Chapter 43: Going In
At the last second something told him not to pull in. Like a hot blast to the skull, he jerked the Crown Vic back right, holding the road, trying to come to terms with this thing that was suddenly upon him. He checked the rearview, glad to find the road clear, slowing now to forty, then thirty-five. He scanned the area to his left, vainly seeking whatever had warned him, but of course, came away with nothing. Now he was to thirty miles an hour. A lone highway light ahead hinted of a turn off and he slowed more. There…and he pulled off the roadway to a dirt cut in the high grass growing alongside. Twenty feet in he came to a stop. The lake, he remembered. Odds were, this was another way in. His skin goosefleshed. The earlier drinks he’d downed at his house had, by now, ground away to an edginess that he could deal with. His head felt clear enough; his hands were no longer shaking. He’d already made up his mind: if this was it, this was it. He let his foot off the brake and coasted into the cover of the foliage. Cut the engine. Got out.
It was after three in the morning and he was dressed head to toe in black, replete with ski-mask. Like some TV cat burglar. He looked around to get a lay of the land. Put his hand to his side to feel the reassurance of the Colt. He’d reloaded it before leaving, doubting even then the effectiveness of the weapon if what he’d seen that afternoon was true.
The road (four-wheel trail, actually) curved out ahead around the lake. Night sounds cascaded around him, cicadas, frogs. Somewhere farther in a dog howled, lonesome and strange in the stillness of the night. Unearthly.
Even now he had to ask himself what the fuck he was doing. His plan was simple enough, he was going to pay a visit to Patsy Standish, and afterward…. Insanity, really. The woman would probably try to have him arrested and he almost wished she would. Because at least that way led to some understandable conclusion. He’d probably even be able to write it off to the guys at the precinct. Of course, it would bring to light again his indiscretions with Skate, but he’d deal with that; hell, right now, that almost looked like an agreeable outcome.
But inside, where the fear lived, he knew that wasn’t going to be an option. This was it. Tonight, whatever hell had hold of this place, would pay for all. He pulled the black leather gloves from his back pocket and put them on slowly. He hadn’t prayed in years (had never even felt the need or the inclination since Ed’s death) but now found himself wishing he could. But he didn’t know what to pray for, nor who to pray to. It was late in the game, too late to change directions. He thought it would only diminish him, somehow, if he vacillated. But he still held out a thread of doubt. If he could pray for anything, it would be that he was wrong. Mistaken. Perhaps Skate had had a greater hold on him than he’d ever suspected, and maybe, just maybe, this was the real end of their relationship. Being picked up like a madman by people he’d probably know, had worked with for years. It might ruin his career, but then again, it might save his sanity.
Regardless, he was going in.
He put the keys in his pocket and closed the door. Checked to make sure it was locked. Good. One thing he’d forgotten was a flashlight but he didn’t think he’d need it. The moon was a bloody red eye in the cloudless sky, so bright the trees cast shadows. He walked on another thirty yards down the path and came to the lake. Heard it lapping restlessly against the ragged banks even though there wasn’t a hint of wind. The surface was choppy and disturbed, the whole area colder than it had any right to be. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. Just a little niggling certainty. He continued along, getting his bearings as he went.
The neighborhood was simplicity itself, one road leading in to a grid of parallel streets beyond. He’d checked the map after his first visit and knew it backed up to an undisturbed, wooded area where a creek ran through, doubtless, a future second filing if and when the builders were ever cleared to continue. That area was probably where this trail led; it looked to head in the right direction. If he followed it on down there’d eventually be only one street left between him and the Standish house. He’d already been down that street once before and knew what the back of her house looked like from the neighbor’s driveway which back up to her property.
But of course things looked different in the night than they did at day. Not to mention this stealthy attack was nothing like he’d envisioned at home. No, there he’d simply seen himself pulling into her driveway and knocking on the door. Of course, that had been really no better, considering the hour, but the imperative was there. Tonight was the night. Something had built to a head.
He could feel it.
So…new plan. He’d circle around the back of the property, here in no-man’s land, and play it by ear. It was late sure, but there were plenty enough blue collar workers living back here, who’d probably (in regular circumstances) be leaving for work or coming home. That part didn’t really bother him. If his feelings were right on this place, most people had stopped going to work a while back. He didn’t know how he knew this; he just knew it. Okay. From back here he’d have to cut through a backyard, cross the street to somebody else’s front yard, and from there he’d be in Standish’s backyard. And from there…?
Again, play it by ear.
He thought it through while walking down the thin-cut path and now the lake was behind him almost sixty yards. The trail led in the direction he’d thought, now a straight line back to the borderline of the last street. The houses would be lined up on his left, the creek farther out to his right. He moved stealthily down the gravel path, mindful of the expanse of wooded darkness stretching off on both sides.
The moon was directly overhead, illuminating the path in its red glow, throwing his shadow out behind him.
He looked up from his feet and froze. There were two forms standing nearly forty feet farther along, their hands linked.
Facing his direction.
Sentries, the first word that came to mind. Nowhere to hide, they’d seen him. They had to. Arnold withdrew the gun from his hip holster and settled into a firing stance. Held it up in the same two-handed grip he’d used earlier in the day at the mailman’s. Only difference now, he said nothing, issued no challenge. Stealth was the key here, he still knew that, and he’d hold onto that supposed advantage until he had no other choice.
So they stood facing one another, these three black forms. Two together and the other off down the road, S.W.A.T.-like, with the Colt boring down its lethal line. Nothing moved. He felt the seconds bearing away like the metronome on a piano. Still nothing, no fear, no seeming realization really from the strange two. He crabbed a couple of steps forward, his eyes slit behind the mask, his forefinger like a piece of lead against the trigger.
The forms made no movement, just continued their silent staring as if they’d been doing nothing other since the dawn of time. Completely devoid of characteristics, two vague, linked shadows on the trail. Tenuous at best.
Arnold sidled up a few feet closer, never letting the gun deviate from its line. Sweat had broken out inside his camouflage, wetted his hair underneath the mask. He licked his lips and started up closer. Where he could see them better. However, proximity proved no advantage, the figures were clothed in black, their skin likewise. From his vantage point, now less than fifteen feet away, the only feature he could make out were four shiny red eyes, unblinking, staring his direction. Their heads swiveled as one to follow his motion. Neither spoke, this late night couple, with a cloaked man with a Colt inching up on them. Ready to kill them.
Underneath the blood-red moon Arnold spoke. “Who the fuck are you?” he spat quietly, venomously.
Nothing. Just the laser point of their eyes.
He pointed the gun at head-level to break the hold of those terrible eyes but failed. The two stood like mannequins in a clothing shop, seemingly oblivious to his presence. Then they moved simultaneously and he almost blew his cover. They turned to gaze at each other, their red eyes disappearing into the void as they did so. Arnold scrabbled back to the verge of the trail, pushing up into
the profusion of undergrowth that bulged out of the slight ditch on both sides. A conscious, studied effort not to start firing here and now in this hinterland of oddity. Everything in his primitive mind screaming to shoot, just to start firing and getting the fuck out of there, but his cop-instincts overruling the reptilian as he held his ground, feeling the skeletal poke of branches along his spine.
The couple moved back toward the undergrowth with no word. They simply turned and began stepping away from the man in their path. Within seconds they were to the edge of the trail, and the next, fading like a wave into its black, prickling depths. Two lovers on some eternal stroll.
Arnold was left standing in the road, alone. His shadow stretching to the edge of the deeper darkness they’d descended into. His breath came in tight little hitches. Slowly, slowly, the Colt fell back to his side. There was no sound of motion through the obviously thick undergrowth. Even the cicadas had scaled back. Ten seconds after their disappearance and Arnold was left wondering what, or even if, he’d seen anything at all.
“Oh, fuck…” he whispered. Now his hands began to shake and he hurriedly clicked the gun over to Safety. Lucky for him his nerves had stood and he’d not started firing wildly away at the pair. At the shadows. He moved away from the side of the trail, back to the center. Shook his head. Pure fucking craziness, he thought. What the fuck was that? But it only served to confirm his being out here in the first place. And if he’d gone blasting away everyone in a two-mile radius would know by now. He shook his head and slid the gun back to its place on his hip.
What now?
He almost laughed at the absurdity. He had to continue on. It was writ in his blood now, a sudden realization of destiny. This was it. Come whatever devils from hell it entailed, this was it.
He bent once more to stare into the gloom that had sucked up the pair. Nothing. Might as well have been a figment of the imagination for the evidence they had left behind. He started back up the trail sideways, keeping an eye behind him just in case. Fifty yards farther along he thought he glimpsed a change in the shadows back there but all that was in the past now.
Now there was only Patsy Standish.
He forced himself not to look back. Kept moving steadily down the trail. Up ahead he could see the first house, the cut-in where the asphalt gained the four-wheeler trail. The foliage had thinned this close in and he instinctively bent low, moving forward, his senses alive to any unfamiliar movement. Then he noticed something. Every light in the neighborhood was off, porch and patio, street lights. Nothing but a stretch of black in the night. If the moon had not been so prominent he’d have found himself in utter darkness.
He was at the cut-in. It led out, left, to the last parallel street in the neighborhood with Patsy Standish’s street. In the darkness he could probably sneak down this street with no one being the wiser, but he immediately cast this thought away. Stick to the plan. He continued on along the trail running alongside a haphazard wall of wood and hurricane fences which backed up creek side. He needed a house with no fence (there’d be less chance of dogs), somewhere he could slip through to the front street.
The grass had gone wild back here, but the trail angled off in a sweep to the right, and if he wanted to find a throughway he’d have to leave it and hunt through the high grass. The feeling was not good. It prickled at his instincts but there was nothing to be done for it. So as quietly as possible he slipped off the trail and wove through the underbrush to the line of fences. Even as he did he considered the unavoidable folly of the plan. Regardless of his stealth, he could not pass through the thick foliage silently. He was constantly stepping on twigs in the darkness, their snaps like dry bones, pulling through wired tangles of vines and stickers. At times it felt like he was pulling the whole goddamn place along behind him. But still no dogs. By this time they should have been raising holy hell, especially any belonging to the houses he was closest to. But there was nothing. Well, he’d take it any way he could, even if this did feel like a trap; and he, the bug skirting the edge of a vast spider web. He wanted the gun in his hand but right now both were busy threading through the foliage that seemed almost sentiently against him getting through.
He stumbled in the thick quilt of darkness and found himself pressed against a wood fence. He glanced left and saw only more wood fence. Right, it looked a little better. No more than twenty paces ahead the fence gave out on another yard. Either there was no fence at all or perhaps even a hurricane-style which would prove easy pickings. He inched along the framework, lifting each foot ponderously now in the vain attempt for complete silence. There were still no dogs, no hurled challenges from someone’s back porch. So far so good, he thought ironically.
Ten seconds later found him, hands on the top waist-high rail of a hurricane fence, staring across a dead backyard to the equally silent house thirty feet away. One simple jump and he’d be on the property. From his rough calculations he should be almost halfway down the street in front, not far from Patsy Standish’s backyard once he crossed it.
He sucked in his breath and propelled himself over with his forearms. Landed like a wraith, silently, a bruise of deeper darkness in the sepulchral night. He stared hard at the silent house, straining his eyes under the red moon-glow for any blur of movement. If he got too far in and encountered a dog, well, his cover was blown. It would be end-game before it even got started. He squatted down and tried to lose the thought. He didn’t see anything and that was good. He did, however, unholster the Colt and held it tightly in his right hand. Once again, the less surprises the better.
Something was not right.
Not that everything was wrong already with the entire situation, but right here, in this backyard, something was not right. A siren screamed as much in his head. He thought he heard a noise behind him, somewhere out there past the fence, in the wild miasma of foliage. Something heavy, ponderous, moving in stealth. If he listened hard he thought he could hear a whispering, a barely discernable sibilant rustling of words of which he had no understanding. But perhaps it was nothing. Nerves, he told himself. Nothing was sneaking up from behind.
He turned back to the yard and began inching forward, his eyes never leaving the dark, screened-in porch, waiting for the second a hidden light would burst to life and he’d have to deal with some irate, sleep-befuddled property owner. He almost wished it so because he didn’t think that was how this was going to play out.
And with this thought he stepped on something lying in the grass. Felt his knee on that side give out. Let himself go with the momentum so he didn’t pop something, and found himself a second later face down in the grass, his heart hammering wildly, but thankfully, unhurt. “Whathafuck…?” he muttered, crawling to his knees. The first thought was a kid had left a toy in the yard and he’d tripped over it, but even this he doubted. It had been soft, yielding.
There was a long, black shape sprawled in the grass.
And then he began to smell it. He’d been a detective far too long to be mistaken. The smell of putrefaction. A body releasing itself to the elements. He looked and the moon revealed a ghastly picture.
The body had been here a while, Arnold guessed a week, week and a half. The skin had already blackened and begun to slough away. Bloating had come and gone. The mouth was pulled into the familiar rictus of agony, the eyes fallen in. The sticky sweet smell climbed over the area now, disturbed when Arnold had tripped over the body. He fought hard to maintain a clinical detachment.
What the hell was this guy doing here?
The house took on more ominous portent. Was it empty? And if not, how could someone leave another family member, hell anybody, out here, obviously, for days? Things closed around him. For the first time that day an inkling of the reality of what he’d stumbled across scrabbled through his brain. This was beyond anything in his experience. Something catastrophic was commencing right here, in this neighborhood. It went beyond the mailman, beyond Carolyn Skate. Beyond even Patsy Standish. An engine had been set in mo
tion, something not of this world.
His skin went clammy and wet, kneeling there in the grass under the blood-red moon, squatting beside the body. Again, he wanted to get out, just scale the fence and beat a retreat back to the car. Kill anything that got in his way on the way to it.
But he couldn’t let it go.
It was not for Skate, not for anybody but himself, and even now he didn’t know why. He could feel in his bones the very real probability that he would not see the coming day. He was a man on the last lonely walk to the gas chamber, the electric chair, and with the thought came another, that of acceptance. Free will clicking over to fate. At some point the intersection blurred until the outcome fixed like a rigid piece of machinery in some monstrous engine. There was no going back.
He stood up, backed away from the body. Chanced another look at the darkened shell of the house. It gazed back unflinchingly, mocking his distress, building it up around him. He wondered what he’d find if he went inside; more bodies, the house a cemetery unto itself, or living people sleeping like the dead, unmindful of one of their own rotting away just on the other side of the door? Inhuman, whatever he’d find. Of that he was certain. Something had drained the humanity away from here, stripped back the years to a time of reptilian coldness. A reign of brutal disregard.
No. Fuck the house. Arnold backed away from the body and sidled down to the corner where the hurricane fence met the wall. Jumped over with the same stealth he’d used in the back. Up ahead, twenty, twenty-five feet maybe, the street. Same oppressive darkness. No sound. But there was the feel, the very real sense of expectation, of waiting. Something crouching in the darkness, ready to pounce.
Arnold slunk along the side to the other corner of the house. Fixed himself like a shadow to the wall and scanned the street in both directions. The moonlight was more fragile now, coming in indistinct slashes through an incoming bank of clouds. Still nothing moved, but a burgeoning breeze carried in with this new front seemed to harbor sounds just on the verge of perceptibility. He was reminded of minutes before when the sibilant rustling on the other side of the fence had seemed to do the same. It was no matter.
The next few minutes were crucial. If someone spotted him crossing the street to the neighbor’s driveway the game was done. He thought about the thing he’d shot in the woods that day. How it had gotten up and pursued him like a ghoul from a child’s nightmare. The air seemed to compress around him. In the darkness he bent to be sure he hadn’t missed something.
His sense of direction appeared true. Even as dark as this, the house just cattycornered from where he stood looked like the one that backed up to the Standish house. The same green Ford pickup stood halfway down the drive, pulled over far enough for whatever other car the family possessed to make it by. Distance from here to there about forty yards. At his prime, in high school, he could make it in 4.8 seconds. Just a blink really. Now, what? Five, five and a half tops? A black figure running in a black night, their shadows incongruent for no more than six seconds.
A calculated risk.
He glanced both directions one more time, assuring himself he’d not missed anything, and broke from the side of the house, his eyes firmly fixed on the truck that had become the most important finish line in his life.
The sprint was surreal, thoughtless. He found himself almost immediately squatting down by the driver’s side door of the pickup, his heartbeat barely jibbed by the run. He crabbed around to the front of the truck, its nose situated in a deeper darkness than he’d found on the side. Put his hand on the Colt and counted slowly to fifty.
No approaching footsteps, no shouted challenges.
He peered down the driveway to the backyard. Another hurricane fence the only thing that separated him from the Standish yard now. He could see small trees back there sidling with the breeze. A metal boat on sawhorses provided him cover to within ten feet of the fence. And there he saw the gate. Opened.
An invitation of sorts.
His blood chilled a few more degrees and he stepped through the opening onto the property of the woman he’d come for.
The house was as dark as the rest, just a vague hump bookended on both sides by overgrown hedges. He slunk back into the corner where two six foot wood fences met, an inky black pool at their intersection. Squatted down in the grass. Two windows along the back wall, both curtained, no light filtering along the edges. Farther left an enclosed patio, siding instead of screen. A door. Then to the end with the large hedge and an extension of the wood fence back to the side of the house. He’d try through the patio.
He scaled along the side of the wood fence separating the Standish yard with her neighbor on the left. Moved into the pool of shadow a derelict basketball goal painted on the ground. Outside the patio room a small square of concrete and he walked across it to the door. Tried the knob and found it unlocked. He pushed it open, expecting anything from an assault to a bleeting alarm. Nothing. He moved into the room, closed the door behind him and stood in the cloistered silence. Vague furniture shapes lined the walls, what appeared to be a small table set before a couch. The room smelled unused. A few steps ahead another door. This would empty out to the carport. He put his hand on the knob and turned. Unlocked. He opened the door quietly, peered around the jamb to the carport. As he expected, no light.
But a strangeness hit him immediately.
The screen door to the carport entrance of the house was pulled back, standing out in a vertical line from the wall. Nothing out of the ordinary, really, you’d have to do that when unloading groceries from the car, moving a heavy piece of furniture inside. Or…moving something out. He inched out of the room and along the thin corridor between the house and carport utility room. Then he saw it; the carport door to the kitchen also ajar.
He pulled the Colt from his hip. Nobody slept with their kitchen door open to the night. Not for about the last fifty years.
He eased himself inside and nudged the door shut with his elbow. Nothing appeared disturbed but he didn’t dare turn on a light. Right now he was just another intruder on private property. He passed through the kitchen/dining room to the living room entrance and paused. The couch was knocked askew and there was a general feeling of disorder. There’d been some sort of scuffle. He grit his teeth and went back to the two-handed grip. A hall led out to his right, like the throat of some prodigious beast. He walked slowly down its length, counting off each footstep in the darkness, pausing at each door he came to for the sound of breathing, or something worse.
At the end of the hall his foot went into something sticky. He quickly backed away and cursed himself again for not bringing a flashlight. Total fucking ignorance! Should have left the goddamn whiskey alone, the small voice in his head chided.
He moved into the bedroom. Stood in the doorway listening for a hint of anything though his hyper-alert senses found nothing. He took his left hand off the Colt and made a decision. Fumbled his hand along the wall until he came to the light switch. Clicked it over to whatever grim horror awaited.