Эд Горман - Blood Moon

I went up the ladder, glad to be climbing out of this place.

Up top, I closed everything up, carefully replacing the boards, so that no stray cat or dog would hurt herself by falling down the rabbit hole to the very perverted Wonderland lying below.

And just as I was finishing up, my flashlight lying atop a stall ledge and giving me sufficient light, I heard it again.

Even above the chill rain and the cold soughing wind — that faint cry that I could only liken to the sound of a young animal crying for help. The fog made the sound even fainter.

I took my flashlight and went back outside to see if I could locate the source of the sound.

I got drenched for my trouble, rain even filling my shoes.

Where was it? What was it?

This time, when the tattered solemn plea came again, I turned back and realized that the cry was coming from the barn. Not the main barn I’d just been in but the much smaller and older barn to the east.

I walked down there, stumbling once through the fog on the foundation of some long-gone silo. They were ideal for tripping dumb human beings who didn’t take extra care in the fog.

The closer I got, the clearer the sound was, and by now I could recognize it for what it was: a woman screaming and screaming and screaming.

I wanted to hurry but the fog made that unwise. I carefully picked my way down the sloping hill, my head starting to go numb from the steady drilling force of the rain, my sinuses getting themselves ready for a good long siege.

The barn door hung skewed badly left, thanks to the fact that its only support was a lone rusty hinge. I eased it creaking open and shone my light inside.

No stalls in this one, no rooms for storing feed, no small round milkhouses or high shadowy lofts, just a square storage box, maybe four feet deep and three feet wide, built along the back wall of the aged barn — that and the rolling ancient dust and the smell of axle grease and motor oil. A 1952 Ford fastback, the kind of car small-town high-school boys drove well into the seventies, was up on blocks. A long time ago somebody had put a lot of time and care into it. But now, in the harsh eye of my flashlight, it looked abandoned and corroded, rust taking its eternal toll, the giggles of the high-school girls seduced in the backseat long ago flown away, like beautiful butterflies on the last day of summer.

The scream came from the back of the barn, past the Ford, past a shadowy stack of firewood.

I drew my Ruger and went back there, still trying to figure out how the sound could be so muffled.

And then I thought, If one barn has a basement room, why not both barns? Didn’t Joanna Lodge say that a lot of buildings had such hiding places?

I went to the west comer of the barn, dropped to my knees and began clawing through some bricks and loose hay that looked suspiciously neat, as if somebody had carefully contrived it to look messy.

I found trapdoor and ringbolt in seconds. This door was as wide as the other but looked as if it were heavier. I took the ringbolt in my hand and tugged but it didn’t budge. By now the woman below had heard me, and her screaming was constant. She was also sobbing and blubbering and crying out, “Hurry! Please hurry!”

It took several tries before the door even budged; three more tries before I got it open.

There on my knees, I clutched my throat, touched my stomach and vomited into the scraps of hay next to me. The odor from below was that foul.

The woman continued to scream but I was afraid to lean back toward the opening and shine my light down there, afraid of what I would see. The reeking odors told me it was something beyond comprehension.

But I had no choice but to crawl back there and play my light below.

I can’t tell you how many of them there were — a hundred at the least, perhaps two hundred at the most — enough to entirely cover the floor of the small basement, some the size of small fat puppies, others barely past the infant stage when rats are blind and deaf. And over all was the mad chittering of their hunger and zeal as they swarmed over what was left of Mindy, who lay on her back on the ground. Half her face had been eaten away so that an eyeball hung on a bloody cheek, and her gnawed and bloody arms shone white with bone. Her stomach was a bloody hole excavated by dozens of hungry rats. She was still screaming, but she wouldn’t be screaming much longer. She was very near death.

I thought of the few things I knew about black rats, how they’d originally come from the deserts of southern Asia but then stowed away on the ships of the returning Crusaders, to help bring bubonic plague to Europe, which ultimately killed millions. And how rabid rats had been known to rip apart animals as big and formidable as horses.

Next to Mindy lay the remains of Betty Roberts, the reverend’s wife. Her face had been torn away, as had most of her torso, but I recognized the short, frosted hairdo. At the moment, a rat sat on her shoulder bone and picked the last of the flesh from her nose.

And as I trained my light back and forth across the floor, I saw the picked white bones of young girls, no doubt the runaways who’d done the porno movies. Done with, they’d been thrown down here as feast for the rats.

I fired two shots straight into the dozens of rats still massing around Mindy. They scattered briefly, the report ear-numbing as it echoed below, but it was too late. They had gotten the top of her head open enough to begin eating her brain.

I leaned to the side and vomited again. I would never be able to forget what I’d just seen. Never.

And then I sensed somebody standing at the back of the barn, a silhouette in the gloom, and I raised my flashlight and saw Kenny Deihl standing there in his Western getup, smiling at me.

“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” he said. “How fast they can totally rip somebody apart?”

I didn’t need to ask who he really was, the monster who was Tolliver’s son, who had sent photos of his victims to his mother and father.

“But then, you’re going to find out all about my friends for yourself, Mr. Hokanson. I’m going to put you down there with them.”

I had made the mistake of dropping my Ruger while I was vomiting.

Kenny Deihl had made no such mistake at all. He kept a Magnum trained on me all the time he talked.

He had killed them all, he told me, Mike Peary, Nora and Vic, Lodge and McNally, Mindy and Betty Roberts. They had all uncovered his secret — or he thought they had, at any rate — and so he was forced to kill them. Eve McNally he’d beaten up when she couldn’t tell him where the tape was that her husband had.

As he would now be forced to kill me. He’d tried it once already, on that first day. God, it seemed so long ago. After Mike, he’d gotten nervous about how much Nora knew, and followed her for a while.

“How about Melissa? You took her so McNally and Lodge would give you back something they were blackmailing you with, right?”

He nodded.

“Very creative, those two. They hid out here and watched the taping in the barn over there. I always told Mindy and Betty that I’d drive the girls back to Cedar Rapids and drop them off. But I never did. I brought them over here and fed them to the rats.” He smiled his improbably boyish smile. “You know the funny thing? Those’re the only animals I’ve ever liked, those rats. Hated everything else.” He shrugged and moved in closer to me. My flashlight was on the floor. He bent over, picked it up, shone the beam in my face. “So good old Lodge and good old McNally videotaped me killing one of the runaways and stuffing her down with the rats. They made me pay them $6,000 a month. I have some money I diverted from Eleanor before I left her — but I just didn’t like the principle of paying somebody blackmail money.”