Identity
by Jon-Michael Todd
The cop looked back at the victim as they drove the dark highway toward a conclusion neither of them seemed readily prepared for. The victim, James Hill, wore a white T-shirt and jeans, both stained in blood. No one was sure whose blood it was.
“So, he just let you go?” said the cop.
“No. I escaped.” James averted the cop’s gaze in the rearview mirror, staring at the floor.
The cop — William Taft, according to the credentials he showed James when he picked him up from the county sheriff’s station — nodded and smiled.
“That’s kind of funny,” Taft said
.
“Funny?” James looked up.
“Everyone he’s captured has been murdered. You’re the first to escape.”
“What are you implying?” James asked.
Taft looked back at James. His eyes searched James for a weak spot, a crack that would allow the truth to surface.
“This guy killed one of my best men, and now I’m gonna catch him. You’re gonna take me to him,” Taft said
.
“I don’t want to go back there.”
James stared out the window of the squad car into the night.
“Well, son, ya have to.”
Taft had picked James up at the county jail. He had showed up like a ghost and seemed to know the situation before anyone told him. He said that he had been following the trail of a vicious serial killer for almost four months, and then the psycho killed one of his officers.
James had stumbled into the Travis County Sheriff’s Station covered in blood, mumbling that something had tried to kill him. The police took his statement. James told them that the killer had kidnapped him, killed the three friends he was traveling with, and was going to kill him in some sort of weird ritual James had yet to fully describe.
That was about the time Sheriff William Taft appeared in the station and told his story. Taft was from the Heartland County Sheriff’s Office, and he was looking for this killer after one of his deputies had become one of the killer’s victims. The deputy’s body was found brutally butchered in a ditch by the county line. From the way Taft talked, he was out for blood.
“You’re going to show me where the son of a bitch is,” Taft told James.
James had wandered from some abandoned farm in the middle of nowhere to the sheriff’s office. He was scared and dehydrated, but he knew to pay attention to his surroundings. He knew he could tell the deputies where the killer was, but he never guessed they would make him revisit that horrible place. However, James complied.
“So, he just let you go.” Taft talked with a tinge of sarcasm.
James stared out the window. They were upon the final stretch of road.
“He’s not human,” James muttered.
“What was that, son?”
James pulled away from the dark sky and looked at Taft through the cage separating them
.
“He’s not human,” James repeated.
“Is that right?”
“When he approached me and my friend, he looked human. Just a random guy. Then, he shot my friend John in the head. After that, he changed.”
“And what were you boys doing?”
James looked down at his lap, the blood from his friends crusting on his jeans and turning a brownish color, like the color of rust.
“We just graduated from college. We were on one last adventure before we had to enter the real world. You know?”
“Sure, sure.” Taft’s upper lipped curled up in an unconvincing smile.
“We were making our way from Pittsburgh to L.A. John called it the ‘Mother of all Road Trips.’ Anyway, we stayed at this motel a few hours away from here. The manager seemed OK. But then we noticed no one was staying there. Before we could sign in, the manager pulled out a gun and shot John.”
“I saw this movie,” Taft laughed.
“What?”
“He keeps his mom’s corpse in the house on the hill, right?”
“You think I’m making this up?”
“Why didn’t he just kill you along with your friends?”
James did his best to ignore the insinuations in every word that came out of Taft’s mouth.
“After he shot John, the manager changed. I can’t even begin to describe the thing he turned into. The flesh seemed to fall off him and he turned into some white, faceless creature. He attacked my friend Dan next, ripping his head off with his bare hands.”
James touched the blood on his shirt.
“And you just stood there as this creature attacked your friends?”
“No. I tried to push him off Dan, but he was so fucking strong he threw me over the desk.”
“Then, what?” Taft asked.
James shrugged. “I was knocked out. When I woke up, I was chained in some basement room. He was there. He told me who he was and what he wanted. He told me that the cops thought he was some killer, but in fact he called himself a shape-shifter.”
“Shape-shifter, huh?” Taft said. The amusement in Taft’s voice made James’ blood boil.
“I know what I saw, damn it!” James yelled.
“Calm down,” Taft said, suddenly serious. “Tell me how you escaped.”
“He told me I was his next ‘change.’ He was going to turn into me and then eat me, or so he said. He unshackled me from the chair and I was able to push him away and grab an axe in the room. I cracked his fucking skull with it. Then, I ran.”
“So, he’s dead?”
“How the hell should I know?” James shrieked.
The car shifted and the sound of dirt and stone tossed by the car’s tires made every muscle in James’ body retract.
They arrived at the farmhouse. Taft stopped the car and cut the engine. For a moment, they stared at the house and barn, both silhouetted by the silver light of the moon. The structures were dilapidated, slowly crumbling in on themselves. The barn was worse off. Most of the black roof had caved in, and there was a giant hole in the side, like something had crashed through it. The house was in slightly better shape. The paneling on the house had begun to falter. A few strands hung from the sides, swinging in the night breeze, like pendulums slowly ticking away the time the house had before its end. There was no glass in any of the windows, only framing. No doors. No life.
“This is it, huh?” Taft said.
James looked at the barn. A revolting image of cows being slaughtered slashed through his mind.
“Yes,” James said.
“Good.”
Taft opened his door and got out of the car. He walked back and opened James’ door.
“Let’s go,” Taft said.
“In there?”
Taft nodded.
“No,” James said, “You can check it out. I showed you where he is. I don’t have to go in.”
Taft drew his gun from the holster on his belt and pointed the weapon at James.
“Get out of the car,” Taft said.
At the sight of the gun, James crawled out of the car. Taft pushed the gun to James’s back and sent him toward the house.
“This has to be illegal,” James said.
“Shut up,” Taft ordered.
The two walked toward the house: Taft scanning the area for signs of movement and James trying not to piss his pants. Then, they were standing at the entrance of the house, which was more of a hole than a doorway. The only light coming from inside was the faint hint of moonlight. There didn’t appear to be a single furnishing inside. James knew the place was empty — except for the basement.
“Is he in there?” Taft asked.
“I don’t fucking know!”
James felt the pressure of Taft’s gun press against his back.
“Go,” Taft said.
They stepped into the house. A yellow beam of light appeared from behind James. Taft held his gun on James with one hand and held a flashlight in his other hand. A green mold ate away at the walls. The floor threatened to collapse underneath them with every step.
“He’s not here,” Taft said.
The sound of the gun’s hammer echoed through the house. James’ heart missed a beat.
“Turn around,” Taft said.
James slowly turned, afraid the last thing he’d see was the bright flash of the gun’s barrel before he died. He faced the gun and the blinding beam from the flashlight. Every inch of his body began to twitch and shake.
“What do you want from me?” James asked.
“To confess.”
“Confess what?” James asked.
“You don’t have any friends. You’re the killer. You thought you were clever with your story, huh? You didn’t think I’d be clever enough to see right through you? Is this where you killed my officer?”
“You’re out of your fucking mind!” James screamed.
Taft stepped forward and pressed the barrel of the gun to James’s temple. James gasped for breath.
“Please don’t,” James said.
There was a snapping sound beneath them. The floor groaned and cackled. Both men knew what came next, though they both thought that they had the upper hand over the other. The floorboard snapped apart and sent both men tumbling into the dark abyss below.
James felt something in his shoulder snap as he hit the concrete. For a split second, he lost his senses and felt as if his consciousness would follow suit. But he remained mostly aware of his current situation. The only thing that kept him from letting the darkness engulf him was Taft’s flashlight teetering on a piece of rubble.
James pulled himself to his feet. Pain coursed through his entire body. He could see the vague outline of Taft’s lifeless body a few feet from him. He hobbled to the source of the light and snatched the flashlight. He immediately shined the light on Taft’s body. He lay unconscious, buried under a pile of rubble.
Thank God for small favors.
James shined the light around the room and realized that he was standing in the very room where a madman almost killed him. He even saw the silver axe that aided his escape at the far end of the room.
There was a long wooden table at the far end of the basement. James knew this was where the killer kept his tools of torture. He’d seen the various knives while chained to the chair. Now, as James shined the light on the table, there were no weapons of any nature. There were, however, stacks of paper.
If he was going to prove to the crazy cop that he wasn’t the killer, he hoped the stacks of paper would vindicate him. As he stumbled over the shards of broken wood, James realized that the stacks on the table were actually newspaper. He picked the top paper and looked at it.
The paper dated back to the early 1900s. A story about a killer had been circled in blue pen. As he sifted through the papers, every single one had to do with the same killer, and the murders he’d been committing for over 100 years. It seemed that this thing had been around for a long time, killing people and … what? Taking their identities, only to discard them later along with their bodies once they served their purpose? He found a paper that was only a day old. It was from Heartland County. It read:
… Heartland Police are still looking for the killer that claimed the life of Sheriff William Taft. Taft’s body was found brutally mutilated late last night …
Taft?
James dropped the paper and froze as the sound of the man who claimed to be William Taft began to rise from the rubble.
“Thought you’d get away that easily?” Taft said in a voice so deep it couldn’t have been human.
Slowly, James turned to face the source of the inhuman voice. He shined the light and saw that the body that had been Taft was now a white, faceless creature. The tanned skin of Taft melted off the creature’s body and landed on the floor like raw meat, leaving nothing but a featureless body. It was like looking at a body without skin, only muscle, but pure, snow white. The creature’s fingers were impossibly long and were accompanied with razor-sharp fingernails. Black holes took the place of eyes, and its mouth had rows of sharp, animalistic teeth. The creature had no other defining features, just white, hairless skin.
James dropped the flashlight at the ghastly sight of the creature before him and opened his mouth to release a shriek of terror. Before any sound could escape his mouth, the creature tossed the silver axe at him. The axe connected with James’ skull, and he fell to the floor in a splatter of blood.
The creature skulked to the body like a predator approaching its prey. Then, the creature that had once been William Taft and countless others, began to feed.
It didn’t take long for the Travis County Sheriff’s Department to realize that the man they had allowed to take their only witness in a recent string of bizarre murders was actually dead.
Based on James Hill’s testimony, the Travis County deputies were able to find the abandoned farmhouse where James had led the man claiming to be William Taft. Four squad cars roared up to the house, lights flashing and sirens combing the night.
As the police surrounded the house, James Hill limped out of the house, his hands in the air.
“He tried to kill me!” James cried.
He fell to his knees and began to sob. The deputies were too preoccupied with sacking the house to realize that James Hill’s sobs had slowly turned into sadistic laughter.
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