Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  He stared at me, his face a horror mask. “You know that ain’t our nature. We don’t seek. We wait.” He shuffled closer, raised his hand with the malformed fingers to make a pinching gesture. “A little lasts us a long time.”

  Then he patted me on the shoulder. “The old blood’s gotten thinned out, but it still shows itself in all sorts of strange ways. Some of us know from the moment we come out of the womb, what we’ve got, what it means.” His too wide eyes caught mine, as he grinned in a manner that I can only describe as mischievous. “Some of us have to learn all that the hard way.”

  * * *

  All four of us rode down the logging trail, Herman driving, me in the passenger seat, Gertrude in the back with Tommy, who, amazingly, was asleep. Herman’s eyes never left the patch of light cut out of the darkness by the jeep’s headlamps, but when he spoke it was as if he was looking at me, his bulbous eyes staring into mine.

  “You know, tiger,” Mr. Crabbe said, “you’re all right. When you come back down the this way, feel free to stop in. We’d love to have you by, for a bit of supper.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said with a shudder. Of course I had no plans to take the Crabbes up on their offer.

  But I did keep my word. I followed instructions and kept my mouth shut. I didn’t stay around to witness Tommy’s reunion with his family. The accolades that could have been mine, plaques, newspaper stories, television crews, would have drawn too much attention. I wanted nothing to do with that.

  By the afternoon of the next day, I’d abandoned my hike. Showered, shaved, gotten a haircut. I was nestled uncomfortably in the back of a bus, heading Pennsylvania way, intending to drop in on my friends a little sooner than expected—but maybe not too soon. From there, I didn’t know. I just knew, I still didn’t want to go home.

  As the road rumbled past and the world rolled into night, I saw things moving in the twilight, and in the dark. Creatures in the fields, or clinging to branches or sheer rock walls, lumbering or scuttling through the midnight streets of the scattered towns that clung for their lives to the highway.

  But I didn’t pay near enough attention as I should, because I peered at them through the memory of my grandmother’s eyes, the night she jerked me by the collar of my pajama top from the haunted cabin that she allowed to linger on in the woods above her farm. I still didn’t know what was in there, what shades she lived with in that lonely valley.

  But now I could remember: how I turned at the sound of whimpers between the rotted wooden slats, and she took my chin in her hand, and made me look at her, at her dark face and her startling blue eyes that practically glowed in the moonlight. The shadows formed a shape about her, something massive and terrifying and full of flowing, feline grace.

  You leave those ghosts alone, little cub, she said. You come away. You’ve hurt them enough.

  THE MUSIC OF BREMEN FARM

  But for a flat tire, no one would have ever known that Old Hag Bremen was dead.

  Her forebears, like other settlers from Germany, staked out plots in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains even before the white colonies declared themselves a nation. Throughout the rolling hills, where houses regard each other across wide vales, and narrow roads still ford streams with wooden bridges held together by iron spikes, the Anglicized names speak from rusting mailboxes: Anselm. Flohr. Krone. Newman. Schrader.

  Yet even in this place of isolation, with cornfields blanketing the land for miles before giving way to defiant oaks on ancient mountain, the Bremens stayed a world apart. They sent no sons to fight in the War of Northern Aggression. They did not come to the whitewashed A-frame churches. They did not grow crops, or ask for work in others’ cattle farms or dairies or tobacco fields. Those few who knew the business of the Bremen family left them to it, and spoke of it at most in late-night whispers that by morning seemed like half-forgotten dreams.

  By the time the single-lane dirt ruts finally gave way to asphalt, only one Bremen remained, a sad, solitary heir rattling alone inside a rambling home more than three hundred years old: still with an outhouse, still with a kitchen standing separate from the building where she made her bed. Only the squirrels and wasps that took shelter in the walls kept her company.

  The rotten roof of the family barn, which only ever held what animals the family needed for themselves, had partially collapsed under a heavy snow around the time of the Korean War. She had never tried to have it fixed, and no one had ever offered to fix it for her.

  No one was even certain of her name, but the children who on dares spied through her windows called her “Old Hag” and that seemed fitting enough.

  Folks in the nearest semblance of a town, about five miles away, rarely saw her, and on the few occasions she ventured in to buy simple things like bread or grapefruit juice, she never spoke. The fact is, the cashiers who found this pale, smelly, shriveled woman with grey eyes and long unkempt hair staring at them from across the counter were grateful for her silence.

  Only the children had any inkling how Old Hag Bremen spent her hours, and those inklings came from short, frightened glimpses after dark. They returned whispering of how she lurked in deep shadow through what was once one of her ancestors’ bedrooms, tinkering with tubes spouting strange colored flames and glassware filled with bubbling fluid.

  Those whispers protected her as well as any fence, until things began to change in the county where she lived. The people there elected a new prosecutor, an aggressive, agitated young man from the North named Edward Jacobs. Echoes of those whispers reached his ears, and he took the scene they described to mean something rather different from what the native folk believed.

  The sheriff, a tall, lean, leathery man born and bred in those hills, argued to Jacobs that he should leave well enough alone, that the old lady hurt no one, but at last deferred to the prosecutor’s wishes, as the law required, and sent two men in the dead of night to spy. They came back talking of a laboratory, and chemicals, and Old Hag Bremen downing the liquids brewed in her beakers. The next night, six more men went, with rifles and a search warrant. They brought the old woman back to the jail, seized her glass equipment and destroyed it.

  She spent a month in the city jail to the south, as the county jail had no place to house women. But after that month, she was free, as the state’s lab tests found no evidence a crime. No chemical that she had kept in her possession, nothing she had brewed, was against the law.

  An innocent passerby, a stout laborer from a neighboring county, discovered her death a mere three months after her return to her family’s farm. He’d spent a day sawing down trees on the slopes adjoining her property, and as he drove his pickup down the unpaved logging trail he blew a tire. Discovering his spare was no good, he hiked to the sprawling old house he could see through the trees in hopes of using a phone.

  The second thing he noticed when he neared the old log house was the smell: the overpowering stench of a decayed body. The third thing he noticed, the flies swarming on the inside of the windows.

  He had first noticed something else: a thin strain of music, tinny notes that conformed to no melody but still made him catch his breath and strain to hear, as if someone were singing and he couldn’t quite make out the words. But the second and third things made him forget the music, made him run down the overgrown path from the house to the nearest paved road and frantically wave down a logging truck as it groaned around a curve.

  The volunteer ambulance workers found the old woman in an indescribable state. Her pale, shriveled hands clutched a music box, an ancient heirloom from the Old Country, so tarnished and corroded that whatever song it held must have been silent for centuries.

  * * *

  When Jacobs learned of the old woman’s death, he felt a trickle of sadness, a fleeting twinge of guilt, but no regret, no lasting sorrow. Mostly what moved behind his close-set brown eyes was a sense of relief. He didn’t celebrate her death, but her passing, to his mind, made the world a simpler, safer place.

&
nbsp; He did experience a different kind of regret, as proving this reviled woman a criminal would certainly have boosted his standing, politically and socially, in this community where he otherwise might always remain an outsider. He believed that if he had had a close watch kept on her, that opportunity would have come sure as sunrise. His one meeting with Old Hag Bremen (whose real name, he knew, was Adelia) convinced him of it. A week after her release from jail, she had come to his office to demand compensation for the destruction of her lab.

  No one who lived in the county seat, nearly thirty miles from her land, had ever seen her there before. Jacobs’ elderly secretary, inherited from the previous top lawman, cut short a scream when she saw the hag sitting in the lobby in a tattered dress the color of ash, her brittle cobweb hair draped past her waist. Her pale face peered from between the tangles of her locks, grey eyes cold and unblinking as she stared at the quailing woman and rasped two words: “Edward Jacobs.”

  Jacobs had seen many unpleasant things, even in his short career, but he grew queasy at the sight of this nightmare woman, terrible and pathetic at once, sitting across the desk from him, utterly out of place amidst the crisp law books on the shelves, degrees and paintings of sailing ships on the walls, the photographs of smiling wife and baby that watched over his drumming fingertips. He had held the leathery visitor’s chair for her, then taken his seat and waited for her to speak.

  When she did, it was like ice cracking. “You owe me.”

  Poker-faced, Jacobs replied, “I don’t think so.”

  “You destroyed my dignity,” she said. “How can I ever get that back? The least you can do is give me the money to replace the physical things you destroyed.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jacobs replied.

  She stood, slammed both hands on his desk, and he flinched despite himself. “You ruined any chance I had to restore my family’s fortune!”

  Jacobs cocked his head, folded his arms and smirked.

  “So much of what my ancestors had is gone. What they owned. What they knew. There was still one way I could bring back glory to my family’s name, and you took it from me!”

  “Lead into gold?” the prosecutor sneered. Old Hag Bremen trembled with rage, but Jacobs interrupted when she tried to speak.

  “Woman,” he said—he couldn’t bring himself to call her “lady”—“I don’t know how you did it. How you fooled the lab tests. But I don’t believe this story you’re spinning, not for a minute. Your house is not made of gingerbread. You’re not a witch, or an alchemist, or whatever it is you pretend to be. If I have my say, you won’t have your lab back, and mine is the only say that matters.”

  She snarled. “You think you understand, but you don’t, not one bit.”

  “I don’t need to understand.” He stood up, and glared down at her. He wasn’t a tall man, but for all his visitor’s fearsomeness, he loomed over her by a head. “Get out.”

  But she wasn’t looking at him. Eyes focused somewhere distant, she muttered his name, then repeated it.

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “I’ll call the musicians. They were with my family in the Old Country. They’re in the other Old Country now. But there’s still a way that they can hear me. It may be the death of me, but they’ll come.”

  “Get out.”

  “The story they tell about the musicians is all fiction, Mr. Jacobs. The real robbers never left our house alive.”

  “Get out!”

  Jacobs had taken to wearing a shoulder-holstered pistol beneath his jacket as soon as he’d learned of that particular affectation of Southern prosecutors. He pushed back the flap of the blue suitcoat he wore and put his hand on the pistol’s cold grip, making sure the old hag could see it. “Go!”

  The hag stared, long enough that he prepared to shout again, his agitation and, yes, fear, building as each second passed. But when he opened his mouth, she turned and left without another word.

  He heard no more from her, until the discovery of her death.

  * * *

  Jacobs sat in the passenger seat, and another deputy rode in the back, as the sheriff drove over steepening hills and through switchback turns toward the Bremen farm.

  The old hag’s body had been removed, and still lay in the city morgue an hour south, unclaimed by any family, as she had none. Now that the house could be endured without wearing a mask, two deputies had gone to inspect the place with gloved hands in search of any evidence of foul play.

  Jacobs had ordered the sheriff not to send any more men than those two, not even to secure the scene with yellow tape. “If we do that someone’s sure to notice, and then they’ll call the press. We don’t need any reporters asking about this right now.”

  Most of the ride unfolded in awkward silence. As he turned onto the final stretch of road before the house, the sheriff looked at Jacobs sidelong. “What if it’s a murder, son? You can’t sit on that. You can’t keep people from finding out.”

  Jacobs clenched his jaw. “Then we control what they find out. Every word of it.”

  Besides, murder seemed unlikely. From the descriptions of the condition of the old woman’s body, it sounded as if she had been savaged by animals, perhaps wild dogs, or a bear. Bears were such a common problem that one had actually wandered down the main street of the county seat and through the automatic doors into the hospital, where a game warden had to put it out of its beastly misery.

  The sheriff barked into his radio as they pulled off the road and parked, asking the men for their locations. No answer came, causing the sheriff to grumble about outdated equipment. It wasn’t at all uncommon for firefighters or deputies to respond to calls in the county’s far corners and discover their radios no longer worked over long ranges.

  The trio hiked toward the house through the woods, but as they came within short range, the sheriff still couldn’t raise a response from his men—not even as the log buildings came in view. The sheriff drew his revolver, and the deputy cocked his rifle.

  Jacobs drew the pistol from beneath his coat. The sheriff glanced at him sidelong again, his voice shaded with contempt. “You sure you know how to use that?”

  “Yes,” Jacobs snapped.

  “I just don’t want you to shoot me by mistake,” the sheriff said, with an emphasis on “mistake” that Jacobs didn’t like at all. Before he could reply, the sheriff walked to the main part of the house, the building that held the bedrooms, where the old woman’s body had lain. He shouted the names of his men, but again, no answer. He gestured to his deputy, who circled around to the back. The sheriff stepped onto the front stoop and tried the door, which opened with a loud wooden groan. Silent as a puma, the sheriff slipped into the darkness within. Jacobs followed, not so silently.

  Though the foyer was dark, beams of light sliced through the rooms beyond, piercing through holes in the chinking and gaps between the roof boards. The foyer let out into a sitting room where chairs stood sentry that had once been ornate and grandiose, but now were splintered and mildewed, feather down bleeding out through rips in the stained cushions. The sheriff stood at the door to a different room, sweeping the floor with a small flashlight. He gave a sharp intake of breath, and ducked inside.

  Jacobs came in behind, and stopped short. But for the nameplate and badge that glinted in the flashlight beam, there would have been no easy way to recognize the torn body on the floor. Dark stains spattered the walls. There was no doubt what the stains were.

  “Animals,” Jacobs said.

  The sheriff aimed his flashlight in Jacobs’ face. “More men here, and this wouldn’t have happened,” he said, his voice like red hot iron. “We’ll have to get at least a mile away before we’re in range to call for backup.” When the prosecutor didn’t answer, the sheriff pushed past him, shouting the name of the other missing man.

  “Sheriff!” called the deputy from outside. “There’s blood. Leads up to the barn!”

  * * *

  The ugliest rooster Jacobs had ever see
n squawked and scurried from the barn door as the men swung it open. It had no comb and no feathers on its head and neck, and bare pins jutted out here and there like spines from the salt-and-pepper plumage along its flanks. It squawked a second time as the men came inside, and flapped up to land on a beam above the door.

  The sheriff asked, “You see any livestock when you came here last?”

  The deputy shook his head.

  The inside of the barn was in ruins, though apparently, incredibly, still in use. Much of the roof had collapsed, leaving old, rotten timbers strewn everywhere. The far end of the barn was a pile of rubble, but the near end still held its shape, though it looked as if a push with a finger could send it tumbling. A trough lay capsized in the straw on the ground, its wood splintered. To either side, stalls that once housed horses leaned askew.

  But one was occupied. A wiry-haired old donkey stood in one of the stalls, its hindquarters to the men. It turned its long head to watch the strangers with one black-pearl eye.