Weirdbook 39

HORROR AROUND THE BEND, by Franklyn Searight-4

“Of course not,” he disagreed.

“What about the cemetery?” Howard asked, aware it boardered the area beyond the toilets.

“Guess you haven’t heard,” she supplied. “There’s probably no connection at all, but two of the graves were dug up—probably by someone looking for gold or silver filling in someone’s teeth—and the bodies were nowhere to be found.”

“That’s crazy talk,” insisted the youngster. “What could it have to do with this man’s wife?”

“Probably nothing,” she returned apologetically. “Just thought I’d mention it.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have—just adds to his troubles.

“By the way, we were told of some weird animal being spotted in the Cypress Lake area. Maybe a wounded deer, or something. Nothing to do with your wife, of course, still…”

The distraught biker was anxious to tell the investigating team what he had heard.

Howard had just finished his sixth foray into the forest, in search of his loved one. He was weary, having had but little sleep the night before, and had lain down for a quick snooze. It was nearing one o’clock, and he was making a bologna sandwich, when he saw two policemen carrying a wicker basket, or hamper, back from the outhouse. He wondered if it contained the remains recovered from the shaft. What a miserable job it must have been, toiling amidst the gory mess in search of evidence, and collecting what was left of the body.

At one point, he noted a city sanitation truck stopping nearby, backing up, and then proceeding along the path in the direction of the outhouses. It was a tight fit, and numerous branches were broken as it forced its way along the narrow trail. Pumping out the latrine in order to recover clues would be a horrific job, and he did not envy the civil servants their onerous task.

A few minutes later, Inspector Randolph made his way down the path and over to where the Prestons’ had set up their outdoor housekeeping. He was dressed in a natty suit and accompanied by two of his assistants, Harley and Warren, both attired in police garb. Howard listlessly shook their hands, when presented, and invited them to partake of coffee when they asked to talk with him.

The four men straddled the picnic table bench and sipped at Howard’s offering before they began.

“Thought I’d bring you up to date on our investigation,” Randolph said. “What I have to tell you, though, is limited to what Chief Carter believes is appropriate to release; you’d hear about it tonight on the radio or the television, anyway, or read about it in the morning editions.

“We’ve had tens of men searching the area for your wife. Karen, right? They covered the immediate area, quickly but thoroughly, and have now branched out into the outlying regions. So far, no luck, but we haven’t given up. We’ll keep spreading out, bringing more searchers in, until we’ve covered a five mile radius. But we won’t stop even there.

“Between the search parties and attending to the bodies, we’ve been a busy bunch, as you can imagine. Just finished clearing out the cesspool. What’s left of the poor woman was transported back to our lab for study.”

“We pity the poor guys who had to lower themselves into the morass,” said Harley, wincing. “They removed the body parts, and went through the grisly rubbish searching about for clues. I’d retire from the force if I were ordered to go down there.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” remonstrated Randolph “You’d do your job, and follow directions given to you.” He turned his gaze back to Howard. “Our preliminary indication reveals it was an older woman, perhaps in her sixties or seventies. She’d been dead for more than a week.”

“So it’s not my wife. You’re positive?”

“The coroner definitely ruled it out,” Randolph answered.

These words had the effect of morphing the dour look on the agitated man’s face into a grateful smile, and a strong sense of relief and gratitude swelled over him. Learning it was definitely not Karen who had been stuffed into the toilet was great news—fantastic news—for him to hear.

But it did not answer the scorching questions in his mind: Just who was the unfortunate woman, and where was Karen?

“Warren, tell Mr. Preston what it’s like down there?”

“Hah! It’s a cesspool down there. Filthy, smelly, worse than you could ever envision. What you might not know about it yet, Mr. Preston, are the catacombs we found down there, a network of tunnels that would please a gopher.”

“Yeah, gopher,” agreed Harley.

“Most of them run from the crapper in the direction of the cemetery.”

“Gainesville Cemetery?”

“Yeah. Remember the funerals held there last year, and the graves caved in? The bodies in them were never found.”

“I remember something like it, yeah. It was there?”

“It was.”

“What’s this about a passageway?” Howard asked.

“One of our men explored a part of it. It tunnels from the outhouse into the cemetery, twisting and turning in all directions, intersecting with even more burrows. It’s a veritable labyrinth down there which we’ll eventually map and compare to the tombstones above the ground. I don’t dare to imagine what else we might find.”

“Yesterday,” added Warren, “one of the patrolmen jested it must have been a ghoul at work.”

“My god,” thought Howard, reacting to the words. “Do they think there’s something supernatural at work here?”

His eyes took in the revolvers the two officers were wearing; he assumed Randolph had one also, concealed. Would they be enough to stop some unworldly entity?

“Yeah, but he was just kidding. Wasn’t he?”

“That’s what we thought. ‘Course, there’s no such thing as a ghoul; probably just a demented cannibal type lurking in cemeteries. And corpse snatchers? I’ve heard of them before, years ago when surgeons would pay for dead bodies they could practice on.”

Harley snickered.

“Think it’s funny, do you?” said Officer Warren. “I’d like to see you go down there. I had to descend into the hell hole looking for evidence.”

“Not on your life! Not while we have adventurous types, like you.”

“You mean, dummies like me, don’t you?”

“No, he doesn’t, Warren,” said Randolph. “Seriously, we appreciate all you’ve done.

“What’s even more disturbing,” he continued, “is we don’t know when the crazed nutcase came to this area. Has he been here all along, or come here recently, looking for a new source of food? We don’t know.”

Randolph somehow sensed Howard’s unspoken question.

“The body you found, the second one, the elderly woman, was partially clothed in a dark blue blouse, far different than the patterned one of light blue you say your wife was wearing when she left your tent last night. We can’t be certain, Mr. Preston, but as near as we can tell from placement of the blood splatters, the woman might have walked into the enclosure where she was seized, murdered, and parts of her eaten. What was not consumed was then stuffed into the shaft.”

“Another possibility,” volunteered Harley, “is something down there was climbing out of the pit when she sat down to do her business, and yanked her in.”

“What a god awful vision that plasters on the mind,” exclaimed Howard.

“Too graphic,” admonished Randolph.

“I’ve heard of snakes slithering up the plumbing and biting someone on the butt,” offered Warren, “but a creature doing what we found is absolutely ghoulish.”

“Ghoulish might be the precise word to use, Mr. Preston.”

“How so?” asked Howard.

“Footprints. Imprints on the damp clay strata, many of them leading into and out of the main passageway. Someone else besides my crew has been walking around down there.”

Randolph’s words were met with silence, continuing for long seconds, before Howard, his mind awhirl, was able to gather his thoughts.

“Were you told about the sighting someone made this afternoon—some creature they couldn’t identify roaming around the Cypress Lake area?”

“Oh, sure. Probably a small deer or something seen briefly before disappearing into the bushes. Misidentification, I suppose. Nothing to it.”

For a moment, Howard’s blood began to race, but settled down at Randolph’s dismissal of the sighting.

“So, we’ve made some progress, but there’s much more to be made,” was the inspector’s final statement.

* * * *

After the lawmen left, and a brief dinner of charred hamburgers consumed, Howard washed his utensils and put them away. Enough light was still available for him to renew his search for Karen, and he remembered the words of the couple he had seen earlier in the day causing him a few seconds of anticipation. Their report of an unknown animal seen around Cypress Lake was probably nothing at all, but he had no other lead suggesting possible success, and he did not want to sit around doing nothing. The lake was nearly half a mile away, just at the edge of the recreational boundary, and a popular place for people at the park to fish.

“Why not poke around there?” he reflected, shoving his flashlight into a pocket. He had nothing better to do.

Shadows were beginning to lengthen as he made his way down the trail to the swampy lake. He had caught a few perch and sunfish there in past years, and knew the area reasonably well. He approached it stealthily, coming upon a mound overlooking the placid water, and abruptly stopped, his pulse quickening at what he came upon, sitting on its haunches with its bony knees sticking up.

“I’ll be damned,” he thought, oblivious of shadows coalescing and twilight settling over the terrain, “it must be the creature those people told me about, and it sure isn’t a deer. If anything, it’s uglier than any bestial cryptid deserves to be, with its bald pate and wolf-like muzzle.”

It was small, alright, naked and hairless, with a slender waist but muscular chest, the size of an early teenager. To Howard, it resembled Gollum, the creature in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, except for its enormous ears, and the tusks protruding from each side of its mouth.

Abruptly, the being lifted its head and opened its mouth. It growled and began to mournfully bay its obeisance to the moon, a soul-wrenching howl of abysmal despair.

Whatever it was, it stopped and loped away down another trail leading back toward the campsites. “It’s definitely a biped,” Howard thought, following behind, close enough to keep it in sight, yet far enough away to attract no attention to himself. Its erratic, scuttling gait sped up and slowed down intermittently, for no apparent reason, as it entered the camping section of the park. Howard was close behind when it passed his tent and turned onto the path to the latrines. There, it opened the door to the woman’s john and slipped inside.

“Aha,” Howard thought. “Now I’ve got it trapped.”

At least, he thought he had. Without pausing to consider his actions, he entered the structure and shone his light around. The small edifice was empty, with no place to hide. The being, whatever it was, was gone. But how could it be? It had entered through the only entrance…

Unless…

Howard looked at the lid covering the pit and decided there was no way anything, even something as small as the creature he was following, could squeeze through it. Raising the lid, however, he saw a much larger aperture with a circumference large enough through which even he could fit, although it would be a tight squeeze.

But why would the creature he had seen yelping in the moonlight want to descend into the cesspool? Had it dropped down in there to hide? Had it gone from there into the warren of tunnels, perhaps where it lived, crawling about like an insect in the maze of passageways below the graveyard?

Caution warned him to wait until morning when Inspector Randolph would be available. Best to tell him what he had seen and suspected, and let him decide upon the next steps to be taken.