My Eyes Are Nailed But Still I See

by Wilson, David Niall

  Johnson’s heart nearly stopped. A loud crack, like thunder, or great walls of ice sundering, sounded deep within the earth. The tree shifted to one side, rocked back, then shifted again. The song continued, growing in pitch and power. Johnson closed his eyes, feeling the world skew, and barely heard the crashing and bellowing as a great, wild-haired figure of a man burst from the trees, a leather pouch in one hand and the other thrown up over his head dramatically.

  “Feckin’ pigs!” cried Angus Griswold, nearly tripping over his own melodrama. Bits of leaves and tree branches peppered his frizzy, grey hair. As the great tree crashed to the ground, sending a massive cloud of dust into the night sky, and setting Angus off into a major coughing fit, the old man slipped a gnarled, black book from the leather pouch in his left hand.

  The black pigs turned in graceful unison, eyes blazing, and stood their ground. Johnson slumped over the branch he’d been clinging to, stunned by the force of the toppling tree.

  The red pig pranced forward, mincing side to side, lowering its snout to the ground warily.

  “I know ye,” Angus cried, “know ye fer what ye are!”

  Johnson blinked, his chest a single bruise. He pressed his hands to the wood of the tree weakly, but there was no give. Though he felt in one piece, the branches pinned him helplessly.

  “Fuck,” he whispered again. None paid him the slightest attention.

  “If you know me, Angus Griswold,” the red pig sneered, “then you know the price of fishing on All Hallows Eve... and what you may catch.”

  “Ye’ll be catchin’ nothin’ more this night,” Angus growled, waving his book wildly. He flipped open his book and spoke. What poured forth was almost a song, chanted in a cadence that rippled through the air. It’s like being at mass, Johnson thought. The words made no sense, but the rhythms held power. The pigs shied, but held their ground. Craning his neck, Johnson saw the red pig striding slowly toward the crazy old man. No amount of squirming or pressing against the tree helped; he was in for the duration.

  “So easy, you think?” the pig hissed. “Crash out of the woods like some avenging, ill-groomed angel and holler gibberish at me, will you? Send me ‘packing,’ Angus?”

  Johnson twisted to see, following the pig’s progress across the soggy ground. Angus’ hair flew wild in the breeze, dancing around blazing eyes, his hand holding the book aloft. The words flowed freely, then slowed, like a tape caught in the gears of a reel-to-reel—still loud, still powerful, but slower. The pigs turned, legs moving as though stuck knee-deep in syrup, tiny eyes pivoting to meet Johnson’s stare. Twelve sets of eyes as the red pig cavorted closer and closer to the old man.

  On the branch directly above Johnson’s nose, a spider dropped into view, catching itself about six inches above his face on the web and hovering in the breeze. Johnson saw it in the periphery of his vision; he shied away but could only move a few inches. Each time he did, the pain was so intense he nearly screamed again—would have screamed if he hadn’t been more afraid of the spider than of calling the red pig’s attention.

  “Thought I flattened you the last go-round, ya little fuck,” Johnson said to the spider through gritted teeth. The spider worked its legs quickly and efficiently; another inch of silk dropped it closer.

  The pigs reached the outer fringes of the tree’s branches, great black snouts rooting and pressing about in the branches. They seemed unable to spot Johnson where he lay, but they knew he was in there. They knew they could find him—root him out. Another grub to be torn and shredded, white bones to glare in the moonlight.

  The spider dropped closer yet, legs nearly tickling Johnson’s nose as he pressed and squirmed, trying to pull away. Failing. All the while, to a background chorus of the great pig’s coronach, the crazy old man chanted.

  The spider dropped fully onto Johnson’s face, tickling down one side of his nose, turning for a moment to scuttle up and brush lightly against the short lashes below one eye, then away, and down his cheek. Johnson squeezed his eyes closed and felt a tear drip loose, following the spider. Concentrating, ignoring the pigs’ and the man’s voice, Johnson worked at more tears.

  “Wash off,” he breathed. “I’m not getting bit by a damned spider and eaten by pigs.”

  Tears rolled down his cheeks, burning his eyes. The moon’s glow threw a warped halo of color around everything. He felt the branches shifting, knew the pigs were pawing closer, fighting through the soup the old man’s words made of time, working their snouts toward him, their teeth—their beady little fucking pig’s eyes.

  Then Angus Griswold snapped the book shut with a crack and fired his final words—a long, straight string of impossible-to-follow gibberish that smote the red pig straight and true, pinning it in place. Johnson fought to watch, but all he saw was the pig staggering back, up on its back hooves and teetering. The old man stood beyond—arms upraised, eyes on holy fire, looking for all the world like something out of The Ten Commandments.

  The voices of the pigs became a droning roar, a great rushing of wind and sound, and Johnson felt more than saw as they drew back and away, moving much quicker than when they’d approached.

  The roar grew in strength until it filled Johnson’s thoughts. He tried to concentrate, tried to think about the spider scrambling down his cheek, tried to think about the pigs and the fucking TREE sitting on his chest, his home or Pig or Mother—even Morgan. But all he could do was become more and more lost in the sound.

  The pigs rose; Johnson made out two of them from where he lay. They rose to their back legs, hooves scrabbling on the soft earth for purchase, staggered in a circle; and in the center of that circle stood the old man, arms raised to the skies. The pigs circled and circled, whirling and whirling, until they became a blur that hurt Johnson’s eyes. He clamped them shut, and in that instant, the world grew silent—and black.

  Empty.

  Johnson flicked his eyes open to the sight of thirteen great white streams of mist, released skyward as the pig-skins slumped back, empty on the ground like dead balloons. The old man watched them with a smirk of satisfaction painted across his wrinkled face.

  “Feckin’ pigs,” Angus muttered.

  Johnson lay back and the world slipped away. This time, he let the darkness take him.

  • • •

  “Careful, Michael,” Aunt Bonnie’s voice floated in from far away. “Lord knows, he’s fallen down enough stairs for one night. You an’ yer fishin’ and monsters and what all.”

  There was no answer, but Johnson felt strong arms sliding beneath his shoulders and knees. Moments later, he was lifted and moving. His head crashed like tin-pan cymbals and his temples throbbed. The world weaved and bobbed, and it took a few moments to realize he was being carried—up a flight of stairs. The “keep.”

  “What...” he started, shaking his head.

  “Quiet lad,” Uncle Michael said softly. “Ye took quite a tumble. Did ye think ye could fly?”

  “But, the pigs—thirteen pigs...” Johnson shook his head and immediately regretted it.

  “No pigs, lad,” his uncle chuckled. “Were ye dreamin’, then? I saw me thirteen great black once, but ne’er no pigs to speak of. Next ye’ll be tellin’ me ye met ol’ Angus out by the loch and ’e prayed ye home.”

  Johnson grew quiet and leaned against his uncle’s shoulder, waiting to be set down. His head, while still pounding like a jackhammer, was at least beginning to function. He shivered.

  Fucking pigs.

  They reached the top of the stairs and turned toward his room. Just as they rounded the corner, something small skittered behind Johnson’s ear.

  Trailing wisps of silk.

  • • •

  I watch Dr. Wagner shake and wonder why the web behind him isn’t quivering. I’ve watched garden spiders before, shaking and jitterbugging like there’s no tomorrow, and their webs keep time like trampolines with vibrators attached. Not this one.

  He dropped that folder quick when he was done, like he hea
rd his own fucking coronach. I bet that’s it. I bet he hears those singing pigs, death-knolling his fat arachnid ass. There’s one more folder on the desk, but now he doesn’t look so fucking ready to read it.

  Pig inches closer to him every minute or so, like he could sneak. Like I don’t see, or the spider doesn’t see. Fucking pig.

  He’s still when the Doctor is reading; he’s still when the past is spilling off the pages and out over those fat lips, dripping down Wagner’s beard. Pig isn’t so much. He thinks and he drinks and he talks too fucking much, but when it comes down it, he’s nailed in place as surely by the words as he was by those sharp nails. He sees as well without eyes as he did with them—being stuffed is like that.

  But the doc is on the hot-seat, staring at me like he wants to say something, or wants me to say something, but he doesn’t, and I won’t, and there’re the folders. Waiting.

  He isn’t asking me about fucking HOME any more, that’s for sure. Last place fat Wagner the garden spider wants to go is there. Last person he wants to meet is Mother, and I have to start to wonder what scissors and some good thread could make of spider hide.

  The clock on the wall ticks, tocks, ticks, tocks, and on his grubby heels—I shake my head, huh uh—not again. Not now. But the clock, like a pendulum, blasts louder and louder. I reach out and slide the last folder over to him.

  “You like to read,” I said. “So read.”

  He stares at me. Pig rattles, like he’s trying to draw a breath, or heave a sigh, and he shifts ever-so-slightly closer to the center of that huge, polished desk. The doc’s hands snake out and grab the folder, flip it open, and grasp the pages. He shakes so hard now, he can barely make out the words. His voice catches, like a motor on a too-cold morning, but then he settles a little and the shaking subsides.

  “Read,” I breathe.

  • • •

  Little Johnson Milhone punches his big brother Morgan in the arm and demands he return the Tonka truck. Morgan sticks his tongue out at his younger brother and skips merrily away around the back of the house, calling over his shoulder, “Come and get it, ya big puss!”

  The dump truck is Johnson’s favorite toy. He obsesses over it, playing hour after hour, digging up dirt from the garden, shoveling it into the back of the truck, carting it all over the yard.

  Instead of chasing his brother for it, though, and pummeling him like Morgan would have done had the roles been reversed, Johnson sits down in the grass and cries.

  Morgan pokes his head around the corner, a grin sneaking its way across his lips, lifting his cheeks, slitting his eyes. He sees Johnson crying and the grin slips from his face. His arm comes back and the truck flies through the air.

  The toy truck slams into Johnson’s right cheek with a sickening crunch, knocking him back in the grass. His hands fly to his face and he screams.

  Just like Pig, Morgan thinks, hands at his sides, vacant, glazed eyes staring at his brother flopping on the ground in the backyard. Pig’s always crying about something. Now Johnson’s turning out the same way—weak.

  Morgan wipes sweat from his brow and pushes his new glasses up his nose. Ever since he got them the week before, they’ve slipped down his nose, even when he isn’t sweating or bending over. Damned glasses. He walks over to Johnson, leans down, grabs him by the wrists, pulling his brother’s hands away from his bleeding face.

  “STOP FUCKING CRYING, YOU LITTLE SHIT!” he roars in the younger boy’s face. “You wanna be like dad, little brother? Is that what you really want? To be a retarded dope that can’t follow instructions and sits there crying all day? Huh!? Is that what you want to be when you grow up!?”

  Johnson continues blubbering, eyes closed, tears streaming, mixing with the blood from the cut on his face. Morgan lets go of his wrists and Johnson curls into a ball on his side.

  Morgan spits on the ground near his brother’s feet. “You know what Mother will do if she sees you like this, don’t you? She’ll fucking freak. Now get up.”

  Johnson hitches in breath, sniffles, but doesn’t move.

  “Get up, dope. Get your ass off the ground before mom sees.”

  Still no movement.

  Then Mother is at the window, calm, even-toned. “Morgan Milhone, what did you do to your brother?”

  “Great, you idiot,” Morgan hisses at his brother, “now she knows. You know what’s going to happen. Why didn’t you just get up? Why didn’t you—”

  “Get up here, the both of you,” Mother says, barely audible over the breeze whispering through the trees.

  Morgan bites his lip, glares at Johnson’s inert form, and turns around.

  “Coming, Mother,” he says, waits till her scowling face is gone from the window, then kicks Johnson in the back of the legs. Hard. Johnson cries out. Morgan leans close and whispers, “Get up, Johnson. It’s bad enough as it is. You know you’re gonna get The Sink. Why do you wanna make it worse?”

  Morgan’s glasses slip down his nose. Pushing them up again, he finishes, “If you’re lucky, this time she won’t put a pig in with you. Now come on.” The tiniest bit of real love creeps into Morgan’s voice, then. “I’ll get your truck; you just get your ass in the house.”

  Morgan grabs the Tonka truck, wipes as much blood from it as he can onto the grass, and starts toward the house, glancing over his shoulder only once to make sure Johnson is moving.

  A dog barks in the next yard. Birds chirp. A car drives by on the dirt road in front of the house, spitting gravel. The soundtrack to what is about to become one of the most terrifying days in little Johnson Milhone’s life.

  • • •

  It’s dark.

  Johnson clutches the Tonka truck in one hand and wraps the fingers of the other tightly around his calf, pulling his knees back to his chin. There isn’t much room, and if he leans back too hard, he’ll feel the wet, sticky drain against his neck. He knows it’s brushing against his hair, wet and cold and wrapped with a clot of duct tape so thick it looks like a hairy softball. That’s in the light. In the dark, nothing is the same. Ever.

  He hears footsteps, moving slowly around the kitchen. Voices echo, as if sliding down the drain behind him. He can’t slice one word free of the next. He knows Mother’s out there, and Morgan, too. Pig’s in the basement. Pig’s always in the basement. Johnson sees those nail-split eyes, staring at him, hears the voice in his head as clearly as if Pig were right in here with him.

  Fucked up again, didn’t you, Johnson, Pig says. Didn’t listen, did you?

  “Fuck you,” Johnson whispers, his voice so soft that even Pig—trapped in Johnson’s head, barely an echo of the man his father used to be—barely hears.

  Something smacks hard into the front of the sink cabinet. Fingers fumble with the latch. Johnson hears too-heavy breathing and, as the fumbling sound hesitates, he sees Morgan in his mind’s eye, pushing those new glasses back up his nose in annoyance before continuing.

  “Brought you something,” Morgan’s voice drags free of the echoing backdrop. The way the pipe warps the sound, it’s as though Johnson is standing beside the ocean.

  Johnson wants to ask what Morgan has brought. He wants to tell Morgan to shove whatever it is up his ass and go away before Mother notices. He wants to believe Mother isn’t standing behind Morgan, watching.

  The door opens a crack, and Morgan’s face is framed in the opening, glasses down his nose again, his brow knotted in concentration. He doesn’t look at Johnson, and that alone is enough to bring on the shakes. Morgan would like nothing better than to watch Johnson squirm, trapped in the dark with the nasty snake-curved pipe at his back and the swelling knot from where he’d been whacked with the Tonka truck pulsing and pounding. In fact, Morgan would like to have a piece of two-way glass installed on the door to the sink cabinet so he could sit and watch.

  Morgan looks down at his hands, and Johnson, trying not to breathe, follows that gaze.

  Morgan has a juice glass upside down in his hand, gripped so tightly his knuc
kles are white. Beneath it, he holds a playing card: The Old Maid. On top of the card—eight furry legs gripping The Old Maid’s bulb of a nose, pincers bared—sits a spider.

  Johnson draws back hard and fast, cracking his head on the slimy pipe, pressing back into it with all he has, sneakers scratching for traction on the cabinet’s musty floor to no avail.

  “I know he’s not the same one we used to play with,” Morgan says through a snort of half-crazed laughter, “but I don’t want you to be lonely.”

  “Morgan, don’t,” Johnson chokes on the words, and they come out an incoherent mumble, tumbling over his numb tongue.

  Morgan slides the card from beneath the glass with a flourish, steps back, and slams the door. The darkness is once more complete, and Johnson lets out a garbled scream. Then he bites down hard on his lip. He can’t scream. Mother will hear. Mother will hear and she’ll come. He gets a mental image of the box of toothpicks in the drawer beside the sink, and what Morgan does to him with those toothpicks in the basement. He shudders.

  And now, all over his skin, the soft prickle of imagined spider feet. Or are they imagined?

  Someone’s outside the sink cabinet again, but Johnson is focused inward. Into the cabinet. Into the shadows that swallow him whole. What happens outside the wooden door will no doubt have an effect on his world, but that world, just now, has been invaded, and all his senses are needed for perimeter defense.

  There’s a shuffle, a sharp click, and then he hears Morgan again, snorting his laughter. Johnson is glad Morgan can’t see his tears.

  “Don’t want you to be alone or bored,” Morgan says. “Don’t want you to think I forgot about you.”