Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction

by James Newman Benefit Anthology

He looked down, holding Jennifer Ann close, so close he could feel her heart beating, could feel her breath coursing down his neck.

  He smiled.

  Laura, Jim, and Theresa were kneeling before the pulpy mass, their feelers twisting, their mandibles clamped together as they cried. Donald could see the smashed remains of the insect, so large, so crushed, as he stepped around them, Jennifer Ann firmly in his arms, and made his way out of the smoke, ignoring the bloody footprints he left behind.

  Angel and Grace

  By Ed Kurtz

  [Originally appeared in Mutation Nation, ed. by Kelly Dunn, Rainstorm Press, 2011]

  Ed Kurtz is the author of A WIND OF KNIVES, CONTROL, and DEAD TRASH, as well as numerous short stories. His work has appeared in Needle: A Magazine of Noir, BEAT to a PULP, Shotgun Honey, Thuglit, and several anthologies. Ed resides in Texas, where he is at work on his next novel.

  Visit Ed Kurtz online at edkurtz.net.

  1.

  The deeper he went into the wilds of East Texas, the more Win Leake came to believe there was nothing but pine trees, cotton, and tarpaper shacks for a thousand miles in any direction. He wandered the backwoods for two days, sleeping on pine needles and being chased off by the suspicious locals whenever he asked about the whereabouts of a Mrs. Bryar. He ran for a mile when a colored man took a shot at him through a grease paper window, hollering about white folk always getting up to mischief. He started to worry about bears like the one old Delmont Bryar tried to kill when he killed his own self instead.

  Near dusk on the second day, Win caught the scent of fresh cut sawdust and followed his nose to a humble sawmill in the middle of the woods. The sweet perfume of the pine contrasted sharply with the grind of the saws and the incessant cussing of the men who operated them, but Win moseyed right up to them all the same.

  “Hullo, fellas,” he said by way of greeting. “Seems I’m a damn sight lost.”

  The two sawyers, browned by the sun and naked to the waist, regarded him and then looked at each other. The taller one shrugged his broad shoulders and the shorter one said, “Whar ye ‘spected t’be?”

  “I’ve come to pay my respects to Mrs. Imogen Bryar, the widow of my dearly departed cousin Mr. Delmont Bryar. Do you fine gentlemen know the Bryars?”

  Again the sawyers shot glances at one another, curiously startled glances, and when the taller man resumed sawing as though Win never spoke at all, the shorter man wiped the sweat from his brow and approached.

  “Can’t say as I knew Del had him no cousin,” he drawled.

  “Once removed,” Win explained. “I’d been living in Arkansas when I heard the sorrowful news.”

  Read it, more like. The news was in the obits, Shreveport Times, which Win had read like it was the racing form.

  “Sorrowful,” the sawyer parroted, considering the word like a jeweler appraises a gem. He sucked his teeth and sauntered over to a pine stump, upon which a brown jug sat in the shade. He tipped it over his elbow with his thumb in the loop and drank ravenously of what Win presumed to be some kind of white lightning.

  “Seeing as you knew my cousin,” Win said, “surely you can point me in the right direction.”

  “Pert near a mile nuth o’ here,” the sawyer said, stabbing a thumb that way. “Ain’t no road. You come to Barney Pott’s hog pen you gone too far.”

  Win thanked the man for his aid and headed north. He felt the sawyer’s eyes burning a hole in the back of his head until he was well hidden amongst the dense verdure.

  2.

  Though he assumed to find a bevy of leaning shacks along the way, Win tramped through the woods for hours with nothing but weakly moonlit pines for company. He no longer worried about determining which shack would house Mrs. Bryar; now he fretted over the utter loneliness of the scarcely inhabited backwoods and whether or not he would ever see another human being again. His stomach thundered and his throat went dry, and when a bank of dark clouds floated cruelly between the moon and the earth and plunged the woods into abject darkness, Win sat down on the ground and waited.

  He did not have to wait long. Some twenty minutes into his sit-down, he spotted a faint yellow orb moving lazily between the trees. The light was accompanied by the soft crunching of pine needles and dead leaves. The orb grew in size and flickered, drawing near, and a moment later Win found himself looking up at the business end of a 20-gauge shotgun. The woman who aimed the gun at his head held up a smoky lantern with her other hand, illumining her drawn, deeply lined face. It was not a welcoming face, nor a friendly one. She might have been comely once, Win thought, but the harsh realities of backwoods poverty had seen to that.

  “Who’re you?” she bellowed.

  “Name’s Win, ma’am. Win Leake.”

  “Don’t know no Win Leake,” she said. “What you want?”

  “I’m looking for Imogen Bryar. A sawyer told me I might could find her out this way.”

  “You found her,” the woman said glumly.

  “Well, heck,” Win said, cracking a smile. “Ain’t you just as pretty as old Del told me!”

  Imogen wrinkled her nose and knitted her brow, giving her the appearance of an old leather bag. “You knew my Del?”

  “Why, sure I did—we was cousins, me and him.”

  “That ain’t right,” Imogen said, jabbing the barrel at him. “Del don’t got no cousins or any other kin. All Del had was me.”

  Win gasped dramatically and feigned a stricken look to rival any nickelodeon damsel in distress. “Oh, Del. All these years gone by…I ain’t never should have said the things I said to him, but I did and he went away and by God! He really never told you about me? About the times we had when we was knee-high to a rooster?”

  “Del never said nothing about no cousins,” she reiterated. “On account of he didn’t have any.”

  “I never knew he hated me that bad,” Win said, and hung his head. “And now he’s gone back to Jesus and I won’t never make it right. What a world, Imogen. What a devilish damn world.”

  Imogen raised one eyebrow and lowered the shotgun so it pointed at Win’s legs instead of his face. She cocked her head to one side and said, “Where’d you say you was from?”

  The obituary had named Delmont’s hometown, along with the especially alluring word “estate”—the word that had driven Win from his flophouse hovel in Shreveport to the Land Office and all the way to these godforsaken East Texas woods.

  “Caddo Parish,” he said, recalling the name from the obit.

  “What part?”

  “Y’know, I ain’t for certain on account of my family left when I was real young. Went on to Arkansas for a while, though me and old Del kept in touch, writing letters and such.”

  “Letters! Del couldn’t write his own name to save his life.”

  “Oh, I know that—he just told someone what to write to me and they scribbled it all down.”

  “That right?”

  “Sure, it’s right. We was thick as thieves, me and Del.”

  “Then how come I never heard of you, Win Leake?”

  “Like I said, we fell out. I always reckoned we’d make it up sooner or later, but now he’s gone. So I come down from El Dorado to pay my respects. It’s all I can do, Imogen. I wish I could do more, but I can’t.”

  Now the shotgun drooped all the way to the ground and Imogen sucked in a deep breath.

  “You really my Del’s cousin?”

  “In the flesh, ma’am.”

  She pursed her lips and glanced up at the sky just as the cloudbank moved away from the moon. Win studied her more closely in the dim, bluish light, taking in her graying hair and baggy, homemade dress. She sighed heavily and set the lantern on the ground, whereupon she offered her hand to Win.

  “I expect you best come to the house, then,” she said. “No sense in leaving you out here to get bit up by skeeters all night.”

  3.

  The name, printed in bold type at the head of the obit, was Delmont Bryar; he was just fifty-three
years of age when he shuffled off his mortal coil, having aimed his blunderbuss at a brown bear whereupon the ancient gun blew up in his face. Mr. Bryar was a native of Caddo Parish, it seemed, though lately of East Texas where he left a widow, Mrs. Imogen Bryar, his only kin and therefore the sole inheritor of the Bryar estate.

  Estate, Win felt, was a fiddly word. It did not indicate worth in and of itself, and could just as easily mean ten dollars as ten thousand. And ten dollars certainly was not worth travelling clear out to the wilds of East Texas for.

  Accordingly, Win ambled down to the Caddo Parish Land Office where he presented himself as a lawyer representing the Bryar family interests and inquired about any holdings the late Mr. Bryar may have left to his grief-stricken widow. To Win’s mind no man could claim much of an estate unless he had land.

  As it turned out, Delmont Bryar had land in spades. This was good, and Win nodded and grunted in the way he imagined a disinterested lawyer would do. When the clerk next asked whether or not the Widow Bryar would be wanting to speak with the Humble Oil people about leasing the property, Win’s disinterest gave way to bulging eyes and gaping mouth. He said he’d have to get back to him about that.

  He all but ran from the Land Office and went directly to the rail yard once again, where he hopped the first train headed east. Win simply could not wait to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Imogen Bryar.

  4.

  The house Imogen led him into was a tarpaper shack, of course, though a substantially larger one than Win had yet seen. The shack appeared to have started out simple, just one room like the rest, but numerous additions contributed sections of varying, trapezoidal dimensions and a sagging porch on the front. A length of rusty pipe jutted out of a hole in the drooping roof that spewed a thin stream of woodsmoke. A rotting pinewood fence penned in a mud pit on the shack’s east side, but there were no animals within. The hatchet lodged into the top of one of the fenceposts suggested there once had been.

  Imogen waddled past the fence to the porch, which groaned beneath her weight. The door creaked open when she pushed on it with her shoulder. A grouping of bottles hung with twine clinked noisily when the door knocked into them. She went in and she hung the lantern from a hook in the low ceiling. Win wore a smile when he entered the dim, musty space, even as he took in the clutter of broken handmade furniture, iron pots and skillets, animal pelts, jugs and bottles, tin plates and cups, a pile of filthy quilts in one corner and a wood-burning stove in the other. He noted a scythe with a dull, jagged blade leaned up against a wall and a peculiar baby doll perched on the only remaining arm of a chair—closer inspection revealed it to be two dolls stitched together, back to back. They were crudely made, like almost everything else in evidence.

  “Such a lovely home,” he remarked.

  “Figgered you was from the ‘umble when I seen you settin’ there in the dirt,” Imogen said.

  “What, Humble Oil? No, ma’am. Not me.” It was the first true thing he said to her since he told her his name.

  “You set down,” she commanded as she propped the 20 gauge beside the scythe.

  He did as he was told, selecting the least rickety-looking of his several choices. Nonetheless, the chair whined like a dying cat when he sat on it.

  “I got to tend to the girls,” Imogen said, groping for the leather handle to the door in the back wall.

  Win presumed she was referring to some old hound dogs or maybe livestock, but the caterwauling that rose up from one of the back rooms put such notions to rest. A pair of distinctively human cries were rocking the shack, which came as no surprise to Imogen Bryar.

  “They’ll be wanting their supper,” she said. “You jest wait here, Win Leake. I’ll be back directly.”

  “Daughters,” he said in a whisper. “Why, I didn’t know—”

  “I’ll be back directly,” she said again.

  And with that, she was through the door and gone like a vapor.

  The Times obit had not said a word about any children. Win sat in the wavering lantern light and wondered why.

  5.

  In short time Imogen returned from her motherly duties and inquired about Win’s own plans for supper. He answered that he would appreciate anything she was serving and she pointed him toward the same door from which she had only just come.

  “We et in there,” she said.

  Win eyed the door warily, wondering what he could expect to find on the other side.

  “Go on,” Imogen urged him. “Have you a set. Won’t be a minute.”

  He nodded and flashed a grin as he rose from the unstable chair and reached for the leather strap. The door came open to reveal a long, narrow room with two pinewood tables, short and square-shaped, situated in the middle. At the far ends of each table was a wooden chair, and in the middle a roughly hewn bench was placed between. Each table sported a burning candle in a tin cup, which shed enough light for Win to see the dead leaves and pine needles piled up in the corners of the room. He swallowed loudly and took a seat at the end of the nearest table.

  From the front room he heard Imogen clanging about as she worked at the stove with her ironware, and a slight shiver worked its way up his sweat-drenched back. He had waltzed right into some mighty peculiar circumstances, but he’d come that far and he wanted Delmont’s land. The alternative was toil by the sweat of his brow, and no amount of peculiarity was likely to set Win Leake on that course.

  Presently the lady of the house backed into the room, her arms wrapped around an iron pot. She set the pot on the table and handed Win one of the two tin plates she had tucked into her armpit. No sooner than he accepted it, Imogen set to scooping the contents of the pot onto the plate, which was brownish and lumpy, a sort of stew. His stomach convulsed when he caught its vaguely meaty odor. The moment his hostess sat down—on the far end of the other table—he dug into the slop with a broken wooden spoon. It tasted vaguely earthen, as though clay was a primary ingredient, which Win guessed was probably true. He finished it off anyway.

  “Met him when he come out here to work for a lumber yard,” Imogen spoke up, apropos of nothing. “Guess he got in some kind of trouble back in Louisiana, don’t know what kind. Runned off to Texas. Strong as an ox, Del was. Stronger, maybe.”

  “He was a strong boy, too,” Win ventured.

  “Well, he was wanting a place to sleep wasn’t just the ground, and I let him sleep on the porch for a while. Later on he came on inside, paid me five cents a night to stay in the front room there. That was good for a spell, ‘til he said he wanted a bed. I gave him half o’ mine, and it cost him ten cents.”

  The candles’ flames bounced as though a draft passed through, though Win had not felt one. His eyes were fixed on Imogen on the other side of the dirty, oddly leaning room. She shoveled a spoonful of brown mire into her mouth and swallowed without bothering to chew.

  “After Del got up on me that first time,” she went on, “I didn’t take no dime from him anymore. Slick as a preacher, that man. Coulda talked me into any ole thing, I expect.”

  “That was Del,” Win said. “Always a smooth talker.”

  “Yes, he was,” she agreed. “Yes sir, he surely was.”

  “But he gave you some lovely children.”

  “Del?” Imogen cracked a smile and fell into a peal of laughter. It sounded like a dozen saws at work. “No, no—not my Del. He didn’t never put no baby in me, Win Leake.”

  “Oh,” said Win, embarrassed to the point of flushing pink. “I’m sorry, I just assumed—”

  “My girls’ papa went to his maker long before Delmont Bryar ever darkened my door, the Lord bless him. Hopper Jackson, I mean. Not Del.”

  Win screwed up his face, working on a smile that did not quite materialize. A soft, childlike moan sounded from somewhere in the mishmash of tarpaper rooms. His shoulders jumped and Mrs. Imogen Bryar smiled sweetly.

  “Ain’t been a man in the house since Del died,” she said. “Ain’t been nobody but me and my girls.”

&nbs
p; Win nodded and scooped a spoonful of slop into his mouth.

  “They’re making a regular fuss,” Imogen went on. “I ‘spect they want to see you for themselves.”

  “I ain’t much to look at,” Win said.

  “You’re plenty,” she countered.

  He swallowed loudly and asked, “What are their names?”

  “Angel and Grace.”

  “Why, that’s plain purty, Ms. Imogen.”

  The small voices cried out again, reaching something like a harmony in the middle as their wavering voices crossed like swords in their hollow desolation. Win furrowed his brow.

  “Well,” Imogen said as she rose from her chair, “You might as well get acquainted.”

  Win watched her closely as she took up a candle and waddled over to the farthest corner of the dirty, slanting room. She knelt down and ran the palm of her hand along the floor until her fingertips found purchase in a gap between the jagged floorboards. She dug in and pulled up a section of the floor, revealing a hole big enough to crawl through. The light of the candle illumined a derelict ladder, its steps artlessly nailed into the frame at various jutting angles.

  Win gaped.

  “They’re down there? Angel and Grace?”

  “That’s right,” she answered.

  The cries came clear and close from the dark depths beneath the floor. Imogen threw her legs into the hole and, taking the candle in one hand, began her descent. The steps creaked ominously.

  Imogen said, “Come on, now. Hurry up.” Then she was gone from Win’s view.

  “Maaaa,” one of the girls moaned. “Maaaama.”

  They were either very young or just plain touched in the head, Win decided. Either way, he deemed it unwise to offend the woman when a perfectly good opportunity to impress her was presented to him on a platter. So he rose from the table and went to the hole in the floor and climbed down after Imogen to meet her daughters.

  6.

  The floor and walls were nothing but dirt, shored up on all sides by rough-hewn lengths of pine. Scraggly roots curled out of the ceiling. There was a small table in one corner, its surface cluttered with grimy tinware, and a pair of iron fireplace tongs leaning against the wall. The tinware itself was cluttered with maggots and flies. On the opposite side of the musty space a pair of shadows lurched just outside the glow of Imogen’s candlelight. She cooed at the shapes, kissed at the air and made low, purring sounds. The girls moaned in reply.