Chapter 7
Roland Mercer
The Yamamba lecture had gone well.
Roland Mercer walked through the empty hallway of the Humanities Building, pleased that most of his students hadn’t slept through the talk.
The Japanese mountain witch had that way about her, though.
She was reliable material. The students who had nodded off through the Russian Baba Yaga and the German Krampus the previous two weeks had been somewhat enamored with the Yamamba.
He understood their fascination.
Yamamba was older, lived in the high mountain forests of Honshu, and waited in the trees for travelers who had gotten lost on the path.
She would feed on them when they came close enough.
Some versions of the tale held that she could be appeased with offerings of rice.
Others held that she could not be appeased at all.
A few versions, the ones Roland found most interesting, held that the Yamamba had once been a midwife in a mountain village, and that what she had become was a kind of spiritual side-effect of a profession the community no longer needed.
The figure was, in his professional opinion, the most thematically rich female monster in the East Asian canon, and undergraduates who had been raised on Disney villains and television witches were generally surprised to discover that a mountain witch could carry the kind of psychological weight the Yamamba did.
He had ended the lecture five minutes early because he had wanted to grade the previous week’s response papers before he left campus for the day. There was a deli on Magnolia that did a country ham on rye, calling his name for dinner, too.
He turned the corner on the third-floor faculty hallway and unlocked his office door with the small bronze key he kept clipped to the inside pocket of his briefcase. He crossed the threshold, took two steps toward his desk to set the briefcase down, and stopped.
His laptop was closed, just the way he’d left it.
Yet something wasn’t right.
He remained still, his briefcase still in his right hand.
He ran the morning through his mind, and the memory of him sliding the laptop a quarter inch forward so the edge sat flush with the lip of the desk pad came back clearly.
It was instinctive for him, yet the laptop was angled so that the right side was an inch off.
Some would label him paranoid, but he deliberately aligned the laptop to that edge every time he closed it.
Every time.
And he’d done so at eleven forty-five this morning.
“Somebody has been here,” Roland whispered to himself as he lifted his briefcase to rest on the corner of his desk.
He focused on the wastebasket.
The small bin was half full. The muffin wrapper from this morning’s cafeteria stop was on top, still folded the way he had done so after polishing off the last bite.
A paper coffee cup he had brought back from the cafeteria was also inside.
Below those two items was an empty mint tin.
The basket had not been emptied since last night, which meant the janitorial staff had not been in the office.
“Not the janitor,” Roland murmured with unease. “Who?”
Roland stepped carefully around the desk and lowered himself into his chair.
He sat on the front three inches of the seat and ran his gaze across the surface of the desk without touching anything.
The fountain pen he kept in the top-right corner was where he had left it.
The framed photograph of his mother in the back-left corner was facing the same direction it had this morning. Nothing else had been disturbed.
Only his laptop.
He quickly stood up and made his way to the office door. He leaned over the threshold and scanned to the left, registering an empty corridor and the distant sound of a conversation drifting from Annette Belkin’s office three doors down. It sounded as if she were on the phone.
Given that his office was at the end of the corridor, all he had to do was gaze straight down the hallway. The main staircase was near the end, and the plastic tarp covering the renovation work being done on the banister was intact.
Everything appeared normal outside his private domain.
He slowly retreated and quietly closed his door, twisting the tiny knob to engage the lock. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t want anyone to sneak up on him while he searched his own office. He returned to the desk and sat down properly this time.
“What did you do to it?” Roland muttered while staring intently at his laptop. “What did you do?”
He wanted more than anything to open the lid.
He wasn’t a technology man. His entire professional career had been spent in folklore studies, which was a discipline whose tools had not significantly changed since the introduction of the photocopier.
He couldn’t have written a line of code if a department chair had held tenure over his head, and he had spent his university years and most of his community college years comfortable with the gap between his expertise and the digital infrastructure of his work.
Roland wasn’t obtuse, though.
Someone had obviously been in his office and done something to his laptop.
He’d read online articles and in some of the better technology blogs about hardware keyloggers, small physical devices about the size of a fingernail that could be plugged into a USB port and intercept every keystroke that followed.
There were even boot-level attacks that bypassed the password screen entirely, as well as Bluetooth proximity exploits and Wi-Fi vulnerabilities.
He gripped the arms of his chair as anger swelled in his chest.
No one respected him publicly, but people had the audacity to break into his office to search for information that he’d accumulated throughout the years.
He’d overheard the comments at the department holiday parties, especially the ones the assistant dean had made when he had thought Roland was on the other side of the room.
Eccentric.
Paranoid.
A fake.
Roland didn’t particularly care what the assistant dean thought of him.
The entire academic faculty believed the accusations of his previous employer.
Accusations had swirled about a journal article in Western Folklore right before his name was about to be added to a tenure list. A colleague had insisted that the article’s central argument had been lifted from an unpublished dissertation by a graduate student at a Tennessee state school.
The accusation had been false, of course.
The graduate student’s dissertation had drawn on the same regional source material Roland had been working from for fifteen years, and he’d been able to demonstrate, through his own research notes, that the parallel argument had been independently arrived at.
The committee had not been interested in his research notes.
All they had wanted at the time was an apology, and he wouldn’t give them that satisfaction.
As if he had needed to plagiarize a single peer-reviewed article in his own field of expertise.
“A life’s work,” Roland muttered in disgust, pushing his chair back. “Blood, sweat, and tears…and they still do not understand what I am doing.”
The end result was what mattered, and the final outcome would be his name and picture on the back of a New York Times bestseller, proving the existence of a centuries-old supernatural presence in the Ozarks.
He’d realized his life’s mission on his fifteenth birthday, when he’d photocopied a Methodist minister’s letter at the Cane County historical society.
Roland stood so abruptly that the chair hit the back wall.
For once, he didn’t care about leaving a scuff on the white paint.
He closed the distance to the black filing cabinet.
He then dragged it forward two inches before reaching his hand into the small space between the back of the cabinet and the drywall.
His fingers brushed the strip of black electrical tape he had pressed against the back panel.
The USB drive was still there.
“Not so smart now, are you?” Roland muttered as he ripped the small device from its hiding spot. “I’ll always be one step ahead.”
The drive contained his life’s work.
Three hundred and twelve scanned photographs.
Forty-seven audio recordings of interviews with elderly Cane County residents, some of whom were now in the ground.
The transcribed Methodist letter and three others he’d managed to turn up in private collections over the past decade.
The geo-tagged map of every sighting he had been able to document from 1886 through the present, though notes in the margins made plain he believed the Threshing Man went back further to the town’s first hard winters in the 1830s.
And the heart of it all…a seventy-four-thousand-word manuscript draft that was eighty percent finished.
Roland had concluded, sometime in his late thirties, that the standard reading regarding the Threshing Man was wrong. The supernatural entity had been misunderstood for centuries, Roland was sure of it.
The urban legend was not a predator.
He was a guardian.
The Threshing Man was Cane County’s protector.
Roland slipped the USB drive into the inside breast pocket of his jacket.
He pressed his hand flat against the fabric until the small device pressed back through the lining.
He then pushed the cabinet back in place, giving him time to consider a new plan.
One that included at least a nine-hundred-dollar price tag.
It was a drastic decision, but one he couldn’t afford to pass on.
He returned to his desk with renewed determination and picked up the paper cup from the wastebasket.
He preferred his coffee hot, and he usually tossed a third of the cup’s contents every morning.
Such a wasteful personal preference had benefited him today.
There was more than enough liquid for what he had planned as he pried the plastic lid off slowly.
Opening the laptop with his other hand, he then deliberately tipped what remained of the beverage over the keyboard.
He kept pouring until the cup was completely empty.
The IT department wouldn’t be happy about the so-called accident, but they would arrange for a new laptop to be issued through the standard channels. He’d call them in the morning.
“Nine hundred dollars,” Roland murmured to himself as he tossed the empty cup back into the wastebasket, “and worth every penny.”
He’d done things these past few years that he hadn’t thought himself capable of, but every one of those sacrifices would be worth it in the end.
Picking up his briefcase, he paused to press his fingers against the breast pocket of his jacket once more.
He’d have to be more vigilant, which meant finding a new hiding place for his material.
The Threshing Man had a guardian of his own now, and Roland intended to be worthy of him.