Legacy of the Wolf

The beast chased Samantha through darkened woods.

Saplings whipped at her face as she sped, faster, faster— knowing all the while that she could never outrun it. She stumbled into a moonlit clearing and turned, shuffling backward, the fear at last overcoming her, preventing her legs from taking another step. No more running, no place to hide. It emerged from the night-cloaked treeline on two legs, its fur glistening in the radiance of the bloated moon, its eyes burning like twin pits of fire. Lips parted to reveal teeth evolved to tear meat from bone.

The maw opened, and a single word escaped:

"Eclipse."

Samantha Cain had awoken with a sharp intake of breath; her pajamas had soaked all the way through to the sheets. Fading sunlight had peeked around the edges of her drawn curtains. A glance at the clock had told her that it was almost time to start getting ready for the evening shift.

The nightmare had remained present in her mind as she showered. This dream had been only slightly different from others—the one difference being the word spoken at the end. 

After feeding the cat, while putting on her uniform, Sam told herself that it was silly for her to dwell on it. After all, she knew what the cause was: her subconscious was reacting to a night two weeks ago when she had been on a foot chase, pursuing a suspect through a backyard. She had taken a nasty fall, hitting her head… and there had been a dog. Luckily the irate animal had been more interested in the fleeing driver than her, latching onto the suspect's leg. Still, she had thought she might have to shoot the animal until the owner came out and called it off.

After that night she had begun having the nightmares. Dogs already made her nervous… that was how it had been for as long as she could remember. Now her mind was just taking that fear and manifesting it in night terrors. All she had to do was let them run their course.

The first few hours of her shift had been uneventful. One call for bike theft, a few warrants, and a stolen car to be on the lookout for—the usual paperwork. Not long after sundown there had been an anonymous call for a domestic violence incident. When she had arrived at the address, however, the home was empty. Sam had checked in with neighbors, who hadn't heard anything, waited for fifteen minutes, and then notified dispatch that the call was a bust. While it was good that no one was in danger, the waste of time was frustrating. She was less than two years out of the academy, still on a probationary period and looking to impress the department.

Had she missed anything? Sam was replaying her performance in her head while driving north on Knox Street through a residential neighborhood known as "Hard Knox" because of the drug and gang activity, as well as the homeless population. Her windows were up to ward off the frosty October air. There was heavy cloud cover and a smattering of intermittent rain, not at all unusual for Washington State this time of year.

Sam had completed her mental self-review and was satisfied with the result when she swung into a roundabout and slammed on her brakes. 

Standing in the middle of the road was a man wearing a scarf, sweater and sweatpants, and a ragged hooded coat. The scarf and hood kept his face hidden, but it wasn't his face that brought Sam to a state of full alert:

The man's gloved hands and arms were coated in blood.

While she was still registering the image before her, the figure dashed out of her headlights. Sam swung the cruiser through the roundabout, turned onto Harris, and spotted the man on her left side running through an overgrown corner lot. She hit the brakes, put the car in park, and leapt out, thumbing the talk button on her shoulder mic with her left hand…  

"Blackrock, echo six on foot pursuit, code 2. Harris Street, the old church. South side…"

And withdrawing a Maglite with her right. The subject was running toward the fence of an abandoned church that was a well-known squathouse.

Dispatch's voice came through: "Copy echo six, backup en route."

The man ran like a track star, disappearing through a large hole in the chain-link fence. Sam followed, the flashlight in her left hand now as she unholstered her Glock 22. 

Scanning with the light all around the rundown structure, Sam determined that the only place the man could have gone was inside. There was the slightest second of hesitation: Should she go in alone? Was this the right thing to do, or a rookie move? Then she thought about the blood.

Someone could be dying in there…

A second later she was at the entrance, informing dispatch: "Blackrock, echo six, entering the church through the south entrance. Suspect is wearing a gray hooded coat, scarf, and sweatpants."

"Copy."

The first open space she stepped into had once been an administrative area with a corridor and pastor's offices. The inner walls had been demolished, leaving a devastated ruin that looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. Sam had crossed her wrists, left under right, so the Glock's barrel followed the beam of the Maglite. Her light revealed trash, debris, and used needles littering the floor. The smell of human waste was pungent. 

Ahead of her and to the right, connected to the only walls that were still intact, was a doorway leading to the sanctuary, where services were held. 

Rapid footfalls, decreasing in volume, carried to her. Sam hurried through the doorway, glancing to either side and then shining her light across the vast chamber.

The pews had long ago been chopped up and used as firewood. A light misting of rain drifted through the missing roof. Sam stepped forward, hearing a door crash open somewhere at the far end of the room. Casting her beam in that direction, she saw an open doorway next to the stage. Something at the edge of the light caught her eye and she swung it over, frowning. She couldn't be seeing what she thought she was seeing:

A man, hanging upside down. He was wearing pants but not a shirt. His skin was a pale, ghostly white. Sam hurried to the foot of the stage, taking a closer look, making a conscious effort to slow her breathing. The man was very clearly dead. There was a large, dark, wet vacancy where his throat should be, and the face below it was masked in crimson. Barely enough of the mangled neck had remained to keep the head attached to the body. Into her mic, concentrating on keeping her voice even, she said:

"Echo six, Harris Street church, homicide to my location."

Sam heard sirens now, getting closer. Her Mag beam was reflecting off of something on the floor. She sucked in air when her light revealed a tarp stretched out over a large hole in the stage. The tarp was weighted at the edges with rocks, creating a reservoir beneath the corpse. That tarp was filled with blood. Further back was a broken straw broom, the kind with tapered bristles, like a brush. The broom too was soaked in gore.

Stepping aside, Sam shined the light onto the back wall behind the body. The back of her right hand flew to her mouth.

There, painted in bloody letters two feet tall, was a single word:

"ECLIPSE."

Sam was still shaken.

After providing details at the scene and writing up her report, after coming home and lying in bed with her cat, Mr. Perkins, for six hours, she still couldn’t get the image of that hanging corpse out of her mind. And that man, the man in the hoodie…

She had come back to the station for an interview with the homicide detective assigned to the case, Bill Barnes, and as she had described the suspect, she thought of him as Raggedy Man. The name just popped into her head. Had she heard it in some movie? Maybe. She didn’t use that name with the detective. But there was something else she didn’t tell him as well:

She didn’t tell Detective Barnes about the nightmares. Her captain had already offered the services of a police psychologist if Sam wanted one; what would they think of her if she told them about the dreams? And what about dreaming the word “Eclipse”? What kind of craziness was that?

Knowing that there was no way for her to get any sleep, and knowing that Kathy would be worried about her, Sam had driven her civilian vehicle, a 1976 Mustang II Cobra, out to her foster mom’s house. She continued turning the problem over and over in her mind as she pulled onto the gravel drive.

ESP wasn’t something she really believed in. So if it wasn’t some kind of precognition, what explanation existed for her dreaming the word and then seeing the word written in the blood of a dead man?

Sam didn’t know. So far, there were only questions. A thorough dragnet had failed to catch Raggedy Man, so he remained a mystery. There had been no I.D. on the body and a preliminary fingerprint check had turned up no results.

The house Sam had grown up in after her parents died was a wood frame farmhouse, out on the edge of the Blackrock city limits. Sam stepped onto the porch and let herself in.

Removing her shoes at the foyer, Sam called, “Mom?”

Shortly after the car accident that claimed her parents’ lives and nearly claimed her own, after Sam’s lengthy hospital stay, she had become Kathy’s ward. Though Kathy had wanted Sam to call her “Mom,” Sam had not been comfortable with it. She had come to stay with Kathy when she was ten. She didn’t start calling Kathy “Mom” until she turned fourteen.

Sam called again: “Mom!”

No answer.

From the floor above, a creak sounded. Sam’s pulse quickened.

Moving to the staircase on her left side, Sam pulled her jacket back, her hand hovering over the Glock on her hip. Though she was wearing her civvies, Sam never went anywhere unarmed.

She had taken two steps up the staircase when a voice called down: “Sam, is that you, honey?”

Sam let out a long breath and pulled her jacket back over the gun.

“Yeah, it’s me!”

Seconds later Kathy came down the stairs wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, carrying a small, empty glass. Her frazzled graying hair was half pulled back, the rest wafting around her face like smoke. At the bottom of the steps she gave Sam a hug and kiss.

“Mom, until they catch this guy, I want you to lock your door.”

Sam followed Kathy through the family room and into the kitchen. “I saw the news, but they didn’t give a lot of details…”

“There’s only so much they’re willing to tell the public right now.”

Kathy took cat food from a bottom cabinet and filled a bowl near the fridge. “Well, I’m not ‘the public,’ I’m your mother! I have a right to know.” Two cats came running for the food.

The media knew that the body had been found upside down, drained of blood, and that was about it. Sam had no doubt that if she gave her foster mom any additional details, those details would spread through the town like wildfire. And it wouldn’t take a genius to figure out where the leak came from.

“And I want to keep my job. Change of subject.”

“Fine, can I get you a seven and seven?” Kathy went to the fridge for ice.

“I’m working later.” Sam wanted to tell her mom that she shouldn’t be drinking at one in the afternoon either, but that was a conversation they’d had plenty of times already. Kathy’s husband and Sam’s foster dad, Ben, had been a long haul trucker. When Sam was fourteen, while traveling the five freeway from California late at night, he had driven off the road and down a steep embankment. His body was mangled to the point that an open casket funeral had been impossible.

Shortly after Ben’s funeral, Kathy had begun drinking more consistently. Part of the reason Sam started calling Kathy "Mom" was because she felt sorry for her.

In recent months, after the death of her favorite cat, Kathy started hitting the bottle earlier in the day. Sam was worried that before long an intervention would be in order. For now she chose to continue monitoring the situation.

“Johnny Clapton called me…” Kathy had set the glass on the island, then opened the fridge and withdrew a 2 liter Seven Up. “He’ll be in town next week.”

Not this again. Sam’s batting average when it came to men was pretty poor, a fact not at all lost on Kathy, who often tried to play matchmaker. Johnny Clapton, who had bedded so many women in high school that his nickname became “the Clap,” was definitely not her soul mate.

“Yeah, Mom, he called you because he has your number. Not mine. Because I don’t want to talk to him.”

Thankfully at that moment Sam’s cell phone rang. She looked at the caller I.D. “It’s detective Barnes, I’d better take it.”

Kathy was pulling the Seagram’s down from an upper cabinet. “He’s the one who’s not married, right?”

“Really?” Sam said before answering the call. “This is Cain.”

“It’s Bill,” he said. “Wanted you to know, although the domestic call you got was anonymous, the number came back to a burner cell phone.”

Sam was wondering why Detective Barnes was telling her this, but her brain put the pieces together even as Barnes kept on: “Someone didn’t want that call to come back to them. What that says to me is that the call was a lure, to get you out there, so you’d see that hooded man, and so you’d find that body…”

Which also meant that the word “eclipse…”

Barnes finished her thought, an idea that was already lurking in the back of her mind, the only sensible alternative to the ESP theory:

“I think that message at the scene was meant for you.”