Bad Moon Rising (Pine Deep #3)

Castle stumbled, tripping over his own feet, and pitched forward almost out of shot, falling hard but making no attempt to stop his fall or protect himself. There was a horrible meaty thud as Castle’s cheekbone struck the unyielding corner of the nearest surgical table. He toppled off and vanished out of frame.

“No…” said Ferro, his dark brown skin sickened to a toxic gray.

There was more movement. Not from the figure that had fallen, but from the doorway, where a second figure was slowly pushing through the door. It, too, was naked, but was darker, heavier, taller, with coarse black hair that matted its milky skin like an animal’s pelt. This second figure had the same long and terrible Y-shaped ventral incision and the same mass of torn skin on its throat held in place by adhesive strips. Ferro and LaMastra watched in stunned horror as Nels Cowan shambled into the room. Cowan stared blindly at the security camera for a while, not with any deliberate focus, but because his face was in line with the lens. Cowan’s face was horrible. The features were slack as if the muscle and flesh just hung from the skull with no internal anchor, a mask draped loosely over a set of empty bones. There was a long incision across the top of the scalp from ear to ear, stitched now to stay in place. Ferro knew, even if LaMastra was spared the knowledge, that during an autopsy the whole front section of the scalp was peeled forward to expose the skull, then the front of the skull itself sawn off to allow the pathologist access for removing the brain. The long line of sutures showed where Weinstock had reattached the lower part of the scalp and all of the forehead flesh. LaMastra’s stomach writhed with icy worms and sour sickness.

Cowan’s face filled the screen and for a while did nothing but stand there, but that was horrifying enough. That face, empty of life but filled with an impossible animation, dominated the whole of Weinstock’s office from where it looked out of the TV screen.

Behind Cowan, blurry now that the auto-focus had shifted to Cowan, something moved. Ferro leaned forward to see, and watched in horror as Jimmy Castle slowly got to his feet. It was an effort of incredible clumsiness, as if the muscles and bones and tendons of Castle’s body had no single point of direction, no memory of how to work in concert. It was a parody of human movement that nonetheless possessed no scrap of comedy. Castle flailed and thrashed, flopping three or four times back onto the floor, each time with a hard-bone crack but no grunt of pain or gasp of effort. There was no humanity to the action, just an effort of a construct to master the mechanics of standing, but even seeing it in such an antiseptic way did not keep the grotesque horror of it from making Ferro’s mind reel and LaMastra’s stomach churn.

Both detectives were sweating badly. Weinstock opened his desk drawer and took out a full bottle of Glenlivet and three paper cups. As he unscrewed the top his eyes were locked on the screen, seeing the images he had watched over and over again, seeing them new again through the eyes of the cops.

Jimmy Castle managed to get to its feet, and somehow in its last efforts there had been some kind of a change, some improvement in the link between body and directing force, as if the flesh had remembered the way in which it was supposed to work. Muscles bunched under the pale, pale skin, and the figure rose slowly from an awkward crouch, straightening inch by inch to stand on firm footing. The body swayed but did not fall.

In the foreground, the face of Nels Cowan had taken on a different cast. Where moments before the eyes had been as lifeless and empty as marbles, now there was something…a faintness of life, a subtle flickering of energy, and as they all watched those eyes seemed to come to a slow and very gradual focus, actually seeing the camera instead of just pointing in the that direction. There was no specific recognition of what the camera was, it was more that the camera was simply the very first thing those eyes noticed. Cowan’s eyes were black windows that looked into a vast, dark space, but now something in that darkness moved. Those eyes stared and stared, and then, slowly, they shifted as if Cowan had discovered that there were muscles that could make the eyes move. He looked right and left, up and down, just experimenting with the mechanics, then found a new and specific focus as Cowan raised his hands to eye level. He looked down at the hands, as white as candle wax and wasted from the massive loss of blood and other body fluids.

For just a moment, it seemed to Ferro and LaMastra that expression flickered through those eyes, something like awareness, or shock, or fear; but if those emotions were there they lingered only briefly and then flitted away as Cowan turned his hands over and peered at them closely. He closed his hands into fists and there was a dry cracking sound as the unlubricated tendons creaked and popped. Opening the fingers, Cowan stared at his palms, and that left the backs of the hands clearly visible to the camera’s unwinking eye.

LaMastra gasped. “Frank, look at his nails!”

Ferro nodded mutely, too stunned to speak. Each of Nels Cowan’s fingernails had changed, had become thicker, darker, almost black, the new growth of nail splitting the flesh of each finger, curling out like talons. Not as long as an animal’s nails, or even as long as many women wore them, but too long for the hands of a man who had been a working cop, and the thickness and sharpness of them was alien and awful.

Cowan opened and closed his hands several times, turning them to stare at them with a kind of animalistic wonder. His face showed the very first flick of emotion as he considered his taloned hands. There was just the barest hint of a smile on his blue-white lips, just enough to show the even edges of his white teeth. Even, except for the incisors.

“No,” said LaMastra firmly. “Fucking no!”

The incisors were long. Far longer than they should have been, far longer than they had any right to be. Too long. Impossibly, insanely long for a human mouth.

“Goddamn it—NO!” yelled LaMastra. He slammed the trash can down on the floor and wheeled on Weinstock. “This is bullshit, man. This is some kind of stupid Halloween bullshit!”

Weinstock didn’t answer. What could he say? He threw an imploring look at Val and Crow, but she was looking down at the lacings of her shoes and Crow was giving the TV a thousand-yard stare.

Ferro reached a hand out to touch LaMastra on the shoulder, but the younger man just shook it off.

On the TV screen, Cowan had turned away and was lumbering toward Castle. They stood there, regarding each other. Cowan was still smiling, but Castle’s face looked almost sad. It didn’t last, though, as Cowan and he scrutinized each other, the look of sad dismay on Jimmy Castle’s face crumbled and fell away and soon he, too, was smiling. That smile was wrong in every possible way.

Suddenly both men—if men they were—stopped and froze with their heads cocked to listen. They stood like that for a very long time, though the microphone of the security camera picked up no trace at all of anything they might have heard. Their smiles widened, became the leering, grinning mouths of animals, losing any last resemblance to humanity. Then, as if responding to a call, both of them turned and walked toward the door. Walked now, not lumbering like machines. They moved with something approaching grace. It was still not a manlike way of walking, but instead it possessed the smooth stalking fluidity of predatory hunters. They crept to the door, listened, opened it, and vanished into the hall.

Once again the autopsy room was frozen into the silence and immobility of a still photograph except for the constantly changing clock. After a while, Weinstock raised the remote and pressed Stop, reducing the image to static and softly hissing white noise.

He looked at the two detectives, feeling sorry for them, feeling helpless as if showing them this was some kind of betrayal of trust.

Ferro sat with his face in his hands, shaking his head slowly; beside him LaMastra was beating one bunched fist forcefully against his thigh. Weinstock knew that the blows had to hurt. Perhaps LaMastra needed the pain to keep from flying apart. That was something he could well understand.

Without asking he poured them each a measure of Scotch, then walked around the desk to hand one to each, saying, “Here.”

LaMastra took the Scotch and sipped at it, winced and took another sip, letting the alcohol burn play surrogate for the pounding fist.

Ferro looked into the cup and said, “I don’t drink Scotch.” Then he drank it down in two gulps, hissing at the fumes. He held the cup out for a refill, which Weinstock provided.

“There’s more of it,” Weinstock said softly.

“The hell there is!” growled LaMastra. “The bloody hell there is!”

“It shows them coming back. It’s on the next tape. It shows them coming back.” He wiped his mouth with a shaky hand. “It shows them all…bloated. Shows them going back into the cold room.”

“Go fuck yourself!” snarled LaMastra jabbing a finger at Weinstock.

“I’m sorry,” said Weinstock.

LaMastra looked up at him, then he wheeled on Crow and Val and they saw tears in the young man’s eyes. “Why’d you have to do this?” he demanded with as much desperation as ferocity.

There was nothing to say to that, so Weinstock gestured with the bottle. Both detectives held out their cups for more. Weinstock filled the cups and set the bottle down on the edge of the desk. He slumped down on the edge of the desk next to the bottle, arms folded protectively across his chest, ankles crossed, head slumped forward. “I’m sorry.”

“What you showed us…” began Ferro, stopped, tried again. “This is just…”

“I know.”

“This can’t be what it is,” said Ferro, then corrected himself. “What it looks like. That can’t be. It can’t.”

“I know.”

LaMastra wiped angrily at his eyes. “There is just no way I just saw that. You just get that out of your head, Doc.”

Weinstock nodded.

“It’s absurd,” said Ferro, trying for a trace of his air of cool command. “What we saw was some kind of prank. Highly convincing, sure, but not real. No way, not possible.”

“Okay,” said Val softly.

“Just a lot of bullshit!” agreed LaMastra.