Shades: Eight Tales of Terror (7 page)

“Why?” Pete hissed.

“Because he ain’t a crook or a moonshiner,” the Sheriff growled, “he’s a damned cuckoo. You can at least trust a crook to act with some sense.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. A robber or moonshiner don’t want to get killed any more than you do. But with a damn cuckoo, you don’t even k
now what world he’s reacting to. It’s hard to reason with a man who thinks you’re really a Martian out to steal his gall bladder.”

“Does Les know that?”

“Hell yeah, kid. Les knows his way around. Why?”

“Because he’s about to go in the house.”

“Wha…?” Carl frowned and looked around the tree again to where Pete pointed. “Dammit, Les!”

The senior deputy had eased around th
e corner of the building and crouched by the ramshackle door. He gave a cautionary motion with his hand at the Sheriff, who now glowered at him from around the tree. Then he pointed at his nose while wrinkling it, and afterwards the door.

“Aw hell,” Carl muttered, “and then there’s always the third option Luther could have taken.”

He watched with growing gloom as the senior deputy used the barrel of his rifle to ease the front door open. If Les thought it worth taking the risk, Carl felt pretty certain the man already knew what he would find. He could see the deputy lean forward and take a careful peek through the opened crack, before shifting position and taking a longer look inside. Then the deputy stood and motioned for them.

“Come on in, Sheriff. It’s over.”

“Yeah,” Carl sighed and motioned for Pete to follow as he headed in. “I should have figured on that. Is it bad?”

“He hu
ng himself, and it ain’t pretty.” The deputy now lit a cigarette. He also started opening and closing the front door like a fan. “It’s damn weird too. But you ain’t gonna like what I found in his trash pile out back neither.”

“The trooper?”

“Nope, somebody else. Maybe more than one somebodies. Hard to tell. They’re just bones…and they’ve been gnawed on.”

“Aw hell!”

“Yep.”

The Sheriff closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers.
He could see the headlines now. This was going to be a total circus. When the rest of the county found out there had been a backwoods cannibal living nearby, there would be hell to pay. On top of that, there would be the almost impossible task of identifying the victim, or victims.

“Just wait.
” Les looked at him like he was reading his mind “Just wait till you see inside. It gets even better.”

“You’re not helpin’ my ulcer, Les.”

Carl could detect the smell of decay when he stepped up next to the door, and braced himself for what was to come. He pulled another cigarette of his own from his pocket and lit it from the deputy’s.

“Here
, Pete.” He offered the pack. “You want one?”

“Oh no, those things will kill you.”

“Your choice.” The Sheriff shrugged. “But it will help with the smell.”

In truth, the Sheriff had acclimated to the smell of rot in the trenches of France long ago but it didn’t mean he liked it. He used to carry cigars for this very purpose, but Les had begged him not to send him home to Kathy smelling like that anymore. Now he settled for using those new menthol cigarettes the wives preferred.

Carl took a deep drag on the cigarette and followed Les into the dim interior of the cabin. No point in putting it off any longer. He braced himself for the worst, but still only made it a couple of steps in before stopping and staring in disbelief.

Luther Cole had died as crazy as he lived.

It took a second for the Sheriff to understand what he looked at. The hermit wore only a deerskin in the form of a cape he tied at the neck. The skin included the head and horns, which Luther wore like a hood over his head. With his neck bent at an odd angle, and the hood now hanging down over his head, it made it difficult to tell the body even belonged to a human being. From the neck down, the corpse had begun to bloat, giving it a doughy shape the old man never possessed in life. Even worse, the blood had settled into the lower body, turning it black  from the waist down and engorging all the extremities…

A
ll of them.

“Ahhh God!” T
he young deputy choked in the doorway while staring in horror at the enlarged phallus pointed directly back at him.

“Easy, Pete,” Les chuckled as he lit a kerosene lantern hanging nearby with a match
. “He don’t mean nothin’ by it. He’s just happy to see you.”

The young deputy swallowed twice before turning green and fleeing the doorway. The two older men watched him go, then looked at each other.

“Les,” Carl sighed. He rolled his eyes as he listened to the sounds of retching coming through the wall. “Sometimes I think you have a real mean streak in you.”

“He was gon
na blow sooner or later anyway.” Les grinned and walked back over to look at the corpse. “Better to get it over with. Let’s see what we got here.”

“You do that, I’m trying to get a count of all these animal skins on the wall. Ol’ Luther was quite the hunter. We got coyote, raccoon…here’s a bobcat…a few possum…and huh? Aw no… crap…”

“Lemme guess…a scalp.”

“Yeah,” the Sheriff sighed. “Two of them. How did you guess?”

“All the arrowheads.” The deputy nodded at a shelf and table littered with pointed pieces of flint. Most were arrowheads but some were obviously for larger weapons. “And he’s got a homemade tomahawk over there in the corner next to his shotgun. It looks like Luther thought he was some kind of injun shamen or something. But speaking of the shotgun… ”

The deputy retrieved the double barreled twelve gauge from the corner and broke it open. He extracted the two shells and stared at them for a moment before looking back at the body with a frown on his lean face.

“Something wrong, Les?”

“Not wrong,” the deputy
grumbled, and examined the body again, “so much as odd.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this shotgun has been fired once. One shell spent and the other still ready to use. Now if you look, you can see Luther took a bullet through the arm here and got grazed on the side here.”

“Uh huh. So?”

“So…” Les stared at the floor in thought. “It looks like the trooper got two shots off at Luther here. Luther got one shot off himself. Then he comes back here sometime yesterday afternoon or evening and takes a short hop with a shorter rope. But look at this…”

Les handed the spent shell over to the Sheriff.

“…this is bird shot. Now I sure wouldn’t want to get hit by it, but it ain’t exactly lethal unless it’s pretty close range. Close enough a trained state trooper should have shot a lot straighter than he did before Luthor pulled the trigger.”

“You’re assuming the trooper shot first.”

“Maybe so.” The deputy looked back at the hanging corpse with a frown, “But if he didn’t, then Luther didn’t make a killing shot and retreated under fire. If that happened, it means the trooper may still be alive here on the island somewhere.”

“You think it’s likely? If he was alive, he should have either left the island, or at least yelled at us when we circled it.”

“I doubt he’s alive,” Les mused, “but we better hurry and check.”

“Yeah,” Carl sighed, “I figured we would find his body here, or not at all…what with Luther ha
ving all night to dispose of it. But since things didn’t turn out that way, we better get a move on. It’s going to be getting dark soon, and we can come back and finish up here by lantern light.”

***

Forty minutes later, the search concluded.

“Well, shit.
” Carl tilted back his hat and stared at the body impaled on the tree. “I guess that settles that. Y’know Pete, if you keep that up you’re gonna strain something.”

The sheriff held the beam of his flashlight on the corpse while he glanced over at the younger deputy. Pete straightened from his sec
ond bout of vomiting in one day and looked apologetically back at his boss. Carl couldn’t exactly blame the kid, the scene was pretty horrific, but he felt it was always best to show coolness under pressure for the new recruits. Still, he felt thankful to have the cigarettes to settle his own stomach.

Killing the trooper must have caused Luther to work up an appetite.

The half nude body hung impaled on a jagged, broken off branch protruding about three feet from the trunk of the tree. Carl tried to imagine how the madman had done this, especially since the branch sat about seven feet up the trunk. And the effort required to drive even a sharp object like the thick branch through the man’s back so it came out his chest must have been impressive. At least it meant the poor man had already been dead when Luther started tearing bites out of his legs… there were large chunks missing from the thighs, and he had stripped them to the bone from the knees down. But that bothered Carl in its own way as well.

It took a savage to consume another human being…but eating him raw?

The sheriff started to think Luther Cole must have been more animal than man by the time he died.

He turned his attention back to the tree, where his other deputy now glared up at the corpse with folded arms. His cigarette clenched in his teeth, Les Patterson glowered at the body as if personally offended by it.

“Hey, Les?” the sheriff queried. “Was he a friend of yours?”

“Huh?” T
he deputy jerked himself out of his scowling reverie and looked at the sheriff. “Oh…no…that’s not the problem.”

“So what is?”

Les looked back up at the body for a second, then down at the trooper’s pistol he retrieved from the ground nearby. He had opened the cylinder earlier and declared all the bullets spent.

“I guess I just don’t like it when things don’t make sense. And what I’m seeing ain’t making sense to me.”

“How?” Carl frowned at the deputy. “It’s pretty straightforward. Luther and the trooper trade shots. Luther finishes off the trooper, hangs him up and…has a snack. Then the crazy fart has a lucid moment and realizes he can’t just kill an officer without the rest of us coming for him. So he hobbles back up to his cabin and hangs himself. End of story. Case closed. Ain’t nothing to do now but pick up the bodies and try to get home before dinner gets too cold.”

Carl offered the last sentence in a hopeful tone…not at all liking the downcast look of his senior deputy.

“It didn’t happen that way,” Les replied softly.

“What do you mean? What’s the matter?”

“Well, first of all…” The deputy shone his own flashlight on the corpse. “Look at this body. Does this guy look like he’s been dead longer than Luther? We know the trooper came out here yesterday afternoon. We know he and Luther traded shots. And we know Luther hung himself sometime later…probably before sunset. But this guy looks like he died sometime last night. Several hours after Luther was already dead.”

“Okay,” Carl sighed, “What do you make of this then?”

“I’m not sure.” The deputy rubbed the back of his neck. “You can see where he took a lot of birdshot to the face…which pretty much explains the poor aiming on his part. He may have been half or even mostly blind. And if he and Luther go separate ways after trading shots, he might have been unable to find his way back to his boat. Top it off with him not knowing Luther was injured or dead, and he may have been hiding or stumbling around down here till dark.”

“Alright,” the sheriff nodded, “that makes sense, but it don’t mean Luther didn’t kill him. I know this body looks fresher, but maybe it’s because the chest has been punctured which would do a lot to reduce the bloating. And with his legs like they are, the body bled out instead of filling up with blood. So it looks fresher but it really isn’t.”

“I guess,” Les sighed. He couldn’t have looked more doubtful.

“C’mon, Les. It had to be that way. We’ve been all over this island and there ain’t nobody els
e here. Now why don’t you relax and help me figure out a way to get the poor bastard down.”

The sheriff had noted Les’s tension ever since finding the body, and now knew why. He supposed the idea there might be a third person on the island would be a little unnerving. The trooper’s body actually did appear fresher, but Carl preferred his answer to the deputy’s. After leaving the shack, they had started at one end of the island and searched it down to this end. They found nothing but the two corpses, and a collection of bones in the waste pile.

If a third party had been involved, they must have owned their own boat and left long ago.

On the bright side, he could now see the sky through the branches above as the fog settled.
It already showed a dark indigo and the first stars were peeking out. With the moon starting to rise in the east, they would at least have a little light other than their flashlights to work by.

“Okay, men,” Carl cajoled, “I’ll tell you what. Let’s just take down the two bodies and bag them, then call it an evening. The bones in the waste pile will be here tomorrow, and we’ll be able to see to do a better search in daylight. I’ll call Eddie up at the State Police and tell them to come pick up their man. They’ll probably want to have an investigator out here tomorrow as well. Oh, and nobody tell Earl what we found. I want to keep a lid on t
his for at least another twenty-four hours.”