Paskagankee (28 page)

Then she realized she couldn't be dead, not unless a dead body could feel pain in at least twenty places and debilitating cold as well. She gave up on the idea of rolling over after trying to move her arms and being rewarded for her efforts with shooting pain up her right forearm and an agonizing, bright-white explosion in her left elbow followed by nausea so intense she feared she was going to puke all over herself and then pass out in it.

I guess I'm comfy enough just the way I am,
she thought to herself when she had regained her senses.
This moving around thing is overrated anyway.
A tiny sliver of washed-out light made its way into her prison; she could see it now after being awake for a few minutes as her eyes began to adjust to the darkness. Her range of vision was limited by her immobility and her position on the floor, but she turned her head inch by painful inch in an attempt to learn as much about her surroundings as possible.

The light was insufficient to make out much beyond a few lumpy grey, amorphous shapes littered around her, but to Sharon it seemed likely she was lying in some kind of large storage room or closet. The stillness was unbroken and she was fairly certain she was alone.

A headache pounded its way through her skull, not doing much to help quell the nausea rekindling in her stomach. Sharon swallowed hard and tried to recall what had happened to her. She was patrolling the big bonfire last night, or at least she assumed it was last night—who really knew how long she had been unconscious?—and something had gone wrong. What was it? The night had been long and cold and boring, that much she remembered.

She had gotten lost; that was it. She recalled her embarrassment at walking out of range of the bonfire's orienting glow and becoming confused about which way to turn. But how had she ended up here, lying alone in the cold with what she feared were two broken arms and assorted other injuries?

Sharon concentrated hard, willing herself to remember. There must have been some kind of accident. But no matter how hard she tried to force herself to recall the events that had led her here, she simply could not. Her head pounded and swam, and she felt a warm sweat break out on her body as the nausea threatened to overwhelm her.

Fear marched through her like a conquering army as she took stock of her situation. She was alone and helpless, lying face down in some sort of big room. She had no idea where she was. Mike would be searching for her, she didn't doubt that, but how would he even begin to know where to look? She didn't consider herself a religious person, not by a long shot, but Sharon began fervently praying that whoever had taken her had left some evidence behind, something for Mike McMahon to follow that might lead him here.

By now Sharon's head felt like a freight train was rolling through her skull. The fact that her arms were pinned beneath her body and she was unable to move them concerned her, but she was oddly reassured by the fact that both of them were at the moment causing her extreme pain. A loss of all sensation would have been much worse.

Feeling alone and sick and scared, Sharon lowered her head to the floor and sobbed once, regretting it instantly as the pain in her head exploded, screaming at her, taunting her, reminding her of her vulnerability. She closed her eyes, thinking of Mike, remembering how good it had felt holding his warm body against hers, sharing her bed with him two nights ago.

It was pointless and juvenile to wonder how he felt about her now, trapped as she was in some unknown location, essentially paralyzed and possibly dying, but thinking about him calmed her and took her mind off the present and all of its unthinkable possibilities. She closed her eyes, remaining perfectly still, and the pain in her skull receded slightly. It was still there, she didn't even try to convince herself otherwise, but it thankfully moved into the background.

Without realizing she was doing so, Sharon drifted back into unconsciousness.

46

“WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?” Mike looked up at Professor Dye and the papers he held in his right hand. He seemed anxious and excited at the same time.

“I know where the old settlement is,” the professor announced. He was shaking and Mike wondered if it was with excitement at his discovery or something else.

“How did you find it?” Mike asked. “I thought we were going to have to hunt down the old-timers that hang out at the Moose Lodge and try to find someone that might have some idea how to get there.”

Dye shook his head. “Aerial surveys,” he said cryptically.

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry,” the professor said. “Sometimes I get a little ahead of myself. No wonder my students call me the absent-minded professor. Anyway,” he said, holding the crumpled papers triumphantly in front of Mike's face like the world's shabbiest-looking trophy, “the state pays engineering firms to do survey work by air. The engineers go up in small planes, flying back and forth over predetermined areas, covering grids, mapping out whole sections of land. Running lines, they call it.”

Mike nodded, starting to get the picture. “And you've accessed the maps?”

“That's right,” Ken said. “But it's even better than that. They don't draw maps by hand like they used to. They actually take digital photographs and then splice them together to form images, sometimes of areas miles wide.”

“And you found the photographs of the area surrounding Paskagankee,” Mike interrupted, feeling excitement begin to ripple its way through his body like a million tiny bolts of lightning.

“Exactly,” replied Professor Dye, “but it's not all good news.”

“It never is. Go ahead, hit me.”

“Well,” Dye said hesitantly, “the old settlement is relatively close to the farmer's field from which Sharon disappeared last night. If, as I suspect, the spirit's body is using the old settlement as a base of operations, so to speak, it is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that she was taken.”

Mike lowered his gaze to the desk, not even seeing the clutter. “So that means she's dead.”

“Not necessarily,” the professor answered, shaking his head for emphasis.

“Listen,” Mike said, exasperated. “You've seen, like I have, what happened to the other two people this . . .
thing
. . .
attacked. The other two that we know about, that is,” he corrected himself. “It's entirely possible there are more victims we haven't discovered yet. But are you trying to tell me you think Sharon could have survived dismemberment? Is that what you want me to believe, Professor Dye?”

“No, no, of course not.” The professor waved his hands like he was trying to ward off Mike's anger and pain. The wrinkled papers he held in his left hand crackled and swished through the air. “I have a theory that, if it's correct, might mean there is at least a small chance Sharon is still alive.”

Mike stared at Ken Dye, then shook his head and sighed. “Okay,” he said. “In for a penny and all that. What's your theory?”

The professor sat on the edge of Mike's desk and stared at him with an almost feverish intensity. “I've studied this legend, this
phenomenon,
if you will, for decades. I've made it my life's work, and I‘ve suffered enormous personal and professional ridicule for it. I believe there is every chance I am the most knowledgeable person alive concerning this Abenaqui legend.”

“I believe you,” Mike told him kindly. “And I'm sorry for jumping down your throat. I just feel . . . ”

“Helpless,” the professor finished.

Mike paused for a moment, reflecting. “Yes,” he said simply.

“I understand. It's how I feel, too. But I'm not telling you this because I'm fishing for an apology. My point is this: I don't believe the spirit's reign of death and destruction is entirely random.”

Mike shook his head. “Why
wouldn't
you think that? Random death and destruction is all it's managed so far.”

“Perhaps not,” Dye corrected. “So far the victims have been men.”

“What difference does that make?”

“Think about it. If my hypothesis is correct, and as you know I'm certain it is, the essence of this spirit is the energy of an agonized young woman, built from hopelessness and despair, which has been trapped on Earth for hundreds of years due to a curse resulting from a brutal murder committed by men—I repeat, by
men
—against her baby daughter. Despite her seemingly limitless rage against the males she has encountered, she would have no reason to harm a female, or at least no motivation to kill her.”

“Then why would she have taken Sharon in the first place?”

“That I couldn't tell you,” answered the professor, “I'm flying by the seat of my pants here. Maybe I'm completely off base. But it would make sense based on the Abenaqui legend, and it provides us with at least a thread of hope to hang on to. Isn't that better than nothing?”

Mike nodded, almost to himself. The man had a point, as crazy as it sounded. He absolutely had to believe Sharon was still alive. He needed that slim possibility to hang on to, like a drowning man clinging to a floating log. He couldn't bear the thought that he was responsible for the death of another innocent human being, not after the tragedy in Revere. That had been an accident, sure. He had been cleared of any wrongdoing, sure; it was a crazy ricochet they said, an absurd one-in-a-million accidental tragedy, sure.

To Mike McMahon, though, none of that mattered. He had fired his gun and a little girl had died. End of story.

Except it wasn't really the end, was it? Now he had made another bad decision, and there was a pretty damned good chance another person was dead. It didn't matter that she was a full-grown adult and a cop, too; that she had known the risks of the job when she signed on. The fact, as Mike McMahon saw it, was that his poor judgment had resulted in the situation they were now in—a situation where Sharon Dupont was in grave danger or already dead.

Mike looked out his office window at a parking lot beginning to fill with the vehicles of arriving day shift officers. The daylight was weak and barely winning the battle against the night's darkness and the fog, but it was likely as bright as it was going to get. “We've got work to do,” he said to Professor Dye. “Let's get moving.”

47

SHARON WONDERED IF SHE might be hallucinating from the pain. Lightning bolts of it flashed continuously through her head, and she was certain now that her arms were broken. Probably at least one rib, too, considering how agonizingly difficult it was to breathe. She wondered, almost as an aside, whether she was suffering from internal bleeding and if so, how extensive it was and how long she could survive it.

She lifted her head quietly and carefully and took a long look around her prison which, oddly, was now well-lit and into which she could see fairly clearly, given her poor perspective from the floor. She lay in a dirty and dingy room—perhaps a living room that had once been tastefully decorated but which had gone quickly and completely to seed. A filthy carpet covered part of the floor. At one time it may have been a rich maroon color with dark gold trim, but ground-in dirt and grime and who knew what else had reduced it to little more than the hard-packed dirt Sharon had originally suspected she was lying on.

She couldn't see the entire room; could probably see less than half of it, in fact, but even from her poor vantage point and through a haze of constant, almost crippling pain, what she could see made her sick with fear and disgust. Scattered around the room were what looked very much like piles of human bodies or at least piles of
parts
of human bodies. They looked as though they had been fed through a shredder, with bits and pieces of clothing still attached. An arm here, a portion of a leg there, a bone which may have been part of a sternum or perhaps a shin, still with a bloody flap of torn skin hanging off it by a thread.

Sharon felt bile rising in her gullet and forced herself to swallow hard to avoid puking all over herself.
It would be a shame to ruin my lovely outfit,
she thought as she contemplated her filthy jeans and sweatshirt, almost giggling but instead choking back a wrenching sob.

One pile of body parts in particular nagged at Sharon's consciousness, and in her pain and general fuzzy confusion it took her a few minutes to figure out why. Then the answer struck her as surely and as violently as if she had been hit with a baseball bat. That particular pile of human remains was different from the others: it was the only one in the room, at least in the portion of the room that Sharon could see, that seemed more or less in one piece. The only one besides herself, of course, and she wasn't entirely convinced all her parts
were
still intact.

Whereas the other remains were grisly reminders of the unearthly horror stalking Paskagankee, Maine—ripped, torn and shredded pieces of skin, bone, ligaments and muscle that appeared barely human—the body slumped across the room on the floor in an opposite corner seemed to be whole. Sharon guessed it was a woman, dressed in a long gray wool skirt, although it was hard to be certain. Whether that person was alive or dead she had no way of knowing, all she knew for sure was that the body wasn't moving.