Chapter Twenty-One – Sam

 

“Mr. Fitzgerald,” Eb said as he matched my grip with one hell of his own. “What brings a fancy newspaper man like yourself out here to my little plot of land?”

Eb and I had separated off from Ike and Faith, gone up to the old red work truck Eb was using for hauling bales of hay. Off in the distance, the cows lowed and mooed as they munched away on the strewn yellow straw, giving us a weird sort of background music as I looked out over the surrounding land.

“The pig you and Ike took into town a few days ago,” I said, not having any reason to dance around the subject. Besides, one look at Eb Shook, and you knew there was only one place he danced, and that was in a honky-tonk when a fiddle was present. It was always better to be as up front as possible with a man like Eb, if only because they didn’t suffer fools, or people who wasted their time, gladly. And dancing when you should’ve been talking was definitely a waste.

“Ike mentioned Dr. Lawrence wouldn’t talk about it.”

“That’s correct, sir. Actually said he didn’t know anything about it at all. Any reason you could think of that he would completely deny it happened?”

Arms crossed, Eb leaned back against the side of his pickup. With one finger, he poked the brim of his hat up and out of his eyes. Even in the cool weather of the morning, the exertion was clearly getting to a man of Shook’s age, and a little drop of perspiration trickled down his cheek, leaving behind a thin wet line in the fine layer of dust. Still, though, you could almost feel the way he took in the sights of his land, the pride he felt over the fruits of his labor. Just like a proud father looking out over his family at a reunion.

“Nah,” Eb said after what seemed an eternity. “Nah, can’t say as I do. He’s never been much of a fan of the press, but I never recall him outright denying it, or anything else ever. The doc ain’t exactly the fibbing type, if you catch my drift. Rather shoot his dog than tell a lie, far as I’ve been able to tell. And I’ve known him a long time, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

“Please, call me Sam.”

Eb nodded. “Fine. Sam. What do you want to know about the pig?”

He took me through what he’d found, where he’d found it. The cuts done to it, the way it had been stripped of skin and all its blood drained.

“Not a drop on the grass around it, just like the others before.”

“Before? Back in the 70s?”

“Read up on it, I see.”

“A little.”

“Probably didn’t read much about the ones before that, though. The ones going back long as we’ve been here.”

That was new. I looked him over, tried to see if he was just feeding me a line, to maybe see how far I would follow him on an outlandish trail. I didn’t sense any kind of duplicity, though. He was being as honest as a man like Eb could be. Which meant he wasn’t ever going to tell you a lie unless he couldn’t help it.

“Long as you’ve been here?”

“Since my family settled the land, from what my Pa told me. Livestock up towards the house, never had an issue. Ones we left out here, we’d lose a cow or a pig every couple of years. Back in the 60s and 70s, it was as much as once a month.”

“Those are the ones you worked with Dr. Lawrence on first, right?”

He cracked a smile. “Sorry. Meant the 1860s and 70s. First, they thought it was just Indians, but that didn’t make sense. How would a hunting party come out and do that, strip the skin and the blood, leave it in the field? Without any of the dogs or the locals seeing or hearing it? And on a moonless night, when the Comanche always rode and raided under a full moon? And why just the cattle or the pigs, when they could easily have come up to the house and taken the children and womenfolk, if they were able to do all that?”

“What was it, then?” I asked. “Did they ever find out about it?”

“Old Mexican hands called it the chupacabra. The goat sucker. Heard of it?”

“I’m familiar.”

I was, in fact, and wasn’t lying at all. I’d killed one down in Mexico a few years back. Nasty pieces of work.

“Well, it wasn’t that,” Eb said, chuckling a little.

“Never found it, did they?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Went away for a little while, it seemed. Till it came back again, this time when I was a much younger man than I am now. Me and Dr. Lawrence were around, that time, and we waited all night to see it. Trap it, kill it. Times were lean back then, and being down a pig or a heifer like that was the difference between eating and not eating that week. Wanted to at least see what was taking food off my family’s dinner table. Put it in the ground if I was able.”

“Did you see it?”

Eb’s face seemed to go stony, to turn in on itself like he’d just taken a giant bite of lemon and was fighting against the most intense bitterness he’d ever experienced.

“You did, didn’t you?”

Arms still crossed, he turned to me, looked me square in the eye. “This is all, what do they call it? Off the record?”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s what they call it.”

“This is off the record, then, right?”

“Of course.” I mean, I didn’t exactly want to tell the man that I didn’t actually work for the Tyler newspaper. “Anything you want. I promise, nothing goes in the paper.”

He nodded again as he settled back against the side of his pickup. “Well, the doc and I waited for a couple nights out here. Long, cold nights. It was winter that time, if I remember correctly, and Christmas was just around the corner. Now, I’ve been a hunter all my life. Back when I was younger, sometimes bagging a deer at the beginning of the season was the only thing that kept actual meat on the table. Been hunting, I think, more times than I could ever count. But, what we saw that night…”

I waited a moment for him to collect his thoughts. I turned back to Faith and Ike, who were standing off a little ways, pointing out into the distance and talking.

“What we saw,” Eb continued, “I just prefer not to think about.”

“What was it?” I asked quietly.

“It was…a…man.”

“A man?”

He nodded. “Tall, light-skinned. Pale almost, like a ghost. He wore some kinda heavy trench coat, like what you see in them old detective movies, the kind that goes all the way down to your ankles. But, he was naked underneath. Butt-ass naked as the day he was born. The doc and I, we must have dozed off or something, weren’t paying enough attention. But, all of a sudden, we come to our senses, and, right then and there, this man stands up from the body of one of my butchered heifers, not a drop of blood on him. Not a single drop, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

“What’d you do?”

He gave me a look like I was an absolute idiot for even having to ask the question. “Shouldered my rifle and took a shot at him. What the hell else you think I’m gonna do? Man’s on my land, stealing my cattle. I know my rights.”

“So you shot him? Did you hit him?”

He nodded.

“What happened?”

Eb turned his head to the side and, still looking forward into the nothingness of yesterday, spat a thick wad into the knee-high grass of the pasture. “Ain’t gonna believe me.”

“Try me.”

“Nothing happened. Nothing at all, Mr. Fitzgerald. I was using a 30.06, a deer rifle. I’ve dropped wild hogs, weigh more than four hundred pounds, with that rifle. They go down like a sack of flour. This stranger, though? This…apparition? Nothing. Nothing at all.”

I thought back to the cultist I’d met in the morgue, how he’d just shrugged off two bullets in the chest like it was nothing. No blood, no fuss. Nothing. Not even a stumble or a stutter.

“Then, bullet hole and all, he just turned and ran from the pasture. Moved like one of ’em cats in Africa, a cheetah. Faster than a horse or anything alive I’d ever seen, leaped right over my barbed wire and headed off onto the next property. Not a word, not a whimper, not a whisper.”

“Sure you hit him?” I asked before I could stop myself. From the look of Eb Shook, I should have known the answer already before I even thought to ask. A man like him grew up with a rifle instead of a baby rattle.

“Weren’t more than thirty paces. Course I hit him.”

“Any kind of markings on him?”

“Markings?”

“Tattoos, or identifying marks, you know? Earrings, long hair. Did you get a look at his face, at least?”

Eb slowly shook his head as I rattled off my question. “Had a sliver of a moon, and that’s it.”

“And you’re sure he was the one doing it?”

“Yessir. Bet my life on it. But, you know, whatever my bullet did to him, it stopped the killings. He got three of them, one right after the other, but it stopped after that night. Until now, of course.”

“Think it’s the same man, then?”

He turned, spat to the side again. “You think just one wasn’t bad enough?”

“Well, that’s not what I mean. I just want to know your opinion.”

“Still ain’t going in the papers, is it?”

I shook my head.

“What I think is,” Eb said slowly, “there’s an evil on this land. An evil that’s been on this land for a long, long time. Maybe far back as to when the Caddo Indians ran this land, before the French arrived and settled it, before the Spanish took it from them. Sure, we got our corruption, and we got our drugs and our sex and our ungodly ways, with the youth running around burning their lives out faster than they think is possible. But there’s something below it, Mr. Fitzgerald. A true blackness worse than even the depravities of the human soul. And whatever the hell it is, it’s back. I ain’t saying I drove it off that night with my little pea shooter. I ain’t saying that at all. I just think it was time for it to go back to sleep. And now, forty years later, it’s woken up.”

I nodded slowly as I turned and looked back at Ike and Faith. They were about fifty feet away, just talking in the middle of the field as they looked out to first the cattle, then the neighboring fields.

She turned and gave me a little smile, her eyes twinkling in the sunlight. Goddamn, she was beautiful, with the sunlight bright on her skin, the Texas breeze twisting and pulling at her hair as it came through.

Faith Riley. Damn. There was just something about her, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

If what Eb Shook said was true, that there was something evil on this land and it was connected to the mutilation of the pig and the burglars in the morgue, then that meant it likely had something to do with her as well. With the strange, imprisoning dream she’d had. With the crow man.

A cold shiver ran up my spine, and, for the first time in a long time, I realized I was actually worried. Because now, the only question was whether or not I could stop whatever this was. Before it was too late for all of us. Faith Riley included.