Sacrifice Read online

Ken pointed at the man by the road. “Who the hell is that?”

  Jeff turned and pushed his ever-present Mets hat up on his head. “Holy…”

  The red Mustang came into view and barreled down the street. The man in the tri-corner hat dashed across the street, waving one arm up and down as he ran, the little girl in tow. The Mustang didn’t slow.

  “Hey! Stop!” Ken shouted.

  The screech of rubber. The thud of bone on steel. The unholy wail of maternal grief.

  The boys raced to the crosswalk. Ken ran to the driver’s side of the car. Josie lay face up on the pavement. The left side of her head was crushed. Her remaining eye stared glassily at the sky. Bright red blood left only the tips of her hair on that side blonde.

  Ken stood in dumb, stunned silence.

  The door of the Mustang swung open. A teen looked out at the ground. Ken recognized Vinnie Santini, another senior. He had black hair parted in the middle and wore a dark silk shirt opened at the neck to expose a thick gold chain. His father had restored the Mustang for him at his body shop. Vinnie’s face was white as marble.

  “She ran out across the street…” he mumbled. “The light was green…”

  On the other side of the car, Jeff rushed to the man in the tri-corner hat. He stood several yards away on the other side of the road, smiling.

  “What the hell were you doing?” Jeff yelled as he closed the distance.

  The man looked over at Jeff in shock, as it wasn’t possible for anyone to address him. His flayed face looked more hideous the closer Jeff got. The whites of his eyes were tinged blood red, and they narrowed as they focused on Jeff. He pointed a crooked, accusing finger, bared his white teeth and hissed. Then he turned vertical. It was as if he were two dimensional, and someone had spun him sideways so he was less than an inch thick. Then what had been his head and feet contracted to the center, and he disappeared.

  At full speed, Jeff could not stop. He passed through where the man had stood. He caught a fleeting whiff of algae. He felt a dark heaviness in the air, but then that disappeared as well. He skidded to a confused stop.

  At the Mustang, Josie’s wailing mother threw Ken out of the way and knelt by her daughter. She tucked a few stray hairs away from the undamaged right side of her face.

  “Oh, baby, hang on,” she said. “Oh, hang on.”

  A siren wailed and a green police car pulled up near the Mustang. The Sagebrook constable scrambled out. He had a head shaped like a block of wood and an overhanging forehead that made him look about as bright. He called for an ambulance on his radio and shooed Ken away from the side of the Mustang.

  “I couldn’t stop,” Vinnie said. He still sat in the car, bordering on shock. “She jumped out in the street for no reason.”

  “That’s right, officer.” Ken whirled around. One of the picnicking couples had come up behind him. A man had come to Vinnie’s defense. “We saw her just run out into the street.”

  “She was chasing a man,” Ken said. “Some freak in a buckskin vest.”

  The couple looked at him like he had two heads.

  “How could you miss him?” Ken said. “Weird hat? Face like it went through a paper shredder?”

  “It was just the girl by the road,” the man said.

  The ambulance pulled up and EMTs dashed to Josie’s side. The cop stepped over to Ken. He grabbed Ken by the shirt.

  “Look kid, this is serious. We don’t need any bullshit here.”

  Ken was about to respond when Jeff pulled him back through the growing crowd. Ken gave Jeff a confused look.

  “Where did he go?” Ken said. “Did you catch him?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “You couldn’t catch him?”

  Jeff slammed Ken in the shoulder. “You ever see a pitcher beat me when I’m stealing second? I could have caught him, but he vanished. Into thin air. In front of me.”

  “He couldn’t.”

  “Well he did. And I pulled you out of there because from what the people in the crowd were saying, no one else saw him. When I called to Freak Show, he looked stunned that I could see him. He knew the girl could see him, but I don’t think we were supposed to be able to.”

  Jeff dragged Ken back to his car, and they got in. Jeff started the car. Led Zeppelin screamed out of the speakers so loudly that the door glass rattled. He spun the volume dial down.

  “So what did we see?” Ken said. “Some kind of ghost? A spirit?”

  “I don’t know what it was,” Jeff said. “But I know I didn’t like the look it gave me.”

  “Like what?”

  “As it flattened into nothing, I swear it looked pissed as hell.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  By Monday morning, the brick halls of Jesse Whitman High buzzed with the news. Vinnie Santini had killed a girl.

  By noon the versions had multiplied, fueled by Vinnie’s absence. Vinnie was in prison. Vinnie had committed suicide. He had been drunk. He had been stoned. He drove down the sidewalk.

  None of the versions mentioned a man in a streamlined tri-corner hat with a nose like a sharpened carrot. Because no matter what tale floated by them, Jeff and Ken did not tell theirs. Even the rest of the Dirty Half Dozen didn’t know. The story of the disappearing man wasn’t one to risk on the telephone. Their middle-class families didn’t have the luxury of phone extensions, and there would be no expectation of privacy chatting away on the kitchen wall phone. This story had to wait until after school to be shared.

  The boys gathered in the shade of the bleachers at the baseball field. Paul, Dave, Ken, Jeff and Marc waited on Bob.

  “Did I ever mention my night with Deirdre beneath these bleachers?” Paul said.

  A collective groan rose from the others. Paul’s football player status afforded him a rapid rotation of girlfriends. His tales of them often read like Penthouse Forum letters, with the same level of veracity.

  “Hampy,” Marc said, “your stories are unbelievable.”

  “Here’s what they all say is unbelievable,” Paul answered. He gave a tug at the crotch of his jeans.

  “Here’s a surprise,” Dave said, pulling a long blade of grass from his mouth. “None of us are interested in your dick.”

  Bob arrived. He’d already changed into a white T-shirt, bleach-stained jeans and a pair of brown work boots that smelled like last week’s fried chicken.

  “All right,” he announced, sticking a cigarette into his mouth. “This better be fucking quick because I need to get to work.” Bob did dishes at the local diner after school.

  “Ah. Mr. Armstrong,” Dave said in a high, nasal imitation of their school principal. “Smoking is a filthy habit and not permitted on the athletic fields.”

  Bob put a lighter to the tip of the cigarette. “Bite me sideways.”

  “Enough of this crap,” Ken said. “You all heard about Vinnie Santini today. There’s lots of stories, but we are going to give you the real one, because Jeff and I were there.”

  The four looked over at Jeff. He snapped a half-assed salute from the brim of his Mets cap.

  Ken proceeded to tell the whole story, every detail of the accident, including the intervention and disappearance of the one he and Jeff had taken to calling the Woodsman for his homemade deerskin clothes. When Ken was done the others stared at him.

  “Well, one thing’s for sure,” Dave said. He pointed a thumb at Paul. “His story’s more believable.”

  “Screw you,” Ken said.

  Marc had been listening with more intensity than the others. “Jeff, is everything he said true?”

  Jeff shrugged and shot him a “What can I say?” look. “Every word, man,” he answered.

  “I believe them,” Marc said.

  “Because these two wholesome boys would never lie?” Dave said.

  “No,” Marc said. “Because I saw him, too.”

  All eyes turned to Marc. He gave each one a look like a novice cliff diver gives the water before his plunge. Then he stared out over their heads
.

  “It was about a week ago,” Marc began. “A few days after the Water Tower Incident. I was home that afternoon…”

  And Marc told the story of his own encounter with the Woodsman.

  Chapter Sixteen

  1980

  A week earlier at Marc’s house.

  “Marcus, we gotta go,” Marc’s mother called down the hallway.

  Danny already stood at the door. He wore the tan golf hat he always wore when he went outdoors. Danny loved to ride in the car. Albert was at daycare.

  Marc carried his violin case down the hall. With Marc’s slight build and short height, the instrument looked nowhere near as diminutive as it did with most people.

  Marc played the violin. He also played piano and enough guitar to impress his friends who didn’t know a B flat from a flat tire. Don’t misunderstand—he was the first in line for tickets when the hot rock bands like Boston and Styx came to the Nassau Coliseum. But of the six, he knew there was more to music, dimensions the others did not grasp. The violin was his instrument of choice.

  At seventeen, he hated having his mother drive him to violin lessons. Every part of the idea screamed “loser”. But he did not have the luxury of a hand-me-down vehicle from his less affluent parents. He sure wasn’t going to ask one of the Half Dozen for a lift. His violin lessons weren’t a secret, but calling attention to them would open up a floodgate of abuse. He liked it better when his teacher had come to his house for the lessons, but he’d screwed himself there by getting too good. His tutor had recommended a more skilled instructor, one whose reputation had transcended the need to make house calls.

  “Do you have everything?” his mother asked. She stared at his shoulders. “You should bring a jacket. The afternoon might be cooler.”

  It was June. People were in shorts.

  “Ma, I’m fine,” Marc answered. “I’m capable of dressing myself. I’m seventeen.”

  “So, my eldest son, you are so old, you drive us to the lesson.” She held out the keys to the car.

  Marc hesitated. A teen mulling whether to drive was even odder than one playing the violin. But his mother had mastered the art of passenger seat driving and could inject advice on any aspect of his technique. Since he’d graduated from his learner’s permit, he rarely drove with her in the car. He took the keys.

  “I can go by myself, Ma,” he said. Danny’s omnipresent smile drooped. “I’ll be back in ninety minutes.”

  “No, I’ll run errands and pick up Albert,” she said. “This will be better.”

  Danny beamed, his trip assured.

  Marc knew it wouldn’t be better. And it wasn’t. His mother’s traffic paranoia meant they left too early and he arrived twenty minutes before his lesson started. He cheered himself up with the knowledge that, after haggling with the butcher over the price and quality of today’s meat, she would probably also be twenty minutes late picking him up.

  His instructor had a room in a narrow music shop at the end of a strip mall. Deciding not to subject himself to the screeching practice of the current student, Marc took a seat outside against the side wall of the building. The sun was warm and the oppressive summer humidity was still weeks away. In his head, he went over the piece he’d been practicing all week, fingering the neck of an invisible violin in his left hand.

  Next door was the fenced playground of a daycare center. A swarm of kids under four years old raced around a collection of half-scale slides and swings. A woman leaned against the inside of the fence. She puffed on a cigarette and checked her watch at intervals of less than a minute. The shrill din of toddlers at play rolled across the parking lot. It still beat listening to first-year violin.

  That was when Marc first noticed him. The preternaturally thin man in the homemade leather outfit. The man with the pointed hat and pointed nose. He was on the outside of the fence, looking in at the kids. His face was shredded almost beyond recognition, like something from a B-grade horror movie. Marc felt his stomach roil. This disfigured man was in the caregiver’s line of sight, but she paid him no mind.

  Marc couldn’t make out what he was saying, but he could tell the man was calling to one of the kids, a boy in the sandbox with a bowl haircut and red coveralls. The boy played with a small, diecast pickup truck and made roads in the sand.

  The boy looked over at the Woodsman, who was pantomiming holding something big in his arms. The Woodsman held it out like an offering. However the boy saw the Woodsman, and whatever the Woodsman made the boy think he had in his hands made an irresistible package. The boy smiled and dropped his tiny toy in the sand. His eyes went kind of glassy.

  The Woodsman pointed at the gate in the corner of the playground. The boy stood up, transfixed.

  Marc’s fingers froze mid-imaginary chord. A chill went up his spine. That creature had nothing good on his mind. And why wasn’t that woman shooing him away from those kids. What kind of idiot was she?

  Mark was about to shout at her when the PA from the daycare interrupted him. “Howie, your mother is here. Howie.”

  Howie didn’t race to the office. His next step to the gate was more hesitant. He looked a bit confused but his eyes kept that glazed, thousand-yard stare. The Woodsman motioned for him to hurry.

  “Howie!” said the woman at the fence. She ground her cigarette into the ground with her heel and marched off in his direction. She scooped him up under the arms and dropped him back down facing the main office door. “Up front you go! No keeping your mother waiting. All the toys will be here for you tomorrow.”

  That snapped Howie back to the real world. He chuckled and ran as fast as his tiny legs could carry him to the building entrance. Marc looked back outside the fence, but the Woodsman was gone, though how he got away so quickly was a mystery.

  The whole event gave Marc the creeps. The hideous man in the bizarre garb, the way he transfixed the little boy, the oblivious playground attendant. The more he thought about it, the more he thought it must have been his imagination. It was just too strange.

  He went in for his lesson. He played like crap.

  Chapter Seventeen

  So in the shadow of the Whitman bleachers, Marc told his story to his friends. When he finished, you could hear a pin drop.

  “Here’s what’s really creepy,” Dave said. “You still take violin lessons.”

  “Honestly,” Marc said, ignoring Dave’s jab, “until you two told about what you saw at the accident, I really doubted the whole thing myself.”

  “You guys are full of it,” Paul said. “You are all putting me on, like when you sent me the fake letter telling me the football physicals were being given at the hospital emergency room.” That classic prank had Paul arguing with an ER nurse for a half hour while the rest of them rolled in the parking lot laughing. No one was laughing now.

  “Do we look like we’re kidding?” Ken said. He turned to Marc. “Did you ever see him again there?”

  “No,” Marc said. “I went back the next day and the day after. Nothing. I couldn’t very well ask the people working there about it. The woman obviously couldn’t see the Woodsman.”

  “And neither could the other kids at the day care,” Dave added. “Just the…target.”

  “And both times, the kid couldn’t have seen the Woodsman as he really looked,” Ken said. “He’s too creepy to ever have a kid trust him.”

  “Assuming all this is real,” Bob said, “what do we do about it?”

  “The thing seems invisible,” Ken said. “But I say we pair up and hunt this thing. Intercept it before it makes another Josie Mulfetta.”

  “And another Vinnie Santini,” Jeff said. “If it looks for groups of kids, so should we. Ken and I can see it, so we make two groups with one of us in each one.”

  “Well, boys,” Bob said. “Love to help, but I’ve got a shift to pull. I’ve got a break at five. Drop by and tell me how it’s going.”

  As Bob turned to leave, he almost bowled over Katy coming up to the bleachers.

&
nbsp; “Katy! Jesus! I nearly creamed you. Wear a bell or something.”

  Katy stepped around Bob and tapped her watch.

  “Late, Jeff?” she said. “I figured when the only the cars in the lot were from the Half Dozen, you’d all be back here.”

  “Katy,” Jeff said, with a combination of embarrassment and regret. “I’m sorry.” He pulled her around the corner out of earshot. He held her hand. “I know we were going to shop for prom corsages. I forgot. I’m sorry.”

  “Well there’s still time,” Katy said. “I don’t need to be home for an hour.”

  Jeff winced and braced for impact. “I can’t make it. We’ll do it tomorrow, OK?”

  Katy dropped his hand like a dead fish.

  “That’s twice you’ve cancelled this,” she said. “I’m the one who wants to go to prom. If you don’t want to go, say so. Don’t play around like this.”

  “That’s not it, Katy,” Jeff said. He glanced back at his friends under the bleachers. “I just can’t do it now. We’ll go tomorrow. I promise.”

  “Well, great,” Katy said. She gave the rest of the Half Dozen a rueful shake of her head. “And how the hell am I supposed to get home since the busses left half an hour ago?”

  “Bob can take you,” Jeff said. Bob was halfway to his car. “Bob!” he shouted across the parking lot. “Give a Katy a ride home, will ya?”

  “Are you nuts?” Katy whispered. Bob drove his mother’s old ’72 Duster. Bob had replaced the six-cylinder drive train with the innards of a 340 Barracuda. The exterior was an experiment in Bondo and two colors of primer. Major components tended to fail without notice.

  “What am I, a fucking taxi?” Bob shouted. “C’mon, Katy. I’m already running late.”

  “I’ll take you, Katy,” Dave offered. He hopped off the bleacher. “I’ve got to go anyhow.”

  “Thank you,” Katy said.

  “Fill me in on the ghost story later, man,” Dave said to Ken.

  Katy gave Jeff a look that could freeze a roaring fire. Then she followed Dave across the parking lot.

  “I’ve seen that look,” Paul said to Jeff. “She wants your nuts in a vise.”