Night Freight (16 page)

Hixon and DeVries had stopped a few paces below him. In a half whisper DeVries asked, "You see anything, Ben?"

Larrabee didn't answer. He was working saliva through a dry mouth, staring hard at the dark foul-smelling opening of a cave.

. . .
Haven't you ever wondered why there have been so many unexplained disappearances in the past few decades? Why so many children are kidnapped? Why there is so seldom any trace of the missing ones?

Haven't you ever wondered about all the random murders, so many more of them now than in the past, and why the bloody remains of certain victims are left behind?

You fools, you blind fools, who do you think the serial killers really are? . . .

T
hey were all staring at the cave now, standing side by side with rifles trained on the opening, breathing thinly through their mouths. The death-stink seemed to radiate out of the hole, so that it was an almost tangible part of the day's heat.

Larrabee broke his silence. He called out, "If you're in there you better come out. We're armed."

Nothing. Stillness.

"Now what?" DeVries asked.

"We take a look inside."

"Not me. I ain't going in there."

"We don't have to go in. We'll shine a light inside."

"That's still too close for me."

"Do it myself then," Larrabee said angrily.

"Charley, get the flashlight out of my pack."

Hixon went around behind him and opened the pack and found the six-cell flash he carried; tested it against his hand to make sure the batteries were still good. "What the hell," he said, "I'll work the light. You're a better shot than me, Ben."

Larrabee tied his handkerchief over his nose and mouth; it helped a little against the stench. Hixon did the same. "All right, let's get it done. Hank, you keep your rifle up and your eyes open."

"Count on it," DeVries said.

They had to prod brush out of the way to reach the cave mouth. It was larger than it had seemed from a distance, four feet high and three feet wide—large enough so that a man didn't have to get down on all
fours and crawl inside. The sun glare made the blackness within a solid wall.

Larrabee stood off a little ways, butted the Savage against his shoulder, took a bead on the opening. "Okay," he said to Hixon, "put the light in there."

Hixon switched on, sent the six-cell's beam probing inside the cave.

Almost instantly the light impaled a crouching shape—big, hairy, wild-eyed. The thing snarled, a sound that was only half-human, and came hurtling out at them with teeth bared and hands hooked like claws. Hixon yelled, dropped the flashlight, tried to dodge out of the way. Larrabee triggered his rifle, but the suddenness of the attack threw his aim off, made him miss. The man-beast slammed into Hixon, threw him down; slashed at him, opened a bloody gash along his neck and shoulder; swung snarling toward Larrabee and launched himself like an animal as Larrabee, fighting panic, jacked another shell into firing position.

He wouldn't have had time to get off a second shot if DeVries hadn't held his ground below, if DeVries hadn't fired twice while the man-beast was in mid-lunge.

The first bullet knocked him aside, brought a keening cry out of him and put him down in the brush; the second missed high, whanged off rock. By then Larrabee had set himself, taken aim again. He shot the bugger at point-blank range—blew the left side of his head off. Even so, his rage was such that he jacked another shell into the chamber and without thinking shot him again, in the chest this time, exploding the heart.

The last of the echoes died away, leaving a stillness that was painful in Larrabee's ears—like a shattering noise just beyond the range of his hearing. He got his breathing under control and went in loose-legged strides to where Hixon lay writhing on the ground, clutching at his bloody neck. DeVries was there too, his face pale and sweat-studded; he kept saying, "Jesus God," over and over, as if he were praying.

Hixon's wound wasn't as bad as it first seemed: a lot of blood but no arteries severed. DeVries had a first aid kit in his pack; Larrabee got it out and swabbed antiseptic on the gash, wrapped some gauze around it. Hixon was still glazed with shock, so they moved him over against one of the rocks, in the shade. Then they went to look at what they'd killed.

It was a man, all right. Six feet, two hundred pounds, black beard and hair so thick and matted that it all but hid his features. Fingernails as long and sharp as talons. The one eye that was left was a muddy brown, the white of it so veined it looked bloody. Skins from different animals, roughly sewn together, draped part of the thick-muscled body; the skins and the man's bare flesh were encrusted with filth, months or years of it. The stench that came off the corpse made Larrabee want to puke.

DeVries said hoarsely, "You ever in your life see anything like that?"

"I never want to see anything like it again."

"Crazy—he must've been crazy as hell. The way he come out of that cave . . ."

"Yeah," Larrabee said.

"He'd have killed you if I hadn't shot him. You and Charley and then me, all three of us. It was in his eyes . . . a goddamn madman."

Larrabee didn't respond to that. After a few seconds he turned and started away.

"Where you going?" DeVries said behind him.

"Find out what's inside that cave."

. . .
I am one of the old breed—not the most fearsome of Us. And sickened by the things I'm compelled to do; that is why I'm warning you. The new breed . . . it is with the new breed that the ultimate terror lies.

We are not all the same. . . .

D
eVries wouldn't go into the cave, wouldn't even go near the mouth, so Larrabee went in alone. He took the Savage as well as the flashlight, and he went in slow and wary. He didn't want any more surprises.

He had to walk hunched over for the first few feet. Then the cave opened up into a chamber nearly six feet high and not much larger than a prison cell. He put the light on the walls, on the floor: more animal skins, heaps of flesh-rotted bones, splatters and streaks of dried blood everywhere. Things had been killed as well as eaten in here, Christ knew what things.

The stink was so bad that he couldn't stand it for more than a few seconds. When he turned to get out of there, the flash beam illuminated a kind of natural shelf in the wall. There were some things on the shelf—the stub of a candle stuck in a clot of its own grease, what appeared to be a ragged pocket notebook, other things he didn't want to examine too closely. On impulse he caught up the notebook by one edge, brought it out with him into the hot clean air.

Hixon was up on his feet, standing with DeVries twenty feet from the entrance; he was still a little shaky but the glazed look was gone from his eyes. He said, "Bad in there?"

"As bad as it gets."

"What'd you find?" DeVries asked. He was looking at what Larrabee held between his left thumb and forefinger.

Larrabee squinted at it, holding it away from his face because of the smell. Kid's spiral-bound notebook, the covers torn and stained, the ruled paper inside almost black with filth and dried blood. But on half a dozen pages there was writing, old writing done with a pencil pressed hard and angry so that the words were still legible. Larrabee put his back to the sun so he could read it better.

. . .
Believe it. Believe me. I am the proof

We look like men, We walk and talk like men, in your presence We act like men. But We are not men. Believe that too.

We are the ancient evil. . . .

W
ordlessly, Larrabee handed the notebook to DeVries, who made a faint disgusted sound when he touched it. But he read what was written inside. So did Hixon.

"Man oh man," Hixon said when he was done, with a kind of awe in his voice. "Ben, you don't think .
. .
?"

"It's bullshit," Larrabee said. "Ravings of a lunatic."

"Sure. Sure. Only . . ."

"Only what?"

"I don't know, it . . . I don't know."

"Come on, Charley" DeVries said. "You don't buy any of that crap, do you? Some kind of monster—a werewolf, for Christ's sake?"

"No. It's just . . . maybe we ought to take this back with us, give it to the sheriff."

Larrabee gave him a hard look. "The body too, I suppose? Lug it twenty miles in this heat, smelling the way it does, leaking blood?"

"Not that, no. But we got to report it, don't we? Tell the law what happened?"

"Hell we do. How's it going to look? He's got three bullets in him, two of mine and one of Hank's. He jumped us out of a cave, three of us with rifles and him without a weapon, and we blew him away—how's that going to sound?"

"But it was self-defense. The sheriff'll believe that . . ."

"Will he? I'm not going to take the chance."

"Ben's right," DeVries said. "Neither am I."

"What do we do then?"

"Bury him," Larrabee said. "Forget any of this ever happened."

"Bury the notebook too?"

"What notebook?" Larrabee said.

. . . You fools, you blind fools . . .

T
hey dug the grave for the crazy sheep-killing man and his crazy legacy in the grass above the outcrop. Deep, six feet deep, so the predators couldn't get at him.

Writers are forever being asked where they get their ideas. We chafe at the question because it is really unanswerable. Ideas come from everywhere and nowhere. Some develop slowly, requiring a good deal of thought and reshaping. Others seem to fall out of the blue and smack the muse's head like the apple allegedly struck Isaac Newton's. Take this story, for instance. One day I was browsing through some old mystery magazines, and halfway through a wholly different and not very good tale of a menaced family, "The Monster" suddenly appeared. Full-born and nasty, first sentence to last, title included. I wrote it in an hour, virtually as you'll read it here—and I seldom consider any piece of writing finished without extensive revisions. Ideas? Hey, don't ask me where they come from.

H
e was after the children.

Meg knew it, all at once, as soon as he was inside the house. She couldn't have said exactly how she knew. He was pleasant enough on the surface, smiling, friendly. Big and shaggy-haired in his uniform, hairy all over like a bear. But behind his smile and underneath his fur there was menace, evil. She felt it, intuited it—a mother's instinct for danger. He was after
Kate and Bobby. One of those monsters who preyed on little children, hurt them, did unspeakable things to them—

"Downstairs or upstairs?" he said.

". . . What?"

"The stopped-up drain. Downstairs here or upstairs?"

A feeling of desperation was growing in her, spreading toward panic. She didn't know what to do. "I think you'd better leave." The words were out before she realized what she was saying.

"Huh? I just got here, Mrs. Thompson. Your husband said you got a stopped-up drain—that's right, isn't it?"

Why did I let him in?
she thought.
Just because he said Philip sent him, that doesn't make it so. And even if Philip did send him . . . Oh God, why him, of all the plumbers in this city?

"No," she said. "No, it . . . it's all right now. It's working again, there's nothing wrong with it."

He wasn't smiling anymore. "You kidding me?"

"Why would I do that?"

"Yeah, why? Over at the door you said you been expecting me, come on in and fix the drain."

"I didn't—"

"You did, lady. Look, I haven't got time to play games. And it's gonna cost you sixty-five bucks whether I do any work or not, so you might as well let me take a look."

"It's all right now, I tell you."

"Okay, maybe it is. But if it was stopped-up once today, it could happen again. You never know with the pipes in these old houses. So where is it, up or down?"

"Please . . ."

"Upstairs, right? Yeah, now I think of it, your husband said it was in the upstairs bathroom."

No!
The word was like a scream in her mind. The upstairs bathroom was between their room, hers and Philip's, and the nursery. Baby Kate in her crib, not even a year old, and Bobby, just two, napping in his bed . . . so innocent and helpless . . . and this man, this beast—

He moved past her to the stairs, hefting his tool kit in one huge, scab-knuckled hand. "You want to show me where it is?"

"No!" She cried it aloud this time.

"Hey," he said, "you don't have to bust my eardrums." He shook his head the way Philip did sometimes when he was vexed with her. "Well, I can find it myself. Can't hide a bathroom from an old hand like me."