The Vine That Ate the South

by J. D. Wilkes

  After hiding our ten-speeds behind two burn barrels, Carver unsheathes his slingblade and we make our move, climbing the stairs onto the back deck. I feel naked without my machete though. I have nothing to protect myself with should a crazed Grand Poobah pounce.

  Dirt daubers sculpt their earthen channels in the overhang (even though it’s been painted “Haint Blue” to confound their nest-building). Carver swings back the storm door and we are in like Flynn.

  Asbestos, dust, and dirty little secrets whip into our eyes with the onrush of dry wind. The darkened hallway is quiet save for the floor timbers that crack like bones with each step.

  It reminds me of all those other odd abandoned places we drive by daily. I mean those back-alley shells-of-buildings you always have to wonder about. Trees seeding up from the gutters, windowpanes weeping black bilge down stone facades. Or those derelict doublewides that sit crooked at the edge of the woods, crammed with hoarded garbage, creamed by the elements, and crowned with snapped aerials. And what about all those failed businesses on the other side of the tracks, the ones with graffiti and weeds but whose lights still kick on at night automatically, giving off an alien strobe through the cracks? And no one knows who’s paying the bill or how to shut them off.

  And then there are those other forlorn spaces, places that never see the light. You imagine shouldering your way into the tight squeeze of a blocked door, pressing past all the cobwebs and into the shadows.

  Your eyes adjust just barely enough to discover another doorway. But you need to move some boxes out of the way for it to open too. There’s a stairwell on the other side that leads you farther and farther below, into absolute darkness, stifling heat, and suffocating must. You plod down the crooked staircase, toward a faint impending energy. And though you can feel the horror growing in your body, step by step you feel you must push. Down, down, down into phantom red terror; your eyes are electric, but your smile is painted-on and false. But be a man, I say! Give yourself over! These are the factories where nightmares are made!

  “Okay. I’ll man up.”

  “Yeah, it’s nothin’. It just smells like bingo in here. Whiskey, smoke, and panelin’. Plus, they only meet once-t a week, buncha old farts. Trust me, we’re just gonna have a quick looksee. So they’s still plunty time to get to the Kudzu House and back before sundown directly.”

  The hallway leads past a cloakroom where green glass heads model a row of red fezzes down a long hallway shelf. A row of ruby-and-gold-colored robes shrug on a coatrack. The cowls of kings. Carver hangs back to ponder the symbolism chain-stitched in the sleeves while I proceed into the holy of holies… pulled in by both curiosity and wondrous dread.

  CABAL

  My mind’s eye swells within the sudden expanse of the inner sanctum. Full fascination is drawn inside, the way smoke curls to fill a room. I step in to find layers of dust covering over cryptic intent as mystic symbols are revealed under swipes of the hand. The place feels haunted by a thousand dark rituals.

  “What do they do in here?” I wonder aloud.

  There are rows of pews like you’d see in the arcade of a cathedral. They all face a stage where candles would be lit. I can just imagine the hooded congregation, ensconced with a common dark purpose. No doubt they join hands in concentric circles and chant. Do they do so for good or evil? Or is it just to impose place memory onto the negative space surrounding them? Forming a virtual tree ring of Yggdrasil itself, cleaving notches into the very Tree of Life?

  Yes, I’m beginning to believe that these eccentric menfolk, these sons of the Templars, are the ones really running things. Too many American presidents have been Freemasons. Too many crooked Southern politicians too. And this is their gathering place. This is their community.

  But the Devil sits upon the dais…

  I approach with reverence, tiptoeing in a hunch. Dim footlights illuminate the chancel here, suggesting this building is still operational. Gnats swarm in the glow like a field of electrons.

  Basking in the faint incandescence sit three mahogany thrones, facing outward with looming presence. There is fury in their framework, anger in their carvings. Rough-hewn details along the legs depict screaming demonic faces. Each twisted figure upholds the next character, like a German Expressionist totem pole. Up top, tin globes, representing the Moon and Earth, flank the velvet headboards. They swivel upon each stile like an orrery. Surely they must symbolize how the heavens, in turn, orbit the mind of God. The largest throne occupies center stage confronting a warlock’s pulpit, whereupon the biggest Bible I’ve ever seen hangs heavy in its sacrificial leather, cracked open to the Apocrypha of Judas.

  How could they leave this place so vulnerable? I wonder as I scan the room from the stage.

  The All-Seeing Eye gazes down from a gold backdrop in the nave. It’s like the watchful eyes that swirl in the birches. Or even the eyes of Carver Canute, when they flash psycho.

  I return my attention to the altar, and to a little golden name-plate put there by the craftsman:

  BROTHER EGGNER METZ

  ORDER OF COPPERHEAD

  I recognize the name! He was the old German “wood butcher” who got caught making church furniture out of wooden implements of capital punishment. Things like decommissioned electric chairs and lethal injection gurneys. He went around scooping them up as soon as the state outlawed the policy. Why, he even had a scrap pile of century-old gallows wood in his backyard. I read somewhere that the Church of Christ ran him out of town. Accused him of blasphemy. They claimed he was responsible for sawing the steeples off of churches for extra wood. They said he’d admitted getting the idea from a demon, a disgruntled “fallen angel,” one that had had its own wings sawn off in Heaven. The demon had taken its revenge by inspiring Metz to do the same to steeples.

  True or false, one thing’s for sure: the Church meant to ruin Eggner and his business. So he closed up shop and sold his property. But, by the looks of things, he must’ve stuck around long enough to pick up some extra work with the Freemasons.

  Inside his ominous altar I find mostly a mundane pile of nothing: some used Kleenexes, a candle, a pack of Big Red gum. But I do discover a mysterious contraption hidden in back. Cleft from mahogany and slightly smaller than a breadbox, the thing comes stamped with another Metz nameplate. It sports a smooth lathed handle and a dainty drawer of black and white marbles. I assume it is a ballot box for “casting lots.” When swiveled by the handle, a marble issues through a hole and onto a plank. It seems I have rolled a black one.

  Whose fate is decided by this gizmo? I wonder.

  “Hey, come look at this!” I holler to Carver down the hall.

  No answer.

  “Of all the places for him to start messing with me,” I mutter.

  I descend the podium and skulk back to the hallway. Luckily, there’s some light at the end of the corridor where we had entered. I gather up all my courage and proceed, walking softly so as not to creak the floorboards. Or, worse yet, try not to fall into the terrifying nothingness of what the basement must be.

  I am midway down the hall when I swear I hear a shadow. I turn my head and see a robed figure. Like a beast, it springs itself upon me in a wild X. It screams and flails a steel blade that figure-8’s inches from my face. I try to holler but the thing has me throttled, forcing me hard against the wall. There’s an explosion of copper in my mouth as my back cracks the plaster. The shelf of glass heads and fezzes crashes to the floor. In my panic I am able to upswing two praying hands between the arms that choke me. I force them apart and bring a knee into the demon’s gut. I am released. Adrenaline has saved me for the split second I need to plan my next offense.

  I gasp and discover it’s only Carver, dammit. He’s wearing a stolen robe and fez and holding his machete. The hallway erupts with out-of-breath laughter.

  “I knew it was you!” I lie. “You still scared the hell out of me! Take that thing off and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Man, you got me good!
But you look like you just ’bout shit yer pants!” he snorts, adjusting his junk. His laugh sounds like a donkey call.

  “Hold up,” Carver laughs, still recovering from my knee to the gut. “I wanna go check the rest of this place out. How wuzzit? Did you find JFK’s brains?”

  “No. You jackass. Run-go check it out real quick. It’s not that scary. Just a bunch of weird furniture.”

  “I’ll be right back. Wait for me. I wanna show ya somethin’.”

  Carver jogs down the hall, floorboards buckling under his goatboots. I make for the door, where the sky is lit with saffron again. Five minutes later Carver returns.

  THE CLASSROOM

  “Well, you were right. There ain’t jack squat down there. That big ol’ Bible was cool. Too big to fit in my saddlebag though. But did you look in there?”

  “Look in where?” I ask.

  “I swear it ain’t another trick. Trust me.”

  Carver walks me to the other side of the hall where the door to another room stands ajar. With a slight push it creaks open, echoing into the expanse of a tall-ceilinged classroom. It is filled with stale air and squalor and dimly lit through old ambered pull shades. Unfamiliar forms fill the floor.

  “Whoa,” I whisper.

  “Look in the middle,” Carver notes with a raised eyebrow and spooky reverence.

  Giant ceiling tiles have fallen from the weight of rainwater and insulation. They are left in a hanging position, suspended midair by a tangle of wiring. Black mold creeps up the walls and rats scurry about. The cold terrazzo floor is littered with random forsaken filth: wet books and clothes, a stack of unused Styrofoam coolers, a box of old work gloves. The room stinks of asbestos, neglect, and decay.

  Then I look down and pick up a stray guitar cable.

  “Cool! I can use this,” I muse, musician that I am.

  “No, got-dangit,” Carver whispers. “Look in the middle.”

  I squint a little harder.

  Beneath the spilling ceiling tiles lies an amorphous pile of something organic on the mattress. Rolled up in a blanket, looking like a blob, it’s… a body? Or… a glob of mush?

  Is Carver tricking me again? It’s hard to tell. My pupils swell with adrenaline as my neck hairs stand on end. Now I can see.

  A deformed corpse lies in a rigid lock of rot. The ravages of time have collapsed its face into a gaping moccasin. Spanish-moss-looking hairs form a wreath around its mouth as it silently screams. Its shriveled eye-holes look like puckered leather navels, and what’s left of its nose is the ace of spades. It curls its claws beneath a purple chin and peeks its head out of a swaddle like a ghoulish Downy baby.

  Drywall dust and bird droppings form a crust on top, and the whole body looks so old and hollow you could almost go pick it up with one hand. Pick it up like a frozen tarp and pitch it like a Frisbee. In fact, it is so far gone even the flies aren’t interested anymore.

  Regardless, this grinning beef-jerky mummy must’ve been someone. It must’ve had a name! It must’ve had a family! Through disbelief and intrigue it finally dawns on me. Our Masonic Lodge is not so much some Southern gothic funhouse as it is a crime scene! A pall of gooseflesh descends. A swirling chill. Hyperventilation. Then from the depths of my soul comes an explosion of buried religion. Yes, through the lips and past the gums comes bursting forth the mighty name of “JESUS!” Not as an expletive but as an involuntary open rebuke of this sinful sight.

  “Jesus! Is that the guy you shot in the woods?! Tabitha’s daddy?!” I shout. “Jesus, Carver, I hoped to God you were just kidding!”

  Carver just looks at me surprised and shakes his head. “I tolt you these Freemasons mean bidness.”

  “No, I told you, dammit! Jesus Jesus Jesus!” I profess again, slapping my forehead.

  But in my other hand I feel a tug. My guitar cable whips out straight on its own, yanking here and there like a magic leash. I drop the thing but it hovers for an unnatural second, thrashes my legs several times, and falls to the floor.

  We both take off running. Rounding the corner and out the backdoor until we hit sunlight. Straight as an arrow, the cable shoots past our ears. A folding chair is sent hurtling at our feet next. With a clanging thud it sticks a landing in the mud just inches away. We scan for more trouble.

  “Who else was in there?!” I scream.

  “NOBODY!” Carver hollers, obviously frightened with his eyes wide and white.

  “Forget this!”

  The Tuvan tones of the woodlands roar like laughter. Carver starts to laugh too. His green teeth are bared but he sounds fake and full of wild worry.

  Holy God, I am utterly lost in an onrush of questions. Within that pregnant, suspended second between the slice of the knife and the arrival of pain, I know I’ll forever be held. Disbelief collides with belief. Then comes the disbelief that you now believe. For it is one thing to suspect the supernatural; it’s another thing to have it confirmed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  SIN EATER Part 3

  It’s not like he respects this town and wishes us well. Heartless bastard. I mean, he literally has no heart! He only does it to survive. Look at him. Now he’s scrambling into the treetops of my mind, scurrying along the planks he nailed there for a hasty getaway. Slow and steady, like molasses running down a butter knife, he rappels to the forest floor on a blackjack vine. He sneaks a peek left. Then right. Then left again. He slithers through the pampas grass, emerging with throbbing eyes. With a hop he’s aboard his secret, sacred podium: an antebellum whipping-post lost to time in the misty woods. An obelisk of inglory. Dangling with the chains and shame of slavery, it is a focal point of bad juju. Here he basks in the LORD’S reinvigorating light to receive his daily charge. To review today’s menu.

  Before long, the cursed scavenger is backtracking down the trail, snapping thicket underfoot. Soon he’ll be worming back into the hole beneath his shed to sit at a table of plenty. All manner of delicacies await: cakes and pies, cookies and fruit, soups, salads, hams, beans, grits and casseroles. They all line the length of his latest victim’s body. A closer look through the candlelight and behold! The victim is ME! My sins, it seems, are “Today’s Special.”

  The Sin Eater says his grace, but his eyes remain open and fixed on me. The “me” that is watching myself. He sees that I’m spying from above through the catawampus floorboards, but he refuses to break eye contact. Yes, he is staring a hole right through me!

  Then, with a sickening twinkle, he curls his grin of crooked teeth. A yellow un-flossed mush of sin-on-the-cob.

  BOOK TWO:

  PANDELIRIUM

  “It was pandelirium! I thought we’d be killed or even worse. I looked out the window in time to see the chicken’s coop go right over our roof! All I could think was, Caroline still has my casserole dish!” —Jeff Foxworthy

  Chapter Twenty

  BURKEHOLDER

  Carver’s Aunt Glennis.

  A visitor from on high.

  Separate ways.

  QUESTIONS

  Quickly back aboard our bikes—rattled, shaken, and on autopilot—we book it down to the Old Spur Line with our thoughts on what we just witnessed. Carver has doffed the robe but is still wearing the red fez he stole, making him look like an escaped hurdy-gurdy ape.

  He swears to God he had nothing to do with the body.

  “So…” I stammer.

  “So, what?”

  “Should we call the cops?”

  “Hell no! Like you said, we don’t want them Masons findin’ out we was snoopin’ around. Come on, let’s get on down to the Kudzu House.”

  “Hey, man. One dead body is enough for me today. I just wanted to come out here to have some fun. Now this?”

  “I ain’t askeert of much, but when it comes to the Masons, the ones that are way high on up and in charge? Them’s the ones that’s got this whole world rigged. Killin’ people and framin’ witnesses is just what they do!” He pauses. “Here, have some whiskey.”

  Carve
r tosses me his flask and I take a deep stinging pull. I try to forget the terrible mysteries of the day, the very mysteries I’ve been waxing poetic about since we got started.

  Thus far in life the closest things I’ve seen to “the paranormal” are the shocking stunts my daddy once pulled (but those weren’t real, were they? I was so young!) and, of course, Brother Withers levitating at a revival. He claimed whoever had “mustard seed faith” could do it too. Maybe it was just a cheap trick, but it scared the hell out of me and kept me godfearing and churchgoing for another four years or more.

  And, oh yeah, there was today’s visit to the sexton’s office. And those shrunken heads? More glimpses of the unexplain-able. Lest I lose my mind, I chug a mouthful more of whiskey and attempt to change the subject.

  “Well, so much for your theory that once you enter The Deadening you can never leave. Or at least that you lose a year when you do. We just rode right out and got a coke.” I suspect I’m just trying to make myself feel better. Trying to quiet this terror.

  “Yeah, but we had headin’ back into the woods in mind,” Carver argues. “Maybe the woods kin predict yer plans. Let you come ’n go as you please, just so long as it knows yer a-headin’ back inside. That makes it not count. Plus, I didn’t check today’s date on the paper back at the FOOD OWL, did you?”

  “No,” I say, wishing I hadn’t brought it up.