17
Freddy Hagerman held his breath, every bit of his concentration focused on listening. Nothing. Not a fucking sound.
But somebody else had just been in here, and he had made sure Freddy found the journal. As his eyes once again locked on the book, Freddy remembered to breathe. After all, he was still alive. Somehow, he thought that if the ghost wanted him dead he already would be.
Steadying the camera, Freddy began to capture the room. He was sorry he hadn’t done this the first time he had come through here, just in case something else had been moved since then. Oh well, he’d spot it anyway when he got a chance to spend some time with the film.
Satisfied, he moved over to the bench where the journal rested. It was a nicely bound book with a soft gray hardback binding. Not wanting to have his own fingerprints disturb any potential evidence, Freddy extracted a kerchief from his pocket. Luckily, he hadn’t gotten around to using it yet. This New Mexico desert didn’t have the Kansas plants that set off his allergies.
He grasped the journal by the edge of the cover and carefully opened it. The first page had a spot for the owner to fill in his name and personal information. In stylized handwriting that filled the block, someone had written two words:
“The Priest.”
Freddy snapped a picture. For the next hour, he stood there, carefully turning page after page, reading and then photographing each one. What began as fascination quickly gave way to shock and then disgust. Within half an hour, Freddy thought he would become physically sick, but he kept at it, changing film rolls as needed, until he was finished.
Straitening, he wiped his damp brow on a sleeve. If he hadn’t already seen the other room and gotten Benny’s report, he would have thought he was being had, that this was some sort of sick joke. This guy Priest had been compulsive in his journal entries, but not in the sense of a normal diary. The journal had started less than a year ago and only covered events that Priest regarded as exciting. The first entry was the strangest.
Priest had apparently been an unwilling participant in an experiment conducted by none other than Dr. Donald Stephenson, the deputy director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Dr. Ernesto Rodriguez. They had injected Priest with some gray fluid, the pain of the process so great that he had regarded it as a quasi-religious experience. The gray goo had given him tremendous healing powers.
The remainder of the journal had described the killing of Abdul Aziz and the capture, torture, and killing of Priest’s female “guests,” all of whom had been dumped down a shallow well on the property.
One thing was very clear to Freddy; the experiment conducted on Priest by Dr. Stephenson had not been an officially sanctioned one. He had been trying to test something derived from his study into the Rho Ship, but that test had gone horribly wrong. The same fluid that had given Priest such unbelievable healing powers had apparently rendered him violently insane, setting loose the darkest desires hidden deep in his psyche, accompanied by feelings of invincibility that led him to act out those needs.
With the handkerchief, Freddy picked up the journal, moved back to the ladder, and began climbing back up. For a moment, the thought that he would find the trapdoor closed brought on a brief bout of claustrophobic panic. But it was still open, exactly as he had left it.
By the time he climbed out into the bedroom, it was clear that the flashlight batteries were dying. It was now hard to see more than a couple of feet to either side of the beam’s central bright spot. Well, that was okay. Only one more thing to check out, and then he’d be out of here.
Freddy exited the house, walked out to his car, and gently placed the journal into his satchel along with the already exposed rolls of film. Then, grabbing a couple of fresh rolls, he began walking toward the spot where the decaying outbuildings stood. A crescent moon had risen and gave forth just enough light that he could make out the dark outline of the barn and what must have been a couple of storage sheds. Next to one of them, Freddy remembered seeing an old well.
As he got closer, he found he didn’t need to be able to see it. The smell led him to it. In the dying light of the flashlight, Freddy could see the circular outline of the rock structure. The beam, which had once supported a pulley, rope, and bucket, lay to one side of the hole. The rope and bucket lay alongside it, the bottom of the latter having long since fallen out.
Freddy leaned over the opening and shone the flashlight down. Shit. People should have been able to smell it all the way from Taos. The darkness swallowed the weak beam of light so that he could only see down the rough rock wall for about a dozen feet.
He picked up a small rock and dropped it down, rewarded with the sound of it striking solid ground not far below. The thing couldn’t have been more than about thirty feet deep and, from the sound the stone had made, must have been dry for a long time now. These shallow wells usually relied on tapping into an underground aquifer that came close to the surface. Apparently, this one had changed course or died altogether.
In his satchel back in the car, Freddy kept a small bottle of melaleuca oil. It was a great natural treatment for cuts, scratches, and bug bites, but it smelled like you had dunked your head in a Mentholatum jar. He walked back and retrieved it, swabbing some of the liquid just inside each nostril. Jesus. That would clear his sinuses. But he’d rather smell that than what was down at the bottom of the well.
Making his way back to the well, Freddy bent down and began examining the old rope, finding it surprisingly strong. Although the beam supports had broken, the old log itself seemed stout enough. Securing one end of the rope to the log with an end-of-the-line bowline knot, he heaved it up so that it straddled the well. With his pocketknife, he cut the other end of the rope free from the bucket handle and tossed the rope into the well.
“Here goes nothing,” he mumbled as he swung his legs over the side, taking a single wrap of the rope before swinging down, sliding into the blackness hand over hand.
The thought occurred to him that he already had plenty for his story, more than enough to win a Pulitzer. Shit, if his story stopped what was going on at the Rho Project, he should get a God damn Nobel Prize. But Freddy was a reporter to his core. There was no way he could not look at and record what awaited him at the bottom of this hole, no more than he could hold his breath until he passed out.
Except for one tense moment when the log shifted, his descent into the well was uneventful. The darkness pressed in around him like the stench. He could practically see the foul smell in the dim yellow beam of his flashlight. At a depth of twenty-five feet, he hit bottom, shuddering as he struggled to find a spot for his feet that didn’t involve stepping on a corpse.
As dim as the light had become, he almost wished he didn’t have it. It soon became clear that most of the people had died because of the fall into this well, something that matched the journal’s descriptions. However, bloody marks high up along the walls indicated that one of the women had tried to climb out. As he examined the rough stone, Freddy determined that such a climb should have been possible, if she had still had fingers.
Freddy bent to examine the corpses more closely. The fresher of the two male corpses must have been that of Abdul Aziz, although it was so badly decayed as to be unrecognizable. As he moved to the corpses of the women, he stopped. Fuck. He had wondered why the blood pattern around the sink in the basement hadn’t trailed out across the room and up through the house. Priest had tied them up, snipped their fingers in the sink, and then wrapped the stumps of their hands with Ziploc baggies and rubber bands before carrying them out.
He had seen enough. Freddy began working his camera, forcing himself to remain in the hole until he could no longer stand it. Then, using his best high-school rope-climbing technique, he started the climb back toward the top. By tomorrow morning, he would be in Santa Fe, having already finished typing out the story on his old manual typewriter that waited in the trunk. Then a couple of faxes to people who still remembered his name at the New York Times and he would be back in the business for real.
There would be no more Kansas shit kicking for Freddy Hagerman.