Dark Screams, Volume 9 by Brian James Freeman & Brian James Freeman & Richard Chizmar (ed)

Author:Brian James Freeman & Brian James Freeman & Richard Chizmar (ed)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

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I kept Mel and Hank with me, sent the others back to the trail to make sure the state boys found their way to us. Standing over Arthur’s body, I felt like a frightened kid, my mind returning to the days when monsters were real and any dark place was likely to brim with them. Things moved in that darkness. Several times while waiting with the body both Mel and Hank spun toward a sound in the forest, only to whip back around because a new sound emerged on the other side of us. In those instances, you can’t help but react. I, too, turned to the noises, gun raised, telling myself that Arthur’s killer was coming back for seconds. When your nerves are that frayed, cruel imagination has the opportunity to peek through the holes, worry them and remove the threads so it can emerge to fill your head with any number of disturbing fantasies. At one point the subtle rustlings in the forest grew so frequent I thought we were being circled.

It was just the wind, I told myself. Foraging animals. Settling deadfall.

I spent a lot of time in these woods as a kid, playing games like tag and hide and go seek, building forts out of fallen branches and thick slabs of scabby bark, setting off in search of imaginary treasures. My best friends from those days, Timmy Feld and Nathan Holm, and I hiked and hid and pretended battle beneath the pines. We found our own world there, a magical primeval world scented like a musky Christmas, a world for boys. I saw my first girlie magazine in those woods, took my first puff off a cigarette, and had my first sip of beer. But for all of the time spent and all of the adventures taken, the woods had never scared me before. As a boy, the woods seemed to be exactly the place where I belonged.

Those joyful days were gone.

For all of my fond and familiar memories of this forest, I stood in it with Mel and Hank and the remains of Arthur Milton, feeling completely lost. The woods held no hidden treasures, no damsels to rescue; it was simply a dark and dangerous place, providing ample cover to at least one monster.

When the state boys showed up, they came stomping through the forest like a platoon, lights cutting the tree trunks and brush. I was relieved to see them. They walked onto the scene all good-natured authority and efficiency, gave Arthur a look, shook their heads. A couple boys cursed, but none of them had the gut reaction we local folks had at seeing the gaps in Arthur’s body. After all, the state boys spent their days scraping people out of ten-car pile-ups, shoveling remains off the rocks at the base of Treetop Bluff (a popular place for suicides upstate). The destruction of the human body came in a number of fashions, and these boys had seen most of them.

They didn’t have to say a word; the crime scene was theirs.

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