Sacrifice (26 page)

Ken milled around in the “S” section of the hall, near the end of the group. He hadn’t seen the others. He knew he wouldn’t see Bob. Bail was set at $250,000 (though the rumor mill had upped it to a cool million) and his mother didn’t have that kind of pocket change lying around. Ken hadn’t slept last night worrying about Dave. He had seen the compound fracture of Dave’s leg. He knew bad ones ended up being amputated, and the idea made him want to throw up.

Paul walked up behind Ken and hit him in the shoulder as a greeting. Ken nodded. They hadn’t spoken since they split up at the burning mill. None of them had. Some combination of the horror of the events and the guilt about Dave’s injury had erected a barrier between them all. Even now, Ken was afraid to speak about Friday night in front of this crowd lest the rest of them end up following Bob to jail.

“You seen the others?” Paul asked.

“No,” Ken answered. “Dave?”

Paul checked to see of anyone was listening, but the graduates were all enveloped in their private conversations.

“He wrecked his car last night,” Paul said. “Broke his leg. An ambulance took him to the hospital.”

That statement filled in enough blanks for Ken. That and the grave look on Paul’s face. “You see him in the hospital?”

Paul looked away, awash in guilt. “What would I say?”

In the din of the hall, the boys shared an uncomfortable silence.

“Bob got caught down at the mill fire,” Ken said. “They say he set it.”

“I wonder what he’ll say?”

Ken remembered the last time he saw Bob, face lit by the mill’s flames, with the calm resolution of a Christian before Nero’s lions. “He’ll say he was there alone.”

Brady and Block were alphabetical siblings so Jeff knew Marc had to be somewhere nearby. Under his mortarboard, Jeff had his Mets cap on, reversed with the brim down the back of his neck. Two weeks ago, when the world had been normal, he’d rigged his mortarboard with blinking green lights at the corners run off a nine-volt battery. The idea didn’t seem as funny today. They remained unlit.

He replayed the last conversations they had in the drive away from the mill last night. Ken told them about the monster apparition in the mill’s main entrance. Jeff told them he saw the Woodsman outside the mill window, but kept the details of the Katy-inspired strip tease to himself. Marc said he hadn’t seen anything, just grabbed the bones for the ritual when he saw the vision of the constable disappear. Jeff had dropped them at their houses and hadn’t spoken to them since.

With a few minutes before the ceremony’s start, Marc walked down the hall. His face was drawn. He was a small guy, but his gown was a size too large and it gave him a shrunken appearance. He seemed like someone else, a stranger. When Jeff caught his eye, Marc momentarily looked away. He got in line behind Jeff.

“You good, man?”

“Yeah.”

Jeff didn’t know what to say. All the horror of the last week played out in his mind. The guilt of Dave’s injury and Bob’s sacrificial arrest pierced his soul. This wasn’t the right place to share all that with Marc, but he wasn’t sure there was a right place. It was as if the night’s multiple traumas had severed the bond he’d assumed was unbreakable.

“Line it up! Line it up!” Mrs. Carrollton called as she shepherded the students into a straight line. “Stay in order or you’ll get someone else’s diploma!”

“All for none…” Jeff said over his shoulder.

Marc didn’t answer.

The band outside struck up a tune and the line surged forward. The Class of 1980 marched out into the grey morning. The graduates filed into the bleachers. A little-known local dignitary sat on the dais ready to lecture the graduates about the brilliant futures that lay ahead of them.

When they sat down Jeff searched the crowd, mentally working down the alphabet through the H and S sections. He found Paul, then Ken. Both looked tense and distracted. He wasn’t sure if they saw him.

Then he made the search he had promised not to do and scanned the crowd for Katy.

When he saw her, his heart did the usual back flip it did whenever she was around. Her mortarboard barely contained a set of elegant curls that swirled around her shoulders with a ballerina’s grace. Jeff sighed when he remembered that was how she was going to wear it to the prom. She wore just a hint of eye shadow that Jeff knew perfectly matched the dark blue dress hidden beneath her graduation gown. He had been with her when she picked that dress out.

Katy stared straight ahead, oblivious to the chatter around her or the speaker before her. Her brown eyes, usually so soft and inviting, looked empty. Jeff looked away, unwilling to risk eye contact.

A void spread within him with an intensity he’d never experienced. Katy was a dozen yards from him, but it felt like a million miles. He was the bad guy. He was a bad guy with good reason, but he was still the bad guy. He would never make this weekend up to her, and even if he did, their relationship could never be the same. He had destroyed the magic they had shared. After two years with her, he could not imagine a lifetime without.

When the ceremony was over, what was left of the Half Dozen were whisked away by their individual families for celebrations of their accomplishment. Over thirty years would pass before the four of them would be in the same place again.

Act III

Resurrection

Chapter Fifty-Eight

1980

Minutes before the mill goes up in flames.

“Ellen! Wake up!”

Ellen Silas felt someone shake her foot through her covers. She forced her eyes open. Between the moonlight streaming through the windows and the Minnie Mouse nightlight she could see the man on the edge of her bed quite clearly.

He had a kind face, like her father. In fact when she first opened her eyes, that’s who she thought it was. But while he resembled her father, he was different. His nose was a little narrower, his face a little longer. And Daddy never wore a hat, certainly not a strange, swept-back one like this man wore. He felt like a relative, like Uncle Billy who always came for Christmas.

“Wakey, wakey,” the man said with another shake of her foot. He gave Ellen a big smile that melted her four-year-old heart and relieved her of any fear this stranger might have engendered.

“I’m awake now.” She rubbed her eyes. “Who are you?”

“I’m a relative,” the man said. “Like a great-great grand uncle, come to visit.”

“Like Uncle Billy?”

“Exactly,” the man said. “Now you get to do something special. You get a secret mission.”

Ellen snapped up in bed. A secret mission! Detective Diana went on secret missions every Saturday morning on TV. She solved mysteries, and Ellen wanted to do that.

“You’ll need to keep your mission a secret,” the man said. “You’ll do it years from now.”

“Can I tell Mommy and Daddy?”

“Why of course,” the man said. “I’d tell them myself, but I can only talk to you. You tell them I was here. Great Uncle Tom with the swept-back hat. They know all about me. All my descendants do.”

Ellen leaned forward, as if to listen harder.

“Soon I will be gone,” the man said. “Trapped somewhere bad.”

“Like a prison?”

“Yes, only worse. But you will rescue me. You will have the key to get me out.”

“I can do that.”

“Let me show you how.”

The bedroom dissolved and gave way to the exterior of the mill. The man stood hand in hand with Ellen. It was a bright sunny day and birds chirped in the trees.

“Where are we, Ellen?”

“At the waterwheel,” Ellen said, which was what she always called the mill.

“Very good,” the man said. “Now you will go inside the mill, into the basement.”

He led Ellen forward and they passed through the mill’s stone wall. Ellen smiled in amazement. Inside the basement, the man pointed at the earth along the west wall.

“You’ll dig here. You will find a bone. That will be the key.”

“A bone is a key?”

“Exactly. Others will tell you how to use it but you will be the one who knows where it is. Because that is your secret mission.”

“Wow,” Ellen said.

The man turned to Ellen and knelt to be eye level with her. “So what will you look for?”

“A bone. A bone is the key.”

The man smiled like a cobra. He placed his index fingers at each of Ellen’s temples. The scene melted back into Ellen’s dark bedroom. Ellen’s eyes glazed over.

“You will remember all this and tell your father,” the man said, “as he told his father and as did his father before him, so the generations know my story.”

Ellen gave a dazed nod.

“But you are the one with a secret mission,” the man said, “so in thirty years you will remember it all again and free me when time has made others forget, and a generation will await unprotected.”

Ellen nodded again.

The man’s face was overcome with fear, and he stared off as if he could see through the walls at something unfolding miles away. He dropped his hands from Ellen’s face. His body shrank to a vertical line and then disappeared.

Ellen got out of bed and stumbled into the hallway. She wandered down to her parents’ room and pushed open the door. She padded over to her father’s side of the bed and shook his face. His eyes fluttered open.

“Ellen?” he croaked.

“Daddy, Great Uncle Tom just visited me in my room.”

Her father’s eyes went wide. He sat up in bed. “All right, Ellen, tell me everything he said.”

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Present day.

The remaining five of the Dirty Half Dozen went to work in Bob’s garage. Bob’s sister Lori was going to have the place cleaned out soon so they needed to save Bob’s Museum of the Woodsman today. Besides, what would anyone who walked into the garage think looking at the grisly collection on the walls? The only thing they
could
think: serial killer. And as a convicted felon… Bob’s reputation already had enough undeserved mud.

Marc and Paul organized the papers and clippings at the center workbench. Jeff joined Dave at a table full of pictures. He had yet to broach the subject of Katy’s revelation last night. He mentally tabled the idea. What difference did it make? He looked over at Ken. Ken stood in front of a collection of yellowed newspaper pages, his face slack in confusion.

“You okay, Ken?” Jeff asked.

“Huh?” Ken’s eyes came back into focus. “Yeah, yeah. I’m cool.”

Jeff nodded and headed back to the house. Ken whipped out his little notebook, read the last entry then scribbled down a new one. Dave hobbled over with a handful of printed computer pages.

“We may have jumped the gun,” Dave said. “These articles don’t tell me the Woodsman is back. These deaths are months to years apart. And based on the names and races, all these kids could not have been descendants of the founders.”

“So he was watching for the Woodsman,” Ken said as he delivered a handful of papers. “But hadn’t seen his return. He shouldn’t since we gave Silas a first-class roasting.”

“There was some other catalyst,” Paul said. “You guys talked to him on the phone, but I saw him in person. He was desperate to get us together.”

Marc carried over a small cardboard box.

“And it looks like he collected this for us,” Marc said.

He opened the box and inside were a clamshell, a chunk of rusting metal, a scrap of fur, a feather, a bag of blue lye crystals, and a small plastic container filled with water.

Jeff entered from the house with a small, black cell phone in his hands. His face was white.

“This was in the living room,” he said, “shoved between two couch cushions. All our numbers are in the call history so it’s Bob’s. No one has used it since he died. The memory is empty, no photos, no saved numbers. Just one recording.”

Jeff flipped the phone open and pressed a sequence of buttons. “It looks like he set this to record, and no one ever found it between the cushions.”

Bob’s desperate voice came out of the speaker. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“I’ve asked nicely before,” a woman said. “My friends here don’t want to be so nice this time.”

There was the sound of a slap, and then the muffled scraping of cushions against each other as some struggle took place on the couch.

“They’re gone,” Bob said. “They all burned in the fire. The whole bag.”

“We both know you’re lying,” the woman said. “At least one made it through. What did you do with it?”

“Why the fuck would we save one?”

“Maybe they dropped it.” It was a man’s voice, closer to the phone than the woman was, probably one of the ones holding Bob on the couch. “He wouldn’t even know.”

There was a pause punctuated by the sound of Bob’s labored breaths.

“Maybe he didn’t know anything,” the woman said. “But now he knows too much.” There was the rattle of pills in a plastic bottle. “Cover our tracks.”

There was another symphony of cushion scraping and then silence. Jeff stopped the playback.