Nightcrawlers

6

There were ten of them now, moving through the wet darkness, the beams of their flashlights cutting through the murk like swords. They moved in a lateral line, one arm’s length apart. The country was filled with tall, unshorn grasses and craggy bushes, low swampy dips filled with leaf-covered pools and cast-off branches.

“You wanna be careful where you step out here, boys,” Hyder was saying. “This country can be treacherous. We get a lot of rain like this on top of that clay, sinkholes develop… can suck a man down five, ten feet before he knows what’s what.”

“Just keep your eyes open,” Kenney said, something unpleasant beginning to worm in him now.

Hyder’s eyes were wide in his rain-misted face. “Yeah… strange things happen out this way… a funny place. Always has been. Air’s just funny, maybe, got a… a… negative charge to it, I guess.”

Kenney stopped suddenly, unsure.

“What’s the matter, Chief?” Chipney asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

They kept going. No one was saying a thing. The only sounds now those of boots being pressed into the mud, withdrawn. Kenney placed each foot carefully, half-expecting to trip over a log or twist his ankle in a hole. Ten minutes into it, he started getting real good and it seemed he didn’t have to think about where he was walking or what he might be stepping on, because his feet were on autopilot and they seemed to know. Instinct, maybe.

The forest began to press in closer from all sides. It was black and wet and craggy, the wind making the high branches rattle together like bones. Squat, gnarled bushes formed themselves into unnatural shapes that stood high as a man and broke up the grid search. More than once, Kenney thought the bushes moved out of the corner of his eye, and he was struck by a mad, irrational feeling that they were alive and sentient. Moving, erasing the search party’s footprints, turning everyone around and shuffling them like cards so they would never find their way out again.

Thoughts like that left his throat dry as ash.

Crazy thinking, sure, but he wasn’t blaming himself for how he felt or how the others felt, the way their faces were drawn and tight like the skulls beneath were trying to work themselves free. This place got to a man, and try as you might, you could not put a finger on it. But it was there. In your guts and head, crawling up the back of your spine. Maybe Hyder was right: maybe it was the air. Maybe there was something negative about it, as unscientific as all that was.

I better pull it together here. I can’t let these boys see that I’m scared shitless. But I am. I really am and I honestly don’t know why.

It was like the skin of the known universe had been peeled back and he was looking over its rim, knowing there was something out there in that fathomless blackness that would drive him mad if he saw it.

He figured if he had been alone out there, he would have run screaming into the night.

Again, it made no sense, but it was there, twisting inside him with a bleak sense of expectancy.

Some of the men were getting apprehensive, too. They began to speak in nervous whispers to break the silence. One man hummed to himself. And Hyder, damn fool bastard, he kept running his mouth like a machine with no off switch. Talking about how livestock sometimes would stray out toward Bellac Road and you’d never see them again, except maybe bones that would show up somewhere in a dry wash come July.

He was afraid and Kenney knew it, but he still had little sympathy for the guy.

He was the undersheriff, and according to state law, the second-highest-ranking law enforcement officer in the county, a leader of men. And here he was talking spook stories and getting the troopers and deputies worked up. Kenney had a maniacal urge to punch him right in the mouth.

But that was stress talking.

Stress had a way of rising up, getting big and bloated and angry, looking for something to vent itself on.

And the stress was bad out there. The damp, the mist, the chill breath of night air. The darkness moving around them. Kenney felt it just like the rest. He kept seeing shapes slinking around them, hearing muted sounds like maybe someone or something was trying real hard not to be heard. And it all got to him, laid down low in the pit of his belly in a buzzing, almost electrical mass of terror.

The mist had become a fog that was oozing out of the earth like plumes of smoke. It was thick and twisting, faintly luminous. The bobbing flashlight beams seemed to reflect off it, filling it with surreal moonlike phosphorescence. It climbed their legs and rose higher and higher, blotting out the landscape like a shifting, ominous sheet.

The men had stopped moving. Something was building and they all knew it deep within themselves. Something malignant and nameless, but savagely aware. It made the hairs stand up on the back of Kenney’s neck, made his flesh go clammy and tight. His eyes were wide and unblinking, his voice locked down tight in a flow of black ice.

Hyder, his voice high and girlish, started to say, “Was… was a fella had a farm just south of here and things… things started happening… something got to his cows—”

“Quiet,” Kenney said, the air hot and cold around him. Just air, sure, but suddenly filled with life, with stealthy motion, with something.

Hyder was making a moaning sound low in his throat.

In the tree line off to their left there was noise, motion, activity. Underbrush crackled and sticks snapped and there was a weird rustling sound like a tree being shaken. Everyone was still and tense.

Kenney felt sweat trickle down his forehead, heard a humming in his ears that he knew was the frantic rushing of his own blood. The noises seemed to be all around them now—slopping, dragging sounds. Moving closer, moving away, circling them like a noose. And he was thinking that any moment now, whatever it was, was going to show itself and something buried deep inside him told him that he didn’t want to see it, he didn’t want to look upon it, because if he did, if he did—

Well, he just didn’t know.

He could smell a foul odor like rotting vegetables in a root cellar. A thick and pungent closed-up smell. The stink of damp, secret places and noisome decay.

“Funny sounds,” Hyder said under his breath. “Always funny sounds out here.”

Kenney gave him a look and he shut up. Thankfully. This was all enough without that idiot whistling past the graveyard.

“Chief… sounds like they’re all around us,” Chipney said.

“That’s because they are.”

No wonder Snow had been ready to come out of his skin. It was terrible out here. There was something positively unnatural about this place. But if someone were to ask him what, he couldn’t have told them. The sounds of movement were everywhere… squishing noises, feet stepping through mud and splashing through puddles.

He began to think about what might be out there.

As crazy as it was, he did not think it was other men. At the same time, he did not think it was animals either. What had Snow said? Kind of like a man… but sort of hunched over. That’s what he claimed to have seen. Something hunched over with long arms like an ape.

Jesus, this was insane.

His ears began to pick up other noises and he wondered if he hadn’t been hearing them the whole time. He couldn’t put a finger on it at first, but as it rose up around them, yes, then he knew. Breathing. A wet, congested breathing like a man sucking wind through a mouthful of rotting leaves. It was all around them. And there were other things, too: shrill, echoing sounds, high and weird whispering.

And then, gradually, everything faded into the night, the mist, and there were just the ten of them, silent as monuments, waiting and waiting. There was nothing else to hear. Just rain dropping from the trees. The breeze. The sound of their own heartbeats. The creaking of leather Sam Browne belts.

“Wasn’t nothing,” Hyder said, enormously relieved. “Wasn’t nothing but our own noises turned back on us. Things get funny out here. Fog’ll do it. Sure enough. I was out deer hunting once and I swore something big was stalking me through the woods. But it was just my own sounds. That’s all it was.”

Nobody was buying any of that, but the less said the better.

They moved on and kept tight to one another, navigating around hedgerows and thickets and boggy hollows that threatened to swallow them whole. Nobody was saying much and Kenney knew that one word, just one word from him, and the lot of them would head back and call it a night. But that wasn’t going to happen. Not until he knew what was going on out here.

Scraped by branches and twigs, soaked right up to his knees, he began to see what looked like ancient foundations set in the ground. Crumbled things nearly entirely reclaimed by wild grasses. He saw a wall off to the left built atop a sloping hill, but just a suggestion of it jutting from the earth like rotting teeth. The shattered remains of a tower or silo. A series of cracked, frost-heaved slabs rising from the earth. Grassy mounds like inverted bowls looming around them, things that could not be natural.

“What is this place?” he asked Hyder.

Hyder kept swallowing, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like there was a hard-boiled egg stuck in there. “Was a town here… long time ago,” was all he said.

Kenney saw a vine-covered wall of limestone block set into a hillside, the dark and near-collapsed mouth of a doorway set into it. Off in the woods, there were other shapes, hunched and broken, other blasted foundations and leaning structures caught in tangles of forest.

The foundations became more numerous. Some had elms growing up from their cellars. Others were like seed pots that wild, reaching knots of leafage sprouted from. They stopped before one that reached for hundreds of feet like the skeleton of some Colonial blockhouse. They could still make out a worn set of steps leading down into a blackened, flooded cellar. They played their lights over the leaf-clotted surface and Kenney thought for one lunatic moment he saw some yellowed face peering up at them from just beneath the oily, turgid pool.

But then it was gone.

Somebody kicked a stone in and it sank without a trace.

Chipney and a couple others walked along the ledge, putting their lights onto something in the distance like a circle of tombstones rising from the earth. Hunched and broken, they were gray with age and threaded with lichen and mold, ground-fog trembling at their bases.

“Christ sake,” Chipney said. “What sort of place was this?”

Hyder said, “We should turn back. No way Riegen made it out this far… not out here.”

“Maybe he did,” Kenney said. “If he got lost in that fog, he might have seen this place, came in for shelter.”

But that got a sort of morose chuckle from Hyder. “No, no way. He wouldn’t come here. Not here.”

“He might,” one of the cops said. “He’s not local.”

Kenney paused there, lighting a cigarette. “Meaning?”

Hyder just shrugged. “Locals know better than to come out here. Nobody comes out here.”

“Why?”

“What reason could they have? Easy to get lost. These old ruins are dangerous, real dangerous. I advise against going any farther. We better wait until morning. That’s the sensible thing to do.”

Kenney could feel that the others, even his own men, were in perfect agreement. He sympathized with them because he didn’t like this goddamn place any more than they did, but a cop was missing. The longer he went missing, the worse the chances were of him being found. Kenney didn’t know Riegan, but he was willing to bet he had a family. Would they understand the search being called off because… because men were getting the fucking willies in the fog?

Pretty damn sure they wouldn’t.

“You’d leave one of your own out here?” he said to Hyder.

“Well, no, but…”

“What if it was you, Undersheriff? Would you like to spend the night out here by yourself?”

“No… not out here. Not out here.”

That statement was pregnant with ominous portent, but Kenney wasn’t about to give it the benefit of the doubt. The more he learned about Hyder, the less he liked the man. Superstitious, afraid of his own goddamn shadow… he wasn’t much of a man and even less of a cop. Besides, maybe Kenney didn’t know all the crazy, pumped-up old wives’ tales about this damnable place—and he was beginning to suspect there were more than a few—but, spooks or no spooks, a man got lost, he saw some ruins he could duck into, he was going to do it. What Kenney wanted to do was give Hyder a good going-over, get to the facts that had him and the local cops shit-scared of this place. But there just wasn’t time. He kept thinking of what was out there in the fog… he knew it was bad, but he wasn’t about to buy any of this nonsense about spooks.

Chipney and some of the other men were looking through the wreckage, flashlight beams scanning leaning doorways and collapsed sod roofs, disintegrating walls and cobbled walks disturbed by black tree roots. Everywhere, hooded shadows crept and crawled. Empty windows were filled with a leering, distorted blackness.

Kenney was wondering how long the place had been vacant.

Centuries, occurred to him, but was that possible?

He supposed it was. Wisconsin had been settled a long time. The British had forts there in the 17th century, and towns always sprouted up around those forts. Maybe this was the remains of one of those places.

He and Hyder threaded through an ancient cemetery of leaning, ivied headstones and moss-encrusted slabs, all weathered unreadable. Markers were swallowed by weedy tentacles. Grotesque, dead and decayed oaks sprawled morbidly over rows of crumbling tombstones that crowned blighted hillsides and sank from view into hollows of choked briers.

Kenney didn’t like the smell of the place.

It would have been normal to smell age and time here, to smell decay and rot. But what he smelled was far worse—a palpable, vaporous stench of contamination. He felt… he wasn’t sure, but almost something like an ominous presence, a great anxiety that made him either want to turn and run or just sit down and give. It made no sense. It ate the heart right out of him, leaving him hollow and trembling inside. The place didn’t feel right. There was no getting around that. It didn’t feel right and it made him feel completely wrong. He didn’t believe for a minute it had anything to do with Hyder and his intimations of spooks running wild or whatever the hell was behind it all.

“We should go,” Hyder said, his voice high and helpless.

But Kenney shook his head. “Not yet… there’s something here… something…”

“Then you feel it, too?”

“Yes.”

Kenney in the lead, they moved off deeper into the mummy of the village, through weedy thoroughfares, up deserted hillocks and down into small vales where charnel shadows bled from the diseased earth like black blood. Their lights illuminated odd, twisted shapes in the rank grasses, but no one dared look too closely. Atop a steep grade, ringed in by denuded oaks, they found the remains of a moldering house of gray, nitrous stone covered in a knotted profusion of withered creepers. Through the leaning, screaming mouth of the doorway an appalling stink of corrupted caskets and bones in mildewed shrouds blew out at them like the hot, sour breath of a dying man.

“Let’s have a look,” Kenney said to Hyder, telling the others to wait outside.

Hyder stared unblinking at the jackstraw tumble before them, looked upon it like it were some hollowed skull whispering secrets and shook his head. “I’d rather not,” he said, his voice dry as cinders in an ashpot. “I don’t like any of this and I don’t mind admitting it.”

“Well, I’m going in,” Kenney told him. “You stay out here, look around and see if you can find your balls—”

Hyder grabbed him by the arm and whirled him around. He was surprisingly strong. “Now, you listen to me, Mister Fucking Hotshot Detective. You ain’t from these parts and you don’t know dog turds from diamonds. Riegan ain’t goddamn well here. You wanna start searching again in the morning, fine, but right now let’s get our asses out while we still can.”

Kenney yanked his arm free. “I don’t know what kind of kiddie spookshow game you’re playing here, Hyder, but I’ve had it right up to here. Now start acting like a cop or get the hell out of my sight. I’ve had it with you.”

“Goddammit, Kenney, don’t be a fool. We’re in danger here. Real danger.”

Kenney shoved him aside and ducked through the low doorway. Inside it was like an oppressive envelope of contagion and degeneration. Flashlight held before him, he clambered over the debris of fallen walls, pushed on through dust and countless seasons of dead leaves. Above him, wan moonlight spilled in through the latticed timbers overhead. He found himself on a slanting floor of fissured flagstones that continued on for maybe thirty feet, before falling away completely into the cellar. Below was heaped rubble, black water, shapes jutting from it.

He heard Hyder coming in behind him as he knew he would.

“Look at this,” Kenney said, shining his light down into the inundated pit.

A jawless skull broke the surface of the stagnant pool, wet leaves plastered to its cranium. The slats of a rib cage, a pelvic girdle. Dozens of others.

“Like some litter pile,” he said.

But Hyder turned away, refusing to discuss it.

Kenney lit another cigarette. His fingers trembled as he held the lighter to the end and blew out smoke. His nerves were shot. But he didn’t want Hyder to know that. He didn’t want him to think for a moment that he was a superstitious idiot just like him.

“So this place is supposed to be haunted, is it?”

Hyder sighed. “I didn’t say that exactly, now did I?”

“Funny, though. Place like this… should be a natural magnet to kids. But I haven’t seen any graffiti, beer cans. Nothing. How do you explain that?”

“Those that know of this place know better than to come here. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Listen to you. And in this day and age.”

“I call it common sense.”

Kenney blew smoke into the dank night. “But what do they say exactly? People around here, what do they say?”

Hyder, his face bloodless in the glow of the flashlight beams, said, “When I was a kid, during the daytime, sometimes on a dare we’d come out here. Maybe take a brick home as proof you were here. Something like that. This place has always been bad… people hear things out here, see things. Things they don’t want to see again.”

“Ghosts?”

“No… not ghosts. Not exactly.”

Kenney was examining the wall near what might have been a hearth. He could see things scratched into the stone, weird symbols of some sort. They didn’t appear to be letters, at least none that he had seen before. There were other things, too, but they were obliterated by innumerable seasons of rain and snow and sunshine. But what really interested him were the marks dug across the fields of etchings—deep ruts like the tines of a garden trowel had been dragged across them.

Kenney traced his fingers through them. “What do you make of this?”

Hyder just shook his head. “Please,” he said, his face beaded with sweat. “Let’s go, let’s just go.”

Kenney decided it was time.

It took them about five minutes to get free of the village. Another five before the black forest blotted it from view. And the entire time Kenney was thinking, thinking. Thinking that something horrible had happened to that shuttered ruin, something horrible that was still happening. The place had gone bad, had been poisoned to its very roots. The very marrow of the village was rancid and contaminated, its blood gone black and toxic like bile. And a man could puff out his chest and pretend he didn’t feel it, but it was there. An abominable physical presence.

Aware, alive, and deadly.