Like I was telling you outside, I first ran into that woman you saw me toting into the woods at a gas station in town. That was the afternoon before you got here. Bear in mind I’m trying to focus in on the past few days and wait to tell you all the rest when I can show you things as well, but there are some things I need to explain as we go so it will make more sense. For instance, how I can tell an outsider—that’s what I call them for reasons that will be clearer in time—from a normal person.
When I bit out Salk’s throat, I must have swallowed close to a quart of his blood in the process. I didn’t think about it at the time, but it’s the best explanation I have for what happened next. I went for nearly two months after killing him without reading about any strange murders or having any indication that the creature I had seen was still out in the world. I was starting to think that it was either truly over and some things would just remain a mystery, or at the very least my ability to intervene had ended with my lead on Salk.
Then one day I was walking down a hallway at the hospital when I
passed an old man. He appeared to be there visiting someone and was
coming out from the downstairs cafeteria as I was about to go in. There
was nothing remarkable about him at all, and as our eyes met at a
distance he gave me a polite nod and kept moving forward. But within
two more steps of him I was hit with a painful wave of nausea. My first
thought was that I was just sick and the first symptoms were hitting.
But then moments later I felt fine again, and I looked to see the man
had moved past me by a little more than the distance that we had been
when I first felt sick.
I pondered it for a moment and then decided to follow him. He had meandered into the nearby gift shop to peruse the handful of magazines and crossword puzzle books on offer amid the stuffed animals and overpriced snacks. I waited a few seconds and then entered behind him. Careful to stay out of his line of sight, I edged closer.
Again, when I got within about five feet of him I was struck with nausea. Not nearly as strong this time, but very distinct and unpleasant. I tested it several times, moving back and forth out of the invisible demarcation between well and unwell. It was as regular and reliable as flipping a switch.
Something in Salk’s blood has stayed with me and become a huge asset in my work. Whenever I get close to one of these things, these outsiders, I feel that same familiar sick feeling. The range varies, but it’s definitely grown over time to an average of about twenty feet. The first time is always bad, though I’ve grown accustomed to it enough that it isn’t incapacitating. After the first time I make contact with one of them, from then on it is much weaker, though it never goes away entirely. And the feeling is unique to that particular outsider. Every first encounter with a new one is always strong.
So going back to the other day when I encountered the woman. I was picking up some candy in the gas station, debating on whether I wanted to just eat junk food that night or actually get some kind of substantial dinner, and that woman walked past me on the next aisle over. I knew right away what the feeling I got was, and the store was empty enough it was easy to tell where it was coming from.
Of course, I didn’t react in any way. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I learned years ago to be careful you never tip your hand to one of them. Surprise is one of the few advantages we have, so it should never be squandered. Instead I waited and listened. When she went up to the counter to pay for some kind of soft drink and chips, I heard the conversation between her and the cashier. They knew each other. Apparently went to church together. That meant she was local, so she would be easier to find later.
As I pretended to look at a bag of chocolate-covered peanuts, I
looked out the window to the only other customer car in the parking lot.
It was a gold-colored sedan with some kind of back window decal I
couldn’t make out from that angle. I waited, hearing the cashier call
the woman Susie as she said good-bye.
Putting down the candy, I picked up another brand and made a show of studying the nutritional information on the back, which was a horror in and of itself. Susie was slow pulling away, but when she finally did I saw two more things. The window decal was for Midcreek Community College, which was only twenty miles away from here. And she had an educator tag on her car.
Smart phones, as disturbing as they can be in some regards, are wonderful tools for the things I do. Obviously any internet research or phone calls I make in connection with hunting is done with what they call burner phones, but they have come a long way, haven’t they? Before I left the gas station I had already found her, picture and all. Susan Averetti, associate professor of economics at Midcreek Community College. A couple of more searches and I had her home address.
When I went out last night, I went to her house first, but no one was there. Next I drove by the college, but there was no sign of her car there either. Then, as I was coming back through town, I saw the gold sedan at that late-night diner near the interstate. Slowing down, I could see her inside at a booth, eating some kind of waffle as she sat by herself.
That is the hardest part, Jason. You see these people, these
things, living their public lives, showing their external face. If
you’re doing it right, they don’t even know you’re watching them. And
they seem vulnerable. Mundane. Human. It is easy to forget that the
woman sitting alone in the dingy dinner, morosely gnawing on a waffle
late at night, she isn’t really a person, not entirely. At best that’s
only part of the truth. And the other part…well, believe me, if you
ever let yourself forget the other part, you’re liable to wind up dead.
So you have to close yourself off from feeling sorry for them or seeing mercy as some kind of virtue. That kind of thinking almost killed me twice early on in all of this, and while it’s the hardest lesson to learn, its also one of the most important.
I parked across the road from the diner in the shadow of a rundown
pawn shop that had gone belly up years earlier from the look of it. I
watched her eat her food, pay her bill, and get in her car. I followed
her, and soon it was clear she was most likely going home based on her
route. It was an educated guess, but worth the risk to get the jump on
her. I turned off to take a different, slower route, making up the time
and distance with speed, and getting to her house three minutes before
she did. From all signs she lived alone, and I had unscrewed her porch
light before she pulled up.
As she was reaching into her purse for her house keys, I stepped out, slamming the syringe into her neck and pushing in the mixture it contained all within a couple of seconds. She made a small noise of surprise and flailed around for a couple of seconds, but she was already lost. The cocktail I give them contains a mixture of sedative and paralytic, and for the most part they are on the ground within ten seconds.
The trick is managing the dosage and judging how much time you have. The right dose is enough to put a normal person into a coma or respiratory failure, but an outsider will push through it and come to in around an hour. As much as they share human frailties when you catch them by surprise, if you aren’t done moving them and dealing with them before the time runs out, you better be ready with another dose or you have a major problem.
But with her, everything went smoothly enough. I loaded her into the back of my SUV, brought her back here, and I had her in the woods all within forty-five minutes. Then I just had to finish her off.
I know that sounds cold. It felt very cold to me the first few times I thought about it in those terms. But when you see the things they do…it’s not all brutal killings like Salk would do. Many of them are far more clever and insidious. When you face the realities of that kind of evil, your sensibilities start to change quite a bit. Your willingness to do harm, your tolerance for cruelty…it slowly becomes palatable. At the best and worst of times, it becomes righteous.
And that’s one of the dangers too. You have to understand these things to kill them, but you have to keep yourself separate too. When I perform a surgery, I want the patient to live very badly. But I can’t let myself care about them or worry about them at a personal level. That emotion would get in the way, making me hesitate or make a mistake. It’s the same thing with this. You cannot do this out of a sense of revenge and you can’t let yourself become like the thing you’re hunting.
In any case, the best and cleanest way to kill an outsider is to destroy what I call the seed. All of them, when they are alive and for a short while after they are dead, have this small, black…well, it looks like a pebble usually. It’s tucked just beneath the left hippocampus most of the time. The hippocampus, as you may know, is part of the temporal lobe of the brain, and is tied to creating memories as well as complex emotions. I have a theory that’s why the seed is so close by. It makes it easier for it to influence the outsider’s perceptions and reactions to things. That’s also why when the pretense is not needed, such as when I was in Salk’s closet or when he had me tied up, they are quick to revert to an almost emotionless default state. But we can talk more about all that later. For now, back to the point.
If you drill into the left side of the skull just in front of and about halfway up the height of the ear, you will often hit the seed. It may take three or four tries, but a moderately powerful cordless drill works just fine with some weight applied to pushing it in, and assuming you have a long enough drill bit, of course. The seed itself is fairly fragile, and when the bit hits it, it will shatter.
Then something remarkable happens. There’s a low vibration that you
can feel in the air—it reminds me of the rumble hum you feel in a
subway station sometimes—and then the body is just gone. More
accurately, it collapses in on itself like some kind of dying star, but
it is too fast to see with the naked eye. I’ve managed to catch some
evidence of it on special cameras, but for reasons that will be
explained, that’s a difficult process in and of itself.
But when it goes, it all goes. The body, the clothing it was wearing, and anything else that is inorganic and on it or inside of it. I’ve taken to leaving the drill in when I hit the seed, as it removes the need for me to dispose of a bloody tool later. Even the blood from the drilling, if it is still physically connected to the body, will all go away. That’s why I make sure to drill through a folded-up towel. If I keep pressure on and do it quickly enough, I can finish with no trace of the person ever being there at all.
That being said,
My grandfather stopped, his face looking concerned and angry as he looked out the window. We were in the living room now, and as I turned to look outside, I saw a pick-up truck flying up the road to the house. It was hard to see at that distance and speed, but it looked like several people were in the bed of the truck, all of them wearing hoodies and masks.
“Shit.” My grandfather was standing up, his face hard. “Apparently someone at the sheriff’s office is part of the House and figured out who you were talking about when you said I had a woman last night.”
I was standing myself now, looking between the road and my grandfather, feeling more and more bewildered. “The House? What?”
My grandfather shook his head. “The House of the Claw. It’s a cult. They’re human but very deadly. No time to explain now. We running or killing? Your call.”
I could barely breathe. “Running?”
He nodded, reaching under the chair he had been sitting in to pull out a semi-automatic pistol. “Fair enough. Stay close to me and don’t stop unless I say so. We’re going for my truck. Now go!”
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Credits
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