The Thing in the Alley (Anomaly Hunters, Book 3) Read online

10

  By the time the gang convened at Calvin’s house that night, news had broken of another grisly death in Kingwood. Brad Vallance’s killer had struck again. Or rather killers, as now seemed likely, at least in the opinion of the police and FBI. Calvin and the others gathered in the parlor and turned on the local news to catch the latest details.

  Shortly before four a.m. last night, Reece Reston, a night watchman at the Red Anchor Brewery on Gater Road, heard a brief, clipped scream from the vacant lot next door to the brewery. Listening at the high wooden fence that separated the two properties he heard “horrible wet crunching sounds” and the voices of at least two people, including one man and one woman, who “kept on saying all kinds of twisted stuff about calling up Satan and chopping up the dead.” Gun drawn, Mr. Reston crept to the edge of the fence and peered around it into the lot. Whoever had been there must have heard him coming, because the watchman saw only a mangled, bloody corpse in the middle of the lot and some bobbing branches amid the shrubs at the rear of the lot.

  The police were called, and they eventually managed to identify the corpse as Terrell Quinn, 48, a borderline schizophrenic who had been living on the streets for the last year. His injuries, while consistent with Brad Vallance’s, were far more extensive.

  “Large portions of the body were missing,” Coroner Chandra said in his usual calm, understated way. “Most of the head was gone. There was no face, no teeth. In fact, there was nothing left to enable an identification except three fingerprints on one hand.”

  The authorities refused to speculate on what had become of the missing body parts.

  Chief Dowdie summed up the opinion of the police and the FBI: “Given what Mr. Reston overheard, it seems all but certain that we are dealing with multiple individuals on some kind of bizarre crime spree, possibly with occult or ritualistic overtones.”

  The two missing teenage boys were still missing, and the police were still refusing to speculate if and how their disappearance might be connected with the deaths.

  When the news report was over, Calvin turned off the TV and sat back in his chair, quiet and thoughtful.

  “Does this change things?” Lauren asked. “I mean, it sounds like it’s probably normal everyday nutjobs who are doing this.”

  “Not necessarily,” Calvin said. “Don’t forget, leucrotas are said to mimic human voices. It might have just been repeating things it heard people saying.”

  “Yeah, but Satan cutting up corpses, or whatever it was? That seems a bit unlikely.”

  Calvin nodded slowly. “It does. But if it’s been prowling the streets of the city for a week or two, who knows what it might have overheard, especially at night. The West River neighborhood has a lot of bars and clubs, some of them pretty crazy places from what I’ve been told.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Donovan said, smiling. “The Gemini Club is in that area. That’s where all the indie heavy metal bands play when they come to town. I’ve been there a couple of times. It’s a cool place. But, yeah, the monster could’ve picked up all kinds of fucked-up talk if it was hanging around on the night of a show.”

  Cynthia couldn’t help laughing. “So, what, the monster might’ve just been quoting some third-rate heavy metal band’s lyrics?”

  “Hey, the stuff that night watchman dude said he overheard could’ve come from half the albums in my record collection.”

  Cynthia thought back to the racket she had heard blaring from Donovan’s bedroom on innumerable occasions, then nodded.

  “You know, he’s right.”

  “I don’t know,” Lauren said dubiously. “I think I need better proof than that.”

  “Ask and it shall be given,” Calvin said with a smile.

  “What do you mean?”

  He told them what he had discovered during his search of the Morning Star’s website earlier that day. He even brought out the Bard County map book and marked the location of each incident with a pencil on the one-page county map at the front of the book. When he was done he connected the marks as he had with the star on the map in the office five years earlier. The line he traced rose up due north from May to Ames, then curved around 240 degrees to Kingwood, forming a three-quarters circle with May in the center. The final shape somewhat resembled the power-button symbol on a computer.

  “Whoa,” Brandon said. “So it really did come out of that thing in the woods.”

  Calvin looked at Lauren, curious to see how she, the primary doubter at the moment, was greeting this new data. She was staring at the map and the glyph he had drawn on it, her brows drawn together. Finally she said, “Hm,” and settled back on the couch, the green leather giving a low creak.

  “Convinced?” Calvin asked her.

  She opened her mouth, hesitated, glanced at the map again.

  “Getting there,” she said. “I’m still not ready to call it a leucrota, though. Especially not after what I found out about them yesterday.”

  “Ah, so I take it you managed to get the research done.”

  She straightened up in mock offense.

  “Of course I got the research done,” she said. “I am the research queen, my good man. Libraries tremble at my approach and bare their naked pages to my gaze.”

  “That sounds pretty kinky,” Brandon said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” she said with a lascivious flick of her eyebrows. “Anyway…” She opened the small spiral notebook she had brought with her. “Let me preface this by saying that much of what you are about to hear is the biggest load of horseshit in existence. Bestiaries, while often fun to read, are not what any even marginally intelligent person would call scientific or coherent. I’ll give you what there is, though.” She started running her finger down the page, reading off each key piece of information as her finger came upon it.

  “Okay, some sources claim the leucrota—aka the leucrocuta, the crotote, and a bunch of other names—is the offspring of a hyena and a lioness, others that it’s the offspring of a wolf and a dog. Some say it comes from Ethiopia, others from India. All say it can perfectly imitate the human voice and, although nobody actually says so, I presume that means it can mimic other sounds, too. Its backbone is said to be so rigid that it can’t turn its head around to look behind it, making it effectively blind in that direction.” She looked up. “Which is, of course, completely ridiculous. I mean, how would it groom itself?” She shrugged and returned to her notebook. “Anyway, the authorities (and I use the term loosely) agree that it doesn’t have individual teeth, just rigid plates of sharp bone. Beyond that, the descriptions of its body are a confusing mess. One source gives it a stag’s haunches, a lion’s breast and shins, a horse’s head, a donkey’s size, cloven hooves, and a mouth that meets its ears. Meanwhile, a different source gives it the size of an ass—”

  Violet burst out laughing.

  Lauren rolled her eyes. “I knew it. I knew she’d laugh at that. I knew I should’ve said ‘donkey’ instead.”

  Violet got herself under control long enough to say in a deep, learned voice, like the narrator of a nature show, “Another source gives it the odor of an ass,” then started cackling again. Donovan joined in too, while Brandon tried to restrain his own snickers but finally admitted defeat and joined the giggle-fest. Though she kept shaking her head, Lauren couldn’t help smiling, too.

  “Are you sure you and Violet are actually related?” Cynthia asked Lauren.

  “No,” Lauren said. “I’m fairly certain that fairies swapped the real Violet for a changeling baby shortly after she was born.”

  “Hey!” Violet said. “I’m not a changeling baby! Whatever the hell that is.”

  Lauren cleared her throat and returned to her notes. “Anyway, as I was saying, this other source also says the leucrota has the legs and hooves of a hart and the head and face of a female badger, of all things.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Calvin. “A badger. That’s the description they used for Dungeons & Dragons. I always assumed they made that up. It sounded to
o silly to be based on any actual source.”

  “Nope,” said Lauren with a firm shake of her head. “It’s right there in Topsell’s translation of Gesner. He also repeats the bit about the mouth stretching from ear to ear, and then goes on to say, oddly enough, that this is the same creature as the mantichora, which he describes elsewhere as having a tail with porcupine-like quills, so you see what I mean about it all being mixed up and nonsensical.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now as a final note, you might wonder why, if it’s always described as being the offspring of hyenas and/or other dog-like animals, it would be as big as an”—a quick glance at Violet—“as a donkey. That’s because, according to later authorities, Pliny, who most of the later bestiarists swiped a lot of their material from, for some reason blended the hyena with the Indian antelope, which also accounts for the hooves being another common feature.”

  “Wow, that is a big mess,” said Cynthia.

  “Yeah, but there are certain constants across all the bestiaries—its size, its ability to mimic human voices, its hooves, and the bony plates instead of teeth.”

  “Do any of the books say anything about its preferred habitat?” Calvin asked. “Forests, or deserts, or mountains, or whatever?”

  “Not that I could find,” Lauren said.

  Calvin grunted. “All we have on that score, then, is the Monster Manual. If I remember right, it just says they inhabit lonely places.”

  “Well, duh,” said Brandon. “Monsters always inhabit lonely places. You never see them shambling down Main Street at high noon.”

  “Unless it’s Godzilla.”

  “It’s different with giant monsters. When you’re capable of wreaking huge swaths of indiscriminate destruction, it doesn’t matter what time it is or where you are. But most monsters—the smaller ones especially, the ones who aren’t gigantic engines of death and chaos—they have to be slyer and keep a lower profile.”

  Amused, Cynthia said, “Gee, I didn’t know you could become an expert on the ecology of monsters just by watching lots of late-night movies.”

  “Sure. It’s like research, only fun.”

  “Research is fun,” protested Lauren.

  “Getting back on track here,” Calvin said, “we need to try to figure out where the leucrota—”

  “Presumed leucrota.”

  “Presumed leucrota. We need to figure out where it’s bedding down. Given that this latest attack was in the same neighborhood as the first one, it seems safe to assume that the monster is lying low not too far from Holly Hills Metropark, maybe waiting until the Park Service search is over before slinking back to its old haunts.”

  “How smart are these things supposed to be?” Donovan asked. “Would it really understand stuff like that?”

  “I’m assuming it’s pretty smart. If it knows what to say to lure weary travelers to their dooms, it must have a decent level of intelligence. It would have to understand human language, at least a little bit.”

  “Like a dog,” Cynthia said. “Dogs can understand a limited number of words. And they’re pretty smart.”

  “Yeah, only this dog can talk.”

  “Like Scooby-Doo,” Violet said with a chuckle. “We’re looking for Scooby-Doo.”

  “Scooby-Doo’s evil twin, maybe,” Donovan said.

  “Scooby-Doom,” Brandon said.

  “Given that the leucrota spent the last two years avoiding heavily populated areas,” Calvin said, “and that it was only the Park Service search teams that drove it into the city, I think we can safely say the leucrota prefers wilder areas. That being the case, it would probably try to seek out places like that in the West River neighborhood.”

  “Parks!” Cynthia said. “Aren’t there some small parks near the area where the murder occurred?”

  Calvin picked up the map book and flipped to the pages that showed the West River neighborhood. Everyone else got up and crowded around him to look at the map.

  “Okay, here’s where Brad Vallance died,” Calvin said, pointing to the approximate spot on Train Avenue where the alley was located. The alley itself wasn’t shown. In fact, as Calvin scanned the pages, he found the book’s lack of detail quite frustrating.

  “And here’s where those two missing graffitists were from,” Brandon said, tapping an area in the northwest corner of the page.

  “And here’s where the latest body was found,” Cynthia said, planting her index finger on a part of Gater Road that was almost exactly between Calvin’s and Brandon’s fingers.

  “Okay,” Calvin said. “We’ll use the site of this new murder as the center of our target area. And let’s project outward a few blocks past the other two sites to form the area’s perimeter. Say, to Castle Road on the east, Axelrod on the south, Pentz Lane on the west, and Miller on the north. What have we got within these parameters that might be monster friendly?”

  “Like I said: parks.” Cynthia tapped several irregularly shaped shaded areas on the map. “It looks like at least four or five, and that’s not even counting Holly Hills.”

  “They’re kind of on the small side.”

  “True, but they might be wooded. That might provide enough cover.”

  “There’re a couple of cemeteries, too,” Lauren said. “Depending on how they’re landscaped, they might qualify.”

  “And look here,” Brandon said, tracing a sinuous waterway with his finger. “There’re creeks running through the area. If they’re in deep, wooded ravines, they’d be good, too.”

  “Maybe,” Calvin said. He shook his head. “We need to look at this area in person. I mean, I can see churches on here that take up half a city block, but the map doesn’t tell us what the grounds are like. Is it open space? Is it wooded? Is it just a big parking lot? There’s no way to know unless we actually go there and take a look.” He sat back and looked at the others. “So who’s available for a field trip tomorrow?”

  “Are you gonna buy us lunch, like they do on real field trips?” asked Violet.

  “Um, I guess that can be arranged.”

  “Cool! Then I’m free.”

  “I thought you had to work,” Donovan said.

  “I’m scheduled to work. Doesn’t mean I have to.”

  Lauren tutted. “You’ve already been fired three times in the last two months!”

  “Uh-uh! I only got fired twice. I quit the Dairy Queen job.”

  “Dad’s gonna have a fit.”

  Violet waved a hand dismissively. “I know how to handle him.”

  “So who else is free tomorrow?” Calvin asked.

  “I’m free,” Donovan said.

  “Uh, what kind of time-frame are we talking about here?” asked Brandon. “I’ve got a couple of job interviews early in the day, but I’ll be free after one o’clock.”

  “I was hoping to start as early as possible,” said Calvin. “There’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  “I can’t make it until after noon myself,” Cynthia said. “I promised my dad I’d help him at the bookstore tomorrow morning.”

  “What about you?” Calvin asked Lauren. “Can you make it?”

  “I get off at two tomorrow. If I head straight to Kingwood from Ames I could probably be there by two-thirty. Do you think you guys can wait that long?”

  “Do you really think you can make it there that fast?” said Cynthia.

  “If I really speed, sure.”

  “Huh. Maybe you’re related to Violet after all.”

  “Hey!”

  “We could do two-thirty,” Calvin said, nodding. “It’ll mean a late dinner, but I think we can pull it off.”

  “Awesome,” said Brandon. “The whole gang together on its first adventure.”

  “I hate to tell you this, but we won’t actually be together most of the time.”

  “Huh?”

  “In order to do a block-by-block foot search of all this territory the way we need to, we’ll have to split up.”

  “All alone?” Lauren said, twisting h
er mouth into a mock pout. “That’s no fun.”

  “Actually, I was thinking groups of two. It would be faster singly, of course, but I figure it’d be better to buddy up just in case any of us actually run into the thing we’re looking for.”

  “Ooh, I get to go with Donovan!” said Violet.

  “No,” said Cynthia.

  Violet blinked at her, eyebrows raised. “Excuse me?”

  “If you and Donovan go together, you’ll never get anything done. You’ll just end up goofing off or getting drunk or something.”

  “Hey!” Donovan said. “I can be responsible when I have to be.”

  “Not when you’re with her.”

  “I can so!”

  “If you really want to be responsible, you should go with someone else.”

  Donovan looked down at his shoes and murmured, “I guess…”

  “Now hold on just a fucking minute,” Violet snapped. Scowling, she planted her fists on her hips and thrust her face into Cynthia’s, or at least into Cynthia’s throat, given that Cynthia was over half a foot taller than she was. “This is a fucking democracy, isn’t it? Who the hell are you to tell us who we can and can’t walk around a city with? What are you, our fucking mom?”

  Cynthia lifted an eyebrow. “You’d better thank every star in the sky I’m not your mother!”

  “Actually,” Lauren said, “surprised as I am to hear myself say this, Violet’s right.”

  “What?” Cynthia said, taken aback. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re coming on a little strong here,” said Lauren. “I mean, it’s not like we’re employees or something. We’re doing this because we want to.”

  Cynthia held her hands up, palms out, in a gesture of conciliation. “Okay, I’m sorry if I’m coming across like that, but I know damn well that if we put those two together they’ll just fuck around. I know what those two are like together. You know it too.”

  Lauren glanced at Violet and Donovan, then bobbled her head in a kind of grudging nod. “Yeah. Those two together are like, I don’t know, Cheech and Chong, or something. But still…”

  “Yeah,” Brandon agreed. “I mean, I don’t want to do this if we’re just gonna get ordered around like employees, you know? I get enough of that shit outside of here.”

  Violet thrust her fist in the air. “Testify!”

  Cynthia shot her an icy look, then sighed and spread her arms. “Okay. What does everyone want to do, then?”

  Brandon and Lauren looked at Violet and Donovan, who were looking at each other, all of them with somewhat startled expressions.

  “Um…” Brandon shrugged. “Actually, the plan as it is sounds okay to me. I was just objecting to your knee-jerk objections to those two pairing up.”

  Cynthia nodded. “Okay, I guess I was a little knee-jerk. I apologize.” She turned to Donovan and Violet. “And you two insist on pairing up together, I take it?”

  “I guess we don’t have to,” Donovan said.

  Violet stepped between him and his sister and crossed her arms over her breasts.

  “Yes,” she said. “We do insist on pairing up together.”

  She smiled smugly. Cynthia resisted an urge to throttle the bitch. At this point Violet was doing this solely to piss her off and wasn’t about to back down. But neither was she, God damn it. It was a matter of principle.

  The two of them faced each other in icy silence, their glares clashing like duelists’ swords.

  “I have an idea that should make everybody happy,” Calvin said in a soft, pleasant voice that was way too soft and way too pleasant to be anything other than a flimsy veil over a Vesuvius-like caldera of ill humor.

  Everyone immediately fell silent and looked at him with apprehension.

  Cynthia felt particularly apprehensive, only just now realizing how much this whole dick-fight must have pissed him off. Yes, it was a democracy and they were all equals and blah blah blah, but in the end, this was largely Calvin’s show. It was his house and his Collection. By bequeathing it to him, Mr. May had clearly designated him as his successor. And as Cynthia herself had pointed out yesterday, Calvin was the only one who had no notable life outside of this. Investigating weird shit was his life, and woe to anyone, even a friend, who had a problem with that or got in the way of that. While Calvin was generally an extremely easygoing, understanding kind of guy, he had his limits.

  “What idea is that?” Cynthia asked, dreading the answer.

  “We’ll just split into two groups of three, that’s all. It’ll take us a little longer to cover all the territory we have to cover, but it’ll solve everyone’s problems. This way, Donovan and Violet can stay together, and you”—he nodded at Cynthia—“can go with them to make sure they don’t goof off. Meanwhile, Lauren and Brandon and I can form our own little group.” He smiled pleasantly.

  It was a good plan, eminently logical. And it managed to satisfy Cynthia’s and Violet’s complaints while making both of them feel as if they were being cruelly punished.

  Violet stared at Calvin in horror for a moment, then at Cynthia. Then her shoulders sagged and she flumped down into her seat.

  “Shit,” she muttered. “Sometimes I should just keep my fuckin’ mouth shut.”

  “That is true,” Lauren said quietly. “And yet you never do.”

  “Sounds, um…sounds good,” Cynthia told Calvin with a smile that didn’t extend beneath her face. She felt as if she had been consigned to sit at the kids’ table. She couldn’t really blame Calvin for being pissed, though; a man-eating monster was prowling the streets of Kingwood while she and Violet stood here sniping at each other over trivialities.

  “There’s one more order of business on tonight’s agenda,” Calvin said, his tone normal again as if the last couple of minutes hadn’t happened. His laid-back nature ensured that his bad moods passed quickly, like summer squalls. “It’s something Cyn and I meant to bring up last time, but we kind of got sidetracked.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Brandon said. “Something about ghosts and fish, right?”

  “Something like that.”

  Calvin and Cynthia related what Betty Romero had told them about Simon Bradley’s death and the strange echoes she and her husband had heard afterward. Then they described their visit to the Fishes’ house.

  “And there’s more,” Calvin said. “A lot more. Tiffany Fish visited me this afternoon.”

  “Oh, did she now?” Cynthia said, a grin spreading across her face.

  Calvin flushed. “She was…it was just a visit.”

  “Wait a minute,” Brandon said, peering at Calvin’s spanking-red cheeks with a grin of his own. “Is there something going on here?”

  “There’s chemistry,” Cynthia explained.

  “Oh, my,” Lauren said.

  “Dude!” Brandon said.

  Calvin rolled his eyes. “All right, guys. Let me just tell you what happened.”

  “Should we, like, turn on some bow-chicka-bow music for this?” Violet asked.

  Calvin’s face now looked as if it were about to spontaneously combust.

  “All right, already. Come on, now. This is actually kind of important. Turns out she’s connected to the alley, too. She was there the night Simon Bradley died.”

  “Wait, what?” Cynthia said.

  Calvin retold the story Tiffany had told him a few hours earlier.

  “She said she’s going to look into this Simon Bradley fellow, then get back to me soon,” he concluded.

  “Aha,” Brandon said, “do we have a new member of the gang?”

  “I don’t know yet. I think she’d be a welcome addition. But she’s kind of shy.”

  “Except around you, clearly,” Cynthia said, smiling.

  “Um…” Calvin’s cheeks began to flare redly again.

  She looked at the others. “Like I said: chemistry.”

  “Dude, we totally have to meet her now,” Brandon said.

  “I’ll talk to her about it. If she’s up for it, I could invit
e her to the next meeting.”

  “Please do,” Lauren said. “I want to see this legendary chemistry in action.”

  “Bow-chicka-bow!” Donovan sang. “Bow-chicka-bow!”

  “All right,” Calvin said. “I think it’s time we call it a night.”