Levels: Fantastic and Macabre Stories

by Nathan Shumate

  Mary says, Keep your eyes on the road, almost like she knows what I’m looking at, but she can’t because she’s just staring straight ahead, has been all the way up from New Hampshire. Mindy’s got a job in Maine at some resort that wants her there this early in the spring to help them get ready and she doesn’t have a car, so we’re driving her up to drop her off until October. Nothing good on the radio, and Mary doesn’t say anything except stuff like Keep your eyes on the road, and Mindy’s a hottie but she’s dumber than hell, so it’s been a long silent ride.

  Mary says, Do you think we’re lost? And I say, How the hell could we be lost? We were on the right road leaving Bangor, and there’s been nowhere to get lost since. This has got to be the straightest road in Maine, and there aren’t any signs because there don’t need to be, there are no frigging decisions to make while you drive, just keep going straight and sooner or later you’ll get where you’re trying to go. And anyway, even if we were lost, and Mary says, Okay, fine, but I’m still talking, Even if we were lost, who would we stop and ask? The trees? We haven’t passed anything for miles except lights way back in the woods, so when we hit the next gas station, if there is another one before we get where we’re going, I’ll let you go in and make yourself sure that—

  And then something comes out of the dark on the right that looks like a person and right BANG into our grill and Mary screams and Mindy screams and I stomp on the brakes as I hit it and maybe I yell a little too, and the car squeals and spins but stays on the road and we stop, everyone breathing heavy and my hands tight on the wheel and Mindy whimpering, she’s hit herself on the seats in front of her because she isn’t wearing her seatbelt, and I look at the hood expecting to see a dent and blood but all I see is some straw.

  Mary turns to me and starts to say something but I know what she’s going to say, that I should get out and see what we hit, and I’d do that anyway so I’m out the door before she says it and my legs are shaky but I walk back toward what we hit. The car is turned a quarter way around so the headlights aren’t right back the way we come, but there’s enough light to see by. I can see more straw, and a shirt. I get closer and nudge it with my foot, and it takes me a minute to figure out what it is or was: a scarecrow. Straw stuffed into an old shirt, and there are the pants over there.

  Who the hell throws a scarecrow out into the middle of the road? I look toward the side of the road where it came from, but I can’t see anything that far from the light, and I can’t hear anything, and maybe the scarecrow didn’t jump out or get thrown out, maybe it was just on the edge of the road and I didn’t see it because of bushes or something. I poke at the shirt half of the scarecrow with my foot and I see the sticks inside that held it together, but they aren’t sticks, they’re bones. I crouch, and I look at the side of the road again, but there’s nothing, so I look down and yeah, it’s bones. Bones sticking out of the straw. Not fresh bones, old and dry and coming apart, just like the straw is old and moldy and the shirt is falling apart, and I don’t know if what I’m seeing are people’s bones, they could be from cows or sheep or whatever else they have in Maine, and I really don’t want to find out.

  I go back to the car, Mindy’s still whimpering and rubbing her forehead and Mary’s got both hands to her jaw like she does when she’s upset. I get in and say, It was just a scarecrow, probably some backwoods idea of a practical joke, and I don’t tell them about the bones because it’d just freak them out worse and I don’t want to drive the rest of the way with two freaked-out women. Then I say, I guess this is a good time to stop for a leak, anyone who needs to go, but they don’t think it’s funny, so I put the car in gear and swing around to head back down the road.

  And there in front of us is a crowd of men carrying torches, and I slam on my brakes again. I didn’t see them come up even though those are frigging torches, but I sure can’t miss them now. It looks like thirty of them, and they’re dressed all old-timey with beards and broad hats and suspenders, and they all carry torches in one hand and some farming tool in the other—hoes and pitchforks and scythes and things I don’t know, nothing like a weedwhacker or anything modern or that takes electricity. And I think, What is this? Because between the scarecrow and all these guys decked out in old-fashioned clothes it seems like a Halloween prank or party or something, and it’s the middle of March!

  Mary says, Locks the doors! And I do and one older guy walks up to the car. Are they Amish? Does Maine even have Amish? He’s got no torch and no pitchfork or whatever, just a cane. He reaches for the door and fumbles with it, like he’s never tried to open a car door before, but it’s locked anyway.

  And I decide I’ve had enough of this, so I throw it in reverse and turn to look out the back, but now there are farmers behind too, and they have us surrounded. The old guy looks like the leader, and he nods to some of the others, and a guy with a scythe and a guy with a pitchfork attack my back tires and slash them, and another couple do the front. Mary’s whimpering just like Mindy now and sniffling some too.

  The old guy knocks on the window like it’s a front door, and he says, Open, loud enough I can hear it inside. Mary says, Don’t! and Mindy doesn’t say anything but she cries louder. And the man says, Open, again, and I just give him the finger. Then he waves to another man to come over, and he’s got heavy tool, I don’t know what, and he raises it like he’s just gonna break in the windshield.

  I shout, Hold on! Hold on! I’ll open up! and Mary tells me, No! Don’t! but it’s either that or they keep taking the car apart until they get inside. I unlock the doors and before I can even get out, there are men at every door, opening them and taking the three of us out. They stand us all on one side of the car, side by side, and no one says anything except the one old guy. And he just says, Thank you.

  And I say, What the frigging hell are you doing, man? Is this some sort of robbery? You gonna steal the car after you slashed the frigging tires? Is this what you hicks do for kicks, huh? And Mary put her hand on my arm to shut me up, but I don’t shut up because what are they going to do that they weren’t already going to do?

  The old guy just watches my face, all calm-like, until I’m done, like I hadn’t just been screaming at him. And then he just says again, Thank you. And I say, For what, huh? For what?

  He says, Things need to start growing. It’s the season. We need new scarecrows for things to grow. And he waves to some of the men at the back and they come forward with armfuls of loose straw and some rope or twine, and some of the other men put down their tools and take out knives, big butcher knives that look like they’ve been using them for years and years.

  And he says, the old man says, Thank you, again. And all the other men all around us say it together, Thank you. And the men with the knives and the fresh straw come up, and Mindy and Mary start screaming and screaming. And me, I’m screaming too.

  In the Plantation House

  Finding the plantation house was a blessing from heaven. As the family wearily and silently hauled their wagon down the rutted road, they first saw its roof, a flat line of slate over the kudzu-covered trees, and quickened their plodding steps. When the full house came into view, it was all they could do to keep Little Bee from shouting out loud.

  The colonnaded veranda was peeling, and the wooden steps down to what had once been a tended lawn were warped and crumbling, but the walls and the roof still held true. Kudzu covered the windows on the first floor, but hadn’t extended to the second or third. Pa motioned Ma to stay with the wagon, and Jacob to pull both of the rifles from the wagon and join him. Unbidden, Robbie followed them, holding his bow at the ready as a rearward. Ma set Eliza, Janice, Little Beatrice and herself each on one side of the wagon to keep watch and raise the alarm if anything moved that wasn’t a tree limb in the sluggish breeze.

  Pa and Jacob advanced at the ready through the doorless entrance from the warped veranda. They kept their rifles aimed where their eyes tracked, and felt the floorboards cautiously as they stepped. There was furnitur
e in the rooms, some still covered with age-spotted drop cloths, most naked and molested by vermin over the years, but the floor showed no sign of any human tread.

  The stairs moaned in protest as they ascended to the second floor, but held solid even when Pa tested each with his whole weight on one foot. The second floor was less disturbed by flora and fauna than the first, and it too showed no sign of occupancy in decades at least. Pa motioned to Jacob and Robbie to check the third floor while he himself examined each of the rooms on the second. He found bed frames with no mattresses, old straight-backed and rocking chairs which held together by sheer Southern obstinacy, and fragments of silvered mirrors in frames warped and flaked by humidity, but no sign that anyone other than themselves was there, or had been, or would be.

  Pa, Jacob and Robbie rejoined the womenfolk outside, and Pa gave Ma a long, slow hug. He spoke for the first time that day and said, “Let’s move our things in.”

  ***

  While Robbie and Little Bee stood guard on opposite corners of the veranda, the rest hauled their possessions out of the wagon to the second floor. Then, while the womenfolk set to cleaning and arranging some rooms as their living space, Pa and Jacob gathered all of the chairs and slat furniture from all three stories. In a leanto out back Pa found a jar full of rusty nails to supplement his own meager supply, and he and Jacob nailed the wooden furniture into a mass of crosshatched timber and doweling. They threaded a rope through it, pounded a few nails into the ceiling above the second floor landing, and improvised a pulley from a caster off one of the old bed frames. When they were done, they had a light but effective barrier that they could lower into the stairwell, filling and blocking it to anything larger than a cat.

  Robbie didn’t want to be left to work with the girls but was too small to be much help with the furniture, so Pa set him to his proudest task ever: Robbie was to keep watch from one of the front-facing windows. Pa even set his own rifle against the sill for him to use. “An arrow won’t do much good until it’s too close,” he said. Robbie beamed proudly and stood at attention at the window for hours, intently scanning the environs clear to the road and beyond. Pa didn’t tell him that he had unloaded all but one of the precious bullets from the rifle before presenting it to him.

  ***

  That afternoon, Eliza and Janice explored the rear of the property cautiously and found the well. Its cover was rotted to little more than bark and spongy splinters, but when they had lowered a cooking pot on a rope, they found the water deep and clear. Pa tasted it first, and after his first swallow, he poured the rest of the pot over his head, and allowed himself a true delicacy: a quiet laugh.

  That night, Ma and the girls made dinner over the small fire that they kindled in the second-story fireplace with wood that Janice and Little Bee had gathered close around the house, while Robbie and his bow stood guard. The meal was beans once again, and the wearying smell of them cooking, even in the sweet well water, took everyone’s quiet exuberance out of them a bit. Sitting on the floor around their meal, they all joined hands and Pa prayed, thanking the Lord for His generosity in helping them find this refuge, and asking that, in the coming days, they would be able to find food to go with the pure water, fruit and vegetable and meat.

  That night, the males bundled into one room and the females into another. Pa told them that they didn’t even need to set a watch, but he himself got up around moonrise, too nervous to sleep without someone on guard, and stared out the window for hours at the vine-covered trees outlined in moonlight, until the gentle night air and occasional hoot of an owl lulled him back to restfulness.

  ***

  By design the next day was to be spent lazily, resting tired feet and mending worn clothes before any further repair of the house or exploration of the grounds. In mid-morning Robbie, who was watching at the second-floor window, hissed Ch-ch, which was the signal they all used to summon Pa without calling aloud.

  Pa came to the window and looked where Robbie pointed. Where the view opened up between the house and the rutted road, one of the dead shambled. Even from this distance, he could tell it was dead; its neck was broken, and its head lay over entirely on its shoulder, bouncing and rolling with each step.

  Robbie held up his bow with bright eyes, but Pa shook his head. “I don’t doubt your aim, but you know an arrow won’t do enough damage,” he murmured, not worried that the dead thing would hear him at this distance. “A flesh wound won’t kill one of them. It’ll only make it interested.”

  He waved over his back to Jacob, who brought his rifle. “I can shoot, Pa,” Jacob said. But Pa shook his head. The bullets were too few to spare for target practice. He motioned both boys away from the window, back toward the doorway where Ma and the girls waited. He steadied the barrel on the window sill, bent to sight with both eyes open, and pulled the trigger.

  The bent head jerked wetly, and the dead thing dropped to the road. Before the echoes had even died away, Pa set the rifle down and motioned to Jacob. They pulled up the barrier from the stairwell and charged down.

  “At least let me guard from the door,” Robbie said, and Pa nodded permission. Robbie stayed on the veranda, his bow at the ready, while Pa and Jacob trotted out toward the road with a shovel. They wrapped handkerchiefs around their faces as they went, but that didn’t help much when they got to the body; the bullet had split its soggy skull, and fierce-smelling brain juices formed a splattered puddle in the dust.

  Pa held the shovel under one arm, and they each grabbed a leg and dragged as far back up the road as the could, until the leg Jacob held came apart at the knee. They shoved and rolled it to the swampy ditch at the side of the road, and Pa quickly shoveled muck over the body while Jacob looked anxiously up and down the road.

  Then Pa went back down the road toward the house, scooping dribbles of rot out of the dust and into the ditch.

  “Let’s be quick, Pa,” Jacob said, trying to sound grown. “You don’t know what might have heard that shot.”

  “I worry about what they smell more than what they hear,” Pa said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. “Though how they smell anything over themselves, I don’t know.”

  Once the main splatter of brain had been buried and the shovel wiped on long grass, they made their way back to the house and beyond it. They cleaned off their hands as best they could with well water, then took Robbie with them back to the second floor.

  The girls had felt free to hum earlier in the day, but from now until nightfall they had no such urge, and as they held hands again to pray around another dinner of beans, Pa pleaded once more with the Lord for their upkeep, for meat and vegetables, and for safety.

  ***

  The next day was a rainy Sunday, and Pa insisted they do no work on the Sabbath, not even to strengthen or beautify their new home. He and Ma took turns reading from the Bible, getting through most of The Book of Judges while the children sat against the wall and occasionally nodded.

  After the Bible reading and prayer, Ma was just reheating leftover beans for lunch when they heard Ch-ch. It was Little Beatrice at the window this time, pointing out toward the road. Pa joined her, followed soon by Robbie, bow in hand.

  The drizzling rain had misted the air, and the figure on the road this time wasn’t nearly as easy to see—just a silhouette that moved slowly. But Pa could tell where the head was, and that was all he needed. He picked up the rifle leaning beside the window, checked the chamber, and started sighting down the barrel.

  “Pa!” whispered Robbie. “It’s not dead! Look!”

  Pa lowered the rifle and looked again. The figure had taken something from its pocket to look at it. A watch? A compass? Whatever it was, it was an action that none of the dead would make.

  “Thank you, son.” Pa replaced the rifle against the wall beside the window.

  “Pa?” Robbie’s face was bright and hopeful.

  Pa smiled and nodded.

  Robbie raised his bow, steadied it against the window sill, an
d shot.

  ***

  The rain got stronger through the day, but never chilled the air beyond comfort. Ma and Eliza discovered only two leaks in the ceiling of the third floor, where they would cause little bother. The dark cloak of rain outside made the house seem separate and safe from the outside world, and everyone napped in the afternoon, even Pa.

  And when they sat and joined hands around their supper, Pa once again thanked the Lord for this shelter, and furthermore declared the whole family’s gratitude that He had heard their prayers and sent them meat.

  Trading With the Ruks

  Malachi and his partners met the Ruk caravan at the trading hill outside the village, after a single Ruk, sweating and nervous, had come as herald into the village square to announce their approach and then scrabbled away as fast as his bandy legs could carry him. The hill was far enough away from the village to be hidden by the rolling land, though it was no secret where the village lay; one only had to follow the wagon ruts back from the trading hill, as the lone herald Ruk had done. But mutant tribes were never invited into a village of the Pure, not with rumors and reports of maidens spirited away by various mutant caravans to help keep those deformed races alive.