The Folks

by Ray Garton

  “I ain’t gettin’ any younger, Andy,” he said quietly. “I’m the head a this family.

  “Whatcha cal the patriarch. Have been since I was about your age. Next May, I’ll be seventy years old. My health ain’t so good. I’ve already lived longer’n my own poppa.

  “Hel, longer’n anybody in this family’s lived for a long time. Ain’t nobody in this family fit to run it. I gotta lotta boys, but they ain’t…Well, they just ain’t fit to take the reins in their hands, y’know what I mean? That’s why I been watchin’ you. You know what I said to m’self first time I saw you, Andy? I said to m’self, that boy could be my son.” He grinned.

  “It’s true. You’re not like the others out there, all them perfect people who think their shit don’t stink. You’re one of us, Andy. You could be a Bollinger. An’ that’s what I wanna make ya. I want you t’be one a the family and take over all my bidness interests when I go.” He sat back in his wheelchair looking satisfied with himself, waiting for my response. He expected me to be happy, excited. It was in his face, his small eyes.

  I wanted to throw up. “Why…me?” I asked. It came out as an unintentional whisper.

  “I toldja! ’Cause you’re so smart! Hell, you could prob’ly do it without any college learnin’, but I think it’d do you good to finish your education. Sharpen you up, make a good Christian outta ya. We’re a Christian family, the Bollingers, and we don’t take to no godless people sharin’ a roof with us, know what I mean?”

  I considered shooting out of the chair and running by him, getting out of the house. But I did not trust my knees, my legs. I was trembling all over and felt like melting butter.

  I said, “But I, uh, I really don’t want to…look, um, there are plenty of smart people who could—”

  “Not like you, there ain’t. Like I said, Andy, you’re one of us.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head, which was beginning to throb. Too much alcohol, too much…Bollinger. “I don’t know what you mean when you say I’m one of you, what…what does that mean?”

  “I gotta spell it out for ya, boy?”

  Someone entered the kitchen quietly. A pregnant woman in a housedress, plain and powder-blue, with old faded-yellow stains on the skirt. Her round belly looked ready to explode, and her small head was bald and slanted sharply backward from the pronounced ridge of her brow to a dull, rounded point on top. People like her used to work in carnival freak shows and were called “pinheads.” Doctors called them microcephalics.

  She was short, just under five feet, with a flat, broad nose and large rubbery lips. No teeth. Her dull eyes swam in her head with the eternal happiness of the feeble-minded as she stepped up behind Bollinger, reached around and playfully put her large masculine hands, with half-moons of dark green grime beneath the edges of her fingernails, over his eyes.

  Bollinger smiled. “Okay, now, lessee…who’s this? Is it…could it be…Daisy?”

  The woman’s small head bobbed up and down as she guffawed like a cartoon character. She stepped around the wheelchair and stroked the top of Bollinger’s head gently, lovingly, still laughing.

  He put his arm around her, his hand on her flat, broad behind, which appeared to be bare beneath the dress, and said, “Andy, I’d like you t’meet my daughter Daisy.” He looked up at her, raised his voice a little. “Daisy, this is my friend Andy Sayer, from the Village.”

  Daisy stepped toward me and curtsied clumsily. She spoke, but it was incomprehensible, thick-tongued babble. The body-odor smell of the house was very strong around Daisy, and I made an effort not to curl my nose and wince.

  “She don’t talk so good,” Bollinger said, “but that don’t stop ’er from talkin’. Ain’t that right, Daisy?”

  She turned and faced him, guffawing again. Daisy got down on her knees and started to unbutton his pants.

  Bollinger pushed her away gently. “No, no, Daisy, honey, not now. I got some jawin’ to do with Andy, okay?”

  She stood and patted Bollinger’s bald head, then went to the doorway. Before leaving, she turned to me and waved a big hand. Babbled something that was vaguely understandable: “Bye-bye, Andy. Bye-bye.”

  Bollinger took the coffee mug from the table and gulped the rest of it down. Put it back on the table and smiled at me, moving a toggle-switch on the arm of his wheelchair. It backed away with a mechanical whir.

  “Let’s go on upstairs,” he said. “You can meet Dexter an’ some a the others.

  “They’ll be happy to see ya, prob’ly. We don’t get many visitors here.”

  As I followed Bollinger to the stairs, I looked for the right moment to bolt. It never came, because there were always others in my path. Others I was afraid would reach out and grab me as I passed.

  Outside the kitchen, we encountered two large men joined at the hip, wearing only a single enormous robe tied at the waist. Bollinger introduced them as his nephews, Charles and Rodney.

  A young man with no legs and fleshy flippers where he should have had arms, crawled over the floor. Another of Bollinger’s nephews, Benny.

  Bollinger’s wife, Wanda, met us on the stairs as I walked up next to the electronic chair that carried Bollinger slowly along its track. She clutched the bannister with her right hand as she made her way slowly down the stairs wearing an orange pantsuit that looked like it might have been in style in the early seventies. In her left hand, she carried a cane, which she held out ahead of her, touching each stair with it before she stepped down. Wanda’s eye sockets were empty. The skin that grew over them was sunken deeply beneath her brow, forming two pools of shadow. Bollinger asked her what Dexter was up to and she said he’d just had a snack. As she passed, I caught a glimpse of the thick, pink, fleshy tail that tapered to the floor from a slit in her pantsuit. She was Bollinger’s wife, but I wondered in what other way they were related.

  “You’re one of us, Andy,” Bollinger said, “because you’re differnt. Know what I mean? Maybe not in the same way, but still differnt. People stare, don’t they? They’re suspicious of you, like your burned face makes you some kinda bad person, huh? A monster? I bet kids’re scared of you, too. And when you were a kid, I bet they picked on you, didn’t they? Huh?”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Sure they did. Most people get that kinda treatment, it scars ’em. And I don’t mean physically. Makes ’em bitter, mean. Not you, though. You’re polite, friendly. You say you ain’t a Christian, but I’ll tell ya sumpin, they’s a lotta Christians could take a lesson from you. You behave the way our lord an’ savior Jesus Christ wants us all to behave. Wish I could say the same, boy. Now me…’fraid I got m’self a mean streak.” He laughed as we reached the third floor. He got out of the chair on the track and climbed into a waiting wheelchair. “But the rest of my family, they couldn’t be sweeter. You won’t get none of that starin’ and meanness from them like you do from the people out there,” he said, nodding vaguely toward a wall, indicating the outside. “They’d take y’in like you’s one of the family. Hell, far as I’m concerned, y’already are. My family’s your family,

  Andy,” he said, smiling up at me. “And when I’m gone, it’s all yours. Everything.”

  As I climbed the stairs, the smell had gotten stronger, closer. The voices and activity from upstairs had grown louder. With each step, my feet grew heavier, my heart pounded harder, faster. I barely heard what Bollinger was saying—I was too busy trying to decide what to do next. But oddly enough, I found myself not wanting to offend him.

  As revolted as I was by everything and everyone I had seen—except the children, who broke my heart, the poor, innocent children—Bollinger had been nothing but pleasant.

  Otherwise, it would have been much easier.

  I said, “I…I’m sorry, Mr. Bollinger, but I’m—”

  “Matt!” he thundered. “Cal me Matt. No formalities here, boy.”

  I walked slowly down the hall beside his wheelchair. It was a long hallway, and at the end, I could see that another hallwa
y formed a T-shaped intersection. There were doors on each side, nothing but doors. No paintings or photographs on the gray walls, no plants, nothing decorative. Just doors, most of them open, people going in and out of the rooms, crossing the hall to enter other rooms. Some walking upright, some hunched, others crawling. The smell was powerful, and I could no longer hide my revulsion.

  “I can’t help you, Matt,” I said without looking at him.

  “Oh? How come?” I heard a smirk in his voice.

  “I’ve got other plans.”

  “And what plans’d they be?”

  “Plans. For my life. I…I’m going to be leaving the Village tomorrow. And I won’t be coming back.” That had not been my plan, of course. Not until that very moment.

  The wheelchair’s whir reached a higher pitch as Bollinger sped ahead, then spun the chair around to face me. I stumbled to a stop. He was smiling.

  “You ain’t got no plans to leave, son,” he said. His voice was low and still pleasant, but with a new edge I had not heard before. “If you did, I’d know sumpin about it. Like I said, Andy, nothin’ happens on this mountain I don’t know about. And I been watchin’ you special. You’re just…nervous, assall. You gotta letcherself get used to the idea. You’ll get more love an’ acceptance here’n you ever got in your whole life, Andy.

  “And remember…I’m rich. Real rich. You’ll be rich, too.”

  Up ahead, Amanda leaned out of an open door, still naked.

  “What’s taking you two so long?” she asked with a laugh.

  “Let’s go,” Bollinger said. “Once you meet Dexter, I’ll give you a tour a the place so you can get to know your way around.”

  I started to tell him I wasn’t staying, but knew it would do no good. The man had made up his mind. There just didn’t seem to be a whole lot of his mind left. I was convinced he was no different than anyone else I had met in the house, mentally deficient in some way.

  “Now, when ya meet Dex,” he said as we continued down the hall, “don’t let ’im put y’off. He’s a little, uh…what’s the word? Hyper. Know what I mean? He’s one a them kids just can’t hold still. Might take you a while t’get used to ’im, but just remember, he only wants to play, assall.”

  “I thought Amanda said he was thirty-eight.”

  “Yeah, but still, he’s just a kid,” he said with a chuckle.

  Bollinger went ahead of me, turned right and went through the door Amanda had leaned out of a moment earlier.

  The room was dimly lit by a small lamp on a table in the corner, and the smell was stronger in there than it had been anywhere else in the house. There were three chairs in the room, and colorful, childish drawings were tacked to the walls. A small rectangular window looked out at the night.

  Amanda sat in one of the chairs beside what appeared to be a baby’s bassinet.

  She was leaning forward, smiling, talking quietly. I could see movement inside the small bed. I stopped just inside the door as Bollinger wheeled over to the bassinet.

  “Hey, Dex!” Bollinger said with a grin. “Gotta visitor. Andy here’s the one I been tell in’ y’about. From the Village.” He peered over the edge of the bassinet. “How ya doin’, huh, boy? I ain’t seen ya all day, I been on the phone, on the computer. Whatcha been up to?”

  The sound that came from the bassinet went through my head like a bullet. It was the squeal of a pig and the cry of a child, and it knocked the breath from my lungs.

  Bollinger laughed, then said, “Whatcha got there, Dex?”

  From the bassinet came a gurgling response.

  “You still playin’ with that thing? Here, gimme that.” Bollinger grabbed something, pulled it up out of the bassinet. It was a woman’s purse, dark blue leather, a long shoulder strap. It looked familiar. “C’mon, now, leggo,” Bollinger said. There was no longer any laughter in his voice. He sounded frustrated as he pulled on the purse, raised his voice. “I toldja y’couldn’t play with that no more, Dex! We gonna hafta get rid of it!”

  Just above the edge of the bassinet, I could see a hand gripping the purse’s shoulder strap. No, that’s not the right word—it wasn’t a hand. But it was at the end of a fat, squat arm, where a hand should have been, with skin the color of buttermilk. There were only two fat fingers and something that resembled a thumb. An inverted triangle of digits. Growing from the end of each was something that nature had intended to be a fingernail. Translucent, thick, and curved to a sharp point. The claws were hooked into the leather strap and pulled stubbornly.

  Soft light glinted off of something on the front of the purse, something silver. Two letters on the purse’s flap, initials: CF.

  Carla Firth.

  I thought of her casket being lowered into the ground that morning, of the brief but upsetting description of the remains of her corpse in the newspaper, found in a small clearing on Mt. Crag. Torn, broken. I remembered what Carrie had overheard in the diner between Chief Ledbetter and the retired forensics expert from the city—

  Whoever did that to Carla Firth? It wasn’t a who. This guy says it couldn’t be human, that it’s an animal, most likely a bear. And he thinks the same thing happened to the others. The ones he reviewed, anyway.

  —and I imagined those deadly, malformed fingernails slicing easily through Carla’s soft flesh.

  Amanda rushed to my side smiling, hooked her arm through mine and said,

  “Come meet my little brother,” as she pulled me toward the bassinet.

  I resisted, but she pulled harder.

  “No!” I shouted, jerking my arm away from her. I backed toward the door.

  Bollinger looked at me with a dark expression. “There’s no call t’act like that,

  Andy.”

  “I have to go,” I said, my voice broken. “It’s late. My grandma will worry.”

  “Your gramma knows where y’are,” Bollinger said with a nod. “They’s nothin’ to worry about.”

  I suddenly felt light-headed, as if my head were floating away from my body like a balloon. “What? What…what do you mean, she knows where I am?”

  “I’ve talked to ’er. We worked ever’thing out. Y’know, she’s been worried ’bout you ever since you quit school. She’s glad I’ll be takin’ you in, givin’ you a purpose, some good Christian learnin’.”

  “D-did…did she know…that you were the one…who paid my tuition?”

  “Course she knew. Your gramma’s a good woman, she wouldn’t take nothin’ like that from a stranger, outta the blue.” He held out his hand, waggled his four fingers, beckoning me with a smile. “Now, c’mon over here and meet Dexter.”

  Although I was still afraid and disgusted, anger swelled inside me. “I’m leaving,” I said flatly, my teeth tightly clenched. I turned to go.

  The two large, beefy conjoined twins, Charles and Rodney, filled the open doorway. They stared at me with four dumb eyes. As they turned slightly sideways and stepped into the room, I backed away from them.

  Sound and movement exploded behind me, and I spun around. The thing in the bassinet had launched itself through the air with a gut-shriveling squeal, naked, trailing a fat, stubby tail. It landed on the floor with a harsh clicking of claws, and immediately jumped forward again, using its powerful tail to push away from the floor. It was a blur of yellowish white as it bounded toward me and landed just a couple of feet in front of me.

  The only part of the creature I saw clearly, the part that made me scream as if something in my mind had snapped, was the large vertical mouth that split open its fat, moist face like a wound beneath a tiny, flat nose, all in the shadow of its bulbous cranium. And teeth, a lot of teeth in the black-and-pink mottled gums.

  I spun around and swung the flashlight blindly, high and hard. It connected with the side of Rodney’s head, and he and Charles fell like a tree. Next thing I knew, I was running as fast as I could down the long, smelly, noisy hall. It was even noisier than before, and I realized that was because I was still screaming.

  I heard
the whir of Bollinger’s wheelchair behind me as he shouted, “Stop him! Somebody stop him!”

  And something else, something closer. The slap of bare feet and the click of claws on the floor, and wet, gurgling breathing, closing the gap between us.

  Seven

  “Where y’think you’re goin’, boy!” Bollinger shouted, and his voice filled the hall way. “No matter where you go, you gonna hafta come back here! Y’hear me?” He shouted even louder and I could feel his voice in the floor beneath my feet. “You don’t know it yet, boy, but you gonna hafta come back here ’cause you got nowheres else t’go!”

  His words meant nothing to me. The stairs were just ahead, but before I got there, Daisy appeared, accompanied by a middle-aged man walking on his hands. His body ended at the waist, and he used his thick arms as legs, hands flat on the floor.

  When Daisy saw me running, she clapped her big hands and jumped up and down happily.

  I slammed between Daisy and her companion and headed down the stairs as Dexter released a long, piercing shriek.

  On the second floor landing, I jumped over an armless, legless person—I could not tell if it was male or female—moving slowly over the floor with a rhythmic rocking motion, a string clenched between its teeth. At the end of the string, it dragged a yellow toy duck on wheels that made a squeaking sound as it rolled.

  Dexter’s feet and claws slapped and clicked on the steps behind me, moving fast.

  It was at the bottom of the stairs that I made my mistake and lost my bearings.

  Too frightened and frantic to realize it, I turned in the wrong direction and ran for the back of the house rather than the front.

  A woman holding a naked, flippered baby stepped out of a doorway and turned to me. In the center of her face was a dark, wet hole, vaguely shaped like the number 8, with the bottom larger than the top. The hole started at her lower lip and ended just beneath her eyes. Mucous glistened around the edges and her twitching tongue was plainly visible in her mouth. I tried to go around her, but my shoulder slammed into hers and knocked her against the wall. I heard her moist gasp as I passed, and she shouted something behind me. It was nothing more than sad-sounding nasal honks.