no matter how outlandish they sound—have a grounding in reality. And in a place as remote and old as the Adirondacks, it may well be that there are phenomena that cold, twenty-first-century rationality can’t fully explain—or even comprehend.”
“In other words, just because I think the opinion of the locals is outlandish, that doesn’t mean I should ignore it.”
Albright nodded.
“What about you? Do you believe the Blakeneys are responsible? Do you believe they could possibly be werewolves?”
Albright chuckled. Then he shook his head, spread his hands. “In the backwoods of the Adirondacks, Dr. Logan, there’s history—and then there’s mystery. I think I’ll get you that beer, after all.”
—
Two hours later, just as the sun was setting and darkness crept over the woods, Logan said good-bye to Albright and got into his rented Jeep. Unable to get any further answers out of the man, Logan had continued chatting with him anyway, and soon found that—beneath the gruff, even coarse exterior—lay an intellect both keen and highly observant. It was interesting, he thought as he started the engine and pulled back onto Route 3A, how different the fellow was from Jessup. A lot of this, he supposed, could be traced to the fact that Albright was a true mountain man, who had grown up deep in the Adirondacks and who, despite his mother’s attempt to get him a “real education,” had clearly never lost the backwoods skills—or, in some ways, the outlook—ingrained in him by his father. Jessup, on the other hand, had spent his childhood in outlying Plattsburgh. The difference could be summed up in the ways the two men viewed nature. Jessup, the Ivy League philosopher, looked at it through Thoreauvian eyes: a cosmic leveler of humanity, something one could hold up as a mirror to the way we should live and view our fellow man. Albright, on the other hand, seemed to look at it in much the way his father must have: something to be experienced and enjoyed, but also an elemental force to be respected…and, when necessary, feared.
Just at that moment, his cell phone rang. Logan plucked it from his pocket. “Yes?”
“Jeremy?” came the faint, crackly voice. “It’s Randall. Where are you?”
“I’m driving back to Cloudwater.”
“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for the last fifteen minutes. How soon will you be there?”
“I guess I was out of cell reception. Less than half an hour. Why?”
“There’s been another killing.”
Logan felt himself grip the phone tighter. “Like the others?”
“Apparently so. I’m heading there now. Step on it—I’ll pick you up on my way past.” The connection went dead.
Logan slipped the phone thoughtfully back into his pocket. Then he glanced out the window, looking skyward through the thick tangle of tree branches. A full moon, bloated and pale yellow, stared back at him, unblinking.
11
Logan had grabbed a duffel bag from his cabin and met Jessup out at the entrance to Cloudwater, eager to avoid offering its residents the spectacle of an official vehicle with a flashing lightbar. Jessup drove fast down the twisting highway, headlights stabbing into the unrelieved darkness. Infrequently, a small blur of habitation would shoot past the windows. In the indirect dashboard illumination, the ranger’s face was set in a grim mask. He turned down one dirt road, and then another, and Logan quickly grew disoriented by the walls of dark trunks flashing past, the canopy of branches overhead. The cabin of the vehicle was silent save for the occasional squawk of the police radio.
“Where was the body found?” Logan asked at last.
“Near Sand Creek. A hunter found it, traveling along a private inholding on an ATV.”
“Backpacker?”
“I don’t know.”
“Near Desolation Mountain?”
“Closer. Five Ponds Wilderness, maybe four miles from Pike Hollow.”
Now Jessup turned off the road onto something that could barely be called a trail, the heavy truck bouncing and floundering wildly over exposed roots and deep ruts, pushing tall grass and saplings out of the way. Ahead, Logan could make out a faint, flickering glow.
And then, quite suddenly, the forest gave way to a clearing. Just before them was a cluster of vehicles—state police cars, Forest Preserve trucks, an ambulance—parked in a rough semicircle, engines running, headlights converging on a single spot. Jessup slowed, then pulled in beside the closest vehicle.
“Stay in the background,” he told Logan. “But keep your eyes and ears open.”
Jessup got out, and Logan followed him as he walked behind the parked vehicles to a spot where about a dozen men were clustered, speaking together in low tones. Another man, apparently a scene-of-crime officer, was unspooling yellow tape around the large perimeter on which the headlights had converged. The full, bloated moon hung over all.
“CSI?” Jessup asked a fellow ranger.
“Inbound from Plattsburgh. Expected at any moment.”
“Any idea how long the body’s been dead?”
“The ME will give us specifics, but I’d guess twenty-four hours, max.”
“Identification?” Jessup asked.
“Nobody’s touching that body until CSI gets here.” This was spoken by a state trooper with two silver bars on his uniform: a large, burly, no-nonsense man who appeared to be in charge. The trooper looked at Jessup’s fellow ranger, then at Jessup, and then at Logan, who was hanging back in Jessup’s shadow. He glared for a minute, then turned back to the man he’d been talking to: a pudgy, white-faced man in a faded army jacket that, Logan assumed, was the person who had found the victim.
Logan looked over at the body, illuminated in the pitiless beams
of the headlights, then after a few brief seconds quickly looked away again. He had seen death before, of course, on numerous occasions, but he had never seen a corpse so violently torn and lacerated. What had once been clothes were now mere strips of blood-soaked ribbons, decorating the surrounding plants like so much crimson confetti. The limbs were broken and cocked at strange angles. Viscera had been pulled from the body cavity and strewn about seemingly at random, soaking the ground in black blood and leaving the chest and peritoneum an empty shell. The face was so shredded as to be unrecognizable.
Sickened, he fell back farther, returned to Jessup’s truck, and stared out at the surrounding landscape. After the bright beams of the headlights, the night forest seemed blacker than ever. He wasn’t sure, but it appeared that the woods beyond the clearing were thinner here. The Five Ponds Wilderness…Logan wondered just how far they were from the Blakeney compound.
Circling around Jessup’s truck, he made his way over the dark and treacherous ground until he came to the edge of the crime scene tape, on the far side from where the others stood, talking quietly. When he was sure the group was ignoring him, he let his duffel slip to the ground and unzipped it. Then he reached in and removed a small device with a digital readout, toggle switches, and a fat adjustable knob: an air ion counter. He held the device out at arm’s length, then swept it in an arc around him, adjusting the knob as he did so. The reading here was barely different from the basal reading he’d taken upon first arriving at Cloudwater: the air ionization was greater by less than 250 ions per cm3. He would also take readings at Pike Hollow and the entrance to the Blakeney compound when he had the chance, but he doubted they would be any more conclusive.
Returning the device to his duffel, he took out another: a trifield EM detector. Once again, he swung the detector in an arc, at last pointing it in the direction of the body and holding it there, carefully observing the analog needle on its VU gauge as he did so. Once again, the readings were inconclusive.
The equipment told him what he had already anticipated. This was not the site of spectral or paranormal activity: what had happened here was all too physical; all too corporeal—the body on the ground before him was bloody, violent proof of that.
Putting the EM detector back into the duffel and zipping it closed, he remained at the periphery of the crime scene tape, still facing the body. As a “sensitive,” a natural empath, he not only had a heightened ability to sense the emotions and feelings of other people, but he could, sometimes, gather a feeling of a place, as well. Normally, this happened when a presence, usually evil, had dwelt in one spot for a long time. However, it was occasionally possible that, when great evil or violence had visited a location even briefly, a vestigial sense of that evil remained—temporarily. Now he closed his eyes, emptying himself of thought and emotion, shutting out the murmur of voices, letting the darkness that surrounded him creep into his mind, waiting for the surroundings, for the dead body splayed before him, to speak; to render up their secrets; to let him know something of what had transpired here.
For several moments he simply stood, mind empty, waiting. And then—abruptly—he went rigid. And he remained so for over a minute until, with a wail of sirens, a paramedic van and two red-painted SUVs—no doubt the CSI team—arrived on scene.
Logan barely noticed. He opened his eyes, and his shoulders slumped wearily. Picking up the duffel, he made his way back to Jessup’s truck, where he got in to await the ranger’s return. He had seen—and sensed—enough for one night.
Because, standing there before the scene of almost unimaginable violence, he had gathered one sensation—and one only. There was a wrongness to this place: something that he could not understand or even begin to fully apprehend. The killer, he sensed, was human—and yet, at the same time, not human.
12
The New York State Forest Rangers Headquarters, Region 5, was an unprepossessing, cinder-block, two-story affair on the outskirts of Ray Brook. It was a few minutes before eleven the following morning when Jessup met Logan at the entrance to the HQ, brought him inside, and took him upstairs to a conference room. It was full of rangers all wearing their distinctive hats, rubbing shoulders with uniformed state police along with a few people in mufti. Jessup introduced him to a tall, muscularly built man whom he identified as Jack Cornhill, supervisor, Zone C, then steered him to a seat in the back of the room.
“I thought I was supposed to keep a low profile,” Logan said. “Here you’re ushering me into the lion’s den.”
“Chance I had to take,” Jessup replied, taking the seat beside him. “The ME’s about to give his report. If anybody asks, just offer up some vague double-talk about research you’re doing for Yale. And do your best to keep away from Krenshaw.”
“Krenshaw?”
Jessup nodded toward the podium, beside which stood the burly state policeman Logan had seen at the crime scene the night before.
“Captain Krenshaw,” Jessup said. “Zone commander, Troop B. His troop covers most of the Adirondacks. As I told you, the whole region is awash in overlapping jurisdictions. But with three unsolved killings now, Krenshaw is sure to take command. He’s a downstater, born and raised on Long Island.”
“How’d he end up here?”
“You’d have to ask the troop commander that. Anyway, Krenshaw is a typical state policeman. He came up through the ranks. Has the imaginative capacity of a snapping turtle. You can guess the dim view he’d take of the rumors you’ve been looking into.”
There was a sudden flurry of activity at the front of the room and a short woman in slacks and a white blouse walked up to the podium, then tapped on the microphone.
“Alice Hannigan,” Jessup whispered to Logan as he pulled out his journal in preparation for taking notes. “Captain of Region Five. She’s the ranger in charge of all eight northern counties.”
“May I have your attention,” Hannigan said briskly. “We’ll do our best to keep this short. I’ll give you a few preliminary facts. Then we will hear a brief overview from Dr. Bryce Plowson, the Plattsburgh ME, regarding the autopsy of the latest victim. Finally, Captain Krenshaw of the New York state police will discuss the investigative procedures to be followed, going forward.”
She cleared her throat, glanced over a few index cards. “The victim has been identified as one Mark Artowsky, twenty-two years of age. When discovered, he had been dead approximately eighteen hours. He was a graduate student, working with a small research team operating out of a disused fire station at the southern edge of the Five Ponds Wilderness. As you know, unlike the two backpackers whose remains were discovered previously, Artowsky was found along the eastern fringe of the Wilderness, about six miles north of the weather station and not quite four miles southwest of Pike Hollow. Any questions?”
When there were none, she yielded the podium to a bald elderly man with heavy spectacles, wearing a white coat over a dark suit. He adjusted the microphone, looked around. “I’ll spare you as much of the medical technicalities as I can,” he said in a high, reedy voice. “First, the good news. As Captain Hannigan has just told you, the body was found relatively soon after death. This meant that a much more accurate autopsy could be performed than on the two men found earlier. Unfortunately, despite that fact, much about this death remains inconclusive.”
Dr. Plowson took a sip of water from a glass at one side of the podium. “Put quite simply, although the attack was just as ferocious and violent as the first two corpses indicated, the size of the puncture marks, and the depth of the wounds, are not sufficiently large as to indicate a bear. A more likely animal would be a gray wolf.”
A wolf. Beside him, Logan felt Jessup stiffen.
“The size and distribution of the puncture marks, along with the uninhibited bite pattern around the neck, are consistent with that of a wolf. The puncture wounds were created no doubt by the maxillae, which then—as is common in dog or wolf attacks—served as anchor points for the tearing that follows when the attacking animal sha
kes its victim. Unfortunately, there is a shortage of literature regarding specific analyses and comparison of lupine dentition and claw marks, so the assessment that a wolf made these bites cannot be one hundred percent conclusive. Besides which, the body is simply in too great a state of dismemberment for the recovery of any paw marks. And it is precisely that dismemberment which adds a further complication to forensic analysis. Normally, a wolf attack—in cases, at least, where extreme aggravation or the protection of cubs was not an underlying cause—would be followed by postmortem feeding. That was not the case here. Instead, the victim’s limbs were severed from the torso with great violence—and in a way inconsistent with the kind of biting, rending behavior we would normally expect from a wolf attack. In addition, the evisceration of the body cavity is extremely unusual. Odontological analysis of the wounds to the limbs and viscera would be helpful, of course, but given the victim’s condition it is almost impossible to establish a useful bite mark protocol.”
Standing beside the medical examiner, Captain Krenshaw stirred. “Excuse me, Doctor,” he said. “Am I to understand, then, that certain aspects of this attack are consistent with that of a wolf, while others are completely inconsistent?”
“That is correct,” Dr. Plowson said. “As I mentioned, the concentrated bite pattern around the neck, and the nature of the puncture wounds, are typical. And yet many things—the mauling of the body, the blunt trauma inflicted upon it, the evisceration, and the lack of postmortem feeding—are not typical of a wolf at all and, in fact, are difficult if not impossible to explain.”
“Could not these wounds have been inflicted by a man, using a weapon such as a butcher’s cleaver, or maybe a winnowing fork?”
The ME pushed his glasses up his nose. “That might account for the lacerations, the way the body was for all purposes torn apart, but of course it would not explain the bite patterns.”