Barns, Blood and Rock and Roll

by Joe Zito

  Moments later Brody stepped out of the corn. Red sat up in attention, looking at Brody standing there by the corn. He was turned to the side so Red couldn’t see his face. Brody’s shoulders moved slowly up and down from his heavy breathing. Finally he turned toward the squad car and stared at Red. What the hell is wrong with him? Red thought. Brody walked like a zombie to the car and opened the door and got in. He just sat there not saying anything, looking out the window into the dark morning with a ghost white look of terror on his face.

  Then Red spoke. “Well, how’d it go? Well what was it Brody? Yoohoo, Brody.” Red waved his hand in front of his partner. “Look, I’m gonna go check it out.”

  Officer Brody firmly put his hand on Reds leg, squeezing it, making it hurt. “You ain’t going nowhere son.” He slowly turned his head towards Red. “Oww, Brody let go. I said let go dammit!” Red demanded. Brody released his grip and returned his ghost like stare through the windshield. The engine of the squad car hummed a low tone as they sat inside, not saying anything for a few moments.

  “What the hell did you see in there Brody?” Red asked. His partner didn’t respond. But the bloody memory from just minutes ago surged through his mind: a headless corpse of an old man and a ripped open and gutted stomach of another man. It was a memory that would haunt him for the rest of his time on the Bludenhale Police Department and every night when he would lay his head down on his pillow, watching his wife sleep, and praying he wouldn’t wake up screaming another night. Brody turned to Red. Wide, moist eyes that were filling up with tears gazed frightfully at him. “You all right Brody?” Red asked him in a low scared voice. “We need to call an ambulance,” Brody said in a lifeless tone. Red forced his head in agreement but it was gnawing at him on the inside. Why won’t he tell me what he saw? Sixteen years later on a very hot and early morning and on the same gravel road, Red Brown would then understand why his partner would never speak of what he saw after walking out of the cornfield in 1958.

  Them two officers got back to the shop about an hour later. As soon as they walked through the door I asked them if they saw George. The younger cop didn’t say anything and his partner held his head low like he didn’t want to look at me. Finally he looked up and he looked like he was real sick or something. He didn’t say nothin’, he just stood there with this scared look in his eyes. It was then that I knew he saw George or maybe something even worse, I don’t know. So you see Gavin, there is a reason why I don’t want to you goin’ out there. What I’ve told you is true, I ain’t makin’ it up and you know I would never lie to you. Now, I’ll understand if you go to your dad and tell him that old grandpa Sam has lost his marbles. I never told your dad about what I saw that night. I don’t why I never did. Maybe I was just to scared to talk about it or I just didn’t want my son to think I was crazy. I did my best to keep him off that road, tellin’ him the usual things a father says to his son about racin’ cars and driving wild and being safe. Hell, for all I know he could’ve went out there a hundred times. Don’t get me wrong Gavin, I love my son and I feel terrible after all these years knowing that I should have told him. Maybe that’s why I’m tellin’ you now. Or maybe I just need to kill that memory once and for all and finally get a good night’s sleep. Ok, my hands getting’ a little tired from writing so much, so I think I’ll pack it up now. Just remember Gavin, you’re my grandson and I love you and I know you’re gonna have a great life ahead of you. But never forget, stay off Devils Bluff road.

  Diable Terres

  Charlotte Winslow murdered her sister and her sister’s husband in 1933. She slaughtered them with an ax and got away with it. No one was charged with the murder or found guilty and no one would ever believe that the devoted god fearing Christian woman Charlotte Winslow could ever do such an atrocity. Her plan worked. Their bodies were found in an abandoned barn on the southern edge of Develenue county, Indiana. They had sat there for three days soaking up hot Indiana sun and by the time police discovered them they were a sloppy, coagulated, watery, steaming mess of flesh gunk. It was a wonderful treat for the fat horseflies in the barn.

  Charlotte’s thirteen year old niece Mary was distraught as can be as she laid her weeping and tearful eyes onto her aunt’s bosom hours after hearing of her parent’s grisly death. Her aunt filled that nurturing motherly role as she gently stroked her niece’s dark brown hair, comforting her as the sound of her sisters screams played like an out of tune violin in her head.

  Charlotte went to live with her sister Ellen in 1928 after Charlotte’s husband dropped dead of a stroke one Sunday morning after church. Ellen and her husband Gregory insisted that she come live with them and that it wasn’t good for her to be alone. Charlotte, who was fifty, felt the pangs of humiliation go through her at the idea of her thirty five year old little sister asking her to come live with her out of pity.

  By the time Ellen was born, Charlotte was fifteen and already feeling the curiosities that went along with becoming a woman, so she never took to her newborn sister very well. Besides, Charlotte was in a situation that was very similar to what happened to her mother nine months before. She had become pregnant and found out just after Ellen was born. She wanted to vomit at the sight of her mother cradling her newborn sister. Charlotte took care of things though a few weeks later in the darkness of her father’s cornfield. A rusty piece of barbwire helped end her predicament. She never spoke of her short lived pregnancy or what she did. It was at that tender age of fifteen that she released herself into the hands of god and never looked back. And for this her future niece would feel the full brunt of her religious ways, just as Mary’s parents did when Charlotte had them hogtied and gagged in that abandoned barn with an ax kissing their mouths.

  By 1933 Ellen and her husband had had enough of Charlotte’s constant talk of the coming end of days and over fanatical religious ways. “You’re scaring Mary, Charlotte, now please stop!” Ellen had told her sternly. Charlotte knew there was no reaching her sister and Gregory. They were the work of the devil she thought, and in her words ‘lost’.

  Mary and her aunt stayed in the house. They never moved. It broke Mary’s heart at times just being inside the house. The old white farmhouse, old even by 1930’s standards, was built in 1900 and now that Mary’s parents were gone, Charlotte had free reign to do whatever she wanted to both her niece and the house. She began terrorizing Mary on a daily basis with her twisted religious beliefs, speaking of the end of days and babbling in tongues. She boarded up all the windows in fear that the sun would set the earth on fire. And the talks of the dust storms out west fueled her paranoia to no end. Every morning at breakfast both Mary and Charlotte would hear the reports coming from the radio sitting on top of the refrigerator of the deadly storms in Kansas and Oklahoma. She was positive that the dust storms out west were a dark sign of the coming end of days. She preached it on a daily basis, numbing Mary’s mind and ears with lunatic religious rhetoric. “Did you hear that Mary?” Charlotte asked, her voice full of fear. Mary tried to pretend like she didn’t hear her but she did and she responded meekly with, “Yes Aunt Charlotte, its coming, I know.”

  “We’re livin’ in the devil land Mary and that devil wind they’re talkin’ about out west is comin’ for you and me. Are you prepared for the end?”

  It was hard for Mary to live in the house that once had so much love. Everything reminded her of her parents especially her mother’s sewing room where she had taught Mary how to sew and crochet. The small room that was once filled with sunlight and her mother’s beautiful blankets was now the prayer room, and had just two wooden chairs and a large white bowl on the floor in between them and ruby red curtains over the windows blocking out all light. Aunt Charlotte had contrived an early morning before school ritual made of prayer and blood. She would force her young niece to ‘bleed’ the devil out of herself by making her cut her arms and wrists with none other than her mother’s old sewing needles. She was convinced that Mary had the devil in her and that it was crucial she blee
d him gone before it was too late.

  A lump formed in Mary’s throat every time she walked into the room hearing the voice of her mother in her mind. She loved being with her mother in there. It was their place to talk and laugh and share happy moments with one another the way a mother and daughter should. Now it was just a dark and hollow pit fit only for lunacy and terror, and of course blood. That big white bowl reminded her of that and the soon to be treachery she would have to endure yet again.

  “Take a seat Mary,” Charlotte would say quietly, wearing her full body black dress with her pitch white hair in a bun; her thin fingers wrapped around the top of the chair and her bony knuckles sticking up like buried skulls.

  The look on Mary’s face was that of sadness and fear but mostly dread. Brown circles filled her skin under her eyes looking like dust coated half-moons. She didn’t have the physical or mental strength to go through another morning horror ritual again. She just couldn’t, but she would. She would hold herself up on the chair, trying not to pass out. Though passing out on the floor seemed rather inviting compared to what she was about to do, (or what aunt Charlotte would make her do.) Mary pictured herself falling over and hitting her head on the chair, knocking herself unconscious so she wouldn’t have to slice her arms up again. Not today darling Mary. Go do your deed and bleed.

  Then, Charlotte would fall to her knees on the hard wooden floor and squawk out, “You’ve got the devil in you Mary, bleed him gone!” Her eyes were like crystal balls of hellish doom, shining their black light prophecy in the dark room.

  Mary would slowly roll up the sleeves of her dress and begin scraping the small needle down her already scarred arms. Her blood would drain into the large white bowl on the floor and Charlotte would scream “Bleed him gone!” over and over again. As Mary screamed in pain Charlotte would cackle madness to her. “Wind and fire souls a scorn, apocalypse angel sound your horn, evil inside show your brawn, bleed this devil bleed him gone.” Once the bloody ritual was done Charlotte would quietly ask Mary, “Is the devil gone?” And of course Mary would say no because there was no devil, only in Charlottes blackened mind. Enraged, Charlotte would grab the bowl and force its contents back into Mary’s mouth, making her drink her own blood. “Well then you put that blood back from which it came!” Mary’s arms waved radically, her hands scratched at air, and her black boots kicked at the hardwood floor as she coughed and gagged; her face masked in her own blood.

  And if it was the morning that brought hell time nightmares it was the night that truly brought out the blackest demons of terror in the old white house when Charlotte would sit at the bottom of the steps after midnight and softly whisper horror to her niece, “Do you see the devil Mary? Do you? And then chuckle a mad eerie laugh in the night as Mary cupped her ears tight and squinted her eyes tight trying not to look into the large oval mirror bolted down to the floor directly in front of her bed. “Mary….Mary….Do you see that devil in the mirror?” Then, the hard sound of footsteps creeping up the staircase made Mary’s heart speed up and her palms turn wet with sweat. “You see that devil Mary?” Charlotte would whisper just outside Mary’s door from the hallway. And then she would slowly push the door open. It creaked long and steady. “Mary,” Charlotte whispered again, “You see that devil?”

  Then Charlotte would charge in the room, her old fright mask of a face coming straight at Mary who had the covers up to her eyes. Charlotte’s ghost white hair was down and flowing as she rushed at Mary and put her face to hers under the dull yellow glow of an oil lamp. Charlotte screamed, “You got the devil in you Mary, can’t you see him?” She pulled Mary by her hair and drug her across the bed towards the mirror. The horror image of Charlotte’s haunting face rushing to the mirror made Mary’s skin turn cold. “Look at the devil, look at the devil!”

  Now, two years after the death of her parents, Mary is still trapped in the hell house of bloody mornings and demon nights. Every morning she would sit at the table in the kitchen with her eyes feeling like sandbags. Damn mirror, she thought. Damn devil, she thought again. So much of her had died along with her parents and she felt it wouldn’t be long before she was completely dead on the inside. Her soul was just a hanging corpse inside a shell of a body waiting for the end.

  “You finish that toast and get yourself in the prayer room,”

  Charlotte said wickedly as she dried her wet, wrinkly hands.

  Mary felt a weight of dread hit at the bottom of her stomach at the sound of her Aunt’s voice. Please God, not again, she thought. And blood soon followed.

  One day at school, Mary was struggling to stay awake during a monotonous math lesson, damn devil, damn mirror. Her teacher’s voice was a distant ghost in her ears and she fell asleep with her head leaning into her hand. Mary dozed off and dreamt of a devilish brown dust engulfing the schoolhouse and through the dust aunt Charlotte peeked through the windows, her face looking old and wretched. Slanted crucifixes made of skeletons rose from the earth in the distance behind her. The windows of the schoolhouse turned to mirrors and Mary could hear her name echoing all around her, “Mary….Mary….Do you see the devil Mary? Blood dripped in straight lines down the mirrored windows and she heard her name again, “Mary….Mary wake up!” It was her teacher’s voice. The kids sitting all around Mary began to laugh. She looked around the small classroom in a scared dazed upon waking from her mid-morning nightmare. Later after school had let out her teacher stopped her before she left.

  Her teacher with concern in her eyes said, “Mary, are you all right? You don’t seem well. Are you getting enough sleep?”

  Mary looked down at the floor and mumbled that she was fine. “I’m fine really.”

  Her teacher was aware of the tragedy that took place two years ago with Mary’s parents and she knew that Charlotte was now her main guardian. What she didn’t know was the hell that was taking place in the house and of Mary’s tormented, sleepless nights and blood soaked mornings.

  Her eyebrows slanted downward with concern and she told Mary, “I know it must be very difficult with your parent’s gone. I’m just glad you have your aunt there to help you through it. She is a woman of the lord.”

  That same afternoon as Mary walked home kicking her black boots along a dirt road, a boy from her class named Johnathon Wickers came up beside her. She didn’t look up. She just kept her head down while holding he books close to her chest.

  “Hi, Mary.” Johnathon said.

  “Hello.” Mary mumbled.

  “Say, I wanted to see if you would like to go to Greyhams soda shop sometime. I heard he has vanilla flavoring now.” His voice was shaky when he spoke. He was nervous.

  “I’m sorry Johnathon I can’t.” Mary said quietly without looking at him.

  Disappointed, Johnathon asked her why and she told him white lies of there being too many chores for her to do at home and she needed to study for that upcoming math quiz, and of course she wanted to go with Johnathon to Greyhams soda shop and suck down a couple vanilla cokes but more so she wanted so desperately to throw herself into his arms and cry and tell him to take her away, far, far away from her house of blood and hell and her aunt. She also knew the repercussions if she did accept Johnathon’s invitation to a totally normal and fun afternoon. She pictured herself tied to her bed and aunt Charlotte standing beside her holding a small sewing needle with a sharp, sick grin on her old face. You think you’re gonna let the devil loose from between your legs and let that boy indulge himself. Not under my roof you heathen. No time for such things, for time is almost coming to an end Mary and you still got the devil in you. Now spread your worthless legs and bleed him gone!

  “I…I really have must be getting home now. I’m sorry.” Mary ran off and away from Johnathon leaving him confused and in a whirl of Indiana dirt road dust.

  Then on a balmy April morning Mary awoke to a still, pitch blackness showing outside her window. The clock on her wall showed that it was eight a.m. but outside it looked like the night had never left. Sh
e quickly got out of bed throwing her white sheets off of her. They flurried upward like ghosts in a tangle. She ran to her window and all she could see was black. The worst dust storm in the history of the United States had made its way to Indiana. Her heart sped up and she went into a panic at the thought of this actually being the dreaded end times as aunt Charlotte had predicted. It can’t be. It just can’t, she thought. It sounded like small pellets hitting her window. It’s like dust, she thought. Then the voice of a radio announcer rang through her mind when she remembered what they’ve been saying every morning on the radio when she sat at the table waiting to go bleed the devil out of her in that fucking prayer room. It’s here. It’s not the end. It’s the dust storm and it’s here right now.

  Then a distant voice came from outside somewhere in the blackness. “Mary.”

  She went stiff with terror. She couldn’t move because she knew her aunt was out there bathing in the black dust that came from the west.

  “Mary,” The old woman called out again.

  Mary turned and saw her reflection in the oval mirror sitting in front of her bed. She didn’t see the devil because there was no devil. It was only in aunt Charlotte’s mind. Mary saw the dreadfully terrified image of herself in the mirror. She began to cry. I cannot do this anymore. I have to leave this place. I can just runaway right now, out there in the darkness.