Black Mountain

EIGHTEEN

Matt swivelled in the driver’s seat so he could see both Sarah and Charles. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘we tell them that we’re working for Chief Logan, and that it’s absolutely vital we psychologically assess the Jordan woman.’

Charles didn’t look convinced. ‘What happens if they want to check us out and they call Logan direct?’

‘C’mon, with my honest face? Trust me, it won’t happen.’ Matt reached into the back seat to punch his friend in the arm. ‘Stop worrying, buddy, just leave it to me.’

Charles batted Matt’s hand away. ‘Sarah, what do you think?’

Sarah shrugged. ‘Might work. Besides, I can’t wait to see the magnificent Matthew Kearns in action.’ She did her best hillbilly impression. ‘After all, we small-town folk get the wool pulled over our eyes on a daily basis by you big city folk.’ She winked at Charles and motioned with her head towards Matt. ‘Prince Charming here shouldn’t have any trouble at all.’

Matt climbed out of the car and took several deep breaths. ‘Let me do the talking.’

The hospital’s enormous front desk looked to him like the Great Wall of China — imposing and intimidating. Behind it sat several woman, talking to visitors or patients, taking calls or doing paperwork. They looked very professional and very busy. One woman glanced up and caught Matt’s eye. She was a small mountain of flesh with a face hard enough to drill teeth. She wasn’t smiling, and probably hadn’t for decades. Matt looked around for someone else to talk to, anyone but this woman. She saw straight through him, he could tell.

He stopped and half-turned to Sarah and Charles behind him. ‘We’re dead.’

Sarah pushed past him. ‘Hi Martha, how’re the boys?’

To Matt’s amazement, Martha the ogress immediately transformed into Martha the friendly mommy.

‘Sarah Sommer, I didn’t see you there. The boys are both fine. Josh is thinking of staying on at school, maybe even going to college; and Luis is still happy fixing cars. But what are you doing here? Nothing wrong, I hope?’

Sarah smiled and leaned on the desktop. ‘I’m fine, just come to visit a friend — Amanda Jordan. Can I see her today?’

Martha typed something on her keyboard, then pulled a face and looked back up at Sarah. ‘Well, I suppose you can visit, but I doubt you’ll be chatting much as the poor thing’s still unresponsive. No sign of her husband yet either… such a shame.’ She leaned forward slightly and lowered her voice. ‘Run off after a fight is what I heard.’ She nodded sagely, then looked past Sarah to Charles and Matt. ‘Are you all together?’

‘Sorry, Martha, yes,’ Sarah said. ‘These are friends of mine from the city university — meet Charlie Schroder and Matt Kearns. Matt here is actually a UNC Asheville alumnus.’

‘Really?’ Martha reached out a large hand. She held onto Matt’s a bit longer than he’d expected and looked deep into his face, the ogress returning for a second. Matt smiled at her, but it felt like a chimpanzee grin, showing every tooth in his head.

‘Room two-oh-five,’ Martha told Sarah, ‘left out of the lifts. Just pick up any hallway phone and ask for me if you have any trouble, dear.’

‘I will, and I’ll keep a lookout for Josh if he makes it onto campus,’ Sarah called back as she headed for the lifts, Matt and Charles following like docile children.

In the lift, both men relaxed. Sarah gave them a look that was a mixture of satisfaction and amusement. Charles folded his arms and gave Matt a mock stare of deep scepticism.

Matt laughed and leaned back against the elevator wall. ‘C’mon, Charlie Brown, did you see the size of that woman? She was terrifying.’

The lift doors slid back, and they walked quickly down the pristine white corridor, stopping at a door with a small glass and mesh window. Sarah briefly peered inside. ‘Okay, come on,’ she said, and pushed the door open.

Amanda Jordan lay on a cot with two pillows behind her head. Feeding tubes trailed from her arm, and a bag of yellow fluid lay under her bed. She was tiny and bird-like, her face drawn, her blue eyes staring glassily at the ceiling.

Sarah picked up the chart clipped to the railing at the base of the bed and picked out details. ‘Age twenty-six, physically and psychologically catatonic, mild muscle rigidity, no facial twitching, no involuntary or dyskinetic movement.’ She ran her finger down the page. ‘Dry-eye treatment, apply saline drops every twenty minutes, fluid induction… Basically, guys, the poor girl is a zombie. Why are we here again?’

Matt walked quickly to the door and opened it, looked up and down the corridor. He let it swing shut, then nodded to Charles. Charles stepped closer to the bed and pulled something from his pocket.

‘One of the strange things about human beings is that scent perception is directly linked to the part of our brain associated with memory and feelings. It’s been proven that smells can trigger memories almost instantaneously.’ He looked at Sarah. ‘Like when you smell chlorine and immediately remember summer days spent at the swimming pool, or baking bread reminds you of your grandmother’s house? Well, those links remain embedded within your brain’s limbic system, ready and waiting to call up a memory or a mood.’

Charles opened his hand to reveal the small sample bottle with the ragged piece of hairy flesh inside. He uncapped the bottle and waved it under the young woman’s nose. Nothing.

He moved the bottle closer, almost covering one of her nostrils. The effect was both startling and terrifying. Amanda Jordan sat up, her eyes bulging. Her mouth opened wider than seemed humanly possible and she screamed — a wail of sheer terror that bounced around the walls of the small room.

Sarah put her hands over her ears and gritted her teeth. Matt clamped a hand over Amanda’s mouth and shouted to Charles, ‘Put it away.’

He grabbed her shoulders and tried to push her down onto the bed, but it was as if her body was electrified. The intravenous needle in her arm began to lift, threatening to tear through her skin. Matt threw his body across hers, trying to use his weight to force her back. Charles, who had recapped the bottle, lunged at her flailing legs. But once the odour was gone, it was if a fire alarm had just been switched off — calm returned and Amanda Jordan sank back into her zombified state.

Matt and Charles stood up slowly, both breathing like they’d just completed a marathon. Charles started to laugh nervously. Matt put his hands on his hips, still gasping, his face clouded.

‘Are you insane?’ Sarah said furiously. Her face was bright red and her hands were shaking. ‘That poor woman looked like she was going to have a heart attack. And if you two idiots expected that stunt was going to bring her out of the catatonia, you failed miserably.’

Charles held out his hands, palms up. ‘But don’t you see — we couldn’t have got a more positive response to the sample. We can conclusively say that whatever happened to Amanda Jordan on that mountain, it involved the creature this piece of flesh came from.’

Sarah wasn’t mollified. Charles took her hand. ‘Look, I’m sorry if that was a little more… extreme than we expected. But she’s the only person who’s seen this thing and is still alive. We just needed to make sure.’

‘But why?’

Matt looked down at Amanda. Her terror mirrored his own. He knew he’d been letting his fear rule his life. He’s been running from it, but now here was an opportunity to face it. He couldn’t let the horror continue. It had to stop. He drew in a shaky breath.

‘Because,’ Matt said slowly. ‘We need to… I…’

Sarah withdrew her hand from Charles’s. ‘The Dome?’

Charles nodded. ‘Yeah, the Dome. We need to go up there.’

Markenson exploded with laughter. ‘A fucking big gorilla?’ He clapped his hands together and leaned forward, almost directly into Matt Kearns’s face. ‘That’s what you eggheads think is responsible for the missing people?’ He frowned with clownish puzzlement. ‘Where’s the ship?’

Kearns looked confused. ‘What ship?’

‘The space-fucking-ship, Daffy. Maybe it’s really an a-lee-yan from outta space.’

Logan banged a large hand on his desk. ‘That’s enough, Markenson.’

‘But, Chief, this is a serious investigation,’ Markenson said. ‘And these experts of yours spend days working on it only to tell us we got some sort of big monkey loose in the mountains. I coulda got that sorta advice from one of the drunks down at the Thirsty Bar any Friday night.’ He leaned over Logan’s desk. ‘For the record, I checked with Kringle Brothers a week ago, and guess what? No missing ape. Besides, we were just up there in the mountains ourselves, and we sure didn’t see no fucking big monkey.’

Kearns looked at his two colleagues and motioned with his head towards Markenson. ‘Any guesses why at his age he’s still only a junior officer?’

‘You smartass prick!’ Markenson leaped at Kearns.

Schroder stepped between them and copped a finger in the eye.

Logan got to his feet, felt his chair tip backwards. ‘That’s enough!’ he roared. ‘Markenson, you ever go to assault a citizen in front of me again and you’ll be pulling graveyard shifts until you’re fifty. Understand? Go and find something to do, now!’

Markenson glared at his commanding officer, then pushed open the door. Logan could hear him swearing as he threaded his way through the desks in the outer office.

‘I’m assuming he’s not allowed to assault me when he’s not in front of you either, right?’ Kearns said.

Logan rested his hands on his desk and hung his head for a moment, exhaling wearily. He looked up at the three scientists. ‘You know who runs this office?’

Schroder jumped in. ‘We’re sorry, Chief; you do.’

‘No, son, not even close. The mayor does.’ Logan picked up the notes on the DNA matching that Sarah Sommer had handed him. ‘I got a lot of technical information here I can’t understand, and a tooth that even I can see is older than Moses. I take this to the mayor to get the money for a full-scale search and by next year I’ll be working security out at the mall.’ Logan righted his chair and flopped into it. ‘A Gigantosaurus! Jesus Christ, couldn’t you have at least said it was another lion; or a psycho running around in an ape suit? A psycho we can understand, but a giant ape thing?’

‘That’s Gigantopithecus Chief,’ Schroder said, ‘and the evidence is almost irrefutable.’

‘Aw, c’mon,’ Logan said, flicking the papers, ‘this is bullshit. Anyone else hada brought me this theory and I’d be kicking their ass six ways to Sunday.’ He looked at Sarah. ‘You go along with this? You’ve seen this irrefutable proof?’

Schroder reached into his pocket. ‘Actually, Chief, we were just in at —’

Sarah cut him off with a glare before turning back to Logan. ‘No, Bill, I haven’t seen all the proof yet, but I trust the biology.’

Logan sat back and exhaled. ‘I’m sorry, Sarah, gentlemen, but it’s not enough. No one but Kearns and Schroder have seen the footprint, my own ME says the forensics are inconclusive, and all you’ve given me is a stack of pages with about a million numbers on them that add up to what you yourself say is fragmented and requires “computer-assisted gene speculation”. I need more proof. I need… I dunno, a witness or something.’

‘Chief, there are no real witnesses because they’re either dead or missing or catatonic,’ Kearns said, sounding exasperated. ‘Look, if we’re right, you’ll wish it was a lion loose out there. The print we saw out at the Wilson farm puts this thing at around ten feet tall and about twelve hundred pounds. It’s big and aggressive and —’

Logan cut in, ‘And freakin’ extinct, according to you. So what’s it doing here now? Where’s it been for the last… what? Million years? Shit, son, where do you hide if you’re ten feet tall?’

Kearns put a hand to his temple, as if he was in pain. ‘I don’t know, Chief, but the answers are probably up on that mountain. I bet this thing has been here before, or something like it — we know the Indians dealt with something similar thousands of years ago. They left us that message written into the stones — you saw it in Amanda Jordan’s photographs.’

Logan shook his head. ‘Professor Kearns, it’s getting colder than a witch’s tit up there. If there is something wandering around on the Dome, the cold is gonna kill it. It’ll drop to twenty below come winter.’

Kearns sorted through the papers on Logan’s desk and pulled out a map with small circles drawn on it. ‘I doubt the cold’s going to kill it. Look at this.’ He pointed to the spot where Amanda Jordan was found, where the cows had gone missing, where the Wilson girl and then Kathleen Hunter had disappeared, then grabbed a pen and drew a connecting line between all of them. ‘Three things leap out at me here, Chief. One, the creature’s making its way down the mountain towards the town. Two, the attacks or abductions are occurring with greater frequency. And three…’ He put his finger on the last circle. ‘It’s almost here.’

Logan held Kearns’s eyes for a moment before looking down at the zigzag line that ran from the Black Mountain down onto the plains and up to the outskirts of his town. It scared the shit out of him.

For the first time in his life, he had no idea what he should do next.

Logan could hear Ollie Markenson, who trailed behind him, still grumbling at being chosen as accompanying officer at this time of day — or night, depending on your perspective. Share the pain, he thought. Being woken at four in the morning wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good time, and usually meant urgent news, bad news, or both.

Martha Oatson came around the reception desk, her face full of concern. ‘She’s awake, Chief, and semi-lucid. Still in shock, and needs a lot of rest, but you did say to call immediately if there was any change.’

Logan nodded, but didn’t slow. ‘You did the right thing, Martha. She’s the only witness we’ve got.’ He looked back over his shoulder as he headed for the elevators. ‘She okay to talk? We got a lot of questions for her.’

Martha clasped her chubby fingers together as she hurried to keep up with him. ‘Yes, but keep it simple, she’s suffering from severe distress. I don’t think she knows what happened to her husband. She’s asking for him. Also, I’m supposed to contact her next of kin to tell them she’s awake but I can’t get onto anyone.’

‘Leave that to us, Martha,’ Logan said, standing close to the elevator door to stop the nurse entering with them. ‘She probably knows more than she thinks.’

When the doors slid closed, Logan turned to Markenson. ‘Get onto the Jordan brothers, Markenson, and inform —’

‘Ahh…’ Markenson cut in, pulling a pained face. ‘I was meaning to tell you, Chief. The Jordan brothers were in town just a few days back.’

Logan frowned. ‘What, all of them. Big Will too? Are they still here?’

Markenson shrugged. ‘Maybe… I mean, yeah. They were all kitted out… heading up the Black Mountain’s hiking track, I reckon.’

‘Jesus Christ, Ollie, and you let them go up there? How long ago?’

Frustration flashed in Markenson’s face. ‘I dunno… three days maybe. Look, Chief, you know the Jordan brothers — they’re around two-thirty pounds each. You want to stop those guys doing something, you need a freakin’ riot gun and twenty square feet of cargo netting.’

Logan exhaled with exasperation. ‘Shit. We’ll worry about them later. Let’s see what Mrs Jordan recollects first.’

Logan was shocked by the change in Amanda Jordan. The woman looked like a small, stringy bird; the skin of her face was chalky, her hair lank and greasy. Her eyes, red-rimmed, stared down at her hands, which lay palms up on the bed. The room smelled of antiseptic and an animal, ammonia odour that suggested fear and distress.

Amanda Jordan looked up when she became aware of the two officers. ‘Have you found him?’

Logan pulled a plastic chair to the bed so he could talk to her eye to eye. Take it slow, keep it non-threatening, he told himself. He didn’t want to increase her stress levels. On the other side of the bed, Markenson stood with his arms folded, looming over the tiny woman. Obviously, he wasn’t reading from the same rule sheet as his boss.

‘We’re still looking for your husband, Mrs Jordan,’ Logan said, ‘but we need your help. Anything you remember — about the place, what happened, anything at all, even if you think it’s silly or insignificant, we’d like to hear about it.’

Her mouth turned down, like a carnival clown’s. ‘He’s still up there then… with it.’

‘It?’ Markenson had dropped his folded arms.

‘He saved me. He let it get him instead.’ She began to sob loudly.

Markenson leaned forward. ‘Was it a lion?’

She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut.

Logan took one of her pale hands in his large paw. ‘Tell us what you saw, Amanda. What’s the it you’re talking about?’

She opened her red-rimmed eyes and he saw the horror in her stare. ‘The monster.’

In the elevator, Logan looked at his watch: nearly 5 am. It would still be dark for a while yet. He contemplated going home and trying to get another hour’s sleep. But knew that he’d never switch off enough to really rest.

The monster got him — oh good Christ. This was turning out to be a nightmare, and he was right at the centre of it.

Logan’s mind turned over. He needed to get a team up there, but still didn’t have anything sane enough to take to the mayor. Perhaps he should listen one more time to those crazy theories Sarah Sommer, Kearns and Schroder had put forward. Then there was the problem of the Jordan brothers out on the peak — he felt a deep fatigue at the thought of trekking up the Dome to find them. Besides, Markenson was right: each of those boys was big enough and bad enough to hold a bull out to piss. They were probably armed to the teeth too. If anyone was going to be all right up there, it was them. Still, should probably close the hiking track for a while, he thought, satisfied there was one activity he could implement right away.

As the elevator doors slid open in the hospital foyer, he saw Martha standing there waiting for him. She handed him a sign-out sheet. ‘So, next of kin? Be kinda nice for that girl to have some company right now, Chief.’

‘Yeah, Markenson’s on it,’ Logan replied. He started for the door, his mind already onto another problem.

‘Maybe Sarah Sommer could come back and visit with her in the meantime,’ Martha said.

Logan froze, then turned. ‘Come back?’

‘Yes, Chief — she and a coupla friends from the city came to see Mrs Jordan earlier.’

Logan groaned. He’d bet good money on what those three amigos were planning to do, or maybe already doing. Jesus Christ in heaven, it’d be like Grand Central Station up on that mountain in another day or two.

‘Leave them to me, Martha. Maybe you could ask Mrs Jordan herself if there’s anyone she’d like to see — other than her husband.’

He headed to the door fast. Markenson had to break into a jog to keep pace. ‘What now, Chief?’

‘Well, I’m gonna grab a coffee, have a think, and wait for the sun to come up. You, on the other hand, are gonna break out some cold-terrain equipment for, say, half a dozen officers. Looks like we might have another lion to hunt.’