Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories

by Nathan Shumate

  Kyle was still aiming his oil at the roof while DeSalle helped Norman to his feet. “Bishop?”

  “I’m all right. Just clumsy.”

  The skeleton scrambled back and forth, glaring at them from its eyeless face, with an agility that Norman wouldn’t have expected from a twelve-foot skeleton crawling through the crosspieces of a barn roof. There was no way he could get a clear shot at it. He glanced behind them; the barn door stood a few feet open as they had left it.

  “Kyle,” he said, “go close the door.”

  “Maybe we ought to call the hotline,” said DeSalle.

  “You know Salt Lake won’t get any specialists here before dawn,” Norman said. “Now that we’ve got it angry, who knows how much damage it’d do before then?”

  Kyle got the door closed, and he sprayed the handles with oil for good measure. The thing growled.

  “All right, I have a plan,” Norman said. “You two go back by the door.”

  DeSalle walked backwards to where Kyle was already standing. Norman side-walked to the opposite end of the barn, by the stalls. The thing above them hissed and scratched at the beams.

  Norman carefully stowed his bottle of oil in his pocket. Then he grasped the medallion around his neck and pulled it off over his head. He held it a moment so its golden glint could catch the light, then tossed it in the straw on the floor, only a few feet in front of him.

  “Bishop!” shouted DeSalle. “What are you doing?!”

  The skeletal thing watched Norman intently. Then, as if drawn by an urge it couldn’t control, it started down from the roof like a spider examining something caught in its web.

  Norman stood empty-handed with his arms well away from his body, feeling like a gunfighter in an old Western. There was a naked place around his neck where the medallion should be.

  Closer, just a little closer...

  The thing paused, clinging to the wall and looking down at Norman. Then with a burst of speed it dropped to the floor in a crouch and launched itself in his direction on all fours.

  “Arms to the square!” Norman yelled. He did so himself, drawing the gun from his belt with his left hand. His left shoulder ached where it had hit the floor, but the thing was close enough that his bad aim wouldn’t matter.

  “By the power of—” he started as he pulled the trigger. The rest of his words were lost in a sound like a pressurized airplane cabin being breached. There was no recoil from the gun; as far as Norman could tell, the clay bullets always vaporized into dust instead of going anywhere. But the thing shrieked and recoiled like it had been hit by a cannonball. It fell backwards, folding at odd angles, and Norman could see its stolen flesh start to curl off it before it even hit the floor. The bones that hit the floor were lifeless and inert.

  He motioned to DeSalle and Kyle to come close and they did so, their oil held at the ready. Norman nudged the skull with his boot; it was now just a pile of gargantuan bones, surrounded by slivers of meat that sloughed off it and soaked the straw.

  “It’s a Gadianton,” he said. “Brigham Young said that the Wasatch Front was thick with their spirits. I’m guessing that the heavy machinery for that subdivision disturbed it, and then once the winter solstice freed it, it started to wander.”

  “And the... meat?” said Kyle.

  “Gadiantons are robbers, always have been,” said DeSalle. “This one stole flesh to clothe itself.” DeSalle looked up at Norman, comprehension settling in his eyes. “And you knew that a robber would go for the gold. That’s why you took off your medallion—as bait.”

  “Actually,” said Norman, “I think it saw I was unguarded and decided to come for me. One way or another, though, it worked.”

  “That... was... cool!” Kyle exclaimed. “It was so awesome! Chew on that Priesthood, you Son of Perdition!”

  Norman looked at DeSalle. “I guess that’s better than the reaction Brother Wills had the first time.”

  ***

  When they trudged back out of the barn, Steve was standing where they had left him on the path, his bare hands stuck under the arms of his coat for warmth, shifting from foot to foot.

  “Is—did you—”

  Norman nodded. “Taken care of. Your other horse is alive, but I don’t know about injuries.”

  “Thank you. Thank you!” Steve grabbed Norman’s hand and shook it ferociously.

  “I can provide a letter for your insurance, but it’ll have to be vague; it might not be helpful. Give me a call after you talk to your carrier.”

  “I will! I will—thank you!”

  Norman turned to DeSalle and Kyle, who was grinning from ear to ear. “If I get you both the paperwork tomorrow night—or tonight, I guess—can you have it finished by Sunday? We’re supposed to turn it in to the Presiding Bishopric’s Office within a week.

  DeSalle nodded. Kyle said, “Can do!”

  “And cleanup?” DeSalle said.

  “The PBO will want the bones, too,” Norman said. “I know just the person.”

  He pulled out his phone and scrolled through to a stored number. After two rings, he said, “Sister Cotter, this is Bishop Evenson. I’m sorry to bother you so late, but you’re the agent Relief Society president in these cases...”

  Story in a Bar

  Larry leaned toward the fellow sitting on the barstool two down. “So,” he said, “how’d you lose the leg?”

  The man swiveled slightly on his stool and looked at Larry, and Larry looked back. He knew he wasn’t much to look at—Cindy had told him so for years, first jokingly, then simply as a matter of thoughtless habit—but he knew that he fit in, here in The Drowned Out, with the other low-grade white collar types who were taking up space at the bar and in the booths. He belonged. This one-legged man, though, was a novelty. His hair was white with a few scattered black threads running through it where it fell into his eyes; his skin was wrinkled leather as if he had spent fifty years staring down the wind and the sun, and his chin was frosted with white stubble. He wore a pea jacket, clinching Larry’s assessment of the man as an “old salt,” though what an “old salt” was doing in Ohio he had no idea. And of course there was that missing leg, without a prosthesis or even a peg in its place; the right leg of the man’s corduroys were rolled and pinned where the thigh abruptly ended.

  The man took a long pull at his beer as he looked back at Larry, then said, “You’re a friendly sort, at you?” His muttered voice was strong but quiet, with a cadence that made Larry think of rolling seas and creaking yardarms or whatever creaked on a boat. Larry had never been on the ocean. He also knew that he was moderately drunk.

  “Well, you seem like a man with a story,” Larry said, waving to Chuck behind the bar for another of what he had just finished. “No point in ignoring it, right? The leg, I mean. Everyone’s always trying to pretend that nobody’s got a handicap—no offense—but hey, the leg’s not there, and it’s hard to ignore. And it’s probably a damned interesting story.”

  “I’m sure everyone in here has his own story,” the man said—not brusquely, not in an effort to end the exchange, but conversational-like. Larry scooted his drink with him as he moved to the stool beside the man. Up close the old pea coat was patched but clean, and despite the stubble and shaggy hair, the man didn’t smell or anything.

  “Everyone in here,” Larry said, “has the same story. Me too. Got a wife waiting at home who ain’t really waiting. No matter when I get there, she’ll be sitting up in bed with the mudpack on, watching whoever’s on late-nite now, and when I crawl into bed she’ll turn out the light and roll over and that’ll be it. As long as I’m not getting any tonight, I might as well be here at The Drowned Out, getting pleasantly plastered. And there aren’t any one-legged men at home. At least, I don’t think her tastes run that way. So? What’s your story?”

  The man hadn’t reacted as Larry slid over. He still didn’t move, except for his eyes—or one eye, anyway. Larry guessed that the eye that didn’t move was blind. The good eye flicked down to h
is empty beer and back. Larry waved to Chuck to give the man a refill. Chuck would just put it on his tab; Larry was a regular, and he liked the feel of that.

  The man turned the handle of the fresh mug around to himself. “A story, then,” he said. “Let me tell you a story. A story about a man named McCabe. McCabe was a sailor, first in the navy during the war, then on merchant ships afterward. Never wanted to settle down, this McCabe. He was fine with the wandering life, taking jobs as they came and leaving them when he felt like it.

  “One trip, on his way across the Pacific—McCabe was the Mate on that run, on a small shipping vessel that ran among the Pacific Islands—the ship got blown off course during a storm, and when the sky cleared they were near a little cluster of islands that they would have missed if not for the storm. The captain wanted to take a day to check for leaks and tighten the bolts, so they moored close to one of the islands—a wee little thing, just big enough to walk around in an hour. The ship checked out fine, all except some work on the engine that you needed some expertise to handle, so only two or three men on board kept working, and McCabe was bored, so he took some fellows to explore the island.”

  Once he got started, Larry noticed, the man had a lilt to his voice, like he was one generation away from wherever his parents had been born. That kind of not-quite accent gave music to the telling of the tale, and Larry could almost smell the brine.

  “So McCabe and his friends hopped to the island and started walking around it. They were almost completely on the other side when they saw what looked like old bricks on the beach. They were rounded by sand and surf, and deep green instead of red, but they were bricks. Now, the tide isn’t going to wash something as heavy as bricks in from the ocean, especially not out in the middle of nowhere, so they must have come from someplace just off the beach. So McCabe and his friends went up the beach and into the trees to find out where the bricks came from.”

  The man shifted on his stool, and Larry saw his crutch for the first time, leaning against the bar on his other side. It was an adjustable crutch, modern and aluminum, but the original padding on the top had been replaced with some kind of hairy black and white pelt, like badger or skunk, sewn on with shoelaces.

  “Not far under the trees, they found a building made of the same green bricks, no larger than a garden shed, with a low brick wall around it that was crumbling into the moss; that wall was where the bricks on the beach had come from. The building didn’t have any windows, and it didn’t really have a door, not anymore. They could tell where a doorway had originally been, but it had been filled in with the same bricks that made up the little building, all green stone which was now even greener with moss and lichen.

  “McCabe hopped over the bit of wall, and he and his friends looked at the filled-up doorway. The little building still held together, four walls and a roof, but if there ever had been any mortar between the bricks in the doorway, it was all crumbled and washed out now, and when they tested the bricks at the top of the doorway, they found they were loose—if they wanted to, they could open the little building and find out what was inside.”

  Larry was impressed. He had thought the man’s story would turn out to be either something simple like getting caught in a combine, or a wholesale whopper like a great white whale. He definitely felt he was getting his bought beer’s worth.

  “Now,” said the man, “there was a man with McCabe, a Polynesian man named... ah, I’ve forgotten his name. Anyway, he was an Islander, and when they saw the little building he hung back outside the wall, and when McCabe started messing with the bricks, he told him to leave it alone. He said, ‘The old people went to a lot of trouble to wall up that door—why do you want to undo their hard work?’ McCabe just laughed and called him superstitious, and the other men laughed too, and those who hadn’t really cared what was inside now wanted to, to prove they weren’t superstitious too.”

  Chuck said, “Last call, fellas.” The man still had half his beer left, and Larry didn’t feel like another, so he just shook his head slightly at Chuck.

  “It’s that late?” said the man. “I’ll need to get along pretty soon.”

  “Oh, we’ve got a couple of minutes,” Larry said. “And you really can’t stop now, right? I’m hooked!”

  The man smiled at Larry and looked him up and down with his one good eye, then took a swallow of his beer before continuing.

  “So the men made a human chain, with McCabe pulling out the loose bricks from the doorway, and the rest handing them along to dump them over the wall out of the way. And when they got most of the bricks out of the doorway, McCabe leaned in so he could see, and you know what he saw? A skeleton.”

  The man coughed, and took another swig of his beer to clear his throat. Larry could feel the pressure from the evening’s beers on his bladder, but he didn’t want to pause the story for a trip to the men’s room; who knew if the man would ever get started again?

  “It was green, moss green like the bricks, from sitting in the jungle for hundreds of years,” the man said. “Some bones were missing, but most were there. And the skull... its teeth... were pointed. All of them. Like two rows of needles.”

  Suddenly the man glanced up. “Hell, is that the time?” He put both hands against the bar and swiveled the stool towards his crutch. “Got to catch my bus.”

  “Wait!” said Larry, jumping down from his stool. There were only a couple of regulars left in the place, finishing up their beers. Chuck leaned against the end of the bar near the door, watching people exit.

  The man wedged his crutch beneath his arm and hopped toward the door. “If I miss my bus, I’ll be stuck on the streets all night, you know.”

  “But—I—Here, let me help you to the bus stop.” Larry almost grabbed the man’s arm to usher him out. “And you can finish your story.”

  The door jingled as they exited, and the cold, silent breath of night air was like a slap in Larry’s face. He felt his bladder contract and wished he had found some juncture at which to relieve himself earlier. The bar was two steps down from the street, and he helped the man up to sidewalk level. With his free hand, the man pointed right, and Larry walked alongside him, trying to appear helpful.

  “So, the skeleton,” Larry prodded.

  “Yes, the skeleton,” said the man. “Did I tell you about the teeth? Pointed.”

  “Yes. Pointed teeth. And then?”

  The end of the crutch made a hard, brittle sound on the sidewalk as the man hop-stepped, in contrast the the shuffle of his lone shoe.

  “This man McCabe picked up the skull,” the man said. He was moving at a fair pace, but his voice wasn’t winded. “He was just as spooked as the rest of them, all right, but he didn’t want to let on. So he went for bravado. He picked up the skull with the jawbone and held them like a puppet. ‘Hello, mates,’ he said in a high voice, just like that. ‘Good of you to drop in!’ He hoped that his friends would laugh and it would break the tension, but they just stared at him, like he had pissed on a cross.”

  The island of light around The Drowned Out was receding behind them, and the nearest streetlight seemed impossibly distant. Larry found it hard to keep up with the man, much less render any aid. He gave up the pretext and trotted alongside him.

  “The old bones were slick with moss,” the man said. “McCabe’s hand slipped while he was handling them, and his thumb landed on one of the teeth. It was still sharp as a pin, and it poked him and drew blood.”

  The man halted, and Larry almost tripped over the crutch as he stopped short. They seemed to be halfway between the bar and the streetlight—was that where the bus stop was?—and the man was nothing but a silhouette in the darkness.

  The man laughed then, low and moist and throaty. Larry’s pulse had already been high from the chill and the walk; now it leaped upward again.

  “And?” said Larry. “And? How does it end?”

  “They all died.”

  Larry fluttered his hands in confusion. “Wait—what? That can’
t be—that’s a dumb ending, McCabe! And it doesn’t even tell me how you lost your—”

  The man leaned in. “‘McCabe’? I’m not McCabe. Not much of me, anyway. And I did tell you how I lost it. Most of the bones were there, I said. Most. But not all.”

  The man leaned in closer, his mouth still open in silent laughter, open wide enough that Larry could see his long green teeth, like a mouthful of needles.

  The Straightest Road in Maine

  So it’s night, black night, not even the moon is out, and we’re driving a road that cuts through the pines on either side and not a house anywhere. Every once in a while I see the light from a house far back in the trees, but I can’t tell for the life of me how you’d get to one of them because there hasn’t been a crossroads or a fork or even a driveway for miles and miles. Not that I want to turn, this is the road I want, but still, how do people get to their homes? Hell, why do they live here in the first place?

  Mary is in the passenger seat and I hate to glance over to her because everything that’s wrong with her now is right in her profile. Nose is still cute, sure, but under her chin I can see all the stuff that wasn’t there before she had kids, and that always reminds me of what’s under her coat, hanging over her belt. After the kids were born I said, Better exercise and do something about that or it won’t stay empty, it’ll fill in with fat, but she didn’t appreciate me saying that and didn’t exercise and what do you know, what I said happened. I think she did it just to spite me or something, because honestly, who’d want to look that way? Sure, I got more pounds on me than I had when we got married but men carry it better.

  And it doesn’t help things that Mindy is in the back seat, Mary’s kid sister, and she leans forward between the front bucket seats to see the road and talk to us when we talk. She’s got a perfect set of knockers, better than Mary’s ever were even before she started squeezing out babies and her boobs inflated and deflated and inflated and deflated until they look like old pillows, and when Mindy leans forward toward us the V-neck of her shirt lets you see all the way to Florida. I adjusted the rearview mirror so I could see better because, hey, just because you’ve bought a horse doesn’t mean you have to close your eyes when you pass a stable, right? And anyway, it’s not like there’s anything else to see out here, the road goes straight in front of the headlights and disappears into the dark and there’s nothing but night further on and to the sides and behind us. That’s why I’m okay with twisting the rearview mirror to check out Mindy because it’s not like there’s anything behind us, hasn’t been for probably an hour, and anyway that’s what side mirrors are for.