Creep Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  One SHAPE-SHIFTER

  Two THE WOLF

  Three THE GHOSTS OF SUBURBIA

  Four CHARMED

  Five MESACHEE

  Six HOWL

  Seven SHADOWLAND

  Eight MONSTERS

  Nine FLIRTING 101

  Ten BASH

  Eleven AZRAEL

  Twelve CREEP

  Thirteen THIRTEEN

  Fourteen LOST

  Fifteen SEIZE THE DAY

  Sixteen BITTEN

  Seventeen SACRILEGE

  Eighteen A LITTLE PSYCHO

  Nineteen SUMFIN’ WEIRD

  Twenty CHILL

  Twenty-One CREVASSE

  Twenty-Two GUNNER

  Twenty-Three FEVER

  Twenty-Four PAINT AND GLUE

  Twenty-Five CONFESSION IN BLUE

  Twenty-Six MERCY

  Twenty-Seven DEMONS

  Twenty-Eight SPIRAL

  Twenty-Nine SHUDDER

  Thirty HORRIDUS

  Thirty-One PUSH

  Thirty-Two INCOMMUNICADO

  Thirty-Three WOLF TRAP

  Thirty-Four BOXER

  Thirty-Five SOS

  Thirty-Six GLITTER

  Thirty-Seven DOG FOOD

  Thirty-Eight CHOKE

  Thirty-Nine GOREOPHILE

  Forty DEVIL’S CLUB

  Forty-One LINNAE

  Forty-Two METAMORPHOSIS

  Forty-Three WOLF

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Mystery and Crime Fiction from Dundurn Press

  Copyright

  Cover

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  Acknowledgements

  For Dill, Modobenny, Bogie, Knighthawk, and Gem

  One

  SHAPE-SHIFTER

  Only distance had shut up Jack Randall. After the footbridge over Lynn Creek had come boardwalks and rustic stairs, then tree roots, boulders, and now a steadily rising incline. The October rain was coming down — not the second flood Randall had predicted, palm out in the parking lot, but a meanish drizzle. In the time it took to pause, unzip his patrol jacket, and swear at the sky, Dion’s new partner had gone charging ahead, invisible but for the reflective stripes on his uniform.

  There was no hurry, in Dion’s mind. Somewhere up the path a dead man waited, growing cold, but a minute here or there hardly mattered. It wasn’t a crime, according to the dispatch. What it sounded like was an unfit man who had hiked himself to death. Happens.

  But Randall was new at this, and ambitious — he’d even said so — and was probably hoping for a startling turn of events, a knife in the back or bullet hole in the temple. What he was going to find was everyday tragedy.

  Dion had met Randall half an hour ago, their introductions made in the shadows of the parkade as they responded to the call-out, but already he knew more than he needed to about the man. Randall hadn’t stopped talking from the moment he’d turned the key till — well, the distance now growing between them had put an end to it.

  Randall was twenty-four, a few years younger than Dion. Born in Chilliwack, raised in Surrey, started his career in the central interior. Then, just days ago, he’d lucked into this North Shore posting, which he thought was great. He hoped he would get to stay a while. The plan was to work his way into the Serious Crimes Section, where he could put his brains to good use. He had good brains — he’d said that, too.

  Dion pushed on. Rain spattered on his forage cap and his shoulders, on cedar boughs and the pathway, and before his eyes, the remaining daylight dimmed. There had been no second flashlight in the boot of the cruiser, and all he had was the penlight on his belt, so when a halo blossomed around Randall’s silhouette ahead — the little bastard had finally switched on the truncheon-sized Maglite — Dion jogged to share the illuminated path.

  Randall heard him huffing and turned to stare. “You okay there?”

  Aside from this summer’s trouble, which had landed him back on uniformed patrol with a loudmouth rookie like Jack Randall, much like when he’d left Depot ten years ago, yes, Dion was okay. “I’m fine,” he said. “Why?”

  “We’re leaving the senior’s path now,” Randall said, grinning. He was short but fit. Round-faced, with ginger-gold bangs poking out from under his cap, wire-rimmed glasses, and easy enough in this spanking-new relationship to mock his partner. “Might get a little tougher from here on.”

  It did get tougher, but not for long. Their destination appeared between trees, a blot of light. In the distance, Dion counted three figures standing around a mound of shiny fabric. One of the figures appeared to have two heads, but as he caught up, he realized it was two people glommed together in the twilight.

  Randall was talking to a medic when Dion arrived. The mound was a body lying on the ground, covered in a foil blanket. Rain thumped on the foil, danced, and splashed. The glommed-together couple resolved into two teenagers in a tight embrace, a boy and girl in rain gear, their hoods up. A second paramedic stood apart, talking on a satellite radio. Everybody winced against the falling rain.

  The first medic was saying to Randall, “… Just time and place, you know, thought it’d be a good idea if you guys took a look.”

  “Sure,” Randall said. “What’s the story?”

  “Probably heart gave out. Name is Aldobrandino Rosetti, fifty-two years old.”

  Randall asked to take a look.

  “Yes. Just watch what you say. Those are his kids. They found him. Came looking for him when he didn’t get home by dinnertime.”

  Dion heard the teenagers murmuring to each other. He heard the word Mom repeated. He looked up the path Aldobrandino Rosetti had apparently come down, a dark tunnel through a wall of old-growth trees. Crazy idea to hike alone, and so late in the day. The victim must have collapsed as daylight waned, when the path had cleared of other hikers. Otherwise someone would have come upon him, reported the find. Nobody had. He might have lain here all night, if his kids hadn’t gone out searching.

  Randall leaned over to pull back the blanket, using his flashlight to look up and down the dead man’s body. He checked the pockets for a phone and found one. Dion leaned forward to see what he could of the dead man. He caught a flash of grey-green cargo shorts and a fat, pale elbow flopped to the dirt. Randall lowered the blanket and went to talk to the kids.

  Randall introduced himself to the young Rosettis. He got their names, address, and contact information, while Dion configured penlight and notebook to take it down. Randall asked the teens about their father, what brought him here, how they’d come to find him. Wetness choked up Dion’s pen, and he interrupted Randall, more with sign language than words, that this was all stuff they could ask later — in the patrol car, out of the rain — time not being of the essence here. He put away his notebook and asked what really mattered: “Does he have any history of heart trouble?”

  “No, none,” the boy said. “His doctor told him to get more exercise. Like everything else he does, he went at it too fast, too hard. I should’ve slowed him down. I should’ve gone with him. I should’ve seen this coming.”

  Randall said, “Shorts and a sweater. He doesn’t seem so well prepared.”

  The boy and girl were silent a moment, looking at Randall, maybe thinking that criticizing their dad at a time like this was just nasty. Then the boy said, “He knew it was going to rain. His app told him. He loves his weather app.”

  “He loves all his apps,” the girl said.

  Imitating the deeper voice of an older man, the boy said, “Is there an app for that?”

  The girl burst out laughing and the boy started
crying. Dion shifted his boots on the uneven ground and looked into the woods. He heard the girl say, “He aimed to be home long before the rain started. He was going to be home for dinner.”

  Randall asked, “Any idea what else he took with him? Gear, packs, hat, camera?”

  “He took his new pack, for sure. I guess his phone, wallet, keys. Lunch. Maybe extra clothes. Probably his camera. I don’t know,” the boy replied.

  “Definitely his camera,” the girl said.

  “You tried calling him, of course?”

  “Of course. Went to voice mail.”

  “Sure,” Randall said. “No signal up here, for starters. I don’t see a pack anywhere. Did you see it when you arrived?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Can you describe the pack?”

  The boy described a cheapie from Bentley, black with grey detailing. Randall nodded at the kids, letting them go back to their private conversation. He shone his light at the ground near the dead man’s feet. He looked under the foil blanket again, then spoke to Dion, not quietly enough. “No blood, eh. No wounds.”

  The distance between Randall’s mouth and the kids’ ears was too short, in Dion’s opinion. He agreed with Randall that there was no obvious sign of injury and asked the kids to move away, please. They did as told, went to stand behind the paramedics.

  Randall crouched to study the earth around Rosetti’s body. The path was sodden now, pooling in places, and smothered in a reddish-brown carpet of conifer needles. The carpet appeared to be disturbed under Randall’s probing light beam. “Looks like he gave the ground a good kicking. Must be hell when that thing gives up, eh? The heart.” He scanned his light about, into the flashing rain, the woods, the undergrowth as far as the rays could reach, then along the path down which Rosetti must have come rushing before his collapse. “So where’s this famous pack?”

  He and Dion climbed some distance farther before they found the first piece of evidence, a small bulk picked up in the light beam, bright red. A bloody hunk of meat, Dion thought, shocked enough to gasp — until he saw it was not organic, but man-made. Not a carcass, and not a pack either, but a heap of red material. A man’s hiking jacket. Up around the curve of the path lay the black nylon pack itself. Like the jacket, it looked brand new. In the dirt nearby, Dion found a small silver item. “Camera,” he called out.

  “Really?” Randall said. “Don’t,” he added sharply, as Dion bent to pick it up. “Take pictures of all this stuff in situ. Okay? Just in case.”

  “God,” Dion said. He used his own camera to take shots of the three items where they lay, bright white flashes pricking the night, then picked up the dead man’s camera by its strap and dropped it into one of the exhibit bags tucked in his utility belt. He stuck the thing in his jacket pocket, to be sealed and labelled back at the cruiser.

  Now that they had what they were looking for, they would get going, he hoped, out of the wilds and back down to civilization. He watched the leafy underbrush swell and shudder on either side. Even armed, and even in the presence of another man who was also armed, the woods made him nervous. There were carnivores here on the upper reaches of the North Shore. Bears, for sure. Cougars weren’t unheard of.

  “How far d’you reckon we walked from the body?” Randall asked, chipper and sharp. He sounded young, almost girlish, like a teenaged boy whose voice had not yet broken. He stood looking down the path they had just climbed, gauging distance with his eyes.

  Dion looked downhill, too. “A long way.”

  “Over a kilometre,” Randall said. “What d’you think, my friend?” Without warning and without waiting for an answer he shut off his light, and the darkness was abruptly all over them, blacker than black. Dion stared at where Randall must still be standing, and Randall’s voice hissed, “Listen.”

  Dion tightened his fist on his unlit penlight and listened. His eyes adjusted, and his partner became visible to him: a ghostly glimmer, pinpricks of light marking the prescription lenses. He could hear what Randall was maybe wanting him to hear, what he had heard all along, now amplified by the darkness: the living rainforest. The ruckus. Creaking, whispering, pattering. Something moaned.

  “Would be kind of scary if you were alone, hey?” Randall said.

  “Sure.”

  “There would have been daylight still when Rosetti was here. But getting dim. What was he running from?”

  “Rain in the forecast, maybe. Let’s have some light.”

  “Rain?” Randall’s laugh was a startling blast of gaiety in the darkness. “Get real. If he was scared of rain, he would put on his jacket, not drop it.”

  “An animal, then. Or his imagination.”

  “What animal? If something was in hot pursuit, it would have caught up.”

  “Imagination,” Dion said, losing patience. “Saw a bear or a cougar, or thought he saw one. Ran like hell. Who wouldn’t?”

  Unlike Dion, Randall was enjoying the debate. “Ran too far for an imaginary fear,” he said. “He’s not an experienced hiker, but he’s not green, either. If he saw an animal, he may have run, sure, or walked very fast for a while. But he would have realized soon enough that whatever it was, it was not coming after him. Natural human pride would have kicked in, if nothing else, and he would have slowed down. Right?”

  Dion took a deep breath, let it out slowly.

  “Made noise, waved his arms, took precautions,” Randall continued. “Instead he ditched his belongings and ran for his life. Ran so hard his heart gave out.”

  “So he got tired. Stopped to take a break. Felt something wrong with his heart, got scared, took off trying to get back to the parking lot before he went into cardiac arrest.” Dion switched his light on, to show he was done. “Obviously he didn’t make it. Let’s go.”

  He bent to gather the backpack, then the jacket, and started down the path, with or without Randall and the powerful light beam he had finally switched back on. Randall didn’t follow immediately — fussing with rocks, by the sound of it, marking the spot — but soon joined him to continue the argument.

  “Sure, feeling chest pain would have worried him, made him rush. But to drop everything and flee? Because that’s what it feels like to me, like he was fleeing something.”

  Dion knew that if he let every what-if bother him, little would ever get done. He said nothing.

  “It’s that distance,” Randall said. “A kilometre? How far can you run after a stroke? Think you can run a kilometre?”

  Dion was thinking about the 9 mm at his side, about using it on Randall, when Randall stopped in his tracks. The light from his torch swung wildly into the trees as he reached out. “Hey, the camera! Let’s see what’s on it.”

  The darkness pressed at Dion’s back and the rain hammered his cap. Whatever had pursued Rosetti was still out there, and it was high time to get out of this wilderness. “No chance. The water would have killed it.”

  “Won’t know till we try, will we?”

  Dion dug out the camera and handed it to Randall, who blotted the thing dry with a tissue, then pushed the review button. His round, pale face was lit greenish by the little screen — it wasn’t dead after all. Dion forgot the shadows at his back and stepped closer, watching Randall for reaction.

  “Tourist shots,” Randall said, disappointed.

  Dion took the camera, shielded it from the rain with a hand, and had a look. The last few photos were stock snapshots — quite nice, actually — the long rays of a dying day shooting between cedar trunks and lighting up endless miles of bush, and a patch of what looked like devil’s club — leaves the size of manhole covers, yellowed now by winter, hiding their razor spikes. Pretty in a forest setting, but armed to the teeth.

  He grinned at Randall. “What did you expect, monsters?”

  “Would have been nice,” Randall admitted.

  * * *

 
“’Scuse me, nature calls.” Randall parted ways with Dion in the corridor to head toward the staff washrooms. Dion watched him push at the wrong door, the one clearly marked female. Tempted to say nothing, but pleased the little go-getter wasn’t perfect, he called out a warning. “Hey, Jack. You’re not a lady.”

  Randall’s response shocked him. “It’s Jackie, not Jack. And yes, I am.”

  He disappeared into the ladies’ room. She, not he. The door closed behind her.

  Dion stared at the door. Presumption had built on presumption. He had misheard Randall introduce herself as Jack. Between her bulky uniform, her low cap brim, and poor lighting, Jack she had remained to him, a man, short and shrill. Now that she was Jackie, she was so clearly female that he burned with embarrassment. Well, at least she’d have a good guffaw with her buddies tonight.

  In the big picture, it didn’t matter. It was just laughter. If being laughed at was going to be his worst problem on the job, then he was one lucky cop who was apparently getting away with murder. He dropped into his chair before his computer, switched on the screen, and got on with his plan of being a good man for the rest of his life.

  Two

  THE WOLF

  DIARY ENTRY OF STEFANO BOONE — OCTOBER 23:

  Humans are such mad deluded creatures all tiny whirring particles within the universe each believing they are the universe saying nothing seeing nothing being nothing so blind so dull so vain. I am not.

  Stefano wasn’t vain, and he wasn’t the universe. He knew what he was, a speckle within it, but a major speckle, one with an important part to play, if only he could figure out what that part was. Right now in this world he was nothing but a really bad fit.

  The pain didn’t help. It spasmed in his calves, ran up his thighs, pinged in his scapulae, but not disabling, and in some ways reassuring. It told him he was developing, that he belonged elsewhere. Not here, chopping carrots.

  He chopped like a machine, bang bang bang bang bang bang bang.

  As if from above, he watched himself working. To escape the tedium of chopping carrots, he planned his next canvas. He would be his own subject, as always. Not a detailed self-portrait, but a streak of cheap acrylic lurking within the slashes of dark and light lines that could be lampposts, or faceless crowds, or trees, abstract verticals toppling like blowdown and blurring his outline to the viewer.