SHADOWS
Elizabeth and her husband live in a well-kept two-story home on several acres of property. Three slobbering mutts clamber over one another to greet me when I let myself through the gate. After I dutifully scratch each one behind the ear, paying the entry fee, they run off to chase some invisible foe.
Elizabeth is sitting on the porch with a pitcher of iced tea sitting on a table. She’s a bit more robust than the photo taken shortly after high school, but the eyes and hair are the same.
“So you’re the man who keeps digging up bodies?” she asks.
“I guess you could say that.”
She motions for me to sit down. “Thomas says you lost a friend?”
I assume Thomas is her police officer husband. “A former student.”
“I hear they hauled you in as a suspect at first?”
“That was an experience.”
“I bet. I bet. But you’re here to talk about Cougar Creek. Really, you’re wasting your time. Like I said, it was a hoax. That’s all there is to say.”
She delivers this as a prepared speech. I can tell that this has been weighing heavily on her.
“Two people think there is,” I say.
“Pardon?”
“Two people see a possible connection. Me and you. When I called, you said you were expecting someone to reach out to you sooner or later. So far we’re the ones with the most intimate knowledge of this, and we’ve both drawn the same conclusion that they might be related.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to go. I don’t want to have to sic my dogs on you.” She says this only half-heartedly.
“Good luck with that. I met your dogs.”
She shakes her head. “Worthless animals.” She resigns herself to accepting my stubbornness. “Fine. Understand that I didn’t have a clear idea what was happening at the time, and after the fact, my friends exaggerated parts of what happened. And then others just went crazy with it. I once even read an account that said we were up there having some kind of demonic animal ghost orgy. I went up that mountain a virgin and came down a virgin, thank you very much.”
“So what did happen?”
She takes a moment to collect her thoughts. “Well, as you probably know, we weren’t the first ones to encounter the Cougar Creek Monster, or whatever. In fact, it was stories about something lurking up there that made Reese Penny and Alex Danson organize the whole trip. They had some idea it was aliens or Bigfoot. Anyway, it grew into a postgraduation campout. Seventeen of us in all.”
“What had you heard before?”
“Hikers said they saw an animal on two legs watching them. They’d come back from fishing and found their campsite had been wrecked. There was even a photo.”
“A photo?”
“Yeah. I think Alex’s cousin took it a few weeks before. I saw a blurry mimeographed copy of it. It could have been anything.”
“What did it look like?”
“At the time, I think Reese said it looked like the Black Panther, from comics. He actually put a comic book cover next to the image. Maybe. But these new girls, these victims, they were attacked by a bear?”
“There are five claw marks, which would indicate a bear. A cat would have four, normally.”
“Thomas says the folks from Fish and Wildlife think there might be a polydactyl cat running around, and that’s why there’s all this confusion. Both big cats and bears are known to bury their prey.”
“Mrs. Collins, I’ve seen these burials. No animal did that.”
“Elizabeth. But you think the Cougar Man might’ve?”
“You still haven’t told me what you saw.”
“Right. Right. So we hike up the hot spring, and some of the others say they think we’re being watched. Lucy Plavin and a couple other girls and I started straggling, picking wildflowers and talking. Pretty soon we were isolated from the rest, but the trail isn’t too hard to follow. We’re walking along, making lots of noise, giggling, whatever, when Carey Sumter stops and asks, ‘What’s that?’ She points to something on the ridge to the left up in the trees.
“We don’t see anything. She says it was something big, and I tell her if it was anything, it was just a bear. Now she’s bone white. Scared. She saw something, but we talked her out of it. Ten minutes later she’s laughing with us and whatever she saw is out of mind.
“It’s not until we get to the spring and start making camp that we find out that three or four other people saw something watching us.
“This is where it started to get a little unsettling. There were three separate sightings at different times. When we compared notes, all of them had the same thing to say: it was on the left ridge, at first it appeared to be a man, but then it slunk off like a cat.”
“Did you think someone was playing a trick?”
“Well, yeah. I thought Reese or Alex was doing something with a costume or one of their friends was hiding in the trees. But they were the ones that seemed the most skeptical. Trying to convince Carey and the others it was a bear. Only they insisted this was too skinny to be a bear. They said it looked like Alex’s photo.”
“Did you see it again?”
She locks eyes with me, as if I’d asked the stupidest question in the world. “Did I see it again? Hell, yes. When it tried to drag me out of my tent.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
ENCOUNTER
“By the time we’d opened up the third case of beer, our nerves had settled down a bit and the ones that came up there to hook up went off to their tents.
“After most of us started to sleep, there was a commotion outside the tents. Carey, Janet, Vivian, and I had decided to share a tent because we trusted the boys less than whatever we thought might be lurking out there.
“One of them woke up at the sound of the tent zipper being opened. At first she thought it was another girl, or one of the boys playing a prank, but when she grabbed her flashlight, whoever or whatever it was had gone. A little while later, Stacey Kavanaugh heard something and yelled. This got everyone up.
“We were back by the fire comparing notes on what happened. Half the tents had said they heard something prowling around and saw a shadow moving past.
“A consensus was reached that it was a bear or a cat. The girls decided to split the boys up among them for protection. Which would have been the perfect plan for Reese and Alex to concoct, only they seemed just as disturbed by what was going on as any of us.
“I knew Scott Cook wasn’t as into the ladies as everyone thought he was, so I ended up sharing a tent with him. He was also captain of the wrestling team, so I felt safe. Poor Scott.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought you knew that part. Well, I’m sleeping on the top of my bag because it’s hot. Scott is sound asleep, curled up in the corner of the tent with Depeche Mode playing on his Walkman.
“At first I think it’s a dream. There’s a sound I can’t quite place. Later on, I realize it’s the tent zipper being raised very, very slowly. My eyes are shut and I’m still half out of it, but then something touches my leg.
“I think maybe it’s just Scott being playful. I decide to ignore it and see how far he goes. Then suddenly, something grabs my ankle and I’m yanked out of the tent.”
Elizabeth’s face gets animated as she recalls this. Her body twists as the muscle memory floods back.
“I scream and grab at Scott’s sleeping bag. As I’m getting pulled outside, I try holding the tent flaps, but this thing is stronger than me and I lose my grip. I roll over on my back and I see this shadow . . . this thing.
“Scott comes running out of the tent and jumps on it. Then . . . then, oh, hell, the thing claws at him. I remember seeing its arm pull back and swipe at Scott.
“That’s when Reese fired the pistol he’d brought with him. Nobody knew he had it until then. The thing let go of me and ran off into the woods.”