The Mad and the MacAbre (24 page)

Gabriel affixed his stare to the point where
the cat had disappeared, passed the spring, and began to scale the
cliff. He should have seen Oscar emerge from the other side of the
rock. Maybe the cat was still hiding behind it, but he had been
moving so fast it would have been nearly impossible to stop so
suddenly, even for a clawed feline. Gabriel clambered over a
granite pinnacle and had to drop to all fours to maintain his
balance on the slick stone. Behind and below him, he heard the
others calling to him. Cavenaugh had found the spatter patterns and
cursed him for allowing the cat to disturb them while Jess
cautioned him to be careful. He made no reply as he crawled toward
the jagged slate fin.

Oscar wasn’t crouching behind it, nor were
there any footprints leading away on the snow-dusted ice.

There was only a deep black crevice under
the slanted rock that led down into the ground.

Gabriel leaned closer, expecting to see the
cat wedged down in there, staring back at him with terrified green
eyes, but there was only darkness and a faint, warm breeze that
smelled simultaneously of dust and mildew, salt and biological
decay.

He reached down into the hole with his right
arm until it was all the way inside and his shoulder was lodged in
the opening.

And still couldn’t feel the bottom.

***

They had uprooted a six-foot aspen sapling,
stripped the branches to the three-inch trunk, and now Cavenaugh
knelt above the hole, prodding the darkness below. He had forced
the tree all the way into the ground and had encountered no
resistance. Gripping it in one hand, he added the length of his arm
and thrust. He grunted and swept the trunk from side to side, but
only succeeded in losing his grip. After a moment they heard the
hollow clatter of wood striking the ground.

Cavenaugh leaned back and stared down the
slope toward the spring with a look of confusion.

“
That hole has to be at
least fifteen feet deep,” he said. “And did you hear the sound it
made? There has to be some sort of cavern directly under
us.”

He gnawed his chapped lower lip, then
brushed away a patch of snow until he found a rock about the size
of his fist, and dropped it down into the crevice. It pinged off
one of the slanted sides before ricocheting from the stone surface
below. He grabbed another rock and did the same thing again, only
this time, after striking the cavern floor, it hit something that
sounded like metal.

Cavenaugh looked at the others where they
huddled for warmth. The expression on his face had metamorphosed
into excitement.

“
There’s something in
there,” he finally said. “And if someone could find a way to get a
sizeable metal object in there, then we can get in there
too.”

“
We shouldn’t do anything
until the police are able to get here,” Jess said. “The signal cut
out, but I’m sure he said they could be here in under twenty-four
hours.”

“
What if Maura and Will are
hurt? What if they need our help? Are you suggesting we should
allow them to bleed to death while we wait?”

“
There was so much blood—”
Gabriel started.

“
All the more reason to
find them now. We can’t sit on our thumbs if there’s a chance we
can help them.”

“
They could be dead
already.”

“
Then whoever killed them
probably already knows we’re here. How long until they come after
us?”

The words chilled Gabriel on a level even
the storm couldn’t. Until Cavenaugh had vocalized them, the concept
had been an abstraction. He suddenly realized that someone could be
watching them that very second, hiding in the branches of a tree,
crouching behind a boulder, or simply standing there at the very
edge of sight, cloaked in the blizzard. Jess was right. They needed
to get the hell off that mountain, but would they be any more
difficult to overcome on the steep descent through the dense forest
and deep valleys? But at the same time, what if the others were
lying somewhere in desperate need of help? And the most horrifying
thought of all…

“
The rifle,” he said.
“Where’s Will’s rifle?”

“
Jesus,” Kelsey
whispered.

They were all exposed on the face of the
peak and the range of the rifle exceeded the extent of their
visibility through the storm.

Jess clicked on the emergency transceiver
again, but there was still no hope of finding a functional
channel.

With the click of a disengaging safety,
Cavenaugh was on his feet, rifle at the ready.

“
We need to seek cover,” he
said. “Now.”

***

They stood in the cul-de-sac on the south
end of the spring with the steep, bloodstained granite wall at
their backs. The steam was a living cloud that seemed to move with
their eyes, alternately concealing and revealing the snow-blanketed
trees and the shadows wrapped around their trunks. They were
sitting ducks.

“
We should head back to the
cabins,” Jess said. “Even if we can’t reach the highway in our
cars, at least we’d be inside where we can defend
ourselves.”

“
We’d still be alone on the
mountain,” Kelsey said. “If someone wanted to hurt us badly enough,
they’d find a way.”

“
You’re assuming we could
even make it back to the cabins in this snow,” Gabriel
said.

“
What do you suggest then?”
Jess asked. She was barely holding the panic at bay. “Should we
just stay here and wait for whoever got to Maura and Will to come
back for us?”

“
Whoever did it is
undoubtedly still here,” Cavenaugh said. He’d given his rifle to
Kelsey, and was now crawling on the ground, sweeping the snow off
the layer of ice. “I’d lay odds they knew exactly where we were
staying and have been watching us the entire time. Probably the
same thing that happened two years ago. They just waited until we
split up and followed Will and Maura.”

“
Will’s an experienced
hunter,” Kelsey said. “He wasn’t the weakest link.” He looked
pointedly at Gabriel and Jess.

“
You keep saying ‘they.’ Do
you really think there’s more than one of them?” Jess
asked.

“
I don’t see one person
being able to overcome Will and Maura at the same time. Even Will
by himself,” Cavenaugh said. He crawled closer to the edge of the
water, still clearing away the accumulation. He paused and chiseled
at the ice with his fingertips, then smoothed his palm across the
surface. “I’ll bet they have us flanked right now.”

“
Why do you think that?
They could easily be miles away by now. For all we know they could
have had a truck waiting down on the road and they could be
anywhere.”

“
These are the same people
who killed our sisters, Jess. And probably Maura and Will as well.
That’s nine people. Just that we know of. Why do you think they
would run? They obviously have no qualms about killing, and they
know these woods a hell of a lot better than any of us. Right now,
they’re just playing with us, hunting us. They want us scared, and
they want us to make the first move, to begin the chase. That’s the
sport of it. And these aren’t the kind of people who are hoping to
get a clean shot at three hundred yards. If that blood belongs to
Maura and Will for sure, then these are men who thrill in working
up close and personal. They enjoy the ritual of the kill, the feel
of blood on their hands.”

“
Or maybe they just feared
we’d hear the report of a rifle,” Kelsey said.

“
Possible, but I don’t
think so. Those spatters indicate a startling level of savagery. No
hesitation. No remorse. They’ve killed that way before.”

“
So you’re saying we’re
screwed regardless,” Gabriel said.

Cavenaugh looked up at him and flashed a
crooked grin.

“
That’s not what I’m saying
at all.”

***

“
Look here,” Cavenaugh
said. He swiped away the wet snowfall that had accumulated on the
ground in front of him in the last few minutes since he’d cleared
it last. “The ice is uneven in spots. See? Some sections are
elevated as though more water had been added on top of the frozen
parts. Everywhere else, the ice is smooth and even. Why then should
these sections be raised more than the rest?”

He looked up at them expectantly and waited
for them to make the connection he apparently already had.

“
We don’t have time to mess
around,” Kelsey said. “They could be coming for us—”

“
Bear with me,” Cavenaugh
interrupted. “And if you look over here…”

He scooted closer to the edge of the water
and brushed away more snow.

“
Blood,” Gabriel said. It
was barely discernible from the dark color of the rock under the
frozen sheet, yet the way the droplets and smears were arranged, it
was unmistakable.

“
Right. Now if you run your
palm across it, you can feel how it’s elevated from the ice. Just a
little bit. What happened is that since the blood was still warm,
it began to melt into the ice before transferring all of its heat,
creating a kind of dimple for the fluid to rest in, a miniature cup
to hold the blood. Once it cooled enough it couldn’t continue to
melt through the ice, it started to freeze. And now that it’s
frozen solid, there’s an uneven bump over the rest of the ice
around it. You can tell this happened a while ago based on the
amount of ice that has since frozen over the top of it. That’s why
you can hardly see it now, but it still leaves a palpable
lump.”

“
We already know someone
bled here,” Kelsey said. His eyes narrowed with impatience. “The
evidence is spattered all over those rocks. We’re wasting valuable
time. Time we don’t have.”

“
You’re missing the point.”
Cavenaugh was growing frustrated as well. “All that blood over
there. The smaller spatters here by the spring. They were killed
over there.” It was the first time one of them had phrased it as
such. The impact served to silence whatever objections Kelsey had
opened his mouth to make. “And they were carried, not dragged, over
here to the edge of the spring, where they were thrown into the
water.”

“
That doesn’t change
anything,” Jess whispered.

“
Of course it does,”
Cavenaugh said. “Where are their bodies? Corpses tend to float,
especially in a saline body like this. That’s why you always hear
about murderers weighting down their victims with stones and
concrete blocks.”

“
So that’s what they must
have done,” Kelsey said. “The water’s deep enough that we couldn’t
reach the bottom, and with as cloudy and bacteria-riddled as it is,
we can’t see very far down into it at all. For all we know, there
could be a whole pile of bodies on the bottom.”

“
It’s possible, however
unlikely. Something would end up floating to the surface,
especially considering the constant influx of water from the
underground source of the spring. These things have to exchange
hundreds of gallons of water a day to keep up with evaporation from
the heat. No, I don’t think their corpses are in the spring at
all.”

“
But you just said that
whoever attacked them threw their bodies into the spring,” Gabriel
said.

“
Exactly.”

There was that strange smile of excitement
again. Coupled with the way he contradicted himself with every
word, Gabriel suspected Cavenaugh teetered on the brink of a
breakdown.

“
You aren’t making sense,”
Kelsey snapped.

“
You’re missing the
obvious,” Cavenaugh said. That smile was starting to grate on
Gabriel’s frayed nerves. “Look back here, where we started. I
showed you how the blood made the ice so that the surface wasn’t
level. What do you think caused this?”

He gestured to several oblong stretches
where the ice was thicker, almost like melted candle wax. There
were dots where drops had fallen and other long lines of spatter,
but in the center of each was a distinct shape that appeared the
same to a large degree with each repeat occurrence.

“
Don’t you see?” Cavenaugh
asked. His smile faltered and he appeared exasperated. He turned to
each of them in turn before finally shaking his head.
“Watch.”

He raised his right foot and stepped down on
the raised section of ice, then did the same with his left on the
next instance. Then his right again on the third.

“
Jesus,” Jess gasped.
“They’re footprints.”

***

“
So whoever dumped the
bodies in the spring got in there with them, weighted them down,
and then climbed back out,” Kelsey said. “That can only serve to
help us. There’s no way they’re walking around out here with wet
legs. They’d have frostbite long before they were able to either
change out of their clothes or find shelter.”

“
You’re right about that,”
Cavenaugh said, “but you’re working under a faulty assumption. Look
at the prints again. They’re narrowest here, on the end closest to
the water, and wider on the leading edge. They were made by someone
coming out of the water just like you said, but I believe they were
made before the bloodstains.”

“
What’s the difference? It
doesn’t change the fact that we need to get off this mountain right
now.”

“
How do you think it’s
possible that someone snuck up on Maura and Will without either of
them noticing? You made the point yourself about Will being an
experienced hunter. Once they found those bones, he would have been
acutely alert and watching the forest like his life depended upon
it. And we would have heard the report if he’d managed to fire the
rifle,” Cavenaugh said. He unzipped his jacket and shed the
hood.