Something in the Shadows

The Riddler of Wolfpine

(This story is being published in the leading English Daily of Sikkim, Sikkim Express in their Story Series Section and this part of the entire story has been published as of today i.e., 20th September, 2017)

It was the New Year's Eve in the small town of Wolfpine when the local news channels ran the breaking news about the final arrest made by the Homicide Bureau associated to the bizarre serial killings which had rocked Wolfpine for the last eight months.

Wolfpine was a laid back town surrounded by the ice capped mountains in north-east, a frozen lake in the west and the pine forests in the south. The only opening it had to the outer world was a gravel road leading onto the highway to the big city dreams. The primary occupations of the people of Wolfpine were lumbering and export of pine cones; the forest being a vast unchartered terrain providing the people with a booming business each year. No one could actually tell how deep the forests grew or the creatures haunting it but the history of the town dates back to the late 1800's when an estranged archaeologist stumbled upon this patch of land and found shelter in a solitary abandoned hut from the cold and the 'horrors' of the forest described in his book Amidst Wolves and Pines, written by him during his solitary stay of three months before finally stumbling upon his team one fine evening. It was not until the late 1900's that people braved the wild to find the land surrounded by pines as described in the book, recognizing a possible business endeavour in the lumbering and pine export front. Soon the unusually silent land became an industrial hub and a small town grew around the dilapidated hut which had sheltered the archaeologist. They named the town Wolfpine based on the title of its founding book; a copy of which lies in the Town Hall Museum, serving as a historic identity of the town alongwith the hut. Nothing new really happened at Wolfpine except for the birth of a few dreamy children harbouring hopes of escaping the laid back town and wandering into the big cities but ultimately getting sucked into the abyssal fate of their fathers and forefathers retiring their aspirations to the family trade. Wolves no longer frequented the town and some of the townsmen claimed that they had all died due to the expanding business and with them the fortune of the town since the business was no longer as profitable as it used to be once.

There had only been petty crimes committed but never had there been anything serious until the gruesome serial killings at Wolfpine making it the first of its kind in the history of the town. The Homicide Bureau had named the killer as The Riddler and the newspaper chipped in with The Riddler of Wolfpine based on the killer's habit of taunting the officers investigating the crime with a piece of riddle and no one really found any evidence pointing towards a particular individual because the fingerprints on the weapons always suggested a family member who had either died or was about to die based on the killing pattern. It really terrorized the residents so much that many of the families left their business and their homes for good reasons. There had been many arrests made in association to the killings but none of them pleaded guilty absolving them of all the charges.

It came as a tide of relief for the keepers of the town when they finally managed to safely assume and get a confession out of the convicted person whose identity was disclosed as Mr. Arnold Gilbert, working for the PineCone Pvt. Ltd., a lumbering company owned by one Mr. Harold Hunter who had made quite a name for himself as the last profitable man in town. Though the department claimed that Mr. Gilbert had more than one alias and was a pure psychopath by instinct with a gift of blending in as a normal man until he locked his sight upon a vulnerable victim, the residents of Wolfpine were assured that the nightmare was over and that the town was safe. The day they aired the news, people who had started to fear sunset stepped out of their houses to celebrate a New Year free of the murdering maniacs. They sentenced Mr. Gilbert to a public hanging after charging him guilty of all the murders.

I was there the day he was stood in the market and hanged in front of a hateful crowd of about five hundred. He stood laughing hysterically as he watched the spiteful crowd and uttered his last words, "It was not me who killed those dead; it was their conscience that did. You fools don't know anything. I shall return for you."

The hangman, with one swish of his hand opened the trap door and the lifeless body of The Riddler hung for public display for an hour or two before the officials carried the body to the forest for burial. No tombstone was engraved for the man to mark where he lay and soon as the days passed, people started to move on with life putting the agonizing eight months behind them. Everyone laughed away the final riddle of Mr. Gilbert thinking it to be the psychopath's delusion except me.

My name is Alec Wolfe and I work for Mr. Hunter now. No one talks of The Riddler of Wolfpine anymore but even after ten years of the psychotic killings a residual fear ripples through the town making us frightful whenever a new riddle makes a round of the town. They tried to laugh away their fear and hide them under a pile of jokes but the atmosphere of the town turned grim once again when on a fine July morning a startled crowd stood in front of Mr. Hunter's lifeless body hanging by a strong rope from the rails of his mansion's balcony and a note hanging around his neck which read – Riddle me this!