The Legend of Devil's Creek, page 17
Lillian’s childhood was no picnic either. Her parents were both alcoholics, and could be horribly abusive when drunk. Though her situation wasn’t anywhere as extreme as James’s, she faced more than her share of frightening and hurtful incidents.
So from a very young age, living next door to one another, Lillian and James took to seeking refuge together. Over time, their friendship grew strong. Their favorite pastime became daydreaming, out loud, of escape. They would lie in the grass on the high bluff overlooking the northern edge of Broughton Cove for hours on end, hatching plans for a one-way voyage to the freedom and adventure of faraway places. London. Paris. Maybe Buenos Aires, Sydney, or even Hong Kong. They would study maps in Port Baker’s tiny library, and then play with James’s real father’s old compass, estimating the headings that would take them to the places they dreamed about.
But beyond his friendship with Lillian, James felt utterly abandoned by the community. Everyone could see he was being hurt. But instead of helping, they turned their backs. Maybe they were afraid. Maybe they simply didn’t want to acknowledge such unpleasantness in their midst. Lillian thought the fact that James was a victim of abuse actually made some people despise him. It was as if they were offended by his helplessness, his weakness, even though he was only a young boy. So instead of offering James comfort or protection, the good citizens of Aubrey Island ignored him, or even targeted him for further derision and bullying.
But these were simply Lillian’s observations, as James, with one exception, never talked about it, never complained. That one exception came after James had taken an especially brutal beating from his stepfather. He disappeared for three days. Lillian searched far and wide, finally finding him holed up in a hay barn on the far side of the island, lying against the bales, a bucket of water and a few stolen chicken eggs at his feet. His lips and eyes were swollen, one of his cheeks black with bruising. He seemed to be in a sort of daze, and in retrospect, Lillian wondered whether he hadn’t suffered a concussion.
After several hours of lying against the hay bales, just holding him in her arms and whispering that everything would be okay, she got him to come around. At first he wouldn’t talk. He just sobbed. Lillian thought he was having some sort of breakdown. Finally, he spoke. Stammering, through split and disfigured lips, he told Lillian his darkest, most heartbreaking secret: that what hurt him more than anything else—more than the bullying, more than the beatings—was the fact that his mother did nothing to protect him. It twisted and tormented him with a sorrow he could not begin to describe. Did his mother not care about him? Did she not love him anymore? Lillian hadn’t answered him. There was no good reason to. She let him sob for several more hours before she could get him to stand up. Then she helped him walk home.
Year after year, James’s stepfather beat the hell out of him while his mother stood by and did nothing. Year after year, the community shunned him, even added to his misery. And year after year, Lillian watched her friend harden, watched the last vestiges of childhood joyfulness and curiosity fade from his eyes. Listened as he began to describe revenge fantasies—some of them violent.
Things got even worse one day when, on his way home from school, four of his classmates, with feigned kindness, convinced a lonely James that they actually wanted to play with him. Cowboys and Indians. Wary, but overwhelmed with hope at the idea of being included, he followed them into the woods. Clear of the outskirts of town, they tackled James and tied him to a tree. They pretended he was a Cayuse brave who’d kidnapped white women from the Whitman Mission, and took turns demanding that he reveal the location of his secret Indian hideout. At first, they just shouted at him. Then one of them grabbed him by his shirt collar, shook him, then spit on him. Emboldened, the other three joined in. Soon they were slapping him in the face, beating his legs with tree branches, and jabbing him with makeshift spears—once with such force that it pierced the skin of his arm. They had such fun that, in subsequent weeks, they took to chasing James home from school, as often as not catching him, tying him to other trees, torturing him. Other kids joined in over time, until there were sometimes a dozen of them, crazed, dancing around the tree like rabid animals, their abuse of James growing more vicious with each incident. It was during this time that James’ revenge fantasies grew truly terrifying. Lillian had refused to describe them.
“Anyway, around that time, Lillian got her hands on a discarded pastry tin, like the big round ones Danish butter cookies come in. She told James it would be their secret treasure box, and that they should fill it with symbols of their dreams, their friendship, and then hide it away. They placed in it things like a map of Paris they’d torn from a library book, a charcoal drawing a street artist had once sketched of the two of them hamming it up in front of Port Baker’s long-vanished soda fountain, and locks of hair from each of their heads, bound together with twine. As a final item, Lillian produced a small bottle of cognac she’d stolen from her parents’ liquor cabinet after overhearing her father talking about how it was supposed to improve with age.”
They decided to bury the box somewhere nobody else would ever find it, and then return one day, as adults, maybe thirty or forty years later, to dig it up and open it. To drink their cognac together in their favorite spot, on the high bluff over Broughton Cove, and look back on how they’d made it. How they’d escaped. It would be a celebration.
But things didn’t work out that way. One day, Lillian was walking down the train track, on her way to find James at his favorite fishing spot, when she saw three of the bullies who liked to tie James to trees up ahead of her, just walking out onto the train bridge high over the gorge of Devil’s Creek. James was coming from the opposite direction. Frightened, she hid behind some bushes and watched. James, who was watching his footing, didn’t see them until he was way out on the bridge, eighty feet up over the creek. They met him near the middle of the span. One of them grabbed his fishing rod. Then they jostled him, trying to scare him. At one point, his pop-bottle glasses were knocked from his face. When he bent over and groped around trying to find them, he stumbled and fell over the side, just catching hold of one of the railroad ties so that he was dangling below the bridge. They teased him a bit more as he cried for help. Lillian could hear him pleading, begging them, “Please help me.” One of them actually put his glasses back on his face as he hung there, helpless, and shouted, “There you go, four-eyes.” They all laughed. But when they finally decided enough was enough, and were reaching down to lift James back up onto the bridge, he fell.
As the bullies fled, Lillian scrambled down into the gorge and found James, his broken body lying on the rocks. He was still breathing, but the side of his face was smashed in, and blood was draining from his mouth, nose, and ears. She held him in her arms. At one point, she’d told Catherine, his eyes turned to meet hers, through his bent and shattered glasses. And for just a brief moment, Lillian was sure that he recognized her. Then he stopped breathing. He was twelve years old.
“Holy fucking shit,” Chapman said.
“And like I told you at the bonfire, within a few weeks, all three bullies were dead. Some people were convinced McNeil’s ghost killed them. Others figured it was the work of a revenge killer, or even someone who had nothing to do with McNeil’s death at all.”
Catherine paused for a breath.
“What does Lillian think?” Sandhurst asked.
“She didn’t say. But whatever the case, one by one, the bullies, then James’s stepfather, then four other local creeps all disappeared. And one by one, their bodies were found in the deep woods—each bound to trees, their arms sawed off and used as clubs to beat their faces in while they bled to death. And on each of their faces, the police found a shattered pair of the same type of glasses James wore. Eight victims in all, over the course of about two years.”
Chapman shook his head. “That’s a fucking horrible story.”
“And it all happened right here on the island,” Catherine said.
“I can’t believe your great-grandmother told you all that shit,” Riddley said. “My great-grandmother’s craziest story is about accidentally burning butterscotch oatmeal squares in the oven.”
“She’s always been outspoken. A tough cookie. But this time, all the brutal detail of it took me by surprise, too. Anyway, Lillian said she and James buried their treasure box in 1928, just before he died. The funny thing is that she never ended up leaving the island. She’s lived here her whole life.”
“Did she ever dig up the box?” Lazko asked.
“No. For a long time, she just didn’t have the heart. Finally, when she turned forty, she took her own two daughters—my grandmother and my great-aunt—out to try to find it. She said she wanted to show it to them to teach them about perseverance in difficult times. This was shortly after their own father, my great-grandfather, had died. They dug hole after hole around where Lillian thought it was buried, up on the bluff over Broughton Cove where she and James used to daydream. But they didn’t have any luck. Lillian went back several times, on her own, and tried again, but she never found it.”
“Maybe we could try,” Lazko said.
“That bluff is a quarter mile long, with trees and brush and boulders and shit everywhere.” Chapman said. “There’s no way.”
“Did she narrow it down for you, where it’s supposed to be?” Lazko asked.
“No. She said she figured if it was meant to be found, she would have found it already. So she said she’ll keep it secret now, and leave it out there as a sort of memorial to James.”
They sat in silence, staring into the fire. Riddley wondered whether James would have had a decent life, would have turned out okay, if only his real father hadn’t drowned. But he had drowned, the accident opening a door for evil to enter the life of a helpless child. It seemed so unfair that a random and chance event could have such profound and terrible consequences. Because of things that weren’t his fault, things that were beyond his control, a little boy’s life was destroyed. He never had a chance.
“Sandhurst, pass the whiskey, will you?” Chapman said, sounding somber. “Sandhurst?”
Sandhurst gazed at the whiskey bottle, holding it suspended between his knees.
“Hey, asswater. Tell us about your un-descended testicle. Sandhurst!”
“Hmm?”
Did you hear a word I just said?”
“About what?”
Chapman smiled and shook his head. “Pass the whiskey ‘round, man.” Sandhurst did. “Here’s something I don’t get. If Lillian’s parents were abusive, why didn’t the killer get them too?”
“Who knows,” Catherine said. “But when I told Lillian I had no idea her own parents were abusive, she actually defended them. She told me she knew her parents loved her deep down. She said when times were good, her folks were good. When times were hard, they changed. But they weren’t all bad. Maybe that’s why they were spared.”
Riddley wondered about that. Were Lillian’s parents spared because they had traces of goodness in their hearts or souls? Did the killer see it in them? Traces of love? Something worthy of life? Perhaps the killer saw people as existing on either side of some subjective threshold. People could do evil things, even though they had good in them too. But once they crossed that threshold, maybe the killer figured they were too far gone. Irrecoverable. Evil. Needing to be culled.
Then he thought about the recent murders. Could the evil that led to them somehow be traced back to the same evil that led to the original Devil’s Creek murders? Had the evil been there all along, lurking under the surface of this picturesque, seemingly tranquil little island, waiting to reemerge after all these years, having perhaps been passed down through time, from generation to generation? Maybe what was happening today really could be traced back to the evil deeds of a few serious assholes many decades earlier. Maybe the real villains behind the recent killings were long dead, the ripples of their bygone evil somehow triggering the horrors of the present. Then again, maybe those people weren’t even the original source of it. Instead, maybe it came, as Bacavi might tell them, from the timeless forces that drive people to do evil things.
“Does it feel like we’re being watched here?” Chapman said. “Or is it just me?”
Riddley wondered if Chapman was just screwing with them. Regardless, he’d already been harboring that very feeling. That sense that nobody could ever adequately describe. The slightest tingle in the center of the chest—the barely noticeable touch of something on the back of the neck. They were surrounded by so many impenetrably dark areas from which someone could watch them. Black hollows behind broken-out window and door frames. Deep black shadows between the largest trees.
Since he was a kid, Riddley sometimes had a vague sense that the forest had a sort of consciousness of its own. An awareness. Possibly kind, possibly indifferent, possibly malevolent. He’d felt it since the first camping trips he could remember as a child, laying in his sleeping bag at night, next to his dad, deep within the Cascade Mountains. The tall trees, the surrounding darkness, aware of his presence. Listening to him. Watching him. He was usually able to convince himself it was a bunch of superstitious nonsense. Usually.
His mind returned to thoughts of the real killer now active on the island. When it came right down to it, it was foolish for them to be out here, whether there was any safety in numbers or not. For all they knew, the psycho was living out here. Some of the old ghost town structures offered a modicum of shelter. Maybe it was the killer’s base of operations. His home. They could very well be treading on his turf. Trespassing. Provoking retribution. Maybe the killer was crouching in the shadows, watching them right now, waiting to grab one of them when they wandered a few feet into the forest to take a piss. Waiting to knock them over the head, drag them away, bind them to a tree and saw their arms off. Shit. Calm down. Though Riddley felt the urge to piss, he’d wait until someone else went.
“I have a good ghost story,” Chapman said.
Riddley didn’t want to hear it. He wanted to go home.
“Do tell,” Catherine said.
“Okay, so there is supposedly this ghost of a teenage girl who still hitchhikes on a country road out near where Riddley and I grew up. The story goes she was picked up and then murdered by some nutcase when she was hitchhiking on Kelly Road near Stillwater thirty-some years ago. I always thought the story was bullshit. But get this—one night this sort of friend of mine, Brad, is driving along Kelly Road, trying to find some party. He sees a girl wearing crazy bell-bottom pants and a floppy patchwork leather hat out there hitchhiking all by herself. So he pulls over and she slowly walks up to his window—”
Chapman was interrupted mid-sentence by the unmistakable sound—and this time they all heard it—of twigs snapping somewhere nearby, perhaps behind the ruined house nearest to them. Whatever had made the sound had to be relatively large. They all stared into the darkness in the direction from which it had come. Nothing.
“What the hell was that?” Riddley asked.
“Probably a deer,” Chapman said, though he continued to stare into the darkness. After a few moments, he resumed his story. “So Brad picks up this girl and asks where she’s going, and she says ‘home,’ and then starts to show him the way. Well, after about ten minutes, Brad realizes this girl is leading him in a giant loop, going down Kelly Road, up Highway 203, and then back over to—.”
A weak moan, coming from the vicinity of the nearest ruined house, definitely from a person. They all stood up. Riddley was dying to piss. He shifted his flashlight to his left hand, reasoning that it would keep his dominant right hand free to swing a punch if he had to defend himself. Then it occurred to him he could use the heavy metal flashlight as a blunt weapon, and he switched it back to his right hand. He could hear his own heart beating in his ears.
Lazko took point as they moved toward the source of the sound in a reluctant, slow-moving column. They crept closer and closer to the house, its gaping and crooked doorway framing an immeasurable darkness, daring each of them to enter. Lazko seemed to think the sound had come from around the left side of the house, and he silently approached its leaning corner. When he was less than two feet from it, a dark figure jumped out from behind the corner, arms raised and screaming. In the blink of an eye, the startled Lazko swung his right fist and landed a punch square in the face of their presumed assailant, cutting off his scream and knocking him to the ground. A terrified Riddley stood frozen, unable to decide whether to stay put or cut and run, when he heard the familiar but muffled voice of Boyd.
“Shit, dude! Shit!”
NOVEMBER
EIGHTEEN
It was a blustery, grey morning. Marshall grabbed a cup of scorched coffee from the break room and joined Quintrell in the darkened dispatcher’s office as Q pored over grainy, black-and-white security camera footage on a spare computer monitor. Hoping to catch even an oblique glimpse of a face they would recognize, they’d collected video from every conceivable source—mini-marts, parking lots, dorm and apartment entryways—within a five-block radius of the Suzzallo Library, from the May date on which someone had signed James McNeil’s name in the University of Washington archives. Unfortunately, much of the footage for that date had long since been erased and re-recorded over as a matter of routine.
Seeing Marshall enter the room, Q paused a video of some parking lot, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, and said, “Good morning, sir.”
“You look miserable.”
“Headache.”
“Take a break. Find anything?”
