The Athol Atrocity

A Story by pasdepoisson

A short horror story set in a small Idaho town

Thick mist blew in from Lake Pend Oreille, spreading through the chilled morning air like ectoplasm, sifted by the dense ranks of spruce trees bordering Highway 54. The clammy air felt cool and sticky as it enveloped the sweaty skin of Kootenai County Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Swanson on his morning run down 54 from his doublewide on Morningstar Lane to Dorothy’s , the little café he frequented.

Nowadays, it seemed he couldn’t stomach the news in the paper without a good, strong cup of coffee and something to chow on. Before Afghanistan, he had been able to listen to news about the horrible state of the world with the cool detachment of youth: since his second tour, to Fallujah, his sensibilities had changed dramatically.

“Once a Marine, Always a Marine” goes the saying, and it was true insofar as those memories and behaviors would forevermore be a part of his personality. It was both comforting and frustrating that those memories fit into a sort of set of veterans’ clichés: the buddy who died inches away while the squad was pinned under overwhelming small arms fire, the look of trauma on the little wide-eyed children’s faces after an IED explosion in a crowded marketplace, the persistent nightmares of the dust and running and deafening noise of small-unit combat.

Swanson suffered not so much from PTSD as melancholia. The loneliness didn’t help, but neither did the infuriating inconsequentiality of most civilian females’ lives, or the inanity of the average Joe’s sports-and-sex obsessed mindset. This was one of the reasons Swanson believed in his job: crime originated in vicious selfishness and virulent stupidity, and as long as he could serve as a first responder to try to salvage what was left of society and values, he felt that life was worthwhile.

The gravel crunched underfoot as Swanson ran past the US 95 intersection and into town, past the gas station that anchored Athol’s existence to the life-giving highway. Most days he would try to push past the pain in his left knee and mount the hill sloping upward toward Spirit Lake, but today’s slight hangover voted against further exertion, so he broke stride into a brisk walk, breathing heavily as he approached Dorothy’s. The café was situated next to the spendy little town grocery store that seemed to always be closed just when he needed Nyquil.

The bell jingled as he opened the door, and a cheerful, slightly overweight woman with a mass of unruly dark brown curls looked up from the espresso machine to greet him.

“Hey Jolene. What’s new and exciting?” he asked.

“Not much personally,” Jolene replied, “but did you hear about the latest incident?”

“Incident?” he asked, a little wary.

“I figured you’d have already heard, seeing as you’ve got an official perspective on the situation and all….” She paused dramatically, looked around in a dumbshow of discretion, then half-whispered: “Another mutilation. Uh-huh. Last night, barely a mile out of town. They discovered the carcass this morning�"only it’s a horse this time!”

Swanson shut his eyes a second, rolled his head back and exhaled a little breath of exasperation, then blinked and came back to life.

“Great. What a pain in the--” he decided it wasn’t worth addressing. “Look, can I just get a 28-ounce Americano with no room?”

“Sure thing. But do you wanna know what? I know it’s related to the UFO sightings along 54. This sort of thing has been going on for years, and the government has never wanted to confront the strange possibility that extraterrestrial intelligences are somehow fascinated with our livestock…”

She handed him his change, which he promptly dropped in the tip-cup, then he turned to seek out the newspaper as Jolene busied herself with the espresso. He glanced around the cluttered interior at the shelves and display stands stocked with faery figurines, esoteric books, wind chimes, astrologically-themed greeting cards, healing crystals, dragons, garden gnomes, and didn’t wonder why Jolene had concluded the recent animal slaughters were related to some outlandish paranormal conspiracy theory. He was both amused and irritated by the incense-tinged ambiance of this hole-in-the-wall, by its audacious hippie-ness that seemed to be one of the last serious statements of a phenomenally powerful magical thinking and naïveté that bordered on the pathological.

The door jingled again, and he turned to see Jim Cardigan (his byline said James), managing editor of the Rathdrum Register, typically over-professional in his black fleece, blue Jos. A. Bank button-down, crisp jeans, and square-toed Sketchers, carrying a laptop in his ever-present black messenger bag. At 23, he seemed to be a high-speed young journalist who should be going places, yet the ignobility of reporting on Spirit Lake High School Girl’s JV Basketball games for a paper with all the journalistic credibility of the Coupon Clipper didn’t seem particularly promising.

Swanson walked up to get his Americano, ending up alongside Cardigan as he ordered.

“Quad Caramel Cappuccino,” he requested. “What a surprise, Deputy Swanson�"just the man I wanted to see, but didn’t expect to….”

“Ditto,” Swanson replied. “Let me guess--you’re here about the latest animal killing.”

“You got it! Do you know any details you can share with the media?” he asked, a little facetiously.

“I haven’t heard anything. Officially, that is. And I don’t have an opinion on the trend, because I’m not familiar with all the evidence.” He slurped the top off his Americano.

“It seems a lot of the locals thinks a Satanic cult is to blame,” Cardigan probed gently over the noise of the espresso machine. “The pastor of Tree of Life in Rathdrum is convinced of it to the degree where sometimes I honestly expect to see him leading a torches-and-pitchforks mob down Main Street any day now.”

“You know that The Tree of Life is a pagan symbol representing The World Tree, and in Celtic myth the worship of nature?” Jolene more asserted than asked.

“Well, it also refers to the Old and New Testament,” Cardigan countered as he received his cappuccino, “which is obviously how Pastor Bill means it. But back to the cattle�"you know, mutilations have been reported around the world, often in conjunction with UFO activity. Sometimes a cow or horse will be dissected with laser-precision, with only one specific organ removed, and be completely exsanguinated, then deposited noiselessly mere feet from its owner’s bedroom. That’s a little out of the ability of wild animals….”

Swanson cleared his throat uncomfortably. Cardigan continued:

“And what’s most tantalizing about this last local rash of mutilations is that some of the farmers claim that they’ve been contacted by the Feds�"like, no-kidding men in suits and trench coats. So what do you think, Deputy Swanson? Aliens, Satan-worshipping punks, or government psyop?”

“They told me never to say ‘No comment’,” Swanson replied, “so I’ll just say I have no opinion in the absence of all the evidence. And with that, I’ll say goodbye.”

Swanson left--to the good-natured protests of Jolene and Cardigan--and walked back home sipped the steaming coffee while pondering the enigmatic mutilations a little resentfully. He had work to do, and this sort of pointless controversy distracted from the mundane reality of the inevitable domestic violence or child neglect calls he’d have to deal with tonight.

But tonight, the shift was not so predictable. At 2000 hours, Swanson received an urgent call dispatching him to the American Self-Storage on Trinity Lane, just past 95 and 54. He couldn’t be sure he heard the call correctly, but no verbal warning would have prepared him for the scene of chaos and carnage at the Self-Storage.

There, in one of the units, its dark recesses shadowed by the glare of headlights and streaked red and blue by police lightbars, lay the blood-saturated naked corpses of two males and a female stretched out strategically along the lines of a Satanic diagram. Their throats and wrists were slashed brutally and deeply, like slaughter animals, and the female’s abdomen and chest cavity had been sliced open in an autopsy-like incision, her ribs truncated and jutting upward like the beams of a collapsed building. Her heart and ovaries were placed matter-of-factly in the dead center of the diagram, and at the head of the profane shape was set a goat’s skull with thick black horns. A bowlful of coagulating blood rested on the stomach of each of the males, and the sheer amount of gore and effusion splashed across the scene meant the victims must have been butchered in that very unit.

Swanson almost vomited from the all-too familiar scent of blood and exposed organs, triggering a shuddering fight-or-flight response, a backward-falling feeling that brought whatever PTSD he had repressed rushing to the front of his brain. He turned his back and staggered several paces from the storage units, bending over with his hands on his thighs, fighting the nausea and tension in his stomach. Still the odor of exposed entrails wafted through the night, like fingers forced through his nostrils, down his throat, poking him in the intestines. He breathed deeply several times, closed his eyes, then stood up, turned, and marched back toward the storage unit to inspect further.

He wasn’t trained in forensics, but it seemed to him the victims must have been drugged, because they weren’t bound, and they must have died at the scene, where there wasn’t any immediate evidence of a struggle. He examined the scene at a distance with his powerful Maglite, so as not to disturb the evidence. One of the males had a bizarre half-smirk on his face that was almost more disturbing than the dissected female’s butterflied chest cavity.

Then he noticed a detail about the diagram drawn on the floor that had eluded him before: in the center of the shape, under the displaced organs, was a crudely detailed picture that seemed to be an illustration of a solar system. Off to the side of this image was drawn a cigar-shaped flying saucer that had ostensibly disgorged two helmeted spacemen beside a Mayan-looking pyramid.

“Seriously?” he thought. “Satan and aliens? Then again, isn’t Satan technically extraterrestrial, too?”

He was called out of his state of semi-sanity to establish perimeter security, relieved by two men in trench coats. Spooks. The Feds were already on the scene. Never in his career had relief been so welcome as when, in the early morning hours, he was allowed to leave the scene and head home. The stink of that storage unit lingered, burrowed into his nasal cavity.

It was still dark when Swanson was awakened from a teeth-clenching whiskey-assisted sleep by a piercing white light flashing past his window. He started and sat up in his easy chair. It was as if sharp headlights had flashed past his window, but the light came from the forest side of his trailer. He reached for his 9mm sidearm lying in its holster beside the chair and dislodged it, then rolled up onto his feet and out the door, in no mood to be messed with. He walked in a semi-crouch with both hands on his weapon, sidestepping across the rough lawn in his backyard, out to the tree line�"but saw nothing.

Suddenly, for a microsecond, he heard a cracking, booming sound before he felt an enormous impact punch through his back and he plunged forward like a felled tree. Before everything could go completely black, a brilliant white light bathed the entire yard, painful and warm in its intensity. He was paralyzed, and time had seemed to stop. He had fallen facedown, but now he was oriented skyward, and he could feel himself levitating toward the brilliant white light, so beautiful and terrifying. He felt someone compelling him to move toward the light, and so he did.

The body of Kootenai County Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Swanson was recovered in his yard a day after the discovery of the carnage at the mini-storage, the Rathdrum Register reported solemnly. The cause of death was undetermined.