Seed of Evil Page 3

  Only another mile down the road, he pulled up out front of a small, well-kept home and tapped the horn twice.

  Ben Wainright got out and stretched his back, feeling the wet shirt unglue from his body. He was a tall man and regarded as being quite dashing. He’d come unannounced so he waited a moment in the sunshine, expecting Mary to appear on the front deck and forgive him for his unexpected intrusion.

  After another moment, still no one had appeared, so he walked briskly up the front steps, twisted the bell twice, and heard it ring loudly inside the house.

  He gave it another minute and then peered in through the glass panel and saw Mary coming slowly down the hallway. She wiped her hands on a cloth and tucked it into the waistline of her skirt before opening the door.

  The pretty young mother looked drained of color, and her eyes were red-rimmed from either lack of sleep or crying. Ben guessed both.

  “Ben.” She made his name sound like a lament.

  “Mary?” He stared for a moment. “Ah, I came to check on Billy. Is everything okay?”

  After a moment, she shook her head, and her voice was little more than a squeak. “Not really.”

  “May I come in?” He stepped closer.

  “Um…” Her head was down and she wrung her hands for a moment, but eventually she nodded and shuffled aside.

  Ben stepped inside the doorway and pointed to a closed door from memory. “Second on the right?”

  She nodded again and he proceeded down the hallway to Billy’s room. But Mary stayed put.

  “Follow me, please,” he said over his shoulder.

  As he neared the door, he slowed and reached out a hand. But for some reason, there was a tingling in his stomach that hinted at a strange nervousness that shouldn’t be there. He shook it away, twisted the knob, and pushed the door inward.

  The first thing that hit him was the smell—fish, rotting vegetation, methane, and excrement. He’d never actually smelled what a fish shit out of its body, but he bet it smelled like this.

  “He had an accident,” Mary whispered.

  It was dark inside, and he reached for the light.

  “Don’t,” she said, voice quivering.

  He paused with his hand hanging in the air and half-turned. “I need to see what I’m doing. I’m sorry.” He flicked the light on.

  The scream that came from the mess of soiled bedcovers made the hair on his neck rise—it was an animalistic screech of pain and torment, hardly had any human notes in it at all. It continued to fill the small room.

  “Billy,” Wainright yelled forcefully.

  The boy immediately quietened but had burrowed down below the covers. Wainright glanced around the small room. On the bedside table were numerous plates, many still piled with spoiling food. A few looked to have been at least nibbled at, but just the meat he noticed.

  There was also a bedpan tucked under the bed that had a few tiny logs of dry feces piled inside. It probably doesn’t help the smell in the bedroom, he thought. He nudged it to the side so he could approach the bed and then sat on its edge.

  He looked up at Mary. “I’m going to examine him now, is that okay?”

  She just stared, not at him, but at the rumpled mound of blankets.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” Wainright reached out. “Billy.” He laid a hand on the mound. “Billy.” He felt the hardness below and was surprised by the sharpness of some of the edges on his body. Rather than a ten-year-old boy under the covers, it felt like someone had thrown a blanket over a tree stump.

  “I’m going to have to pull the covers back now, Billy.”

  The mound shook violently for a few seconds, so he paused.

  “Does the light hurt your eyes?” he asked.

  There came something like a nod from the top end of the mound.

  Wainright sighed, determined to press on. “I need to examine you, so just keep your eyes shut.”

  The mound jiggled violently again, and there came a sound like a hoarse exhalation that devolved into a sibilant hiss.

  Wainright had had enough. “Sorry, Billy, I’m just here to help.” He yanked the blankets back.

  He sucked in a breath and leaped to his feet. The boy was naked, but from his head to his groin the skin was totally grown over by some sort of hardened growth. From his back, there extended things like branches, but that spread wide, giving the impression of wings.

  The boy looked up at him with a face that was as horrifying as it was pitiful. Small, yellow eyes glared, and the mouth opened, showing a rim of needle-like teeth that seemed to ring the entire mouth and would have been more at home on some deep-sea predatory fish.

  Billy mewled and placed hands over his face that were encrusted claws. Wainright swallowed in a dry throat and steeled himself as he carefully sat back down. He lifted a hand and reached out to place it on the boy, but froze—infection, his mind screamed.

  Wainright drew his hand back, stood up again, and leaned forward. He licked his lips. “Ah, Billy, tell me where it hurts.”

  There came a soft mewling again and then a rasping sound. Wainright leaned closer. “I didn’t catch that, Billy.”

  “Alllloooverrr.”

  “All over?” Wainright repeated. “It hurts all over your body?”

  “Yesssss.”

  Wainright felt a growing knot of anger in his stomach. He straightened and turned to Mary. “How long has he been like this?’

  She shook her head for a moment, and he noticed her eyes were wet as she stared at her son. “Days.”

  Wainright scowled. “He’s been in this condition for days? How could you…?”

  “He wouldn’t let me.” The words came in a rush and her eyes slid away from her boy’s to his. “It just began as a coarse rash. But it got worse, then this started growing all over him.” She clasped her hands together as if begging him. “He wouldn’t let me tell anyone. Made me promise.”

  “I’ll need a sample.” Wainright reached into his bag for some gloves to pull on and also found a disposable hypodermic needle. He gently laid a hand on the boy’s upper arm and felt the strange texture beneath his fingertips. It didn’t feel like skin at all and more like exposed bone or maybe even something akin to tree bark.

  He’d read about afflictions that resulted in a thickening and hardening of the skin’s epidermal layer. But this seemed beyond anything he had ever seen or heard of before.

  “Just stay still for a moment, Billy.” He pressed the needle into the arm, but the point wouldn’t penetrate the skin. “Damn.” He drew it back, looking at the tip. He’d have to find an area that wasn’t so calcified.

  Wainright looked back at the boy who had pulled the blankets back over himself. He went to peel them back again.

  “I haven’t quite finish…” The boy suddenly lunged at him.

  Wainright pulled his hand out of the way just as the needle-sharp teeth came together in the air where his fingers had just been.

  “My God.” He leaped to his feet, staring.

  The boy pulled back beneath the blankets and kept his small yellow eyes fixed on Wainright. The doctor felt his heart thumping in his chest. The kid looked like some sort of vicious animal retreating into its burrow. He swallowed noisily.

  “I’ll, ah, need to do some analysis, Mary. I have no idea what it could be right at this moment. I’ll consult the medical texts when I get back, and also make a few calls.

  “I still need…” He quickly crouched to grab Billy’s bedpan, “…this.”

  Billy grumbled as he retreated fully into his nest of blankets, and Wainright looked briefly into the bedpan at the small, speckled logs—it certainly didn’t look like a human bowel movement. He was confused and a little frightened.

  “Mary, do you know if he ate anything, or came into contact with anything strange?”

  She seemed to search her mind for a moment, and then looked up. “The mine. All the kids go and swim at the mine, as it’s the first time it’s been flooded in years. Billy said
when the water dried on him it made him a little itchy.”

  Wainright knew the place; the Angel Mine was just outside of town, and though home to a disaster way back early in the century and all closed up now, sometimes the ground water percolated to the surface and created an oasis. It was rare, but it would be irresistible to kids on a hot day, he bet.

  “Okay.” He started for the door and once outside pulled it shut. He lowered his voice. “We’ll need to send him to the hospital. Get professional care from experts and some decent food into him. We can’t have him lying here like this all day.”

  “But he doesn’t,” she whispered. “He goes out at night.”

  “Goes out? Like that?” His head pulled back on his neck. “How, where?”

  She looked up at him, moon-eyed, and slowly shook her head. “I don’t know where. But I hear the window open…about midnight.”

  He waited but she just went back to wringing her hands. “Okay. Ah…” He held the bedpan and looked around. “Do you have…?”

  “Yes, yes.” She bustled away.

  Wainright looked down at the boy’s bowel movements again. They were dry, oval, and had white flecks through them. He’d seen coyote scat before, and it reminded him of that.

  He was hoping for some sort of container or bag but Mary came back with just a cloth that she draped over the pan. It wasn’t sealed but he didn’t think it’d make a mess as long as he kept it upright.

  She then led him to the door and stood to one side, watching him. With his medical bag in one hand and the bedpan in the other, he could only nod and give her his most reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, Mary, we’ll sort this out.”

  She nodded. “Please…”

  He paused.

  “Please help us,” she whispered.

  *****

  Ben Wainright sat back from his desk for a moment and pondered his next move. There were other children affected, lots of them, and it now seemed to be some sort of outbreak of…what? He had no idea, but after examining Billy’s excrement, he found it contained nothing but digested protein, fur, and animal bones. It seemed the boy’s night-time foraging was where he was getting most of his sustenance.

  His old filing cabinet was now near full of cases, and he knew it was time to admit defeat. He pulled out the small, black leather-bound address book he had in his top drawer that all physicians kept. It contained emergency numbers for everything from fires and flooding, to nuclear bomb fallout. It also had the number for the Communicable Disease Center—termed the CDC—that had been around since the mid-40s, and he had never thought he’d ever have to call in his life.

  He circled the number and lifted the phone. This was out of his hands now.

  *****

  Ben Wainright was there when the vans arrived—dozens of them, all black. He felt like some sort of informer, handing over a list he had drawn up that identified the families, where they were, and then assisted in allying those same family’s fears when they were rounded up for detailed medical treatment at a facility in the big city.

  Some of the children were in the early stages of the affliction, with just mild skin rashes and fevers. Others were like Billy and had onset deformities with the bony protrusions all over the bodies. But then again, some were barely recognizable as children anymore, and even had branch-like growths from their backs that resembled wings—Eldon Angels, he heard one of the CDC guys mutter. But it was far from angelic, and rather more frightening and revolting—and not just for the parents, Wainright had thought.

  If they were angels, they were fallen ones, he muttered.

  He’d watched as most went willingly, some fearfully, but all hoping for answers, a cure, or perhaps just an end to the horrifying ailment that was plaguing their children.

  Not all the kids were found, as some were assumed to have gone feral and simply melted away into the countryside. Or worse, the rumor was that they disappeared into the depths of the Angel Mine.

  Long after the vans had gone, Wainright headed out to the mine and saw that a line of new cyclone fencing and multiple warning signs had been erected. He’d heard that the water hole that the flooded mine had created had drained away again, perhaps back to its subterranean lake where it originally came from.

  He stood in the sunshine for some time, feeling the heat of the noonday sun sting his neck. He imagined the whoops of delight from kids leaping into the water—boys and girls, freckle-faced, sunburned cheeks and bronzed shoulders.

  They were all gone now, contaminated, and those found were herded away in the night—all on his say-so. He felt sick in the heart as he turned back to the path leading to his car.

  “Adotte Sakima.”

  The sudden voice nearly made him jump out of his skin. Right there in front of him was the young Native American man he had seen on the road.

  Ben Wainright held up his hands. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Who does?” The youth shrugged, and then faced the impenetrable darkness of the mine mouth. “The curse is not gone, you know?” He turned back to Wainright. “It only waits.”

  Wainright backed down the hill. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Good, remember it. Remember everything that happened here.” The Native American picked up his satchel. “Because I can’t hold it forever.”

  “Okay. Got it. Thank you.” Wainright turned away and scrambled down the loose rock of the rutted path to his car. He pulled open the door and jumped into its furnace-like interior, slammed the door, and quickly ducked down to look through the windscreen back up the hill.

  The young man was gone. “Crazy.” Wainright swallowed hard onto a hammering heart.

  He started his car and turned in a tight circle, shooting loose rock out behind him. He’d had enough of curses, people turning to wood, and Adotte Sakima, or whatever the guy had said.

  Right now, he was going home to get good and drunk.

  CHAPTER 06

  Eldon, Missouri – today

  Saturday morning and Doctor Mitch Taylor sat at a window seat in the coffee shop and sipped from a mug of coffee the size of a soup bowl. Everything seemed bigger and better out here, and much better value.

  He had time on his hands and had decided to wander into town. His first weekend and he was excited, as everything was new and interesting, and he’d loved exploring ever since he was a kid.

  He looked up and down the main street, deciding on his exploration plan—first, he’d go up one side of the street and come back down the other, doing a bit of window shopping, and maybe introduce himself to a few of the shopkeepers.

  He saw that down opposite the council chambers was the Eldon Museum, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt to bone up a little more on his newly adopted home’s history.

  Mitch finished his coffee and then walked up the street to the plain, white-painted building with the glass double doors and cupped hands to each side of his face to peer inside. It had just gone 10 am, and though there was no “Sorry, we’re closed” sign hanging on the Museum door, he didn’t know if they even opened on Saturdays.

  There was a flick of movement inside so he dropped his hands, grabbed the large brass doorknob, and turned it. The door opened smoothly, and he pushed into a smell of chalky mustiness and dry air-conditioning.

  “Hallo-ooo.” The musical greeting made him smile and a woman bustled toward him with hands clasped in front of her.

  She pointed. “It is you.” She beamed. “You’re our new doctor.”

  Mitch raised his eyebrows. “My notoriety precedes me.”

  She laughed softly. “You had a write-up in the Eldon Gazette just a week back. You look just like your picture.” She held out a hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Doctor Taylor.”

  “Nice to meet you too and please call me Mitch, Ms…?” He returned the smile.

  “Alston, Samantha Alston, but call me Sam. And thank you. I’ll call you Mitch out here, and Doctor when I’m visiting. Okay?” She raised a pair of tiny eyebrows.

&nb
sp; “Works for me.” Mitch grinned back.

  She leaned a little closer. “I’m also president of the ladies bridge players club.”

  He nodded, knowing he was meant to be impressed. “Nice.”

  “So, you’ve come to take in some of our history?” she asked.

  “Sure have.”

  “Then let me take you on a personal tour.” She rubbed her hands together and turned. “Follow me.”

  The museum wasn’t large; maybe in the past it had been a converted, larger type house of one floor that now had been partitioned into open display rooms for each of the period themes.

  She pointed at certain relics, pictures, or artifacts, and gave him a brief overview of each. She was pleasant, knowledgeable, and quite entertaining. Mitch was enjoying himself.

  She paced as she kept up her stream of information about when Missouri was first settled, the state’s oldest town, founded by French Canadian colonists in 1735.

  Then she stopped and gave a tiny shrug. “But our little town of Eldon never made an appearance until 1882 and is a relative newcomer to the landscape. It’s said that it was the old stories that apparently stopped a lot of people from settling out here.” Samantha turned.

  “Stories?” Mitch asked.

  “Yes,” she declared, but then, “well, maybe legends is a better word. In those days, superstitions and belief made a huge difference to what people did and didn’t do.”

  “What sort of legends?” Mitch asked, intrigued.

  “Well, though Eldon is a young town, and Missouri is only just on 400 years old, its history is far, far older.” She half-turned. “Well beyond our history.”

  She led him into the back of the museum and switched on some lights. “There were seven ancient tribes in the area of what is now called Missouri: The Chickasaw tribe, the Illini, Ioway, Missouria, the Osage, Otoe, and the Quapaw tribe.”

  She stopped before a large case that held what looked like several statues. “And these are some of the mysteries of the area. The history of the Black River area of Missouri goes back to the Paleo-Indians, the ancient peoples of the Americas who were present at the end of the last ice age. They camped and hunted along the Ozark River, perhaps as long as 14,000 years ago.”