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

8

  “So how’s the new job going?” Cynthia asked Lauren at that night’s meeting. By general consent it was going to have to be a very short one. Thanks to various minor hindrances, nearly everyone had wound up running really late, and by the time the whole group settled down in Calvin’s parlor with the remains of last night’s snacks-and-beer buffet it was already nearly ten p.m.

  “They’re working me like a dog,” Lauren said, stifling a yawn with her fist. “They had me running up and down the stacks all day long. But don’t get me wrong: I love the job.”

  “A job you enjoy isn’t really a job,” Brandon said.

  “I’ll drink to that.” Lauren clinked her Bass Ale to his Edmund Fitzgerald Porter.

  “And what about you?” Calvin asked Brandon. “How did your job interviews go?”

  “Eh. Most of ‘em probably won’t amount to anything. Which isn’t so bad, because the jobs looked extremely lame. I got a good feeling about one of them, though: a local indie record company. Buck Futt Records. They specialize in punk bands.”

  “Oh, I know them,” Donovan said. “I have some of the Razorface albums they put out.”

  “Yeah, they’re pretty cool. The job I applied for was art director, which I thought I’d be way underqualified for. I figured it couldn’t hurt to try, though. Showing up is half the battle, you know. And in this case it might actually pan out. They sounded pretty hard up for someone competent, and I think I made a good impression. I should be hearing back from them in a day or two.”

  “I hope it works out for you,” Cynthia said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Okay, guys,” Calvin announced. “Let’s get this meeting underway. We have a lot to talk about and not a whole lot of time.”

  “So did you guys figure out whodunit and all that?” Violet asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  Calvin and Cynthia took turns relating the results of their investigation that afternoon. At least in part. They didn’t get around to Betty Romero’s story about the ghostly echoes, much less the meeting with the Fishes, because when Calvin and Cynthia described what Betty Romero claimed to have heard in the alley on the night of Brad Vallance’s murder, Lauren jerked bolt upright in her seat and waved her hand back and forth, palm out.

  “Wait wait wait,” she said. “Let me make sure I have this right. It sounded like someone or something was repeating exactly what this Ruddy woman had said, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Calvin.

  “And this old lady heard a sound like hooves?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And correct me if I’m wrong, but Coroner Chandra said that the wounds on Brad Vallance looked like they’d been made by sharp smooth plates configured like a set of jaws, correct?”

  “More or less, yeah.”

  Lauren sat there in silence for a second, mentally running through the facts one more time just to make sure. Then she shook her head with a small, self-conscious laugh.

  “That sounds like a leucrota.”

  Calvin frowned, trying hard to remember where he knew that word from. Then he had it: “The monster from Dungeons & Dragons?”

  Now it was Lauren’s turn to frown.

  “What?” she said.

  “Leucrota, right? That’s a D&D monster.”

  Violet snorted. “I knew he played that shit.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Lauren said, ignoring her sister’s comment, as did everyone else. “I never played D&D. The leucrota I’m familiar with is a monster from medieval bestiaries. I did a boatload of research on bestiaries for a paper I did for one of my classes. The leucrota was supposed to be this vicious man-eating quadruped. Instead of teeth it was said to have single plates of sharp bone, one in the upper gum, one in the lower, and it had cloven hooves like a goat’s, and most importantly it could mimic human voices. Its favorite trick was to lie in wait near roads on dark nights and lure passing travelers to their dooms by crying for help in a woman’s voice.”

  Calvin nodded slowly, remembering what his old Monster Manual had said about leucrotas. “Yeah! That’s it. I should have seen the connection earlier.”

  “Um, no,” said Lauren. “No, you shouldn’t have. Because, see, leucrotas aren’t real. They were actually hyenas. Kind of. They were a description of a hyena told by a bunch of ignorant, superstitious people who had never seen a hyena but had only heard fourth- or fifth-hand stories about them. The hyena’s eerily laugh-like cry got distorted into the leucrota’s ability to perfectly imitate the human voice. It was just a…a mistake, that’s all. There’s no way a leucrota could be real. I mean, they’re biologically impossible. They’re dog-like animals with hooves.”

  “Based on your description, this does sound like a leucrota, mistake or not,” Cynthia said.

  “But it’s…it’s…” Lauren shook her head. “Where did it come from, then? If leucrotas are real, where have they been hiding for the last millennium?”

  “The clearing in the woods, remember?” Calvin said. “Maybe it came through there.”

  “Oh, yeah. The magic hole in reality. So, what, it generates not only extinct species but species that are and have always been entirely fictional?”

  “Why not? We don’t know exactly what’s really going on with the clearing. We don’t know how it works. Maybe it’s funneling things from alternate realities into ours.”

  “I find it hard to believe that leucrotas could exist in any reality,” Lauren said. “I really hate to be a pooper at your party, but there is a very clear origin to leucrotas. We know they’re a garbling of accounts of hyenas with bits of a few other things mixed in. That’s all they are. That’s all they ever were.”

  “Aha,” Brandon said. “That brings us back to the theory that the whatever-it-is in the woods is making the stuff of imagination into reality, like in that book.”

  “What book?” Cynthia said.

  “I don’t know. Wasn’t there a novel about something like that? I never read it, but I heard something about it.”

  “I think we’re kind of getting ahead of things here,” Lauren said. “All I said was that what that old lady described sounded like it could be a leucrota. I’m sure there are plenty of other plausible explanations that fit the facts. Besides, I think you’re overlooking one very obvious problem with your theory.”

  “Which is what?” Calvin asked.

  “If this thing is a leucrota and it came from the clearing, then it didn’t just hop a bus to downtown Kingwood. It had to travel there on foot. Or, well, on hoof.”

  “It hoofed it to Kingwood,” Brandon said, grinning. “See what I did there?”

  “Unfortunately,” Cynthia said.

  “The point is,” Lauren said, “it would have taken this thing at least a few days to travel that far. And that’s assuming this thing traveled in a straight line from here to the edge of downtown Kingwood. And bear in mind, leucrotas were supposed to be fairly large, about the size of a donkey if I remember right. A creature that big would need to eat a lot of food every day. So why haven’t we heard about any attacks before this one?

  “There were those two missing graffiti guys,” Donovan said.

  “Yeah, but that was the same neighborhood as the dead guy. That still leaves at least ten miles of ground for Mr. or Ms. Leucrota to have traveled. Ten miles of very heavily populated ground.”

  “It might have been sticking to woods and fields and stuff,” Brandon said. “Even though it’s pretty heavily populated between here and Kingwood, there’re still plenty of wild and abandoned areas.”

  “But if it’s slinking along from one secluded spot to another, it would take it that much longer to travel, and in all that time it still needs to be eating something.” She shook her head. “I just don’t see how a creature that large and that conspicuous could travel that far through a densely populated area without being seen and without leaving any traces.”

  There was silence in the room for a moment as everyone pondered this. The sil
ence was broken by a sharp hiss as Violet twisted the cap off another bottle of beer, then the faint clatter as she tossed the cap onto the coffee table, where it joined the caps of the other four beers she had drunk since the meeting began.

  “Have there been any other missing person reports lately?” Cynthia said.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Calvin said. “Of course, if the creature’s been feeding on transients or something, it’s possible no one’s noticed.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Lauren said. “I think even a bum getting torn up like that would attract plenty of attention.”

  “Not if the bum got eaten whole. Brad Vallance’s remains might have been an exception. The creature might normally gobble down every last bone and belt buckle.”

  “And it doesn’t have to have been eating only people all this time,” Brandon said. “It might’ve been eating animals. Pets, raccoons, stray dogs, whatever.”

  “Or even livestock,” Calvin said. “There are farms not too far north and south of this area. Plus there are wild deer. There’s plenty for a carnivore to eat.”

  “But if that’s true, why would it suddenly decide to start attacking people in the middle of a busy urban area?” Cynthia said.

  “We need to do some homework,” Calvin said. He looked at Lauren. “Do you think you’ll have the time to dig up whatever info you can find about leucrotas between now and tomorrow night?”

  “I can try,” Lauren said. “There isn’t really very much information to be had, and most of it’s kind of silly.”

  “Just find out whatever you can, silly or not. In the meantime we need to start digging around and seeing if there’ve been any reports of mysteriously murdered or missing people, pets, or livestock in the area lately.”

  “Uh, who’s ‘we’ exactly?” Brandon asked. “I mean, I’m pretty booked up with more job interviews all day tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll be working,” Lauren said. “As it is, I’ll have trouble fitting in the leucrota research.”

  “And, sorry, but I’m slated to help my dad at his bookstore,” Cynthia said. “So’s Donovan, for that matter.”

  Everyone looked at Violet, the only one as yet unaccounted for. She was in mid-swig of her latest beer. When she sensed their gazes upon her, she froze with her lips tightly sealed around the bottle’s mouth, her eyes sweeping the faces turned her way. She plucked the bottle from her mouth with a hollow pwok.

  “Hey, don’t look at me!” she said. “I ain’t doin’ no fuckin’ research!”

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said. “I mean, if we want it done right, we don’t want Violet doing it.”

  “That’s right!”

  “I guess it’s up to you, then,” Cynthia told Calvin. “You’re the only one without a life.”

  “Oh, thanks!” he said with half-joking umbrage.

  “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant a life outside of anomaly investigating.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure. Anyway, can everyone make it back here tomorrow night? I know you guys all have lives and stuff”—he shot a pointed glance at Cynthia, who tutted and rolled her eyes—“but we need to get on this quickly. The leucrota—”

  “Presumed leucrota,” Lauren said. “I’m still not convinced.”

  “Okay, this entity that resembles a leucrota in a wide variety of ways might continue to kill people, so we ought to get on this as fast as we can.”

  “Maybe we should alert the cops or something,” Cynthia said. “Just so they have a better idea of what they’re dealing with.”

  “And tell them what, exactly? That they should be keeping their eyes open for a nonsensical mythical beast that’s right out of the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual and can mimic voices better than Rich Little?” He shook his head. “I don’t think they’ll buy it. I mean, they already heard what Betty Romero had to say, and we know from their press conference that they’re at least considering the possibility that some kind of deformed animal is involved. I’d say that’s close enough for government work.”

  “What about the haunted alley and Tiffany Fish and all that?” Cynthia asked Calvin. “We never even got to that stuff. Do we want to get into that now?”

  “The what and the who?” Brandon said.

  Calvin checked his watch.

  “Not tonight,” he said. “It’s already pretty late, and everyone’s tired, and you guys all have to get up early for your lives tomorrow.”

  “You’re not gonna let that go, are you?” Cynthia said.

  “Not for a while. And in any case, I think the leucrota situation takes priority over the ghosts of West Train Apartments and young Ms. Fish.”

  “Ghosts?” Donovan asked.

  “Who’s Ms. Fish?” Brandon said. “Isn’t that from a Psychedelic Furs song?”

  “Why don’t we save that discussion for another time,” Calvin said. “Let’s just say that the leucrota isn’t the only mysterious phenomenon that’s come to our attention lately.”

  “Are you saying we can’t multi-task?”

  “Not with all of you having lives, we can’t.”

  “All right,” Cynthia said with a groan. “I’m sorry I said that.”

  Lauren yawned loudly, then shook her head and stood up.

  “Sorry, but I really need to get going, guys. I’m whipped, and I have to be up super-early tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” Cynthia said, likewise rising. “It’s time to get this party ended.”