by Tobias Wade
“The cloaks,” she said, “Were the final set of prizes. They arrived about a week after you left. I don’t know why I never mentioned them. It just seemed, improper somehow.”
“Liz, please—“
She held a finger to her lips and shook her head. “Shhh. Now is not the time for talking. It’s time for listening. It won’t work if you are not fully aware of what is happening.” She glanced up and let her eyes roam through the trees, “What, and why, and how. You have no idea how hard this is for all of us. If there was any other way… If it could be one of us, even. Tristan, you’re my first and only love. I love you so much it hurts. I want you to know that. I want you to know that I never wanted to hurt you.”
“But why? Please!”
“Because he demands it. Because we are beholden to him and cannot resist. Because he is angry with you, Tristan. He thinks you tricked him. He thinks you tricked him on purpose and because he is the father of lies, he will not stand for any of yours.”
“Wha—“
“Shhh. Remember all the challenges, all the phone calls, the words, all of it? It was supposed to be you. Malumesti does not mean ‘storyteller,’ it means, ‘Evil One.’ Early on, you either didn’t read it right or you missed something or, I don’t know, maybe you were being sneaky. You were the elected leader of our little coven, yet somehow you never took the vows yourself. You never gave yourself to him. Not like we did. It was just a game to you, and still is. You gave nothing to him. And he is furious.
“After you left, the nightmares began. Night after night, my father’s face, burnt, smoking and charred, begging me to save him as his melted eyes ooze from their sockets. Ryan already told you his. Robert and Jennifer don’t talk about theirs but when it came to what needs to be done to stop nightmares, they agreed quite quickly. They’ll do anything to make them stop.
“When I was finally able to contact Sammons, about the dreams, about the visions, about the voices in our heads, he explained it all. It was so simple, he’d said. So subtle. While the preachers and the parents railed against mazes and monsters, he was winning souls for his master. The only way to stop the torture, he said, was to break the circle. One of us has to die.
“I offered myself. I want you to know that I did but he said no. It was our prodigal that would have to be offered. Our pure, white lamb. Our unblemished Malumesti.”
“You’re going to kill me,” Tristan said, casting about desperately, looking for any means of escape. But he now knew it was futile. He slumped and looked up at Liz. “Please. Make it fast.”
Liz’s face cracked and tears streamed down her face. She shook her head and said, “I wish I could, my love.”
One of the cloaked figures sniffled and bawled. Jen. “Jen, please! Rob! Don’t do this!”
Liz stood and took her place near her fire. Tristan realized they were standing in a pentacle, with him at the top. “PLEASE!”
A cloak approached him and knelt. It removed its hood and he saw Jen’s face, swollen from crying. She looked him in the eye and began chanting in Latin, then in German, then in Arabic, and finally Hebrew. She leaned in close and blew on his face. Air. She stood up and took her place on the star.
Each Seeker repeated the same words in four languages. Rob splashed him with water. Ryan dusted him with earth. When they were finished, Liz began her chant. As she spoke the words, Ryan and Rob walked into the woods. Each came back carrying one of the gas cans Tristan had filled earlier. As Liz finished her incantation, they poured the fuel over him. He sputtered and coughed as the gasoline entered his eyes and nose and his skin began to burn.
Liz Rankin stood up, walked away from him, then turned and threw a burning brand towards him. As the fire erupted all around him, as he watched his four best friends burn him alive, he could see a fifth figure standing behind them. He did not have time to wonder who the newcomer was before everything became agony and flame.
Lucie and Snaggletooth
“Where are they, Campbell?”
“I already told you, Sheriff, I don’t know!”
“That’s shit and you know it.”
“It’s not! I swear! I’d give anything to be able to help.”
“You just tell me what you do remember.”
It started with the lottery and it ended with a losing bet. I had to get that part down before any of the rest because it’s important somehow. It’s going to help me remember what I’ve already forgotten several times. I don’t want to forget, I don’t think. It’s not my fault. No, that’s not right. It’s all my fault. I think. It’s just… The forgetting is not…
Look, I’m doing the best I can here. I’m trying to cooperate but there’s this thing. Like… a barrier to my memory. I can see in my peripheral but not straight ahead. There’s something about playing cards and a stack of shingles. Roofing nails. I can see the box of nails and the leather of the boots of… someone.
Black leather. Old and worn. But polished. Well-kept. A bit of clay dried to the sole. Tan canvas pant leg. Frayed hem.
Sound of a voice. Sweet Creole accent. Musical. Sexy. Sexual. More than that… Pure lust. Offering refreshment. This is no servant girl though. And while I am almost painfully aroused by her presence, I am also frightened to my core. Still out of focus, indistinct, a hand holding a pitcher. The hand and arm are… white?
That’s not right. The hand should be dark. Dark skin. Everything is out of focus and the harder I think about it, the more I lose it.
Stop. Relax. Focus on the pitcher. On the boots. On the clay or the wooden deck. Roofing nails. Shingles. What’s with the shingles?
The pitcher. The hand holding the pitcher is white. That was right. The hand and arm belong to my wife, Becky. Becky is pouring me a glass of iced tea as I sit on the front porch, taking a break from fixing the roof. She’s wearing jean shorts and a white and blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She fills up my glass and refills her own and sets the pitcher on the table.
“How’s it coming?” she asks.
“Coming along,” I say before draining my glass.
“You think you’ll finish today?
“Don’t want to jinx it,” I say, “But unless something happens, I should be done before dark.”
“That’s good. I know you’re not having fun, but it needed to be done.”
“I just feel, like if I can make my case, that as many times as I’ve patched the sombitch, it should be completely water tight by now. I mean, I’ve been tearing off more new shingles than old ones.”
“Well, now that you found the dry rot, you’ll fix it and it’ll be the last time for a really long time. And who knows? There might be a little something in it for you later.” She shoots me a sexy smile.
“Oh yeah?” I say before hooking a finger into one of her belt loops and pulling her close. She leans in slowly, then scrunches up her face and gives me a peck on the forehead before pulling away.
“Extra stuff comes after showers. And maybe a ceremonial burning of your clothes. Shoo!”
She turns and goes into the house, leaving me on the porch wondering about the shiny boots and the sexy Creole voice.
Without knowing why, I shudder.
I do remember winning the lottery. That part is not obscured in my mind. I had been coming home from somewhere. Rebecca had texted and asked me to pick something up, so I stopped into a convenience store and bought a couple of scratch-offs and a lotto for that evening. The scratch-offs were both losers, so all three tickets went into the console under the dashboard to be entirely forgotten until the following week. I almost threw the lotto away before I realized I hadn’t checked it. Imagine my surprise when the “winner” music started playing. It said I had won ninety-four grand. After taxes and all other associated rigmaroles, it came out to be roughly sixty-three thousand dollars, which I was happy to accept.
Becky and I had long dreamed of owning a house in the country; a place we could grow fruit trees and maybe have a
goat or some chickens. But with incomes and economies the way they’d been, the, “Ranch,” as we’d taken to calling it, was probably never going to happen. I mean, we’d even started a Ranch fund in our monthly budget. That’s how serious we were. But of course, that had been the first thing to go when our son was born.
Our son.
My wife and I had a son, a little boy, and his name was…
Jim? No, that’s not right. Jessie? Jacob? George? Something with a “J” sound.
I’ll think of it in a moment. I told you, I can’t remember anything.
Anyway, the kid needed diapers so our dreams of a little homestead out somewhere you could still see stars at night was impossible until this nice little lottery payout. As it stood, we were able to afford a much larger piece of property than we’d dreamt about. Given the combination of public auction and cash in-hand, we managed to grab a plot that was just shy of thirty acres with utilities and well water already there. There was even an older ranch-style house on the property. It was no Taj Mahal, but it was serviceable while we figured out our next steps.
“What do you want to do first?” Becky had said as we turned off the paved road onto the dirt one that took us up to the property.
“Let’s get the keys first,” I joked, “Else we won’t get in the gate.”
“We need to clean things, make a safe place for Jason (Jason! That’s it!) to toddle around in.”
“Of course! And we need to clean out brush and burn it and plant fruit and nut trees and make a few garden plots. I also want to get a deer feeder up before too long so maybe we can attract some game. So, we probably need to get a deep-freeze pretty soon.”
Becky laughed. She was just as excited as I was about our new life and likely had just as many things on her wish list as I did.
We pulled onto the property after about ten minutes on the bumpy dirt road. As we parked, a car pulled in behind us and a Sheriff’s cruiser behind it. The Sheriff get out of his vehicle and shortly after, a neatly dressed young woman got out of the other car. She was on her phone and held a stack of papers. She chatted for a moment more before ending the call and coming over to shake hands with us.
“Sorry, I tried to get out here before you, but I got a bit lost,” she said, “Amanda Murphy, Murphy Real Estate Group.” She handed us both business cards. “This is Sheriff Wood.”
The uniformed man removed his sunglasses and shook hands with us as well.
“Mr. Wood comes with me on my remote meetings sometimes, just to be safe. Sometimes you have homeless people squatting on vacant properties. Always better to be safe than sorry. How was the drive?”
“It was nice,” Becky said, “Pretty country out here.”
“Oh, it is!” Murphy said as she made her way to the house. “Y’all planning to live out here full time?”
“We’d like to,” I said, “As soon as we can sell our other house we want to build a new one.”
“Well, let me know when you do. I know all the good contractors. This one ain’t much. But of course, you’ve already seen the pictures. Three beds, one and a half baths, fourteen hundred square feet. So, not a lot of room. But it’s solid construction so it ain’t going nowhere. It’ll get you through while you build your dream house. And let me tell you, it’s so much nicer to live on property and monitor the construction day by day rather than having to live in a hotel for months on end.”
Murphy unlocked the door. A stale, dusty odor assailed us as we crossed the threshold. The house was a wood-paneled, linoleum-tiled, orangish-brown and blue monument to mid-seventies home décor. The bathrooms were both tiled in a light, powdery blue that matched the threadbare and crumbling carpet running through every room but the kitchen. I laughed and made a comment about how it must have been a long time since anyone had lived here.
“It’s been, oh, twenty years easy,” said Murphy, “Old Mr. Johnson. He passed,” she turned to the sheriff, “Ninety-six? Ninety-seven?”
Wood nodded, “Sounds about right. I was still in high school so you’re pretty close.”
“Passed away three days after his hundredth birthday, if you can believe it,” said Murphy.
“And what?” I said, “It’s just been sitting here since?”
“Well,” Murphy explained, “Mr. Johnson didn’t actually own the property. Colton Bradley gave him the plot and the house when he retired. Mr. Johnson had worked for the Bradley family his whole life.”
She walked through the kitchen and opened the back door. A screen door whined on its hinges as she opened it onto a rotting wooden deck. We all stepped carefully out into the back yard.
“The Bradleys used to own pretty much everything out here. The family still does own quite a bit, but as the kids grow, they’ve been selling off their stakes and properties and moving away. Anyway, Mr. Johnson worked for Colton and Mr. Colton ‘gave’ these thirty acres and this house as a retirement present. He built the house new for them, even. So, Mr. Johnson and his wife Miss Bernice lived here. Had a little garden plot and some goats and just did their retired thing. Miss Bernice passed away back in the mid-eighties. Old Mr. Johnson just stayed here and tended the garden and the goats.
“Well, when Mr. Johnson finally passed, his family started discussing what they were going to do with the land. That’s when they found out that Colton had never actually deeded the land to their grandfather. Colton Bradley had been dead at least fifteen years, maybe more by then, so there was nobody even alive who knew what had been discussed. So, the Johnsons got a lawyer and the Bradleys had a few of their own and in the end, Johnson’s lawyer found some old squatter’s law that worked in their favor and they ended up winning the case. But God, that took something like ten years? The Johnsons ended up just selling it to pay the court costs and taxes. It was really a shame. Since then, it’s been through a couple different property companies and two foreclosures. It finally went to auction because the bank just wanted it off their books.”
We walked around the house and Murphy showed us the well pumps, the septic system, and other things we would need to know about. There was an outbuilding with some rusty old tools hanging on rusty hooks, and here and there the remnants of a chain-link fence that had long since given up on its job. “It really is a pretty piece of property,” she said again.
After a bit more exploring and signing some documents, Murphy handed Becky the keys to our new home. We said our goodbyes and moved toward the vehicles, walking with them as they left.
“You hunt?” Sheriff Wood asked me casually as he opened the door to his cruiser.
“On occasion,” I said, “Haven’t been in a couple of years.”
Wood nodded, “I’d suggest you get a good pistol and learn to use it. Don’t take to walking around out here without some kind of weapon and believe me when I say that the bigger you can get, the better. We got a feral hog problem, well, pretty much statewide but it’s extra bad here. Bastards are big and have no fear of humans. They’d as soon cut you as look at you. And hog cut ain’t no good way to go.”
I looked around at the trees and took in the relative wilderness we were surrounded by. “Thanks, I’ll definitely look into it.”
Wood pulled out his phone and scrolled for a second. “Y’all come take a look at this.”
Becky and I went over and looked. “Oh God!” she said.
On the screen lay a man with a huge gash in his side, and his intestines lay next to him in a black heap.
“This is… was, a local man by the name of Guillermo Rivas. Hogs got him walking out to his truck one morning. This happened just three weeks ago about half a mile down yonder. Guillermo was no slouch. He grew up here. Did ranch hand work through junior high and high school. Hunted, fished. He knew what he was doing, and the hogs still got him. Hit him from behind and used their tusks to rip his belly clean out. He was probably alive for a bit while they chewed on his liver and kidneys. Hell of a bad way to go. You need to go from here to whereve
r it is you have your guns stored, or to a place where they sell them and get you one before you come back here and start stomping around the woods. Get one for the missus too.
“Now, I’m sorry. That photo sure is shocking, I know it. But it was just to show you how serious it is. If you see a hog, shoot it. There’s no season, no bag limit. You can process all the bacon and ham you want. Bring your friends out and let them shoot ‘em too. And when your freezer is full, feel free to drop ‘em where they stand and let the coyotes eat ‘em. I’d sure thank you for it.”
As we pulled back onto the dirt road to head back to the hotel, I turned to Becky. “I guess Officer Wood helped us decide what we need to get first.”
She grimaced. “I don’t know. I never thought about animals before. Do you think it’s safe? I mean with Jason and everything?”
“Honey, people live out here with their kids and have for hundreds of years. I’m sure it’s safe enough. Or, at least it’s no more dangerous than the city where we have to worry about crosswalks and child predators. We’ll follow Woods’ advice and get some firepower. We’ll put a fence up around the yard. We’ll just have to keep an eye on the boy. But not any more than we already do.”
“I don’t know, Jim. I could have gone my whole life without seeing that picture.”
“Yeah, it was pretty gnarly. I didn’t realize they were so aggressive.”
We rode the rest of the way in silence, both of us contemplating just how long Mr. Rivas had been alive while the hog or hogs stomped around in his guts, taking little bites as he slowly bled to death. How much did he feel before shock took over and he fell out of himself? I’d read books about soldiers who had been gut-shot or hit by shrapnel. Sometimes they would live for days, writhing in agony. I shook my head as the car bumped along the uneven road.
The next day, the two of us arrived bright and early to the sporting goods store in town. We spoke to the salesman and explained why we needed weapons and he set us up with what he said were the right tools for the job. “Now, these are going to be a bit bulky for carry pistols,” he had advised, “But you want the knockdown power to take down a hog.”