woods. I went to where the shape had gone, moved as quickly as I could down a trail that was half my width. I took a few limb slaps in the face as I went. I heard something ahead of me, a cracking sound, and I went after it, moving pretty quick, and then I didn’t hear anything. I stopped. I decided I didn’t want to keep going. The brush was thick and it was dark and the shape was definitely in there. He could be anywhere, and all he had to do was be quiet and still and wait on me.
I took a deep breath, backed about twenty feet down the trail, then turned, and there he was. I just got a glimpse of that strange face, that misshapen, shaved skull. Before I could bring the .38 up, he hit me so hard I didn’t remember falling to the ground, didn’t even feel it at first. I tried to roll over, but he kicked me in the side. I tried to lift the .38, but realized I didn’t have it anymore.
I heard Booger yell, and then I heard him crashing down the trail. There was a fleeting glimpse of pants legs, and then one more kick in the ribs, and then Stitch was gone.
I got on my knees and felt around and found the .38. I heard Booger calling again. I got up and staggered back down the trail and out to the larger path. I looked at the thing in the clearing again. I moved on down there, and didn’t hear anything again, and didn’t see anything, except for that thing in the clearing. As I grew closer, I saw that it was human-shaped and it seemed to be squatting, as if it had paused to take a bathroom break.
I had some idea what it was, but I went over there as quietly as I could, holding my side where Stitch had kicked me. My jaw was starting to ache from the punch.
The moonlight was spilling over the squatting thing. It was a woman and the woman was nude and her skin was leathery-looking, like there had been some kind of preservation attempted, taxidermy perhaps, or maybe she had just been stored in salt. The face was wrinkled and old-looking, but I knew the person wasn’t old. I could recognize her even though I realized now her bones were gone and there was nothing but her skin and skull there. The skin was stretched over some kind of frame in the general shape of a human form squatting. The body was nude, and the woman’s breasts had been stuffed with something that made them knotty-looking, and the squat was such that her ass was touching the ground; it too appeared to be stuffed with something. The hair on the woman’s head was red but there were patches of it missing. She looked worse than she looked in the photos, except now the framework gave her shape. The tattoos on her skin just looked like scars.
There was a dark line on the forehead, and I found myself reaching out to touch it. It was a cut line, and it went all the way across. I got hold of her hair and gently lifted it and the top of the skull came right off, leaving a lower line of hair hanging around the bottom part of the skull. Inside, the skull was hollowed out and there was a fat envelope nestled at the bottom. I took a deep breath and took it out with my other hand, put the top of the skull back in place.
I heard a noise, turned, dropped the envelope, squatted, pointed the .38. It was Booger. He was walking toward me, the .45 down by his side.
He came over and looked at what I had been looking at. “Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” he said. “You hear me calling, man?”
“Of course.”
Booger wasn’t paying attention anymore. He was looking at the squatting shape.
“I know her,” I said. “Tabitha.”
“Read about her in your notes. Saw her in the photo. She was the one supposed to be kidnapped.”
“Guess she was at that,” I said.
“What’s that?” Booger said, pointing to the envelope on the ground.
“It was inside her skull,” I said, picking it up.
Booger nodded. “There was someone out here with us, you know that? He got me confused in there. Cut back on his trail and I lost him. Got me going in the wrong direction for a while. I didn’t think anyone could do that to me, trick me that easy. Hey, what’s wrong with your side?”
“You know that someone out here with us? Me and him met.”
“Shit, man. I’m sorry.”
“Saw him cross the trail, went in after him a little ways, decided it wasn’t such a smart idea after he punched and kicked me. If you hadn’t yelled, he might have finished me. But what I really think is he doesn’t want me dead. Not just yet. That would take the fun out of whatever it is he thinks he’s doing. He wanted me to find what I’ve found. I bet he’s got other plans for me. And now you.”
“I see him again, me and him, we’ll have a meeting of blood and bone…I guess the game is afoot, huh, bro?”
“Sherlock Holmes,” I said.
“Damn skippy. Read him when I was in the orphanage.”
That was the first I’d heard of the orphanage. Booger was slow to deal out facts about his life.
“We have another address to check,” I said.
When we got in the car I opened the envelope. Inside were some religious tracts. About how Darwin wants the world to believe we came from monkeys and isn’t that a crime. There were others that looked to have been printed about 1950, and they showed caricatures of blacks as monkey-like; one black man had his arm around a character that I assumed was Darwin. There were pamphlets of a more recent vintage that railed against the mixing of the races. There were also flyers about the speech that Reverend Judence would be making at the university. Outside of it all being hateful and stupid, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
I handed it all to Booger, then studied the map from the glove box while he looked over the material I had given him. I put the map away and drove us to the next address quickly.
As I drove, I felt more and more uncomfortable. The location was near where Belinda lived, but when I finally turned on the street I needed and away from her place, I began to feel a little better.
We drove down into the black part of town, a very poor section about three blocks from where Belinda lived. There were no streetlights, and the homes nearby were dark. Right at the lip of that section there was a church, a big old white church that was charred on one side from fire and had a sign out front that said FIRST BAPTIST. It had a high tower that stood above it all and there was a window in the center of the tower that looked out at the night, and a big white cross at the peak. The fire appeared to have happened some time ago, and though it had smoked the building up good and burned it badly on one side, the other side seemed intact.
I parked at the curb and we walked across the moonlit, windblown grass on the front lawn. The grass had grown up high and was wet from the rain and sprouting some tall sticker burrs that we avoided.
“Man, we’re just right out here in the open,” Booger said.
“I know, but I’m not feeling all that sneaky.”
We went to the front door of the church and pushed against it, but it was locked. We went around back and tried the door there, but it was locked too. I knew we could get in on the burned side without a lot of effort, as there were gaps in the wall there, but I wanted to stay out of the soot, which was damp from the recent rain and which would stick to us like ink to blotters. It seemed a funny thing to be concerned about right then, but it was in my thoughts nonetheless.
We found a window we could force up, and crawled inside.
There was a pile of pews. Half the place was charcoal. Across the way, it looked as if the fire had cut the wood in the shape of teeth rising up from the floor. You could see through those gaps and what you could see were a bunch of dark homes and a dark street that looked to have last been paved about the time pigs flew. A good wind and all of it on the burned side could topple like a smoldering fireplace log, and what made me nervous was we were having just such a wind. On the side that wasn’t burned, the windows rattled in their frames like maracas, and the air still smelled of charcoal and soot.
“When did this place catch fire?” Booger said.
“I don’t know exactly. Dad said it could have been arson.”
I found a little narrow stairway that went up. I hesitated for a moment, but there was nothing else to see anywhere. I took out the .38 and looked back at Booger.
“I’m going up,” I said.
“I’m not stopping you.”
I went up. On the stairs, about halfway to the top, I could see where the skein of a spiderweb had been snapped and someone had gone through. I climbed into the room above. The smell of smoke was strong there. It had gathered into the lumber thick as the paint, even though there was only a slight bit of burn damage on the far right wall. The stench made my nose itch and my eyes water. Underneath it was an even more unpleasant
