Horror 100 Volume 2

Missing

Sam Nolan took his breakfast of cold salmon and buttered toast every morning at the bottom of a two story house three miles north of Kenai Harbor. There were no windows in the basement of that house from which to study the blue sky, yet that proved to be a small blessing for the giant man; for all the years he came to work at this outpost, Sam found little favor for the endless daylight which accompanied it.

He stood six-four, with a strong back and plate-sized hands, and could work men half his age straight to their graves. His eyes knew the inside of every processing plant in town, and his arms knew the motions of any commercial fishing job Alaska had to offer. Sam Nolan never had trouble finding work in Kenai Harbor during those lively months of the year.

There were locals who lived near Sam, and they all knew him by sight, many by name, and a few a bit more than that. One man could rightfully claim that Sam Nolan was even his friend, if it were in his nature to do so. Yet if you asked any one of those locals if they thought Sam was a tough man, your answer would be a simple one.

But Sam didn't need anyone to tell him he was tough. He remembered that day he sent three men to the health clinic for talking the way they did to that young girl. "They bore an ill-favored manner on that woman, of which I took offense to," was his reply to the officer-in-question. Sam Nolan was a man of little words, but when he did speak, it seemed everyone heard what he was saying. He slept in his own bed on that night.

In a dark corner of that basement which Sam called his home for six months of the year was a small oak dresser containing three drawers. None of those drawers kept so much as a sock in them, as they were all evenly filled with books and magazines. And since there were only four things Sam ever did while in Kenai, if he wasn't working or sleeping, it was quite possible you'd find him there in that basement, reading one of those books or magazines.

But because his hobby of choice was a private one, no one ever did witness Sam as he sat there cross-legged on the floor wearing his glasses, flipping through pages. Yet sure enough, the sight would have certainly struck a few of those locals as being most queer; burly Sam Nolan with his scraggly hair and wild beard, and those gargantuan hands all towering peacefully over a delicate little book. All the same, if you asked any person who vaguely knew Sam whether or not he was a learned man, your answer would yet again be a simple one.

But Sam Nolan didn't need anyone to tell him he was smart, either. He knew how many books he read.

Readers often have a preference as to what they put in their hands. Some liked novels of various genres, others reached for non-fiction in all its forms, and still there were those who were very much like Sam, in that they simply read a little bit of everything.

But it was in April of 1989 that Sam took a keen interest in reading about the local myths and legends of the Pacific Northwest. While in Anchorage, Alaska during that time, he found at a used bookstore a host of literature which fit that particular field of study. He read through half of those books before he made it back to that basement in Kenai, one month later.

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"People went missing," Henry Fall used to say, as they sat in the only bar Sam would ever visit, there in Kenai. The old man kept his long grey hair forever in a pony-tail, saddled on top with a ragged ball cap. There were grim vacancies in his toothy smile, but that never stopped Henry Fall from cackling the way he did, every hour of every night in that bar. This was the man who could've claimed Sam Nolan for his friend, for on those occasions when Sam acquainted that bar, it was Henry whom he sat with and talked about mostly nothing of any great importance to. And that by the way, was the fourth thing Sam ever did while in Kenai harbor.

"They went missing for many reasons," Henry would continue. The old man had a lengthy list as to why people went missing in Alaska. Everything from plane crash, to fratricide. And when he was sober enough to take a serious tone, his tales on that subject would snare Sam Nolan the same as one of those books in that basement did. But in the warm months of that year, 1989, as Sam and Henry were sitting in that bar talking about people going missing, the old man decided that his friend might value something a little bit more than just words.