by Victor Allen
The Crone House
Maybe not the best of the stories, but one which holds a special place for me. It was the very first story I ever wrote with the intention of trying to sell it.
I would have been about nineteen or twenty, living in a rooming house in Star, North Carolina, upstairs, circa 1980. It had no air conditioning and if you had to take a shower during one of the horrendously hot, muggy, North Carolina summer afternoons, you had to use four towels to dry yourself and still came out wet. I worked the three to eleven shift at a textile mill and when I got off work one October evening, I went to my room and sat down with pen and yellow legal pad, very aware that the nights had finally cooled enough to allow me to do something more constructive than swelter in bed. I had always written stories, but had never really thought about writing as a living. But I was now entering my tenth year of work, my first job having been at the Green Thumb Plant Nursery in Seagrove when I was eleven years old. And the most enlightening thing I took away from my first day of work was this: it wasn’t for me.
But you gotta pay the bills, so I had a job like everybody else.
The Crone House didn’t start off as an evil fairy tale, it just kind of developed that way. As in Once Ago, I used two different writing styles- narrative and third person omniscient- but simply switched the order. But even now, after more than thirty years, I wonder where the narration, a sort of 1930’s style pulp horror voiceover, came from.
And yes, it has been tweaked a little. To the best of my knowledge, no-one had been Rick-rolled in 1980, nor did mp3 players exist. But the gist of the story and most of its structure remain pretty faithful to that long ago creation, written on a legal pad under incandescent lighting, in the quiet, dark hours of the morning, with a cold October wind blowing restfully through a slightly raised window.
SHC
In SHC, the dream sequence as described really happened to me, with the heat and the smell of the burning hair. I’ve since read that such symptoms can be accounted for by anything from epilepsy to demon possession. Fortunately, it’s never happened again.
As a writery sort of thing that may or may not interest you, the protagonist’s name, William X, was pretty much an accident.
When one writes a story, or a book, or anything, there are times when you’re just stuck, or you want to change something, or you just want to know where you are in a story. To that end, most writers use some kind of trick to mark places they want to come back to without searching through an entire manuscript.
In SHC, I wasn’t happy with my main character’s name, so I would mark every occurrence of it with an “XXX”, intending to plug it into “find” in the word processing program and come back and change it to something I liked better.
As the story built, I found that the William XXX didn’t seem so off-putting, especially when it was shortened to the generic “X”. When the perception of the protagonist by the people around the protagonist is more important than the character’s perception of himself, the technique is called illumination. Since William X was revealed by illumination, and the story was really as much about the people around him as about him, the William X served to anonymize him, and I thought it was a nice touch, accidental or not. So it stayed in.
.Gov
A couple of things happened.
The first was a computer class I took several years ago. I had heard of Google Earth, but not given it much thought, until my professor had me punch in my address. You’ve heard the term gob smacked? I know what that means.
There, laid out for anyone who wanted to enter my address, was an aerial view of my house. The resolution wasn’t great, but my house was perfectly recognizable. The T-shape, the two cars in the semicircular driveway, the little line of pines and cedars between my fruit trees and the field next door, the dog kennel, pig lot, and chicken coop. Try it with your own address. If this was there for anyone to see, how much more could the various spooks and spying agencies of the US government see?
The second thing was a lot of talk about the Federal Reserve during the election cycle of 2008. Curious, I did a little research. Like almost all Americans, I was under the delusion that the Federal Reserve was a government organ. It is not. Even though the Fed works so closely with the federal government they might as well be naked beneath the sheets and playing footsie, the Fed is, in fact, a private banking cartel shrouded in impenetrable secrecy. Its ownership and shareholders are not open to public scrutiny. And this is the entity that creates the money for the United States. Not the currency (the mint does that, and if you don’t know the difference between money and currency, don’t feel bad. Most people don’t, and that’s part of the problem), but the actual store of value for the country. And it doesn’t create money out of thin air, as some would tell you. It’s even worse. It creates money from debt. I’ll not go into everything I learned, but briefly, I now see the Fed as, at best, a protectionist racket for multinational banks and, at worst, a criminal enterprise.
Once you get into the Fed issue, the rabbit hole opens pretty wide with government plots behind every blade of grass and conspiracies beneath every grain of sand. Naturally, you take it all with a large dose of salt so you don’t go full tin foil hat crazy, and pretty quickly it becomes almost impossible to separate the shit from the candy.
One thing of which I’m now firmly convinced is this: American government’s first priority is its own self-interest; to grow itself and its power, and you and I are indentured to secure that wealth and power. Once your perception becomes filtered through that lens, most of what government does -red team and blue team- becomes understandable, if not right or rational.
So I wrote .Gov to illustrate just how pervasive and powerful the government is, and just how uninformed (and I was one of them) the American citizen is. Is it as bad as advertised? Probably. I do know that the technology as described exists now (I use some of it myself, such as running an operating system entirely in RAM so that nothing ever gets on the hard drive, and I could have written another entire book on such things as PRISM, the incestuous data-sharing relationship between government, search engines, social networking sites, and media manipulation, but .Gov is a short story). Are there venal and cruel people in government who would stick at nothing to enrich themselves or increase their power? I think even the most fatuous American would have to concede that. I certainly don’t expect to change the world with the story, but it’s my own little cautionary tale.
Bookends, I and II
Writing is like law or medicine: you never perfect it, you only practice it. One of the things I like to do is tinker with structure. Now structure doesn't only mean how something is organized from point A to point Z. It can also mean taking a single concept and branching it into two disparate directions.
I just got it in my head one day (as most people do at one time or another) that someone I had just met was somebody I had known a long time ago. Normally, when an idea or inspiration strikes, it takes me a little bit to see which way the story is going to go, and once it takes a certain track, I generally stick with it.
In the cases of Only for You and The Laughing Lady, I, by choice, set out to use the same notion to go on two entirely different tacks. It's kind of amazing to me that the same kernel can become something very sweet like Only for You, or something very heavy and dark like The Laughing Lady.
Spoiler Alert.
Now, the bit in The Laughing Lady about the Mountain Lion really happened pretty much as written. And yes, I am, even at my age, stupid enough to go haring off into the woods looking for the thing (The boy is even worse. He'd just shoot first and ask questions later). I didn't actually see the thing until after I took the ride in the police car and we looked into the next door neighbor's field. And we could see it, moving around, its eyes reflecting red (unlike in the story). Thankfully, I've seen nor heard hide nor hair of that critter since then. It's still nerve-wracking to know there was something like that out there at all, where your wife hangs out the clothes, or the do
gs go out to do their business. I, like I do with most things, just made up a story around it.
Spoiler Alert off.
Like We are the Dead, which I contemplated not even publishing, I wrestled with even including The Laughing Lady in A-Sides. It's probably one of the most horrible things I've ever written, and I've written some pretty horrible stuff (in all senses of the word). Though it's not the darkest thing ever penned, it's pretty dark for me. I don't like my characters to be totally irredeemable, but the narrator of The Laughing Lady is pretty low rent.
As a final aside, I sometimes revert to the cool, wordiness of nineteenth century literature and that's a turn off to some modern readers. But it felt like a good fit for The Laughing Lady. Also, the casual reader might notice that there are no names in The Laughing Lady. As it was being fleshed out, names seemed superfluous. The story takes place between two characters (actually, mainly inside one character's head), a he and a she, a sort of universal duet which we all know. We've all been in those relationships: The world outside is light years away and nothing matters but the here and now, the you and me, the him and her. And I saw The Laughing Lady like that. Very intimate and personal. Names would have just cluttered it up.
Share the Fire
My interest in anthropology extends in both directions: where do we come from and, more important to me, where are we going? Irrespective of our genesis -cosmic accident or Divine intervention- the fact is plain: we’re here, and despite our genetic similarity to every other species on earth (we share better than 99% common genes with chimps and about 50% with the lowliest microbe), we’re leaps and bounds ahead of every single one of the millions of other chump species on our planet. Considering that brawn more often than brains wins in Nature, that we’re here at all seems nothing short of a miracle to me. So that was my first question: Why were we so different?
Now, for the second part.
In pure disciplines, like mathematics or chemistry, there is only one right answer. In math or chemistry, something either works or it doesn’t, with no room for argument. In less pure sciences like anthropology -as evidenced by the flap over Kennewick Man- the science is open to personal biases and patronage.
A fairly recent hypothesis which postulates that modern humans may have evolved separately in different areas of the globe caused such a fuss amongst the “Out of Africa” anthropologists you would have thought they had dug Darwin out of his grave, pissed on his corpse, and set it afire. My only dog in this fight is that I want the truth. If “Out of Africa” is the truth, fine. We all had to come from somewhere. If parallel evolution is the truth, fine. I can live with that. What galls me is not that people like to hold on to their own pet theories; that’s just human nature. No, the really galling thing is that competing theories are summarily rejected without a fair hearing and those who propose said theories are treated, literally, as heretics. The same thing happened to Giordano Bruno. However, the arbiter of his heresy was not the scientific community, but the 16th century Catholic Church. Now, competing theorists are no longer being burned at the stake, but when you impugn and destroy their professional reputations and take away their livelihoods, you have effectively destroyed them. And that ain’t science, that’s an inquisition. So that brought me to the second question: what truth, no matter how outlandish, saved us as a species from major global catastrophes? And if one discovered that truth, could one buck the “consensus” and risk their professional life?
In Share the Fire, I took a case of a bottleneck in human evolution (even that is now being debated) and posited a little help to keep us going. Now, I’m not one of those guys that sells humanity short necessarily. I don’t think humans needed alien help to build the pyramids or the microchip. We’re pretty clever little monkeys. But I did ask myself, what if all but ten or fifteen thousand humans simply vanished randomly from the face of the earth, not leaving families intact, or large groups in one place? I asked myself, could we, as modern humans scattered thinly across the entire globe, survive? When the crops were taken over by weeds after three years; when the wild predators made a resurgence and lost their fear of man; when the cold and snow came with no power plants to provide heat; with no hospitals to treat their diseases or injuries; with no water treatment plants; with no communications, with no large groups to offer support, what then? The answer is: I don’t know. But I think, sadly, that a few of those humans might live to see their three score and ten. Some might even have offspring. But do I see survival of the species seventy years later? I think the chances are slim. I think people would try to survive. But the human animal is no match, physically, for other animals or the elements. Disease and accident would claim many. The world would simply be too big, the numbers too small, to recreate a viable population.
So when I think of things like the Mount Toba eruption, I have to ask myself? How did we survive?
P.S. For those purists among you who want to point at that The Pythia was the preferred title for any Delphic Oracle, not the tragic Cassandra, let me just say I knew that. But as it also says somewhere else around here, sometimes you have to massage the myth a little to fit the story. Cassandra was close enough. ;-D
P.P.S. So now the tales are done and I hope you spent an enjoyable hour or two with them. It’s always fun to go places and do things that never were and never will be, and come back safe and alive with not even a hair out of place. But that’s the magic of stories, you know? They let us be and do those things which the laws of physics and the real world deny us.
So I thank you for your time and wish you good health and prosperity. And when you need a break from the real world, come on back to Wandil Land. There’s always a strange brew to be had.
Warm regards,
Victor Allen
Thanks Again
Thank you for purchasing and reading A-Sides. That you would invest your money, and, more importantly, your time into reading something I wrote means a great deal more to me than I can properly express. In looking over the offerings of the many book selling sites, it seems readers these days are spoiled for choice, but there are never really enough good books, are there? And in that spirit, my most fervent desire is that you consider reading A-Sides your time and money well spent.
Every writer hopes that the reader enjoys their work, but whether your experience was good, bad, or indifferent, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me a line at [email protected].
Please enjoy the excerpts that follow. If something intrigues you, it's only a few clicks away.
Again, and as always, thank you so much for you time and consideration.
Best wishes in everything, always,
Victor Allen
Excerpts
Essex
by
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved
From Essex...
1955
Essex Pass lies buried between Pisgah Park and Bald Head mountain in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. At 5500 feet it is a shorter and older sibling to the high mountain passes of the Rockies, and a lifeline to the seven hundred people who inhabit the mostly anonymous towns erected on the cold broadsides: towns like Judas Point and Prairie's End. Snow chokes the roads for six months of the year and the tracks laid 150 years ago by the N and S railroad are the only commercial artery that flows to the towns as winter's slow heartbeat pulses at the edge of life.
Neal McAlister stood up in the cab of the loco. At age twenty, with a six months' pregnant wife at home, he had remained mostly silent on his first run after eight weeks of training in Atlanta as a fireman, a mostly useless position perpetuated by union rules and held over from the not too distant days when locomotives had been fired by coal. He was relegated to the front of the train with the engineer while the brakeman and conductor tried to catch forty winks in the caboose at the far end of the one hundred car freight train.
His initial anxiety had been subdued by the constant, low key thrumming of the diesel eng
ines which were, in reality, generators that powered the electric motors which actually moved the locomotive. After a time the powerful, steady vibrations became less cacophonous than soothing, but his uneasiness at being the new guy remained.
He wasn't yet seasoned enough to have a colorful nickname and his picture tacked up on the bulletin board at the depot in Stella, NC. Not like the conductor, who was called Bobo for no apparent reason that Neal had been able to figure out. Neal's companion in the engineer's cab was an easier study. His fleshy jowls and ruddy features lent themselves to his own affectionate nickname of Hogjaw. The brakeman, a middle aged man with a U of red hair and a leonine head was Hub, a simple variation of his given name, Herbert.
They hadn't been distinctly unfriendly to him. A little distant, a little doubtful of the new guy who came to them from a succession of menial, low paying jobs. Railroading was still dangerous work and the old crew weren't yet ready to believe in the new guy until he proved himself in some fashion or another. Neal had grimly resolved to make this work. He had more to think about than himself.
The train had been making a steady thirty five miles per hour on a fairly level grade for the past thirty minutes. The snow-covered plains of the desolate landscape had been long unscarred by buildings, electric lights, or even natural features. All was blameless white glory, glowing heraldic blue in the cold light of the full moon. The clatter and clank of the steel wheels on the rails and the perpetual swaying of the freight cars were sleepily hypnotic in the wasteland.
Neal peered out of the tiny window at the side of the locomotive. Picked out in the brilliant beam of the locomotive's headlight was a white on green metal sign mounted on standard Highway department steel posts. The reflective sign glowed with an unaccountable brightness. Drifts of snow had piled up against the robotic legs of the sign and the occasional capricious wind blew sprays of snow from the tops of the drifts.
Essex Pass
3 Miles.
“Best sit back down, Neal.”
Neal looked at Hogjaw. It was the first time he had spoken in an hour. His face in the feeble bulbs of the cabin had taken on a tense, drawn look that seemed impossible in so much flesh. His pressure on the throttle eased and the steady thrumming of the electric motors spun down. The cascading effect of thousands of tons of freight avalanching behind them shook the locomotive and Neal quickly sat down as the inertia threatened to spill his legs from beneath him.
Hogjaw applied the brakes with an ogre's hiss of compressed air. The train began to glide to a stately halt, taking a full half mile to ease into motionlessness.
Hogjaw stood and wrapped himself in a heavy coat, leaving the locomotive's massive diesel generators at a rattling idle. He pushed past Neal and stepped off the engine, down the steel steps of the locomotive and onto the snow covered ground before Neal even had a chance to ask what was up. He stared out the window, unsure whether to get up and follow, or stay put.
Hogjaw stood just off the tracks in a foot of snow, a blue hued blob in the moonlight, blowing on his cupped hands with hot breath that condensed into a cold mist on contact with the subfreezing air. Neal wondered why he hadn't put on his gloves.
Neal stood and swung around the steel pole that connected the cab's floor to its ceiling next to the steps. As he descended he looked toward the rear of the train and saw two dark figures floundering through the snow toward Hogjaw.
Hogjaw gave Neal an offhand glance, equal parts distrustful and impatient as Neal swung down into the crunching snow. Neal ignored the look and wished only that he hadn't left his coat on the seat of the engineer's cabin. He stood his ground amid the hostile glances as Bobo and Hub trudged up.
As boss of the freight, it was Bobo's place to give Neal an approving look.
“You want to get your coat, or do you want no part of this?”
Nervous and awkward amidst these hardened, middle aged men with bristly faces and dark, fleshy circles beneath their eyes, Neal forced a steady reply.
“What's going on?”
Hub made a derisive, blowing sound.
“He ain't got the beans for this,” Hub said. He looked at Neal. His expression was earnest and past condescending. He emphasized his points by shaking a finger the size of a Polish sausage in Neal's face.
“This is likely gonna be your first and last trip. You best go on up in the cab and hide. Let the menfolk do what has to be done.” There was no challenge in Hub's eyes, only inflexible belief.
“Don't count me out yet. All I want is a clue.”
Hub sighed heavily and only the ghost of a look passed between the three men. Without another word Bobo opened his satchel and began pulling out cloth wrapped bundles. Hub and Hogjaw each took a bundle and waited. Bobo took a bundle for himself and offered a parcel to Neal. Neal took it in slightly trembling hands and unfolded the cloth.
The cold dampened down the smell of oil as Neal unfolded the cloth. He knew even before he saw it that the steel of a handgun would be glinting up at him, glistening cold black and blue in the moon and snow-slashed night. He shook from the cold and a new unease dried the spit from his throat. Minutes ago he had been warm and mostly comfortable, whiling away his time in the workaday world. Now he shivered in the cold and snow-ravaged night only minutes later, among armed strangers who were secretive and hostile and wouldn't tell him what was going on. He laughed shakily.
“What's the gun for?”
“Dangerous times,” Hogjaw said hollowly. “Dangerous places.”
Neal looked around at the white nothing.
“Here?”
Bobo pointed ahead of them at the brightly lit tracks slowly moving up the steep grade before perspective narrowed them to a converging point in the distance.
“Up yonder. Essex Pass.”
Neal looked from face to face, trying to find a trace of humor or some sign that this was an elaborate prank. Finding neither, he stared down at the gun. A good one, a 9MM he reckoned, though he had never held or fired a gun in his life.
“You really expect me to use this?”
“If you have to,” Bobo said.
“For what?”
“You'll see,” Hub promised. “And once you see, you can never say. That's just the way it is. If you can't live with that, you can leave us after the end of the run. It's just the luck of the draw, kid. You got the short end. If you're with us, you're with us. If you're not, just keep out of the way and try to stay alive. Keep your trap shut about things you don't understand.”
“Don't be so hard on the kid,” Hogjaw said. “Hard enough times ahead tonight.”
Hub looked disgusted. “This guy's just like old Bird Cole. He ain't never been nowhere and don't know nothin'.”
“Take this,” Neal said, re-wrapping the gun and handing it back to Bobo. Some bad business was up ahead. He didn't stop to think what he had counted himself out of, only that his knees knocked with cold and fright at the thought of some unknown dangerous doings that were well out of his league. He kept his eyes averted from Hub, expecting some crisp jibe at his lack of manhood, but Hub remained silent. He had bigger fish to fry.
“Cold out here,” Bobo said. “Go on and get back in the cabin.”
Neal climbed back up the metal stairs, thinking that if he were a real man his booted feet would make the metal clang. But in the cold his tread didn't even make them squeak. He sat back down in the cab amid the mocking silence of the stairs.
He sat on one of the thinly cushioned benches as the men outside talked. They spoke for a few minutes, their icy breath pluming bright and shiny in the crackling cold.
“Whatchoo wanna put the kid up here with us for, Bobo,” Hub complained. “He ain't gonna be worth a tin cup bailing out a battleship.”
“Kid alone in the caboose,” Bobo mused. “A man alone would be easy pickings. Just make sure he stays out of the way.”
The men climbed the stairs into the loco's cabin, the steel steps ringing out as if in a c
heer.
They pushed past Neal with barely a glance. Hogjaw took his customary position at the throttle. Bobo sat at the left side of the cabin, staring resolutely from the window on that side. Hub sat on the bench next to Neal. Neal sneaked a glance at him. A tight little smile crimped Hub's face, but not one of good humor. It was full of a deep unease. A short, tense tic jerked at the corner of his right eye, causing him to look almost as if he were winking. All three men had their sidearms within easy reach.
The air brakes snapped and hissed as they were released. There was no sound of conversation for the electric motors to muffle as they loudly spun up. The rapid, throaty, rum, rum, rum of the electric motors torquing up and the metallic rattling of the diesel generators joined in screeching chorus with the clank and crash of cast iron drawheads losing their slack and accordioning out as the locomotive began to inch forward. Steel wheels bit against steel rails, striking orange sparks into the white night.
Hogjaw had the throttle pushed to maximum, urging the behemoth forward. Against all prudence, he seemed to be urging the metal monster to accelerate up the steep incline to Essex Pass. The engines grumbled and complained but tried valiantly to comply like an iron horse under his master's whip.
Rum rum rum rum.
The control panel voltage meters had danced up to 610 volts, nosing in and out of the red, danger zone. The already muted bulbs of the cabin burned down even more as the train improbably gained speed up the incline. Shadowed faces became darker and grimmer as the train snaked between the bulking mountains straddling either side of the pass. An ominous shadow fell over the train as the moon was wiped from the sky by the hostile mass of the mountain.
The pass was less than a mile away now as the train passed twenty-five miles per hour. Craggy, black rock faces peered out from ledges of white snow drawn above them like aged eyebrows. Some of the snow showered down in shallow spills triggered by the vibrations of the passing train. The freight cars swayed dangerously from side to side behind the locomotive, their massive springs squeaking. The wheels clattered rapidly over the expansion joints in the rails and angry sparks spat from rough spots in the steel ribbons.
The train entered a wide bend to the left, still accelerating. Thousands of tons of freight hastened through the black heart of the night at forty mph, the contained kinetic energy of a small, nuclear explosion held in check only by the thin ribs of rails. The stink of diesel fuel and burnt ozone drifted through the cab. The electric meters stood riveted to the far right, past the danger zone. Neal felt the viscera-rattling vibrations through his feet and legs and rear, so strong that a wave of nausea gripped him.
The mountain on the right suddenly dipped and Neal saw the faint glow of a dozen or so lights nestled down in the dark valley. Orange light, not like electric lighting. More like oil or kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps shining dimly from some tiny little village swallowed in the dark belly of the mountains.
The train cleared the bend. Directly ahead of them, no more than five hundred yards away, a ten foot high barricade of flaming, creosote-soaked cross ties lay across the tracks. Thick, roiling billows of greasy, black smoke boiled angrily into the night. Twenty foot towers of orange and yellow flames raged and screamed their hot fury. Oil bubbled and festered from the cross ties while gases boiled and hissed and flared. Within seconds the roar of the flames would be enough to drown out the onrushing train. Thirty seconds more would take then crashing directly into the flaming mass, yet Hogjaw hinted at no intention of slowing down. If anything, he pushed harder on the already maxed out hand throttle, trying to urge just a little more juice out of the engines.
Neal gripped the rail next to the steps and held on.
“What the hell...” he began.
“Shut up!” Hub snapped. “Sit down and stay out of the way.” Hub looked tensely at Bobo.
“Ready?”
Bobo nodded.
Eyes shining with singular purpose, Hogjaw sat steady at his post, one meaty hand on the throttle, the other on the pistol in his lap. Bobo opened the door on the left hand side of the cabin and stepped down onto the second step. Hub did the same thing on the opposite side. Frigid air whistled into the naked cabin like a hurricane, flapping the pages of the engineer's log and flipping the brim of Hogjaw's engineer's cap up. Snow churned into the cabin and stung Neal's eyes like icy grains of sand.
The train churned toward the barricade, keening through the night, motors whirring and wheels pounding. To his right and below, Neal heard the misplaced, ululating whinny of a horse. He snapped his head around and looked down.
Riding parallel to the train, half a dozen riders dressed in black capes and cloaks kept pace with the speeding train. Long snakes of tangled hair streamed out behind the riders. Ghost white faces shone like blank bone above tangled black beards. Eyes glinted like coal chips in black-shadowed eye sockets. Galloping hoof beats thundered in the night.
Hogjaw laid on the air horn and added its long, ear slitting bray to the roar. He held the cord tight, no sign of let up forthcoming.
“My side! My side!” Hub cried.
Bobo reeled across the cabin and stood by Hub, crowding onto the step with him.
Shocked by this skewed re-enactment of an 1880's train robbery where the Indians and bandits had been replaced by black clad cossacks and the steam engine supplanted by a three hundred ton, high tech diesel-electric monster, Neal watched in slow disbelief as one of the riders swung toward the train. There was a rattling clatter not five feet away from him and a now riderless horse peeled away from the train.
“To your right! To your right,” Bobo yelled over the screaming of the wind. Hub spun to his right and fell backward against Bobo. A crackling shot rang out. A high pitched yell was cut off in mid shriek and a black shape went tumbling across the open doorway and plummeted to the ground, tumbling through the snow and plowing gouges in its unsullied white.
Neal watched the man's body bounce and skid and roll away from the train in a bone-breaking tumble. If the shot hadn't killed him, the subsequent fall would. He snapped his head back front and saw the flaming barricade looming in front of the train. This close he could feel the heat from the flames blowing into the open doors, mixed hot and cold. The smoke smelled thick and cringing and oily. Orange flame glow flared in the engine's cabin, overwhelming the already dim lights and painting stroboscopic shadows of men in a life and death struggle splashing on the inner walls of the cabin.
Bobo and Hub struggled to right themselves from the attack and keep from falling to the ground themselves. Bobo hugged the railing like the last, providential handhold on a precipice, his feet dangling inches above the ground speeding by below him. Hub had hold of Bobo's heavy coat, his red face colored an impossible purple by the orange of the fire. Bobo's legs air-danced in a mad dash and he was finally able to swing himself back up onto the step.
Neal stood without thought to grab onto Bobo and Hub. His eyes fixed on the doorway on the opposite side of the cabin. A wild figure swung into the wind split chasm. A pale, unhealthy face glowed sallowly in the fire glow. The man grinned a sickly grin and Neal saw in the erratic light that the man's teeth had been filed into points. The figure held onto the doorway with his left hand. In his right he held a long, thick bladed knife.
Forgetting about Hub and Bobo, Neal lunged for the gun in Hogjaw's lap at the same instant the train crashed through the barricade in a tornado of orange sparks and splintering wood.
The mass of the barricade was too pitifully insignificant to slow the train an inch, but enough to knock everyone off their feet. Hub and Bobo fell in a new, interlocked tangle on the loco's step. Hogjaw pitched forward in his seat, completely oblivious to the threat on his left. The unwelcome boarder stumbled but remained upright, shielding his eyes from the tumbling timbers and flying sparks with his left hand.
Neal lunged forward on his hands and knees, scratching for the gun in Hogjaw's lap. He cried out a garbled, nonsensical warning from
deep in his throat and Hogjaw finally looked to his right. His eyes widened in surprise and curiosity as he saw Neal on his hands and knees, his right arm stretched toward him.
Neal snatched the pistol from Hogjaw's lap and used both hands on Hogjaw's right shoulder to push himself up and away. He skidded backward until his back hit the bench. Hogjaw pitched sideways off his seat, just in time for the intruder's arcing knife blow to hiss through only empty air over his head.
The train careened through the night, leaving the demolished barricade burning in exploded fragments behind it. The intruder gathered himself for another blow.
Neal pointed the gun and pulled the trigger, knowing that Hogjaw's only hope was that it was primed to fire.
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!
Three quick shots echoed in the cabin. The reports slammed back and forth in the tight space, seeming to stretch the metal of the cabin with their savagery. Blood and flesh sprayed from three sudden holes in the intruder's chest. The slugs knocked the intruder backward in stuttering steps toward the open doorway. The intruder flung his arms out and slapped the door jambs, but the slipstream was too much. He held on for a split second, then slipped backward into the night like a piece of litter tossed from a car window.
Instead of rapidly returning darkness in the doorway, Neal saw something else. The gun fell from his hand and bounced on the floor. His heart hammered harder and a new kind of fear -not primitive fear for his life, but fear of a more intellectual kind- stole the last of his strength.
A towering, white body literally filled the doorway; some light being of immense proportions. An intense, diamond-fire glow radiated from the being's forehead, but the white face was hideous. A huge, hooked Indian nose stood out above the fleshy lips. The lips were okay on the thing's right hand side, but on the left they curved down grotesquely almost to the tip of its pointed chin. Eyes as pale and cold as arctic ice stared at Neal with a narrow cunning. The white light in the doorway that surrounded it seemed to shimmer liquidly as with some kind of energy. And then, as capriciously as it had appeared, it vanished. The doorway was as pitch black as it had ever been.
Hogjaw was up from the floor in an instant. He crossed the darkened cabin in a flash and knelt down by Neal. Too stupefied for immediate reaction, it took a few moments for Neal to register that Hogjaw was shaking him and screaming in his face.
“Did you see it?” he demanded. The wind had whipped Hogjaw's hat away and his steel gray hair swirled in the wind.
“The face,” Neal whispered weakly. “The white...”
“Aww, shit...,” Hogjaw muttered. He seemed about to say more when a rattling and banging announced the arrival of Bobo and Hub into the cabin.
“Hogjaw! Get on that throttle! Now!” Bobo reached down and hoisted Hogjaw from the floor.
“He seen it, Bobo,” Hogjaw said and his face was as white as a ghost's. “Holy God, he seen it!” Hogjaw's trembling lips began to move in silent prayers. Bobo slowly shifted his gaze from Hogjaw's face to Neal's.
“Did you see it, boy? The white star?”
“White star? I don't know. Something white...”
Bobo and Hogjaw lifted Neal from the floor and sat him on the bench while Hub closed the doors. The flaming barricade was well behind them now and the entire episode of the murderous horsemen, though only seconds before, seemed like it might have happened a year ago. Bobo and Hub sat on either side of Neal on the bench while Hogjaw retook command of the train and steadied it down.
“What happened back there,” Neal asked shakily. “That man. I shot a man!”
“That man would have killed you,” Bobo said. “You did nothing no other man wouldn't do. Here, let's get a blanket on you.”
Neal hadn't realized it, but he was shivering openly, his body spent with cold and an adrenalin rush. Hub pulled a blanket out of an overhead compartment and draped it on Neal. Neal wanted to talk about what had just happened, but was unable to force words through his chattering teeth.
“Don't, Neal,” Bobo admonished. “Don't even think. Don't play it over in your head.”
Bobo turned to Hogjaw who was already on the radio.
“How long?”
“Forty-five minutes, maybe,” Hogjaw said. “Too late for him, though.” And the oddest thing about that statement, Neal was to reflect later, was that Hogjaw had sounded sympathetic.
Hub had poured a cup of hot coffee from a thermos and Neal slurped it down gratefully. It suddenly seemed too hot in the cramped cabin and Neal tried to throw his blanket off and stand up, but the two men gently, but firmly, held him down.
Neal's eyes roved from one man to the next. “Tell me what's going on,” he asked in a near whisper. “I just killed a goddam man and I'll have to answer for it. I've got a wife and a kid on the way! I can't go to jail!”
The three other men exchanged a silent look.
“Finish your coffee, Neal,” Hub said gently. Neal looked at him as if he were crazy. Hub gave Neal a hopeful look and he slowly drank the last of his coffee, looking between Bobo and Hub.
Then they told him how it was and why he could never say what had happened that night.
By the time the train chugged to a halt at the depot the next stop down the line, Neal was already off the train and running for the office. The silent patrol car sitting in the depot parking lot told the rest of the crew all they needed to know.
By the time the rest of the crew trudged in after Neal, he was in tears, the patrolman standing by him as if wanting to give comfort, but knowing his job prevented him from doing so. Neal looked at Hub, and Bobo, and Hogjaw.
“She's dead,” he said. “How could you know?”
The three crewmen remained silent. They had already given him his answer.
They watched him as he climbed into the passenger seat of the patrol car, a young man whose entire life had been irrevocably altered in an instant.
“That's the last we'll see of him,” Hub said knowingly. The other men silently agreed.
But they were wrong.
Two weeks later, after a proper period of grief and mourning, he was back. He walked slowly and deliberately into the depot with his satchel in his hand, still a twenty year old kid, but with an indefinable aging to his features, as if he had been through hell itself and made his way back not whole, but alive. He stopped by the bulletin board and looked up there, the first smile in two weeks creasing his lips. Someone had found a photograph of him and pasted it on the board right there amongst Hub, and Bobo and Hogjaw. Written on the bottom border, the nickname,“Deadeye”.
Condolences passed among the crew and they boarded the train. And this time, on the approach to Essex Pass, nobody had to ask Neal to take up his position.
He had brought his own gun.
1961
Doyle Rathmun couldn't believe his luck. Twenty-four hours before he had finally been pinched and locked up in a twelve-by-twelve holding cell with a bunch of drunken southern sots, now he was a free man. On the run, but free.
He'd started his Southern odyssey a week before, fleeing his home town of Boston during the first snow fall of the year, when the native Bostonites engaged in the singular Bostonian ritual of flocking to the ice cream shops. The cops had begun to get too close. A string of rape murders that had started with an eighty year old woman named Joanna Michaud and ended eleven corpses later with twelve year old Susan Kelly had somehow been tied to him.
The Boston PD had eventually netted a sad, simple minded man named Albert de Salvo for the run of murders. But even the thick, Boston cops already suspected that De Salvo, if he had committed any of the murders, certainly hadn't committed them all. The twelve stranglings had been evenly divided between strong, young women, and defenseless old women and children. De Salvo looked good for the murders of the healthy women, but the steely eyes of the law had already looked beyond De Salvo for the murderer of the elderly women and children.
Doyle knew his own mouth was to bla
me, recalling that he had bragged to one of his coworkers at the rubber plant, one George Nasser – a man as twisted and sadistic as he- that as long as a woman had “two tits, a hole, and a heartbeat,” she was within his range of acceptability. And once the cops, in their plodding, foot dragging way, had finally chased down enough leads to get a bead on a few suspects, a remark like that would likely land him in their net. They had already scooped up Nasser for questioning.
On the run from the heat in Boston, he had driven south in his '58 Chevrolet. It was the first car he'd ever owned or driven, a virtual land yacht with huge, wide-whitewall tires, automatic transmission and standard AM radio. He had no real aim or plan other than to put distance between himself and the Boston PD. He was no career criminal; had never spent a day in jail. Maybe the killing was caused by the steel plate in the back of his head, compliments of a Chinese mortar shell in Korea. The bone had never completely mended, leaving a two inch indentation that was covered only by steel and skin.
He made his way more by accident than anything else to this mountainous area of North Carolina. When the local legal beagle had put the light on him just as darkness was falling, he had remained cool. Nobody knew him here.
He watched in his rear view mirror as the heavy southern cop squeezed himself out of the cruiser and meandered up to his driver's side door. He lingered near the rear of the car, taking down the license number on a notepad.
“Evening, officer,” Doyle said cheerily. “What seems to be the problem?”
“I need you to turn off your engine and step out of the car, please, sir.”
Doyle's cheerful exterior wilted a little.
“Officer, I...”
“Do it now, please, sir.”
The look in the officer's eyes left no room for argument. Doyle switched off the engine and stepped out of the car.
“Somethin' I need to show you,” the officer said. “Step to the rear of the car, please, sir.”
Doyle accompanied the officer to the rear of the vehicle.
“You've got a taillight busted out.”
The unbroken lens of the taillight gleamed at Doyle even in the growing twilight. He turned to face the officer and saw that he had his pistol drawn. Before he could react, the officer swung the heavy butt end of the pistol against the taillight lens and it crashed out with a sad tinkle. It was so cliché it would have been funny had Doyle not realized his chances of getting out of this were becoming extremely remote.
“You got Massachusetts plates,” the officer said. “They let folks in Massachusetts drive around with a broken taillight?”
“Officer, we can work something out...” but before he could finish, the cop had interrupted him.
“That's gonna cost you, son.”
So now they came down to it.
“How much?”
“How much you got?”
“Oh, hey, now,” Doyle protested with a cadaverous smile. “You have to leave me something so I can get out of here. Never darken your lovely state with my presence again.”
“You makin' fun of the great state of North Carolina?”
Doyle backpedaled. This cop was no weak old woman with a heart condition or a little girl without the strength to resist him.
“Look,” he said. “I've got thirty-five bucks. It's yours.”
“Goddam right it's mine,” the cop said.
Doyle pulled his battered wallet from his back pocket and extracted three tens and a five. The cop took the bills and tucked them in the breast pocket of his uniform.
“You know what I think,” the cop said. “I think you're one of them northern boys come down South to stir up trouble with the darkies. Get 'em riled up so's decent folks can't feel safe at night while you go back home where you got 'em all penned up in the middle of your cities.”
“Nothing like that. I'm just passing through.”
“Well, tonight you'll pass through a holding cell, enjoy some Southern hospitality, courtesy of Castonmeyer county.” The cop wandered over to the other side of the car and smashed out the second set of taillights. “We can't have you drivin' around with no taillights, even if you are from Massachusetts. I'll have Royce Reid come up here, haul your vehicle in. Tomorrow, you'll be in front of the magistrate, trying to figure out how to pay the tow bill, the fine, and the repair bill for your taillights.”
He'd been handcuffed and shoved into the back of the cruiser to await a hearing before the magistrate the next morning. And the cop had told him if he couldn't raise the needed money, he'd likely be a guest of the state of North Carolina for the next month. Doyle had been issued his prison blues and escorted to a holding cell filled with greasy haired southern thugs and more real, live black people than he'd ever seen in his life anywhere besides the television. He'd been taciturn in the cell, unwilling to speak for fear his heavy New England accent would mark him for even more special attention.
Before dawn the next morning, a screw came around to the holding cell with a list and began calling out names.
“Darrow, DeBerry, Herrick, Nichols...” The call out continued until the guard got to Doyle's name.
“Rathman,” he called out.
Blinking, scared, and uncertain of what to do, Doyle filed out of the cell with the rest of the call out.
They trudged into the cafeteria and had a dreary breakfast of oatmeal, toast and fatty sausage. Falling in line as the roll was called again, Doyle puppy-dogged the line as they loaded onto a bus and drove off to parts unknown. Mountains and fields rolled by outside the lightening windows. Farmland mostly, lots of barns and a few grimy cinder block and brick buildings. Even as a first time prisoner, Doyle thought it odd that only one armed guard rode on the bus with them. Twenty minutes later, the bus rolled into the small town of Prairie's End and the bus hissed to a halt at the corner of two fairly large streets.
The cons, unshackled, filed out the door and stood at the corner of Garner and Qualls streets. After the last con filed out, the bus door shut and the bus pulled away with a roar, leaving the cons in the backwash.
Looking around with wide eyes and finding no shotgun toting guards, Doyle turned to Crispin Cyrus, one of his erstwhile cell mates.
“This is a setup, right,” he asked, thinking of the venomous act that had landed him in the cooler. “They let you out so you can run, then put a bullet in your back?”
“No, man,” Crispin said. “Work release. This is the Slave Corps for the hayseeds. You wait here until some cracker picks you up in their truck. Then you go with them to do whatever it is they want done. Paint their house, work in the fields, bale hay, prime tobacco. You usually gets a good meal and a few cents in your pocket. Five o'clock, they gots to have you back here for head count. Don't shit on a good thing, man. If you tries to run, they's no place to go.”
They waited as a succession of trucks with fat farmers and ruddy rednecks pulled up and the drivers shouted from their widows.
“Need two to drive a dual axle and bale hay.”
“Here, boss,” the cons would shout, raising their hands.
“You,” the drivers would say, pointing, “and you.”
The smiling cons piled into the beds of the trucks and went off to work.
Who can run a splitter?
Me, boss!
Who can dig a ditch?
Me, boss!
Who can lay brick?
Me, boss!
And so it went until the last cons had been trundled off to whatever labors they were most qualified for.
When the call came for a man to do electrical work, Rathmun shouted out.
“Me, boss!”
“Climb up, boy.”
Doyle climbed into the bed of the truck and watched the last couple of cons recede into the distance. The truck was an old one, early forties vintage, and it labored and wheezed up the mountains. This high the air was cold and Doyle shivered, even though he was of hardy New England stock and used to it. He d
idn't know how he had ended up in work release, but it was a godsend. He had to think.
As signs of even the most rudimentary civilization disappeared behind them, Doyle waited for the truck to slow on one of the steep upgrades. As the truck faltered down to fifteen miles per hour, Doyle jumped from the truck and fell to the road, lying there as if injured.
The driver stopped and carefully allowed the truck to roll backward to where Doyle lay. He heard the ratcheting of an emergency brake and the engine being switched off. Secreted in Doyle's hand was a large steel nut he had found in the bed of the pick up truck. God knew where the massive, rust coated thing had come from, likely some sizeable piece of farm machinery. The important thing was it weighed nearly a pound, it was cold steel, and it was a weapon.
The driver, an old man with a trusting face who was pushing eighty, leaned over Doyle, his eyes concerned and friendly behind Harold Lloyd glasses.
“You okay, son?”
“My ankle,” Doyle said with a sheepish grin. “Goddam, I don't know how I managed to fall out of the truck. This is really embarrassing. Help me up, will you? I think I can walk it off.”
The old man leaned down and gave a good effort to help Doyle up. Careful to keep the large nut hidden in his hand, Doyle pushed off the ground to help the old gent. He flung his left arm around the old man's neck and hobbled convincingly to the passenger side door of the truck.
With a sudden grunt of effort, Doyle squeezed the arm looped around the old man's neck and pinched him in a headlock. Simultaneously, he brought his right hand with the massive nut in it around in a great, looping right hook. The old man's thin skull caved in just above his brow ridge with a crack and a spray of gouged flesh. Doyle let the old man's sudden dead weight slither from his grasp as he crumpled to the road.
“That's for your Deputy Dawg, old man.”
Leaving the old man's lifeless body, Doyle jumped into the driver's seat of the ancient truck. He was mortified to discover an extra pedal on the floorboard and a shift mechanism on the column. As a Bostonian he had ridden the commuter trains most of his life and driven only sparingly. His own car was an automatic and he had never driven a straight drive in his life. He would have to take a crash course and he hoped that wouldn't be literally.
He turned the key and the engine sputtered. The whole truck jumped and rattled like a massive, shivering dog before the engine died. Doyle looked down. The clutch. He pushed the furthest pedal to the left in and keyed the engine. It groaned and turned over for a few seconds before catching into rocky life.
Good. Good. Now what?
The brake. He eased the emergency brake down and the truck began rolling alarmingly backward down the steep grade.
The clutch! The clutch!
He let the clutch out. Unknown to him, the driver had placed the gear lever in reverse when he stopped the truck. With the sudden engagement of the clutch and its already backward momentum, the truck abruptly accelerated in a series of jumping fits and starts. Doyle stabbed at the floor pedals, hitting brakes, clutch and, finally, the gas.
Already rolling backwards at twenty miles per hour, the sudden acceleration twisted the steering wheel in Doyle's hand and he careened backward down the steep grade, the front wheels lazily turning until the entire rear of the truck slipped off the road and began rolling down the heavily wooded side of the slope. Doyle wrenched up on the emergency brake and heard the stretching whine of the cable breaking. He pushed the clutch in to change gears but the sudden loss of engine compression only made the truck roll even faster down the slope. Trees and bushes flashed by him as the steel stallion bounced and reared and bucked, snorting oily, blue exhaust and whinnying in squeaks and groans. He released the clutch and when the grinding gears engaged they slowed the truck enough for Doyle's head to snap back into the window glass behind him. The engine died with a hiss and Doyle might have continued in free descent had the truck not crashed with finality into a large tree, snapping his head back once more.
Seeing stars, Doyle climbed out of the truck, struggling to push the heavy door open against the force of gravity, hearing the cooling engine ticking, smelling burnt oil and exhaust. He slipped down on the steep slope as his feet hit the ground and the door swung backwards with a mighty squeal. It banged heavily shut, just missing Doyle's head.
He stood up, supporting himself on the truck's fender, and looked around in this strange land. Steep hillsides draped in rioting fall color craned around him, deep valleys beckoned below. Now a murderer in two states, his only choice was flight. Whatever bureaucratic slip up had allowed him to be placed in work release would soon be discovered, as well as the dead body of the old man. And Doyle believed the crackers who would be coming after him with dogs and shotguns would likely have no desire to bring him in for “justice”. They would deliver it themselves.
He slipped and slid downhill for a way before he came to a clearing that allowed him to see into a tiny little hamlet, not the same one he had come from, tucked into a little fold of a valley like a lost coin that is luckily found shining like gold. It was beautiful, wreathed in low lying fog and sparkling with new morning dew, almost as lovely as the mountains of New England. Still quite distant, maybe six miles, he could see a few houses and a careless dirt road leading into the town. And it was downhill. He had to find a place to hole up, to think, to hide. He would be easy pickings alone in the unfamiliar hills.
He traveled steadily downhill, trying to keep the town always in sight, panicking slightly when he had to scale sudden rises that blocked his view of it, breathing a sigh of relief when it finally showed up again. It crept closer by maddeningly slow increments and it was only after the sun began its skid into the west and he heard the first, distant howling of the dogs in pursuit of him that he was convinced he was closer. Two more miles, maybe.
He forced himself to hurry, panting, hoping to have the town within reach before darkness hid it from sight. Once there he could steal a car, maybe get across the border into Tennessee or South Carolina. He couldn't think of anything beyond that.
The dogs were closer, that was certain. Not within sight, no, but their frantic baying and barking was more distinct, not safely muffled by distance. Before now, the howling had been merely benchmarks to measure progress. Now he counted the howling as second hands marking time toward his escape or recapture.
Time had hastened as steadily as his heartbeat. His prison blues dripped with fear sweat. The sun would fall quickly in this part of the world, first impaled, then devoured by the mountain peaks. Already the woods were shadowed, even though blue still lingered in the sky.
Doyle picked his way down another steep slope, the sound of howling dogs now a sharp discord. He reached the bottom of the hill only to look up and find his view of the town blocked by another hateful rise.
“Christ,” he muttered, despair cracking his voice. He began laboriously climbing the slope, knowing that when he reached the summit the town would be spread out before him beneath the last pink of the darkening sky behind him.
He crested the rise and there it was. Lights shone from the windows of houses only a half mile distant. Soft, yellow light, like candles. Save the lights, he saw no sign of life in the town. No cars, no streetlights. He frowned. He had come this far, he had no choice but to force himself forward.
He nearly fell headfirst down the last slope, his body outrunning his churning legs. He found his balance and the ground suddenly eased its precarious slant and leveled out. He hurried forward, slipping through little copses of trees, the houses of the town now real and substantial, not miniatures seen at a distance.
He gave a backwards glance in the darkness toward the sharp sound of the dogs baying and shrilling. Despite his headlong rush, he had to stop and look.
Outlined against the darkened sky at the crest of the slope he had just traveled, he saw flashlights and lanterns. Silhouettes of braying dogs and shouting men scurried back and forth at the top of the rise, il
luminated by the lights. Gaunt silhouettes of rifles and shotguns were visible. He watched for perhaps a full minute before it dawned on him what was wrong with this scene.
Doyle could have been no more than half a mile from them, possibly even visible to them, even in the darkness. He had escaped from one of their prisons, killed one of their own people. Yet they refused to make the final effort to come the last half mile after him. They paced restlessly back and forth across the top of the rise, both men and dogs, but none would come closer. No-one took a pot shot at him, no men shouted. After a few seconds of excited activity, the lights and the men stood still, the dogs stopped baying and pacing, as if standing sentinel.
Again, Doyle didn't question his luck. He turned and plunged forward, but more slowly. He slowed to a casual walk, catching his breath, letting his heart slow. The woods were still fairly heavy around him, but the town was plainly in sight. This close he could finally make out more than just impressions. Somewhere in the distance behind the houses, he caught the flicker of burning fires. Then the smell of smoke, but odd. Not like charcoal, but a thick, meaty smelling smoke, like grease that has gone rancid on a charcoal grate.
He stumbled slightly and caught himself. He looked down to see what he had tripped on and was surprised to see snow on the ground. This far south, even in the mountains, there shouldn't be snow in October. But this snow was crunchy. He stopped and looked more closely. His stomach racked into a noxious coil. Not snow. Bone. Chips and dust and powder and fragments and even full specimens. Bones ahead of him and to the side of him, as far as the eye could see, a pavement of bones all the way into the town. White bones, not sun bleached or time scarred, but white. Boiled white; stripped white.
It was then that he saw the unsound, yellow eyes of those who had been hiding and waiting for him. They came from their concealment behind the trees and closed in on him from all sides. Doyle smelled stinking, diseased breath, foul body odor, sour, rancid clothing. Scant night light glinted on teeth filed into tearing points. He tried to run but got no more than three steps before they fell on him, subdued him, and carried him into the town, gagged and bound, and still alive. Behind them, the men and eerily silent dogs turned and walked back to where they came from, leaving the night totally dark again.
Even hell on earth has its benefit.
1963
William Keane awoke as tipsy as a kid on Christmas morning, but happy June sunlight shining through his window made a lie of that. Yet it was still a day all the ten year old boys and girls in Judas Point anticipated with the same high spirits. Coincident with the first weekend after school let out, it was the kids' first step into adulthood. No longer would they have to be constantly chaperoned by adults, or remanded to return home by seven in the evening even on the long, summer days when the sun lingered in the sky until nearly nine o'clock. After today, the young boys could go fishing, or bike riding, or treasure hunting, or all the other things ten year old boys do without the onerous and joy-killing shadow of an adult hanging over them.
What actually went on at the “commencement” was a closely guarded secret from those who had yet to attend, but older kids would always drop subtle hints about the commencement, enough to scare and captivate those uninitiated tenderfoots.
There was talk of burnings and piercings and spooky stories with the adults sitting out in the audience in their Sunday clothes, all glassy eyed and hanging onto every word of the stories. The stories, William figured, were always embellished to frighten the younger kids, and they worked. William had convinced himself that it was like a trip to the doctor. You didn't know what he was going to find, and sometimes you got a shot. But there was always a reward after the pain, even if it was nothing more than feeling better. He felt a little heave of pride in his heart. Today, he would know the secret.
“Will-Yum,” his mother called.
“Already up.”
He smelled coffee in the percolator and frying bacon and eggs. He threw the covers back and rubbed his hand over his close cropped crew cut. He walked through the living room and saw his sixteen year old beagle, Baby Pig, slurping coffee out of his mother's cup. She was nearly toothless now, giving her gray muzzle a sunken, puckered look like old people without their false teeth in. Numerous skin lesions peppered her coat and there were hard calcifications of bone on her ribs. She was skinny now, not muscled up as she had been many years ago. She was no longer able to jump up onto the bed or even furniture and she had her own little dog bed she now slept in. Scattered around her dog bed were the remains of chewed cigarette butts.
“Mom! Baby Pig is drinking coffee and smoking again.”
“Leave her be. Let her enjoy herself. She hasn't got that long left.”
Baby Pig looked up at him with her still bright, brown eyes and seemed to smirk at him before going back to lapping her coffee.
William went over to the stove and poured himself a cup of the “Black Drink” his mother had steeping in a pot. There was some good natured rivalry in the town among the Indian kids who called it the “White Drink” while the white kids called it the “Black Drink.” It was all the same thing. Brewed from the leaves of yaupon, and various toxic seeds and flowers, the specific recipe itself was handed down only from mother to daughter (his sister knew how it was made), and it was as much a part of William's morning meal as the coffee his parents drank, and had been for as long as he could remember. As a younger kid, it had sometimes made his hands and tongue tingle, but the poison administered in low doses over so long had so saturated his tissues by now that he rarely felt its effects anymore.
“You have to look your best today,” his mother said with a smile. “My little boy's growing up.”
“Aw, jeez, ma.”
“Are your nails cut?”
“Last night.” All the parents in town were fanatical about keeping their children's fingernails and toenails cut. Most of the labor in town was farm work and not favorable to long fingernails, anyway, even among the grown women. Biting, also, was strictly forbidden and woe was the kid who resorted to using his teeth in a schoolyard brawl.
“Your dad will get off work early today. You've got a couple of hours to get ready. Soon's you finish your breakfast, you'd better get hopping.”
While William dressed, he heard his father come in; the squeak of the door, the thump thump of his booted feet on the floor. The floorboards creaked as he walked down the hallway to William's room.
“Your mom's frettin' a little,” he said from the doorway. “All moms do, I guess, when their kids take one more step away from them. Dads, too, I won't kid you about that. You'll be brave for her, no matter what, right?”
William was a little disturbed. This wasn't like his dad. Hesitant, openly concerned.
“I'll be okay, dad.”
William's father smiled.
“I know you will.” He turned to go, looking back once.
“We'll be leavin' soon as I get changed,” he said. “Time to wrap it up.”
They walked to the school, where the ceremony would be held in the auditorium. There were maybe twenty kids who would go through the ceremony today, and they walked -some a little grimly- with their parents down the narrow streets. Older brothers and sisters who had already gone through the ceremony congregated in superior little groups, giving knowing glances to the younger kids on their way to the ceremony.
William saw his own brother, Ken, four years older than William, with a gang of his teenage buddies, giving him the wise old eye that said “I know something you don't.” William had tried without success to get Ken to tell him what would happen, but Ken had adamantly refused to part with his hard won knowledge.
“You'll find out soon enough,” he had told him ominously.
Among the throng of folks streaming to the auditorium, William saw the Kellis sisters, buxom teenage farm girls from the spread across the way. Once, William recalled, he had been hanging around with Ken and some of his friends down by the
railroad tracks.
The two Kellis sisters had been walking along the other side of the tracks, trying to ignore the taunts of the teenage boys.
“Hey, Lynne, why don't you show us your candies?”
This had gone on for some time, until one of the Kellis girls had finally called back.
“Come on down here and we'll show you what we got.”
Interested looks passed among the teenage boys and Ken, the bravest of the gang, had ventured down to the Kellis sisters while the rest watched with breathless anticipation.
Sauntering with a false swagger up to the girls standing between two idled boxcars, his grin had quickly turned to a look of chagrin when the sisters fell on him, got him down, and rubbed dirty sand from the rail bed into his eyes. Ken had run back, fighting back tears, while the Kellis sisters laughed.
Thinking of that now, William was able to forgive his brother's superior attitude.
Just outside of the school, there was a small, tasteful statue of the town's founder, Judas Wakalona, a full blooded, Cherokee Indian. Judas, his father had once told him, was not his real name, but one given to him by his own people.
“Why,” William had asked.
“You'll find out,” his father had told him, “when you're ten years old.”
That day, William knew, had come.
********************
What poisonous secret laces the ground and flows through the black waters of Essex, turning men mad and filling them with a taste for human flesh? The terrifying secret is revealed with only a few mouse clicks....
Available at https://www.wandilland.com
Available at https://www.wandilland.com
The Lost Village of Craven County
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved
From The Lost Village of Craven County...