The Narrows (9 page)

Ben nodded. “I do.”

“What
is
that?”

Without responding, Ben Journell walked to the top of the hill then swiped the beam of his flashlight back and forth across Porter’s east field. Whitish lumps appeared in the searchlight’s beam, humping out of the grass like great mounds of sand. Ben counted eight of them before Porter and Eddie joined him at the top of the hill, their combined respiration forming clouds of vapor in the frigid air.

“There they are,” Porter said, disgust evident in his voice.

“How many in all?”

“Christ,” said Porter. “All of ’em.”

“I mean, how many is that?”

“Thirteen.”

Scanning the field again, Ben quickly recounted. “Where are the others?”

“In the barn.”

Ben frowned. “Whatever did this got into the barn, too?”

“Yeah, Ben,” Porter said. “Bold little cuss, whatever it was.”

Ben went over to the first whitish heap rising out of the field, Eddie and Porter following close at his heels. The whitish heap was one of Porter Conroy’s Holsteins, keeled over dead on its side. Its mottled white hide looked incongruous lying in the black, wet grass. Ben’s flashlight illuminated the massive piebald flank first. He was surprised to find no wounds along the cow’s body that would have been common in an animal attack. A muddy, congealed jelly that at first looked like it could be blood coated the Holstein’s rear, but on closer inspection—and getting a whiff of the stuff—Ben realized it was feces. He traced the flashlight’s beam along the flank to the neck and saw that the white hair of its throat was fully exposed. Thin red crescents, like a series of curved puncture wounds, scaled the length of its throat, the depth and severity of which could not have been fatal.

Finally shining the light onto the cow’s head, Ben saw that it had been twisted in such a fashion that allowed him to see the open mouth ringed in foam, the snot-webbed portals of its cavernous nostrils, and one glazed, soupy, tar-colored eye rolled back in its socket. A pencil-thin rivulet of dark blood snaked out of one ear.

Ben frowned and said, “I don’t see any type of wound that could be—”

“Back of the head,” Porter interrupted.

Ben and the others stepped around to the other side of the cow, Ben’s flashlight beam now training on the top of the cow’s head.

Eddie pulled a face. “Jesus, Ben, the goddamn thing’s skull has been busted open. What the hell does something like that to a cow?”

Ben squatted and took a closer look at the wound. The top of the cow’s skull had been smashed open like a gourd, the concave bowl of its cranium glistening with black blood punctuated by tiny pinkish-white fragments of tissue and brain matter. The stench was beyond brutal.

“Its goddamn brain is gone,” Ben muttered.

“A wolf, maybe?” Eddie suggested, kneeling down beside Ben. Behind them, Porter Conroy stood like a scarecrow waiting to be scooped up and carried away by the next strong gust of wind.

“Coyote, is what I think,” Porter opined.

“Wolves and coyotes don’t do this,” Ben said.

“Been rumors of a mountain lion over in the next county, Ben,” Eddie added.

Ben brought the flashlight closer to the gaping wound, the shadows shifting within the bloody chasm. He held the beam tightly on the bones of the skull that poked up like serrated teeth through the torn flesh, whitish-yellow and marbled with grayish striations. Spongy, brownish marrow was visible around the circumference. The flesh at the edge of the wound looked like it had been burned away, not torn. There were parts along the side of the cow’s head where hair had been completely shorn away.

Without taking his eyes from the wound, Ben pointed beyond Eddie to where a large branch lay in the wet grass. “Hand me that, will you, Eddie?”

“Uh…” The officer snatched up the stick and handed it over to Ben. At this proximity, Ben could hear one of Eddie’s nostrils whistling.

With the branch, Ben gently prodded a clump of greenish sludge that clung to the serrated edge of the skull.

“What the hell,” Porter said somewhere above Ben’s head.

Ben pushed harder. The sludge quivered and appeared to be as malleable as taffy. For one instant, Ben thought of marshmallows roasting over a bonfire, melting and dripping into the flames.

“What
is
that?” Eddie asked.

Ben withdrew the stick and tossed it into the grass. “I don’t know,” he said. It looked like moss clinging to the bone. There was a webbing of the stuff caught in the cow’s eyelashes too, Ben noted. “What are you feeding these things, Porter?”

“London broil. The hell you think I’m feeding them?”

Shaking his head, Eddie said, “What kind of animal does something like that?”

“I have no idea,” Ben said.

“I know what it is,” Porter barked, shattering the quiet. Apparently something had just dawned on him.

Both Ben and Eddie turned their heads toward the older man.

“Ted Minsky,” said Porter.

“Ted Minsky did this,” Ben said. He jerked his chin due north, in the direction of the Minsky farm. “That’s what you’re saying?”

“The son of a bitch has been skinning deer and leaving them dangling from his porch. Damn things attract buzzards and then the buzzards shit all over the place and tear the hell out of the bedding in my barn.” He jabbed a knotted finger at the dead milk cow. “Buzzards did this.”

“Buzzards don’t go after living animals,” Ben told him.

“Don’t tell me.” Porter was obstinate. “I’ve seen those filthy birds all over the goddamn property. They got claws like industrial machinery.”

Ignoring Porter, Eddie looked back at Ben and shrugged his shoulders. “What about a bear?”
 

Deep in thought, Ben didn’t answer. It wasn’t unusual for black bears to come down from the mountains and make their way into the surrounding towns. He had seen them loitering around trash cans and at the cusp of Wills Creek on more than just a few occasions. When he was a boy, he’d had friends who’d crossed their paths—unharmed, thankfully—while hiking through the woods no more than a mile or so away from civilization. However, he had never heard of a bear attacking a field of livestock before. And such a precise wound as this? To crack open the back of the skull and presumably eat the contents? Ben couldn’t think of any indigenous animal capable of doing such a thing.

Ben stood up. In the beam of his flashlight he could make out all the other slumped forms dead in the field. They appeared to glow beneath the light of the moon. “They all look the same?” he asked Porter.

“What do you mean?”

“The other cows. Their bodies all look like this one?”

“More or less,” said Porter. “Except maybe for the ones in the barn.”

Ben asked about the ones in the barn.

“Their heads,” said Porter. “Goddamn buzzards tore their heads clean off.”

3

With Ben’s assistance, Porter pulled open the large double doors of the barn, the squealing hinges like the shrieks of pterodactyls. From within—and almost instantaneously—a pungent, almost medicinal odor accosted them. Eddie said, “Ah, phew,” then pulled a face and waved his hand back and forth in front of his nose.

That’s not the smell of cow shit,
Ben thought, following his flashlight’s beam into the barn.

The barn was spacious and wide, with a ceiling that yawned to nearly three stories. The floor was scattered with hay and there were great bales of the stuff stacked like oversized building blocks beneath a roost. In the beam of his flashlight, Ben made out farming tools hanging from pegs driven into support beams and tools hanging from a pegboard against one wall. The smell of the place caused his eyes to water.

Porter took down a kerosene lamp from a nail that protruded from the doorframe and lit it. Soft, orange light pulsed ahead of them, making the shadows dance. “Storm knocked out the power to the barn,” Porter said, addressing the electrical outlets gridded about the high beams in the ceiling with a crooked, arthritic finger.

“Where are the cows?” Ben asked.

“I’ll show you.” Porter cut around Ben and headed for the shadows deep in the belly of the barn. The lantern’s light cast a halo around his stooped old frame. Ben and Eddie followed, stopping only when they arrived at a wall of three segregated stalls. Each Dutch door stood ajar. There was more straw here as well, heaped in mounds and scattered with what Ben assessed to be oats and grain. And something else, too. Spotlighting a specific mound of hay, he bent down and immediately recognized the third substance as blood.

Ben looked up and peered into the first stall. Inside lay the patchwork hull of another large cow. It was on its side, hooves out toward the open Dutch door, exposing a quill of tender-looking white udders for Ben’s scrutiny.

“There’s two more just like that one,” Porter said, jabbing his gnarled finger at the other two stalls where similar humped shapes rose up out of the darkness.

Just as Porter Conroy had promised, the cows’ heads looked to have been practically sheared off their bodies, leaving nothing behind, save for a pulpy tangle of tendons surrounding the jagged protrusion of a backbone jutting up through the mess like the tapered and pointy head of a spear. There were slashes of bright red blood on the wooden walls of each stall and in the hay surrounding the stalls.

“Where are the heads?” Ben asked after he’d examined each carcass.

“Beats me,” Porter said.

Ben rubbed his upper lip while Eddie, still peering down at the massacre in one of the stalls, kept muttering over and over to himself, “Sweet Mary.”

Ben jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the barn’s double doors. “You typically keep those locked?”

“No, sir. I don’t.” There was an undeniable pride in the old man’s voice. Like many of the old farmers out in this part of the country, Porter Conroy was adamant about not changing his ways. The only way someone like Porter would put a lock on his barn doors was when cows figured out how to work doorhandles.

“Mr. Conroy, have you had any…disagreements…with anyone lately?” Humorlessly, he added, “Aside from Ted Minsky, I mean.”

“Disagreements?” Porter said, as if he did not understand the word. The old man’s eyes reflected the dancing flame contained in the glass housing of the lantern, which he’d set on the half wall of the nearest stall.

“Arguments,” Ben clarified. “Fights. Anything like that.”

Porter laughed. “What kind of fights you fellas think I’m getting into at my age?”

Eddie was looking at Ben with wide eyes, his face narrow and slack and nearly translucent in the firelight.

“What are you getting at, Ben?” Porter asked evenly. “I’m not following.”

Ben had raked a set of fingers slowly up and down his chin before mumbling something about just being curious.
Animals don’t do this,
he thought.
Someone broke in here and took these cows’ heads, mutilated these poor animals.
It would have had to have been someone—or a group of someones—who possessed more than just a mean streak and had some bone to pick with Porter; it would have had to have been someone evil.

A papery, rustling sound from above caused the three of them to jump. Ben looked up. In the glow of the lantern, it looked like the underside of the hayloft, which was directly above their heads, was moving. Ben clicked his flashlight back on and directed the beam upward.

The underside of the hayloft was teeming with bats, dozens of them, dangling upside down by their tiny, clawed feet, their piggish heads bobbing and jerking while the thin membrane of their wings quivered.

“Oh, yeah,” Porter said conversationally. “Been having a bat problem lately, too.”

4

On the car ride back to the station, Eddie said, “You know what eats brains, don’t you, Ben?”

“What’s that?”

“Zombies.”

“Ah. Of course. Zombie cows.”

“You joke, but strange stuff like that happens all the time.”

“Is that right?”

“Quit humoring me. You ever hear about those exploding sheep over in Ireland?”

Ben clicked off the cruiser’s high beams as another vehicle approached him on the wooded road. “What are you talkin’ about?”

“I read this news article on the computer once, about a farmer in Ireland. A bolt of lightning hit one of his sheep while it was out grazing on a hill. The static in the wool or something caused some kind of electrical chain reaction, and the lightning zigzagged from sheep to sheep—
blam, blam, blam!
—and fried every single one of the buggers right there on the spot.”

Ben laughed. “That sounds like bullshit.”

“Next day, there were thirty, forty of the sons of bitches sizzling in the field, looking like chicken legs that had been burned to charcoal on a barbecue.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think lightning was the culprit this time.” He was thinking about the dead cows in the barn.
What instrument would someone use to take off a cow’s head like that? Those didn’t look like cuts at all. And how would someone get a goddamn cow to stay put for the amount of time it would take to do something like that?