THE MANGROVES

778
0
Submitted Date 12/07/2018
Bookmark

Unbelievable things happen in Florida. We’ve all read the headlines – “Florida Man Claims Wife was Abducted by Holograms, “Florida Man Dances on Police Vehicle to Ward Off Vampires,” “Florida Man Stabs Couple, Eats Dead Man’s Face.” They never stop. I used to think it was something about the heat – something about the salinity of the ocean air that just drove everyone stir crazy. But I don’t believe that anymore. This isn’t one of those stories either. It’s as unbelievable as the rest, but this story’s of a different breed. This story begins with a child's shoe found deep in the mangroves, and it ends without justice.

I was new, back then, to the police force. I'd gone through the University of Central Florida's Criminal Justice program, bounding through hoops with the hope of one day riding success straight into the district attorney’s office. It was in my last semester when I realized that that wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. I think most would-be cops have that moment of realization - that little happening where you help an old lady coerce her cat out of a tree without the fire department’s help or you assist some lady at the grocery store as she tries to hunt down her missing kid who, in reality, had just stopped at the Candy Section and never moved on. It's that moment that the decision is made, and the trajectory of your future segues into public service. Something like that happened to me, something small, but it made me realize that I wanted to help people to the best of my ability, and that the best way to do that was to be a police officer. So, I put a stop on all my law school applications, apologized to everyone I'd set to writing rigorous letters of recommendation, and stumbled my way into the police academy.

Months later and I was hunting for a beat. My family was well-known further south, and I found myself worrying more and more about my parents as they grew older. My hometown was no slum, but it had its fair share of issues, as I'm sure most towns do. So, I did what seemed to serve both purposes at the time: I applied for a Deputy position at the Sherrif's Department in the area. It took months - so long, in fact, that I almost gave up on it - but one day my cellphone rang, and I was asked to interview. Shortly after, I was officially part of the department.

It was interesting, seeing how much happened behind the scenes that an average kid like me had never known about. Gang violence, pimps, hookers, drugs - every one had its own little place in a community I had only known through rose-tinted glasses. The novelty wore off around the fifth time I got a domestic abuse call. I learned that not everyone was good and kind and helpful where I'd come from. I learned that the coast was far more dangerous than I'd ever imagined. I learned to fear those streets at night and to always be on the ready for the worst.

But I wasn't ready when they found her.

I was pulling a graveyard shift and there wasn't much going on. They'd shuffled me into desk work rotation and I was busy checking reports and eyeing up the pretty, young secretary when the call came in:

All units, be advised, we've got reports of a seven near Lake Ingraham. Back up requested, over.

I looked up from the sheets I'd been shuffling and something in the secretary's eyes told me to get off my ass. Everything processed and I grabbed my jacket to follow the few others who'd been damned to the desk for the night. The siren came on before our wheels even started spinning.

I remember thinking the air was unnaturally cool on the lakes shore. There had to be almost ten squad cars at the docks. The Sheriff had already boarded a boat and was waving his hands at the rest of us, shouting his commands like a sea captain. I clambered over the edge and the engine roared to life. The docks were swallowed by night.

The mangroves loomed ominously as the lights of the boat flashed red then blue then red against their wilting flanks. A smaller boat, only noticeable by the bright white of its lantern, hugged a niche that had formed in their dense patch. The operator cut the engine and our boat drifted toward the other. The Sheriff moved to the edge.

"Mr. Landon, been out here long?"

"Not long," the other man grunted. I could see him now, ragged overalls and bare chest, a dull-bulbed miner's hat atop his head, his skin the tan of wet clay. He was standing, rod in one hand, the other idly resting atop the lantern. "Good you got here quick. I seen it down in there. Figured it was your business."

The Sheriff nodded gravely. "Thank you, Mr. Landon. All right, bring us around."

Our boat engine clicked on momentarily and we slipped around the other side of the mangroves before it fell silent again. The Sheriff walked to the back and dropped anchor. "Stick around, we'll be quick."

I wasn't sure what I expected when I saw him climbing up over the edge of the boat and down into the tawny water, but I followed him anyways. I could feel my feet slipping through the mud as we moved under the branches and wormed our way inside, flashlights slicing through the dark and the shadows and echoing off others from the opposite side. We pushed under the boughs and through the leaves, carefully navigating the roots, gently stepping and always hoping that there be nothing else lurking in the water. My light was the first to fall on it - pale blue with white edging, simple, feminine. That's when we knew we were hunting for the body of a child.

---

The press was pushed up against the podium, twitching with impatience as the Sheriff took his place at the head of the congregation. I was standing by his side, hands crossed over my belt, eyes just above the cameras. Still, I glanced at them a few times - vultures dressed to the hilt in business clothes, beads of sweat riding their cheeks and settling along their necklines. The Sheriff cleared his throat:

"As you all know, a week ago, we recovered the body of a child from Lake Ingraham. We have been asked to withhold the name of the victim. Upon parental consent, we performed an autopsy, which revealed no signs of foul play. However, due to the fact that the child was missing for multiple months, presumably taken by another parent leading up to the discovery of the body, we are pursuing anything and everything we can in the hopes of preventing this from happening in the future. Members of the community are encouraged to share any information on current Amber Alerts with their local police force and to help diminish the possibility of such a tragedy ever occurring again. We will not be accepting questions at this time."

The Sheriff stepped down from his podium and the chatter commenced. I followed him into the hallway. We left before the mayor gave his speech.

As our cruiser jetted down the highway, the sense of worry was palpable. Moments of silence turned to minutes, and it felt as though the Sheriff wasn't going to say a thing for the whole ride. Then, he broke the silence:

"What happened to that poor girl is unbelievable. A child of five, twisted up like that? Nothing in creation could do that."

I swabbed the sweat from my brow with my sleeve and cleared my throat: "Gators, maybe?"

He shook his head. "The coroner claimed that the wounds on the girl's body didn't match the bite pattern of an alligator. He said that it was hard to tell from the length of time she'd been in the water, but that, from what he could see, he had no idea what could've done it."

"Are we sure it's not a person? People are fucked up enough..." As the seconds of silence passed, I tried to choke back the embarrassment that was welling up. My cheeks flushed.

"Under the arm rest, top folder," was his only response.

I lifted the black leather and pulled the folder at the top of the stack out from under it. Its face was smudged, bent, as if it had seen years of use, but it was dated a week previous - the night we'd found the girl. I opened it.

What I saw, I can never capture in words. The way her body was twisted, the way the gouges and cuts wrapped around at every angle - it was horrific. Where something wasn't missing, it was marred by splintered bone or ragged flesh. There were more bruises than there was skin. A girl, a little girl, young, barely recognizable - I only wished that she appeared to be in the cadaver slumber that most dead bodies came to us in. I felt feverish. I felt my throat knot. I closed the folder and replaced it.

Just as we pulled up in front of the department building, just as the Sheriff shifted the squad car into park, he looked me in the eyes: "If any man is capable of that, then this is Hell."

I felt the heat of the sun rush in as he opened his door, and then it was quiet.

---

A year went by, but I never forgot what had happened with the girl in the mangroves. I saw plenty of dead bodies, I saw plenty of horrible crimes, but nothing like that. Around the department, it became taboo to speak of the case. Everyone had lost so much sleep over it and, in the end, we'd been forced to close it and treat it as some sort of accident. It was all but a memory when it happened again.

This time, the child was a boy. Same means of discovery, same place, same state. I'd like to say that, by then, I had been weathered enough to handle it like the Sheriff seemed to be able to, but nothing prepares you for the body of a child. An autopsy was performed, and we were able to get an ID. Another missing child - another dead, missing child. We notified the parents and we witnessed their grief.

Over that year, the Sheriff and I had grown closer. We'd gone to the bar on our off days, we'd gone fishing or golfing together. I had started dating the secretary and, on a few occasions, we'd been invited over to his house for supper. I didn't think anything of it when he called me into his office after the second press conference. I thought he might want a drink. When I saw the two folders on his desk, I knew that wasn't the case.

"You were right."

"I was?"

"It has to be a person. It has to be. All this time, we've been treating it as some sort of freak accident - some sort of 'natural' death, but it's been delusion. We've been telling people that there's nothing to worry about, but we've been wrong. There's a child murderer out there, and he's been keeping on while we've been turning a blind eye."

I sat down. The office was dark, cool, and the only sound that seemed to pervade in the silence that grew between us was the soft hum of the AC. "Are you sure? The autopsies both came out saying there was no foul play."

He grunted. "Science can only do so much, but what other option is there? Look at these cases. Both children, both missing for months, both found in the same place, at night, with similar means of death, just short of a year apart. There's no other option here. We need to mount an investigation. We need to get in touch with the other nearby police forces. We need to find out if anything else is going on, and I want you to be part of it."

I nodded gravely. Without another word, I got up and left his office. That night, I didn't sleep.

The next few months were spent corresponding with almost every other police force in Florida. After some time, I learned that there were similar cases, although they didn't always follow the same pattern.

In some cases, the children were older - sometimes almost adults. In others, the children were never reported missing, or had never gone missing altogether until the nights they died. All were located along the southern tip of Florida and all had had autopsies that showed nothing in the form of human interference. All of them had been found in the water. In the end, I counted almost twenty-five cases that fit the same details as ours. Though we couldn't figure out how he was torturing and killing these children, we knew that there was someone out there doing it, and we were hellbent on getting him.

---

Another year passed. The death toll ticked like clockwork in that time. Every police station in Southern Florida was buried in paperwork and grieving families and missing persons reports. When the month where the two previous murders had happened was drawing near, the Sheriff and I put a plan we’d devised into action. Regular patrols around Lake Ingraham, stake-outs and other extra precautions were taken. We had a twenty-four-seven watch in the area and made numerous PSAs in an attempt to covertly inform the public to be on their guard. I was on watch the night we found the third and final body - the same night I finally saw who had been responsible for all those robbed lives.

The night was cool, almost cold, and the air felt thin. My partner and I had parked our squad car along the road, a few hundred yards away from the dock entrance. The moon was bright and massive and hung low in the sky, the stars dulled by a scuzz of clouds. The radio was tuned to a Country station, and I was grinning and bearing it. My partner was asleep.

Every car that passed, I made sure to watch them until they left my sight and entered that of another nearby patrol car. I'm not sure how, but I could feel that this was the night it was going to happen – gut-feeling, instinct, premonition. My limbs were already numbed by the adrenaline that had been coursing through my veins for hours. My lips were dry, no matter how much coffee I drank. I kept my eyes on the road.

At the first sight of movement, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. The road had been dead for almost an hour and yet I swore I'd seen something in the darkness. My breath caught in my throat and I stared until my eyes began to grow dry.

He emerged from the trees on the far side of the road, a looming black shape, growing more distinct with each step. He was moving slowly, but steadily, with an almost limp-like gait. As he emerged more into my line of sight, I could tell that he was hunched, and when he reached the center of the road, I could see that he had something slung across his back. When he reached the same side of the road as our squad car, the clouds parted, and I saw the pale skin of a child.

Immediately, I turned my key in the ignition. The engine erupted to life, my partner jumping in his seat, the sirens wailing loudly and the headlights blooming on. I planted my foot on the gas but the shadowy figure bounded into the treeline. I slammed the break and threw the door open, hurdling into the darkness after him, my partner's screams and the shrill chirrup of the door alarm sounding at my back.

My feet pounded the dirt and the sand in the darkness, my heart racing ever-faster in my chest. I pulled my gun and light from their respective holsters, hoping, praying that this wouldn't be the end. As I broke the treeline and slid down the slope to Lake Ingraham's white beach, I saw him reach the edge of the water. He turned and met my light head-on.

Dark-gray, scaled, and monstrous - a nigh-translucent membrane stretched from rib to underarm and echoed between its fingers and its toes, the horror stared back at me. Eyes, large, black, and reflective, fixed on my position. It's maw yawned open, the same membranes billowing from the sides, and I saw it's need-like teeth as a hiss bubbled from its throat. A fin snapped to on the center of its skull. My gun fell from my hand.

I watched as it darted into the water and the fin sank into blackness. I watched the water swallow the body of yet another child as the creature dragged it under.

I stood there listening to the waves, staring at the water. Like sails, I saw them unfurl – hundreds of ribbed fins riding the glass-like face of the lake beneath the moon, all hurdling toward the center. When they met, they shook, and the water churned. The waves broke and rolled back toward the shore, toward me, and as I watched them, I cried. I was crying when my partner found me – out of breath, gun in hand, his light on the surface of the water. By then, it was still again. But I kept staring. My eyes moved over the black water until it met the mangroves, their gnarled, amphibious forms twisting up toward the moon in worship.

I closed my eyes and saw only the ghostly form of the creature, its blue veins suspended like thread in the night air. My partner radioed the Sherriff.

I knew that, yet again, we’d find a child's body, piecemeal, in the mangroves – and that, for as long as they stood, it wouldn’t stop. Not ever.

Comments

Please login to post comments on this story