Fishing in Brains for an Eye with Teeth (Thirteen Tales of Terror) (25 page)

Only as Kyle was passing Tom did he realize Tom
wasn’t
fleeing after all.  He wasn’t trying to get away.  He was trying to get to Joe’s hatchet.

Kyle skidded to a stop, looking back at Joe.  He then looked at Tom and shrieked, “
What are you DOING!
”

Only now did Kyle see the tears streaming down Tom’s face.  He was shocked.  He’d never seen his buddy cry and would have bet he’d
never
see this.

Of course, he also would have bet he’d never see any of his friend’s brains.

“He killed Drake!”  Tom blubbered, not even looking at Kyle as he reached up to grab the handle of Joe’s tomahawk.  “He killed John!  He killed Lunkhead!”

Kyle screamed, “HE’S GOING TO KILL US TOO IF WE DON’T GET OUTTA HERE!”

Instead of responding to Kyle, Tom grunted as he pulled on the tomahawk.  It didn’t budge.  The blade was completely embedded in a fat, old oak tree.

Kyle realized what Tom was trying to do.  For some reason he’d abandoned his gun, thinking he could somehow turn Joe’s own weapon against him.  Kyle didn’t know if the idea was brilliant or insane.  Too panicked to say anything else, he wailed, “Tom!”

Tom glanced at him, a wild look in his eyes as he said, “I can do this,” and then he raised a foot and pushed against the tree as he used both hands to try to pull out the tomahawk.

He grunted, then squealed, and then squealed again.  Looking at his hand with bulging eyes, he screeched at the top of his lungs, a cry of either pain or terror, Kyle couldn’t tell which.

Kyle saw the reason for Tom’s horror.  Tom had let loose of the tomahawk with his left hand and was using that hand to push against the tree, but his right hand seemed
affixed
to the black handle.  Ribbons of energy— a mixture of a blue-white electric current and green will-o-the-wisps— crackled around the tomahawk and up Tom’s arm.  Before Kyle’s horrified eyes, he saw Tom’s hand
become
the handle, melting into the wood until all his fingers were gone.

At the end of Tom Pascal’s right arm was now a black tomahawk that was still firmly embedded in a tree.  He pulled on the right appendage, grunting, and then wailed with frustration and fear. 

Tom looked frantically at Kyle and yelled, “GO!” 

Tom and Kyle made eye contact in the dark.  Thanks to dramatic beams of moonlight, they could clearly see each other’s faces.  “GET OUT OF HERE!”

“But—!”  Tom was trapped.  Kyle knew it.  He couldn’t leave him here with that evil devil.

He couldn’t leave him here to die!

“GO ON!”  Tom yanked and yanked on the tomahawk, wrenching his shoulder in the process.  Wincing, grabbing his right shoulder with his good left hand, he collapsed against the tree and cried.

Kyle looked back and saw that Joe had just reached the shore, he was barely ten yards away from them, stalking forward, still grinning, the fog now nipping at his heels.  The ghost stepped over Drake’s body, headed toward Tom, but he looked directly at Kyle.

Kyle ran.

Behind him, Tom groaned, “Noooo!”

Kyle knew he was a coward.  Even as he ran faster, out of the clearing, into the darkness of the forest, he knew he was a traitor.

Tom needed his help.

“Oh God, no!  Please, NO!”  Tom then screamed like he’d just received an electric shock.

Kyle lowered his head and ran faster, nearly clipping a tree in the dark.

“No, you can’t!  YOU CAN’T MAKE ME DO IT!”

Kyle gasped, “What’s Joe
doing
to him?”

“YOU CAN’T MAKE ME CHOP OFF MY OWN—”   There had been a lot of screaming tonight, enough to fill a lifetime’s worth of nightmares, but the screams which now echoed through Bountiful Woods were the worst yet.  Kyle didn’t know how a human throat could make that sound without breaking.

And then there was a cracking sound (a tomahawk striking wood) and the intensity of the screams doubled.

Kyle couldn’t help but wonder what body parts Tom was now missing.

Then Tom’s screams suddenly stopped, cut off with yet another hatchet crack.

Unbidden, Kyle’s harried mind conjured up the mental image of Tom being forced to use the tomahawk-at-the-end-of-his-own-right-arm to lop off his own head.  Tripped up by his own imagination, Kyle fell, going down hard.  He put out a hand to catch himself and promptly broke his wrist.  The pain was immediate, burning up all the remaining alcohol in him that wasn’t already destroyed by adrenalin.  He howled, wailed, caught his breath, and wailed some more.  He held on to his lower right arm, looking at his wrist, which was now slightly crooked.  The break was a bad one.

In agony, he looked back behind him, searching for Joe, but he saw nothing.  Motivated by his terror, he made a monumental effort to still his cries so he could listen.

As soon as he was quiet, he heard Joe approaching.

Something
big was coming, snapping twigs and breaking branches on its way.

Kyle got to his feet.  Still holding his broken right hand with his good left one, he tried to run again.  It was difficult.  He couldn’t seem to catch his breath.

He ran and he ran.  Pain and terror fogged out most of his conscious awareness.  His fleeing feet did all his thinking.

But then he came out of the thickest part of the forest.  Moonlight found him from above.  He thought he might actually make it out of Bountiful Woods alive!

He knew all he needed to do was get to the fence surrounding this accursed place.  Once he was beyond that barrier, he would be beyond Joe’s reach.

He thought he was going to make it.

And then he
knew
he was going to make it.  Kyle was going to escape.

He saw the wire fence before him.  The metal signs that said NO TRESPASSING on the other side stared blankly at him on this side.  He whimpered when he thought about climbing the fence with only one hand.  But then he nearly giggled when he thought he was actually going to live.

Relieved, knowing he’d escaped Joe, knowing he’d hear Joe if he was approaching, Kyle turned back for one final look at Bountiful Woods.

Joe loomed over him, three feet away, almost within reach.  The Indian’s eye-sockets were now empty, like black holes.  There were four different bullet holes in his face, all of them bloody.  An ear had been shot off and part of his throat was missing.  And as bad as the damage Lunkhead and Drake did to his chest, the wreckage there now was twenty times worse.       

Joe was riddled with bullet punctures.  A spray of holes cut across his thighs, so many it looked as if his legs were almost severed.  Somehow Kyle knew that low pattern of holes was drilled by a Tommy gun, sometime during the 1920s.

He was looking at every wound Joe’s apparition had ever suffered for the last one hundred and eighty years.

Joe’s moccasins were completely submerged in a puddle of blood that just kept growing.

Terror totally transcended physical pain.  As Kyle looked up into the dead eyes of this ravaged monster, he again went crazy with panic.  He turned and grabbed the fence, intent on climbing it, desperate to get away, oblivious to the agony.

That’s when he felt Joe’s hand come down on his head.

The Indian may have been a ghost but its touch seemed very real.  A cold hand that felt absolutely massive clamped down on Kyle’s head and
picked him up
.

He was certain he was going to die.   He imagined Joe crushing his skull like an overripe cantaloupe.

Kyle hung by his head for a terrible moment before a rough voice straight from Hell said to him, “Fuck
you
, Kyle Cain!”

And then he was
flung
through the air.

He was already unconscious, even before he hit the ground.

When he awoke on the other side of the fence, hours later, as dawn filled a new day with light, Kyle was startled to realize he was still alive.

******

In the days that followed, hundreds of men scoured the area, looking for Bountiful Woods and the bodies of Drake Dupree, Tom Pascal, John Womack, and Roger Luttman.  Divers combed Bullet Lake.

After an overnight stay in Middleridge Community Hospital, Kyle Cain returned to the area with Sheriff Carver and his deputies.  Not only couldn’t the bodies be found, they couldn’t find the fenced-in woods that Kyle swore had to be there.  They spent an entire day looking for that wire fence with its NO TRESPASSING signs and came up empty.

Suspicion fell on Kyle at first, despite his injuries.  He was questioned repeatedly by the Sheriff.  He always told the same story and he was always met with the same incredulity.  Everyone who had grown up in this county— including Sheriff Carver— had heard the Legend of Injun Joe. 

Nobody believed it.  It was myth.

There was no denying, however, Kyle’s broken wrist.  Or the mark Joe left on him.

There was a great deal of talk about drugs.  Kyle eventually admitted to not only drinking but also the marijuana.  He became indignant, however, when it was suggested that the ‘ghost’ in this story was the product of a hallucinogenic drug.

One week after Kyle barely made it out of Bountiful Woods alive, the body of Roger Luttman was discovered.  Lunkhead washed up on the
far
side of the lake, right near High Caliber Diner in Flagg City.  An autopsy was performed but the cause of death was never in doubt.  The county coroner confirmed Roger was burnt to death, burnt
alive.
  Evidence of Roger inhaling both fire and lake water was found.

At first, Kyle thought this was a small blessing.  It confirmed his story.  And yet he was met with even stauncher skepticism.  One deputy suggested that Roger was so drunk he
fell
into a campfire and that Kyle was so drunk, the sight of seeing his friend burn to death so traumatized him, he somehow got the circumstances all mixed up in his brain with the ghost story they’d all heard as children.  The deputy related a story about how even
he
had been once frightened as a kid by the local legend.  After hearing the tale one night, he thought the distant light of a combine in the fields was the lantern light of Joe.

In other words: nobody believed a word Kyle said about how a
real
ghost
really and truly
murdered his four friends.

Everyone already thought his story was nuts.  With the discovery of Roger, everyone acted like they know the
reason
Kyle flipped out.  The part about Roger burning alive was real.  The part about a seven-foot-tall ghost being responsible for the preternatural pyre was hysteria.

When talking with Sheriff Carver or his men (or even the reporters from
The Middleridge Daily Messenger
) Kyle ended every argument the same way.  “Okay, so if I just
imagined
this and there
was
no ghost, then how do you explain
my head
?”

No one could explain his head.

At least, not at first.

And always Kyle would say, “You wait and see.  Wait until they find Drake and Tom and John. 
Especially
Tom.”  He would generally shudder when he said that.  He didn’t like imagining what ultimately became of Tom.  He promised himself that when they
did
find Tom, he would avoid all news for several days.  He never wanted to know what caused Tom’s screams.  “Once they find the others,” he’d say, “
then
you tell me I’m full of bullshit.  When you find Drake’s head cleaved down the middle or John’s shish-kabob eyes,
then
you tell me Injun Joe isn’t real!”

But the bodies of Drake Dupree, John Womack, and Tom Pascal were never found.

To this day, no one has ever found a trace of them.

During the last conversation Kyle ever had with Trinity county Sheriff Jack Carver, he once again asked the question, “Then how do you explain my head?”

The Sheriff pointed a level gaze at him and said, “The mind is capable of all kinds of things.  Ever see those Hindus who can walk on coals without being burned?”

Kyle scoffed.  “This is hardly the same thing!   Are you saying
I
made it happen?”

The Sheriff shrugged. “The human mind is amazing.  It’s capable of all kinds of things.”  He gave Kyle a shrewd look as he finished, “Sometimes it even creates its
own
reality.”

He knew what the Sheriff was implying.

Kyle had a hard time dealing with his friend’s deaths.  At night he was plagued by nightmares (always with hideously shrill soundtracks) and by day he suffered survivor’s guilt.  Neither of his parents believed him.  They offered to pay for him to go to a therapist but that only pissed him off more, knowing even
they
thought his ravings about Injun Joe were utter madness.

It was a visit with John’s grandfather that helped Kyle find a means of coping.

John’s grandfather’s name was Wendell Womack.  He was seventy-nine-years old and in failing health.  He lived on bottled oxygen at the Autumn Meadows Nursing Home in Middleridge.  When he called Kyle on the phone, Kyle at first actually believed it was some kind of obscene phone call.  Wendell began the conversation with wheezing.

When Wendell asked Kyle to come to see him, Kyle was reluctant.  “I don’t know, Mr. Womack.  I’m still having a really hard time.  I don’t feel much like talking about John.”

“I don’t want to talk about John, Kyle.  I
know
what happened to John.”

Kyle was stunned.  He had been doubting his own recollection of things lately.  And so he blurted out, “You do?”

“Sure I do.  Injun Joe got ‘im.”

Kyle was so startled, he nearly dropped the phone.

He met with John’s grandfather the following afternoon.  In his tiny room in the nursing home, Wendell Womack sat in a wheel chair, attached to an oxygen tank, rasping for breath.  He had Kyle take a seat and he didn’t mince words.  With eyes as sharp as a hawk’s, the old man glared at Kyle and said, “You
did
see Joe, didn’t ya?”

Emotion choked him.  Kyle found it difficult to speak.  Since the night his friends died, this was the first person he had talked to who actually honestly believed Injun Joe was real.