The Wildman (37 page)

As he faded away, he remembered being asked if he wanted someone to contact his next of kin, but he didn’t remember what he answered. As it was, Susan never showed up at the hospital that night or for the three days he was there. She didn’t get in touch until he was back home, recuperating. His parents called him and sent him a get-well card, but they weren’t able to make the trip to Maine from Florida. Matt came home one weekend, and it was great to see him. He would have stayed longer, but it was heading into midterms.

You could say the story ended when David Blake, the police captain in Arden, and a rookie patrolman named Russell Dawkins drove out to the boat launch at the first light of dawn. The clouds had passed in the night, and the day was breaking sunny and unseasonably warm. The cops half-suspected everything Jeff had told them had been the ravings of a man delirious from exposure, because they didn’t find Evan Pike’s body where Jeff had said he’d left him for dead. No body. No footprints in the still-wet dirt of the parking lot or on the road leading down to the boat launch.

The policemen began to reassess when, further down the boat launch road, they found Ben Foster’s body and saw Jeff’s car, submerged in the lake. Dawkins spotted a few traces of blood on the road. Closer to the lake, it looked like there had once been a significant quantity of blood on the road, but the rain overnight had washed most of it away. The state Crime Investigations Unit would bring out their fancy forensics stuff later. The boat Jeff had told them he had paddled with one oar from Sheep’s Head Island was, indeed, pulled up on the shore where he said it would be. Only then did the police become concerned about what they might find when they made it out to the island.

When they did, it was much worse than either of them imagined. It sure looked to lake and Dawkins as though what Jeff had told them was true.

You could say it all ended later that winter, once the authorities concluded their investigation. By January, Jeff had recovered from the wounds he’d sustained and from the effects of exposure, but he was never the same after that. He testified at the hearings in December and then, that same week, quit his job at Bayside Realty. He sold the house in Westbrook. It was too big for a man living alone, anyway. He planned to live off his severance pay and the profit from the house sale until he decided what he wanted to do next.

At this point, you very well might think the story is over. Jeff would feel some vindication for being proven right, and he would be glad beyond belief he hadn’t become a victim or a suspect for any of the killings. You’d be perfectly justified in thinking he was satisfied when all the evidence the police found on the island validated his version of events.

But there was one key element that never came to light, and unless or until it did, Jeff, at least, would never feel as though this story was over.

It would never be over for him until they found or accounted for all of the bodies. Tyler, Fred, Mike, and Ben were all accounted for, but in spite of a rather extensive search, no one had found any trace of Evan Pike. The police did all they could with dogs and divers and search parties, but they all came up dry.

There was plenty of speculation about what might have happened to him. Some of the locals dismissed it by saying scavengers must have dragged Evan’s corpse off into the woods and finished him off. But if that were the case, why had Ben Foster’s body, in the same immediate area, been left untouched?

Other folks were convinced Evan wasn’t dead when Jeff rolled him out of the car. Maybe he had been so hurt he got disoriented and wandered down the slope and fell into the lake, where he drowned. If that’s what happened, these folks declared, his remains would most likely show up come spring, once the ice that blanketed the lake from November to April finally melted.

Other people suggested that Evan may have been conscious enough to try to walk back to town to get help, and that maybe he got lost in the woods where
if not this year or next, maybe
some
year a hunter or a group of hikers would come across a pile of decaying bones. If they
were lucky, there would be enough to identify him.

And of course there were other people who had some fairly peculiar ideas about what might have happened out there. If they’re right, then this story will never end. It wasn’t long before talk about what had happened on Sheep’s Head Island that weekend took on the charm of folklore.

Not long after ice-out that spring, when fishermen were plying the waters of the lake for rainbow trout and bass, there was talk that if you took your boat close enough to the island—especially around sunset—you might catch a glimpse of a ghost, lurking on the shore near where Camp Tapiola had once stood.

The story is, this apparition’s hair is snow white, and his long, gray beard wafts in the wind like smoke from a chimney fire. His eyes flash with murderous rage whenever anyone comes within hailing distance of the island. Some folks say it’s not a ghost at all. They say a crazy hermit, a wild man who has lost his mind, lives out there, subsisting on roots and berries and whatever animals he can catch and eat.

Of course, these stories about ghosts on the island bring to mind the death that happened out there thirty-five years before, which is when this story really may have started. There is plenty of talk—especially from older people who remember what happened back then—that maybe what they’re seeing is not an old hermit at all. It’s the ghost of a lost, lonely child who still watches and waits for his friends to come and join him.

And as long as people even half-believe such stories … as long as people repeat these tales, then you could say the story about what happened out on Sheep’s Head Island will never really be over.

ALSO BY RICK HAUTALA

UNTCIGAHUNK:

The Complete Little Brothers

It has been five years since Kip Howard saw his mother killed horribly by a blur of “little brown things.” Five years of nightmares and a terror of dark places. Five years of struggling to overcome what must have been just his imagination...
But the “untcigahunk”—the Indian word for “little brothers”—are no one’s imagination. Hideous forest creatures who feed every five years on human flesh, the little brothers are about to emerge from underground once again.
Only this time, there will be no escape for the young boy who witnessed their last feast.

This edition comprises the bestselling novel ~ Little Brothers ~ and a collection of tales and short stories that complete the canon of the voracious woodland creatures.