by Shane Staley
It happened in a split second. The boy stopped in the middle of the road, turned towards the jeep, and froze there. His head disappeared beneath the hood and the impact of metal and cracking bone sounded, barely audible above the gunfire.
The road was narrow with steep embankments on both sides. If my father had swerved, they would have crashed and been captured. If my father had stopped, they would have been shot.
In the rearview mirror, my father watched as the small boy’s body was tossed aside like a rag doll, flung back towards his mother who could only watch with arms outstretched and pleading.
A split second decision changed my father’s life forever. Something in him died, although he lived on.
Less than a week later, gunfire broke out as the platoon was positioned in a foxhole. Under heavy fire, my father rose from cover and began shooting, his eyes wide and searching for the bullet that would put an end to his pain.
Gary pulled him down.
“Don’t do it, man,” Gary told my father. “I know you think the hurt will never end, but we’ll work through it. I promise you we’ll find a way.”
Gary and my father returned to the States within months of each other. Years later, both men relocated to Indiana, reunited at the Whisper Ridge Campgrounds by the promise of being cleansed.
My father was on the brink of suicide when Gary made the pact. They would try this same crude experiment that Lester Smith performed. If it actually worked, they’d be free of torment, of all that bound them to the past and to their misery. If it failed, they would die, which, at the time, was already my father’s main focus. Each day and night my father would revisit that jungle in his mind. And the face of that child in the headlights would stay with him both day and night. Life had turned into a living hell, a curse, a damnation. Something had to end: his pain or his existence.
This was their last hope of getting through it, of beating the pain that had plagued them. And this was also a ticket to living a normal life, without the ghosts of the past coming back to haunt them day after day.
Chapter 8
We sat around the fire until the sun came up, listening to Gary tell stories about my father. Audra turned in as the birds began rustling in the trees, chirping into the first rays of the slowly rising sun.
The morning was hot and humid. The temperature gauge already read seventy-five degrees and it was only 6 A.M.
“I still don’t get it,” I stated. “Why would you even try something like that? Especially on the advice of same crazy religious nut?”
“We thought it was crazy at first,” Gary said, “but I knew Lester well and he swore it had worked. He actually gave me the leech before he left for the nursing home.”
Gary pulled out a book from his pocket and handed it to me. I looked at the cover and it appeared to be one of those pocket Bibles that religious groups give out. But instead of The Bible written on the cover, it said Book of Eclipse.
“He gave me that book as well. Told me to read it and that all the answers to the cleansing and the circle could be found in there,” Gary explained. “The last time I saw Lester, he could barely breathe. He made me vow to secure the leech. He kept saying that if the leech were to inhabit another host, all hell would break loose. The leech was like a vessel or something, withholding the evil inside him. If it were to reenter another man’s body, it would change him.”
“Sounds crazy,” I commented.
“I thought so, too,” Gary replied, “but now I’m not so sure.”
I glanced at the Mason jar on the picnic table. The jar was now completely filled with the black leech. It had grown steadily throughout the night. I shivered at the sight of its shifting body.
“So did you ever read the book?”
Gary swished his beer around in the bottle, shaking his head. “No, not really. I’ve read bits and pieces, but the thing sounds like a strange Christian text. Talks about God being both the devil and God. And that people were created to have both sides, evil and good. It talks about the bloodletting ritual.”
“So what was it like?” I asked.
Gary looked at me confused. “The book?”
“No, the cleansing,” I replied.
Gary shook his head, like he was attempting to loosen the memory from his head.
“I thought I’d faced hell in ‘Nam,” Gary said, “But ‘Nam was a distant second to the cleansing.”
Gary put his beer on the ground next to his lawn chair. His vision remained locked on the bottle. “That goat was cleansed in less than an hour, but it takes up to seven hours to cleanse a human. In that time, you go through fever and hallucinations. I had to relive events in my life that I had blocked out. The hallucinations seemed so real. During one particular episode, I returned to the worst day in my childhood. I had shot a dove with a BB gun numerous times. It just sat there on its nest. Dumb bird, I thought, too stupid to fly away. So I shot it again. After it was dead, I climbed the tree, pushed it out of its nest. Beneath it were three baby doves, all pink and chirping, opening their mouths for some food.”
I shifted in my seat to get comfortable. The one thing I truly enjoyed about Gary was that he was a natural storyteller. His words painted images in my mind, and I felt like I was there, a part of the story.
Gary continued: “A few days went by and I kept hearing those birds crying. A few times I dug up some worms and put them in their nest. On the third day the nest was quiet. I climbed that tree and they had died during the night. The smallest bird had dried blood around its throat. The other two birds had tried to feed off it. I had nightmares that those pink-skinned birds were crawling beneath my covers at night, pulling themselves along with their bony wings, their blind eyes searching for my neck. I had nightmares even when I grew up. A few months before my wife passed away giving birth to Audra, I dreamed we were in the delivery room and that she gave birth to one of those pink-skinned birds. Well, the cleansing brought it all back. I felt those birds die. I felt the cold around them. I felt everything.”
“My god,” I said. “Sounds horrible.”
“It seemed like I spent a lifetime in the cleansing. It lasted only three hours, but I made it. I stabbed a charlie over in ‘Nam. Blocked it out. It was easy to shoot from a distance. It was our job. But nothing prepared me to actually stick a knife in that guy’s guts, watch his life bleeding onto my hands.” Gary grabbed the beer and shook it, then set it back down. “I watched my wife die all over again. One moment we were hugging and holding our newborn daughter for the very first time, the next she...she just shut her eyes. Forever.”
A lone tear streamed down his face.
“I’m sorry,” I told him.
He shook his head, tried to smile, but couldn’t.
“I saw the darkest times in my life flash before me and I felt something surging out of me, like I had collected this darkness from those very moments and was now exorcising it. When I awoke, that silver leech was exiting. It crawled down my chest and stopped there, turning black.”
“Did it work?” I asked.
Gary nodded his head, confirming the fact. “Audra was one year old when I got cleansed. I had to do it. I lived wondering how I was going to live with myself another day. She needed me, but all I could think was missing her mother. I felt rage and hatred. I was pissed at God for allowing bad things to happen. That’s how your dad felt after hitting that kid in ‘Nam. He couldn’t deal with being allowed to live on.”
“And what about after the cleansing?” I asked.
“For a few days I was numb. I felt like I wasn’t really alive. Like I was watching life, but not really there. Eventually I felt normal again. But even though I remembered everything in my past, it no longer mattered. I felt...at peace with everything.”
“So it was worth it, right?”
Gary looked up at me with a terrible expression on his face. His face looked pale and tired. His lip quivered. In the morning sunlight, I saw that his eyes were hugely dilated.
“At fi
rst I was convinced, but I’m not sure anymore.”
My heart must have skipped a beat when the realization struck me.
“You’re sick too, aren’t you?” I asked.
He nodded. “Brain cancer, just like your father. I haven’t told Audra yet, so please keep it between us.”
“I promise. I won’t say a word.”
“We’re all dying or already dead.”
“How many were there?”
“There were four of us who took part in the cleansing. All of us got sick about the same time. Besides your father and I, there was Patrick McClure who died back in April. The fourth was Michael Mason and he was just diagnosed. We all have the same type of brain cancer.”
“My God, why is it happening?”
“No one knows. At least they won’t admit it. But deep down, we all know. You don’t mess with the way God created things. This is just God’s way of putting us all back in line. You see, half our souls are in those damn things,” Gary said, pointing to the leech inside the Mason jar. “And I’m pretty sure you can’t get into heaven with half a soul. In order to make it into heaven, you must face endless trials. The good half of your soul will clash against the evil half. In the end, either good or evil prevails. But we cheated the system. We removed the dark half. But not one of us ever thought of where darkness goes when the soul has no dark side to accept it. Anything that happened to us after the cleansing had nowhere to go. The space our souls vacated was replaced by a mass.” Gary shook his head. He laughed, but there was no real emotion in his face. “The doctors call it a ganglion.”
Chapter 9
The Mason jar burst. Glass shattered across the picnic table. The leech slithered into the grass.
“Holy shit!” Gary yelled. “Get another container!”
Audra poked her head from the trailer, then disappeared back inside.
I stood up from the lawn chair and froze, watching the creature weave its three-foot body around the fire pit. It had obviously avoided the flames on purpose. I could make out its jaw in the front, a rather large circular opening which flexed with its movement.
Audra rushed from the trailer with a plastic three gallon water jug in her hand. She quickly tossed it to Gary who fumbled with the lid.
“I need some gloves,” he yelled back at his daughter.
“All of them are back in the shed,” Audra said.
“Just great!”
Gary slammed the water jug down in front of its path. With careful precision, he grabbed the leech in the middle, quickly brought it up and flung it. The leech bounced off the top of the jug. Audra grabbed two pieces of wood from a nearby pile and tossed one log near the slithering mass.
It suddenly changed direction and headed straight for her.
“Get back!” Gary screamed.
Audra backpedaled a few steps, then brought the other log down like a club. The log struck the giant leech in the center. I grabbed the water jug, held the open end down toward the ground and approached her position.
I held the jug as steady as my nervous hands would allow. Gary stuck his boot on one end of the leech.
“Work its head into the opening,” Gary instructed.
Audra moved the log slowly towards its mouth.
The leech writhed wildly.
Its jaws connected with the back of Audra’s hand.
The log rolled off its body, but it didn’t let go.
A stream of blood poured from the sides of its jaw. Audra screamed shrilly as Gary held her hand and pulled at the leech.
The leech’s body ripped in two. I watched in disgust as both ends became two separate entities. One end whipped its body, still attached to Audra’s hand. The other end fell to the ground and began slithering back towards Audra.
Gary scooped that end up and shoved it inside the water jug.
“Dad, get it off!” Audra screamed.
Gary stuck his fingers around the leech’s jaws, trying to detach it.
“Come on, you fucker, attach to me,” he said, working his fingers around the suctioned end.
Blood continued to stream down Audra’s fingers.
Gary gave up, ran to the fire pit, pulled out a half-burnt stick.
“I’m sorry, honey, we have to do this,” he said.
I watched the red glow of the burning end of the stick and cringed.
“Wait,” I said, “Let me try something.”
“We don’t have time!” Gary yelled.
“One second and you might be able to save her hand from first degree burns.”
A can of mosquito repellent was on the ground by my lawn chair. I grabbed it, then returned to the scene. Audra closed her eyes tightly as she grunted in pain. The leech was beginning to burrow.
I uncapped the spray, shook it quickly, aimed and fired. Nothing happened.
Gary picked up the burning stick beside him.
I kept spraying; the can was almost gone.
“Get back,” Gary told me.
I kept spraying.
The leech’s jaws shifted, its body seemed to go into spasms.
Half the jaw loosened. Gary pried his finger beneath that half and pulled its entire body free.
As he threw the second half in the water jug, I stared at Audra’s hand. A V-shaped incision peaked at her knuckles and ran half way into the back of her hand. Blood seeped from the wound.
“I need your help,” Gary said.
“What do you need?”
“I need hot water to irrigate the wound. Use the teapot inside, but don’t boil it. Just get it nice and hot. Her blood won’t clot until we flush out the hirudin.”
I rushed to get the teapot, hoping it was hot enough and ran outside where Gary was helping Audra onto the edge of the picnic table. He had ripped his shirtsleeve off and had wrapped it around the wound.
I brushed broken shards of glass from the tabletop and sat the teapot down.
“What’s hirudin?” I asked, concerned.
“It’s a secretion,” Gary said while pouring the hot water into Audra’s wound. “Most leeches have it. They secrete it into their host’s wound to stop the blood from clotting.”
“How does the bite look?”
Audra’s eyes remained closed.
“Looks worse than it actually is. But if it doesn’t stop bleeding, we’ll need to get to a hospital fast.”
Gary dressed the wound after flushing it and we waited.
Luckily, fifteen minutes later the bleeding finally stopped.
Gary escorted his daughter into the trailer.
I sat back in a lawn chair and calmed myself. My hands were still shaking from the incident. I looked at my watch. It was nearing noon and the heat was already unbearable. I felt sick to my stomach, one half of it being nerves, the other half heat.
But I didn’t vomit. At least not until I looked back into that water jug.
“Oh my God,” I said out loud.
Both segments of the leech were now connected.
One half was being eaten by the other.
Chapter 10
“So how big do the leeches get?” I asked Gary, as we headed for the circle. Audra had slept most of the day away. The sun was starting to slip in the sky as distant thunder rumbled.
“I really don’t know,” he replied. “The leeches that were used on us eventually grew five times that size.”
Sweat rolled down my forehead as the humidity was still unbearable. “Damn,” I muttered, swatting a mosquito.
Gary looked at me, took his Yankees cap off and wiped his forehead. “Yeah, we’re due for a nasty storm. This is the fourth straight day the humidity has been like this. Usually we’ll get a storm and it will cool things off and the humidity will go down.”
“That would be nice,” I commented. “I feel drained.”
“Sorry, buddy, but we have some work to do before we rest,” he said, shaking the water jug with the leech inside. “We’re going to burn this sucker and see what happens to Junior.”
&nbs
p; “You’d do that to your own son?” I said, jokingly.
“Afraid so. The four of us would never take the chance before now. We thought that by burning the leech, we might harm ourselves. When your dad fell ill, we didn’t know what to think. When Michael and I got it, we knew the cleansing had caused it.”
“If you burn your own leech, do you think it will make you well again?”
Gary looked away. “I don’t think so. I think what’s done is done. What’s growing in my head right now is something connected, but separate from what that leech has taken from me.” Gary looked back at me, his eyes watery. “But now I don’t have any choice. For my own peace of mind, I need to make sure these things are destroyed before I start getting worse. I don’t want those things living on and finding another host.”
We walked across the circle of dead earth. Standing there, the circle seemed surreal. In the dimming light of dusk, lightning flashed through the sky and the cracked earth seemed to move, like something was squirming beneath us. I felt relieved when we finally reached the woods on the other side of the circle.
A short distance into the woods, we came upon what looked like a junkyard. Twisted metal and a few broken down golf carts were half-buried in the weeds. Gary pulled a metal barrel from the brush and rolled it on its end. He took the water jug with the leech and dumped it in the barrel, quickly shutting the small circular opening at one end.
I could hear the metal vibrate and the sound of something slithering madly inside.
We continued rolling the barrel deeper into the wooded area until we came to a soggy marshland that extended from a dark pond.
“The sucker that came back out of me was so aggressive that we had to seal it away.”
“Where are they now?” I asked.
Gary smiled at me. “There’s five of them. All four of ours plus Lester’s and they’re all sealed in a well beneath your trailer.”