Paskagankee (33 page)

Finally, Mike had moved far enough from the area that he could no longer make out the pieces of Professor Dye lying scattered on the ground. “Thank God for small favors,” he muttered through clenched teeth to no one as a wave of pain radiated outward from his knee, momentarily stopping him in his tracks.

When he reached the steps leading up to the open-air porch, Mike grabbed the wooden railing with both hands and pulled his faltering body up to the front door. He had hoped his damaged leg would begin feeling better as it loosened up, but if anything it seemed to be getting worse, the pain exploding with each beat of his heart. He paused at the entrance to the cabin, breathing hard, glancing one last time back into the thick forest, wondering why he had been spared and where the vengeful apparition had gone. He could see less than half the distance to the big boulder; nightfall was nearly complete.

Mike took one deep breath and pushed open the cabin's heavy oak front door, stepping into a house of horrors.

54

SHARON WAS THIRSTY; SHE was burning up. Her lips felt puffy and foreign, like they belonged to someone else. They were dry and cracked and bleeding. She lay on the floor of the cabin wanting nothing more than for her suffering to be over. Blood oozed out her open mouth onto the floor; her face was slick with it as she rested on the dirty carpet. Unable to lift her head, she pushed her body forward with her legs a few inches—ignoring the shrieking pain in her useless arms and her damaged ribs—until she was clear of the gooey mess. She immediately started drooling more blood onto her new location. It wasn't pouring out of her mouth and it wasn't gushing, but it had been oozing sluggishly for hours. Sharon knew she should be worried.

But she was too tired to be worried. She had been fading in and out of consciousness for indeterminate periods, each time lingering in some fuzzy netherworld a little longer and sinking into it again a little faster. Maybe this time when she closed her eyes it would be the last time. Maybe this time it would all be over, this crazy nightmare she had been thrust into with Mike McMahon. Strong, steady Mike, with whom she had shared her bed and with whom she had fallen in love.

That was the only real regret Sharon felt as she waited for the end. She had slept with plenty of men, starting at about age fourteen—or was it twelve? She couldn't remember for sure and that was so sad—when she perfected the art of using her sexuality in exchange for drugs or alcohol. Dozens of men throughout the years, mostly during those four sick, insane years of high school when she had been out of control. Not so many recently.

But during all those hookups, all the times she had awoken in strange places next to strange men, often much older than Sharon and whose faces she could often, frighteningly, not recognize, she never once felt a connection, a bond beyond the physical like that which she had experienced for such a short time with the new chief of police of Paskagankee, Maine. She treasured that bond and didn't want it to end but at the same time was thankful she had been able to experience transcendence above the physical at least once before exiting the pain of this world into whatever the next one held, if even there was a next one.

The front door opened, squeaking slightly on its hinges, and Sharon knew it was the Court–thing returning to its lair. She wondered if this would be the time it finished her off. As she raised her eyes toward the cabin's only entrance, trying to ignore the pain pounding through her body, she was surprised to see that the spirit no longer floated above the floor; it was now walking with its feet solidly placed on the soiled carpet.

Something was different, though. The thing wasn't exactly walking; it was limping. Badly. It would rest its entire weight on its left leg, then hop/shuffle painfully on its right, before coming to rest again with the full weight of its body on its left side.

Sharon noticed the thing was now dressed differently, too. Instead of the tattered red hunting jacket with its checkerboard pattern and the disgusting matted hair, the apparition now wore a Paskagankee Police uniform and looked, incredibly, impossibly, unbelievably, like Mike McMahon!

Sharon smiled, her bleeding lips screaming painfully at her to stop, as her eyes rolled up into her head and she was gone again.

55

MIKE STEPPED INTO THE cabin and almost had to retreat. The stench was overwhelming. From somewhere inside the darkened home wafted the smell of corruption; of decaying flesh; of death. Mike gagged and moved a step or two into the large, open living area and waited for his eyes to adjust to a darkness even more complete than that of the thick forest.

Nothing leapt out at him. Nothing attacked him. Nothing even moved, as far as he could tell. Whatever horrors had taken place here had apparently been perpetrated by the single renegade spirit inhabiting Chief Court's body, and for some unknown reason that spirit had vanished. Mike wondered if it was gone for good, and if not, how much time he had before it returned.

A stealthy sliding/slithering sound interrupted Mike's train of thought, and he strained to see through the gloom. Something across the room moved almost imperceptibly on the floor, something that looked like a pile of clothing—someone was alive! He rushed as quickly as he could through the darkened room on his damaged knee and as he got closer his heart leaped into his throat. It was Sharon Dupont, smiling up at him incongruously, surrounded on the floor by what looked like gallons of blood, barely able to move and in very bad shape, probably dying.

But she was alive, and to Mike McMahon, who had seen more death and devastation in fifteen years as a law enforcement professional than he wanted to remember, it was nothing less than a miracle. He had been hoping against hope to find Sharon alive and now, here she was. He knelt beside her broken body, ignoring the pain in his knee, and took her hand, hoping to assess the extent of her injuries.

After that fleeting smile, she fell into unconsciousness, and Mike hoped it wasn't for good. She was clearly very badly injured. Both arms bent at awkward angles, broken and/or fractured and obviously useless. Blood streaked her face, oozing from her mouth in a slow but steady trickle and forming a map on the carpet marking her slow progress across the floor as she tried to keep her beautiful face clear of it.

She had lost so much blood Mike wondered how much longer she could hold on. He hoped fate would not be so cruel as to allow him to find Sharon alive, only to snatch her away while he sat and watched helplessly, injured and waiting for rescue.

Leaning against the side wall, sitting in a sticky reservoir of Sharon's drying blood but not caring, Mike reached for his radio with his left hand, fumbling to remove it from its leather holster. He held both Sharon's hands, so tiny and frail, inside his big right hand and wasn't about to let them go.

Mike unclipped the radio. Dropped it. Picked it up, now slick with blood, and keyed up the Paskagankee Police frequency. He tried to remember exactly where the cabin was located and how he and Professor Dye had gotten to it, passing the information as quickly and succinctly as he could along to Gordie Rheaume in the dispatcher's office.

He knew how difficult it would be to find this cabin in the dark, especially given the near impassability of this ancient primeval forest, but he also knew that time was running out for Sharon Dupont. If a rescue wasn't affected tonight, it wouldn't matter how long it took afterward because she would be dead by morning and the mission would change from a rescue to a body recovery. He knew she might die anyway, it seemed quite likely in fact, but he wasn't about to give up now that he had found her.

Dispatcher Rheaume asked for details. “What the hell went on up there?”

But Mike was too tired to pass along irrelevant information, and besides, he didn't really have a clue what had happened, did he? One minute he found himself dangling helplessly eight feet off the ground, held aloft by an angry three hundred-fifty-year-old spirit of a dead Native American girl with the clear intention of tearing him apart, then the next moment he watched in horror as his friend Professor Dye was dismembered in front of his eyes. Then the thing disappeared into thin air, gone as thoroughly and completely as if it had never existed in the first place.

Mike shook his head in tired confusion, telling Gordie, “Just get those guys up here; we have a seriously injured officer who needs immediate medical attention.”

After terminating the radio call, Mike struggled to his feet, not wanting to let go of Sharon's hand but knowing he had to investigate the rest of the cabin. His stomach lurched as the awful stench of death penetrated his consciousness again. He had been so wrapped up in his discovery of Sharon and calling for help that everything else took a back seat, but now it came rushing back with a vengeance.

Mike tried to ignore the distracting smell and pulled out his Maglite, shining the bright white beam around the open expanse of the cabin's living area, searching for a light switch. He finally located one in the corner of the room, next to an open doorway leading to the kitchen. His knee pounded and throbbed, screaming out with angry insistence for attention. He ignored it and shuffled/hopped to the switch, flicking it on. Nothing happened.

Mike chuckled. He must be more tired than he realized. Of course nothing happened. There was no electricity way out here in the middle of nowhere, so obviously Chief Court must have powered his home with a generator. The spirit inhabiting Court's body had been too busy wreaking havoc in and around Paskagankee to worry about anything as mundane as electricity, so it stood to reason that the generator would not be powered up.

In fact, depending upon how long ago Chief Court had lost himself to the powerful spirit, there may not be any fuel in the generator anyway. If the engine was running when the chief‘s body was taken over, then it likely would have continued indefinitely, chugging along until exhausting the fuel supply.

Recalling the only time he had met his predecessor, Mike remembered thinking something must have been bothering the man. He had appeared disheveled, with his tie askew and his uniform shirt buttoned improperly. His hair was relatively long and unkempt, and he had been sweating profusely, seemingly distracted and unable to sit still.

Mike chalked it up at the time to nervousness, to concern by Court about his pending retirement. Plus, he didn't know the man, and thought it possible he was just a slob. Later, as Mike got to know Sharon Dupont, and she related her admiration of Wally Court and all he had done for her as a teenager, it occurred to him that Sharon's recollections didn't mesh with what he had observed of the former chief with his own eyes.

Then all hell had broken loose and he became far too busy trying to deal with the gruesome murder spree to worry about the personality quirks of the man whose job he had taken. Mike wondered if things might have turned out differently had someone tumbled to the fact something was horribly wrong with Chief Court. He doubted it, but there was so much he didn't understand about the last few days that he just didn't know.

Mike shined his Maglite around the room, horrified by what he saw. It was obvious that at one time this cabin had been a small but beautiful home, crafted with care by a man who knew what he was doing. The hardwood floors still gleamed in spots, despite the general disrepair of the house. A chair rail ran the width of the room to protect the walls, and a beautiful patterned border encircled the living room wall at its junction with the ceiling. The cabin had at one point undoubtedly been a very comfortable home for the chief.

Now, however, all that remained was utter devastation. Dirt and mud covered the floor, smeared in places inches thick, dead grass and straw everywhere. Holes had been punched through the walls, in sizes anywhere from a couple of inches to several feet wide. Mike wondered what might have caused them and shuddered.

But far worse was the human wreckage littering the room. Body parts lay strewn about, some clothed and some not, all in varying stages of decomposition. A decapitated head lay on the floor, barely six feet from Sharon's prone body. Identification was impossible, but he assumed the head belonged either to Agent O'Bannon or his partner, Shaw, the men who had been so dismissive of Professor Dye and so anxious to leave Paskagankee behind.

The suffocating stench of corruption issued from these and the other human remains. Mike was aghast and his heart went out, not just to the victims, but to Sharon Dupont as well. He wondered what it must have been like lying in the middle of this horrifying scene, unable to move, knowing she would likely be the next victim.

He continued to play the beam of light around the room and froze as it fell upon what appeared to be a relatively undamaged human body. The figure was unmoving, lying face down in a corner of the room opposite Sharon, undoubtedly dead, but nevertheless still in one piece. From the distance of twelve feet or so and in the heavy darkness crowding the room Mike couldn't be sure, but he thought he saw dark red hair; hair that looked familiar but that he couldn't quite place in his exhausted and stressed condition.

Mike crossed the room, slowly and laboriously thanks to his injured knee, and winced from the pain as he reached the limp body and eased himself to the floor for a closer look. It was a woman. He gently turned her head and found himself staring into the face of Melissa “the Maneater” Manheim, the Portland Journal reporter he assumed had left the bonfire last night in a huff after their confrontation.