by Glen Krisch
She wiped a single falling tear from her cheek and her memory drifted away like a dream. She noticed Junior had flipped again to his stomach. His snoring had quieted.
A new sound filled the void. Muffled voices. Coming from outside. Raspy, but ordered, like the chorus of a strange form of sentient insect.
Daddy's come home, she thought immediately. No, that's wrong, she corrected herself. Would never be right. Daddy's never coming home.
In her daydreaming her leg had fallen asleep. She rubbed life back into it, and then stood, warily looking out the window.
The moon was two days shy of full, hovering along the treeline like a glowing white face. The craters could be a crude mouth, a mere smudge of frown below hollow, downcast eyes--eyes that saw, just a second before Betty, people gathered at the family graveyard.
Junior was still asleep. Setting aside the distractions of Junior and her father and her fruitless longing for George Banyon, she stepped into her houseshoes. She opened the bedroom door as quietly as possible. The house was still. Her mom wouldn't be in her bedroom. She knew where she would find her.
The screen door screeched as she pulled it open, too loud. A chilling mist swept against her legs as she descended the stairs. The ground felt damp underfoot.
The mist carried the distant voices to her, amplifying the lowest tones of speech. She couldn't make out any words, just the weight of their mournful sadness.
Her every step drained her confidence. Still, her curiosity compelled her to keep moving. A steady breeze pressed the bare skin of her arms and legs like a firm hand. Goosebumps traced her spine and she wrapped her arms in front of her. Despite the unknown ahead, the darkness, the simple fact she could no longer be certain of anything that went on in this town, she hurried on through the mist.
She crouched the last twenty yards until she reached the property's edge. The voices separated, became distinct. The moon's luminescence touched the skin of the three people gathered around the newest grave.
A scream caught in her throat like a clenched fist. She wanted to cry out, but couldn't.
Her mother was weeping on Magee's shoulder, who in turn, looked terribly uncomfortable as he patted her back. Doctor Thompson held a closed book--possibly a bible--between his elbow and ribs. He was speaking over the open pit of her father's empty grave, his tone that of a preacher. A cheap pinewood casket sat next to the empty hole. Mismatched mounds filled the open casket--she could see just the crests of them--and in the moonlight they shimmered as if coated in wet paint or mud.
Thompson yelled into the grave, "We don't have all night." Hearing his tired, frail voice, Betty realized just how close she was to the grave, a grave she assumed was empty until now.
A mere twenty feet away. Her close proximity and the affect of the whitewashing moon left everyone in stark contrast to the dark backdrop of her Aunt Paulette's cornfield. Her mom looked wrung through and heartbroken as she continued to sob.
Dirt rained up from the hole, collecting on an already substantial pile. "I'm nearly done, just gimme a minute."
A minute went by, then another. Dirt flew from the deepening hole at alarming speed. It soon stopped and a shovel came flying out, clinking against a rock.
Fingers gripped the lip of the hole. The person grunted, pulling himself up and free. Betty uttered a noise like a strangled bird, unable to gain control of herself. She slapped a hand over her mouth, but it was too late.
Eyes darted her way. Her mom's. Dr. Thompson's. Magee's. The gravedigger's horrid black pustules set deeply in his gray-skinned death mask.
The man was rot and decay. Festering wounds seeped along his face, neck and naked shoulders. Pus and maggots fell in clumps like ladled stew from the cavernous hole in his cheeks. Something else twisted in the unnatural cavity. Black and sinuous. Creeping from between his ragged lips. A vile tongue lapping at his own ooze.
"Betty!" her mom cried, pulling free from Magee.
When Betty met her gaze she verged on fainting, but instead, she fell to her hands and knees, vomiting deeply, repeatedly, painfully.
Mom's involved in this? Something so horrible. How could she?
"Oh, my God, Betty! Why can't you just… stay out of it?" Her mom came to her side and rubbed her back with soothing circles as she would a flu-ridden child. "My poor girl." Tears made her voice watery.
But Betty wasn't soothed. Not one bit. "What," she gasped as the retching trailed off. She spit to clear the taste from her mouth. "What… what's going on?"
She looked from the pine coffin to the rotting man. Shock flashed across her face as if she were seeing him for the first time, as if it were possible to forget such a hideous sight. She fell to her rump and began pushing away with her feet. "No. Nonono! This isn't right. This isn't happening. This just isn't happening!"
The rotting man shambled toward her, leaving behind a slime trail of himself like a snail's path.
"Leave her alone, Scully! Don't you touch my daughter!"
"She's seen," the thing said.
"I've told her the truth."
"She knew that's her Daddy in a bunch'a pieces in that box?"
Betty gained her feet, and she couldn't help herself. Looking again at the coffin, she saw a denim work shirt that should've been pale blue from dozens of washings. But torn a dozen times over, now stained with gore that looked like spreading pitch in the moonlight. Shreds of fabric holding together shredded human meat.
She was going to be sick again, but swallowed hard. Swallowed right past the lump gathered in her throat.
"You don't need to put it so," her mom scolded the rotting man.
Betty had to get away, as far away from this place as possible. She no longer cared about her dreams of escaping to the high class fashion world, of champagne toasts with big band music ushering in the dawn. She no longer cared because she no longer harbored such hopes. She just needed to get away. Now.
Heading back toward the house, the shoe flew from her left foot in a comical arc. She didn't give it a second glance, and didn't turn around, even as her mom's cries became shrill, so shrill her voice cracked and she began to sob once again.
Her bare foot slapped the damp ground. She sprinted up the rise, into the shadows, fear straining her body to its limits. The noise from the graveyard drifted away with distance. The moon climbed out from behind a passing cloud. The pathway became visible.
In two split seconds birthed one after the other, Betty's eyes first acknowledged the animated carcass blocking her way, then a blade's cold bite piercing the skin low on her belly. It carved through muscle, violating her internal organs. Searing pain raced up her abdomen, spreading upward like the pressure of a pulled zipper. She heard the rush of fluids hitting the grass.
Her belly was split from pubic bone to sternum, her flesh rent by a foot-long blade, the warmth of her blood and organs splashing her legs and feet.She fell to her knees in her own filth, and the world seemed to shift on its axis, shifting as if to meet her falling head and lessen the impact of her collapse.
"Ethan! My girl. No, you can't, not my Betty…"
Her mom was somewhere far away, but her voice became louder as she ran up the path, closing in. Betty's senses beat a hasty retreat. For a brief instant she could smell the tang of her own blood, but then thankfully, it was gone.
Her mother's trembling fingers brushed her cheek.
Warm, so warm…
"Don't… don't try to speak, honey. It's, it's going to be okay. I'll fetch Dr. Thompson. He's right… he's right here."
Her mom croaked as if struck. Through her failing consciousness, Betty heard more flesh ripping. Smooth cuts parting the living from the dying. A distressing, protracted sigh--either her own or her mother's--she could no longer tell. A weight hit the ground nearby and didn't stir.
Mom…
Betty's eyes dimmed. In the last of her vision she saw her murderer's pale skin, his arms veined with what looked like wriggling worms. His forearm flexed, twitching the kn
ife at his side. A blood bead seeped from its tip to the grassy path. Her murderer turned toward her house and sleeping brother. Betty's vision shrank to a mere pinprick then winked out for good.
11.
Scully thought he was going to have to kill Dr. Thompson, but the old man just meekly curled up in the grass and cried. That was a good thing. His boss went up to the house to finish off the family, leaving Scully to keep an eye on things at the graveyard. He was weakening. Badly. He wasn't sure he could take down anyone, even an old man like Thompson.
Gonna fill that hole up good, he thought. Three bodies, no make that four, counting the boy up at the house.
Just when he was about to say a prayer of thanks for Thompson's tears, Magee took out a flask from his pocket. The old barber winced as he tipped it back and drained it, answering any doubts Scully had about Magee.
Good. No hassles from nobody.
"Why don'tcha get your sorry asses outta here?" Scully tried to sound threatening, but only succeeded in shredding something in his esophagus. It hurt like hell--the ripping and rotting and falling apart--but it couldn't be helped. Not until he returned to the Underground. That wouldn't happen until he and Ethan had this big old mess cleaned up. "Another loose end severed," his boss would say.
After long years of dormancy, Ethan was taking more risks lately. His boss would repeatedly implore that it was all for good reason--the consolidation of his power and the security of the Underground, above all things, the security of the Underground. While Scully thought those were valid reasons, he thought something else was spurring Ethan's risk taking. Thea Calder. Ethan wanted her to be with him, wanted to possess her like a golden trinket hanging about his neck. He would do anything to insure that no one would learn about their hidden lair. No, no one could learn the secret. No one could dare threaten his immortality, his eternal happiness.
Magee grabbed the doctor's elbow and helped him to stand. Neither one took their eyes off Scully.
"You have no right doing what you do!" Thompson yelled, spittle and tears flying off him. Waving his index finger at Scully, he stepped toward him.
"That hole's deep enough for another body, another two, you keep yapping." Scully hoped his tone didn't reveal how weak he felt. He picked up his shovel, then with effort, held it high like a brandished weapon. He hoped the men couldn't see the clean white of his arm bone gleaming through his rotten flesh.
Not much holdin' me together. He tried to laugh. His chance at humor couldn't hide the fact he was getting scared. He couldn't remember it ever getting this far.
Why'd Ethan have to go after the boy anyhow?
"Come on, Doc. Let's get home."
"It can't go on. Not like this," Thompson said, but his expression held defeat, not resolve. His shoulders slumped. He wasn't going to fight, and he wasn't going to say anything to cause any more bloodshed. Scully could see it in his eyes.
"Don't speak like that. Now, you know this is how it is. Let's just git while we still can."
"Magee, you have another bottle of the clear stuff?"
"Do fishes blow bubbles?"
Magee and Thompson staggered up the path, careful not to step in the bloody mess that used to be the Harris women.
Scully waited until they were gone, then fell to the ground. He wanted to simply sit and rest while waiting for Ethan, but was starting to lose control of his motor functions.
It was getting harder to breathe. He thought how funny it was to notice such a thing. He no longer needed to breathe, not up here aboveground, but his body continued to listen to instinct. His lungs sucked in air, acting out the motion of respiration. Something beat in his chest cavity, something that pushed and pulled a viscous fluid, something very unbloodlike.
Holding his eyelids closed, Scully focused on controlling the delicate muscles holding them in place. He didn't want the rotten membranes to tear. He hated that feeling; it was worse than paper cuts dipped in vinegar.
His mind flitted back five minutes, seeing that girl's insides emptied out like a tossed bucket of piss. Dead before she hit the ground.
The image sent him further back, to when he first saw Ethan laid up in a hospice bed tucked inside a crumbling Spanish mission on the edge of the Everglades, on the edge of the civilized world. Bandages bound his entire torso. Without them his insides would have spilled like that Harris girl's. He remembered the room stinking of spoiled meat, and searching for it until he realized the stench was coming from his friend. The Seminoles routed Ethan's company, cutting three dozen soldiers to ribbons, gutted stem to stern. Their ambush lived up to the Seminoles' savage reputation; added to it even. And there were niggers amongst them. Mixing nigger blood with savage. The thought had made him nauseous. Still did.
The mission's physician had sent a letter to an address he found in a stack of letters in Ethan's rucksack: his widowed mother in Pekin, Illinois. In no condition to travel the Mississippi to collect her incapacitated son or his putrefying remains, she asked Arthur Scully, Ethan's childhood friend, to go in her stead. He agreed, knowing she wouldn't want to see her son in either condition.
Entering the makeshift hospice, Scully saw mosquito netting shrouding Ethan's sick bed. Netting meant his friend wasn't dead. They wouldn't need to protect a corpse from mosquitoes. They clouded the outside material, while flies buzzed inside the shroud, having hatched from his wounds.
Ethan had been unconscious and feverish. Blisters rimmed his mouth, seeping, crusting. But he was alive.
Scully stepped through the netting and sat in a chair at Ethan's side, swatting the flies away. Taking in the severity and extent of his friend's wounds, and afraid to do anything more, he held his hand, waiting for his eyes to open.
A week later, Ethan woke from a frightful delirium in which he had raved about setting fires to scorch crops and flesh in equal measure, and the necessity to skin the conniving red skin, skin the treacherous black skin. Rid the earth of them. The last words of his delirium haunted Scully, and from that day on, he would often wake from his own nightmares with Ethan's words conjuring up the worst possible imagery.
A distant voice niggled his brain, shaking it free from memory's pull: "Scully. Scully, come on, Arthur, wake up."
Someone slapped his face, hard. Ethan. Ethan had returned from the house. A dull thud hit the ground nearby. The Harris boy. The job was done.
"We need to get you back. In a hurry." His friend lifted him, grunting with the effort as he threw him over his shoulder. "I didn't realize it was so bad. Digging the grave must've made it go faster. I told you it needn't be so deep."
Scully tried to speak but couldn't.
"Don't worry. Here we go. We're going home."
Arthur Scully's body was falling apart. Ethan's hands kept slipping through the muck that was all that remained of his flesh. "Just close your eyes, rest up." Scully didn't know his eyes had opened of their own accord. He could no longer feel his skin, could no longer see.
"I'll get you back safe, then come back to fill that hole you dug." Something from inside his skull was pressing down with the gravity of being carried upside down. The pressure built at his brow line, then found release as something gushed through his eye sockets and into his matted hair.
"We're going home," Ethan told Scully a few weeks after waking from his delirium.
"We didn't think you'd make it."
"But I did." Ethan grimaced as he stood from the hospice bed. His wound's dressing still needed frequent changing, and he wasn't up to full strength yet, but Ethan had an urge about him; he had to leave this place behind and move on. He no longer wanted to sleep in the bed where he had been expected to die.
They bought two seats in a cramped, rickety wagon from a group of trappers and merchants traveling from the Everglades to New Orleans. Sharing the wagon bed with curing skins pulled taut over wooden frames, the oppressive air smelled worse than Ethan's recovery room. Ethan was still too weak for them to travel on their own, and Scully didn't know the lay of the la
nd, so despite the stench, the arrangement worked for the best. Once in New Orleans, they booked a cabin on a steamer heading back to Illinois, and they were soon on their way home.
Scully remembered the moment specifically. The first mention from Ethan about a venture that would change the course of their lives. Haze rose in indolent wisps from the Mississippi. They both leaned against the railing circling the deck of the steamer, watching the sunrise over the wooded Tennessee side of the river. Ethan leaned closer and in a conspirator's whisper said one word: "Expedition."
"Expedition?"
Ethan glanced around the deck, but it was early and few people strolled by.
"Private Abrahms, he died in the final Seminole raid, he used to go on about how he was going to trap once the fighting was done. He was going to trap live gators and bring them up north, sell them to carnivals and zoos. Once up North, he'd make his return trip home with rich old coots to do some of the trapping themselves. He'd set up cabins along the 'glade's shore, make them real fancy. The best liquor, the best whores, the best hunting and trapping. He'd go on and on like it'd be a damn resort."
"We don't know nothing about gators, Ethan. Don't they bite?"
"Not gators, nitwit. That's just where the seed of my idea came from. A jumping off point."
"You lost me."
"Ain't gators we're going for."
"What then?"
"Niggers. What else? We'll set up an outfitting company for rich southern folk. Some will hire us on to catch their runaways, and we'll track them and collect the bounties. Some will want to come along to bag a prize to bring home."
"Niggers… you know that sounds, well, is that legal?"
"If the right people get a take, anything's legal."
"Sounds like poaching to me."
"Exactly! That's the point. We bring in the Borland brothers for muscle, and with you and me on the business side, we'll be rich in no time."