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

For the first time in our bizarre interview, Tommy Lawson, the lone survivor of a mysterious 1988 Halloween incident that left five teens dead, was on the verge of showing real emotion. He’d just told his version of what happened that singular night, and his green eyes watered thinly as he fought back bitter tears. His face was a twisted mask, and he sniffed once as he tried to regain his composure.

I pretended to review the Sheriff’s Department report of the weird incident. It was in a brittle manila folder spread out before me on the dirty metal table between the two of us. The plain black and white clock high on the wall behind Lawson said that it was almost five o’clock. We didn’t have much time left. Soon it would be supper time at the Haines Island mental institution.

In Lawson’s version of this strange story, a 12-year-old hunter shot him with a bow and arrow. The boy’s name was Willie Goss, and he told investigators that he thought he’d shot a deer. The boy, who vanished without a trace two years later while playing in an abandoned gravel pit, claimed that he’d shot a large buck with a big rack of antlers.

When the deer hit the fog-shrouded ground, the boy ran to get his father, a man named Bill Goss, who sat on the tailgate of his truck, smoking a long-stem pipe and eyeing the woodline for any deer that might step out into the dirt road. The boy and his father returned for the deer Willie shot, but instead they found Lawson unconscious with an arrow sticking out of his chest. At first, because of all the blood, Bill thought Lawson was dead, but he knew enough first aid from Vietnam to tell that there was still some life left in the wounded teenager.

These were the days before cell phones, so Bill and Willie half-carried, half-dragged Lawson to their beat up truck and drove to the nearest landline phone, which happened to be on the ground floor of an old Masonic hall a few miles away. They called for an ambulance and the Sheriff’s Department. At the time, all parties involved had no idea what had happened the night before atop Kill Devil Hill, that is, except for Lawson who was too out of it to tell anyone about it.

I glanced back up at Lawson. “You OK?” I asked. He nodded, but looked far from okay. I could see beads of sweat on the back of his hand, atop the black widow spider tattoo that seemed to move with life whenever Lawson wiggled his fingers.

“What happened after the ambulance and deputies arrived?”

“I remember being loaded into the ambulance,” he said. “It was freezing in the back of the ambulance. Very cold.”

Although he was sweating, Lawson shuddered with the memory of that ambulance ride.

“Next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital bed at Claiborne City Hospital,” he continued. “I didn’t know where I was at first, what day it was or what time. It was night outside, but because of a street light I could see the wall of the building next door. A minute or so after I came to, I saw a shadow play across that wall. I began to scream. The thing that I saw had legs and arms like a man but horns like a buck.”

(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.)