Black Frost (5 page)

“Where are you?” he asked, voice moving into
law enforcement mode.

“Home, in the study,” I said.

“I’ll be there in five!” he said, then hung
up.

I called Tom Yelos and explained I couldn’t
make the morning workout. I gave him some excuse about the furnace
needing repair, then settled in to wait for dad. I replayed the
scene in the woods in my head, struggling to remember details. The
only thing new that came to mind was my final mental image of the
blond man. When he had nodded to me and turned to bolt away, the
long hair on the left side of his head had swung back, just for a
moment. I decided I was misremembering the moment, but the
impression stayed with me…..the man’s ear had a point like Spock
from Star Trek.

Dad pulled in the driveway a few minutes
later and I met him at the door, shotgun in hand, watching the
farmyard on either side and behind him. I was concerned about the
remaining green troglodyte.

He noticed my attention, even while keeping
his own careful scan, his right hand near the butt of his .45, his
steady gaze taking in the spear and shotgun in my hands

“Glad you’re here, you can be the one to
commit me,” I greeted him.

“Tell me what happened,” he ordered as I led
him to the little study.

I took a deep breath, considered that my
ultra-conservative, federal agent father would never buy the tale I
was about to spin, and then launched into it.

He stayed quiet through the whole story, not
even making a sound when I played the camera footage on my laptop.
His expression was locked down into what I used to call his ‘agent
man’ face.

“Describe the man,” he directed.

I had spent hours as a child, playing
description games with my father. The information rolled off my
tongue without much thought.

“Six feet, maybe six- one. Platinum blond
hair, long, bound in a pony tail. Athletic build, but not bulky.
Whippy, sort of. Maybe 175 pounds. Eyes are extremely light blue,
slight epicanthic fold, almond shaped. Skin color, dark tan or even
brown hued. He was dressed in black leather…of some type,” I
frowned as I tried to recall more about his clothes. “Unknown
impact or blade weapon, also black. Angular facial structure with
high cheekbones. Left ear deformed.”

“What’s your problem with his leather?” dad
asked, picking up on my hesitation.

“Well…it was oddly patterned. Some sort of
geometric design or something.”

“Impact
or
blade? The vivisected body
on the video seemed clear enough,” he asked.

“Yeah, well it was tough to get a handle on.
Like one moment it looked like a bowie-style blade, the next tanto
or katana-ish, and at least once like a baton.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment, just
kept his gaze steady and evaluating. I was used to that look,
having seen it my whole life. When I failed to shift my
description, even a little, he grunted and then asked his next
question.

“Deformed ear?”

This one was uncomfortable. I just met his
gaze and nodded. He sighed.

“How was it deformed, Ian?” he asked.

“It’s ahh…pointed. On top,” I said as evenly
as I could.

“Pointed? Pointed? Like, what? Vulcan?” he
asked, his eyes widening slightly.

I watched a lot of the classics growing up,
but this felt like the part where he was going to stop believing
me. I sighed, then nodded. “Pretty much! Also his teeth were
odd.”

“Odd?”

“Pointed kind of, sharpish looking,” I said,
really uncomfortable.

“Fangs?”

“No, just pointed, like someone who had their
teeth filed or something.”

His left hand reached up and stroked his
moustache absently while he processed that.

“So…he was tall, thin, but athletic, with
long white hair, almond shaped, ice blue eyes, dark skin, high
cheek bones, wearing black leather, had pointed ears and sharp
teeth?”

“Yeah, that’s about it. But when you say it
like that, it sounds like he escaped from Lord of the Rings or
World of Warcraft,” I said, protesting the lameness of my own
description.

He started at bit at that statement, as if
something I’d said had triggered a connection in his orderly cop
mind. He grabbed Grandpa’s journal from where it was sitting on the
desk and flipped through the pages, looking for a particular
entry.

“Here, read this one,” he said shoving the
book into my hands.

May
11
^th
–
Starting to think my grandmothers stories were accurate. Too many
similarities to the flyers with the teeth, which seem to be on the
same side as the squatty white monster (goblin? troll?), the
smaller green ones teamed with the lizard man. I remembered that
pixy in Peter Pan was Tinkerbell, maybe these things were her
inspiration. Hell, they may be at the bottom of the whole
fairy/pixy legend.

I looked up at my dad abruptly.

“Lizard man? That sounds a lot like the thing
I saw. And something was buzzing around the old foundation last
night. It scared Ash and Charm,” I said, musing. He harrumped, his
eyes narrowing immediately.

“Oh they’re fine, but I found the oddest
little piece of bug on Charm’s rabies tag. Only it evaporated when
it hit the colander in the sink,” I said.

“Would that colander be steel?” he asked. I
nodded.

He took back the journal, flipping through
another couple of entries till he found one.

May
17
^th
-
They don’t like steel or iron, particularly iron. Just like the
legends. In fact it’s as poisonous to them as the Tinks are to
anything from this world. Hit one of the big bird-like ones with a
full blast of lead pellets. Killed it. But also hit another with
four or five pellets and it just flew off. Hit one with just one
steel #4 and killed it dead!

I started to call time out, thinking it was
getting too crazy, but then the image of the green goblin-thing
sizzling on my knife blade and staff point popped up.

“Ahh Dad? What legends is he referring too?”
I asked, although I had a sneaking suspicion.

“He talking about the
sidhe
and the
unseelie sidhe
, if I’m not mistaken. The fae, little folk,”
my father said, perfectly seriously.

“Ah, that’s crazy! Isn’t it?”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he
looked out the window and spoke.

“Ian, your grandfather was the most grounded,
practical man I’ve ever know. But in the last two months of his
life, he covered all his windows and chimneys with steel mesh and
started loading his shotgun with steel shot. He was acting weird at
the end, and I’ve been thinking he was suffering from dementia, but
he never forgot a thing,” he paused to glance at me, then
continued. “But now we have a carcass killed by something with
piranha teeth, but able to not leave tracks and kill on a hill top.
We have a highly credible eyewitness of known observational skill
and a piece of video evidence that I
know
you lack the skill
to fabricate.”

I’m past forty years old, but I was still
thrilled to hear my father describe me as a highly credible
witness. Bob Moore, Jr. was a hard man and there were many times in
my past that I had felt his disappointment with my decisions.

“Dad, this is America, not Ireland. The
legends you’re talking about all come from Ireland.”

“Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany,
Belgium, all of the Scandinavian countries, and pretty much the
rest of the world. Every country on Earth seems to have a legend of
little people, gnomes or some sort of goblin-like creature,” he
said, matter-of-factly.

We both looked at each other then he shook
his head and stood up.

“Come on, I want to see the crime scene,” he
said.

I wasn’t super excited to go back out there,
but I wasn’t going to say that to my dad.

“Let me grab my Sig and I’ll be ready,” I
said

I only own one handgun and one rifle, plus
Grandpa’s shotgun. My dad is the family gun nut, and while I
certainly felt comfortable around them, Sarah hadn’t been too
thrilled to have them in the house.

I grabbed my .40 Sig Sauer from the locked
pistol safe under my bed, picked up Grandpa’s little shotgun and
was ready to roll. My father was out at his SUV, opening a rifle
case in the back.

“How long have you had that?” I asked,
indicating the Chinese made, semi-auto version of an AK-47 he was
loading.

“A couple of months. I don’t like it as much
as my Russian version, but it’ll do. I got it loaded with some
cheap steel cased ammo,” he explained.

A lot of foreign made ammo uses steel
jacketed bullets instead of copper. Steel is cheaper to find in
many cases, but doesn’t shoot as well and can wear out a barrel
faster. In this case, it would be better than expensive, domestic
stuff.

He pointed at my shotgun. “You still got
those BB loads in?”

I shook my head. “No I switched them for what
I thought was buck shot from the cuff, but now I think is steel as
well.”

Grandpa’s ‘social’ gun had begun life as a
plain jane, Belgian made Browning over/under shotgun. That’s a
double barrel where the barrels are stacked on top of each other,
rather than side by side. The fella that owned it first had somehow
managed to crush the ends of the barrels. Grandpa bought it for
fifty bucks, cut the barrels off at twenty inches, re-crowned the
muzzles and did some minor cosmetic work on it. The resulting gun
was three feet long, had a nylon shell cuff on the stock that held
six more rounds and was handy as hell. It’s biggest drawback was
the two shot limit.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, the fridge magnet sticks to them, and
they’re lighter than lead buckshot, plus I found steel
three-eighths inch slingshot ammo in Grandpa’s reloading stuff,” I
replied.

We headed out, with Charm on point, my father
insisting on taking a different route. I hadn’t thought of ambush,
but that’s what comes out of a professional’s mind.

I’ve never looked at the woods on my land
like a hostile territory before. I didn’t like it. Every shadow,
every bush could harbor a squat killer. I felt like we were being
watched the whole time we were out there.

The shredded moss and gooey residue were
still there, although the rain was washing away the goo at a pretty
good clip. My father pulled an evidence kit from his coat pocket,
and proceeded to collect some of the viscous crud before it could
all disappear, while I watched the forest uneasily. He took some
pictures, had me walk him through the action as best I could
remember and measured distances and angles. I remembered sitting in
his car, about nine years old, watching through the rain streaked
glass as he walked the scene of a drug buy gone bad.

When we got back to the house, he headed
straight to the work bench in the cellar of the house, where the
reloading equipment was. I showed him the steel slingshot ammo, he
merely grunted, instead interested in a set of glass baby food jars
of what appeared to be iron and steel filings.

“I’m gonna take the iron filings, I got some
things I want to put together. What are you going to do?

“I think I’m gonna finish reading the
journal, then check the house over. Make sure it’s tight. Then I
have a project in the forge I want to try while I wait for Ash’s
bus,” I replied, my mind whirling from the surreal nature of our
discussion.

Chapter 4

With a sharp screech of brakes and a cloud of
diesel exhaust , the bus pulled to a stop at the end of the
driveway where Charm waited to collect her human. She got two for
the price of one, as Lindsey got off the bus with Ashley. It took a
second for me to remember, but with everything that had happened I
had forgotten that Lindsey was staying the night. I panicked for a
moment as the girls trudged down the driveway, laughing at their
own jokes followed by Charm who was beside herself with excitement.
Having another teenage girl in the house doubled the safety risks.
But after a moment’s thought, I realized it might be
beneficial.

I met the pair outside the forge shed, wiping
iron dust and rust off my hands with a rag.

“Hi girls, how was school?”

“Hi Mr. Moore!”

“Hi Dad. School sucked as usual, but now it’s
over!” Ashley supplied.

“Sorry to hear my tax dollars are being
wasted,” I said.

“You sound just like my dad,” Lindsey said,
surprised.

“Yeah well, someday you’ll sound the same
way! Listen ladies, there’s a skunk running around here and I think
it might be rabid, so I want you both to stay inside and keep Charm
with you, okay?”

This lie had a dual purpose; it would do to
keep the girls inside and it explained the holstered Sig on my hip
that Ash had been eyeing.

Ashley gave me a look, glanced at my gun
again, then rolled her eyes.

“Whatever. What do we have for snacks?” she
asked.

“Lots of apples, oranges, bananas and
grapes,” I said, flatly.

She stared at me for a moment then we both
started laughing. Lindsey smiled, but then protested.

“Hey,
I
like that stuff!”

“Yeah and I wish you would plant that idea in
your buddy’s head, ‘cause you’d think fruit was toxic to her,” I
said. “There’s some new bags of chips and pretzels, popcorn and a
few of those Little Debbie brownies left,”

“Sweet!” Ashley replied, grabbing her pal’s
hand and yanking her toward the door.

That would keep them for an hour or so, then
their teenage metabolisms would demand dinner. I went back into the
shed and cleaned up from my project, taking two cardboard boxes out
as I locked the door.

As I walked across the driveway to the house
a black shadow flickered by on my left side. I spun and crouched,
struggling to get one of the boxes out of my gun hand. Still
fumbling I realized it was just a crow, winging over the bird
feeder, but unwilling to land with me right there. Good thing it
was only a bird, because I would have been toast. The bird flew on
by the house and landed in the old oak tree that shades the barn.
Oaks take forever to drop their brown leaves and this tree was
still thick with them. The crow disappeared from view into the dead
foliage.