Day 23

Chapter 32

Mrs. McGregor picked up one of the knives and handed it to Mandy. “Find a place to hide,” she whispered. Mrs. McGregor sat down on one of the waterproof boxes and took on an air of exhaustion and confusion, an older person’s greatest ruse. She turned off her flashlight.
Mandy scanned the room, finally deciding on a crack near the entry tunnel, fronted by a pile of breakdown. It wasn’t the best hiding place, but, hopefully, attention would fall on Mrs. McGregor. She also turned off her flashlight. The darkness startled Mandy: she hadn’t expected it to be so black.
From the tunnel that they had come down, Mrs. McGregor could see flashes of light. She could hear someone carefully walking toward the room, knowing that someone might be in the room. The footsteps stopped just outside entrance. The light scanned the room, slowly taking in everything. When it landed on Mrs. McGregor, head bowed, breathing heavily, it jumped as its owner jumped. Mandy heard a small noise of surprise. She almost jumped herself. She could feel the fear prickling the back of her neck. she hadn’t had time to think about what they had found. Two and two. The image of the dead deer flashed through her mind. She had to control a terrible gasp in her throat. she felt the metallic taste of adrenaline in the back of her throat, and felt it course through her heart making it flutter. She gripped the knife, not knowing what she would do with it.
Mrs. McGregor heaved a sigh and the light jumped again.
“Who’s there?” A man’s voice said shakily.
“Oh,” Mrs. McGregor said, as though she had not reaized that anyone else were there. She looked into the light. She had removed her hat; her hair lay disheveled and flattened against her head. A whisp stuck out on the side. In the light, her face seemed ghostly pale. She looked down again, saying nothing more.
“Who are you?” The voice asked. Trying to bolster confidence, the voice had a gruffness to it. “What are you doing here?”
Mrs. McGregor stood up and the man with the light advanced. “Don’t move,” he said. Mrs. McGregor looked at the man again, exhausted resignation on her face. Mandy could feel his confusion. Her hiding place stood five feet from the man, directly to his left. She couldn’t see him well. He stood about five feet tall. She could see that in his right hand he held the flashlight pointed at Mrs. McGregor. In the left he held his hand in front of himself, palm facing her. He was unarmed, as far as Mandy could see. She grabbed a rock from the floor. She prepared herself, gripping the rock, testing its weight. She decided that as he took the next step, she would jump out and strike him from behind. She couldn’t see the floor, but thought that she had a good idea where most of the loose rocks lay.
Mrs. McGregor collapsed. Mandy didn’t have time to worry that she might not be faking the fall. The man took a step toward Mrs. McGregor and Manyd jumped out as silently as she could. The flashlight swung around toward her, but not before she landed a blow to the back of his head. The man fell to the floor with a soft thud.The feeling of rock hitting bone and hair left Mandy nauseous.
“That was great,” cried Mrs. McGregor.
Mandy stood over the man unable to say anything. She flicked on her light and shown it at his face. He couldn’t have been over twenty. “I’ve killed a college student,” she said.
“No. He’s not dead at all. Look at his chest.” Mrs. McGregor pointed. “He’s just having a little rest. Did you like my acting?”
Mandy looked up at her. She felt disgusted and exlierated at the same time. She smiled a little and felt guilty for it. “I konked him good, didn’t I?” She said. “What shall we do with him?”
Mrs. McGregor shined her light around the room. “I suppose that we should move him out of the way. And we ought to cover him up so he doesn’t go into shock or something like that.”
They tried to move the unconscious young man, but found the going difficult: for being only five feet tall, he seemed inordinately heavy. After a minute of struggle and not much headway, Mandy suggested that they leave him were he lay. She took two of the robes and covered him up, using them as blankets. She suddenly felt hungry. She went to the boxes of food and rifled through them looking for something that looked appetizing. She settled on a bag of chips.
“Do you think that this is our livestock killer?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Mrs. McGregor. “We’ll have to ask him when he wakes up. And hopefully that is soon because he isn’t the only one in the gang.” She nodded to the robes. “It looks like two more.”
Mandy nodded as she ate the chips. She examined the remaing robe. The cuffs definitely had blood stains on them. Whose, or what kind of blood, she could not tell.
By the time the young man began to stir, both women had become chilled. Mandy felt tired after using so much adrenaline. When she heard a moan from his direction, however, she stood up, ready to go again.
Mrs. McGregor shined a light on the man’s face. He grimaced in the bright light. Slowly, he drew his hand across his eyes to block out the light. “What happened?” he asked.
Mrs. McGregor moved the light out of his face so that he could uncover his eyes. “You snuck up on us, and we got the drop on you,” she said. “What are you three doing down here?”
The young man groaned. “Why did I let Frank talk me into this?’
Mrs. McGregor remained silent, perfering to let him talk. “It was fun at first,” he said. “We came down here and drank some wine that we had stolen from our parents, maybe had few chips [make them more high school age]. Then Frank started talking about sacrificing. I thought that he was just kidding, but then one night he showed up late and had this animal. I couldn’t even tell what it was. He had torn it apart; there was blood everywhere.” He moaned again and sat up. “Who are you? Are you the cops?”
“Did Frank make you kill those deer?” Mrs. McGregor asked.
The boy looked terrified. He slowly shook his head.
“Did Frank kill them himself?”
The boy put his head in his hands. “I haven’t been down here for about a week, not since those deer were killed. That scared us pretty bad. We were over at Torture Rock. Frank and Jimmy wanted to do a sacrifce under the moon. It was pretty late and we were pretty drunk. We were all gathered around the rock and Frank was leading the ceremony, when there was a terrible noise from up on the ridge.” He stopped and Mandy could see him physically shiver. “I never heard anyting so terrible. It made me sick to my stomach. It was like somebody pulled the guts out of dying cat. I thought that I was going to throw up, but I didn’t.”
Mandy glanced at Mrs. McGregor, tearing her eyes from the boy. She didn’t know what to say. She could clearly see, however, that he told the truth: he was terrified of the memory of that night.
“What’s your name, dear?” Mrs. McGregor asked. She sounded motherly.
The boy looked up at her. “Martin, ma’am,” he said.
“Then did you go up and have a look to see what had made that noise?”
“No ma’am,” he shook his head. “We ran back to Frank’s car and drove right back here. I came back into the store room and hid. I’m not ashamed to say that I was as scared as a baby. The next morning, Frank convinced us that we should go have a look up on the ridge. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to be left behind either. So I went with them. We hiked up there and found where that deer was killed. I was scared when I saw that it didn’t have a brain anymore.” He looked at Mrs. McGregor, his eyes pleaded to her across the darkness. “Who would do that to a deer?” He asked.
“Did you carve those symbols on the tree?” Mandy asked. She cringed at the sound of her own voice, she had listened to the other two for so long.
“Frank said that we should mark the place so that as to ward off the evil that had been done there. He says those symbols are a sign of protection. I think that learned them from his father.”
“Do you know what they mean?” she asked.
Martin shook his head. “I guess they just mean stay away from here because evil was here.”
Mandy had a hard time reconciling the fact that these boys had practiced animal sacrifice, but felt that they needed to ward themselves from evil.
“Where are Frank and Jimmy now?” Asked Mrs. McGregor.
Martin shrugged his shoulders. “I haven’t talked with them since Friday at school.” He hugged his arms around his chest. “Please, ma’am. I’m getting cold and my head sure hurts.
“Do you have a car?” Mandy asked.
“I rode my bike. Usually Frank drives us down here.”
Mrs. McGregor helped Martin to his feet. She draped one of the robes around his shoulders. She rummaged through the food box and brought out a candy bar, handing it to him. He opened it and greedily stuffed it in his mouth. Mandy felt compassion and revulsion in equal measures for this boy. He seemed lost and scared and stupid all at once. On the way out, she grabbed a bottle of wine and put it in her backpack.
They carefully climbed out of the cave. Mrs. McGregor led the way, followed by Martin, and then Mandy. Mandy felt that Martin told the truth, and she hoped that he did. She didn’t envy Mrs. McGregor leading the way out when anyone could be waiting around a corner, or at the entrance. They came to the crawl and worked their way down the slope to the floor of the main tunnel. Martin stumbled every now and then, and Mandy worried that they would have to carry him out, which she knew that they could not do.
They reached the entrance and broke out into the daylight. It hurt her eyes at first, but she quickly adapted. She looked around the sinkhole carefully searching for an accomplice. The hole stood empty. They climbed to the rim and walked to the care, stills stuck in the ditch. Martin’s bicycle was not in sight. “Where’s your bicycle?” She asked.
Martin pointed to the other side of the road. “I hid it over behind some brush. No one looks over there. How did you find the cave?” He looked at the car and said, “Oh.”
“Do you think that you can ride out of here and get help?”
He shook his head. “I’m not feeling too good,” he said.
“The question is why doesn’t anyone else find the cave?” Mrs. McGregor asked.
“It’s not on the refuge maps. I don’t think that they want to develop it because there are bats that live back down the main tunnel.” Bat conservation had been a hot topic in McLoughlin for many years.
“How did you find it,” Mrs. McGregor asked.
They all sat down on the hood of the car. “We were biking out here and Jimmy had to go to the bathroom. We stopped and he walked out into the sagebrush and just found it.”
Mandy opened the car door and found a bottle of water and a corkscrew. She handed the water to Mrs. McGregor and got to work on the wine bottle. Mrs. McGregor took a long swig of the water and handed it to Martin. He gratefully took a drink also. Mandy poured a plastic cup half full of wine and handed it to Mrs. McGregor, then one for herself. Martin looked like he thought that he should have one also. Mandy held the bottle away and asked, “How old are you?”
He smiled. “Twenty-one, ma’am,” he said.
“You’re not over eighteen if you’re a day,” said Mrs. McGregor.
“And besides,” said Mandy, “you’re not supposed to drink alcohol after being hit on the head with a rock.” She shrugged. “Sorry about that.”
She put the bottle on the roof of the car and they sat to wait for someone to come by.