Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  “This is your room?” Amanda whispers. Her black gaze takes in the pastels, the makeup on the dresser and the stuffed animals piled on the bed.

  “Yeah.”

  “Won’t your parents find out?”

  “Not if we’re careful.”

  I pull the laundry hamper away from the plywood door to the crawlspace behind the wall. “If you hear anyone coming, duck in here.”

  Amanda gets down on her hands and knees. She peers into the crawlspace as I hold a candle aloft. It’s only about twelve feet by four feet. It’s full of old suitcases and broken lampshades. You can smell the dust.

  “It’s better than being outside,” she says. “Or in a fridge.”

  I sit on the floor with my back to footboard of the bed. Amanda sits down, facing me. Lothar waddles between us and stretches out.

  “So…what now?” she asks.

  This is a weird version of a slumber party. This isn’t like the last time I went to Renee’s house, when we giggled, ate ice cream from the carton, and watched Disney movies, or the abbreviated beginning of last Halloween at my house. This is a whole different kind of sleepover.

  I glance out the window. In the distance, smoke rises from the crematorium, a black shadow against the sky. “We need to come up with a plan.”

  “Okay.” Amanda sits cross-legged and tucks her feet under her butt. Lothar goes over to her and rests his head on her knee.

  “We know that there are more of…of you out there. Do you have any idea how many?”

  She shrugs, and her hair falls over her eyes. “I have no clue. If they were made the way I was…how many people could that frat guy have possibly bitten?”

  I think back to the police blotter that was shoved in my locker. I pull it out of my bag and skim it over, looking for missing persons reports. “I don’t see anything here, but I think that there’s a rule that an adult has to be missing for forty-eight hours before he can be declared to be a missing person.”

  “And for all we know, that guy could’ve been sitting in a tree stand all week and his wife’s not expecting him back until Tuesday.” Amanda grimaces.

  “I guess that’s a good thing. We know that there’s him—the Hunter. There’s you. There’s Travis, the frat boy. And Jesse.”

  “Who’s Jesse again?”

  “The guy who busted out of his grave and has been chasing leathery chicks at the tattoo parlor.”

  “Awesome.” Amanda stares up at the ceiling, blowing her hair away from her mouth. “What the heck is this? The hillbilly version of vampirism? Is this the beginning of the zombie apocalypse? Are the undead gonna take over the town? I mean…what the hell, dude?”

  She doesn’t know. I didn’t expect her to, but if she was part of some master ghoul conspiracy, she would know. I put my head in my hands, digging my fingers into my scalp, as if I can encourage myself to think. “I don’t think this is something that began with you. Or the Hunter. Or Jesse, or even Travis.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you remember the story about the first settlement here vanishing?”

  “A little. Everybody was gone.”

  “Right. So, what if this is what happened to them?”

  “The idea is totally worthy of a History Channel documentary, sure. Maybe aliens?”

  I flip the charm out of my pocket. It lands on the floor between us. Amanda’s fingers hover over it, and it seems like she wants to pick it up, but can’t.

  “I think this is the first rendering of Catfish Bob,” I say. “And it sure seems to have an effect on you. It’s magic of some kind. It went crazy at the séance my grandmother started this evening.”

  “Okay. Let’s assume that Catfish Bob was around way back when, that he’s been gnawing on people since that time. That’s an old catfish.”

  “What if he’s not a catfish, though? What if he’s something else? Something…” I struggle to form the words, because the concept is so foreign to me. “Something…immortal.”

  “Then how do we stop him? And Travis, and Jesse, and god knows who else out there?”

  I put the charm back into my pocket. I reach for my backpack again, digging around. I find the book in the bottom. “Maybe we can find out what happened the first time.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A journal, from the trappers who found Mooresville deserted.”

  “You lifted that from the museum, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  Amanda scoots over beside me, dislodging Lothar. I open the book over our knees. Her shoulder is pressed against mine, and her skin radiates cold through the sweatshirt.

  Suppressing a shudder, I flip to the first page and begin to read.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  March 14, 1841

  It is night. We have taken advantage of the shelter offered by a deserted inn. There is enough wood already chopped to start a fire, and sleeping out of sight of the stars is an unanticipated luxury.

  Items have been disturbed here. The lock on the front door is broken. There are shattered dishes on the floor. It seems that nothing has been taken. The silver is still in drawers. There is ale in barrels. And the linens are still in cold beds. If marauders had come, I do not imagine that they would have left the jewelry in the chests.

  It is as if some great wind has blown through here, tearing open the doors and leaving frost inside the windows and snow on the floor.

  I have swept the snow out and barricaded the door, in the event that whoever was here comes back.

  My hand hesitates on the page. On the page facing it, there’s a sketch of Mooresville, covered in snow and under an inky blanket of night. Fences are broken, and doors stand open. I finally turn the page, and more illustrations confront me, drawn in the same ink that’s as dark as gooseberries. There’s a pantry of dry goods, through which mice have crawled. Bags are torn open, spilling grain on the ground. Tiny tails and feet track through the snow and grain. The lines of the walls aren’t very straight, as if the illustrator is much more accustomed to sketching natural landscapes, not man-made ones. But there’s something about the sketch that indicates that nature is taking a new toehold, in a silent, chilling way.

  I turn the page, and the narrative continues:

  March 15, 1841

  The Milburn River is frozen. We had hoped to find a boat to take downstream to St. Clairesville, but the ice is impassable. We shall have to wait until it thaws and we can break a small canoe through the water.

  No good meat on the foundered cattle. I went to the woods to place traps and saw an Indian on foot. I called out to him, and he stopped. I do not think he understood me, but he looked upon me with much fear and fled.

  There’s a serene picture of the frozen river and a man working on repairing a canoe. Another shows a Native American man covered in furs running between birch trees.

  Amanda sits beside me, gnawing on her fingernail. She nods for me to turn the page.

  March 17, 1841

  I caught something in the trap today. I do not know what it is.

  My breath whistles through my lips as I look down at what appears to be an arm, but blackened and viscous. The edges are ragged, leaking into the snow, as if whatever creature grew it had torn it off and left it behind.

  Amanda rubs her nose. “What is that?”

  I stare at the illustration intently, turning the page over. The trapper’s drawings of animals in the other journal were very precise, like the Audubon sketches I’ve seen in library books. I am quite certain that this is very close to what he saw, without embellishment or romanticism, as he seems not to be a man given to sentimentality.

  “It looks human,” I say, squinting. “Sort of.”

  “I guess you’ve seen a lot of anatomy.”

  “But nothing like that. Maybe it’s decomposed in some way.”

  Amanda rubs her elbows.

  “Are you cold?”

  “A little.”

  It’s getting chilly up here without the heat. I g
rab a couple of sweatshirts from my dresser. She accepts one gratefully, though it’s a little tight in the chest for her. She stares down at her hand and the illustration of the oozing arm-like thing in the book.

  “Do you think…I’m going to…” She wiggles her fingers and her voice dips to a whisper. “Do you think that I’m going to rot? Like that?”

  I think back to the floater. Travis. “I don’t know. Do you feel anything different? Like you’re getting squishier or something?”

  She looks at one hand, while the other traces the wound underneath her sweatshirt. “No. I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe it’s like those vampire movies. You’re frozen in the state in which you were bitten or whatever. Or the process slows down or something if you get enough human food.”

  “I hope so. I don’t want to…leak like that.”

  “Well, you don’t smell funny.” I try to be reassuring.

  “Thanks.”

  “I mean it. Decomposing bodies have a distinctive odor. You don’t smell like that.”

  There’s no other consolation I can offer without shoving my foot farther down my throat. Really? You don’t stink was the best I could do? I bite the inside of my cheek and settle the journal on my lap. I flip the page, hoping Amanda can’t see my burning face in the half-dark.

  March 18, 1841

  Last night, there was a scratching at the door. I thought it could be bear, which might be a boon. John and I loaded our rifles and went downstairs.

  By the time we opened the door, the creature was gone. I expected to see bear tracks, but there were none. Only human tracks. I thought that the Indian might have come back.

  The moon was full. We followed the tracks through the snow, hoping they would lead us back to the Indian camp. But instead, they went to the river. They went to the river, out across the ice, and vanished at the edge of a hole.

  A drawing of a still moonlit night and the ice on the river confronts us. Tracks lead from the riverbank, where the silhouette of a man wrapped in furs and holding a rifle stands.

  “That’s like Travis,” Amanda says. “Come out of the river to find some flesh to gnaw on.”

  “But not like you,” I say, looking at her. Amanda, though hungry, isn’t mindlessly ripping my head off and guzzling down my blood like an energy drink.

  She looks at me. “I don’t know why. I wish I could say.”

  I go back to reading.

  March 19, 1841

  Something is not right here. John thinks this place is haunted. We are rightly considering taking off on foot, away from here. It will put us at least six weeks behind, if we do not leave by boat.

  We worked on digging one of the boats out with our axes most of the afternoon, but the ice is too thick. We were interrupted in our labors by a group of Indians, approaching from the west. They approached silently, like the bobcat. The Chief wore a hood of bobcat fur, and he spoke English. He wanted to know what we were doing here. We told him honestly, in hopes that we might be able to trade. He did not strike me as a warlike man, and we were far outnumbered, besides. He showed some interest in our pelts, but told us that we should not stay here. When I asked him what happened to the people here, he said that the God of the River had awoken and was very displeased. He had taken them.

  I tried to explain to him what happened last night, with the footprints leading to the river. The Chief told us that the God of the River and his servants dwell under the ice.

  Some of the women came forward with baskets full of beads and carved bones. The Chief traded for some of our pelts and then gave them to the women. The women put the pelts into the baskets and then walked out onto the ice of the river. I shouted in objection as they poured their treasures into fissures in the ice, the current sucking the goods away. I could see the fur swept under the glasslike surface.

  The Chief stilled my protest with a raised hand. He said that these were sacrifices to the River God, to placate him. It seemed like a terrible waste to me, but I kept my mouth shut. I was paid for my pelts, regardless.

  John asked the Chief when the ice would melt, telling him that we needed to travel by boat along the river. We were told it should be soon, that only great torrents of water would fully satisfy the River God and scour the land clean. After that, the River God would sleep.

  The Chief invited us to stay with his tribe until the waters came. John and I discussed this at length. It seems to us that if the Indians had wanted anything from the people of Mooresville, they would already have taken it. And if they wanted to kill us, they would already had done so. We made a good trade with them, and have no quarrel with their people.

  We accepted their hospitality and will return with them to their settlement, to wait for the spring thaw.

  March 21, 1841

  The Chief has treated us like honored guests. We went hunting with his sons and shot a doe, so I feel that we are earning our keep. We sleep in the Chief’s wigwam, in the center of a settlement about ten miles away from Mooresville.

  I have tried to get more information about what happened to the people of the town. The Indians are reluctant to say, indicating that the River God brought a plague upon them. He calls the plague “the Devourers.” I think that it may be a disease, and it is lucky that the Indians did not catch it. But the Chief wants it made clear that they came to no harm at his hands. I think that is part of the reason they asked us here, to explain what happened to a white man before our soldiers come and blame them for it. It is a shrewd political move for him.

  I believe him. He has given me a piece of bone carved like a catfish. I wonder if this is his River God.

  My breath catches in my throat. There’s an illustration of a fetish there, the very one I hold in my pocket. I fish it out and press it to the page. It’s identical.

  March 25, 1841

  Something came into camp last night. I was awoken from sleep by a great alarm and ruckus. I snatched up my rifle and ran to the source of the disturbance. I found the sons of the Chief standing with arrows and axes around a pale, pale creature dressed as a white man.

  I called for them to stop, as my heart rose gladly at the thought of seeing another white man here. But the Chief’s daughters grabbed my arms and begged me to stop, to look more carefully.

  The man they surrounded was not what I thought. It was a damned thing, pale as the belly of a fish, with glistening black eyes. His face was covered with blood. The women had drawn away a young man, one of the Chief’s sons, who was bleeding profusely from his arm.

  The Indians surrounded the pale thing and forced it into the fire. It howled as it burned. And then the Chief’s son, examining the wound on his arm, walked willingly into the fire after it in a terrible human sacrifice.

  The women wailed. The men danced around the fire, as it seemed to gain strength from the flesh.

  One of the young tribeswomen walked away from the fire. The other women followed her and piled her throat, hair, and wrists with jewelry. The Chief placed his fine bobcat fur around the young woman. There were tears of sorrow from all.

  I thought that the young woman was the wife of one of the men in the fire, that she would throw herself on the fire in solidarity.

  But no. She turned and walked to the frozen river. She walked across it, stepped into a fishing hole cut into the ice, and vanished into the dark water underneath.

  Horrified by all this death, John and I retreated. We gathered our things and returned to Mooresville as the sky opened up and the heavens rained down.

  We arrived in Mooresville in the gray hours before morning. We struggled with the boat, trying to determine how to work it through the ice. The water was rising rapidly, and we hoped that there might be just enough to make our escape.

  I felt eyes upon us. I thought that the Indians had followed us back to the settlement, perhaps to cajole us into returning willingly. But they were not Indians watching us. Rotting creatures in English dress confronted us, and I knew that death had come upon us.
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br />   A roar sounded in the distance. At first, I thought it the cries of the Indians. Yet it was the howl of a flood of water, come crashing down the ice from upriver. The water spilled over the ice, crushing it. In the chaos, John and I scrambled into the boat and held tight. The water lifted us up and away, washing over the cursed bodies on the riverbank, washing it clean as if this habitation of man was simply debris.

  We will continue to St. Clairesville and not return here again.

  The next page shows a sketch of the river, water swallowing up the stripped trees up to their top branches. There are no pictures drawn of the creatures, the fire, or the Native Americans. It seems that the writer wanted to forget—not that I blame him. The next pages are filled with lists of supplies purchased in St. Clairesville and an account of a riverboat journey farther south.

  I close the book.

  “Wow,” Amanda breathes. She knits her fingers together. “So, uh…I guess we did good by cremating the Hunter?”

  “It seems like it.” I pull my sweatshirt hood over my head, against the cold seeping in from outside, and from the chill of Amanda’s shoulder pressed to mine.

  “Um. You wouldn’t burn me, would you?” Her voice is small.

  It takes me a few seconds longer than it should to answer. “Not unless you asked me to. Or you tried to eat someone.”

  She stares at her hands. “If…when…I become like those men in the story, I would want you to.”

  I nod sharply. It seems as if this is more and more an inevitability, if we can’t find a way to change her back. I don’t know if I have the guts to do it, though. She seems awfully human now. But that could change.

  “Uh…did you happen to give my note to Rafe?” she asks, shifting the topic of conversation.

  “Yes.”

  “Did he read it?”