In his youth, when Stillwater was still a flourishing blue-collar town, the streets would teem with children of all ages on Halloween night. Ben himself had raced up and down those streets, a plastic dime-store mask cinched to his face, an old pillowcase bursting with goodies banging against his shins as he ran. Christ, how things had changed. Nowadays, he was surprised if he came across a dozen kids schlepping their meager satchels of goodies up and down the sun-faded streets. They were sad and derelict in their costumed campaign along the otherwise empty sidewalks. Families had picked up and moved, and the ones who stayed mostly didn’t have children of their own. Stillwater had become a barren womb.
In another ten years,
Ben thought, counting out his change at the checkout counter of Lomax’s,
this town will be nothing but dilapidated shotgun shacks, paranoid hermits, career alcoholics, and weekend hunters. This is what happens when a town folds in on itself.
If nothing else, the Stillwater Police Department was just a microcosm of the town it served and protected. Just a handful of years ago they had had nine officers, two sergeants, a lieutenant, and a chief. Now, they were left with four officers, a working sergeant (which was Ben), a lieutenant who had recently transferred out East and whose position had yet to be filled, and Chief Lom Harris, who was now—and always seemed to be—out of town on vacation with his wife. True, there was very little in the way of crime in Stillwater to warrant a well-staffed department. Much of the action came in the form of drunken brawls, traffic violations, and the occasional domestic dispute.
He left Lomax’s and walked up Hamilton, enjoying the cool autumn air on his face, the crunch of dead leaves beneath his sneakers, and the smell of fireplaces coming from the residential streets just a couple of blocks over. Many of the shop windows were dark and soaped over. The businesses that remained, like random teeth in a diseased mouth, tried their best to appear upbeat and festive, their windows decorated in seasonal attire and jack-o’-lanterns glowing on the front stoops. In the front window of a liquor store, a cardboard decoration depicted a cadre of skeletons in top hats wielding slender black canes, their fleshless arms intertwined in some semblance of camaraderie.
That’s us,
Ben thought morosely.
That’s all that’s left of the proud Stillwater PD—a bunch of skeletons marshaling through the streets of a ghost town.
At the corner of Hamilton and Susquehanna, Ben jaywalked in the direction of Hogarth’s Drugstore. The drugstore’s windows issued a soft, yellow glow and Ben could see a variety of Halloween costumes—masks and hats and capes—in pedestals behind the glass. He hopped up the curb and entered Hogarth’s.
It was a cramped little store that had an old-fashioned soda fountain toward the back. Godfrey Hogarth was back there now, toiling away with something underneath the counter. At eighty-eight, Godfrey Hogarth was one of Stillwater’s eldest residents. Despite his age, the man’s memory was as sharp as a tack, and he was known to tell stories about Stillwater’s heyday—or what passed as Stillwater’s heyday—with much fanfare and animation when he was down at Crossroads, enjoying some dandelion wine or Wild Turkey. He’d run the drugstore since Ben had been a kid, though back then it had taken up the whole block and had employed roughly a dozen people.
“Hey, Mr. Hogarth.”
“Hello, Ben!” The old man’s eyes lit up as he peered at him from over the counter. “Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”
“I’m either working or holed up at the farm. You know how it is.”
“You want a float?”
The notion struck him as almost comically appealing. “You know what? What the heck, let’s do it.”
“Fantastic!” The old man opened a freezer chest and took out a small container of vanilla ice cream. He opened it and scooped some into a fountain glass then poured cola over it. The drink fizzed and the ice cream bobbed like a tiny iceberg.
“I came in to ask you about a boy named Matthew Crawly,” Ben said as Hogarth slid the ice cream float in front of him. “Do you know him?”
“Sure. He’s been coming around some days after school with another boy, looking at the costumes in the window.”
“His mother reported him missing Saturday night.”
“Oh, no. What happened?”
“We don’t know yet. Do you remember the last time you saw him?”
“I certainly do. It was Friday afternoon.” He pointed toward the front of the store with one hooked, arthritic finger that reminded Ben of a knotted tree branch. “He stood right outside on the sidewalk with his friend and looked at the costumes and masks in the window.”
“Did he come inside?”
“No.”
“Did you go out there and talk to him?”
“I would have, but I was on the cash register.”
Ben sipped the float through an accordion straw. It was delicious and reminded him of childhood.
“Do you think something bad has come down on the poor kid’s head?” Hogarth asked. There was genuine concern in his ancient turtle eyes.
“I don’t know much yet,” Ben said truthfully.
“That’s a shame. He seems like a nice boy.” With speed Ben would have thought impossible for the old man, Godfrey Hogarth jerked one finger up beside his face. He had the tired, drooping face of a scarecrow, capped with a wild nest of thick, iron-colored hair. “You know, I may be a crazy old man, but I haven’t felt right since that other boy was found down in the Narrows, Ben.”
“I know what you mean.”
“I’ve seen a lot of things. I’ve felt a lot of things, too.” Hogarth shook his head, his eyes wise yet distant, like the eyes of an old reptile. “I know when to listen when my heart tells me something.”
This sparked something else inside Ben. “In all the time you’ve lived here, have you ever heard of any animal eating—God, this sounds so stupid—any animal eating the brains out of other animals?”
Hogarth brought his hand back down. His muddy-brown eyes narrowed. “Eating brains, did you say?”
“I know how it sounds.”
Like something out of one of Eddie La Pointe’s horror magazines,
he thought. “We’ve had two cases of farmers whose livestock have been killed.”
“Since you’ve mentioned the brains, I’m assuming you mean
only
the brains, correct? Nothing else was eaten?”
“Not that I can tell.”
“Well,” the old man huffed, “that
is
strange.”
“That’s not something a mountain lion would do, is it?”
Slowly, Godfrey Hogarth shook his shaggy head. “I couldn’t say, Ben. I suppose anything is possible. A mountain lion?”
“Some folks in Garrett shot and killed one Friday night.”
“Would get cougars come down from the mountains on occasion,” Hogarth said. “You know that as well as anyone, having grown up here in Stillwater, Ben.”
Ben nodded. But that didn’t help him. He was trying to narrow things down, not broaden them.
“I’ve heard tell of strange things come down from those mountains in my lifetime, and stranger things pulled from the Narrows,” Hogarth went on. “I’ve seen a few, myself. Mutated toads and tadpoles bristling with more legs than a goddamned centipede, if you pardon an old man his language. Stuff like that. These things happened with more frequency back when the factory was in operation, of course.”
“The plastics factory.”
“Pollutants in the water, runoff, things like that. Used to be a guy up on Yew Drive claims to have caught a rockfish with a fully working eyeball growing right outta its side. Can you imagine?”
“Do you believe that story?”
“Sure. Why the hell not?”
“I’ve never seen anything strange down there.”
“That’s because the factory’s been closed long before you were ever born. And mutations like that don’t breed and they don’t live long, neither. It’s God’s way of making sure nature corrects whatever man done screwed up.” He shrugged, as if the whole conversation was suddenly inconsequential. “Heck, I suppose there’s still some freakish things down in the Narrows—and in the mountains beyond—but they’s mostly just legend now.”
“When I was a kid I actually used to swim in there.”
“As did I,” Hogarth said. “Maybe that’s why I’ve lived so long.” The chuckle that followed was a low, rumbling growl clotted with phlegm. “Of course, back then, the Narrows used to flood much worse than it does now, so maybe all the bad that collected in there got flushed out more regularly. Year I was born, most of what was then downtown Cumberland was destroyed when Wills Creek flooded, and all the runoff came right through Stillwater, tearing down bridges, knocking the walls out of homes, and uprooting trees. A baby went missing in that flood, too. The sorry little thing was just pried from its mamma’s arms, was how I heard it told. I remember, when the floodwaters finally receded, there were dead horses and livestock all over the streets. The smell was unbearable. After that, many of the residents moved their farms higher into the mountains.
“It wasn’t until the fifties that the Army Corps of Engineers finally came in and assisted the city in putting in a pump system and retaining walls around the creek down by Route 40 to help alleviate the flooding problems. That was what created the Narrows as we know them now. At the time, it was one of the most costly public works projects in American history. The price tag was something like eighteen million dollars, if I remember correctly.”
Ben whistled.
“Took ten years to finish the project, too,” Hogarth went on. “And while I don’t believe Cumberland has ever had a bad flood since, us folks here in the river valley of Stillwater still get dunked occasionally.”
“I remember one summer when my dad’s entire harvest was washed away,” Ben said. “There were three feet of standing water in the south field. And when the water went away, I remember seeing someone’s front door lying in the mud. Just some random front door to a house, washed up in our yard. It had a decorative oval of glass in its center, completely whole and unbroken. I remember being amazed at how a flood could cause such destruction—destruction enough to tear a door off a house—yet leave the oval of glass completely intact.”
“Crazier things have washed up.” Like that poem about Santa Claus, Hogarth pressed one finger to the side of his nose. “Craziest thing I ever found was a Viking helmet—bullet-shaped thing with the horned tusks coming out of the sides.”
“No kidding.”
“Saw it wedged up in the fork of a tree,” Hogarth said. “I must have been about seven or eight at the time, and a hell of a tree climber. I scaled that tree, pulled the helmet down, and took it home to show my old man. I remember him examining it by the firelight in the hearth that evening—we were living in a tar-paper shack out along what is Tillman Road now—and how he turned it over and over in his big hands. He was afraid of it, thought it meant there were soldiers hiding somewhere in the mountains plotting some attack. My father was a descendant of English pig farmers. He hadn’t the slightest clue what the hell a Viking was, let alone what sort of headgear they wore.”
“What about animals?” Ben asked. “Did any nonindigenous animals ever wash up?”
While the look on the old man’s face conveyed a lack of familiarity with the word
nonindigenous
, he understood the context and did not miss a beat in answering Ben’s question. “There was a snake once. A big one. And I’m not talking your garden variety mountain snake, Ben. This thing looked like it had come straight out of the Amazon.”
“A python?”
“Lord knows what it was. It was pale yellow with these whitish, wavy markings down its back. It had drowned in the flood and washed up at a dirt intersection that eventually became Calvert Street, right where the Farmers’ Market used to be. Damn thing was as long as a school bus and, at its widest, thicker than a grown man’s upper thigh. Midway along its body was a massive bulge, an indication that it had eaten something before it died.”
Ben finished his ice cream float and slid the glass across the counter. Lost completely in the past, Hogarth did not appear to notice.
“Some men came out of the cannery—there used to be a cannery at the far end of Susquehanna, where all those homes are now—and one of them had this long buck knife. We all gathered around in the street and watched as he cut into the belly of the snake and all this greenish-black ooze spilled out. I remember it taking him some time and effort to cut that belly open, and when he finally got it, the gash separated like a purse.”
“What was inside?” Ben asked. His voice was close to a whisper.
Hogarth said, “A little girl.”
Ben blinked.
“She had been maybe six years old, judging by her size, though it was hard to tell because she had been partially digested. Her features had been melted and worn away by the snake’s stomach acids, giving her this faceless, inhuman appearance. I was in my thirties back then, but I still suffered about two weeks’ worth of nightmares after seeing that girl’s featureless body slide out of the opening in the snake’s belly, splayed out there on the muddy road in a pool of bile, blood, and digestive juices.”
“Jesus,” Ben breathed.
“Yeah. So maybe the Viking helmet wasn’t the craziest thing ever washed up around here after all.”
“My father never told me stories like that.”
“Your dad had stories to beat the band, Ben. I once saw him save the little Winterbarger girl when she was chokin’ on a bit of stewed lamb at the county fair.”