by Wither
“Please! They’re coming!” Jack said. “We have to get inside—”
The old man grunted. “Ayuh, they’ll be along soon,” he told Jack; his voice was cracked and gravelly with disuse. “I’m sorry, son.”
“What!?” Jack seized the old man by the shirt and tried to shake him. But despite his thin build the old man was solid, like something carved of wood. His face was hard, weathered as old board, and fixed in an expression of infinite sadness. Like the weary acceptance of a cenotaph martyr, guarding the dead.
Jack released his grip on the old man and took a step back. The old man’s glittering eyes looked beyond Jack to the banshee wailing coming from the woods. Jack smelled the hot stench hed smelled before but didn’t turn this time to look.
The old man said simply, “They’re here for you, son.”
The ground thundered behind him. Finally, not really wanting to, he turned slowly and saw the death that had come for him… the three crooked shapes looming over him, as big around as trees, almost nine feet tall, seething with hunger. Vultures, he thought with dread fascination until he saw the clawed hands that reached for him. Only then did he understand…
They tore him to pieces, and fought amongst themselves for the scraps.
BOOK TWO
* * *
“THE CHOSEN”
October
From the Essex County Examiner, October
WINDALE. The search continued throughout Saturday for eighteen-year-old Jack Carter, who disappeared a week ago under suspicious circumstances in the vicinity of a condemned industrial site.
According to a female friend who was with the Danfield College freshman at the time of his disappearance, the youth was allegedly under the influence of both alcohol and marijuana when he attempted to scale the old trestle bridge, which fords Miller Creek. Though the witness maintains Carter was abducted, town sheriff William Nottingham feels a more likely explanation is accidental death, and speculates that the intoxicated youth probably fell from the bridge and drowned in the rapids of the creek below.
To date, efforts to locate the boy’s body in the creek or the neighboring Hadleyville reservoir into which it flows have proven futile.
The underage witness had a blood alcohol level below the legal limit for the State of Massachusetts, and tested negative for marijuana and other hallucinogens. Her bizarre testimony is being attributed to the acute psychological distress of Carter’s disappearance. Danfield officials have not yet decided whether any punitive action will be taken against the young woman for violating that school’s policy regarding underage drinking.
CHAPTER FOUR
* * *
The old man in the rocking chair set aside the newspaper and took up his tin cup of chicory tea, swallowing the bitter liquid in a futile attempt to wash away the thirst that had haunted him for more than a hundred years.
Today Matthias had added hard spirits to his morning draught, as he’d done every other morning of thisgoddamned week, in an equally futile effort to forget the boy he’d seen devoured in his own backyard. But hard spirits had long since ceased to affect his wits. Like water on stone, they only darkened the color of his mood. (And that was how he imagined himselfnow, as a stone, a fossilized thing.) He remembered once what it was to be drunk, the dizzy thrill of it, but it was a sensation remembered at a great distance, like the memory of happiness. Memories were brittle now, so fragile they fell to dust at the slightest recollection. Only fear remained as bright as the first time he’d tasted it…
That first time had been over a century and a half in his past. And it was his father who’d introduced him to it, an even harder man than Matthias. We’re caretakers, our kind, his father had said as he led him through the forbidden woodland path to the old barn. Even as a boy, Matthias had understood that he was to inherit whatever secret waited in that barn, just as his father had inherited it from the father before. Matthias recalled that he had felt a childish pride on that long walk through the woods, perhaps the last human emotion he would ever feel. Moments later, pride was replaced forever by fear—as his father pushed him alone through the barn door, locking him in darkness where something darker crouched. It was Matthias’s initiation.
Matthias coughed on his chicory tea now, choking on the memory. Yes, the fear was still fresh, though he’d made many trips in the years since to the barn, and no longer was surprised by what slept there.
He was due there this morning, and he was dreading it, which was why he lingered over his newspapers. (Once, he’d been an educated man, and he’d kept the habit of following the turnings of the world—though he was no longer a part of it) He rocked a moment longer on the porch, the chair’s old runners creaking torturously beneath him. The morning smelled of dampness and impending light, the hard autumn sky softening toward dawn. Just a little longer,he thought, willing daylight to overtake the world. The things in the barn were weakest in the strong light of noonday. But god help the man who met them in the night…
Or the boy. The unwanted sight of the week before came again to Matthias—the three of them tearing the boy in two, fighting over the scraps. Matthias had turned away as soon as it began, but no matter how quickly he walked he couldn’t escape the wet sounds of them feeding…the cooing noises the one made… the other’s mad cackling….
He wished they would finish the boy quickly, or at least take their meal back to the barn. It wasn’t the boy’s cries that bothered Matthias so much—those were over quickly enough—but rather the sound of the feeding itself. It conjured an unwelcome memory from the dust motes in Matthias’s brain of the time he’d served them up his own wife. But he’d had no other choice. They were most dangerous when they were hungry. Fortunately their hunger came less frequently than a man’s, and they were content to lie dormant for whole decades, like the seventeen-year locusts that had returned this summer. When Matthias sensed they needed feeding he would buy a few head of dairy cattle and shoo them through the barn doors. The three would be so sluggish with their long sleep he’d have to slaughter the cattle himself and leave the steaming carcasses in the dark.
For decades they were content with this fresh kill. But then they would begin to emerge from their slumber, reawakening with an appetite for a more savory meat. If Matthias did not satisfy this hunger they would begin to venture forth in the evenings to hunt— a risky time, when Matthias felt most vulnerable to discovery. (He’d learned to take precautions to eliminate all traces of their slaughter, and had taken pains to burn the most recent boy’s shredded clothing in a pyre out behind the springhouse.) The last time they’d awoken—a century past—Matthias had done what he could to feed them. And so he had led Mary through the woods to the barn, as his father had led him once, though for a different purpose. His wife had thought it a game when he pushed her through the open door into the dark. He’d stood with his back to the plank door, trapping her within, and he remembered how shed laughed, never knowing that behind her the crouching shadows were stirring…
Such was the price a man paid for longevity.
Matthias carried his shovel to the barn.
For a change, Wendy arrived early for comp lit in Pearson Hall. Even though the Gremlin had stalled twice on the way to the East Lot, she still arrived at Lecture Room 100 five minutes before class. It was easy to be on time in the morning when you couldn’t sleep at night. She had been awake and showered well before her bedside alarm clock let out its first shrilling buzz. Not that she was feeling particularly chipper that morning. The last couple of weeks had granted her fitful sleep only grudgingly The dreams were so viscerally disturbing she felt more relaxed in the wicker chair by her window at night, sitting a silent vigil for the sun.
She was walking down the hall, navigating on autopilot, when Frankie Lenard spotted her and plotted an intercept course. From the opposite direction, Alex peeled off from a group of guys with whom he’d been joking, and hurried toward her. Wendy thought, amused, that if she stopped short, the two of them woul
d probably collide with each other.
“Wendy,” Frankie said in a forceful whisper, “I can’t take it anymore. It’s driving me crazy!”
“Wendy,” Alex said, arriving a split second later on her left, “I want to ask you something.”
She looked blankly at both of them, twice. I need more coffee, she thought. A gallon or so should do it.
Frankie placed an arm possessively on Wendy’s shoulder. “Ladies, first and foremost.” Alex nodded, didn’t budge. “A little privacy, please,” Frankie said. “This is women talk”
“Wouldn’t want to hear any of that,” Alex said. “Must be some sort of gender rules violation.”
“Yes,” Frankie said, grinning wickedly, “punishable by castration or frontal lobotomy. I guess, for a guy, it’s about the same either way”
“Such a die-hard romantic, Frankie,” Alex said. “Wendy, I’ll save you a seat, okay?”
She nodded. The moment he stepped through the lecture hall doors, Frankie steered a yielding Wendy back toward the wall. “I’m dying to know how it went out there, alone…naked in the woods. You and Mother Earth doing your thing. You did do it, didn’t you?” Wendy sighed heavily, said nothing. “You chickened out! Jeez, I knew you’d never go through with it. Well, that explains it. You’ve just been too embarrassed to tell me you wimped out.”
Wendy squeezed by her, but not before she said, “For your information, I didn’t wimp out.”
Frankie’s jaw dropped a couple of notches as she caught up to Wendy. “You really did it! Tell me.”
“Not much to tell,” Wendy said, feigning disinterest. “Made a circle, lit a few candles, cast a few fire and air spells. Rather uneventful, actually”
“You’re joking, right?”
Wendy started up the lecture hall stairs, Frankie about as close as a pilot fish on a shark. “Well, it was a… brisk evening.”
“Oh, I’ll bet it was, Lady Godiva,” Frankie said, soft enough for Wendy’s ears alone.
Wendy noticed Jensen Hoyt sitting in the back of the crowded class, completely alone with her thoughts. She looked as if she hadn’t been sleeping well either. Cyndy Sellers had moved to another little clique. And, of course, Jack Carter was gone, missing and presumed dead. The police thought drugs were involved, but apparently Jen’s story included some details that had been too farfetched for the official police record. Between the reported details and the truth of Jack’s disappearance was a twilight zone of inner turmoil for Wendy. Somehow she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had been involved in Jack’s disappearance and probable death. Hadn’t she clutched the tektite stone and performed her banishing spell? Even though she had only wanted him to get off her case, was it possible the spell could have been much more powerful than she intended. She had made it rain, hadn’t she? That couldn’t have been her imagination, though the days since then had been a confusing mental game involving internal smoke and mirrors and self-deception. Half the time she convinced herself the rain had just been a coincidence; the other half she was filled with doubt and guilt that not only had she altered the weather pattern over Windale but also had somehow killed Jack in the process.
As Wendy reached the desk across from Alex, Frankie clutched her shoulder and whispered in her ear, “I’m not letting you off this easy, Wendy”
It could have been her own conscience speaking to her.
Alex smiled at Wendy after Frankie continued back a couple of rows to a free desk. She settled into her desk and already the pull of lethargy was strong. She glanced at her watch: 9:02.
“Prof’s late,” Alex said. “On exam day, no less.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me,” Wendy said, smiling to take the sarcasm out of her words. She couldn’t figure out what to do with her hands. Her fingernails were still pitch black, a shade she had often painted them in the past. She had debated covering the “natural” black with a more “girlish” shade like hot pink or rouge red, but in the end she thought that might draw more attention to her fingernails than the black they had become. And it wasn’t even the black color that bothered her as much as the thickening of the nails, which made trimming them with clippers almost impossible.
“What I wanted to ask you,” Alex said, “is if you’d like to be my partner.”
“Your partner?” she was confused, still lost in her own thoughts.
“Well,” he said, “I couldn’t help noticing that moon and stars tattooed on your leg.”
Oh, Christ.“ she thought, embarrassed.I’m balling my fists to hide these fingernails and he’s staring at the stupid tattoo on my leg. She crossed her legs at the ankle so quickly that he laughed.
“No,” he said, “I think it’s kind of cool, actually.”
“So did I,” she said wryly. “About a year ago.”
“It’s just that it got me thinking, you know, about these astronomy lab assignments coming up.”
“Ah, yes, those pesky lab assignments.”
“I figured you must have the inside scoop on the moon and stars and stuff,” he said. “And I thought these labs would be a little more interesting if we tackled them together.”
“You did.”
& ldquo;Sure,“ he said, a little more comfortably into his pitch now. ”We have that sunrise-and-sunset calculation one coming up next week. We could get together this weekend and figure it out…“
“Well, true, I’ve got the moon and stars covered,” she said, “but the sun is a whole different tattoo. You’ll never guess where Bruno said he’d have to draw that one.”
He grinned. “Well, if you’d rather do it alone…”
“No, no, I think we should team up,” Wendy said. “I’m not really a morning person, so you could do the sunrise calculations and I’ll take the sunset. Fair?”
“It’s a date,” he said, offering his hand of course, which Wendy dutifully shook.
A date, she thought. I like the sound of that.
For the first time in her teaching career, Karen was late to class. She arrived ten minutes after the class bell, flush and flustered from her breakneck drive to campus. She’d overslept, exhausted after a late night with Paul, worrying about his brother. And of all the days to arrive late to class, it had to be this one—she’d scheduled an essay test on House of the Seven Gables.
She dropped the shrink-wrapped bundles of blue exam books on her desk and beard an audible groan go through the lecture hall.
As she began distributing the books, one girl in the front row voiced the collective disbelief of the class: “You’re not actually still thinking of giving us this test, are you?”
“I don’t want us to fall behind schedule so early in the term.”
“But, professor, you were late!” the girl said with an angry pout
“I know, and I apologize,” Karen said. “But don’t panic—the exam shouldn’t take you more than twenty minutes.” She fanned out the sheets of exam questions (they could choose any one of five) and sent them up the rows.
With that accomplished, Karen slumped behind her desk, already exhausted by a day that hadn’t even begun. She knew she looked like hell, dark circles beneath her eyes, her hair a lusterless tangle. She crossed her legs on her desk and leaned back in her chair, her notes for her afternoon seminar lecture on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury propped on her belly. The baby, who seemed to be somersaulting all morning, grew uncharacteristically still, and Karen found herself suddenly alert to the silence, the way you do when a background noise suddenly stops. When this happened she had an almost eerie sense that the baby was listening to Karen, in a kind of silent standoff between mother and child.
Her eyes unfocused as she turned her senses inward, attuned for movement. When did it first happen? Karen thought. When did her unborn daughter suddenly cease to be an extension of herself and become a stranger? And implicit in that thought was a more taboo one Karen hadn’t yet allowed herself to speak aloud: When did she first begin to fear the baby?
Around Karen,
three hundred pens scribbled in a kind of cumulative whisper. She felt her eyelids growing heavy. Just for a moment, she told herself, but of course that wasn’t a decision for her to make…
He is watching, he will come: the dread inevitability of nightmares. His face is lined with deep creases, as if it has been carved up then sown hack together with a coarse Hack thread. He wears a waistcoat and linen shirt, knee-length breeches, hose, and black shoes. She knows he is watching with his black, narrowed eyes.
The pleasant aroma of bayberry wax on her hands and clothing is a cruel background for the nightmare. But she is a chandler, trading her candles for food, sometimes clothing. And since she has not remarried since her husbands death, the trades are becoming more difficult.
She passes the town hall with its row of pillories and stocks. Goodman Osgood stood haplessly in one pillory, marked for the drunkard again, the letter D dangling from his neck.
Across the commons, opposite the town hall, is the lofty church. It always pains her to see it. She still attends services on Sundays,but the memory of her husband’s death in the church’s constructition is, at times, too much for her to endure. It is all too easy to imagine that the church scorns her, has abandoned her.
She feels the touch of a black breeze that smells like the magistrate. The steady thumping of an unseen samp mortar, pounding corn into a coarse grain, keeps time with her steps as she forces herself to continue on: THUMP… THUMP…THUMP…
Across the commons, beyond the grazing cows, Goody Gable maneuvers her well sweep. Young Timothy Brown rushes by Rebecca, cradling a fire scoop as if it were the queens jewels. The Browns always have such terrible luck keeping their chimney fire lit. She wrinkles her nose at the foul smell of wood ash lye and burning grease as she passes the Goreys making soap over a bubbling, smoking kettle.