The Creeping

“Okay, back to it,” I say to Moscow, who’s purring loudly from the opposite end of the couch. I need answers, and this is the only way I know to find them. Since all evidence points to a multigenerational cult at work in Savage, and the cat, butchered on a makeshift altar, screams twisted sacrifice, I search three terms: “cult sacrifice,” “animal sacrifice,” and “child sacrifice.” I start with general searches on Wikipedia and Google.

After snowdrifts of bizarro articles, I’m too queasy to wade through all the dementedness anymore. I need to narrow results, since it’s unlikely that Savage residents are performing an obscure ancient Chinese ritual of sacrificing people to the river deities or that the fictional Cthulhu Mythos has been brought to life in our small town. I get the point: There are sickos out there, and they believe all sorts of warped things.

Next I search the same terms but limit the results geographically to Minnesota. Using search engines, I come up with a load of indie bands and heavy metal groups with the terms in their names. I switch to searching news databases and subscription websites like LexisNexis, which we use for the Herald, but I don’t find a single article about any cults, legends, or lore in Minnesota that says an iota about sacrifice or redheads.

No shortage of death and dismemberment, though. This area’s history is grisly, not the oasis-in-the-wilderness fantasy I remember learning about in school. Fur traders settled their outposts here and massacred the wildlife. Pioneers drove the natives from their villages. Colonial wars left mass casualties. And outbreaks of tuberculosis, called “the white death,” wasted the population. I gulp. Maybe there’s something to the name of our town after all? Yet none of this has anything to do with Jeanie or the tortured cat in the cemetery.

Moscow arches his back, showing off his chubby tummy. “You brilliant little pig,” I coo to him. I bring up the Savage Public Library’s webpage and click on the news archives. All of the town’s records aren’t available, but it’s worth a try. I search “animal sacrifices.” Zero results. I glower at the screen. I was so sure. I’m about to close my laptop and give in to my sulk and that pint of ice cream in the freezer when something occurs to me. I type “animal disappearances”; holding my breath, I hit enter.

I blow out the breath in a whoosh of dismay. I was right. Seventy-three entries for missing pets in the Savage Bee’s classifieds fill the screen. The newspaper still devotes its last four pages to community classifieds: rummage sale notices, job postings, houses and cars for sale, and missing pets. I hunch over the laptop and scroll through them, my throat getting tighter with each. There are holes in what’s available, multiple-year blocks where no search results are yielded, but there’s enough for it to be a kick in the chest. There are entries dating from 1910 to 2014. Some entries are even from the same week. Families missing dogs and cats, local farms missing livestock, the nursery school missing a goat from their petting zoo, all posted in the classifieds in the hope that someone will find their animal and return it.

I drag Moscow into my lap and cradle him protectively. There’s even one article published in the newspaper on a bizarre number of dog disappearances in November of 1938. This isn’t shocking; ten Fidos going missing is the definition of small-town news. For the seventy-three missing pets that are posted in the classifieds, there must be tens that went unreported. I bet if I went to the library and spent hours looking through the archives, there would be scores more that haven’t been scanned into the system—just like Sam’s articles about the missing girls.

“Why would someone do this?” I think of the butchered tabby cat. Someone went to the trouble of making an altar of candles and sacrificing the poor cat in the place where Jane Doe was found. Aren’t sacrifices usually meant to appease some awful thing? To stop something bad from happening? If all these animals were taken to be sacrificed—I suck in my breath hard—then there were bad things happening around them.

I search for violent crimes and deaths in the archive. With a notebook and pen I chart a time line, staring at the computer screen until my lids are like sandpaper on my eyeballs and my mouth is almost as dry. It isn’t comprehensive. I don’t have time to read every boxed-up and disintegrating newspaper in the archives at the library to flesh it out. I also remember what Sam said about there being more newspapers donated from the years closer to 1972 than further back in time. The distribution of dots on my time line tells the same story. There are even more dots after 1973, since the Savage Bee was rebuilt and the records preserved.

I sit back against the couch and behold the ten-page time line spread over the coffee table: tragic deaths and accidents and their corresponding clusters of animal disappearances.

“Oh. My. Freaking. Gosh,” I say to Moscow. He yawns loll-eyed. My phone buzzes loudly from where I kicked it across the living room floor an hour ago. I crawl toward it; a little current of anticipation runs through me as I spot Sam’s name on the screen.