Voracious - Alice Henderson [46]
“What happened when you were fourteen?” Noah asked at last.
She looked off toward the window, reluctant to answer his question. “A couple years before that, there was a rash of killings in Montana. All the victims were men in their thirties and forties, who were killed while in the outdoors, generally while hunting or fishing. The victims were … flayed. Flayed alive, the police realized after autopsies had been performed. And all the murders happened on the night before a new moon.”
“Hey … I remember this!” Noah said suddenly. “There was a media frenzy! The press dubbed the murderer the Sickle Moon Killer. Didn’t he also—”
Madeline nodded; her hands gone clammy. “Yes. He would eat skin from his victims, then regurgitate it. It was a ritual to separate himself from his abusive father. He killed men similar to his father, then ate them, making the men ‘blood of his blood,’ as he described later in an interview. Then he threw them up to forever divorce himself from those men, in essence rejecting his father on a deeply emotional and biological level.
“The police had no leads. They staked out some likely places, recreation areas, popular fishing sites, things like that, but they never caught anyone. Then suddenly the killings stopped. Police thought something may have happened to the killer, that he himself was killed or put in jail on some other charge. Two years went by.
“But neither was the case. The killer was just reestablishing himself in a new town. A man named Sam MacCready moved in down the street from us, and everyone thought he was pretty nice and quiet, but he gave me the creeps.
“Ellie and I used to go out to this spot near an old dam and hang out and talk. It was one of the few places we could get privacy in that town. We’d go for long hikes and talk about everything under the sun. Our parents. Boys. We both shared a passion for wildlife watching and nature.” Madeline paused, the memory of her friend alive. “She never judged me or was reluctant around me. Never treated me like a pariah. She even defended me at times.”
She stopped talking, wanting to linger in that warm area of good memories, of her stalwart companion. She didn’t want to finish. Finishing meant killing Ellie all over again.
“And what happened?”
Madeline bit her lip. “On one of these hikes, Ellie dropped her bracelet. Her grandmother had left it to her, and Ellie was really attached to it. We backtracked, doing a bit of bushwacking. We’d been eating some huckleberries along the way and had stepped off the trail a number of times. She got ahead of me, went out of sight, hurrying because we didn’t have much time before dark.” Her voice trailed off.
As Madeline told the story, her mind left the room and the little cabin in Glacier National Park. It moved, tentatively at first, back to that day by the river. Then it rushed, tumbling, crashing back to those memories still so fresh. She felt the weight of the grief, the sheer, shocking power of those images, and soon was no longer in the cabin with Noah at all.
She was back at the North Cascade River, in those last few minutes with Ellie.
Madeline was sure Ellie had lost her bracelet while picking berries. She stopped at a huckleberry bush they’d spent a lot of time at while Ellie moved farther up the trail to look near a thimbleberry bush. As Madeline bent over, searching the ground, a gleam of metal caught her eye. It flashed in the sunlight, some four feet from the path. Madeline walked to it, sure it was the bracelet. But instead she found a knife, recently dropped. The blade was clean, no dirt or sign of lengthy exposure to the elements. She stooped and picked it up, and images rushed into her.
Sam MacCready torturing a man, making slices in his skin and peeling it off like sheets.
The victim screaming as MacCready bent forward for more flesh.
The victim lifeless, cast to one side, wet muscles