by Harvey Click
It was the bald man who had stared at her last night. Today he was wearing dark sunglasses, like several of the others.
At some point the bald man turned and seemed to stare directly at her, just the way he had last night, and she froze except for tilting her binoculars up, afraid that a glint of sunlight off the lenses had given her away. But apparently the man didn’t see her, because he soon looked away and went to fetch another bag of chalk or whatever it was from one of the SUVs.
The man with the edger finished digging, and there was a sudden silence when he turned it off. The man with the line marker finished his work too, except for a three- or four-foot wide gap in both circles where there was no chalk.
The crippled man moved his electric wheelchair up to the large ring, aimed the tip of a long black rod between the two lines, and moved it around. White powder trickled from the tip, and he seemed to be writing or drawing something in the grass between the two rings. He very slowly made his way around the circle, and every minute or two another man used a funnel to refill the long stick with chalk.
Amy heard a vehicle driving down the lane, and soon Dilkens’ police car appeared. He emerged from the driver’s seat, and the Blevin boys emerged from the backseat clutching between them a naked man with his hands cuffed behind his back. It was Jerry Jefferson, the man they had harassed yesterday behind the bar.
He started screaming and struggling wildly as they led him to a dead tree that stood about fifteen feet outside of the circle. Dilkens uncoiled a rope, tossed one end over a stout branch, and then tied it around Jefferson’s ankles. The Blevin boys tugged on the other end until the naked man dangled upside-down several feet above the ground, and then they tied the rope around another branch to hold him there. Dilkens cut Jefferson’s plastic handcuffs with a pocket knife, and he grasped to reach the ground but was strung too high.
Screaming like a child, he twisted on his rope and swayed back and forth. Ray Bob, or maybe Roy Bob, swung his meaty fist and smashed Jefferson in the mouth, causing him to rock back so abruptly that the back of his head smashed into the tree trunk.
There was a sudden noise from the crippled man, like the sharp hiss of a snake, followed by a few harsh-sounding words that Amy couldn’t make out, and Dilkens and the twins, like scolded dogs, hurried to their car and drove quickly away. The man then pointed at Sam Ebbing, and he too fired up his pickup truck and disappeared up the lane.
The crippled man maneuvered his chair through the gap into the double circle, and the others solemnly followed. When they were all inside, he used his long stick to close both circles with white powder and scribbled something between the lines. He moved to the very center of the ring, one of his men pulling out the stake so his chair could sit precisely where it had been.
He handed his black stick to one of the men, who in turn withdrew a long gleaming sword from a black case, knelt, and handed it to him. The crippled man raised the sword high in the air, and all twelve of the men immediately sat down in a circle around him, facing the tree.
Jefferson was making a thin, pitiful wailing, his voice now hoarse from screaming, but aside from that there was a strange silence. Even in the woods where Amy hid, all sounds seemed to have ceased: the birds no longer chirped and the locusts were still.
Then the man in the chair began to chant. His voice was barely audible to Amy, but what she could hear sounded high-pitched and screechy like a senile man singing out of tune in a rest home. The air began to feel different; it seemed to crackle, and when Amy moved her hand from the binoculars to her forehead to move a stray hair, she was jolted with a sharp spark of static electricity.
The horrible chanting continued, and the tip of the sword, which was pointing at the dead tree, seemed to be inscribing invisible words in the air. A black mist began to form around the tree. It grew thicker and taller and wider until it was like a black pillar taller than the tree and so wide that its circumference nearly reached the circle in which the men were sitting. Grotesque shrieks, growls, and snarls seemed to issue from the blackness, and they didn’t sound like noises made by Jefferson.
The man in the chair made a sudden sweeping gesture with his sword, and the mist immediately drifted upward like black smoke and vanished. Amy moved the adjustment lever of her binoculars because she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
The area where the mist had been was now filled with creatures. Some of them darted through the air like harpies with batwings and human faces, or nearly human. Some of them crawled on the ground or scurried up the tree trunk like enormous centipedes, also with faces nearly human. Some of them hopped like huge toads, some swung from the branches like baboons, and some couldn’t be compared to any earthly thing at all, except for their faces, which resembled hideous parodies of human faces sculpted by a madman.
But these monstrosities weren’t the worst. The worst was a tall hunched creature the color of bloody meat that stood on two thin legs. It looked like a skinny humpbacked man with his entire face and body flayed, skinless pink muscles and red veins exposed, bulging eyes with no lids and long white teeth with no lips in a narrow face twisted into a screaming rictus of hatred and pain.
With fingernails like knives it slashed Jerry Jefferson’s thighs open from his knees to his groin. It peeled a long strip of skin and meat off his leg and sucked it into its mouth like a huge strip of bacon.
The harpies darting through the air shrieked with excitement and began diving at the victim to take bites out of his legs and torso. Two of them took turns devouring his penis, fighting with each other in the air between mouthfuls. The flayed creature swatted them away, tore another long strip of skin from the thigh, and gobbled it hungrily. The centipede-like things, three or four feet long with countless legs, were scurrying around on Jefferson’s body now, nibbling away little chunks of flesh while he screamed with pain.
As much as she wanted to, Amy was unable to look away. Seeing is a form of power, and some primitive part of her brain seemed to believe that if she looked away for even a moment she would lose this power, and the creatures would come and devour her. She remained frozen, scarcely breathing, the binoculars pressed to her eyes, until there was nothing left of Jerry Jefferson but bones.
The man in the chair raised his sword and chanted, and the black mist appeared again, growing tall and wide until it blotted out the tree and the horrid things beneath it. He made a sweeping gesture with his sword, and the mist drifted upward like smoke and vanished.
The tall skinless thing was gone, vanished with the mist, but the other creatures remained, fighting over the bloody bones beneath the tree. The men ignored them. The leader moved his wheelchair out of the circle, and the others followed him back to their SUVs.
Chapter 7
Amy was in such a state of shock that for a while she couldn’t move. Then she remembered the man in the deer stand and realized that she needed to get to her car and get out of the woods before he got to his.
There was no time to be quiet; she scrambled down from the knoll and ran as swiftly as her shaky legs were able. Through the trees she saw his Jeep still sitting there, and she raced past it to her car, threw the shotgun into the passenger seat, and turned the ignition.
There was no room to turn around on the narrow path, so she put the car in reverse and looked into the rearview mirror as she backed up. She had gone only a short distance when a face suddenly appeared in the mirror.
It was the crying man. He must have been hiding on the floor of the backseat.
She hit the brake and opened her door, but before she could leap out the crying man reached around her seat and grasped her shoulders.
“Be still,” he said, and all the strength and fight seemed to go out of her muscles. She leaned limply against the back of her seat, wondering if she’d had a stroke. Her foot had slipped off the brake, and the car slowly backed up until the rear bumper collided with a tree.
The crying man got out of the back and leaned in through her open door,
his face so close to hers that she could feel the hot wet mist of his reeking breath, which smelled like spoiled cabbage. His blood-red eyes with their tiny pupils like punctures stared deeply into hers, and he touched her face gently with his long yellow fingernails.
“Too long you have lingered here,” he said in his hoarse, gurgling voice. “So now you must go hence to hell and there abide, where the hours stretch out longer than the spaces between stars.”
Licking his pointed yellow teeth, he placed his bony hands around her throat and squeezed. Suddenly his head fell off his shoulders and a tall fountain of blood gushed from the stump of his neck.
The man with the camouflage mask was standing behind the crying man, holding a sword dripping with blood. He pulled the twitching body away from Amy’s door and said, “Your car’s in gear.”
He had to repeat it before she understood what he meant. Her car was still in reverse, bucking against the tree it had backed into. She put it in drive, pulled back onto the path, and then slammed it back into reverse, intending to back up as fast as she could until she found a place to turn around. But she couldn’t because the Jeep was sitting there blocking her path.
The man pulled her door open, turned off the car, and took the keys. “You’re not going anywhere, not yet,” he said.
He pulled off his camo mask, but Amy had already recognized his voice. It was Shane Malone.
“You damn fool,” he said. “I warned you to leave, didn’t I? Yesterday even they wanted you to leave, but now they’ll never let you go.”
“Who are they?” she asked.
“Sandoval and his thugs.”
“Who’s Sandoval? The old man in the wheelchair?”
“Yeah. People here don’t even like to speak his name, so they just call him the mayor. Anyway, you can’t stay and you can’t leave, so you’re in a nice fix. Do they have some of your hair or fingernails or anything like that?”
“Huh?”
“You heard me. Hair, fingernails, DNA—do they have any?”
“Somebody stole my hairbrush from Billy’s house.”
“Then that’s how this thing found you out here. Wait a minute.”
He went to his Jeep and returned with a pint Mason jar filled with some sort of gray goop.
“Take off your clothes and rub this stuff all over your body,” he said. “Face, ears, personal parts, even between your toes.”
“No fucking way,” she said. “Let me outta here, you perverted asshole.”
“You can go to the other side of the car and I won’t watch,” he said. “But hurry up, or those damn things will be coming up the hill here any minute. Rub it on everywhere, even in your hair. I’ll get any places you can’t reach.”
“Like hell you will, you sick son of a bitch.”
“Get those clothes off or I’ll rip them off myself,” he said.
She grabbed the jar and went to the other side of her car. Watching to make sure his back was turned, she undressed.
“Shoes, socks, underwear, everything,” he said. “Get it all off.”
She opened the jar, scooped out a glob of the greasy ointment, and sniffed it. It had a spicy smell, like some sort of incense.
“What is this stuff?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Frankincense, myrrh, and a lot of other things. You can find the recipe in Exodus.”
“What’s it for?”
“If they have your hair, they can sniff you out,” he said. “This stuff confuses them—I guess you could say it makes you invisible to their noses.”
“What can sniff me out? Their dogs?”
“No, their demons.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “How’d you know this shit was going on out here?”
“I didn’t know. I came here to look for Billy’s cooking shed, remember? Did you see the whole show?”
“Yes. What the hell was going on down there?”
“Did any of the men spot you?” he asked.
“No. I was hidden.”
“So they don’t know that you saw the sacrifice. But that thing knows. And that means pretty soon they’ll know it too, as soon as that thing tells them.”
“I don’t think that thing’s going to be talking to anyone anytime soon,” she said. “You chopped its head off, remember?”
“Come over here and look at it.”
She pulled on her clothes and came around the car to look. The head and body had already decomposed into two separate puddles of putrescence. But both of the puddles were throbbing and squirming, and the smaller puddle that had been the head was slowly wriggling toward the larger puddle. There was an overpowering stench like rotten cabbage.
“What’s it doing?” she asked.
“It’s trying to reconstitute its body.”
“My God, it’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” she said.
Shane took the Mason jar from her, scooped some ointment on his fingers, and reached inside the back of her T-shirt.
“Hey, what the fuck!” she said, pulling away from him.
“Settle down,” he said. “I’m not playing doctor’s office here, I’m trying to keep you from getting eaten by demons.”
He rubbed ointment on her back, took the jar to his Jeep, returned with a large plastic bucket, and pulled off the lid. It was filled with white powder, which he poured on the two squirming puddles. They sizzled, shrank, and stopped moving.
“What’s that stuff?” she asked.
“Quicklime. The thing won’t be able to use that body again, and it’ll take longer to make a new one from scratch. But I don’t know how much longer, so we need to get moving.”
“Get moving where?” she said. “I mean if I can’t leave and I can’t stay, just what the hell am I supposed to do?”
“I can only think of one option, and even that may not be an option,” he said. “I need to make a phone call to find out. Just follow me. We can’t drive past Sam Ebbing’s place because if he sees us he’ll tell them, so we’ll leave the same way I got here. If you try to go your own way once we’re on the road, I won’t come after you but they will. You probably won’t live out the day.”
“I can’t believe Sam’s working for these bastards,” she said. “His family’s been living here forever.”
“Half the people in town are working for them,” Shane said, “and the other half keep their mouths shut. Okay, let’s get moving.”
“You have my keys,” she said.
He tossed them to her, got in his Jeep, and started to drive up the path. He was facing the right direction but she wasn’t, so she had to follow him in reverse until she found a clear spot to turn around. They got out of the woods and descended the lane as quickly as they could without breaking an axle in the ruts.
Leaving the property there was only one direction to turn, but before Shane got to Sam Ebbing’s house he turned right into the driveway of the abandoned house where the McCalls used to live and followed the driveway to the lane that ran between two corn fields. When the first field ended, there was another lane to the left. Apparently whatever farmer was renting the land used the lane to bring his tractor in from Wellman Road so he wouldn’t need to use Ebbing Road.
Shane turned right onto Wellman Road, heading toward Clarkton. A few miles before Clarkton he turned left onto a narrow dirt road that meandered through the hills for a few miles before dead-ending into another small road where he turned right. He turned right again and left again, always on narrow back roads, and before long Amy was thoroughly confused. Now her dashboard compass said they were going south, but a few minutes ago it had said they were going north. Shane seemed to be leading her in circles, deliberately trying to get her lost—and he had succeeded.
Every few minutes she saw him put his phone to his ear, and she wondered whom he was calling. Maybe he was calling friends to arrange a gangbang. He had saved her life, but that didn’t mean she trusted him. He had threatened to rip her clothes
off and maybe he was looking for a safer place to do it. She was glad the shotgun was leaning against the passenger seat beside her.
They had driven for the better part of an hour when he turned onto a narrow dirt driveway with a sign that said:
SUNRISE YOGA CLUB
MEMBERS ONLY
ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING
The driveway wound its way through a dense grove of trees for about fifty yards before a ramshackle two-story house appeared with the same sign in front of it minus the warning about trespassing. To the right of it sat an old barn.
Shane pulled into a graveled lot beside the house and got out. Already a tall woman with long black hair had come out of the house and was approaching him. Amy parked beside the Jeep and opened her door but didn’t get out.
“Who’s she?” the woman asked.
“Her name’s Amy,” Shane said. “Sandoval’s going to be looking for her because she saw a sacrifice today.”
“Does he have her scent?”
“Yeah, I think he has some of her hair. But right now she’s wearing incense ointment.”
“You shouldn’t have brought her here.”
“Well, I tried to call you half a dozen times, but I couldn’t get through,” Shane said.
“You know what the phone connection’s like out here, and you also know what the rules are.”
“So what was I supposed to do?” Shane asked.
“You should have left her to Sandoval. She knew nothing about us, and now she does.”
“They would have tortured her and killed her,” Shane said.
“That doesn’t concern us,” the woman said.
“I have some good information for you,” Shane said. “I found out where they’re doing their sacrifices, and I witnessed one. The chief ugly looked like a tall hunchbacked man with no skin.”
“That would be Zahbeezul the Skin-Eater,” the woman said.
“Is that useful information?”