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

13

  Packed into Brandon’s van, the whole gang sans Lauren parked in a parking lot half a block up Gater Road from the Red Anchor Brewery and the latest crime scene. Lauren showed up a few minutes later in her pea-green Honda Fit, and the whole gang headed to the vacant lot where Terrell Quinn’s body had been found the previous day. Like the alley a few days earlier, they showed up too late to witness any police or media activity. A length of yellow police tape was tangled in the branches of a bush at the west end of the lot, its ragged plastic ends fluttering gently in the breeze.

  A large square of mostly bare dirt in the center of the lot indicated that a house had stood there until fairly recently, one that had no doubt matched the two-storey homes that lined most of the rest of the block. The board fence that separated the lot from the Red Anchor Brewery to the east was thick with graffiti, and a few boards had holes kicked in them. The house directly to the west had a For Sale sign on the lawn, and its windows were covered with plywood.

  Aside from the square of dirt in the center, the lot was overgrown with shin-high grass, ragweed, Queen Anne’s lace, and a variety of small shrubs. An old oak tree stood in the middle of what had once been the back yard. A pair of rotten ropes with frayed ends hung from a low, thick branch, attesting to where a swing once hung.

  “This is it, huh?” said Donovan, scanning the weedy field. “It’s weird thinking someone died here.”

  “It’s a crowded world with a long history,” Lauren said. “Someone’s probably died just about everywhere by now.”

  They roamed through the field, the grass and weeds whispering against their pants legs.

  “So are we looking for anything in particular?” Donovan said.

  “I don’t know,” Calvin said. “I just thought it would be a good idea to check out this spot before we started our foot search.”

  On the other side of the graffiti-covered fence, they heard a side door of the brewery open, letting out a blast of muffled rock music and the drone of many voices.

  “Hey,” Brandon said. “If we want to have dinner somewhere afterward, the Red Anchor’d be the perfect place. They’ve got a restaurant attached, and they serve some awesome bison burgers. The beer’s good, too. The Davey Jones’ Lager is particularly tasty.”

  “Let’s get the job done before we worry about our bellies,” Calvin said.

  They soon found the spot where Terrell Quinn’s body had likely lain: a swath of matted-down weeds and grass a few paces south of the square of dirt. Many of the plants in the center of the swath were stained rusty red.

  “Whoa,” Donovan said, staring at the blood. The whites of his wide, round eyes were dimly visible behind the dark lenses of his sunglasses.

  “Hey, check this out,” Violet said. She had strolled a little ways away onto the square of dirt to examine a piece of paper she had thought might be money (it wasn’t), but had found something potentially more interesting. She pointed at the dirt at her feet. “You were just talking about hooves last night, weren’tcha?”

  “What?” Calvin hurried over to join her, the others close behind. They looked down at where Violet was pointing.

  There in the soil was the clear, perfectly formed print of a cloven hoof.

  “Jackpot!” Brandon said.

  Calvin looked at Lauren.

  “So,” he said. “Convinced yet?”

  “Um…” Lauren eyed the hoof print a moment longer, then glanced back at the patch of flattened grass where the body had lain. “Your chain of evidence is linking up nicely.”

  “Isn’t it, though?”

  Calvin dug into his messenger bag and pulled out his digital camera to take a few pictures of the hoof print.

  While he did that, the others scanned the dirt for similar prints. The dirt had been heavily tracked up by police and reporters and morbid curiosity seekers, but Cynthia soon found two-thirds of another hoof print six feet north of the first one, the remaining third having been printed over by the wide, deep tread of a size 12 Red Wing boot.

  “It looks like it was heading toward the back of the lot,” she said.

  They found two more partial prints near the north end of the square of dirt, both of them likewise pointing north toward the line of trees and bushes that edged the back of the lot. They spent a few minutes looking for more prints or other evidence amid the brush back there, but found nothing. The dirt there was too hard and too covered over with mats of old, dry leaves to retain prints.

  They returned to the sidewalk in front of the lot.

  “All right,” said Calvin. “Let’s go through it once more.”

  Everyone groaned. They’d been through it twice already.

  “Brandon, Lauren, and I will take everything from here to Pentz Road in the west. Cynthia, Donovan, and Violet will cover everything from here east to Castle Road. The north and south boundaries of the search area are Miller and Axelrod, respectively. Remember: We’re looking for areas where a creature used to living in the wild would feel at home—woods, parks, ravines, maybe large cemeteries. And bear in mind, this thing is supposed to be about the size of a donkey, so the location would have to be somewhere a creature that large could lurk unseen.

  “If you do happen to run across this thing, do not under any circumstances approach it. Just call the others and then try to keep the creature under observation until we can all meet up and figure out a plan of action. Any questions?”

  No one had any questions.

  “All right, then. Let’s aim to meet back here in about three hours. Good luck, you guys.”

  Cynthia, looking like a condemned prisoner, led Donovan and Violet across Gater, then north up the road. The others headed south.

  “Dude,” Brandon said as they walked along, scanning both sides of the street for likely leucrota habitats, “that was pretty badass.”

  “What was?” Calvin said.

  “You! You were sounding all leaderish and shit. Like a general mustering the troops. Patton Beckerman. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  Calvin shrugged, feeling both embarrassed and pleased. “Well, you know…just doing what I had to.”

  “Did you know Patton was actually really foul-mouthed?” said Lauren. “He thought obscenity was an integral part of being a soldier, and he reveled in it. I was just reading about that.”

  “I thought you were mostly into older history,” said Calvin. “You know, ancient and medieval stuff.”

  “Oh, no. I love it all. I’ll quite happily go from, say, some musty tome on Assyrian culture to a biography of Nixon. It’s all good to me.”

  “A true history geek,” Brandon said.

  “Yep! But I have to say, there is indeed something particularly fascinating about reading about really old events, knowing that all the participants have been literally dust for centuries.”

  “It’s something about time, right?” Calvin said.

  “Yes! It really makes you understand how we’re all just brief blips on a historical continuum. Everybody likes to think they’re living in the apotheosis of civilization, but trust me, it’ll go on and on long after we’re gone, and we can’t even imagine what the world will evolve into.”

  They came to Axelrod Road and turned right. As they walked along, Calvin’s gaze was drawn south across Axelrod’s four busy lanes. The road was like a boundary dividing one world from another; the houses on the far side of Axelrod were larger and more opulent than the working-class homes over here, forming an enviable panorama of trellised rose gardens, vivid green lawns, shiny BMWs and Lexuses parked in the shade of stately old elms, and picture windows that looked big enough to fit a sailboat through. This was the northern edge of the Elm Hill neighborhood, where the Fishes lived. Their house was only four blocks southwest of here. Calvin couldn’t help watching the passing cars in hopes of spying Tiffany’s Audi.

  “Hey, check it out,” Brandon said, pausing to look over the side of a short stone bridge they were crossing. He leaned over the parapet, his chest and his hands
on the stone blocks.

  Calvin and Lauren joined him. Twenty feet down was a narrow creek, its sides fringed with trash. The banks were overgrown with bushes, brambles, young trees. Fences lined the tops of the banks. The creek meandered generally northward, though after a hundred yards its convolutions and the unkempt verdure that in many places overhung the water hid its further course from view.

  “That might be a decent leucrota hangout spot, no?” Brandon said.

  “Definitely.” Calvin unsnapped one of the side pockets of his messenger bag and got out his Kingwood street atlas to mark the location with a pencil. Using his finger to trace the thin black line that represented the creek on the map, he said, “It looks like it heads pretty much straight north to join the Kanseeka near King Street. And farther south it skirts the western edge of Holly Hills.”

  “Ooh, this might be it,” Lauren said.

  “Maybe. But we should still keep looking. This might be the course the leucrota followed north when it was driven out of the park, but it might have taken up a different residence by now.”

  “Are we gonna go down there?” Brandon asked.

  “Not right now. Right now we’re just noting likely locations. Later on we can merge our list with whatever the others turn up and pick the likeliest areas to start a real search.”

  “Then the fun really begins,” Lauren said. “And by ‘fun’ I mean risking getting our faces chomped off.”

  “It beats what’s on TV these days,” Brandon said.

  They soon came to Jackson, another working-class residential street, which they followed north. Here and there they caught glimpses of the creek ravine behind the homes on their right. Two blocks up, near the intersection of Jackson and Train Avenue, was a small park whose edges were sufficiently overgrown with trees and bushes for Calvin to make a note of it in his map book. He also noted an elementary school half a block farther on, which was abutted on one side by a strip of woods.

  As they neared Miller, the northern boundary of their search area, the residential neighborhood increasingly gave way to businesses and large apartment buildings. Miller was a main artery that connected downtown Kingwood half a mile northeast with the I-60 Outer Belt a mile west. Pausing on the corner of Miller and Jackson, the trio could see a few of downtown’s taller buildings above the rooflines and treetops to the northeast. The traffic speeding along Miller’s six lanes sent pulses of warm, smoggy air washing over them.

  “I’m betting even a creepy monster would be leery of crossing Miller,” Lauren said.

  “That’s partly why I picked this as the northern terminus of our search area,” Calvin said. “Even in the middle of the night this can be a pretty busy road.”

  “Yeah,” said Brandon. He slapped a palm on the metal pole that was crowned with the crosswalk signal, producing a clung that resonated up and down the pole. “And mythical medieval beasties probably don’t have a very good grasp of traffic signals.”

  “Why, I’ll bet those little hooves can’t even reach the Walk buttons,” Lauren said with mock sorrow.

  “Very sad.”

  “A real tragedy,” Calvin agreed.

  For the next hour they slowly made their way west, traveling up and down the blocks. Calvin noted several more locations in his map book, including another ravine, a small park, and a wooded lot behind Saint Raphael’s Catholic Church.

  On Hyde Road, nearly the entire block between Weber and Hays was occupied by the Verger Brothers Junkyard. Calvin, Brandon, and Lauren stopped beside the padlocked main gate and looked through the chain-link fence at the rusting hulks of old cars stretching away in uneven lines. Clusters of weeds sprouted here and there in the hard-packed dirt. A metal sign on the front gate read, “Closed Until Further Notice.”

  “This is a possibility,” Calvin said, opening the pocket of his messenger bag for his map book and pen.

  “Dude,” Brandon said, “this has to be the place. It’s a junkyard. Monsters love places like junkyards.”

  “They do?” Lauren said. “How do you know?”

  “Cuz they just do. They love mazy places full of junk.”

  “They do?”

  “Sure! Think of the Minotaur. Or…or…” He trailed off, unable to think of any other examples. “They just do!”

  “Okay, then. I’ll assume this is more sage knowledge derived from Channel 23’s Saturday night Fright Fest.”

  “Hey, research wears many faces.”

  Brandon hooked his fingers through the holes in the fence, making the chain links jingle, and peered inside.

  “You know, even if the monster isn’t here, we gotta come back. Or at least I do. I gotta get some of these car parts for my work. I had an idea for, like, robot dinosaurs made of old car parts, and they’d be all wired up with motion detectors so that whenever someone passes by, their headlight eyes would flash and they’d make growly engine noises. I figured I could call ‘em stuff like Tyrannocarus Rex and Stegacarus. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

  “Yeah,” Calvin said, grinning.

  Lauren chuckled. “And you call me a geek.”

  “I’ll have to make a midnight raid,” Brandon said.

  “Are you sure it’s safe?” Lauren rapped her knuckles against the sign. “It’s probably closed for a reason, you know. There’s probably oil and battery acid and toxic slime all over the place. Not to mention rats.”

  Brandon straightened his back and raised his chin with mock bravado.

  “No hazard is too great in the pursuit of Art.”

  A pit bull bounded from one of the aisles of junked cars and barreled toward the fence, its paws thudding on the dirt, saliva arcing from its maw, a tag on its collar clinking.

  Calvin, Brandon, and Lauren leaped away from the fence a moment before the dog crashed into it, making it bow outward. The dog caromed off the fence and thumped to the dirt, but if it was hurt by the collision, it didn’t show it; it sprang right back up and heaved a volley of barks at the gawping humans on the far side of the fence.

  “Um, okay, maybe some hazards are a little too great,” Brandon said.

  “I think we can probably cross the junkyard off our list of places to search,” Calvin said. “If the leucrota tried to get in here, either it or the dog would wind up dead.”

  A man in a Blackjack Security uniform appeared from the same aisle the pit bull had exploded from. He was stubble-cheeked and pot-bellied and had a cigar butt in his mouth.

  “Place is closed!” he hollered over the pit bull’s barks. “No loitering! Move along!” He waved a grimy, pudgy hand at them. “Move along!”

  “We’re moving, we’re moving,” Calvin muttered as the trio strode away.

  The remainder of Hyde Road yielded another small park and the partly wooded grounds of the Holyoak Assisted Living Facility. By the time the trio reached Axelrod and turned right toward Ferntree Avenue, the sun was halfway down the western sky and was out of sight for long periods behind the trees and rooftops. There was only an hour left till their scheduled rendezvous with the others, and they still had a third of their search area to cover plus the long plod back to the brewery. They stepped up their pace accordingly.

  They had traveled nearly half the length of Ferntree when Lauren suddenly stopped with a gasp, her eyes on an old stone church a hundred yards ahead. The church was set back from the road in a narrow lot between a White Castle and a small cinderblock building whose sign read “New World Services.” From here, only the church’s façade and the belfry were visible beyond the cinderblock building.

  “Holy shit!” Lauren said, grinning, her eyes alight like those of a treasure hunter who has just unearthed a pirates’ chest. “That’s the Western Reserve Congregational Church! I forgot that was in this area!” She started walking faster and faster until she was practically running toward the church.

  “The what?” said Calvin as he and Brandon hurried to catch up.

  “It was one of the first churches in Bard County, built in 1828. I’ve a
lways wanted to visit it, but I never had the time to do more than drive past it. Wow!”

  “So, is it a big deal just because it’s old?” asked Brandon. “Or is there some other reason it’s so cream-in-your-jeans cool?”

  She slowed her pace enough to shoot him an amused glance over her shoulder.

  “I don’t cream in my jeans, thank you very much. But, yeah, there’s another reason, which you guys should love. After all, you’re into weird mysteries and stuff, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Calvin, perking up. “What’s the mystery here? I’ve never heard of this place.”

  She tutted. “Someone has been woefully lax in their local anomaly research, then.”

  They stopped on the sidewalk in front of the church and gazed at the structure in silence. Its gray sandstone blocks were weather-streaked and splotched with moss and lichens. Over half the roof’s slate shingles were missing or broken. The glassless windows were boarded up with stained and mildewed plywood, the only exceptions being the arched windows in the belfry, which were devoid of both glass and wood, granting a view of only darkness and emptiness within, as if the tower had been completely hollowed out by rot. The lawn was so weedy and overgrown it looked like a meadow. The decayed remains of two posts that had once borne a sign were visible amid the high grass in the middle of the yard. The heavy oak front door was listing slightly on its rusted hinges, baring wedges of darkness at the corners. Across the door someone had scrawled “Ripent!” with black spray-paint. A few other bits of graffiti were visible here and there on the grimy stone façade, though considering the church’s decrepitude it was surprising there weren’t more. Or perhaps it wasn’t so surprising; the building had a sinister, brooding aura, and even sitting here in broad daylight it looked somehow twilit, its features dim and gray. Perhaps few vandals were bold enough to approach the place.

  “This is like something from an H. P. Lovecraft story,” Calvin said, both awed and spooked at the sight of the place.

  “I wonder if our missing graffitists were responsible for any of these barely literate effusions,” Brandon said. He glanced at Calvin. “Do you think the leucrota might be squatting here? If anyplace we’ve seen screams ‘monster abode,’ it’s this place.”

  “I don’t know,” Calvin said. “I just assumed it would stick to outdoor areas. Given how big leucrotas are said to be, I figured it wouldn’t be able to move around comfortably inside an abandoned house or someplace like that. But I’m hardly an expert on monster behavior. Why don’t we take a look around?”

  “In plain sight like this?” Lauren said, casting nervous glances up and down the street. Two little girls were playing hopscotch on the sidewalk across the street, and a freshly parked station wagon was disgorging a family of five in the White Castle parking lot barely fifty feet away.

  Calvin shrugged. “There’re no ‘No Trespassing’ signs, and it’s clear no one’s living here, so we’re not violating anyone’s privacy. Besides, it’s not like we’re gonna be here long; we’ll just take a quick walk around the place. If anyone stops us we can just say we’re students of local history on a field trip. You can bombard them with geeky info as proof.”

  “Gee, thanks. Leave it up to me.”

  After looking around to make sure no one was watching, Calvin strode down the crumbled remains of the stone walkway that led to the church’s front steps. Brandon and Lauren followed close behind.

  “So what’s the story behind this place?” Calvin asked as they examined the front of the building. He tried the front door. It was locked and, though crooked and decaying, fixed firmly in place.

  “Okay,” Lauren said. “Back in 1828 when Kingwood was still a dinky little settlement named King’s Mill, a group of settlers built the Congregational Church, worshipped there normally for a while, yadda yadda yadda, nothing too weird. But then in 1831 they got a new minister, this dashingly handsome young fellow named Gideon Squash.”

  “You are so making this up,” said Brandon.

  “I’m not! He really was named Gideon Squash, unless several dozen local history books were written by chronic liars. Anyway, he started preaching here, and then one day a few months later, a woman and her two six-year-old girls—twins, actually—disappeared from their home. The townsfolk searched high and low, and nobody could find a trace of them. Inevitably, suspicion fell on the new preacher because he was the only stranger around.”

  “Wouldn’t they have suspected the Indians?” said Brandon.

  Calvin groaned. “The Indians were pretty much long gone by then. Even I know that.”

  “All right, all right, history was never my forte.”

  The inspection of the front of the church done, Calvin led them across the weedy lawn toward the side, bits of shingles occasionally snapping and crunching underfoot.

  “So anyway,” Lauren went on, “the vanished woman’s husband broke into the preacher’s house one night when the preacher was away, hoping to find his family inside, or at least some clue to their fate.”

  “Did the preacher live by the church?” Calvin asked as he scanned the side of the church. It presented the same decrepit and foreboding appearance as the front, and like the front there were no openings for anything larger than a rat to get inside, at least not without scaling the sheer stone walls to the belfry windows. The trio set off for the back of the building.

  “No,” Lauren said. “Squash lived in a regular house on—get this—Train Avenue. Except it wasn’t called Train Avenue at that point. It was just a nameless dirt trail that connected a few places on the outskirts of the town.”

  “Let me guess,” Brandon said: “His house was where the alley of death is now located.”

  “Not even close. It’s in the other direction. Or it was. The house is long gone now. It stood just west of where Train intersects Pentz. It was where the Mad Hatter Novelty Company’s warehouse now stands. A pretty appropriate name, all thing considered.”

  “Actually, isn’t it more like an ex-warehouse at this point?” Brandon said. “Didn’t the company go bankrupt a couple years back?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  They had reached the back of the church. A yard as weedy and overgrown as the one in front stretched from the church’s rear wall to a rickety wooden fence that marked the end of the lot. Again, there was no way inside the church. As if to underscore this, someone had written “No Entree” in gold spray paint across the locked back door. The trio continued their circuit of the building.

  “So what happened with the guy who broke into Squash’s house?” Calvin asked Lauren.

  “That’s part of the mystery. See, a couple of other local guys had gone with him, but they wound up waiting for him outside. I guess none of them were brave enough—or maybe bereaved enough—to break into a preacher’s house. So these guys just hunkered down and waited for their buddy to come out. It turned out to be a really long wait. When he finally emerged two hours later, he was like a totally different guy. He was all weirdly happy, almost serene. He told them Reverend Squash couldn’t have had anything to do with his family’s disappearance because the preacher was a great man of God, and they’ve committed a horrible mistake in even suspecting him. The guy’s friends were understandably baffled, and they kept asking him what happened to make him change his tune. But he wouldn’t explain; he just kept telling them to trust him, Reverend Squash wasn’t responsible, he was a man of God, blah blah blah.

  “So they all went home, and sometime that night the guy who broke into Squash’s house put a gun in his mouth and blew his brains all over his kitchen.”

  “Dude,” Brandon said in a long, low whisper.

  “Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet,” Lauren said with a huge smile, clearly enjoying her role as spooky storyteller.

  They emerged onto the front lawn again, having discovered no place for a leucrota, much less a person, to have entered the building. The church, though decaying, was secure. They gathered in a cluster on the sidewa
lk in front of the church to listen to the rest of Lauren’s tale.

  “Nobody quite knew what to make of the guy’s suicide,” Lauren said. “Was he just despondent over his family’s disappearance and perhaps also riddled with guilt over breaking into the house of a man of God, or was something more sinister afoot? As you might expect, all kinds of rumors began to spread like wildfire. The locals ultimately fell into two camps, one saying that Reverend Squash was innocent, the other saying he was a black magician who had sacrificed the woman and the kids to the devil and then put a spell on the husband. Soon those who blamed Squash started saying that those who defended him were also under the preacher’s enchantment, while those who defended Squash claimed that those who believed he was guilty were being addled by either Satan or their own stupidity and that they were unjustly maligning a just man.

  “And what did Reverend Squash say? Why, he just kept delivering his sermons, same as always, and otherwise maintaining a low profile, which his defenders saw as a sign of his maturity and wisdom but which his detractors saw as proof of his guilt.

  “For a while it appeared as if things might blow over. But then, instead, things got worse. A lot worse. Three months after the woman and her kids disappeared, two young boys, both twelve, vanished while they were out fishing in the Kanseeka. No trace of them was found. Their parents, who had been firmly in the anti-Squash camp, now became its leaders and demanded that the preacher allow a search of both the church and his home. Well, the pro-Squash camp saw that as insulting and probably blasphemous, and they urged Squash to ignore the demands. And then…

  “I don’t know how much you guys know about local history, but have you ever heard of the Halloween Riot?”

  “Uh…” Calvin cast back through his memory. “It rings a bell. I couldn’t tell you anything about it, though.”

  “And I’ve never heard of it at all,” said Brandon. “Enlighten us, please.”

  “Oh, I will. On Halloween night, the anti-Squash camp held a meeting in the town hall to figure out their next move. The pro-Squash folks decided to hold their own rally in the town square, basically right outside the hall. Well, the people in the square got so loud with their ranting and speechifying that the people in the hall could barely hear their own ranting and speechifying, so they stormed outside to tell them to scram. And, well, you know how these things go: Tempers flared, heated words were exchanged, and then somebody—no one knows who—threw a rock. It hit a woman in the pro-Squash camp right in the head. It didn’t hurt her very badly, but it was enough to set off a full-blown riot right there in the center of town. Fists flew. Knives and guns were drawn. The whole thing lasted only about half an hour, but by the end five people were dead, nearly two dozen were injured, pretty much every window facing the square had been shattered, and somehow the dry goods store next to the town hall caught fire and burned down.”

  “Whoa,” said Brandon. “I never dreamed this boring two-bit burg had such a colorful backstory.”

  “Ha,” Lauren said. “If you think this is colorful, remind me to tell you about the King family sometime, the folks the city was named after. Or the so-called Bridge of Blood incident in 1891. Or the whole grave-tampering scandal in the 1920s.”

  “Grave-tampering?” Calvin said.

  “Oh, that’s a great story, but we don’t have time for that right now. Anyway, getting back to our smoky, bloody, riot-ravaged town square, it eventually dawned on a lot of people that the very focus of the riot, Reverend Squash, was pretty much the only man in town who hadn’t been there. He had told his congregation he would stop by their anti-anti-Squash rally at some point, but he never showed up, and some of his followers started to worry that maybe while everyone had been occupied with the melee, some of the anti-Squash folks had taken the opportunity to slip away and put an end to the supposedly evil reverend once and for all.

  “A group of townsmen went to Squash’s house and knocked. No answer. They called his name. No answer. The house was dark and silent. Figuring that maybe he had gone to the church, they went there next. Same thing: dark, silent, no answer.

  “By now they were sure that something was wrong, so they headed back to his house, where they forced a window and climbed inside. Nothing seemed amiss…until they checked the basement.

  “Now, the basement was a pretty rudimentary affair, with stone walls and a dirt floor. Most people back then used their basements to store vegetables and stuff like that, but Squash’s was completely empty. Or at least almost completely empty. When the searchers reached the bottom of the wooden stairs and raised their lanterns they found a human skull lying in the middle of the floor. It was small—a child’s skull—and it was badly discolored as if it had been buried for a long time.”

  “Oh, crap!” said Brandon. “He did kill the kids! He…” He trailed off, seeing that Lauren was shaking her head with a devilish grin.

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “That’s what everyone else assumed at first. But a few days later the town constable, whose job it was to check these things out since Bard County didn’t have a coroner in those days, determined that the skull was too small to belong to any of the missing children. The missing boys had both been twelve, and the missing twin girls had been nine. This, however, was the skull of a toddler. And based on the skull’s discoloration, it was estimated to have been in the ground at least a year, and probably a lot longer.

  “By then, the searchers had made another interesting discovery in the basement. Someone noticed that sections of the stone wall appeared to have been disturbed recently; some of the stone blocks weren’t aligned quite right, and there was loose dirt on the floor below them. When the search party removed these stones from the walls they discovered tunnels behind them, nearly a dozen in all, leading in all different directions. The tunnels were roughly six feet high, and their walls and ceilings had been crudely but effectively shored up with stones and wooden beams. Most of the tunnels extended about thirty or forty feet, but a few ran on for over a hundred.”

  “Where did they lead?” asked Calvin.

  “Nowhere. That’s the really weird part. Most of the time when someone makes tunnels in their basement, you think they’re making a secret passage to someplace else. But none of these tunnels headed toward anything of any importance. One of them ran underneath a neighboring cow pasture and then dead-ended in a stone wall. Another led to the edge of a nondescript grove of trees.”

  “The skull might have been something he unearthed when he was digging,” Calvin said. “It might have been the skull of some Native American kid from decades or centuries earlier.”

  Lauren nodded. “That’s what a lot of the local historians have concluded, though a few think the skull might have been planted there by anti-Squash folk to frame him.”

  “So what happened to Squash?” Brandon asked.

  “No one knows. No one ever saw him again. Some historians theorize that someone from the anti-Squash camp murdered him and hid the body, others that when Squash learned of the riot he decided to skip town, either to save his own skin or to spare the town further strife.”

  “Was any of Squash’s stuff missing?” asked Calvin.

  “Nope. Even his personal copy of the Bible was still sitting on his bedside table.”

  “That argues in favor of the theory that someone killed him.”

  “Maybe. If someone killed him, they hid the body really well. And the same applies to the four missing kids and the missing mom: No trace of any of them ever turned up.”

  “And that’s it?” Calvin asked.

  “Yep. You want mysteries, there’s a whole bundle of ‘em right there: Missing people, mysterious tunnels, an inexplicable suicide, rumors of black magic, and a skull of unknown origin.”

  “Damn,” Brandon said. He looked at the church looming before them. “I can totally see why this place is abandoned.”

  “Actually, believe it or not, after the Squash incident the congregation got themselves another preacher and went right
on using the church for decades. Eventually the congregation grew too large for the church, and in the early 1900s they built a bigger, better church about a mile north of here. After that, this one sank into disrepair. Reverend Squash’s house, on the other hand, was reputed to be cursed and wound up burning down in a mysterious fire that was almost certainly arson in the 1860s.”

  “And a warehouse full of kitsch and gewgaws took its place,” Brandon said. “Score another triumph for the forces of capitalism and banality.”

  They resumed their search, walking more quickly now to make up for lost time. Calvin noted a few more places that might be worth investigating, including a wooded area behind a putt-putt course and another ravine. On Pentz Road, the last leg of their search, they paused briefly to regard the Mad Hatter Novelty Company’s Kingwood Distribution Center in the industrial park across the street, the former site of Reverend Squash’s house of mystery. The warehouse’s vast parking lot was empty, and atop the façade, the big, unlit neon sign which showed the company’s cartoonish logo, a Cheshire Cat-like grin springing out of a black top hat, sported holes and cracks from rocks hurled by vandals.

  “And now the warehouse itself has been closed down,” Lauren said. She gave a small, sad smile. “Time rolls on.”