The Altar (7 page)

“I’m sorry,” Erik said. “I didn’t know if you were being serious or just joking with me.”

“I’m not joking.”

Erik nodded. “Thanks for letting me hang the poster, ma’am. And when I get a chance I will look at those graves.”

“If I see your pet, I’ll be sure and let you know, Mr. Hunter. Maybe she just wandered off.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

The bell rang quietly as he closed the door behind him.

-4-

Melissa Jones frowned as the man hung the poster of the cat on the window of the Dairy Mart. He’d told her mother that the cat was lost, and that made her feel bad. She’d had a puppy once and it had run out into the road and had been hit by a dump truck. That was when she was just a little girl, but she still grieved.

But that seemed like such a long time ago. Since then her parents had divorced and she’d been living with her Dad in Miami for the last two years. But she’d fallen for a boy in her class and her Dad had sent her back to New England as punishment. Now she’d be staying with Mom in the store. She was afraid it was going to be a long summer. There weren’t any kids her age in this hick town, let alone cute boys.

It wasn’t even lunch time yet and she was already bored. She watched the man with the lost cat take a jug of milk out of the cooler. She felt bad about his cat. It looked really cute in the picture, like it was the kind that purred when you pet it. Maybe she could help and find the cat. That would be good. Anything would be better than staying here and waiting on customers.

“Mom, can I go outside? Maybe I can look for the man’s cat.”

“I don’t think so,” her mother said from her seat behind the cash register.

“But I’m bored. And it’s a nice, sunny day outside.”

“I’d rather you stayed here with me.”

“Can’t I just go for a walk?”

“Maybe later,” he mother said.

Melissa knew what that meant. It meant it was going to be a long, boring summer spent inside the boring store and watching people buy bread and milk and ice. All of her friends in Miami would be outside now at the beach, or swimming in the pool.

“It’s not fair,” she mumbled as she watched the man with the lost cat pay for his bread and milk.

His eyes locked with hers for a moment, and, although he tried to smile, she saw that he looked scared, almost like the way her Mom had looked when her Dad had first left. She didn’t like it when adults looked scared.

“That man must really miss his cat,” she said quietly after he had left.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing,” she replied.

But she really would like to help the man find his lost cat. Maybe she’d get a reward. Or at least she’d get to pet the cat. She looked over at her mother and yawned. All the while, the gearbox of her mind was hard at work.

CHAPTER EIGHT

-1-

Erik had lost just about all hope of finding Faith when he pulled back into his driveway. He’d left his computer-generated poster everywhere he could think of and, as expected, no one had seen any sign of his cat. He really didn’t think the posters would do any good, but he felt like he should do something. And hanging the posters did keep his mind off of his real fears.

He supposed that Faith had wandered off into the woods in search of mice or birds—and after that, he didn’t want to think of what might have happened. The cat could still be out there, of course. But he didn’t believe that, not for a minute. Most likely, Faith had run into trouble of some sort. It had either become hopelessly lost—after all, she was a city cat—or had fallen victim to a larger predator in the woods. She might have been hit by a car, but he had been keeping an eye out on the side of the road in both directions, and hadn’t seen a dead cat. Or, the other possibility—that some weird cult had gotten hold of her. It was just too unsettling to even consider.

He supposed he’d have to go and find Dovecrest and ask the man to go with him to search for the cat. He couldn’t very well go off into the woods again on his own. The idea chilled him to the bone, even now, in the noontime heat of a summer day. That wasn’t to say that Dovecrest didn’t unnerve him nearly as much. But at least the Indian was a known quantity, while the woods were totally alien. The whole thing was probably a product of his own imagination. He had gotten after Todd for letting his imagination run wild, and now he, a grown man, was doing the same thing.

Slowly, he stepped out of the car, stalling for as long as he could as he walked towards the house. He wasn’t looking forward to coming back home without any news about the cat. Todd and Vickie probably expected him to have found Faith at the plaza, or wandering by the side of the road, and he knew his returning without her would be disappointing.

Moving into the new house had not gone according to plan, he realized. First the incident with Todd, and now the cat. There were plenty of things to be unnerved about, as well. The radio talk show host and his story about the devil worshipper. Dovecrest. Then the lady at the antique store and her story about the graveyard. She had upset him more than he cared to admit.

He would explore that graveyard for himself as soon as he had the chance, and follow up by doing a bit of research of his own. Finding out the real story would put an end to the wild speculations that were whirling about in his mind—speculations that weren’t doing him any good right now. Right now, he had an ominous feeling about that graveyard, without having even seen it. He could almost feel something wrong, now that he knew it was there across from the plaza.

“I’ve been watching too many horror movies,” he mumbled.

Suddenly, a voice called his name, startling him and embarrassing him at the same time.

It was Dovecrest, who had appeared out of nowhere. Erik flushed, wondering if he had heard him talking to himself.

“Sorry to startle you, Mr. Hunter,” the Indian said.

“No...it’s nothing. You just sort of surprised me, that’s all.”

Dovecrest shrugged and Erik almost imagined that the man was telling him he had every reason to be frightened.

“I saw the posters about your missing cat. I think I might have found her.”

“Oh, thank God. My son’s been....”

But he could tell from Dovecrest’s expression that something wasn’t right.

“What’s the matter?”

Dovecrest winced like a doctor about to deliver bad news to a patient, and Erik immediately knew that Faith was dead.

“I think it’s your pet. You’ll have to check it out for yourself. It is difficult for me to tell.”

“What happened?”

Dovecrest shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, and Erik knew he wasn’t telling the truth. “It looked like an animal got ahold of her. Maybe a fox. Sometimes a wolf or even a bear wanders into these woods.”

He held out his hand in a gesture of helplessness.

“Like I said the other night, these woods are dangerous. It might seem like you’re just a few minutes away from the city, but it’s a whole different world out there. Your little boy was lucky. Your cat wasn’t.”

“Where is she?” he asked.

He had no doubt now that the cat was his and he just wanted to get this over with now.

“I’ve got her at my place. I didn’t want your boy to see.”

Erik nodded. “Then let’s go.”

It only took a couple of minutes to walk to Dovecrest’s place, a small log cabin that had existed long before the new road connected it to the rest of civilization. It was probably four rooms, Erik guessed, and a still-standing outhouse suggested that the place had only recently been connected to indoor plumbing, probably when the road was cut through.

The house looked out of place in the neighborhood of green manicured lawns. It stood right in the middle of a wooded area, as if it had been built within the forest. Then Erik realized that this house had stood here long before this new suburbia had intruded into these parts. The place had no driveway; and Dovecrest didn’t seem to need an automobile. Erik guessed that, until the new road and the plaza, the man must have lived out here by himself, a hermit living off the land of the reservation.

Dovecrest led him around to the back of the house to where a modern oak picnic table stood like an anachronism beside this frontier cabin, breaking the illusion that they had traveled back in time to the 1700s. Dovecrest further broke the illusion by opening a green plastic garbage bag and peeling it back to show its grisly contents.

“I found her in the woods,” Dovecrest explained.

It was Faith all right. Erik knew immediately when he saw the red collar around the cat’s twisted neck. His stomach churned as he looked at what remained of his pet. The head and neck had been bent backwards at an impossible angle and the animal’s chest and belly had been opened up like that of a specimen in a sadistic lab experiment. Organs and entrails spilled out like spaghetti and the cat’s eyes remained open—even in death the cat seemed to silently scream of unspeakable horror.

“It’s her,” Erik said. “God help me. How am I going to explain this to my kid?”

Dovecrest shrugged. “I would suggest you just bury her as quickly as you can and say a fox caught her.”

Erik shook his head sadly. It was just a cat, but he felt like crying. Faith had been part of their family.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can’t let him see her like that. It’s not right. How’d...her neck get twisted like that?”

“That’s how a fox makes its kill. It goes for the throat and breaks its prey’s neck. At least it’s a quick death.”

Erik nodded and wrapped the remains back up.

Only later, after he had buried the cat in the corner of the back yard did he stop to wonder why whatever had killed Faith hadn’t bothered to eat its prey. But by then, Dovecrest was already gone.

-2-

Todd watched from his bedroom window as his father placed the plastic trash bag in the hole and covered it over with the freshly dug dirt. Todd knew he should cry about this. He’d cried over things that were far less important and much less sad. Like the time his Little League team had lost its first game. And the time his cousin had ripped one of his baseball cards by accident.

But when he thought about Faith being gone, the tears just wouldn’t come, even though he wanted them to. He felt sad, all right. Terribly sad and lonely and let down, as if a part of him had been torn out and thrown into that garbage bag to be buried with his cat. Yes, there was an emptiness like he had never felt before since this was his first experience with death.

But another, stronger emotion drowned out his grief, engulfing him in a bottomless fear that choked away at his very breath. This terror lived with him always now, had, in fact, been his constant companion and bedfellow ever since that awful night in the woods.

His Dad had told him that Faith had been killed by a fox and he wouldn’t let him see his cat because it would bother him even more. But Todd was already beyond being “upset” as his mother called it. Not because Faith was dead—that itself would have been terrible enough—but because he
knew
what had killed his beloved pet. It hadn’t been a fox, or any other animal either. He knew what had happened to Faith and that was why he was almost paralyzed with a terror so complete and so devastating that he couldn’t even cry now when he needed to the most.

It was that thing in the woods. That rock. That’s what had gotten to Faith. That’s what had killed her. He knew it without the slightest doubt.

And he knew the thing would kill again, would kill him, in fact, if it possibly could. The thing enjoyed killing. It fed off of making its victims suffer. The thing wanted to kill again, and it wanted to kill him.

He had escaped from it once and that had made it angry. That was why it had chosen his cat. He knew this. He also knew that the thing was growing stronger and more powerful with each day. Now it would wait for its victims to come to it. But soon enough it would be strong enough to come for them. Strong enough to come for him.

He turned away from the window and crawled onto his bed, remembering how Faith would curl up beside him on his pillow and allow him to scratch behind her ears, pretending to only tolerate his advances while betraying her pleasure by purring like a lawnmower.

Todd sighed. Somehow he’d have to get that thing in the woods before it got to him. He didn’t know how, but he knew it was important, that his very life depended on it.

But he was only a little boy and this...this
thing
had all of the strength and experience of time.

Then, when he realized how small and insignificant he had suddenly become and how hopeless his situation was, only then did the tears begin to flow.

-3-

After burying the cat, Erik decided it was time to do a bit of research and find out a bit about the history of the place where he now lived. He began by logging into the
Providence Journal
’
s
online service. Annie from the antique store was right about the bulldozer incident, which had happened just about a year ago.

The driver had been killed when the machine ran over him. It was ruled a freak accident. But it was rather odd that an experienced driver had made such a critical mistake, and questions had been asked, but never really answered.

The dozer had, indeed, unearthed the graveyard, and, in particular, a headstone made of some sort of meteoritic rock, according to a geologist from the University of Rhode Island. The cemetery contained thirteen graves of unidentified colonists from the early 1700’s. It was believed to be a small colony of Europeans who had been massacred by the Narragansett Indians. A couple of URI professors were still researching the subject, but so far, there wasn’t much specific information. Erik jotted down their names. Maybe he’d give them a call at some point.

The path of Farmington Road had, indeed, been moved after the discovery of the historical cemetery. The final construction of the plaza and the housing development had begun as soon as the road was finished. A look at the police log did show a number of pet disappearances, including that of a Rottweiler, but most of these disappearances had subsequently been explained as road kill.

It was a little bit weird, but there was no mention of anything out of the ordinary, or any reference to cults or devil worship. Erik breathed a mental sigh of relief. The old lady’s imagination must have been as vivid as his. There was also no mention of the rock that his son had told him about, though the description did seem consistent with the rock that made up the meteoritic headstone. But the headstone was right out in plain view at the side of Farmington Road, not in the middle of the woods, so that made no sense.

Finally, he checked out Dovecrest’s name on the
Journal’s
search engine. There were sporadic references to a Johnny Dovecrest from all the way back to the late 1800’s. Dovecrest and his father, Erik assumed, had held tribal offices with the Narragansetts until the 1960’s, when Dovecrest seemed to retire even from tribal life. Some of Dovecrest’s relatives were still heavily involved in tribal affairs, it seemed.

Erik wondered if it were unusual for Dovecrest to have the same name as his father—he didn’t know if the Indians used “juniors.” He decided it might be worthwhile to visit the small town library, and perhaps even the town hall to check out some of the vital records.

Still, there were some things that didn’t add up. Like Todd’s mention of the big rock, and his broken geologist’s hammer. And how Dovecrest always seemed to be in the right place at the right time—first to find Todd, and then to find the remains of his cat. Then there was the question of his cat—why hadn’t the predator eaten its prey?

Just on a hunch, he decided to do a search on Satanic cults. Even as he typed the keywords into the search engine, he felt a shiver run up his spine.

-4-

Melissa waited until her mother was busy with a customer ordering fifty “Powerball” tickets, and then she took the opportunity to slip out the back door unnoticed. The lottery jackpot was up to about a zillion dollars and there’d been more people buying tickets than buying food. It was just about supper time, the time when the store got really busy with people stopping on their way home from work, and Melissa knew her mother would be pretty busy for awhile. There was plenty of time for her to sneak out and look for the lost cat. And who knows? Maybe there were some cute boys in town.

She made her way around to the back of the plaza and around the side of the store. The cat wouldn’t be wandering around in the parking lot—someone would have seen her by now—so she supposed it had either gone off into the woods or had been hit by a car.

She looked at the woods beside the plaza and decided that would be the best place to start. She wouldn’t actually go deep into the woods—she was really a city girl at heart. But she sure was anxious to get out of the boring store where she’d been cooped up all day. She followed the edge of the parking lot, looking into the woods as far as she could. A blue jay regarded her with interest, and she wondered if it were true what they said about jays, that they’d peck at your head if you came too close to their nests. The bird looked harmless enough, but she wasn’t about to find out first hand. She walked away.