Chapter 8 A Growl in the Aftermath #3
Green walked up to the rear. The doors hung wide like reaching arms. A single yellowjacket crawled along the hem of a thin white sheet pouring over the edge of the occupied gurney.
In the unreality of the moment, the shrouded body seemed to be a whirlpool tugging the little ship of his attention nearer. He was there to look. He needed to look. What could be more important to see than this?
Green swallowed, teetering on the edge of the whirlpool.
Mechanically, he forced himself to step up into the back of the van. It felt twenty degrees colder inside. The yellowjacket retreated, grazing his ear with a faint whine like a distant motor.
He paused.
“Valentina?”
His voice was a hoarse whisper.
There was no answer.
He moved to the head of the body and reached for the sheet. It was tucked beneath the figure and fought with him as he worked to peel it aside.
Don’t they have body bags in the cop shows?
The sheet came away.
There was the young woman with the mint coat he’d seen at the Count and Countess station on the night he’d arrived.
Her blond hair was plastered over one eye.
Her lower lip protruded, frozen at an odd angle, exposing white teeth and a line of pink gums. The tops of her ears and the tip of her nose looked stained with ink.
Dark as the wolf’s flesh.
One of the two double doors behind Green slammed shut and he barked out a cry.
“Stop,” he said.
The gaunt man reeled back and doubled over from the sound of Green’s voice. He gagged and spit in the dirt. His clipboard clattered on the ground.
“Christ,” he said to the empty air as Green stumbled out of the van.
Green staggered to the cabin’s porch and let himself spill onto the weathered boards, his heart racing.
The man in scrubs recovered and slammed the second door.
A moment later he, his partner, and the body of a woman on a fun little trip to the mountains rumbled down the wooded drive and away from Kinkaid Cabins.
Green sat up and watched them go, trying not to think of the way her lips looked like molded wax.
Not alive. Somehow, not fully dead. Completely and utterly wrong.
He scanned around for Valentina, but couldn’t see her. It was hard to know whether that was good or bad. She wasn’t much of a comfort. He flinched at a car door slam and looked up to see the cops were pulling out of the little parking area.
Gravel dust billowed.
The sound of the tires rose and fell.
Plastic police tape murmured in the breeze of approaching evening.
“Mr. Green?”
The Valentina smudge stood five feet off.
“What?”
“Tell me what you’ve seen so far.”
The question made him very tired.
“I saw one of the bodies. I knew her face. I saw her at the gas station when I arrived in the mountains. Like I saw Kyle Cartwright. Is this me? Am I doing this somehow?”
He didn’t need to see her to feel the weight of her attention.
“Hmm. Are you a dangerous, predatory cryptid somehow deceiving the most experienced cryptonaturalist in the world?”
Her tone seemed artificially light. He didn’t like it.
Green thought of the things he hadn’t told his new teacher. He thought of the acorn in his pocket. He thought of the crow he couldn’t explain, the acrid haze of memories that hurt to touch. He thought of the wolf’s accusatory pronouncement. Not-man.
“Did you somehow come here and harm these people while you were simultaneously observing the rag moth?”
He didn’t have the words or the energy to argue.
“No,” he said.
“No, indeed. No, you are one of the people fighting to solve this. That is what you are doing here. Now, tell me what you saw.”
Green tried to breathe, but it felt shaky.
“Teacher. Can…can it wait?”
In his current state, away from the awe of the library tree, using the word “teacher” felt uncomfortably infantilizing.
Valentina paused. He couldn’t see her face or guess her expression. He was talking to a disturbing bruise on the landscape.
“Yes. I suppose so. Come, stay within sight of me while I finish my examinations.”
He watched the nauseating shape of Valentina duck under the police tape.
He rose with a groan and followed. He had to stay close or lose her.
The tape cordoned off a large metal fire ring surrounded by three bright blue camp chairs.
They looked new and smelled like a sporting goods store.
Green thought of that same camping gear smell lingering in his own car.
The wind shifted and the police tape billowed, changing the oblong perimeter into a fat bean shape.
Valentina knelt by one of the camp chairs and did…something. Green could hear a scraping noise like a fingernail scratching at nylon.
The scene was too clean. What had been there when the police arrived?
Were there empty beer cans beside the toppled bodies?
A Bluetooth speaker? A half-eaten bag of Doritos?
Marshmallows? A cooler full of hot dogs and melting ice sold to them by Alf?
How much of it was sitting in a cluttered evidence room?
He stood at the edge of the ring and thought about friends sitting around a cheerful fire.
It was a happy image, the sort of idyllic vignette he carried with him as he drove toward the Catskills.
It was the hopeful future he clung to as the acorn chased him out of his old life, a classic campout with friends, an endless summer vacation.
Except, it all went wrong. For him and for them.
Something came here and it went wrong. As wrong as it could go.
Something.
That’s what Valentina would want him to think.
But it wasn’t something. It was the horned wolf. The monster.
She wasn’t there. She didn’t see it.
He didn’t want to get any closer than he needed to in order to keep track of his teacher.
He didn’t know what to look for. All he could do was contaminate the scene or be in the way.
He shifted his focus to a nearby patch of grass and found a dead robin gaping up at him with sightless eyes like black beads.
Nowhere is safe to look.
Valentina moved about like a minnow flashing in a mountain stream, glimpsed then gone, glimpsed then gone.
He didn’t like the silence, so he tossed words at it.
“Can you see anything?”
“Still searching,” Valentina said. “They took most everything, of course. I’m confounded as to why they didn’t take the chairs. Not that I’m an expert on modern policing.”
Green tried to think of something useful to add.
“I saw the girl’s body in the van. She had dark patches on her skin. Dark like the horned wolf’s body. Is that important?”
His voice was flat.
“We have far too little data to make any educated guesses yet.”
He tried to allow for Valentina’s wisdom and experience, but all he could see was that sharp-toothed skull pressing in on him.
What would have happened if he had reached out and touched that black, pooling flesh?
Would they have found him lifeless in his car with ink-stained fingertips?
Perhaps he was still destined to take a ride in that beat-up van.
It wasn’t data, but it felt true. True and hateful. That huge nightmare creature pouncing from the dark trees with unearthly grace. They wouldn’t even see it, would they? A world they couldn’t touch, but it could touch them just fine. More than touch.
Valentina might be experienced and wise, but Green thought he had something that she didn’t—a healthy connection to instinctual human fear.
There was a kind of wisdom in that, too, wasn’t there? Did Blobert do his job too well? It was possible to be too detached and analytical. Wasn’t that a kind of gap in her awareness?
Green thought of the young man in the Ohio University hoodie back at the Count and Countess station. He pictured him being slid into a metal drawer. What was he studying? Why wasn’t he able to see the threat lurking out of the dark trees?
His brain floated back to his own college days, a drunken span of years in which poetry and coffee shop politics seemed like the only path leading up and out of the bullshit.
What had Tennyson called nature?
“Red in tooth and claw.”
“Hmm?”
He had accidentally spoken aloud.
“Oh. Nothing.”
“Come, Mr. Green. Look here. These patches of grass. Can you see the shapes? But why would the grass die from such brief contact with a body?”
Valentina was a smoky lump crouched near the crime scene tape. Green swallowed and took a knee beside her.
“Here, beside this chair, then over next to the fire ring. Can you see the discoloration?”
It was subtle, but he could see it.
The grass was the wrong color. Not dead. Not yet. But on its way. A pale yellow was overtaking the green.
He made an unintentional sound in his throat when he noticed the shapes.
The patch in front of them was the silhouette of a body on its side.
Green stood and looked at the other patches.
They were less clear, but still unmistakably human.
A yellowing shadow of an outstretched arm.
The clear crook of an elbow. The L of a foot outlined in wilting grass.
“They look like…fingerprints of death.”
Valentina was silent for a moment. He couldn’t see her, but he again felt the weight of her attention. She was considering him.
“This was too much. A string of too much. I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
Green thought about disagreeing, but he was bone-tired. Spiritually tired. He wanted to be done. He didn’t even have the clarity to articulate what that meant.
“Rest your mind. It needs a break. Your only task is to stay near me. Focus on that.”
Green touched the acorn in his pocket, one more persistent unknown.
Valentina retrieved two mason jars from a side compartment on the pack and unscrewed the lids.
“Here. Drink this. It will help you metabolize the cricket venom faster.”
Green took the jar.
“Thanks. Is this made of something tragic? Widow’s tears?”
“It’s water and honey. You’ll find honey has myriad uses in our work.”