The Pale Man Rises

CHAPTER SEVENTY NINE

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The helicopter lowered its altitude as it cast its faint shadow onto the snow-covered town. Looking through binoculars Captain Bradley spotted the glow of the road flares in the thick atmosphere before he actually saw the LZ the police chief had prepared for them. Once he had completed the chore Townsend had returned to the office and was now himself attempting to raise the Sheriff and his deputy once again over the radio and the walkie-talkies.

Jerrold circled the thumping giant bird about the town looking for potential hazards such as power lines to close to the LZ or other such innocuous bits of the landscape that could become problematic once he attempted to set the machine down. He saw few and the ones he did see posed no threat to them about the grocery store or the shaft of space, which they would hover in and lower the metal beast down.

All was clear of any obstruction. It came in like a bird of prey on its approach. A bird of prey alighting on some rodent it had eyed fleeing in the snow wishing to sink its sharp talons into the tender flesh to take home to feed hungry small ones.

As it touched down the rush of wind from its blades tumbled distant hats and sprayed snow all about piling it on itself and the spiked brilliant flares. Jerrold disengaged the helicopter's engines and the blades thumped slower and slower until they at last stopped and tilted slightly to one side. Soon everyone disembarked from the flying machine and were led inside by detectives Farr and Spellman who had come out of the municipal building to greet them. The citizens who had cleared the lot remained where they stood and watched all this police activity with great concern. What in the world was happening here in their small town?

Once all the lawmen were inside they gathered around the desk where the FBI Special Agent stood preparing for his audience with them. Everyone was there save but for Ronald Langley the Sayer County detective and William Berle Fipps the Sayerville Gazette reporter.

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Mabry took no notice of the aforementioned absences because of the growing crowd around him and too since he was now quite worried about Sheriff Harper and his deputy Skeeter Branch. He began the briefing with this distressing news and then quickly disseminated everything he suspected even the wild proposal that there was something surreal about this case.

The two military men looked at each other cynically when they heard all this, but they reacted like any junior officers would have in a briefing that was being given to them by the high hat brass, they kept their opinions about such things to themselves.

Harper and Jack took all of the old people back to a room and tied them into the furniture there. They tore shreds from the bed sheets to accomplish this disregarding any protestations by the old people that the knots were to tight or that they had been taken into the wrong room. The pale man ordered the child to have a seat near the beautiful tree. She went nearby it and sat on her knees giving the impression of a child at her own tree eyeing its beauty but disappointed that there were no presents or toys secure beneath its man-made branches.

"Do you enjoy Christmas Hildy?" the monster asked the child. She turned about to him and he could see she was crying. She was crying like an adult. Like many of the pathetic adults she'd known in her brief life. She was crying, but her tears were veiled in silence.

She'd noticed that. She noticed that when adults cried most times it wasn't in loud wailing tones like children make when they are upset. It'd always seemed to her in her young mind that when adults cried it was a way of surrendering to their grief or the troubles that plagued them. And as she sat there at the lovely tree without gifts she realized that she would not see another such holiday and there was no way of denying it. And so she had surrendered to the inevitability of her situation. She would never grow up, but if growing up meant coming to terms with the reality of life, that it was endless toil, and drudgery, and ultimate doom then she was now herself aged beyond her time.