Alice Henderson - Voracious

“Only one friend stuck around. Ellie.” She looked down at her lap, the pain still unendurable. “But even that changed when I was fourteen.” She couldn’t bring herself to finish. She’d barely even talked about this with George, the only person she confided in back home. Putting it into words was just too difficult.

“What happened when you were fourteen?” Noah asked at last.

She looked off toward the window, reluctant to answer his question. “A couple years before that, there was a rash of killings in Montana. All the victims were men in their thirties and forties, who were killed while in the outdoors, generally while hunting or fishing. The victims were… flayed. Flayed alive, the police realized after autopsies had been performed. And all the murders happened on the night before a new moon.”

“Hey… I remember this!” Noah said suddenly. “There was a media frenzy! The press dubbed the murderer the Sickle Moon Killer. Didn’t he also-”

Madeline nodded; her hands gone clammy. “Yes. He would eat skin from his victims, then regurgitate it. It was a ritual to separate himself from his abusive father. He killed men similar to his father, then ate them, making the men ‘blood of his blood,’ as he described later in an interview. Then he threw them up to forever divorce himself from those men, in essence rejecting his father on a deeply emotional and biological level.

“The police had no leads. They staked out some likely places, recreation areas, popular fishing sites, things like that, but they never caught anyone. Then suddenly the killings stopped. Police thought something may have happened to the killer, that he himself was killed or put in jail on some other charge. Two years went by.

“But neither was the case. The killer was just reestablishing himself in a new town. A man named Sam MacCready moved in down the street from us, and everyone thought he was pretty nice and quiet, but he gave me the creeps.

“Ellie and I used to go out to this spot near an old dam and hang out and talk. It was one of the few places we could get privacy in that town. We’d go for long hikes and talk about everything under the sun. Our parents. Boys. We both shared a passion for wildlife watching and nature.” Madeline paused, the memory of her friend alive. “She never judged me or was reluctant around me. Never treated me like a pariah. She even defended me at times.”

She stopped talking, wanting to linger in that warm area of good memories, of her stalwart companion. She didn’t want to finish. Finishing meant killing Ellie all over again.

“And what happened?”

Madeline bit her lip. “On one of these hikes, Ellie dropped her bracelet. Her grandmother had left it to her, and Ellie was really attached to it. We backtracked, doing a bit of bushwacking. We’d been eating some huckleberries along the way and had stepped off the trail a number of times. She got ahead of me, went out of sight, hurrying because we didn’t have much time before dark.” Her voice trailed off.

As Madeline told the story, her mind left the room and the little cabin in Glacier National Park. It moved, tentatively at first, back to that day by the river. Then it rushed, tumbling, crashing back to those memories still so fresh. She felt the weight of the grief, the sheer, shocking power of those images, and soon was no longer in the cabin with Noah at all.

She was back at the North Cascade River, in those last few minutes with Ellie.

Madeline was sure Ellie had lost her bracelet while picking berries. She stopped at a huckleberry bush they’d spent a lot of time at while Ellie moved farther up the trail to look near a thimbleberry bush. As Madeline bent over, searching the ground, a gleam of metal caught her eye. It flashed in the sunlight, some four feet from the path. Madeline walked to it, sure it was the bracelet. But instead she found a knife, recently dropped. The blade was clean, no dirt or sign of lengthy exposure to the elements. She stooped and picked it up, and images rushed into her.

Sam MacCready torturing a man, making slices in his skin and peeling it off like sheets.

The victim screaming as MacCready bent forward for more flesh.

The victim lifeless, cast to one side, wet muscles gleaming in the sunlight, the skin completely gone.

MacCready picking up a handful of skin and pushing it into his mouth, stifling the gag reflex and swallowing, the sweet sensation of the act momentarily overpowering the anguish of his life.

Then vomiting up the skin, MacCready thinking of his father and his cruel eyes, the sting of the old man’s hand across his cheek, the pain of his father’s fingers digging into his skin as he hurled insults at his little boy.

Euphoria sweeping through him as he looked at the pieces of regurgitated flesh, a ritual to purge himself from his overbearing father and save other sons from their own oppressors.

Madeline threw the knife aside as she fell forward, landing hard on her knees in the dirt. She tried to separate her own mind from MacCready’s, but for a long and horrible moment they were one. She forced her eyes to close and tried to dispel the images. But they were too strong, as if she’d been there with him, reveling in his crimes, eating the flesh of his victims.

She stood up, the forest swimming back into view. And before her stood MacCready, his face contorted in fear. He held Ellie in front of him, a knife to her throat. Tears streamed down her face.

MacCready looked down at the knife Madeline had thrown aside, then back up to her face. “You’re that girl from town,” he said, and Madeline felt the weight of his statement hit her like a punch. “What did you see?’

She shook her head. Ellie started shaking uncontrollably. Madeline noticed then that Ellie had blood on her hands, knees, part of her shirt. MacCready was covered with it.

She tried to formulate a plan, some kind of escape, but her mind was numb. She didn’t know how she could wrestle the knife away from him, but there was no way in hell she was going to let him take Ellie. In a rush of anger, she ran straight at him. He jumped back in surprise, and Ellie twisted free.

They ran, crashing through the underbrush with MacCready close behind. In a few moments they hit the river trail, taking off at full speed with Ellie in the lead. Madeline could hear her friend’s ragged breath, their footsteps muffled by the blanket of fallen pine needles.

As they rounded a large boulder, a flash of movement streaked down from above. MacCready landed violently on top of Ellie, and she went down hard. Madeline barely stopped short of colliding with them. She darted around MacCready, who struggled to regain his balance. Madeline had almost reached her friend’s side when she realized Ellie wasn’t moving. She lay on the riverbank, her head against a rock and a stream of blood trickling onto the sand. MacCready leapt toward Madeline, and she dodged out of the way. As he turned, he clumsily bumped Ellie’s side, rolling her into the river.

As the current took Ellie’s body, Madeline ran downstream and dove in, muscles instantly robbed of warmth. MacCready followed, hitting the water at the same time she did. Coarse hands grabbed her in the icy water and shoved her head under. The roar of the river grew louder as they tumbled through a rapid, Madeline’s shoulder hitting a submerged boulder. The jarring bump tore her out of MacCready’s grip. She gasped for air and kept swimming, searching for Ellie.

Struggling to keep her head above water, she didn’t see Ellie at all. Instead, the cement of the old dam loomed up before her, a barricade across the river. Rocketing fast toward the wall, she put her feet out first and collided with the cement, doubling over and hitting her head on the dam. Gripping the stone with fingers gone numb, she pulled herself out, fighting the rush of the water. Ellie was still nowhere in sight, and Madeline hoped desperately she’d climbed out farther upriver. She stood there for a few tense moments, not sure if she should run back to town for help or keep watching for her in the water.