Red Mountain (9 page)

He passed near a small tavern where a friendly crowd standing in the doorway waved at him to come inside. Charlie didn’t recognize anyone—they were all strangers, merchant sailors who told him they’d only been in Portland for a few days.

Charlie had never been in such coarse surroundings before and was stunned by the forward women and the drunks. A man who wore a silver plate for a nose laughed when he observed the shock on Charlie’s face. When Charlie glared back, the man apologized and asked him if he could makes amends with a bit of rum. His name was Captain Greeley, and he claimed to have sailed the world nine times over.

Several rums later, Charlie found his surroundings had much improved. He and Captain Greeley were later joined by some of Greeley’s crew. Stories were traded and songs were sung at the tops of their lungs. Throughout the night, Captain Greeley continued to take Charlie’s cup and refill it with more rum. Charlie made many attempts to leave, but his new friends kept stopping him at the door and begging him to stay a little longer.

By the time he drained his final cup, Charlie was overcome with an intense dizziness. Since he’d never been drunk before, he had no clue that he’d also been drugged. After his head struck the table and he was out cold, two giggling crewmen picked Charlie up and followed Captain Greeley through a door behind the bar. Showing the way by lantern, Greeley took them down a staircase to a dank tunnel where they passed below several city blocks. If Charlie had been conscious he would have seen the cages of female sex slaves and Chinese opium dens. The tunnel finally ended at the docks where ships floated gently on the black Willamette, decks busy with the movement of shadows.

Charlie had been shanghaied.

For the next fourteen years he vanished without a trace. Some believed he’d been murdered, or run away to the woods to work in a lumber camp. Overcome with grief, his father died within months after his son’s disappearance. The children were sent to an orphanage. Six years later, most of Charlie’s siblings were buried side by side after a deadly flu outbreak swept through the city. Captain Greeley returned from a long trip at sea and purchased a house in Portland at a bargain.

****

On a foggy winter day a merchant ship brought Charlie back to Portland. The house where he’d once lived was no longer standing, having at one time burned to the ground. After making several inquires, he was able to locate his sister Iris—the only sibling still alive who’d married and stayed in the city. She barely remembered him. His face was so deeply tanned and thin, and his eyes frequently stared at empty corners of the room or spaces beneath trees. Then inexplicably, he’d slowly nod his head and smile before turning back to meet your gaze. Iris took her brother’s odd behavior as a sign of sheer exhaustion and being too long at sea. She saw that he rested in her guestroom for the next few days before taking him to the local cemetery to place flowers on the family graves.

Over the next few weeks, Iris failed to see any improvement in her brother’s behavior. His condition seemed to be getting worse. She heard him shouting in his sleep at nights, and once while she stood outside his door she listened to him having conversations with invisible persons. When she glimpsed Charlie’s face without his knowledge, she saw the great effort it must have taken him to conceal his darker emotions from her. His tragic life had shattered his poor soul to pieces, she thought. How else could she make sense of his refusal to go to church service with her? Did he really mean it when he told her he had no use for God?

She needed to get him to talk, to confess to her what he was experiencing. Her husband was beginning to feel uncomfortable in his company, and her children thought their uncle frightening.

When they went alone on a carriage ride to the countryside, Iris asked Charlie about what had happened to him all those years. At first Charlie merely repeated his story of being shanghaied, of seeing foreign lands from his captor’s deck. Yet something in his eyes told Iris there was much more he was leaving out. She begged him to tell her the whole truth, to allow her to bear witness for him. When Charlie saw her tears he too began to cry. He’d gripped both her hands in his and gradually began to speak…

What he told Iris made her blood run cold, and after he was finished she ordered him to pack his things and leave her home at once. He put up no argument and did as she asked. She never saw her brother again.

It was shortly after Charlie left his sister’s home, however, that Portland was besieged by a series of grisly murders. Captain Greeley and several of his crew were found slaughtered in their homes, in a manner reserved only for those who engaged in the practice of drugging men and turning them into slaves once they awoke at sea. The victims had all been hung from the ceiling by their ankles. The killer had intentionally slit the tops of their heads so they would slowly bleed to death while thinking about what they had done.

One of the crewmen, however, had escaped the fate of his captain and the others. He’d also seen Charlie’s face. When the police raided the small room Charlie had been renting from an old widow, the mysterious lodger was nowhere to be found.

According to Iris’s interview with the chief of police a week after the murders, her brother had confessed to her that he’d made a pact with an evil spirit. He’d told her in great detail how he’d barely escaped from Greeley and lived on a remote island somewhere off the coast of Africa among the natives. At first the natives had tried to kill him. In fact they’d left him for dead. Yet somehow Charlie managed to survive the deep spear wound to his back after spending weeks hiding in the jungle undetected, going to the sea late at night and soaking the infected wound, snaring small animals and stealing from the long boats left out on the beach.

The next time he approached the tribe, Charlie first rubbed his body down with white ashes. The tribe believed he’d come back from the dead, and it was his new ghost status that allowed him to live freely among them without fear. Later, he befriended the tribe’s witchdoctor and sometimes dentist, where he learned a style of black magic, including the ability to conjure. He’d admitted to Iris he was protected by two of the creatures he’d helped bring to life, that they were always close by in case he needed them.

For a year and a half following the brutal murders of Greeley and his crew, Maynard moved up and down the country holding up banks. Bank employees, like many folks, found themselves easily taken in by Charlie’s immense charm. It was only after he’d departed that his befuddled victims realized they’d been robbed. Some claimed to have heard unusual sounds or saw figures that were little more than wisps of smoke. The police surmised that Charlie had the ability to mesmerize.

Those who’d tried to collect on a bounty for Charlie’s head were never so lucky. Even those who dared to get in his way found themselves on a short cut to an early grave. In all, eleven murders were attributed to Maynard’s crime spree, which ended a month after his holdup in Wrath Butte.

Pursued by determined lawmen since a robbery in Idaho, Maynard headed for the mountains of the Oregon Cascades, where he hoped to hide until the posse grew tired of searching for him. At first his strategy failed to test their confidence, until he slipped through their defenses and killed two lawmen while they slept next to their campfire. Having heard their horrible screams, those who’d been in charge of keeping watch ran back to find nothing but their colleague’s smoldering bones. A week later, Sheriff Longhorn’s deputies were found brutally slain. Stripped naked, their flesh had been punctured with horrific wounds. Some speculated the weapon must have been fashioned from elk horn.

Instead of being persuaded to turn away, a band of hardened lawmen continued their hunt for Maynard…

CHAPTER 15

Robert leaned forward and vomited on the street. He pressed his palms against the side of his truck and waited for the nausea to subside. Neighborhood dogs barked at his presence, reminding him he should keep moving before someone came to a window.

He got inside and released the brake, allowing himself to coast down hill with no engine or headlights for the next block. There were no flashlight beams darting from behind, nor any signs of police. His clothes were soaked to the bone, and he shivered until he started the truck and turned the heater on high.

Regardless of how it happened, he was still responsible for killing someone. A family man just like he was. Robert blamed himself for being unable to gain Nolan’s trust. If he’d been able to get him to cooperate he might still be alive.

It should have worked. The police had been called as Robert predicted. If Nolan had only done what he’d asked him to, then maybe…

Maybe you just got him killed.

No, Robert told himself. You did what you could, what you thought would work to save everyone. And even if he’d made the wrong decision, Nolan had been brave. He’d chosen to do what he thought was right…

He drove the backstreets home and took a hot shower. His skin was raw and stung when he rubbed soap into it. After he toweled off, he swallowed two painkillers and lay in bed. The sheets smelled like his wife, and he turned his head and kissed her pillow before his body shut itself off.

****

As he drifted off to sleep, Robert’s thoughts gathered at his grandfather’s cabin in the mountains. It was summer time, and after visiting for a month and a half he desperately missed his friends back home. He’d re-explored every nook and cranny in the surrounding forest, caught so many rainbow trout that he was growing bored with fishing.

If his arthritis wasn’t acting up too badly, Robert’s grandfather would pack sandwiches and they’d go for long hikes in the woods. On especially clear days they’d take the trail up to the timberline where they could touch the snowy slopes of Mt. Hood. Robert loved the higher altitude and the view of the giant glacier it opened onto. It made him giddy and caused his scalp to tingle. His grandfather was just the opposite. The old man would become quiet and reflective, and when he spoke it was to tell Robert strange things.

“What is it grandpa?” Robert always asked, and grandpa would lift a crooked finger and point toward the glacier.

“It’s a stunning thing to behold. But there’s something wicked inside that ice.”

Robert would squint up where his grandfather’s unblinking eyes seemed to remain fixed. Fissures in the ice closest to them gradually became larger as you moved your focus up between the spines of the mountain. To Robert, the crevasses looked like grinning jawbones, but what affected him most was the eerie blue light seeping from between their jagged teeth. The light had always beckoned him to come closer, and Robert would have gone to it if his grandfather had allowed him.

“I’ve never seen anything bad grandpa. You always say that when we come up here.”

“It’s not something you can see, boy. You feel it in your gut. And sometimes when a cold gust comes down from the glacier you can hear voices being carried with it.”

Robert shook his head and smiled. Today it’s the glacier story, yesterday the power of tree hugging. He was feeling too old for this silliness now. He needed to be around his friends back home, shooting hoop or hanging out at the public pool. Grandpa’s spooky discussions no longer had an affect on him, yet grandpa hadn’t seemed to notice.

“Whatever you say, Grandpa...”

A long silence followed between them, until Robert wondered if he’d offended him. Grandpa put a wrinkled hand on Robert’s shoulder while his gaze stayed on the mountain.

“You don’t have to believe me, Bobby. But some day you may.”

Right, Robert thought. I’m sure
that
will happen. But it was only a few days later when Robert found out his grandpa wasn’t always making things up…

****

He hiked alone on Old Burn trail, passing several acres of blackened dead trees. Something about the place always set his teeth on edge. Perhaps it was the contorted shapes of the snags and the bitter scent of old charcoal. Or the feeling someone was watching him. His mother would blame it on an overactive imagination.

The trail led to a remote lake deep into the mountains. Because he loved the solitude, Robert was willing to put up with the discomforts of getting there. Plump trout leaped high for the flies his grandpa had taught him how to tie. He often forgot what time it was.

Returning one evening with his largest catch to date, Robert decided to take an old logging road back to his grandfather’s cabin. He’d forgotten his flashlight and knew it would be easier to see his way in the moonlight than trying to take the usual deer-trail shortcuts through dense undergrowth. He nerves were jangled, for he’d been certain a pair of yellow eyes were following him through the woods. He’d stopped many times and listened, yet hadn’t heard anything definitive. Whoever was stalking him knew how to walk quietly. He wondered if it was a bear.

As he made his way up the path to the cabin he noticed a pair of yellow eyes waiting for him. The owner of the eyes wasn’t a bear, but the tall flickering shape of a man. Except this wasn’t a living man made of flesh and bone. It was a ghost.