by Scott Hale
Entry Nineteen
I waited in the bushes below the windowsill. I took no pleasure in watching Clara Davies disrobe, but I watched all the same. The howling of the wolves in the woods put her to bed quickly; she pulled the covers up to her eyes, as though it would make them stop.
I bashed her head in with a rock, because I couldn’t bear to look at the disappointment on her face. Edmund and Ruth helped me bring her back to Amelia. As we tore open her chest to give a clear view of her stilled heart, the Queen of Corpses reached into her blighted womb and worked free a clumping of root, flesh, blood, and bone. She lowered the ovum into the cavity between Clara Davies’ breasts and smiled proudly as a mother would at one of their own.
“She has to stay down here with us,” Amelia Ashcroft lectured her children. “No more games. We’ve lost too many as it is.”
And then she leaned in and whispered another name.
Entry Twenty
Father Clark found me on the outskirts of town covered in mud and crime.
“What are you doing out here?” he shouted, hurrying over to the willow, oblivious to the portal it held. “Mr. North, what’s happened?”
“You have to leave. I can’t stop it.” I took him by the shoulders and nearly lifted him off his feet. “What will it take for you people to leave?”
“Herbert,” the priest pleaded, my weakness giving him strength, “we’ve nowhere else to go. This is our home! What have you seen? What do you know?”
“The children,” I wheezed, releasing the priest, “at least send the children away. There has to be another town, another village in this fucking marsh.”
Father Clark wrapped his arms around me and kissed me on the top of my head. “Why the children?”
Entry Twenty-One
Herbert North waited until Rowena Russell’s parents had turned their backs before he stole her away from them. At first, she didn’t scream, because she had seen the investigator from afar and heard that he was good.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Herbert North told the little girl as he covered her mouth and took her apart.
Entry Twenty-Two
Father Clark called a town meeting after they found the ten pieces of the ten-year-old Rowena Russell impaled upon the gates.
“Cairn,” he began, “is lost.” He looked at me in the corner and I nodded. “God would not have us suffer any longer. We’ve endured enough and it is time for us to make our exodus.”
Everyone was in attendance, and when Father Clark spoke, everyone nodded in agreement.
“Mr. North, please,” he called me over, “tell us everything.”
I wore my scars for all to see, to show them I’d made the effort and that it hadn’t been enough. I felt their eyes follow me to the podium, some disappointed, others suspicious.
“The creatures that haunt these grounds cannot be killed by the weapons I’ve brought here,” I told them, the ragged and tortured whole of Cairn. “There are hundreds of tunnels beneath our feet—” a lie, “—and we would all die if we were to go into them and flush the creatures out.” I began to cry uncontrollably, feeling the vein pulsating somewhere in my skull. “I’ve failed you. I’m not enough. Go, you must go! I will stay, I will stay, but you must go!”
“And what will you do?” A large man stood up, Elijah Lindsay, and puffed out his chest. “What have you done at all?”
See through my ruse, I thought, and butcher me like the beast that I am.
“He’s lost his mind.”
“He’s done more for us than anyone else!”
“Look at him, look at us! We should listen to the man and leave.”
“I’ll not leave my home to Satan!”
Rowena’s father, Horace, came to his feet, his hand still holding his wife’s firmly. The crowd quieted, and he said in a whisper, “Why are they doing this to us?”
My chest tightened as the vein wove through my ribcage. I wanted to tell them the truth, but it was not mine to tell. “Because they can,” I said, closing my eyes, “because nothing can stop them.”
Horace’s wife, Anne, released her husband’s hand and stood beside him. “You’ve only been here a week, Mr. North. How can you be so certain?”
A week? It felt as though I had been there for months.
“Where are they, Mr. North?” Anne persisted. “I want vengeance. I want to hurt them like they’ve hurt us, all of us!”
“They’re diseased,” I sputtered, “diseased by the same affliction that took Parish. If you stay, it will spread!”
My words fell on deaf ears as the crowd loudened, Anne’s words setting a flame afire in their hearts that had died out months ago.
“Too proud, too stupid,” Amelia Ashcroft hissed into my mind. “They were complacent and now they’re careless. Let them come. Let their bodies fill our coffers. I’ll love them all.”
Entry Twenty-Three
Envious am I of those who do not wake to screaming. It has been three days since I’ve had a full night’s sleep. The townspeople have agreed to send the children away, and for this I am grateful.
It will take years to wash the blood from the headstones.
Entry Twenty-Four
Half of Cairn has fled with the young, led by Grunt and those who know the woods best.
The other half remains, doing what they should’ve months ago; that is, scouring the town for the Ashcroft brood. Frederickson leads them, and boxes them up when the children cut them down.
Meanwhile, I await my orders.
Entry Twenty-Five
I’m not sure how long I have left—I can hardly lift the pen to write this entry—but it’s done.
The veins lay before me, throbbing, coiled, speckled in blood, with chunks of flesh and muscle clinging to their thorny sides. I can feel the gouges in my throat; the tears inside me widen with every breath. Bruises climb my flesh where blood vessels have burst, and I can feel something dripping slowly behind my eyes. I know I left something behind—I could only get my arm so far down my throat. I can still feel it in there, a part of the vein, but I can’t hear her, feel her, and if what I’ve left behind will be enough to get me to her, close enough to split her in two…
Entry Twenty-Six
Cairn burned brightly behind me as I hurried through the graveyard, over the fence, and into the outskirts where the Ashcroft willow waited, still undiscovered. A mysterious fire had broken out in town, and I used the chaos it created to slip away unseen.
“Hurry.” Edmund beckoned from the glistening hole at the bottom of the tree, only his pale hand visible in the misty dark. “Hurry!”
“Where’s Ruth?” I asked, following the corpse child through the twisted bowels of stinking earth.
“She’ll be back.” He looked over his shoulder, neck twisting around like an owl’s. “They were getting too close. She likes fire, says she can still feel it if she gets near—”
I took Edmund’s head and slammed it into a protruding rock. The point drove into his skull, bursting his eyeball. He screamed for his mother, and as he yelled, I grabbed his jaw and ripped it off. He spun, spewing red and purple blood as the roots that infested his body hurried to repair the site. He slashed at me, bit at me, kicked his feet, and spat at me.
“No fair,” I told him as I pulled both bone daggers from my sides and pushed them under his arms. “No fair.”
He didn’t fall into a pile of decomposed sludge, but there was enough ghoul in him that it finished the boy off all the same.
“Kill the priest,” Amelia Ashcroft shouted from her coffin, having heard my approach. “Give him to his god, and I’ll give what’s left to mine.”
I circled around the Queen of Corpses and threw her son’s severed head at her feet. “Give your god this one instead.”
Amelia Ashcroft let out a guttural wail that echoed through the hollow. The cancerous mass to which the coffin was attached throbbed. She stepped out of it fully nude, with tight bands of roots wrapped around various p
arts of her body that fed into her pelvis and breasts, her heart and her spine.
“Shouldn’t have given you those back,” she remarked. She sighed as she looked over the tens of corpses before her, a tiny parasitic infant suckling at each one’s heart. “Shouldn’t have gotten in the carriage. Shouldn’t have read the letter.”
“What did you put in my neck?” I stomped on the heart of the nearest corpse and the child drinking from it broke into dust.
Amelia Ashcroft cringed. “A gift for someone else.” She focused her green eyes on me and said, “You may just live long enough to find out what it’s for. Can you feel me scratching?”
I gritted my teeth as my skull felt as though it had been cleaved.
“Amon didn’t expect much from us, but we did the best—”
I rushed Amelia and stabbed her repeatedly in the stomach. The roots bound to her and the coffin behind her flailed and flew forward. I closed my eyes and closed my mouth; I felt the roots at my eyelids and at my teeth. They snaked through my clothes, searching for orifices and creating new ones to get inside. I kept stabbing, kept cutting until her innards spilled over Edmund’s severed head.
Amelia reached for my wrists, but she was dead before she could touch them. Her body fell to the ground, and all the ova she’d been growing leaked from her womb, down her leg, and into the dirt.
I took a breath and was grateful I was no longer able to experience repulsion. Then I killed the rest of her children in their boney cribs.
Entry Twenty-Seven
The fire had consumed most of Cairn. Only a few buildings remained, though it was difficult to determine what still stood through the smoke. I left without saying goodbye to the priest, though it makes me happy to know that he is still alive (and that Frederickson, apparently, is not).
Ruth Ashcroft has vanished, and I expect it will not be long until she’s reunited with her uncle Amon once more.
I’m not sure if I’ll make it back to London. In fact, I’m not sure if I’ll make it to the end of this road. Wolves howl in the woods around me, but they’ve no interest in me; my mind intends tear me apart long before they do.
Thoughts of Seth will bring me home, but should I bring this home to Seth? Perhaps I should return to Cairn and go where I belong, and walk some more behind the graves.
THE EASIEST JOB IN THE WORLD
Beatrice Bacchus looked into her empty wallet and sighed. Her hands found her pocket and her fingers its bottom and, again, she sighed. In one overly dramatic motion, she collapsed upon her bed, put her palm to her brow, and kicked off her sneakers, knocking over a desk lamp on the other side of the room. She eyed the upside-down appliance, calculated its worth. Remembering it had been a gift from her father, she quickly put the thought out of her head.
“Mother fuck,” she said aloud. She sat up and blew her hair out of her face. “God damn it.”
Beatrice turned on her side and fumbled at the handle of the nightstand. I need to refuel, she thought, sliding her free hand underneath a pillow, until it closed around a half-eaten granola bar.
“Not bad,” she mumbled as she chewed, not because it tasted good, but because it was still edible after being opened for three weeks.
She returned to the nightstand and pulled the drawer that was always stuck with all her strength. After a moment, the drawer finally relented, and with one tug of herculean might, it was ripped from the nightstand. Frayed wings of paper soared through the air and then crashed the words they carried into the ugly carpeted floor.
“You asshole,” she said to the nightstand as she crawled off her bed to the ground.
The papers crumpled beneath her weight as she moved like a beast along the floor. Most of them could be disregarded and subsequently discarded, but there were a few she couldn’t part with. They were of a heavy paper, comprised of cruel fibers that cut the flesh subtly for sustenance. They were folded three times to give an air of professionalism and burned when held. They were relentless, seemingly endless; torn pages from the tome of the Leech God, written with the blood of its whore, Academia.
They were student loan statements.
“There you are,” Beatrice said, spying a document hiding like a spider in the shadows beneath her desk. “Where are your buddies, eh?”
She plodded like a toddler on all fours towards the desk and snatched the document. At the corner of her eye, she saw its companion skirting along the carpet, the box fan in the window its humming accomplice, and grabbed that one, too.
“Gotcha,” she said, a maniacal grin forming across her face. But just as quickly as it had formed, the grin disappeared and sadness came over her. “I’ve lost it.”
A voice wreathed in buzzing spoke from the foot of her bed: “Do you always talk to yourself this much?”
Beatrice turned her head towards the source of the sound. In a cradle of sheets, she saw the soft glow of her cell phone’s screen. She squinted and scowled; tried to remember what she had said or done in the past fifteen minutes that could be used against her in future conversations. I think I’m safe. She’d done and said worse in her life. She wasn’t proud of the fact, but it did make these moments of madness a little more manageable.
“Are you there?” The voice—Lauren? God damn it—“Is everything alright?”
“Yes and no,” Beatrice said, picking up the phone. “I must have butt dialed you.” Turned the speaker phone on too, she thought. How the hell? She put the receiver to her ear. “How long have you been listening? Why didn’t you say something earlier?”
Nothing.
“Did you just shrug?”
“Sorry, I was reading something on the Internet.” A click of the mouse, a snap of a laptop lid: Her full attention was on Beatrice once again. “You sound tense.”
“I am tense. I have no money. I have bills, and I have no money.” She lifted the student loan statement close to her face. Her contacts were still resting comfortably in their case on the bathroom sink, and her eyes were useless without them. “Jerry fired me,” she said nonchalantly.
“Seriously? What’s his problem?” Lauren paused for a moment. “Wait, what did you do? Beatrice, come on now. What’d you do?”
“Nothing!” Beatrice shouted. “I was late last week. That’s it. He was just looking for a reason. He’s always had it in for me.”
A snap of the laptop lid, a click of the mouse: Lauren had lost interest again. “That really sucks,” she said, her voice distant. “What are you going to do? I’m sure your mom and dad would be more than willing to help you out.”
“No,” Beatrice said. “I love them, but I’ll never hear the end of it. This is my apartment, this is my car…” she pointed out the window as though her friend could see what she saw, “… and this is my debt.”
“Hmmm, I don’t know,” Lauren said, sipping on something loudly. “That’s kind of stupid. You should ask them. You’re not proving anything to them unless you tell them, anyways. Jesus.” Her voice trailed off. “People are weird as hell nowadays.”
“Tell me something I don’t know… like where I could come up with two hundred bucks.”
“You’re making a big deal out of two hundred dollars?” Lauren cleared her throat. “I don’t get it. Why would you protest bioengineered organs? It’s good for everyone.”
Beatrice watched the blades of the box fan rotate in their plastic prison. “Did they use that word in that article or did you come up with it on your own?”
“Were you always a bitch or did you just get this way from being poor all the time?” Lauren snapped back.
“You know the answer,” she said solemnly. “They don’t like people playing god,” Beatrice explained, quickly returning to the topic. “Next we’ll be making clones… gay clones! Then they’ll really lose their shit.”
“Some already have.”
Beatrice knew Lauren was referring to her older sister, who had joined the Penitent, a fundamentalist group hell-bent on freeing god from his supposed earthly shackle
s.
(“How can something trap god? He’s god!” Beatrice commented to Lauren once, who only responded with a red face and a string of curses.)
“Why don’t you mosey on over to campus and see if you can get some work?” she suggested, changing the subject. “Two hundred can’t be that hard to scrounge up. I still think you should ask your parents. What the hell you trying to prove? You bummed like three hundred off them that one time you trashed Connor’s—”
Click.
Beatrice spent the majority of the trip to campus pressed up against the driver’s side door, trying desperately to avoid the searing hot, metal seatbelt buckle that followed her like a magnet. She looked like a cat clinging to a bathtub’s edge, and when the buckle touched her, howled like one, too. Her life, with its student loans and murderous seatbelt buckles, was a hard life, indeed.
At the last stop sign before Brooksville University, Beatrice saw a chubby kid gawking at her through the window. Caught and shamed, she came down from her perch and tried to play it cool. She winked at the kid like he had a chance with her—and at this point, self-esteem as low as it was, he probably did—and fiddled with the radio knobs. Here’s hoping no one escaped from the sanitarium today, she thought, flipping through the channels. Because if anyone fits the bill…
Beatrice knew from her experience as an undergraduate that the library would likely be, no, had to be in need of assistance. The building housed thousands of books within its ancient walls, and yet most students avoided it, as though by standing in its shadow they would become irrevocably smart and painfully self-aware. She’d seen the skeletal librarians who worked its counters and shelves. They were too feeble to even lift the chain attached to their smeared spectacles. There’d be work, Beatrice knew—good, old fashioned, mind-numbingly boring, punch-me-in-the-tits work. She saw herself inventorying books, scanning documents; hell, she’d even engage in small talk (“What a cute kid!” she’d lie as one of the old birds whipped out a photo of their buck-toothed boy) if it helped sweeten the pot.
When she arrived, however, Beatrice quickly learned that not only was she, as Lauren had said, a bitch, but that she was also, somehow, this-has-never-happened-to-me-before wrong. The library had become a gathering place. Its post-modern innards were fitted with cushioned chairs and a series of stalls that vomited caffeinated drinks and sugary snacks into the hands of the bleary-eyed.