The Narrows(20)

“Where?” Ben said.

Porter pointed beyond the crest of the hill. In a voice that sounded very much like a sinner confessing to a priest, Porter said, “Just over the hill. I first came across ’em less than an hour ago. I figure it’s some kind of animal did it.”

Ben scratched one ear. “Did you hear any noises, any commotion?”

“Not a sound,” Porter told him. “For an animal to do something like that, you’d think you’d hear something, right?”

“You’d think,” Ben agreed.

Eddie La Pointe appeared beside Ben’s other elbow. The officer had the green, sallow skin of someone chronically seasick. He glanced at Ben with large, beseeching eyes. He looked tired and very young. “Do you smell that?”

Ben nodded. “I do.”

“What is that?”

Without responding, Ben Journell walked to the top of the hill then swiped the beam of his flashlight back and forth across Porter’s east field. Whitish lumps appeared in the searchlight’s beam, humping out of the grass like great mounds of sand. Ben counted eight of them before Porter and Eddie joined him at the top of the hill, their combined respiration forming clouds of vapor in the frigid air.

“There they are,” Porter said, disgust evident in his voice.

“How many in all?”

“Christ,” said Porter. “All of ’em.”

“I mean, how many is that?”

“Thirteen.”

Scanning the field again, Ben quickly recounted. “Where are the others?”

“In the barn.”

Ben frowned. “Whatever did this got into the barn, too?”

“Yeah, Ben,” Porter said. “Bold little cuss, whatever it was.”

Ben went over to the first whitish heap rising out of the field, Eddie and Porter following close at his heels. The whitish heap was one of Porter Conroy’s Holsteins, keeled over dead on its side. Its mottled white hide looked incongruous lying in the black, wet grass. Ben’s flashlight illuminated the massive piebald flank first. He was surprised to find no wounds along the cow’s body that would have been common in an animal attack. A muddy, congealed jelly that at first looked like it could be blood coated the Holstein’s rear, but on closer inspection—and getting a whiff of the stuff—Ben realized it was feces. He traced the flashlight’s beam along the flank to the neck and saw that the white hair of its throat was fully exposed. Thin red crescents, like a series of curved puncture wounds, scaled the length of its throat, the depth and severity of which could not have been fatal.

Finally shining the light onto the cow’s head, Ben saw that it had been twisted in such a fashion that allowed him to see the open mouth ringed in foam, the snot-webbed portals of its cavernous nostrils, and one glazed, soupy, tar-colored eye rolled back in its socket. A pencil-thin rivulet of dark blood snaked out of one ear.

Ben frowned and said, “I don’t see any type of wound that could be—”

“Back of the head,” Porter interrupted.

Ben and the others stepped around to the other side of the cow, Ben’s flashlight beam now training on the top of the cow’s head.

Eddie pulled a face. “Jesus, Ben, the goddamn thing’s skull has been busted open. What the hell does something like that to a cow?”

Ben squatted and took a closer look at the wound. The top of the cow’s skull had been smashed open like a gourd, the concave bowl of its cranium glistening with black blood punctuated by tiny pinkish-white fragments of tissue and brain matter. The stench was beyond brutal.

“Its goddamn brain is gone,” Ben muttered.

“A wolf, maybe?” Eddie suggested, kneeling down beside Ben. Behind them, Porter Conroy stood like a scarecrow waiting to be scooped up and carried away by the next strong gust of wind.

“Coyote, is what I think,” Porter opined.

“Wolves and coyotes don’t do this,” Ben said.

“Been rumors of a mountain lion over in the next county, Ben,” Eddie added.

Ben brought the flashlight closer to the gaping wound, the shadows shifting within the bloody chasm. He held the beam tightly on the bones of the skull that poked up like serrated teeth through the torn flesh, whitish-yellow and marbled with grayish striations. Spongy, brownish marrow was visible around the circumference. The flesh at the edge of the wound looked like it had been burned away, not torn. There were parts along the side of the cow’s head where hair had been completely shorn away.

Without taking his eyes from the wound, Ben pointed beyond Eddie to where a large branch lay in the wet grass. “Hand me that, will you, Eddie?”

“Uh…” The officer snatched up the stick and handed it over to Ben. At this proximity, Ben could hear one of Eddie’s nostrils whistling.

With the branch, Ben gently prodded a clump of greenish sludge that clung to the serrated edge of the skull.

“What the hell,” Porter said somewhere above Ben’s head.

Ben pushed harder. The sludge quivered and appeared to be as malleable as taffy. For one instant, Ben thought of marshmallows roasting over a bonfire, melting and dripping into the flames.

“What is that?” Eddie asked.

Ben withdrew the stick and tossed it into the grass. “I don’t know,” he said. It looked like moss clinging to the bone. There was a webbing of the stuff caught in the cow’s eyelashes too, Ben noted. “What are you feeding these things, Porter?”