Free Red Mountain by Dennis Yates Page A

shadows.
    Charlie had been shanghaied.
    For the next fourteen years he vanished without a trace. Some believed he’d been murdered, or run away to the woods to work in a lumber camp. Overcome with grief, his father died within months after his son’s disappearance. The children were sent to an orphanage. Six years later, most of Charlie’s siblings were buried side by side after a deadly flu outbreak swept through the city. Captain Greeley returned from a long trip at sea and purchased a house in Portland at a bargain.
     
    ****
     
    On a foggy winter day a merchant ship brought Charlie back to Portland. The house where he’d once lived was no longer standing, having at one time burned to the ground. After making several inquires, he was able to locate his sister Iris—the only sibling still alive who’d married and stayed in the city. She barely remembered him. His face was so deeply tanned and thin, and his eyes frequently stared at empty corners of the room or spaces beneath trees. Then inexplicably, he’d slowly nod his head and smile before turning back to meet your gaze. Iris took her brother’s odd behavior as a sign of sheer exhaustion and being too long at sea. She saw that he rested in her guestroom for the next few days before taking him to the local cemetery to place flowers on the family graves.
    Over the next few weeks, Iris failed to see any improvement in her brother’s behavior. His condition seemed to be getting worse. She heard him shouting in his sleep at nights, and once while she stood outside his door she listened to him having conversations with invisible persons. When she glimpsed Charlie’s face without his knowledge, she saw the great effort it must have taken him to conceal his darker emotions from her. His tragic life had shattered his poor soul to pieces, she thought. How else could she make sense of his refusal to go to church service with her? Did he really mean it when he told her he had no use for God?
    She needed to get him to talk, to confess to her what he was experiencing. Her husband was beginning to feel uncomfortable in his company, and her children thought their uncle frightening.
    When they went alone on a carriage ride to the countryside, Iris asked Charlie about what had happened to him all those years. At first Charlie merely repeated his story of being shanghaied, of seeing foreign lands from his captor’s deck. Yet something in his eyes told Iris there was much more he was leaving out. She begged him to tell her the whole truth, to allow her to bear witness for him. When Charlie saw her tears he too began to cry. He’d gripped both her hands in his and gradually began to speak…
    What he told Iris made her blood run cold, and after he was finished she ordered him to pack his things and leave her home at once. He put up no argument and did as she asked. She never saw her brother again.
    It was shortly after Charlie left his sister’s home, however, that Portland was besieged by a series of grisly murders. Captain Greeley and several of his crew were found slaughtered in their homes, in a manner reserved only for those who engaged in the practice of drugging men and turning them into slaves once they awoke at sea. The victims had all been hung from the ceiling by their ankles. The killer had intentionally slit the tops of their heads so they would slowly bleed to death while thinking about what they had done.
    One of the crewmen, however, had escaped the fate of his captain and the others. He’d also seen Charlie’s face. When the police raided the small room Charlie had been renting from an old widow, the mysterious lodger was nowhere to be found.
    According to Iris’s interview with the chief of police a week after the murders, her brother had confessed to her that he’d made a pact with an evil spirit. He’d told her in great detail how he’d barely escaped from Greeley and lived on a remote island somewhere off the coast of Africa among the natives. At first