by Curran
Strand shook his head, not liking those eyes of Missy Crow’s upon him. They were just as dark and oily as coffin varnish. They seemed to look inside you and know all the things you had done and you would yet do. “I heard…I heard you can raise up the dead.”
Those eyes were on him hard then, looking into him and maybe right through. Eyes that were mystical and cabalistic, peering out from shadow-riven glens, sacred groves, and misty mountaintops where the witch-clans gathered and sang their songs, flew through the air on hackberry rods and hickory shafts, casting the runes and harnessing malignant spirits and malevolent elementals.
“And ye wish that I raise up yer dead mama, eh? Call her from the damps of the grave and from beyond the pale?” Missy Crow spat again. “Do yerself a favor, Luke Strand. Forget such vile doings. Take her home and bury her proper, say a prayer to Jesus and the saints.”
“But I brought money,” he said. “Everything I could get.”
“Did ye now?” She put those eyes on him that were open sores and secret cancers. “Then say the words, Luke Strand, say them words that will damn yer immortal soul straight to hell. Say unto me what ye would have done.”
“I want you to raise my mama…from the dead,” he managed, his breath catching in his throat.
“Ye wish a resurrection?”
“I do.”
With no help from Missy Crow, Strand brought the shrouded body of Mama Lucille into that dank-smelling cabin. Through the warped plank door knotted in a tangled profusion of woodbine and trumpet creeper. A place of shadows and sheeted forms; tables crowded with alembics and retorts and dried animal scraps; corpse-fat candles guttering on shelves amongst bones and jars of fetal things floating in brine. It smelled of spices in there, of ashes and tanned hides, wormseed and devilpitch, rotting coffin linings and graveyard soil.
“Now, Luke Strand, ye kindly step outside while I cut and sew and snip, whilst I remove things and say words and sprinkle essential salts and warm this barren clay.”
It took about two hours.
Then the still sleeping form of Mama Lucille was placed back in her box, smelling of dampness and carbolic, preservatives and cold rain.
Missy Crow the straw-witch took the money, and whispered something into the shroud. Then to, Strand himself: “Take yer mama home and bury her, son. Two days of seasoning in the ground, she’ll ripen like slaw and then just maybe…just maybe…but if she moves, if she walks above again, no salt and no meat. Remember that, Luke Strand, and I bid you good-bye. And may the Lord have mercy upon yer heathen soul for the things ye have done and those ye will yet do.”
*
Two days later.
The cemetery.
What Strand did he did in silence, he did alone, he did with a madness tickling at the base of his brain and a spade in his hands. And in that sullen graveyard, there was the rustling of unknown shadows, somber light winking off leaning tombstones, spiders tickling the dark with silken threads. High above, that ancient moon slid through the sky like whispering casket silk as something far below ripened and readied itself.
It was a night of resurrection beneath that same glowering, bloated moon. A night of digging and clawing, of the moist skin of the earth cut by the surgical blade of a shovel as a hideous gestation reached its peak. As the swollen belly of the graveyard delivered a grim parody of life from the moldering oblong box of its womb and cold meat was given breath and colder clay given sterile animation.
Strand worked that shovel, tossing out clods of black earth and squaring off the grave meticulously as was his way. He could feel it below him, waiting in the thick and swelling blackness of his mother’s coffin: a dire breathing in those damp confines of decay, a life, a death, the undead and poisoned milk of the charnel yard filling that box and needing to spill out in noxious tangles.
When he struck wood, found that fine gumwood coffin with the iron bands, he brushed dirt from it, whispering something under his breath just as he was certain something inside was whispering to him.
Was that…was that the sound of ragged fingers scraping from within? A thudding and a shifting like a child announcing itself from its mother’s belly? No, not yet, not yet.
As Strand reached for the catches on the coffin lid, his hands pulled back and some dread voice in his mind demanded to know what he thought he was doing, in this place, down in this claustrophobic darkness.
And that stayed him for a moment or two, long enough for him to hear the chortle of frogs from the ravine and the sing-song shrilling of whippoorwills and the droning of night things. But then his fingers were at those catches, undoing them, curling along the seam of that lid as an earthworm coiled fatly beneath his hand.
It’s time, mama, he thought with a buzzing sibilance in his head. It’s time to wake and rise up and Then the lid was swung open and there was a rush of moist putrescence and fetid gas that made Strand gag. Mama Lucille was laying there in her silk burial gown, gray hands folded neatly at her bosom. Her face was pallid and drawn, the skin there thin and tight as if the skull beneath was trying to push its way through. Blackened lips pulled back from narrow teeth in a livid corpse-grin.
She was dead, she was not alive…yet, there was almost a repellent and lewd vitality to her that did not belong. There was a sentience, an awareness that was practically obscene. Like seeing a wooden window dummy smile and wink at you. Life did not belong in those remains, yet it was there.
This was when Strand truly realized he had made an awful mistake.
Then Mama Lucille’s eyes flickered open, luminous yellow sacrificial moons.
She grinned and those withered fingers reached up, skeletal twigs scratching at an October window.
Strand started screaming.
*
It was a week later when he stumbled into town, gibbering and mad, his eyes wide and reflective like wax pennies. He made it to Sheriff Bolan’s office and collapsed into a chair, his face grimy, leaves and sticks braided into his hair. When he tried to speak, all that would come out was a dry gibbering. And when he tried to make Bolan understand with just his hands, those fingers shook with violent quakes.
No, Bolan did not know what had happened to him, not then, but he knew it was bad. Luke Strand was thin and wasted, drooling and delusional. Whatever had taken hold of him it had done so with claws and teeth and appetite. Chewing up the man and shitting what was left out the other side. You could smell the fear and the insanity running from him in a sharp juice. He was like some demented ghost haunting the bones of his life.
“ Okay, Luke,” Bolan finally said. “We’ll do it my way then.”
Bolan was a big man, hard and wiry with sure hands and a cool head. And if there was one thing he believed in, it was whiskey. It was the only medicine he used and the greatest curative in God’s creation. No greasy, slick-talking Yankee snakeoil salesman could touch good Kentucky whiskey and that was the plain truth. So he got out his bottle and he started pouring it into Luke Strand along with hot black coffee that was so strong it could’ve made a blind man see or a seeing man blind.
After a time, incrementally, Strand relaxed. All those compressed springs and taut wires loosened slowly, slowly, and he began to speak. He was still out of his head. So far out that try as he might, he could not find the way back in again. But he was lucid. And that was something.
“ Eileen’s dead,” was the first thing he said. “She was murdered.”
Bolan sat down, nodded, rolled himself a cigarette and gave it some fire. “Did you do the killing, son?”
But Strand shook his head so violently it looked like it might fall right off. “No, sir! It weren’t me…it was, it was… my mama.”
Bolan pulled off his cigarette, his eyes narrowed to razor cuts. He knew that Strand was not pulling his leg; he could see the sincerity in his eyes and it didn’t sit well with him. There were certain things that could be and others that could not. “Your mama’s dead, Luke. I saw her put in the ground.”
Strand�
��s eyes were glassy and staring like those of a stuffed elk. “She was in the ground, sheriff, then I dug her back up and I took her…took her to Missy Crow…”
Bolan grimaced and a slight tremor passed through his hand. An understanding passed through his eyes, a recognition as if he knew this dark path all too well and where it led. He sat there silently, smoking, looking as if what he had chewed for lunch was chewing on him now. “I told you to leave that goddamned hag out of this.”
But, as Strand explained, he could not.
He told Bolan what it was like with Mama Lucille being gone, how it had all pulled out his guts, emptied him, the grief stuffing something else back in there that was poisoned and foul. He told Bolan how he had gone to the straw-witch and paid her and all the rest.
“ Then I dug her up and she was dead…but she was alive,” Strand said.
But not really alive, he admitted. She was animate, but not human anymore. After she had woken up down in that grave, he climbed out of there, his mind just gone to sauce. He ran home and hid in the farmhouse and Mama Lucille followed him.
Strand was running his hands through his hair roughly like he wanted to yank it out by the roots. “She…she wasn’t mama, she was something else. Like a living scarecrow, something that should not walk but did. Not human, not like me and you. Not warm and feeling, just a cold shell… walking, breathing meat.”
She would not speak, Strand said.
She made funny hissing sounds and grunting noises like a hog rooting in soil, but that was about it. She did not sleep. She walked around the house, flies nesting in her hair and mouth and she did not seem to care. She would stand in the hallway for hours staring into space or in the corner just looking at the wall. At night, she would pace back and forth, that black flyblown stink hanging on her. Once, she got outside and laid down in the turnip patch. By the time Strand found her, there were beetles and ants tunneling in her.
“ I…I tried to pretend she were really mama, sheriff, I know it’s blasphemy and I’m going to rot in the bowels of hell, but I just weren’t thinking right,” he said in a squeaking, childish voice. “I wanted her to be mama, I needed her to be mama. I tried to get her to eat. I gave her soup and bread and taters with no salt just like Missy Crow said, but mama wouldn’t touch it. Then…then two days ago, I dug a grave out in the field and I made her lay in it. I buried her down near five feet. She was dead, she was walking carrion, stinking and rotting and always chattering her teeth like she were hungry. But she was dead so I buried her.
“ I thought that would be the end of things. That she was dead and she would stay dead. Eileen had left me, she never saw none of it. When I went to dig up mama she just left, went back to her people, I reckon. I was thinking that the madness had passed and things could be sane again. But that night…that night I was lying in my bed and I heard Rafe Short’s old hound begin to howl down the road a piece and I knew what was going to happen, I just knew it. Then I heard the creaking of those loose boards out on the porch and the door opening. Then those slow, heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. I think…I think I screamed when the door opened. Mama stood there in the moonlight coming in through the window and I smelled her long before that and heard all them flies buzzing on her. She stood there, just dirty and moldering and wormy, clods of earth falling off of her. She was holding out her hands to me like she wanted something, chattering her teeth, just chattering and chattering those teeth…but I knew what she wanted, God help me, but I knew what she wanted.”
Bolan looked a little sick himself by that point. He crushed out his cigarette under his boot. “And what was that? Tell me, boy.”
Strand licked his lips. “Meat. She wanted meat. She wanted salt. Missy said not to give her none, but I did. I had a joint of beef, raw and bloody, and I gave it to her. I dumped salt all over it. She chewed it right down to the bone…just gnawing and chomping on it, then licking it. When I tried to take it away from her, she snarled at me, she hissed and there was something in her eyes, something evil, Sheriff. It hadn’t been there before. Something black and godless and…and hungry.”
Strand said she went down in the root cellar with her bone and he could hear her down there nibbling on it. He ran out of the house and did not come back until the next night, which was last night. Eileen must have come home and found Mama Lucille…and Mama Lucille found Eileen.
“ Oh dear God, Sheriff,” Strand said, barely able to catch his breath. “I came home and right away I could smell it…that bloody, raw smell like you get around butchering time. I found mama with Eileen. She had bitten most of the meat off her face and eaten her fingers. She was chewing on her leg when I got there.”
“ What did you do?”
“ I hid in the corn patch all night,” Strand said. “I thought she would come after me, too. Then I got on my horse and I rode off. I was heading out of Boone County and never coming back. Then a couple hours ago, I thought I better come and see you.”
Bolan thought it over for a long time. Then he stood up and strapped on his Army. 44s. “All right, we better go take care of this, son. Ain’t no one but us that can.”
*
Missy Crow was sitting on her porch when they rode up. “I warned ye, Luke Strand. Did I not warn ye, boy, what ye were bringing onto yerself by calling up the dead? Oh, I knowed, God, how I knowed! I knewed ye wouldn’t listen! I knewed ye’d feed her the salt and the meat!”
Bolan dismounted his dappled mare, tying her off at the hitch post. “Then you know, don’t you, you old hag? You know what you’ve brought to being here? What terrible things you’ve set into motion?”
The straw-witch pulled off her ash pipe, grinning like a stuffed ape. “It’s not what I set into motion, Sheriff. It was that fool there! He’s the one! His mind and his hands and his heart! I was not the fire that burned down his house and damned his soul!”
“But you struck the match, you old witch,” Bolan told her, trying desperately to keep his hands from his guns.
Strand was beyond fear now, beyond retribution. He was just pale and small and lifeless. “She were not human, Missy Crow. She killed my wife…she et her…”
The straw-witch laughed with a booming, unpleasant sound like thudding from inside a buried box. “Ye gave her the salt? Ye gave her the meat? I cain’t help ye now, boy, ye brought this on yerself! She were a dead, mindless thing before, but now she’s something else! There’s things out there, boy, hungry and evil things that were never meant to be born…but now ye have birthed one and it’s in yer mama, hear? A scratching, hungry pestilence! Ye have to bury her deep in a chained box! Let her go back to death, let her feed on herself, starve until there’s nothing left but bones!”
Bolan had pulled one of his. 44s now. “I should put you down right now, you goddamn hag.”
“Yes, maybe ye should, Sheriff. But ye won’t. No sir, ye won’t. It’s not in ye to kill an old woman even if she be the devil’s own.” Missy Crow leaned forward in her rocker, her eyes blazing and sulfurous. “Hear me well, Sheriff Bolan. Ye might be thinking of mayhap riding up here with a posse tonight or tomorrow to burn me out. But ye better think on that careful. I know yer wife is with child. Didn’t know that, eh? Well, she is, boy, she certainly is. I knowed what’s growing in her now and I also knowed what could be growing in her if I make it so! Something with teeth that would bite her from inside. Now ye don’t want that, do ye?”
Bolan was taken aback, but not for long. “Listen to me, you hag. You’ve existed in this county because I’m a tolerant man. Now I give you fair warning: get out. Get out of my county before that posse does come, you hear me?”
Missy Crow just nodded. “I hear, Sheriff. I hear just fine.”
*
It was sundown by the time they reached the Strand farm.
And just riding up there, Bolan could feel something like fingers unfurling in his belly, white and cold and clutching. If there had been doubts seeded in his brain, looking for soil to spread their roots, they we
re gone now. There was something spiritually defiled about the farmhouse, a palpable sense of rottenness that was not sensed with only the nose. It crawled and coiled like it was looking for a throat to wrap itself around.
The wind rustled the corn and the branches of a dead cottonwood tree scraped together overhead like knifeblades.
Lighting a coal-oil lamp, Strand said, “She’s in there, Sheriff.”
“Maybe you better wait out here.”
But Strand shook his head. “Missy Crow’s right: I am to blame. I have to see this through.”
He was so completely calm about it all it was disturbing. Bolan wondered if there was a limit to what the human mind could suffer before the cogs of horror were worn smooth and there was only acceptance…indifferent, long-suffering acceptance.
Stepping up onto the porch and pushing the door open with the barrel of one of his. 44s, he could smell that tomblike, violated atmosphere just fine. It was not just a stink of decay and organic corruption, it was something far worse. It was the odor of black earth and mildew, of bone piles and spoiled meat and creeping vermin, but something else too. Just a fathomless black stench of darkness beyond mere darkness, the smell of buried graves and crumbling pine boxes, the oily blood of deep rank earth dripping and running and settling into the mold of ages.
Bolan sucked in a breath, that smell repulsive to not only his belly but his brain. He wanted to vomit, then scream. Maybe both at the same time. The shadows were thick and oddly bunched, slithering and heavy and aware. The air was grainy, it seemed, hard to breathe and Bolan knew it was the air of crypts sealed for decades and centuries. The air the dead breathed, suffocating and damp.
There was blood in the hallway.
Oh, just buckets of it sprayed and smeared and splashed around like a pig had been gutted and drained in there. Bits of meat and tissue and hair were stuck in it. It had dried now to a sticky film like a membrane of cooling molasses, but the stink of it was all-too recent: raw and savage and coppery.