Thaw (Night Fall ™) Read online

  THAW

  RICK JASPER

  MINNEAPOLIS

  Text copyright © 2011 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.

  Darby Creek

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  241 First Avenue North

  Minneapolis, MN 55401 U.S.A.

  Website address: www.lernerbooks.com

  Jasper, Rick, 1948–

  Thaw / by Rick Jasper.

  p. cm. — (Night fall)

  ISBN 978–0–7613–6145–9 (lib. bdg. : alk. paper)

  [1. Horror stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J32Th 2010

  [Fic]—dc22 2010003323

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1—BP—7/15/10

  eISBN: 978-0-7613-6548-8 (pdf)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2943-7 (ePub)

  eISBN: 978-1-4677-2944-4 (mobi)

  Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

  Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before

  —Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

  1

  I didn’t know it then, but it all began with a wild thunderstorm in July. Trees blew down and two people were killed. Lightning struck a power station and all of Bridgewater lost electricity for a couple of days. Days with highs in the nineties.

  When the power came back, all the news on TV was about the damage, people suffering without air conditioning, food spoiling, people driving fifty miles around closed roads to find someplace where the gas pumps and their cell phones worked. The biggest story, though, the one that made national news, involved the Institute for Cryonic Experimentation, or ICE. It was on all the networks. In fact, you can still find some of the reports online. I did.

  Here’s an early one:

  “WBNE has just learned about a gruesome sidelight to the storm and power outage in the town of Bridgewater. Our Megan Rodriguez is on the scene. Megan, what’s going on there?”

  “Well, Buck, you can see the one-story brick building behind me. It looks quite ordinary, but federal agents have descended on this building in the last twenty-four hours, and residents of Bridgewater have learned about a bizarre research project that’s been going on here for years. I have FBI Agent Joe . . . Sir, how do you pronounce your last name?”

  “Felice. Rhymes with police.”

  “. . . Agent Joe Felice. Agent Felice, can you tell us what this building was used for?”

  “It’s a cryonic facility, ma’am. The government has been studying the effects of super-low temperatures on human tissue.”

  “And we’ve learned that the human tissue was provided by deceased federal prisoners, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Several inmates who died while incarcerated and who had signed donation consent forms were subjects of the research.”

  “How many?”

  “Twenty-seven, ma’am.”

  “For how long?”

  “Going on fifteen years now.”

  “Agent Felice, we’ve all heard stories about the wealthy having their bodies frozen in the hope of being restored at a future time. But why would the federal government be involved in this?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t release that information, ma’am.”

  “There has been speculation that this involved NASA research into deep-space travel.”

  “I’d respectfully offer no comment on that.”

  “Let me ask a different question, then. Is it true that one of the deceased inmates used in this research was the infamous cult leader Ted ‘Scatter’ Olson?”

  “Yes, ma’am, he was one of the first.”

  “Wasn’t it Scatter Olson who was locked up for life years ago? Didn’t he influence his followers to commit armed robbery and ritual murder?”

  “That’s correct, ma’am.”

  “Agent Felice, was the facility affected by the power outage?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The backup generator—you know, like you have in a hospital in case power fails?—that failed as well.”

  “So the subjects of this research, uh, thawed out?”

  “Presumably, ma’am.”

  “Can you describe the scene? I’d imagine decaying corpses would create quite a stink.”

  “No smell, ma’am.”

  “But in this heat, wouldn’t the bodies be decomposing rapidly?”

  “No bodies, ma’am.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That’s what we’re investigating, ma’am. The bodies are gone.”

  Pretty interesting, I guess. I paid attention at the time. But I forgot about it quickly, because a day later my best friend disappeared.

  2

  My name is Danielle Kraft. My friends call me Dani. And my best friend, the one who disappeared, is Jake Sawyer. Jake and I have always joked that we were twins. We were born on the same day a little more than sixteen years ago. I was born in Bridgewater and Jake in Israel. His dad was there for two years studying ancient languages. Jake didn’t remember the place; he was a baby when his parents moved to Bridgewater and his dad started teaching at Noble College.

  We started hanging out in sixth grade, when I was still taller than he was. Jake was a pudgy kid then, but cute, with wild black curls and glittery blue eyes you thought could almost glow in the dark. It was in sixth grade that we figured out we had the same birthday and that we were both only children. And we had something else in common, although to this day we haven’t named it. It’s like a special awareness of each other. We can always tell without talking how the other person is feeling, and when we do talk we have to make an effort not to finish each other’s sentences.

  By the time we got to high school we might as well have been twins. We texted constantly and worked on school projects together whenever we could. We were both on our school’s swim team. We both had other friends but . . . I don’t know. Maybe, for each other, we were the siblings we didn’t have at home.

  Of course we both got teased as we got older, as Jake got skinnier and gained six inches on me. Like my friend Alexa, for example, who’s always raging, “Dani, you are so in denial! You guys are in love!” I swear it’s not like that, though. In some ways it’s almost like we’re still sixth-graders. We just like hanging out. We’re easy together. In the mornings at school we’d always hug the first time we saw each other, as if we were glad to see the other had made it through the night.

  In the summers I didn’t see Jake as often. We both had jobs, mine at the country club and his at the supermarket. But we phoned and texted. Either one of us could always tell you what the other’s day had been like. Until the storm. When the power came back I texted, I called—no answer. He wasn’t online.

  At first I was impatient, then worried. On the third day of nothing, I biked over to Jake’s house across town. The family car was in the driveway, but the house looked as if no one lived there. No one answered the door, even though I practically banged it down. I looked in the windows. Nothing. I called the supermarket, and they said Jake hadn’t been in since before the storm. But they hadn’t been open. They were still cleaning up the mess.

  At some point then I just started to lose it. How could he just disappear like that? I couldn’t sleep at night. I started crying all the time. Every time my phone rang, I’d jump. Then I’d be annoyed with whoever was calling because it wasn’t Jake.

  By the second week, i
n between my tears, I was angry. What kind of a friend would do this to me? The anger finally gave way to just a sick, sad feeling whenever I thought about him and the prospect of going through the rest of my life without any answers.

  Alexa was totally wrong. Jake and I were just friends. But my heart was breaking anyway.

  Then, on a Wednesday more than three weeks after Jake vanished, I had a visitor.

  3

  That Wednesday Mom and Dad had left for their annual week in Maine with a couple they’d known since college. So I was home alone that night when I heard the doorbell. Through the locked screen door I faced a man on our porch. You know when your parents tell you not to talk to strangers? This guy looked like the strangers they have in mind. Tall, thin, dirty, with a stringy black beard and eyes that wouldn’t stay still. Stained, baggy jeans and a gray hoodie that matched his skin. When he spoke, I saw that he was missing about half his teeth.

  “You would be Danielle Kraft?” he asked.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  The missing teeth caused him to whistle on the “s” sounds when he said, “I’m a friend of the Sawyers.”

  Just hearing the name made my eyes start to get watery. I was such a wimp. Would the tears ever go away? “The Sawyers are gone,” I said and started to close the door.

  “Almost.”

  “What did you say? What do you mean?!”

  “Jake said you were his best friend.”

  “You talked to Jake?! When?”

  “You are Danielle, then?”

  I gave in. Somehow, this guy didn’t frighten me. He just kind of grossed me out. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk out here.” I unhooked the screen door, turned on the porch light, and stepped outside. The light made the man squint, and it gave me a better look at him.

  His skin, which had looked gray in the shadows, was gray only in splotches. In places it was a raw red, and in others, like his nose, the gray was almost black. It reminded me of something familiar; I just couldn’t quite pin it down. And he was missing more than teeth. Several fingers and the ends of fingers were gone from both hands, and he had lost an ear.

  “What’s your name?” I asked. “What do you know about Jake?”

  He kept looking over his shoulder, as if he were afraid of being watched.

  “Call me Vincent,” he whistled. “I spoke to Jake a week ago. I tried to help him. Now . . .” He looked sadly at the floor. “I’m afraid I may have done the opposite.”

  “If you’ve hurt him . . .”

  “Not me. Does the name ‘Scatter’ mean anything to you?”

  “Uh, dead guy in the news? His body was frozen at the cryo place. Now it’s missing? What does he have to do with anything?”

  “You are too young to remember when Scatter was . . . here. He had a large following.”

  “It sounded like he was a creep.”

  “To those of us . . . to his followers, he seemed to be . . . . Right, wrong—Scatter seemed to be beyond all that.”

  “He went to prison.”

  “Yes, one of his followers betrayed him. Gave a certain government official information about his activities.”

  “Like killing people?”

  “‘This world cannot understand me.’ Scatter said that many times. And he said he would die in chains because of that, but return to confront his enemies.”

  “This has nothing to do with Jake,” I said.

  “I’m afraid it does. The person who betrayed Scatter was Philip Sawyer, Jake’s father.”

  I started to feel sick. “And now . . . ?”

  “Scatter has returned, as he promised, and when the frozen were returned to life, he acquired new followers.”

  “Has he hurt Jake or his parents? Has he killed them?”

  “They live, but I can’t be sure how much longer. They are in Scatter’s world now.”

  “Scatter’s world? Seriously. What are you even talking about?”

  “Young lady, there are many worlds. And there are those, like Scatter, who know how to move among them.”

  This was all too much. I was an idiot. I was so worried about Jake that I had almost bought into this nut case, Vincent.

  “Look,” I said, “this is all bull. You’re feeding me something out of a cheap horror movie. How do I know if any of this is true?”

  Silently, Vincent reached under his shirt, pulled out a brown envelope, and offered it to me. As I took the package that would change my life forever, I realized what Vincent’s skin looked like. Freezer burn.

  4

  Inside the envelope was a DVD. I put it in my laptop and, for the first time in almost a month, I was looking at my best friend. He was in his room at home.

  “Dani,” he said, “if you’re seeing this, you’re probably pretty pissed at me.” He had that right. “But the thing I’m about to do is really messed up,” he continued. “And it’s a family thing. I can’t pull you into it. Anyway, I think I can do it on my own. You’ll only be seeing this in case I couldn’t.

  “If you’re watching this, then you’ve met Vincent. Maybe he explained a little bit to you already. The morning after the storm, when everyone woke up without power, I woke up without my parents. The car was here. Nothing seemed out of place. But Mom and Dad were gone. No note. I called Dad before I realized the phones weren’t working. Then I thought maybe they’d gone for a walk. The neighborhood was full of people checking out the damage. But I asked around everywhere, and no one had seen any trace of Mom or Dad.

  “You know, Dani, I’m not that close with them, but it’s so weird when they’re gone for no reason. You start thinking, ‘What if they never come back?’ I thought about calling the police.”

  Why didn’t you think about calling me? I thought, and immediately felt selfish.

  “Then there was someone at the door, and I thought maybe it was them. But it was Vincent, with the story about Scatter, and Mom and Dad’s days in the cult. Vincent thinks I can find them in this other world, and he says he’ll help me. I’m going to try.

  “It’s funny, even before the storm, for the last week they’d been acting kind of strange.”

  What was funny about that was that Jake’s parents acting strange was like the pope acting Catholic. How those two managed to have a kid as normal as Jake was an ongoing mystery to me. They were in another world a long time before their disappearance.

  I’d heard my dad call them hippies. Dr. Sawyer was dark like Jake, but short and powerful. His eyes were black, and even when he smiled they drilled into you like the eyes of some actor in a silent film. He couldn’t make normal conversation; he blinked and nodded like the real world in front of him was some kind of odd entertainment. Jake’s mom—that’s where he got his blue eyes and maybe his tall, thin build—was blond and hyper. She was always busy, running around, like something was chasing her.

  Jake went on. “I’m hoping you’ll never see this, Dani, and we’ll be back in touch in a day or two. But I asked Vincent to give you this disc if he didn’t hear from me in three weeks.”

  And then came the part that, of course, made me melt into tears: “Hey, twin sister, I love you. Whatever happens, I hope you know that.”

  “Whatever happens?!” I yelled at the screen. “Dammit, Jake, why didn’t you call me?!”

  After a while, I just tried to think. I replayed the recording. Three times. Then once more. And something was wrong. What the heck was the matter? Was it his voice? His expression? I knew Jake almost as well as I know myself. And something was off. I couldn’t pin it down. The guy on the DVD was definitely Jake. But somehow, it wasn’t.

  5

  I had to start putting some of this together. So I googled Scatter. Born Theodore Harlan Olson in 1950 in Boise, Idaho. Ordinary family: Dad worked at the post office. Mom taught kindergarten. One sibling, a younger brother.

  In 1970 Ted was a college student. He was drafted into the army, but serious asthma got him a deferment. Three years later he was in Egypt, a gradua
te student in archaeology. That was the first time he got into trouble. In 1974 Egypt deported him back to the U.S., and he was kicked out of his grad program for trying to steal ancient artifacts.

  No one heard from him for the rest of the seventies. But he surfaced in upstate New York in 1981. By then he was the leader of two or three dozen “disciples”—people in their teens and twenties, plus a few children. That’s when he took the name Scatter. The cult lived on an abandoned farm. The members supported themselves by begging in nearby towns, doing odd jobs and—it wasn’t known then—robbery.

  The group worshipped Scatter. First thing every morning he would preach to them. Then he’d send them out to do their work. There would be another service in the evening after dinner. On Sundays he’d preach all day. His message was pretty standard cult stuff: He had been anointed by God to save a chosen few from the wicked world. He was destined to be persecuted and killed, but he would return in triumph and reward his followers. He demanded absolute loyalty from all. That included the women in the cult, who were expected to sleep with him if so ordered.

  Over the years, it was rumored that the group had stashed a lot of money. Now and then the leader would even refer to “Scatter’s treasure,” claiming he would divide it among his followers on his after-death return. But things went south in 1993, when an anonymous tip led police to a gravesite near the cult campground. There they found the bodies of the family—parents and three children—who had supposedly abandoned the farm years before.

  All five had been mummified. Their organs were removed and put in jars, and their bodies were soaked in salt water and wrapped in cloth saturated in plaster. They were arranged like the spokes of an uneven wheel. Their feet touched at the center; the organ jars stood by the head of each.