The Narrows(54)

“Some men came out of the cannery—there used to be a cannery at the far end of Susquehanna, where all those homes are now—and one of them had this long buck knife. We all gathered around in the street and watched as he cut into the belly of the snake and all this greenish-black ooze spilled out. I remember it taking him some time and effort to cut that belly open, and when he finally got it, the gash separated like a purse.”

“What was inside?” Ben asked. His voice was close to a whisper.

Hogarth said, “A little girl.”

Ben blinked.

“She had been maybe six years old, judging by her size, though it was hard to tell because she had been partially digested. Her features had been melted and worn away by the snake’s stomach acids, giving her this faceless, inhuman appearance. I was in my thirties back then, but I still suffered about two weeks’ worth of nightmares after seeing that girl’s featureless body slide out of the opening in the snake’s belly, splayed out there on the muddy road in a pool of bile, blood, and digestive juices.”

“Jesus,” Ben breathed.

“Yeah. So maybe the Viking helmet wasn’t the craziest thing ever washed up around here after all.”

“My father never told me stories like that.”

“Your dad had stories to beat the band, Ben. I once saw him save the little Winterbarger girl when she was chokin’ on a bit of stewed lamb at the county fair.”

“I’ve heard that story,” Ben said. “I meant stories about the land, the town itself. I was told never to go up into the mountains by myself and, when I got older and could go out beyond the highway, I was told never to swim in the Narrows alone. But I was never told about…well, the way you speak of it, there was a sort of…power, I guess, that the land held. I hear you talk about this town and it’s like listening to stories from another planet.”

“Every small town has power,” Hogarth said. “The people are aware of it in the way we’re aware of electricity humming through the walls of our homes or that our water is delivered through a network of pipes underground. We sense it like animals sense a tornado coming. You feel it just as much as I do, Ben. I’ve just been around long enough to recognize what it is.”

He thought about the cold, empty nights in the farmhouse now that his parents were dead and buried. He could not deny the sense of indefinable power that seemed to radiate up through the old, warped floorboards on certain winter nights…the power that funneled down the old stone chimney and moaned like a bear from the cave of the hearth…

“Lately,” Hogarth said, snapping Ben from his reverie, “I’ve been having trouble sleeping. It started before the last storm and it’s just gotten worse. Not insomnia, per se…but a certain wakefulness that I feel is partially thrust upon me and partially my inbred responsibility. I feel like a warrior keeping watch in the tower of some medieval castle.”

“If that’s supposed to make me feel better, it doesn’t.”

The old man’s smile looked pained. “Me either, Ben. Me either.”



2



The moment he stepped back out onto the sidewalk, Ben’s cell phone trilled. He anticipated that the call was from Paul Davenport over in Garrett County with the number for the Fish and Wildlife folks who had come and collected the carcass of the dead mountain lion, but he was wrong.

“Ben Journell,” said a man’s voice, vaguely familiar. “It’s John Deets over in Cumberland.”

“Oh. Hello, John.” Deets was the county ME whom Ben had brought in to deal with the drowned boy who’d washed up along Wills Creek almost two weeks ago. He’d forgotten that Deets had been trying to reach him.

“Listen,” Deets motored on, talking in his clipped and rushed way, “I’m sorry to bother you on your day off, Ben, but I’ve been trying to get in touch with you and, well, it’s your name I’ve got listed down here as the case sergeant.”

“I heard the boy has been identified,” Ben said. “Is that correct?”

“Well, we did happen to hear from a couple whose son went missing a few days before the body was found. They were on a road trip and had stopped at a motel off Route 40. The kid went outside to walk the family dog and never came back. The father went out looking for him and found the dog sniffing around some Dumpsters out behind the motel. No trace of the kid.”

“Have they identified the body?” Ben asked.

“They were going to.” Deets’s voice sounded unsteady. Apprehensive.

“John,” he said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Ben,” said Deets. “The boy’s body is gone.”



3



“What the heck are you doing here?” Eddie said, peering at Ben from around the side of his cubicle. He had one of his horror magazines open in his lap. “It’s your day off.”

“I’m just grabbing some stuff to take home,” Ben said, going immediately to his desk. A stack of slim blue case folders sat at the corner of his desk. He picked them up and hastily thumbed through them.

“What’s the emergency?” Eddie asked as he flipped casually through his magazine.

“I just heard from John Deets at the morgue.”