The Pale Man Rises

CHAPTER SEVENTY FOUR

532

Once Special Agent Mabry finished his conversation with Professor Chavis he spoke briefly with Sheriff Harper before he and his deputy Skeeter departed for the Rankin residence. He urged them to simply scope out the situation and to report in as soon as they were in a position to know something. "Don't take any chances we should wait for my people before we make any moves." He told the big lawman. Still cynical about what they had learned Harper said. "Shit you don't really believe we're after some kind of monster do you?" Mabry made no comment he simply eyed the sheriff with a look of wary confusion.

Once Sheriff Harper and his deputy Skeeter Branch moved on Mabry escorted the two detectives who had accompanied him down here to one of the department's holding cells. They were getting rather tired and had decided, with Mabry's encouragement, to take a short nap. The chief had suggested they take a rest back here in one of the cells if they so desired. Once they checked the viability of doing so with Mabry they all set out for this portion of the building.

"You boys go ahead and get a brief nap–don't worry I'll let you know when the chopper gets here." Mabry told them as he prepared to head back to the chief's office. Farr and Spellman expressed their appreciation as they gratefully lay down on the hard bunks inside one of the empty cells.

Once he was back in the chief's office the special agent now pondered the whereabouts of Detective Langley and the reporter Fipps. He was still rather suspicious of them both. Were they in cahoots? Chief Townsend suggested that they might have gone looking for the dog Spellman had mentioned was in the reporter's vehicle when they arrived and had now suddenly disappeared as if it had been an illusion.

"They need to get their asses outside and to help those citizens clear that lot." Mabry said and then he excused himself and went alone to the parking lot. He saw the arriving crowd of folks the chief had recruited to clear the landing spot in the grocery store parking lot for the helicopter that would soon be arriving. Some of these people had come on foot carrying shovels, and still others had arrived in their own four-wheel drive vehicles. 

533

 One fellow astonished everyone when he came roaring up on a snow mobile. Why someone in a southern backwater would possess such a machine was rather curious and was an instant topic of conversation. Mabry only hoped that the preparations they were making would prove successful.

He stood there watching these men; some still arriving, busily discussing the chore ahead, and considered what Professor Chavis had told him. And what that was really wasn't that much. All it did was confirm what Mabry's initial suspicions about this case were.

Once he saw the first victim's photographs and the photos of the subsequent ones at the motel he began to believe they were dealing with something not of this world and Chavis had just said as much. Only later when he remembered about the rare form of anemia did he begin to doubt his original, but unspoken hypothesis.

Was this thing some kind of devil? Is that what the devil is, some mythical creature come to life? Some myths have a grain of truth to them, at least he had read that somewhere. Perhaps this creature, this Mantaque was that grain of truth. He had figured it out he was sure. When the tornado had struck the Reese farm it had torn the giant oak tree out of the ground and evidently this was the burial spot for this beast once defeated, but not totally gone.

Somehow the beast had tricked one of the Reese's, likely the junior, and had him rejoin its severed head to its torso. And then the carnage had begun and the trek to this place, this place being The Great Black Swamp. Surely the thing did not believe flight into what little of the swamp that remained would save him. Unless, of course, the thing had a hiding place in there that even modern man had not detected. Certainly the beast could see how mankind had progressed since his exile beneath the tree. Didn't he realize that modern man would hunt him down and dispatch him with relative ease compared to his defeat by any ancient peoples? Unless of course there was some magic in the swamp that would protect him. When he first lost his head he was a long distance, in those times, from the swamp. Why this was so was unknown at this juncture, but it was true and the distance he was from the swamp may have been his greatest handicap.