The Legend of Devil's Creek, page 6
*****
“Alright, what’s tonight’s subject?” Chapman asked, well into his beers.
“How about humiliation at the hands of modern medicine?” Boyd said.
“I like it. I have a good one for that. But you called it, so you should have the honor.”
As Riddley wondered what this was all about, Boyd began a story of how he once had to urinate in a cup during a physical for high school sports. He filled it to the rim and, as instructed, began walking it down the doctors’ office hallway toward the lab drop-off window. When he was barely halfway, a “beautiful” receptionist with a “great rack” came flying out the open door of one of the examination rooms, her eyes focused on a clipboard. She collided with Boyd, sandwiching the cup between their two bodies with enough force to dump the full load of urine onto her own blouse and pants.
“Dude, she was soaked! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I, of course, had to go back the next day and fill another cup with piss. And of course, the same girl was there, standing by the receptionist desk. You can guess how that went. ‘Oh, hey, how are you doing? I’m not sure if you’d remember, but we met yesterday. Ha-ha-ha.’ And she was totally hot. Hot. It was awkward,” Boyd said to the laughter of the group.
“Maybe she was into it,” Lazko said, in the usual deadpan that made it so hard to tell whether or not he was joking.
“It didn’t seem like it did anything for her.”
“That was a good one,” Chapman said. “Really, that was a good one. How about you, Lazko?”
“Nothing much really. I’ve had my balls groped in a physical, like everybody else. But nothing too crazy.”
“Catherine?”
“I’m not taking part in this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The medical things women have to deal with are on a whole different level than what men deal with.”
“You don’t have a good story?”
“I have lots of good stories, but you aren’t going to hear them.”
“That’s lame. Well, I have one that beats Boyd’s. And there’s a lesson in it for all of you about the stupidity of trying to diagnose something yourself.”
“Let’s have it,” Boyd said.
“Alright. Cast your minds back to the hellish days leading up to the SAT. We’re all in after-school test prep classes, stressed out relearning basic math, right? So one night I’m laying in bed scratching myself when I discover something with my fingertips—something that doesn’t feel quite right. A little bump, maybe the size of a dried currant, on one of my nuts.”
“What the hell is a dried currant?” Boyd asked.
“It’s sort of like a raisin, but smaller.”
“Maybe I should leave,” Catherine said.
“It’s not all that crude,” Chapman said. “You can handle it.” Chapman went on to tell them how he waited two agonizing and insomnia-filled weeks—terrifying himself with internet-based attempts at self-diagnosis, and convincing himself he was dying of testicular cancer—before at last reluctantly scheduling an appointment with a urologist.
“So I get the full groping by this creepy doctor. But that wasn’t the worst part, right? He orders an ultrasound. Sends me down to the ultrasound lab. Next thing I know, my pants are off, I’m lying on a cold steel table, and this dude who looks younger than me is squeezing a giant toothpaste tube-looking thing, squirting ice-cold gel all over my balls.”
“Gel?” Boyd said.
“The ultrasound machine can’t see through air or whatever, so it has to have this gel filling any space between it and my balls in order to get a clear picture of what’s inside them. Cool, right? By now, I’m all shrunk up from the cold and humiliation, looking like a cluster of three glistening walnuts. So this guy grabs hold and starts going to town, sliding this electric shaver-looking instrument all over my sack while I lay there, nuts out, with the innards of my testicles on display on a sixty-inch flat-screen monitor above my head. It’s already a nightmare. But then all of a sudden this fucking girl walks in, carrying a pile of towels she’s delivering. And she’s totally smoking hot. Does she realize the situation and say ‘oh, excuse me’ and hightail it out of there all embarrassed? No, she does not. And does the guy who’s probing my sack help? Hell. He’s like ‘hey, Kim,’ or whatever her name was, as though they’d just bumped into each other at Starbucks, and they start a conversation about whether or not she’s going to take the bus home or ride her bike. I’m lying there thinking like, ‘Hey. How’s it going? My name’s Andrew, and these are my shiny testicles. Would you like to sit down and join us?’”
“The crazy thing is that I actually kept quiet, which you know is out of character for me, because the idiot in me thought there might be some chance she hadn’t noticed me lying there, even though she was only three feet away, and I was under this fucking circus spotlight of an examination lamp, in an otherwise dark room, with my ball meat on HDTV. Fuck.” He shook his head, his face contorted in an expression of unease, as though it all happened just yesterday.
His story had everybody laughing—aside from Sandhurst, who seemed to have passed out leaning against a giant granite boulder.
“So what happened?” Boyd asked.
“She left after about five minutes.”
“No, no—with your balls.”
“Oh, it turned out to be scar tissue that had probably been there a long time. Probably from getting kicked in the nuts playing soccer or something. I just hadn’t ever noticed it before.”
When they asked Riddley if he had a good doctor’s visit story, he said he hadn’t, which was true. Sandhurst was unconscious, having drained at least six more cans of beer, so they didn’t bother asking him. Over the next forty or fifty minutes of chatting about nothing in particular, they finished the beers and let the fire die down to glowing embers. Chapman and Lazko buried what remained of it in wet sand from the riverside. Then they roused Sandhurst, and the group climbed back up to the car to head home.
Finally in bed just after three in the morning, Riddley lay wide awake reflecting on the evening, thrilled he’d found the courage to jump from the bridge, but even more elated to have apparently been accepted by this group of people he hardly knew. They seemed to like him, much to his surprise. Even the beautiful Catherine. He wondered if this would have been the case had he not jumped off the bridge.
For a sweet and fleeting moment, Riddley imagined himself and Catherine as boyfriend and girlfriend, out on a date, sharing a laugh over dinner in some tiny, romantic Italian restaurant in Seattle. But really, how could he ever get there from here? The very idea of asking her out filled him with dread and self-doubt, making his throat and belly tighten and his face flush hot. Was such a thing even possible? Him—a guy who’d never even asked a girl to a high school dance, let alone had a girlfriend—in a relationship with the beautiful, intelligent, mature Catherine? He doubted it.
His doubt blossomed into a greater anxiety over the longevity of his apparent acceptance by the group. Sooner or later they’ll figure out I’m a douche bag, he thought. Despite his initial sense of triumph, Riddley fell asleep with a depressing expectation of inevitable rejection.
OCTOBER
FIVE
An intermittent breeze blew from the north, the late afternoon sun was doing its best to burn through the low overcast, and the inbound tide was just starting to run past the gravel point on which Jack Jordahl stood, when he realized he hadn’t seen or heard his twelve-year-old white Labrador retriever, Moonlight, for an unusually long time. He scanned the dense tree line along the shore, but saw no sign of his dog. It didn’t really worry him, as Moonlight, despite her advanced age, would still sometimes take off on an impromptu hunt after catching scent of something. But she always came back. And she couldn’t get into too much trouble out here on the wild northeastern flank of Aubrey Island, as there weren’t any houses or roads for at least two miles in any direction. Plus, it took Jack an hour to hike his seventy-year-old ass down here from the road, so he wasn’t about to stop fishing to search for his wandering dog.
He took a deep breath through his nostrils, savoring the solitude, and resumed his methodical casting out over the gently swirling eddy just down current of the point. He stood about ten feet from shore, in three-foot-deep water, wearing rubber chest waders to keep himself dry. At the end of his fishing line, he’d tied a silver and white saltwater fly, meant to imitate a minnow when dragged through the water.
He cast out, let his line settle for a moment, then began to strip it back in quick two-foot pulls, hoping to attract the attention of one of the late Coho salmon or early sea-run cutthroat rumored to be migrating through the area just then. They liked to sit, five or ten feet deep, in the eddy south of the point and watch for food fish to drift by in the tidal current.
Even if the fishing didn’t turn out to be all that hot, Jack figured it was still a beautiful place to spend a few hours. The point faced the main commercial shipping lanes, from the Pacific into Seattle and Tacoma to the south, so there was nearly always barge, tug, or containership traffic passing in front of him as he fished. Sometimes a pack of sailboats coming out of Edmonds. Sometimes even a towering grey aircraft carrier or sleek black submarine steaming out of the naval shipyard at Bremerton. And when the sky was clear—which wasn’t all that common this time of year—he could see a glorious hundred-thirty-mile stretch of the snow-capped Cascade Mountains to the east, clear from Mount Baker volcano up near the Canadian border, all the way down to Mount Rainier, some sixty miles southeast of Seattle.
After another twenty minutes of luckless casting, the sky darkened as a dense, charcoal grey patch of cloud passed across the area where the sun would have been were the sky not so completely overcast, and a chilling wind kicked up, strong enough to get under Jack’s collar. He shivered, listening to the breeze hiss through the tall forest behind him. His dog was still nowhere to be seen. Something wasn’t right.
“Moonlight!” he called out toward the dark wall of forest. “Moon-light!” Nothing. Just the sound of the wind in the trees. He stood a moment longer, searching the forest edge for any sign of his dog. “Oh, hell.” He reeled up, waded out of the water and struggled out of his gear. When he had his hiking boots back on, he gave the edge of the forest one more cursory search, and then walked straight for the trees, picking a gully cut through the eroded bank as his point of entry.
Once through the dense wall of vine maple, salal and blackberry vines of the forest’s outer edge, Jack stopped to listen. It was noticeably darker than it had been out on the open shoreline. The interior of the forest was quiet and sheltered from the breeze. While the high canopy and peripheries of the forest were thick with evergreen needles and leaves, the interior of this dense stand of second-growth fir was a seemingly lifeless, red-brown labyrinth of bare tree trunks, dead branches, and decaying wind-downed trees. The ground was a cushion of fir needles and humus. The air smelled like the aging, half-rotted stack of firewood Jack kept under a blue tarp alongside his farmhouse.
“Moon-light!” Again, nothing. He continued inland, his eyes constantly scanning for movement. It always struck Jack how close the air felt in relatively flat patches of second-growth forest like this. It made him a little claustrophobic. He tried not to think about it.
After a good forty minutes of following a loose zigzag pattern, back and forth from southeast to southwest, Jack was truly worried. “Damn,” he said as he caught his breath after climbing over a downed tree. He was thinking the dog might have followed the old trail back toward his pickup truck on the shoulder of North Island Road. But now it occurred to him that if the dog was onto the scent of something, which seemed likely, the scent would probably have originated up-wind—which was to the north. “Damn dog. Hell.” The sky seemed to be darkening, though the sun wouldn’t set for another—what time was it?—half hour! “Oh, damn it!”
Jack turned around and started back. He held a fairly straight course, making it to the point in just over twenty minutes. He resumed his calls as he continued north. Another five minutes went by. Indeed, the sky was darkening as the sun settled toward the western horizon, still obscured by the unbroken, seemingly endless marine layer of grey cloud rolling in off the Pacific. It made the close spaces of the inner forest all the closer in Jack’s mind. The visible world was shrinking all around him.
At last, Jack thought he heard something that didn’t fit with the forest. He stopped in his tracks for a listen. For several moments, he heard nothing. Then, as he was about to continue on, his ears caught it again: a faint and distant sound of breathing—an odd breathing, exaggerated, probably through someone’s, or something’s, open mouth. He began a slow and cautious approach to the source of the sound. That’s damned odd. Whatever is making that sound must have heard me calling from close by. If it’s Moonlight, she’d have heeded my call by now. If it’s an animal, it should have bolted. If it’s a person … .
Though it hardly made sense, given his deliberate and loud effort to attract attention during his initial approach to the area, Jack found himself stepping as lightly as possible in an attempt at stealth. The sound seemed to be coming from behind an unusually broad, decaying old-growth stump. It was more pronounced now—definitely open-mouth breathing, along with what sounded like aggressive gnawing or chewing. Jack was now less than twenty feet from the stump. He began a creeping, silent sidestep to his right, leaning over and leading with his head to hasten a first glimpse. As he rounded the stump, his dog’s white rear end gradually came into view, her tail quivering. As more of the dog came into view, Jack could see that her back legs were drawn up against and under her body, and that her belly was flush against the ground—a posture she often took when chewing on a favorite toy or stick while holding it with her front legs.
“Moonlight?” Jack called gently. Another sidestep to the right, and Jack saw something that made his blood run cold. A foot. A human foot in a sneaker. He froze in his tracks, trying to assess the situation while futilely wishing his pulse back down to a normal rate. “Hello?!” he blurted, half startled at the volume of his own voice. No answer. He waited a moment, then sidestepped again until he could see both feet and legs of the inanimate stranger. He still couldn’t see what the dog was doing. A few steps closer. Then quieter, “Hello?” Still no answer. Someone asleep against a tree? Or dead?
“Moonlight!” The dog, without pausing from whatever it was working on, gave a low, drawn-out warning of a growl—stay away. At this, Jack began to tremble. He didn’t fear his dog. Never did. And he wasn’t a fearful man in general. But his dog had never, not once in twelve years, growled at him like that. He didn’t know what to make of it.
A few steps closer, his heart pounding, and Jack halted to take in the whole horrific scene. Moonlight was indeed gnawing on something held between her front paws. It was the top end of a severed and colorless human arm. Moonlight’s eyes stared straight ahead, though she seemed to mark Jack’s location with her peripheral vision. The white fur around her mouth was red with blood, while the fur on her back stood up in further warning.
Next to the arm, a Douglas fir, perhaps fifty years old, had grown out the side of the decaying old-growth stump. Against the fir, the mutilated body of a man, armless, his torso duct-taped to the trunk of the tree, with a two-by-four running behind his head and across his shoulders like a prop for a crucifixion. His face was pulverized like a boxer’s, black and blue with bruises and lacerations that stood out against his otherwise cadaverous white skin. His eyes were wide open, as was his mouth—as if frozen in a final terrified scream. Barely an inch of torn stumps were all that remained of his arms. On his face sat a pair of bent and shattered eyeglasses.
SIX
Port Baker Police Captain John Marshall was jolted into confused semi-consciousness by the shrill ring of his cell phone. It was pitch black, and it took him several seconds of shaking off sleep, feeling around, and smelling the air to realize he was still in bed in his small beach cottage on the quiet western shore of Aubrey Island.
Reaching blindly for the phone on his nightstand, he paused, realizing he was in tears. He always woke in tears after having the dream—the recurring nightmare that wasn’t really a nightmare at all, but the vivid recollection of an old and terrible memory. A vision of unspeakable horror, wrought by his own hand. The five year old girl with her arms still wrapped around the toddler brother she was trying to protect. Their mouths and eyes wide open in final expressions of fear and horror, staring up at him from the ground where they lay. Their bodies seemingly unscathed, but with small, telling droplets of blood in their nostrils and ear holes. Their internal organs shattered by the concussions of exploding ordinance. Ordinance Marshall had brought to bear. The fact that their deaths were unintentional didn’t make him feel any better. If anything, the idea that such a terrible thing could come about by accident made it all the more terrifying.
When he’d first rotated home, more than thirty years earlier, he had the dream several times a week. It wracked his young mind, driving him to deep depression, to the very edge of suicide.
And, as if that weren’t bad enough, there were also the episodes—the dissociative fugues, or whatever his old Army psychiatrist had called them—probably brought on by the stress of his traumatic memories. Periods of time he couldn’t account for, had no recollection of. He’d wake up somewhere, sometimes far from home, having no idea how he’d gotten there. Hours of his life missing.
