The Unwinding House and Other Stories

by Jared Millet

  >TAG / YOU’RE IT

  “Professor!” shouted the pilot. “The radar station in Australia just spotted twenty more Khendaar past the moon. They’re heading this way!”

  Weiss didn’t hear. He stared dumbfounded at the translator, even as the battling titans rolled his direction. Numb to the world, he never felt the foot that squashed him.

  Rougarou

  Hope Fisher dashed across Whatley Middle School’s softball field, weaving between the mass of screaming children who were running the other way. Five older boys, troublemakers all, stood against the chain-link fence behind home plate, cheering in ghoulish delight at whatever lay on the other side. Panting, Hope pushed between two of them to see what they were gawking at.

  She gasped, as much at the acrid stench as at what was on the ground. There were bones, bleached like a skeleton in a museum. The remains were draped in a disintegrating t-shirt and jeans, but they were wrong. The bones weren’t on the ground, they were in it, half-sunk into still-smoking earth. The fresh-cut grass around the smoldering corpse was otherwise undisturbed.

  In contrast to the condition of the clothes, the body’s rubber boots were pristine. Hope recognized the hedge trimmer lying off to the side and choked.

  “Is that Mr. Verette?” She didn’t hear if anyone answered, because at that moment she saw Annie Picou, silent as a tombstone, shivering against the supply shack not ten feet from the body.

  Hope ran around the fence and was at Annie’s side in a heartbeat. The girl was tiny, even for a sixth-grader, and her face was twisted in a look of horror that Hope never wanted to see on a child. She took Annie in her arms and blocked her view of the body.

  “Go get help!” she yelled at the boys. As soon as she spoke, she saw the math teacher, Ben West, jogging toward her. Annie wouldn’t move, so Hope picked her up. The girl let loose a sob as if she’d been holding her breath.

  “What happened?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s a body. Call the cops.”

  “A body? What? Did Annie…”

  “I don’t know! Call the cops and get these kids out of here. I’m going to the nurse’s station.”

  Hope was Annie’s home-room teacher. In the weeks since school began, Annie had struck her as quiet but not withdrawn. Hope had seen her with other girls at recess, but in the classroom Annie had all the presence of a piece of furniture.

  The halls should have been empty, but weren’t. The children swarmed as their teachers tried in vain to herd them into classrooms. Someone in the Principal’s office added to the chaos by ringing the period bell over and over.

  Hope had almost reached Administration when a boy named Randy Zachary grabbed Annie’s shoulder and stopped Hope in her tracks.

  “Annie, what happened?”

  “Go back to your room,” Hope said, trying to sound stern.

  “But I need…”

  “Go back to your class, young man.” Hope hated talking like that; it made her feel much older than twenty-five.

  Randy glared under his dark mop of hair and slunk away with an odd, bow-legged gait. Because his father was a city councilman, a lot of teachers treated him with kid gloves. Hope didn’t care at the moment. Annie still hadn’t uttered a word. Hope pushed through the school office and brought her to the nurse.

  ~

  Whatley’s Sheriff secured the scene and the Principal tentatively identified the deceased as the groundskeeper, Sam Verette. The Sheriff asked for the students to be kept in their classrooms, but once the State Police arrived all the children were sent home except for Annie and the boys who’d seen the body.

  Hope was told she could leave after giving her statement, but she insisted on staying. Annie was locked in an office with a State Trooper and a woman from Social Services. Hope tried several times to call Annie’s mother, but she wasn’t at home or her job in Baton Rouge. Hope wanted Annie to have a familiar face nearby, at least until a family member came.

  Restless, she wandered into the library and found Randy reading a magazine with a cover story about the “Y2K Bug.”

  “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “It’s nice that you were worried. Are you and Annie friends?”

  Randy shrugged. “Sort of.”

  Hope arched her eyebrows, waiting for more.

  “She lives out by our property,” he said. “I see her now and then.”

  Hope thought it odd that Randy hadn’t gone home.

  “Don’t you have a ride?”

  “My dad’s telling the cops how to do their jobs.”

  Hope nodded. Before she could ask more, the library door opened.

  “Junior,” said Randy’s father. “Let’s go.” He wasn’t a tall man, but he was built like a linebacker.

  “Mr. Zachary,” Hope asked, “are the police almost done?”

  “Not hardly.” He stopped for a moment to inspect her. “You’re that new teacher who found the body?”

  “This is my second year, but yes.” Hope was determined not to be intimidated. “Do they know what happened?”

  “You’ve got a TV? Watch the news like everyone else.”

  Hope stuck her tongue out behind the councilman’s back. Randy Jr. noticed. It was the first time Hope saw him smile.

  ~

  She made it home in time to catch the “unexplained death” on the ten o’clock news. Against her better judgment she found herself wishing for a major disaster or scandal, anything to keep the local story from going national. After the weather, it was announced that Whatley Middle would close for the rest of the week. The School Board had decided to reopen on Monday, but until then the students would have an unexpected vacation.

  After thirteen months in Whatley, Hope still didn’t have any friends. Too many of her peers had grown up with each other, and it was nearly impossible for an outsider to worm her way into their cliques. Instead, she spent her week grading homework, writing lesson plans, and chatting on AOL. On Friday she drove to New Orleans, but it rained. On Saturday the sky was clear, so she walked to Whatley’s tiny downtown.

  She ran into Ben West at the hundred-year-old drug store. She’d only popped in for a soda, but he waved her over to the lunch counter with such a friendly smile that she couldn’t refuse.

  “Bonjour, ma chérie.”

  “Please. You’re about as French as a potato chip.”

  “How’s Annie holding up?” he asked.

  “I wish I knew. I haven’t seen her since she went home and she was barely speaking then. I gave her my number, but she hasn’t called. I just hope she’s got someone to talk to, you know? Someone besides the police.”

  “Bunch of yahoos,” grumbled another man at the counter. He wore a dark suit and sat hunched over a plate of red beans with his nose in a week-old edition of The Whatley Courier. “Should’ve sent the girl home right away and got a statement later. It’s not like she was going to skip town.”

  “Well, you know cops,” Hope replied. “Good for tickets, but not much else.”

  Ben coughed a little too loudly. “Hope, this is my cousin Lou with the State Police. He’s investigating… you know.”

  “Lou Melançon,” the man said as he offered his hand. “You must be Ms. Fisher.”

  “Hi.” Hope returned his handshake like a fish on dry land. “Sorry about that. I just meant, you know, our cops…”

  He waved dismissively. “Bunch of yahoos. Pardon me for sounding like a hick, Miss, but you’re not from around here, are you?”

  “My mom was. She got pregnant at seventeen and ran off to Miami. Then a year ago I showed up at the middle school with a sign that said ‘Free to Good Home.’”

  The detective grinned. “I was asking Ben what the rumor mill’s been saying about Mr. Verette. Anything you heard that might be interesting?”

  “I’m not on the grapevine, officer. Just the facts.”

  “I was telling him,” Ben interjected, “some of the old folks are saying that Sam was killed by the rougarou. I’v
e even heard some of the kids pick it up.”

  “The rouga-what?” she asked.

  “Rougarou,” Lou explained. “Cajun werewolf. Bigfoot of the bayou. Everywhere else it’s just a folktale, but Whatley’s one of the few towns that’s had actual rougarou sightings.”

  “Bull.” Hope saw the smile on Ben’s face and felt sure that his cousin was pranking her. “So what’s the story?”

  “The way I heard it,” said Ben, “was that if you break Lent seven years in a row, you turn into a rougarou for a hundred days.”

  “It’s the usual bogeyman nonsense,” Lou added, “but I don’t mind stories like that. Unexplained deaths can bring out the worst in small towns, and as long as people are blaming Bigfoot they’re not pointing fingers at each other.”

  “Why would they do that?” Hope asked. “No one even knows what happened. Are you saying it was homicide?”

  “I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation. Let’s just say that right now we’re treating it as a wrongful death until the evidence says otherwise.”

  ~

  Annie Picou didn’t show up when school reopened. The students who did were better behaved than normal, but Hope wasn’t fooled. The calm was unnatural, and sooner or later it would pop.

  She was gathering her notes during recess when she heard screams outside her room. Hope ran into the hall just in time to see a strange figure chasing a pack of girls toward the exit. She swore under her breath and marched after them.

  The student menacing the girls was wearing, of all things, an alligator skull on his head. When he burst into the open, he nearly ran over a seventh-grader named Tony Hood.

  “Rougarou Rougarou!” the alligator shouted. Tony screamed and ran. Gator Boy charged at a knot of older students and shouted again: “Rougarou Rougarou!” They laughed and tried to grab him. “Rougarou Rougarou!”

  The boy in the mask ran circles around the recess yard to the cheers of half the school. Hope couldn’t help but smile. Another teacher might have put a stop to it, but she felt that laughter was just what they needed.

  Randy Zachary made a bee-line straight for the “rougarou.” Too late, Hope saw the look in his eyes. Before anyone knew what was happening, Randy ripped the skull off and punched the other boy in the face.

  In an instant the mood changed. Students watching from afar suddenly rushed in close for a view of the fight. Hope shoved her way through the mob, seeing Coach Watson and old Mrs. Landry doing the same. They reached the brawl at about the same time, but Randy had already landed more blows. The boy on the ground (Trey Barnett, now that Hope saw him) was about to cry.

  Coach Watson grabbed Randy and pinned his arms behind his back. Mrs. Landry pushed the crowd away and Hope helped Trey to his feet. The coach took both boys to the Principal’s office, and Hope snatched the alligator skull from an eighth-grader before he could make off with it.

  An hour later the reptile’s head adorned a table in the teacher’s lounge. Hope sipped her tea and watched it with a wary eye.

  “You know what that reminds me of?” Ben said while pouring coffee. “Maceration.”

  “Too much of that and you’ll go blind.”

  “Cute. No, I’ve got a friend at LSU who does research on turtles. He puts dead ones in a container with all these bacteria and they strip off the flesh so he can study the bones.”

  “Nice hobby.” It only took a moment for the turtles in her mind to turn into Sam Verette. “Hey, wait. You don’t think…”

  Ben caught her train of thought.

  “No, it takes weeks to strip a turtle, much less a human body. Besides, haven’t you heard? It was spontaneous combustion.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I’m serious. Saw it in the paper and everything.”

  Hope paused. The Courier hadn’t said anything.

  “The Advocate or the Times-Picayune?”

  “Weekly World News.” Ben smiled grimly. “Whatley’s made the big time.”

  ~

  That evening the mosquito trucks were out in force. They’d been spraying for weeks, every night around sunset. It was one of Whatley’s rituals – once you heard the buzz of the sprayers it was time to drag the kids and dogs inside. Hope got stuck behind one as she drove to Annie’s house. She turned off the air, but it didn’t stop the bitter smell of pesticide from leaking into her car.

  She turned down a gravel road toward a group of mobile homes crammed between the pine trees. The school’s records listed Annie’s as #4. None of the lots were marked, but she spotted a hand-painted sign that read “Picou.” In the small yard next to the trailer was an ancient swing set, a picnic table, and steps made of cinder blocks that led to the door.

  When she knocked, a man in an Iron Maiden t-shirt answered. It took Hope a moment to collect herself; there had been no father in Annie’s contact information.

  “Hi. I’m Ms. Fisher from the school. I just wanted to check on Annie and see how she’s doing.” She didn’t ask to come in.

  “Annie!” the man shouted. A moment later she appeared wearing shorts, flip-flops, and a sleeveless yellow shirt.

  “Miss Fisher?” she asked. “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, honey, I just wanted to see you.” Hope led her to the picnic table for a modicum of privacy. “I was worried when you didn’t show up today, but I don’t blame you.”

  “I don’t wanna go back,” Annie stated. Hope wondered if the School Board had sent a psychologist, or if they even meant to.

  “I know it’s rough, sweetie, but you’ll to have to come back eventually. It’s okay if you skip for a little while, but you missed all the excitement. We had a rougarou at recess.”

  Annie gasped. It wasn’t the reaction Hope expected. Annie went white, crossed herself, then put her hands over her mouth. The fear in her eyes was real.

  “No, it’s okay,” Hope said. “It was Trey Barnett. He had this alligator skull – don’t know where he found it – and he ran around with it on his head. Then he got in a fight with Randy.”

  “Randy Zachary?”

  “Yeah, why… Annie, what’s wrong? What is it?”

  Annie shook her head and bit her lip. She seemed even more bothered by the mention of Randy than the rougarou.

  “Please, sweetheart, whatever it is, you can tell me. If it’s a secret, that’s okay. I won’t say anything.” She hated lying, but she had to find out. She thought back to how Randy had grabbed Annie in the hall.

  “I can’t talk about it,” Annie whispered. “Not ever.”

  A hundred scenarios, each worse than the last, ran through Hope’s mind all at once. She swallowed hard. Whatever she’d stumbled into, Hope didn’t feel ready.

  “Annie, it’s alright to keep some secrets, but there are others it’s better to tell. Especially if somebody hurt you. Is that what happened, sweetheart?” Hope’s lip trembled as she fought to stay composed. “I really need to know. Did Randy—”

  Annie’s eyes widened, but not with fear.

  “No! It’s not that. He’s just a friend. It’s…” Annie looked around and whispered again. “I know about the rougarou. The real one.”

  Hope’s mind cartwheeled from dread to relief to confusion.

  “The what?”

  “I can’t talk about it. Ever. But I can show you something.” Without another word, Annie ran to her trailer and came out with a flashlight. The man inside yelled, “Where the hell are you going?” She shouted back that she had to show her teacher something for science class. The door banged shut and Annie waved for Hope to follow her into the woods.

  It had already been getting dark when she’d driven to Annie’s house. Now night was falling in earnest and all she had to guide her was a fading flashlight and an eleven-year-old’s sense of direction. Cursing her stupidity, Hope followed the sound of flip-flops and held her hands in front of her to ward off snags and branches.

  The ground sloped gently downward between the pines and oaks. After several minutes of stum
bling over fallen logs, Hope realized they were coming up on the bayou. There was an official name for it, but in Whatley they called it Hog Creek. It was shallow enough to wade across, with a current as slow as a funeral. The bank was a three-foot drop into mud.

  Annie stopped at the bank. Indigo painted the sky, but the trees made walls of midnight, a dark concert hall for crickets and frogs. Annie switched off her light and became a pale apparition before the muddy, black ribbon of water.

  “My Mamaw told me about the rougarou. Mamaw’s smarter than Mommy or Russell.” She said the man’s name with a healthy drop of scorn. “She told me the rules ‘n stuff.”

  Hope wondered where this was going.

  “So what are the rules? I’m not from around here, remember.”

  “The main thing,” she said, leading Hope along the bank, “is you can’t talk about it. If you find out who the rougarou is, you can’t tell anyone or you turn into one yourself.”

  “That’s—” Hope didn’t know what to say. What did Annie think she was hiding? And what was she going to show her?

  “There.” Annie clicked her flashlight on and shone it down at the creek. Hope bit her knuckles to keep from crying out.

  There in the mud was the bleached white skeleton of an alligator, minus one head. The bones, sunk partly in the earth, had been picked clean just like Mr. Verette’s.

  Hope knelt for a closer look. Annie held the flashlight steady while she slapped at mosquitoes on her legs. Hope’s fascination fought with her sense of danger.

  “I come out here to swim. I never saw a gator before, but I was climbing out of the water and this one just came at me. It would’ve got me too, but the rougarou jumped out and killed it.”

  Hope was stunned. “How?”

  Annie shook her head. “I don’t know. I just ran.”

  The sky was totally dark. The woods were a maze of shadows.