“There’s a body maybe two miles up. Some guy was torn up pretty bad. I think someone just got murdered up there.”
“You sure it wasn’t a prank?”
“I wondered at first, but then.” The kid puts his hands to his face and starts to cry. “I touched it. Then I smelled my hands and I knew. Oh god he was all tore up. They say there’s some kinda witch up there but I never believed it. Till now, maybe.”
“There’s bears around here, last I heard. What makes you think he was murdered?”
“No bear coulda set him up that way.”
“Set him up?”
“Up on the boulder,” he says, choking out the words. His eyes glow wet in the moonlight. “Folded over with his face to the sky, insides on the outsides. Maybe he was scalped, too. There’s chalk on the stone with markings like you see all over the trees up there. Ain’t a bear in the woods could do somethin’ such as that.”
It sounds too familiar.
“Listen up,” I say, “Any of you got reception?”
“Don’t you think we’d have called the sheriff by now?” says the kid.
“Not a good idea,” I say. It’s a lie, but the last thing I want is some hillbilly deputy getting between me and the man that killed my partner.
“Why not?”
“You’d be the center of the investigation. The first one to find the body.”
“Jenivette found the body,” says the kid.
“They’d find a way to pin it on one of you.”
“Maybe they would.”
“Best get the car back on the road,” I say. “Once you get on the highway you message my friend and let her know I’m on foot. You and Jenivette can forget all about this.”
“I shouldn’ta told you her name.”
“As long as the sheriff ain’t involved, it don’t matter.”
The kid nods slowly. “You won’t say nothin’ ‘bout us bein’ here?”
“Like I said, message my friend and we’re even.”
• • •
It takes both of us lifting the back end of the Toyota to get the front axle to stick. Once the car gets traction, Jenivette scoots over the console and the kid dives feet first into the driver seat without so much as a sideways glance. Gravel sprays like buckshot as they disappear down the road in a cloud of tan dust.
From the trunk of my car I find the Maglight and a bottle of water. I flick the light on, give it a slow pan over the treeline. Fir branches pendulous in the night breeze. I turn and light the road as far as it will reach. If the kid was right, there’s a good chance Brierley could still be up there. Maybe even watching from the cover of the trees.
I start out on foot. The road curves in a hairpin around a grove of buckeyes and I pass over a dry wash where springmelt has drawn ragged furrows through the silty ground. My footsteps are all I can hear, as if I am travelling in vacuo through the darkness. The deadened air moving as I move. The moonlight is now bright enough to click off the Maglight, so I hold it in my left hand as a readied weapon.
My gun hand is free to draw and fire at will.
It’s now midnight. The silence has given over to coyotes and whippoorwills. The forest opens to a vast wheatfield, the aching dry rustle like the sound of torn paper.
There is another sound.
Something out of place.
A ponderous croon.
A woman’s voice.
I skin the Colt and thumb the hammer, searching for the origin of the sound. I turn a circle as I walk, revolver at the end of my arm. Finger on the trigger.
The voice again, this time with a curious lilt before a long and terrifying wail. I stop, scan the surroundings. I feel like I’m being watched.
A sudden rustle to my left.
There’s movement in the wheatfield.
A bowed spine weaving through the awn and spike.
I thumb the Maglight, paint the field with the light. More movement. I look closer. It looks like some half-dead sea creature cresting and falling against the surface, snaking through a tide of wheat.
I watch it turn.
Wheat rattling.
It winds closer to the fieldline, the figure just visible behind the swaying stalks. A dark form in the grasses. Eyes like tiny kernels of fire. Watching me. I part the wheatstalks with the gun barrel, plant my knee in the dirt.
When I shine the light, there is nothing there.
All is still and silent.
Like it was never there to begin with.
• • •
Beyond the wheatfield, the road ends at a misty crossroads. To the east lie the ruins of an old stone building. Cavelike windows surrounded by ragged masonry. Some walls are orphaned and rise unshouldered like monoliths in the vaporous dark.
I wander among the ruins, gun and light clasped together. From the branches hang wreaths woven into crude shapes, twisting soundlessly among scrags of white lichen. There are Celtic knots carved into the fir trees and within these markings the moss does not grow.
It isn’t long before I find the body.
It’s just as the kid described. A torn figure sprawled on a large stone, his face locked in a grisly, silent howl. Viscera unspooled like curtain rope. When I look him over with the light I see that his eyes are missing and there are knotwork symbols carved into his cleaved skull.
Just like Bill.
But there is something else, a different kind of familiarity. Something about the blond eyebrows and narrow bridge of the nose. I thumb my phone to the saved photo of Brierley.
It’s him. There’s no doubt about it.
I spin around, search the shadows. If Brierley’s dead, then all bets are off. I’m now dealing with someone else entirely.
Or something else.
The sound from the wheatfield returns.
A sick groan.
A dark form moving between the pillared firs.
“Come out,” I say to the trees, watching the movement. “Whatever sick game you’re playing, it ends now.” There is no reply, only the creaking of branches and the whistle of the whippoorwill. I call out a second time.
A twig snaps somewhere in
