by Paula Guran
The crowd had just visited next door. Greenboy was sure he sensed John-Moseby, his best friend, sitting in an oversized and overstuffed chair by the door, nervously cracking his knuckles. He’d have been eating from a big bowl of chocolate pudding, so dark it didn’t shine even in direct light, thick as something found between the stones in a dead man’s gut. Some of it would’ve dribbled onto John-Moseby’s chin, leaving him with a spattering of freckles like black water droplets from the River Styx. He’d be tensed, tempted to bolt should that feared knock come at the door. But where would John-Moseby run to if it did? He couldn’t go out the back for the crowd always surrounded a house after they chose it. And he couldn’t flee up the stairs for they’d simply come in after him. Naturally, at least one had the key.
Well, it didn’t matter at this house. For three days ago Greenboy watched his father remove the back door. Now it was solid wall in the kitchen, icy smooth plaster.
“They’re comin’ up our walk,” Early whispered, feathery white-blond hair framing her face until—with her large eyes—she resembled a backwoods owl. “Is it time, Greenboy? How long’s it been?”
When you speak in a hush and you’re only six years old, the s’s lisp until you seem to be underlining your speech with Shshsh.
She peered at a table where a clock, set into the belly of a porcelain bobcat, ticked. She hadn’t yet learned to tell time. It had been dark outside for a spell, maybe for fewer hours than she thought. It always seemed to be longer than it really was, didn’t it? The devil must’ve invented waiting.
Greenboy’s eyes darted to the clock, too. “It’s almost eight-thirty. But don’t mean nothin’. Ain’t no set hour or minute. Just has to be by midnight.”
Feet moved outside, across black earth, shuffling up the sidewalk, snapping slick ebon twigs and crackling scoops of corrupted leaves. He couldn’t help it—he went to the window as homemade noisemakers rang and clattered. Some faces he glimpsed beyond were nightmarish, others silly. But the way candles inside the darkened room reflected on the glass, every adult out there was on fire.
Because her brother looked, Early couldn’t resist the impulse. She climbed up on a stool. “Don’t you think they look dead, Greenboy?”
“They’re s’pose to,” he replied, hearing his own muffled S’s.
“I see Momma and Daddy,” she said almost inaudibly. “They’re walkin’ beside Mr. and Mrs. Rodell.”
Early shivered and climbed back down, sharing a look with her brother. The Rodells lived on the other side of them from the one John-Moseby’s family was. Last Halloween they lost one of their twin girls. Now the surviving twin waited next door: thinking what, feeling what?
Greenboy wondered if she shared the fear or pain. Twins were said to be mysteriously linked. He’d see Emily Rodell at school. She never seemed to blink. Her eyes bulged wide every second, as anybody’s would from glimpsing something horrible. And her mouth always hung open as if she couldn’t breathe. There’d be a trickle of silvery drool on her chin. (Had a water moccasin kissed her?) Her grades weren’t very good anymore. She couldn’t concentrate.
But the weirdest thing was she always smelled a bit rancid now. Like a dead squirrel struck by a car on a late Indian summer morning might smell on the way home from school in the afternoon.
“They’re goin’ away,” Greenboy announced under his breath, letting out a gasp he’d only intended to be a sigh.
The crowd indeed stalked back down the walkway, teeth and bells in little plastic sandwich bags providing a jarring, primitive marimba. They traveled across the lawn, downright bypassing the Rodell’s. Had that family given enough? Could anybody ever give enough?
Greenboy heard the water pipes groan. The toilets—one down the hall off the kitchen and the other upstairs—both flushed simultaneously, then gurgled as if all the liquid was being drawn down under the building. There must be bubbles in the swamp. He almost felt those, too, rising in fetid microcosms, necrotic rainbow circles in the moonlight. Daddy told them that every time the house pipes made this sound, it was because the swamp connection was uneasy. It caused a drop in pressure. Roots grown into the works or moss choking a valve someplace connected with the bog’s throat.
A few years ago, when Greenboy was only five and before Early had yet to be born, one of those popular riverboats full of gambling tourists sank during a storm. The people submerged, screams softened into droning drowned. The county couldn’t dredge even one for burial. Then suddenly at night, months later, those bloated bodies came up together. They’d drifted under the water, moving miles from the river’s deepest center to the swamp, though nobody guessed how. One or two might’ve managed it, relocated by another storm or dragged by gators, but all? There were so many end on end that Daddy said you could’ve walked from one side of the swamp to the other, crossing a bridge. The water pressure dropped low—like voices in a church—and no one was able to make coffee or bathe or even flush their toilets for a week. And the stench! All over The Sticks the odor of carrion was pervasive.
“I’m sleepy,” Early said after the crowd moved off toward the end of the block. She rubbed her eyes. “Can’t I go to bed?”
“No,” her brother muttered, tired himself. He glanced at the clock. Nine-thirty. Where had the whole last hour gone? Maybe the adults went away, clear to the other side of The Sticks by now. “You can lie down on the sofa but you have to stay downstairs.”
And you must be so quiet. Respectful. Careful as a baby chick at a red-tailed hawk convention. Early curled on her side on the couch, knees up to her chest, fists under her cheek. Greenboy took his jacket off the back of a chair. He passed the barrel, a soft shuffling coming from within. He shuddered and wanted to throw the coat over it so he wouldn’t see it. But instead he used the jacket over to blanket his sister. He hoped he wasn’t going to have to wake her up later.
“How can you just sleep like nothin’s goin’ on?” He marveled mutely, able to close his eyes and shrug it away. Of course she could do that. She’d never seen anything. She knew the rules and was a good girl. She accepted the admonition to be quiet as a mouse, same as she did during the annual Christmas mass or Easter pageant, baby Jesus being revered in a simulated manger and then, enigmatically, admired as the older version died in contortions upon a replicated cross. She watched as adults did incomprehensible things because grown-ups did stuff that never made sense. Kids always pestering their parents with why this and why that got whippings, and she didn’t like being punished.
But it took more than being told what to do and then doing it to understand.
The autumn Greenboy was five, he’d stared out the window as a child across the street was sucked beneath the crowd like under the wheels of a train. That house had candles in all its windows, too—not bright like Christmas, only glowing like Halloween, glass panes ruddy with it as if smeared with cherry ice. And one minute there were teeth and bells, shrieks added to them. Then those candles went out.
The Sticks once had a cemetery, same as most towns. But the swamp overtook it, black water creeping up a little each night. Finally one morning every grave was a sump hole. So the mayor and council hired local boys to move it to the other side of town. But without the bog making sink holes through the neighborhoods and downtown—in other words without visually creeping through the center to reach the end—the swamp simply appeared in that new location, too. Had it slid underneath them? Poisoned, motionless muck threaded the underground until it became soft with decay. Not more than a month later that new graveyard went to quicksand and gators, stinking bayou and snakes. They tried twice again to relocate so that cemeteries were eventually attempted north, south, east, and west. It always ended the same way, eventually encircling The Sticks with swamp. They’d needed to build bridges to get across.
Now the town’s official policy mandated funerals at water’s edge, Spanish moss rustling like a mortuary’s velvet curtains as they gave their dead to the swamp. Same as burials at sea.
When the family held the funeral for Granddad two years ago, Greenboy stood on the bank. It had been a horrible feeling, ground sucking at his feet, hungry and too-soft. Water seeped into his good shoes. Full of tiny things, water actually wriggled, spreading around his ankles and between his toes as if it had places to go and bones to build sewers in.
Greenboy figured the reason he recalled the thing about the cemetery at that moment, as he remembered what he’d seen when he was five, was because as that hapless child went down across the street, it seemed there were suddenly lots more folks outside. The black earth gurgled and they came up out of the ground. They rose like bubbles of gas and gator jaws stretching wide. They multiplied in the dark—so dark he couldn’t be sure of what he’d seen—flat as the shawls of moss, shadows starting out black, then turning red as they took on a substance of bloody imagination, next going briefly yellow-white as the candle flames, finally winking out just as suddenly as the candles themselves had reverted to ash.
He’d cracked the window open that night years ago, just a sliver, trying to make out what these shapes were. The whiff he caught from the wind was foul. It reminded him of his grandmom’s leg which had developed gangrene because of her diabetes. The doctors had cut the black limb off, saying they did it to keep it from rotting away the rest of her.
How had the grown-ups known then to stop their parade at the house across the street? There must’ve been a signal but he’d never heard anything beyond the teeth-and-bell castanets, the adults’ calling, his own shshsh to himself as a reminder not to cry. Maybe the ground had turned muddy, the swamp coming up. Or the air began to stink like corpses shot out of a big cannon (what he smelled). Had balls of swamp gas led the way like a troop of cotton-mouthed faeries pointing the direction to who’d been chosen this year? Perhaps gators had come in and could talk, lizard voices sibilant with Shshshow’s over here, ya’ll. Shshshame and shshshinbone shshshivaree. This year’s shshshrine . . .
The next morning he’d seen the mother from that house, hysterical on the lawn. The paint on her face from the night before streaked from sweat, frozen to her skin because the wind had come in cold. Happened even in the deep, deep south sometimes. She ran around the yard, dropping to her knees, digging up bloody little bones which lay just beneath the surface of the ground, hugging them to her chest, kissing them as she wept.
And his own momma told his daddy, “Jake, promise me . . . ”
And then last year, when the Rodell’s lost their twin girl . . . Momma sat at the breakfast table the morning after, face scrubbed raw and her nails cut so short the quicks were bruised. She stared into a cup of coffee like its blackness came straight from the swamp. She was unable to look at Greenboy or Early. She said to Daddy, “I can’t do it. Not if it comes down to either of ours.”
And this year, this fall, the day before October 29 came around and the plagues of their own personal Egypt descended, she said it again. Not softly, not in any kind of a whisper, but loud so that Daddy put a hand over her mouth. He feared the neighbors would hear. It might carry to the swamp which encircled The Sticks. There was a flicker in her eyes, of candles and madness. She pried his fingers away and begged Daddy to promise. He sat down, using the end of a paring knife to clean under his own nails. They weren’t dirty but he went after them as if there something nasty under them. He scraped and scraped until they bled. Eventually he nodded.
Greenboy now heard the brattle of teeth and bells. Footsteps came up the street: some in shoes, some in boots, others barefoot. It had become so still that Greenboy himself must’ve fallen asleep, remembering those things. But sounds woke him. Early, too. She yawned and sat up, his jacket falling away from her.
He glanced at the clock. Eleven-forty-five. Had it happened yet? Where?
No, it hadn’t happened. If it had, the adults would be quiet. They would’ve stuck those sandwich baggies with the teeth and the bells into their pockets. They’d be somber, the shshsh’s having gotten them. They’d creep down the street toward their homes. A few would murmur prayers for forgiveness, even as they wondered who the hell they were supposed to be asking forgiveness of.
It was nearly midnight and the crowd moved back this way.
Early jumped up and climbed back onto the stool, looking out the window. Greenboy shook his head, thinking how, for a second, she was like a little kid searching for Santa Claus. He went to stand beside her. Of course, he was twelve years tall as a cattail and didn’t need to stand on anything to see out the window.
“I still think they look dead,” she told him out loud.
“Hush, Early,” he reminded her.
She slapped her hand over her mouth. Her breath made a little whistle. Then she turned to him, both hands going to perch at the windowsill, her mouth twisted. He felt her trembling next to him. This time her voice was the barest sniffle. “Greenboy? ARE they dead right now?”
No, he wanted to answer. But it would soon be true. Even if only for a few minutes, it would be true: most of what was out there would be dead.
They came up the walk. The candles had been going for hours and were waxy puddles, wicks burning, floating in individual swamps. The group parted and began to go around the house, circling it just like the swamp did The Sticks.
He pictured those cartoon gators. Shshshow’s over here, ya’ll.
Heavy boots clomped onto the porch. There was a knock at the door.
“Early, get upstairs. Now!” Greenboy commanded as softly as he could, lifting her down from the stool and setting her on the floor.
“But, Greenboy . . . ”
“You saw what’s in that barrel? Now git!” He’d barely aspirated the words through his clenched teeth.
She took off. He grunted and heaved to push the barrel over, hoping the top would come away by itself. It didn’t, sealed tight with six strong metal tabs that went one direction to press the wooden top and moved another to swing free. The shuffling inside had grown louder but was still hard to hear over the racket the grown-ups created outside. Greenboy moaned, kicking at the lid and jumping back. Still it didn’t come loose. He’d have to take the lid off himself. He crept up, fingers twitching, arm not wanting to stick the hand out to pry at those tabs. His flesh sidewindered.
There was another knock at the door.
“Don’t wait,” Daddy had told him after he’d taken out that kitchen door and covered up the entrance. “Do it fast, then cut out. Don’t hesitate and don’t come back down lookin’ to see what’s goin’ on, no matter what you hear.”
And then, October 29, Daddy opened up the chimney for a little while. He set the big barrel underneath it, sitting there with a pistol prepared to shoot anything that missed going inside.
Greenboy held his breath and reached out, flicking open the first metal tab. The click made him start. He undid the next one, wishing that would be enough except it wasn’t. He moved the third tab, sensing vibration in the barrel as it juddered through the steel tongue. With the fourth tab, he felt that vibration stiffening the fine hairs on his arm. With the fifth tab the lid bulged, pressed from within, the contents aching to swell out.
He was too afraid to undo the final tab. He stepped back, watching the lid’s edges tap. White forks licked from the seams. The top would explode out when he undid that last lock, wouldn’t it? And he’d be caught too close to ground zero. But he had to do it for he heard another turning in the keyhole. Yet the door didn’t open. He heard somebody (Daddy?) say, “Wrong key.”
The noise of teeth and bells clashing together, people howling, and something similar to the sound bacon made when it sizzled into ruin echoed in his head until the boy couldn’t think straight. Shadows pressed against the window, nearly spent candles folding them across the furniture and walls, resembling gators capering on hind legs.
. . . This here’s this year’s shshshrine!
A clatter, a jangle. Noises of a struggle as the crowd realized stall tactics when they saw them. Somebody had grabbed the keys away and tried
one in the door.
Greenboy leaned forward like a runner poised for the gun to signal the beginning of a race, body straining to the starting line, legs stretched with the torso balanced upon the good graces of the fingers. He reached for that final tab, shocked to find the metal in it hot as a stove burner. He thought at first the hiss he heard was from the barrel’s insides as they reached with magic intent through the solid lid to bite him. But it was only the skin of his fingertips blistering on that last lock. He flicked it and jerked away. He scampered backward toward the stairs, stumbling upon the bottom step.
The lid just plopped toward the carpet like a fallen drawbridge. Then it bounced to roll like a bicycle tire across the floor. The snakes coiled out at last, jaws widened to expose glistening fangs in cottony mouths.
Whoever had taken the keys finally found the right one as Greenboy turned to run up the stairs. He didn’t pause to look behind him. But he noted the strong septic smell: of clogged sewers and flooded graves, of necrotic snakebite wounds and the not-completely cremated in their cold ashes.
People poured in through the doorway, unaware the cottonmouths were mad as hell and ready to strike. They pressed behind those who stumbled in first and fell, bitten. There was a bottleneck over the knots of water moccasins as some realized the danger and tried to rush back out—only to be trampled.
Upstairs, Greenboy locked the bedroom door. There was a sound under his sister’s bed. Early had skittered down to hide there, the bedskirt stirring. He didn’t blame her. But ever the witness, he watched from a window.
It had become apparent to those on the lawn and over the sidewalk that something was wrong. People screamed and no child had been delivered out. But the moss-flat shadows still oozed from the ground, bumping together like bodies rising bloated in the swamp. Shapes were of mud and fuzzy sump, with features dripping or smiles rigid as a gator’s jaws. Shapes were spindly and gnarled as the trees bereft of their foliage.