They called me. I wished to close my ears but they called me. Dozens, hundreds of voices called me. Hundreds of individual voices. My granmammy called me. My son called me. Generations of my Boktussa blood called my name. I gripped the desk and watched the green-black figures multiply, generations of souls swallowed by the butte and then, walking among them, ministering to these frozen spirits as they turned to worship her, the white-hot body of an eight-year-old girl. As she walked through them, the chant began to change until the voices solidified, lost their individual characters, and chanted, Mommy… Mommy… Mommy… Mommy…
I stood up, straightened my knees, and let go of the desk. I stared at Andee’s glowing form, radiating light among the bruised creatures surrounding her. “I’m coming,” I heard myself say. “I’m—”
The phone rang. The phone rang? It rang again. The absurdity of such a normal, pedestrian sound shattered whatever spell I was under and I laughed, I picked up the receiver and, laughing, said, “Hello?”
“Hey, babe. You should answer the phone sometime. You been painting or something?”
Still laughing, I said no, no. “It’s just Andee, she’s—there’s there—you see—” My inability to form a sentence made me laugh stronger till I was lying on the floor, holding my stomach, and my sobs of laughter turned to weeping, and I wept.
“Tabatha! Tabatha! Are you—? Are the kids all right? What—what—?”
I tried to answer, but my breath caught. In the silence, I realized the chanting was no longer. The world was quiet except for Ben’s barky confusion.
“Ben… Ben, I’m okay. I need to go check something, though. Will you stay on the line?”
“Of course, Tabby. I—”
His voice faded as I walked away, leaving him on the ground. I heard the sliding-glass door open. I closed my eyes for a moment then opened them again and walked forward. Andee stood on the mat, naked save for the white crust staining her hair and face and body. It seemed to be caked so thick that her form was obscured and she looked neither young nor old nor small nor wide. The only aspect of her that seemed living were her burning black eyes.
“Andee—?”
I hate you.
She hadn’t said anything, but I felt as if she had.
“Andee…”
For a moment, her shoulders quivered such that I knew she would break into tears and run to my arms as she had hundreds of times in the past. But she was not that Andee anymore. This Andee steeled herself, lowered her chalk-white brow over her depthless eyes and said as calmly as reciting the two-times tables, “That was my chance to be a god.” Then she walked past me to the stairs and I heard her descend to her bedroom. I forgot about Ben waiting on the floor. I stepped outside into cool summer night air. Mars was barely visible to the left of the full moon. The night was still, no insects, no birds. I walked to the butte. Halfway up, Teddy joined me and together we crested to the top. The silver light of the moon made shadows of human-shaped impressions scattered through the mud. Teddy ran ahead and found Taggart in one, staring blindly at the stars. The dog licked Taggart’s face, making skin-colored stripes in the white. Taggart sneezed and blinked. “Mom?” I made a burst of sound and pulled him into my arms. I carried him down the hill, bathed him, put him to bed in my own bed. I held him tightly, uncertain if I would sleep.
In the morning, I stepped on the phone. Ben was snoring and no yelling could wake him. I hung up and began to pack the car. We would make sure several people in town would know we were heading to Oklahoma City for a minor-league ballgame. Yes. And then we would drive to Oklahoma City. And then we would turn east and keep driving till we found the Atlantic. We would find a nice place to disappear. I would call Ben’s home office and give him a phone number. And his imaginationless soul would come find us, would be a salve to our broken souls.
I stopped at the grocery store to buy jerky and licorice and peanuts. I chatted loudly with the girl at checkout about our baseball plans.
“You know,” said a voice behind us, “you are the last of Bethelsda’s line. You can’t just leave.”
I turned. Mr. Barrett smiled at me in a grandfatherly way. I laughed, I hope brightly. “We’re not leaving. We’re just going to watch a baseball game.”
“What a coincidence,” he said, his voice as cheerful as mine but his eyes dark as Andee’s had been. “I’m heading to the city myself. I do love a bit of ball in the summertime.”
“Oh… good. Maybe we can sit together.”
“I would be honored, my dear.”
As we left town, we led a caravan of seventeen cars. All headed to Oklahoma City. All in the mood for a baseball game. All planning to caravan there together and to caravan back together, always together.
I stared at the road ahead. Pointed my mirrors down to the pavement so I could not see what was behind me. And drove and drove and drove.
IT CAME FROM THE WOODS
Jason A. Anderson
Their second date had gone very well so far. Stan, not-quite star athlete at Shadow Valley High, and Billie, not-quite Prom Queen, had spent over an hour at the Brookbank Falls, deep in the mountains that ringed Pine Bow County. During the winter months, these mountains drew skiers from around the world to challenge its white-capped slopes. In the early summer, like now, the hills took on so much green they almost blended together, making it about impossible to tell one range from another.
Billie looked up at the lengthening shadows. Years of camping with her father had taught her a little, and though she wouldn’t consider herself a “mountain girl,” she knew enough to know how quickly daylight could descend into night on the mountain.
“I didn’t realize how late it is,” she called across the creek to where Stan was investigating something wedged between two large boulders.
Stan looked up at her and smiled, then leaped from stone to stone back to her.
“We should get back to the car,” she said. “It’s still a couple miles’ hike to the road.”
Stan shrugged and said, “Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll make it before dark.”
“If we leave soon, I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Billie redirected, and tried not to pull away when Stan put an arm around her shoulders. then the two of them headed down the dirt path.
“What were you looking at?” Billie asked as they walked.
Stan’s hesitation drew her attention to him. He looked slightly uncomfortable.
“Uh,” he finally said, “it looked like what was left of a coyote. It was pretty mangled, so it was hard to tell for sure. But it was fresh.”
“Hunters?” Billie asked.
“No, it looked like something with teeth.”
Suddenly nervous in the waning afternoon light, Billie glanced around, her gaze trying to pierce the heavy forest and foliage, looking for the telltale signs of predatory wildlife.
“Do you think whatever killed that is still around here?” Stan wondered aloud, sounding intentionally aloof.
“We should be fine, as long as we can get back to the car before dark,” Billie replied.
Without a passable road to them, Brookbank Falls enjoyed an exclusivity that helped preserve its pristine location. At the same time, with the tall peaks surrounding them, the afternoon and evening sun took little time to fade, enveloping the young couple in deep shadows and making the trail so treacherous that they eventually had to slow their progress.
“I don’t think we’re going to make it to the car before dark,” Stan said, his nerves beginning to show in his voice.
Billie decided not to comment on the obvious and pulled a small, powerful flashlight from her belt. It cut through the heavy darkness, allowing them to continue forward, until she stopped without warning.
“What is it?” Stan asked, watching Billie shine the line around them, then shining it up the path, then back the way they’d come.
“Did we pass a split in the path without realizing it?” she asked, hitting him in the face with the beam of light.
&n
bsp; Stan put a hand up to shade his eyes and said, “If we did, it couldn’t have been too far back. Why, are we lost?”
Billie illuminated the way ahead, but her scowl didn’t inspire confidence in her date.
“I thought you said you’ve been here before,” Stan accused, doubt and aggravation trickling into his voice.
Not rising to the bait, Billie said, “I have, but never after dark. You know how woods all look alike, once the sun goes down.”
Before she could say more, something crashed in the darkness a ways off the path and in the distance a coyote howl echoed out at them.
Stan snatched the flashlight out of Billie’s hand and played the bright-white beam back and forth in the direction the sound of movement had come from, but couldn’t see anything. He held his free hand out to Billie.
“Come on.”
Scowling, the girl took his hand and the two of them hurried along the path.
They made good time, until another howl jerked Stan’s attention from the path. His left foot snagged against an unseen tree root. He cried out in pain as he fell, twisting his ankle so far Billie was surprised she didn’t hear a snap.
“Are you okay?” Billie asked, kneeling down beside him.
The two of them carefully straightened out his wrenched foot, Stan wincing, but putting on his “tough football player” face instead of crying out a second time.
Billie took her mobile phone from her small handbag. After glancing at its screen she pursed her lips, then said, “No signal. How about you?”
Stan managed to extract his mobile phone from his back pocket without a whimper, but his mood didn’t brighten when he looked at the screen. He held it up for Billie to inspect.
Her eyes fell on the complex spider-web of shattered glass that now took the place of the shiny, smooth glass surface. “Oh,” was all she said.
He tried a few times to start up, but when the device refused to respond, he growled in frustration and tossed the phone a few feet away.
Billie hurried over to pick up his phone, but just as her fingers touch the metal case, something rustled about a stone’s throw away and a low growl drifted to her on the breeze. She froze. When the growl faded away a few seconds later, she snatched the smartphone out of the damp dirt and ran back to Stan.
“Come on, Romeo,” she said and hoisted him to his feet, ignoring his grunts of pain. “We gotta go.”
Once she had Stan upright, it emphasized the height difference between them. In order to keep him from slumping to his left, she strung his left arm across her shoulders, pressing her right and his left side tightly together, for support.
As one, they hobbled as quickly down the dark path as possible, their progress hindered by the increasing pain in Stan’s foot. It originated in his ankle and radiated up his calf to behind his knee, and any weight on it sent pulses of stabbing agony nearly to his hip.
“Keep it up,” Billie encouraged him, “you’re doing great.”
Stan could only grunt in response.
A few hundred feet further on, the couple paused to rest. Stan managed to lower himself to an unearthed tree stump and shut his eyes while catching his breath through clenched teeth.
Before they were ready to move again, Billie heard faint growling behind them. She turned and scanned the path behind them, but couldn’t see anything. There was, however, a thick, gnarly branch lying nearby. It made a solid weapon in her hands. As if in response to her new-found ability to defend them, the growling increased and she could’ve sworn she could now see a faint sickly greenish-yellow glow trickling between the leaves and branches of the thick woods.
“Um, Stan?” she stammered, backing away from the edge of the trail, her eyes still on the faint glow.
“What?” he demanded, not opening his eyes or making a move to stand.
Billie hurried back to him and, amid his grunts of protest, she managed to get him moving down the path, using her branch as a crutch to support her as she supported him. Several times she hazarded a look behind them, noticing that the sickly glow didn’t get closer, but hadn’t faded away, either.
Suddenly they reached the edge of the woods. The trees and underbrush didn’t taper off, they stopped at the edge of a vast, empty field. The path they were on continued, snaking through the knee-high white field grass, in the direction of a motorhome or camper trailer permanently parked on the far side. Squinting in the gloom, Billie could make out several items surrounding the motorhome—weird statuary made from sticks and branches.
“Uh-uh,” Stan told Billie.“No chance.”
“Unless your cellphone has magically repaired itself and gets service,”she said evenly, “we don’t have a choice. We need a phone and someone there may have one. Plus, you can get off that ankle.”
After a few seconds, Stan nodded reluctantly.
“Good man,” Billie agreed and the two of them continued along the path.
Billie’s anxiety increased as they approached the dirty tan motorhome. The strange icons woven out of sticks and bound together with twisted field grass turned out to be much more complex than she could see from a distance. Several were free-standing latices, with handmade runes woven into them made from sticks, twigs, several different colors of hair and strips of animal hide. She had seen similar items in horror movies over the years.
Her confidence really began to wane when the motorhome’s doorknob started to rattle before they had gotten close. The teens halted just outside the perimeter of trampled dirt that made a large circle around the motorhome and that appeared to be the “front yard” outside the vehicle.
Like frightened animals caught in car headlights, both of them stared at the flimsy motorhome door as it opened outward and the biggest man Billie had ever seen angled himself out of the vehicle, stepping two feet down to the ground. The motorhome rocked back to a level stance.
In less than a second, Billie estimated the distance between the giant and them and determined that if the two of them decided to run, it wouldn’t take long for the man to build up a big enough head of steam to catch them.
“Um…” she said, then hesitated.
The large man stopped, staring at them long enough for Billie to form a second impression as he stood before them in his tattered denim overalls. He had the look of a retired sports-entertainment pro wrestler: massive size, most of which had migrated from his upper-body to his sizable girth; a scruffy complexion that may or may not have concealed a few facial scars; piercing, attentive eyes that almost seemed out of place.
“I’s just fixin’ ta make supper,” the man said, his voice lisping slightly through a few missing teeth.
“Can you help us?” Billie managed to ask, trying to adjust the weight of Stan, who seemed to be leaning on her more by the minute.
“T’ain’t no one fer more’n a mile,” the man said, turning away from them and crossing to the open pit fire that illuminated the area.
“My friend’s hurt,” Billie said. “I think his foot’s broken.”
The man glanced over at them, then bent over the large stew pot perched over the open flame. A few seconds later, he motioned toward a beat-up armchair that may have once sat in a upper-class casual room, but now looked out of place sitting out in the dirt.
With a grateful sigh, Billie said, “Thanks,” and stepped from the path onto the dirt area that surrounded the motorhome. With effort, she managed to get Stan over to the chair, who grunted in pain as he was unceremoniously deposited onto the low cushion.
Billie straightened and took in a deep, cleansing breath. “Do you have a phone I could use?”
The man only grunted, but it was obviously a negative grunt.
“I need to call my family. We need a ride to the hospital.”
“No phone.”
Before Billie could protest further, the man dipped a fire-blackened ladle into the bubbling cookpot and fished out a piece of cloth about two inches long and over two feet long. Billie got her first whiff of the aroma comin
g from the pot and gagged at the noxious stench. What she had initially assumed was the “supper” he mentioned was obviously not. She hoped.
Carrying the strip of cloth on the end of the ladle, he crossed over to where Stan sat. He nodded down at the teen.
“Shoe. Off.”
“Uhh…” Billie hesitated, then said, “Okay,” and knelt beside Stan’s injured foot. After working his shoe loose with several apologies along the way, she sat back on her heels as the big man knelt in front of Stan. He took the injured foot in one of his massive hands, lifting it slightly to get a better look. However, instead of rotating it to examine it while he squatted in place, he leaned and stretched around the stationary foot with an agility that defied is size. It reinforced her opinion that the man was faster and more flexible than his size first indicated.
Nodding to himself, the man gently wrapped the smelly strip of cloth around Stan’s injured foot, the entire time muttering so softly Billie couldn’t tell what he said. Within a few seconds, the lines on Stan’s face began to soften, the pain receding from his eyes.
Billie resisted the urge to hug their benefactor Instead she settled for saying, “Thanks.”
Before she could say any more, an eerie howl echoed out from the nearby woods.
Lurching to his feet, the man turned and headed for the edge of the dirt circle, detouring only to grab a staff along the way, half-again as tall as the branch that Billie still held. It looked like it had started out as a regular walking stick, but the decoration of carved runes, several small sticks and what appeared to be bone fragments, and the large clear stone attached to the top of the staff now hinted at a darker, sinister function.
“That’s what was following us when Stan hurt his foot,” Billie said to his back.
Another howl brought the attention of all three of them to the edge of the woods, where the greenish-yellow glow had begin to halo the tops of the trees.
Redneck Eldritch Page 19