Eli McMorn and the Strange Case of Kill Devil Hill – Part 21

In the dream, I was sprawled on the rocky, jagged surface atop Kill Devil Hill. The smell of dead pine straw and ancient lichen filled my nostrils. A large coyote had my right shoulder clamped between his slavering jaws.

Digging in with his large forelegs, the crazed coyote shook his hoary head side to side with great violence. I smelled the rabies in the foam around the beast’s lips and sensed sickness in its veiny, red eyes. From a distance, somewhere out of sight, a young woman’s panicked words reached my ears.

“McMorn! Get up! Wake up!”

I swam up out of sleep as the phantom notion of the coyote fell away with the rest of the macabre nightmare. An instant later, my right hand closed over the grip of my trusty Beretta as I drew it free of its holster. My eyes snapped open but had yet to focus before someone slapped my gun hand.

A panic worse than the dream fear dumped a hot shot of adrenaline into my veins. I came wide awake.

“McMorn! It’s me!” a woman’s voice said. It was the folklore student, Abbie Armitage. “Kat’s gone.” she continued. “All her stuff is gone.”

I jumped to me feet. By the dim, unsteady light of the dying campfire, I saw that Kat Corwin’s small nylon tent was no longer on the hilltop. How long had I been asleep? Had I slept so deeply that she’d packed up and slipped away without my notice?

I took a deep breath. Gather information. Form a plan. Think. What to do next?

I fixed Abbie in my gaze. “What happened?” I asked.

“We fell asleep by the fire,” she said. “Kat must have slipped out of her tent, packed all of her stuff and slipped down the trail, headed back to Claiborne.”

“In the dark?” I wondered out loud. “She seemed too afraid to strike off alone like that.”

Abbie drew her coat in tight around her thin shoulders. “I know.”

Abbie cupped her thin, elfin hands around her mouth to amplify her voice. “Kaaaaaat!” she shouted into the indifferent night. Her voice echoed with a forlorn flatness. A small cloud of misty vapor issued from her mouth and into the cold night air each time she shouted the name of her missing friend.

I moved to the empty spot where Corwin’s tent had been, knelt and examined it closely under the beam of my headlamp. Oddly, I saw no trace that she’d ever been there. She hadn’t even hammered her tent pegs into the rocky hilltop.

Abbie called out again and again, stopping between shouts to listen. “It’s hard to believe she just left,” Abbie said. “Daylight’s only a few hours away.”

“Hush,” I whispered, cocking my head to one side. Faintly, from the east, I heard what sounded like a female voice.

“You hear that?” I said under my breath.

Abbie nodded. “It’s her.”

A moment later and louder, we heard another female voice, but we couldn’t make out the words. The inarticulate sound was long and drawn out and sounded like someone in distress. Again, the nagging feeling that something wasn’t right ran its cold, bony finger down the crest of my spine.

I racked the slide on my handgun and took Abbie’s arm. “I think it’s her. Let’s go.”

Abbie called out to her friend once more as we moved towards the spot on the monolithic hilltop where the trail started its narrow way down the side of the secluded hill. Another long female sound, again unintelligible, came from the east. We skittered to a stop at the top of the trail, just behind the thick line of salt we’d poured earlier around the entire campsite.

“Hold up,” I said.

Overhead, the full moon was big and bright, but down below, the forest beneath the hilltop was shrouded in a shifting mass of white ground fog. The twisting trail down the side of the hill disappeared into the fog about 10 feet from the top. A whiff of noxious brimstone filled the air.

“What’s that?” Abbie said, pointing at a small, dark object just off the side of the trail.

“Stay right here,” I said as I stepped over the salt boundary and made my way down the trail. Before I reached the obscured object, I realized what it was. I picked it up, stepped quickly back to the top of the trail and handed it to Abbie.

It was Corwin’s Claiborne Cannons baseball cap. Abbie took it from me and turned it over in her trembling hands. “What’s this stuff?” she said, rubbing the thumb and fingers of her right hand together. In the light of my headlamp, a milky-white, viscous substance dripped from the bill of the cap.

I took the cap from her, tossed it on top of the campfire and watched it go up in a whoosh of green flame. I got some of the goop on my fingers too and brought my fingers to my nose. The distinct smell of ozone flooded my nostrils, confirming my suspicions.

“What is it?” Abbie asked.

I wiped my fingers on the side of my khaki cargo pants. “Ectoplasm.” The word dropped like a stone between us.

(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)