Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  I gingerly set the laundry basket of bedding down in front of me. “I know that this won’t be super-comfortable, but it really hasn’t gotten cold out yet…”

  “Hey, this beats sleeping in a field. Or a tree.” Amanda plucks the pillow and blankets from the basket. She turns on her heel, gazing at the crematorium. I see what she sees: the residue of ash on everything, the limited light leaking in through the shutters, the ash boxes that we order from a company that also makes Chinese take-out boxes. It’s a creepy place, I know.

  “Thank you for this,” she says.

  I nod and pick the laundry basket back up. I glance outside, where I see distant headlights moving up the gravel drive. “I gotta go. But I’ll come for you tomorrow…probably tomorrow night. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”

  “Will you, uh…bring something for me to eat then?”

  I swallow. “Sure.”

  I close the door behind me, but don’t lock it. She should be able to come and go, like a ghost. I know that this is a place for the dead. Maybe it won’t bother her because she belongs here. Maybe.

  I sprint back to the house, through the back door of the Body Shop. I make it in enough time to throw the laundry basket into the hallway and duck into the shower before Garth and Gramma make it upstairs.

  Gramma is bitching about her glasses: “Damn bifocals. This…this line is still there. Right across the middle. Can you see it?”

  “Yeah, Gramma,” Garth responds with the patience of Job. “The guy said that they’re supposed to be that way.”

  “I can’t see a damn thing.”

  I stick my head out of the bathroom with the water running. “Garth! I’m home.”

  “Um…okay.” He sounds distracted, wrestling with Gramma’s complaining.

  I shut the door and slide into the shower to wash off the creek mud and grime. It spirals down the drain, leaving behind green and brown streaks in the bottom of the stall. I aim the showerhead to rinse it away.

  I put on my pajamas and head for my room. It almost feels like a regular school night with homework waiting. Like nothing crazy ever happened.

  I plunk down on my bed, grabbing for my notebook. I have Geometry that I need to do. A paper to write. Normal stuff.

  I glance out the window.

  There’s a light shining in the crematorium, a dim light leaking through the cracks of the shutters. A laugh bubbles up, unbidden. Funny how an undead person could be afraid of the dark.

  Undead person. What the hell?

  I reach to my bedside for the bottle of pills that the shrink prescribed for me to take.

  I take two and pull the curtains.

  *

  Jesus Christ, whatever’s in those pills is enough to turn me into the walking dead.

  I swear that I can’t remember a damn thing until midmorning at school. I have apparently managed to get myself dressed and gotten through two periods without remembering a single thing. Well, that’s not exactly true. Snippets of dream images are still swimming in my head, the image of a catfish with Amanda’s eyes at the bottom of the well of my imagination.

  I resolve not to ever take those meds again. I need whatever little bit of sanity is left to me, and I don’t feel like being in a zombie haze is helping.

  I turn in an idea for my term paper: Native American animal symbolism. Mr. London distractedly approves it, and I begin searching the Internet during computer lab time, only half-paying attention to my HTML assignment. The way things are going, I figure that I’m likely to forget most of it anyway. I get an energy drink out of the soda machine, sit in the back, and surf the web.

  I start by googling the Cattells. I don’t find much about them, other than some death notices that suggest they are a family that’s been in the area since the re-establishment of Mooresville after the mass disappearance. Nothing remarkable shakes out, but I make a mental note to ask if the museum has access to any genealogical sites that might be behind paywalls.

  Next thing on my agenda: Ghouls.

  That was what Amanda called herself. I find an encyclopedia article on a mythology website that explains what a ghoul actually is:

  Ghoul (n). From the Arabian ghala, “to seize.” A flesh-eating monster, believed to inhabit graveyards and deserts, where they prefer to scavenge dead flesh and set traps for travelers. The first mention of such cannibalistic creatures is in Arabian Nights. In folklore, they are creatures of substantial strength and sharp teeth. Ghouls can smell human flesh from great distances. They can be stopped with fire and decapitation. The star Algol is named after these demons, which is the star in Medusa’s head, carried by Perseus in the night sky.

  I grimace, the energy drink souring in my mouth. Well, hey…at least I know I can fend Amanda off with a torch if she gets too interested in my flesh. Or not.

  I read further:

  Ghouls are nocturnal creatures, sired by demons, and susceptible to sunlight. They are of poor intelligence and low initiative, often appearing to be empty, hungry vessels.

  Well, crap. I already know that’s false. Amanda said she’s been walking about in the sunshine, and she seems pretty darn intelligent to me. Which puts the veracity of the entire entry into question.

  I continue my search, taking super-legible notes in case I forget things later. There’s not a whole lot to go on. Vampires are apparently the sexy undead, with thousands and thousands of pages devoted to their taut white flesh, many of which are blocked by our school’s filters. Ghouls are really relegated to background material. I find a few pen-and-ink pictures of ghouls, depicting gaunt, gray creatures with huge claws and needlelike teeth.

  The teeth look right. I wonder if the rest of it is the utter bullshit of artistic license, or if Amanda is eventually going to degenerate into a creature like that. A dumb, ravenous beast with talons like a vulture, stuffing its face with human flesh. I read Stoker’s Dracula a couple of years ago, and it seemed to me that it took a while for Lucy to degenerate into her bloodsucking self. I wonder if ghouls are like that.

  I flash back to the image of Amanda standing in the Body Shop, eating an arm like it was a turkey leg.

  Ick.

  But folklorists seem to think—according to their websites, at least—that there’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to ghouls. And maybe there isn’t. I think about the disappearance in Mooresville, the chewed-looking bones, and the talisman burning a hole in my pocket.

  And it dawns on me, in my drug-fuzzy brain, that maybe this is something that’s happened before. Bits of Gramma’s story churn though my head.

  Hmmmmcrap.

  I google the shit out of catfish. They are apparently as ravenous as the ghouls, able to eat nearly anything, with rows of tiny teeth capable of tearing flesh from bone. They can live almost anywhere in freshwater that’s warm enough—deep unfrozen water at the bottom of rivers in winter, in effluent ponds in chemical plants, even in abandoned Chernobyl. They’re truly atavistic creatures. They’re nocturnal and can grow anywhere from a centimeter long to weighing six hundred fifty pounds. I watch a video showing a catfish that growls as it’s being dragged out of a river into a boat. Growls. Like an angry human, with a low, deep grumbling….it has a voice!

  And they really will eat anything. Anything. There are some species in central Asia that make bullet-like holes in people and eat their internal organs from the inside out. There are pale, small knifelike catfish that will crawl into any orifice they can find and drink blood. And there are the truly monstrous ones—ones weighing hundreds of pounds that can devour a man whole.

  I flash back to the creature I saw in the river. Catfish Bob.

  I google Catfish Bob. I remember something about him from when I was a child. He’s a local mythological creature used chiefly by parents to scare kids away from swimming in the river unsupervised. I find a few poorly-constructed, homemade websites that also feature sections on Bigfoot, Mothman, and the like. Most of them include really terrible pencil drawings of deformed mermaids
with fish-heads. A couple of those have boobs. Men on the Internet are entirely disgusting. I click out of those quickly. I strike out on searching the archives of The X-Files and Fringe. The most useful tidbit I find is a footnote from a folklorist:

  Catfish Bob has haunted Sumner County since the 1800s, when Native American tribespeople warned settlers of a river god that demanded sacrifices. The then-mayor of Mooresville, Thomas Farrell, was shocked to see that the tribe would bundle its dead with rocks and send them to the bottom of the Milburn River, for the catfish god to devour. Once every few decades, it is rumored that the tribe would send a young woman to drown in the river and become the wife of the river god.

  Over time, the myth has evolved into the present-day incarnation of Catfish Bob as a kind of bogeyman who devours people who do not respect the river. In the 1930s, dam-building efforts on the river were suspended when several people involved with the project vanished, including the chief architect. Officials attributed the disappearances to more conventional foul play, but the disappearances were never solved.

  “Dammit,” I breathe. My mind races to the talisman in my pocket.

  The computer lab teacher gives me a dark look and opens his mouth to reprimand me, but the bell rings.

  I scuttle out of my seat before he can catch me, zipping into the crush of bodies in the hallway to catch the bus. My new knowledge is roiling in my head. It’s as if some puzzle much larger than I am is falling into place, just beyond reach. I need to find a way to make Amanda human again, some way that doesn’t involve turning her into a corpse.

  I stop short as I enter the last wing of the school, the one containing the auditorium. I am as immobile as a stone, gazing upward as people flow around me.

  Amanda’s art tribute has been posted on the walls. It stretches from the level of the drinking fountains to the high arch overhead, twenty feet high. There are shadows of fairies and demons drawn on notebook paper. Black construction paper birds have been folded to make them three-dimensional, dotting the arrangement and suspended in the air by fishing line attached to the ceiling.

  And Catfish Bob is in the middle. But it’s not just the image of the fish that I saw in two dimensions, in her notebook. No, this is a much larger work.

  It is made out of some kind of metal, painted black. As I look closer, I see that they are cut aluminum pop cans. Massive segments of the fish are suspended from the ceiling by chains. There are dozens of segments, linked together by what looks like chain mail. The janitor is up on a ladder, putting the tail fin into place. The pieces drift lazily in the hot breeze generated by the river of people, making it undulate over the crowd. Long whiskers and open jaws reach toward the floor, turning and swimming in the sticky air.

  Suddenly, I know this is it. This is Amanda’s magnum opus. Her great work.

  And she knows Catfish Bob.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I CANNOT WAIT TO TALK to Amanda. I want to go charging into the crematorium right after school and demand answers, but I can’t.

  There’s a patrol car sitting in our driveway.

  I slip in through the front door. I take my shoes off and pad down the shiny hallway to the door to the Body Shop. Voices and light leak out from under the door. I hold my breath and listen.

  “…He attacked her in the parking lot of the bar.” The Sheriff’s voice is a bit muffled by his mustache. There’s slurping, too, like he’s working through a Big Gulp-sized cappuccino. Or else Lothar is in there, getting into something that I don’t want to know about. “He grabbed her, and Louise whacked him with the tire iron she was using to change the tire. Whacked him and ran back to the bar.”

  “Is she all right?” Garth asks. “I mean, she must be, since she’s not here.”

  “She went to the hospital with some abrasions and a pretty bad cut on her scalp where he grabbed her hair and nearly yanked it off her head. There was a lot of blood. Honestly, it looked like Halloween in there.”

  I chew on a hangnail. I think I know who they’re talking about. Louise Thomas is the co-owner of the tattoo parlor next door to Catfish Bob’s. They do glow-in-the dark tattoos, I shit you not. She’s known for having huge Dolly Parton hair and boobs pushed up to her neck. Nobody knows if either thing is real. With a two-drink minimum, she’ll show you a huge tattoo of a Pegasus on her back. Anyway, she’s the only Louise I know.

  My father says something unintelligible, and I press closer to the door.

  “Get this,” the Sheriff says. “She swears that the guy who attacked her is Jesse Cormac.”

  “The Jesse Cormac that got stolen out of his grave?” Garth asks.

  “The same.” There’s a slurping sound that I assume comes from the Sheriff.

  “Whoa.” That has to be Garth.

  “Yeah. She said he was filthy and smelled like…what did she say?” Pages rattle in a notebook. “Ah, here it is. ‘He smelled like a goat marinated in piss.’ But she was certain it was him.”

  “Well…I’m betting it was dark. And knowing Louise, she was probably pretty drunk,” my dad says, almost too low to hear.

  “She swears up and down it was him. Saw the tattoo on his arm that she gave him six months ago. A tribal thing around his bicep. A dragon. It’s supposed to glow in the dark.”

  “Classy,” My mother mutters.

  The Sheriff sounds grim. “So you understand, I gotta ask…Now, Jesse Cormac was buried by you guys. Are you one hundred percent sure that he was dead when you stuck him in the ground?”

  “Well, of course!” My mother’s voice is bright with anger. She hates having her expertise questioned. “We wouldn’t have buried a guy who was alive.”

  “Did you embalm him and all that?” Sheriff Billings goes on.

  There’s a pause.

  “No,” my dad says. “His family didn’t want it on religious grounds. Didn’t really matter, though, since it was closed casket.”

  “And what about the floater and the Simms girl?”

  “We didn’t even get a chance to do autopsies on them before they disappeared,” my mom admits.

  “Have you ever heard of anything like this happening? I know it’s ridiculous, but I gotta ask to put it in the report. It’s not a common thing for people to accuse the dead of walking around.”

  There’s another pause. I imagine my parents swapping glances, thinking of what I said about Amanda.

  “No,” my mother said. “Nothing like that. Just the normal rigor mortis stuff. Corpses sitting up, flopping over, curling up. But not getting up and taking a hike around town to rip out someone’s hair extensions.”

  The Sheriff sighs. “This is a PR nightmare. The family of the floater is talking lawsuits, so we’ve gotta—”

  A throat clears behind me. I whirl around, my heart hammering.

  Gramma is standing at the bottom of the stairs. I don’t know how long she’s been lurking there, but certainly long enough to see me eavesdropping.

  She lifts an eyebrow. “Did you hear anything interesting?”

  I nod, feeling so guilty I almost wish I couldn’t smell the delicious bread that Gramma is baking.

  She gestures for me to follow her upstairs. Hanging my head, I follow.

  She sits down at the kitchen table and gestures for me to do the same. I take the seat beside her, staring at my reflection in the table. “Look, I didn’t mean—”

  Gramma rolls her eyes. “Of course you did. And you beat me to it.” She threads her fingers together greedily. “What did they say?”

  I relay what I heard. That Louise had gotten attacked by a tattooed guy who’s supposed to be dead.

  Gramma laughs so hard that she buries her head in her arms on the table. At first, I think she’s crying, but her quaking shoulders are fits of unfettered laughter.

  “Louise got her hair torn off?” she gasps. “Ha!”

  “Holy cow, Gramma. I didn’t know you had it in for Louise.”

  She gasps for air. “Louise stole one of my boyfriends when we were in
school. Bitch deserves what she gets.”

  I sit back in my chair, shaking my head. “Jesus, Gram. She could have gotten killed.”

  “Yeah, well. There’s a line to bump off Louise.” Gramma wipes the mascara bleeding down her face with a napkin. “That made my year.”

  “Happy to be of service.” I stand up and start to push the chair out so I can go up to my room to contemplate what I’ve learned today.

  “Not just yet.” Gramma lifts her finger and points at the chair.

  Sullenly, I sit back down. Now comes the lecture.

  She leans in, conspiratorially close. “What do you think happened to Louise? For real?”

  “I don’t know.” I really don’t.

  “The other night, when Amanda vanished, you said she was walking around. Talking.”

  I swallow hard and begin to pick at my hangnail. I want to tell her; it seems like she might even believe me. But I promised Amanda that I would keep her secret. I remain silent.

  “Was it true?” Gramma asks.

  “I don’t…I don’t remember a lot of that night,” I say. “My dreams are all mixed up in my head.” That was true, at least.

  Gramma snorts. “Damn your mother for pumping you full of drugs.”

  I press my lips together. I want to cry. Everyone knows I’m on drugs.

  Gramma reaches out and pats my sleeve. “There’s nothing wrong with you, Charlotte. Not a damn thing. And I’m here for you, if you want to talk about it.”

  I nod, still not trusting myself to speak.

  The oven timer goes off. Gramma gets up from the table to check on her baked goods. “Louise may be a drunken whore,” she mutters. “But I believe her if she says someone came back from the dead and tried to rip off her face.”

  I do too, but I don’t dare say it.

  *

  I wait until everyone has gone to bed. I clutch the windowsill, watching the crematorium for some sign of life. Or un-life? I shake my head. No lights gleam from inside.