“My girls,” she muttered. “My babies.”
“Maaaama,” a strained voice said.
Win paused at the bottom of the ladder, his eyes narrowed at the rocking figures in the corner. Several flies abandoned the rotting food on the tinware to circle his head instead. They buzzed noisily in his ears and he swatted at them, cursing beneath his breath.
Imogen moved into the center of the dank, humid space, whereupon Win observed a long, pallid extremity swing into the flickering halo of candlelight. A gnarled, groping hand snatched at the air, its skin taut and riddled with scabs. Imogen took the hand into her own and a voice gurgled wetly. Now the light fully illuminated one of the two girls in the corner. Win gasped.
The unfortunate creature’s head appeared twice the size it should have been, the forehead high and angular while the back of the skull was elongated and lumpy with tumors. The eyes were small and black, wide-set and as soulless as a spider’s. There was no nose to speak of—only a puckered pit in the center of its face—and a wide, drooling mouth with infrequent, rotted teeth flapped madly as it babbled. Win saw that the thing was entirely naked, whereby he spied the long vertical wound that ran between two drooping, scabby breasts clear down the length of her abdomen. The wound was red with yellow splotches, badly infected and swarming with maggots.
Win gagged and looked hurriedly away.
“I want you meet somebody, Angel,” Imogen said sweetly. “This here’s your cousin Win.”
The girl jerked her bony arms and waggled her fingers, of which Win noticed there were only three on each hand. She was seated on a wooden bench, her mangled legs hanging helplessly beneath her. They looked broken in various places, almost jellied. She made a sound he took for a laugh, and it sounded like scraped sandpaper. Win shuddered.
“I reckon she likes you,” Imogen said. “That’s just fine. Angel was the one I was worried about.”
Angel cried out—“Nyuhh”—and smashed her hands together.
“Worried?” Win asked, a nervous titter in his voice. “Why ever for?”
“On account of Grace is already married,” Imogen said.
She raised the candle then, casting a sickly yellow light over the entire corner. Win stared and his breath hitched in his throat.
Fused to Angel’s back in a veiny, knotted mass of twisted flesh was what he presumed to be Grace. She was every bit as disfigured as her sister, though her head was a sagging assortment of black-blue cysts and dripping pustules and she had no eyes at all. When Angel jerked, Grace bounced feebly behind her. Only when she raised her massive, abscessed head to release a low, plaintive moan did Win realize she was not, in fact, dead.
“Good god,” he whispered. “Siamese twins.” The moment he spoke, a pitiful cry emanated from the ground at Grace’s feet.
“Oh, hush your mouth, Henry,” Imogen snarled. “That man, I swear.”
“Henreeeeee,” Grace squealed.
“Huh—help,” said a voice in the shadows.
Win sucked a deep breath into his lungs and stared into the darkness until Imogen’s light came near enough to reveal the nude, emaciated man shackled to Grace’s boneless ankle. He was curled up so that his knobby knees touched his stringy black beard, and his sunken eyes glared solicitously up at Win. He was covered in grime and sweat and not a few poorly healed lacerations. Beneath him the dirt was turned to mud by the suffering man’s own waste.
Both of Henry’s arms ended at the elbows where badly healed stumps squirmed with teeming bugs of every stripe.
“Please,” he rasped. “Please help me.”
Imogen waddled around the conjoined girls and delivered a sound kick to Henry’s ribs. He yelped and cowered, pressing himself as deeply into the foul corner as possible.
“I said shut up, Henry!” she screeched.
“Sweet Jesus,” Win said. “What the hell is this?”
“This is Henry, my Gracie’s husband,” Imogen answered. “And I’ll thank you to quit all that cussin’ in my house, Win Leake.”
“He’s chained up!”
“A’course he is, you nitwit. We don’t want him to get away, now. Them two is bound by the holy bond matrimony, you know, and that can’t get unbound by nobody.”
Grace convulsed then, pulling her and Angel both to one side and then the other. Her serpentine legs wobbled beneath her, rattling the chain that connected her to Henry.
“But who is he?” Win asked, his voice rising in pitch. “How’d he end up here?”
“Who, dumb ol’ Henry? He was my Del’s brother. Come round last summer, sniffin’ out some land he reckoned on havin’ a right to. My little Gracie here, why she was just wild about Henry, wasn’t you pumpkin?”
Grace burbled until her burbling turned into a growl. Henry started to weep at her limp feet.
“Just wild,” Imogen said. Then, upon turning to touch Win gently on the elbow, she asked, “Are you married, Win Leake?”
7.
Not only was Win well aware of the regularity of shotgun weddings in the rural South, he had actually narrowly avoided one himself. The girl was a mulatto housemaid who passed for white, and it was her employer who directed his outrage at Win for putting the offending bun in her oven. The man jabbed double barrels in Win’s belly while a footman ran to fetch a pastor, though by the time the clergyman arrived all he found was a man with his hand blown off by his own shotgun, hollering bloody murder while Win high-tailed it out of Tennessee for good.
He struggled to recall the girl’s name, feeling it was somehow important of a sudden, while he absent-mindedly pulled at the iron cuff encircling his right ankle. Welded into the cuff was an iron chain that was welded to another cuff on the other end, which was attached to the repulsively squirmy left leg of Angel Jackson. Her heavy head bobbed on her neck as though it floated on water and her crooked hands worried the long scabby gash that ran the length of her torso. Win did everything possible to ignore her, digging deep into his memory to find that housemaid’s name. Occasionally the lump on the back of his head would flare and he would grimace at the thought of Imogen getting one over on him by pounding that rock against his skull. He could not help but wonder if he would have had so much trouble remembering the mulatto girl’s name had he not been struck on the noggin by a three-pound stone.
At length Win snapped his head up and cried out, “Leonora! That was it—Leonora.”
Angel groaned and scratched at the air with her twisted fingers. A similar scene unfolded on the other side of the bench, a mirror image of a deformed unfortunate and her unwilling groom. Henry mostly just wept, however, while Grace made moist baby noises and hummed tuneless melodies. Win had already given up all attempts to make conversation with his fellow captive, finding him as poor a conversationalist as Angel and Grace were. Nonetheless, he bellowed the Tennessee housemaid’s name at the sobbing man like a call to arms:
“Leonora, you blubbering bastard! Leonora!”
Angel hissed.
“Oh, you hush up,” Win snapped back.
Presently the panel at the top of the ladder shifted and clattered away. A shaft of weak, dusty light poured down as Imogen descended, her bare feet black on the bottoms. From one hand a tin pot dangled by the handle, its contents sloshing from side to side.
“Supper time,” she said cheerfully.
“Glory be,” Win grumped.
“Now, you best eat it up, Win Leake. You don’t eat any more than a bird and you got to get your strength up. You’re fixin’ to get hitched in case you went and forgot.”
“How on God’s Jesus green earth could I? I’m chained up in a hole in the god-damn ground, for Christ’s sakes!”
Imogen’s brow furrowed, darkening her face.
“I told you about that cussin’, now,” she said low. She set the pot down on the little table near the ladder and retrieved the fireplace tongs from the corner. Win’s eyes bulged as he considered the woman’s intentions.
“God, no,” he said. “Not that.�
��
“If you’re to be my Angel’s husband, you’d best start acting right, Win Leake. This’ll teach you. Might could take a turn or two, but it’ll teach you.”
“Imogen, Imogen please…”
She stepped in front of the lantern, transforming her into a backlit shadow of a woman who wrapped her fingers around the handles of the tongs and snapped them closed. Win flinched and squeezed his eyes shut at her approach. A small whimper roiled out of his throat. His face flushed hot and tears spilled down his dirty cheeks.
“Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you people?” he muttered.
“Wrong?” Imogen exclaimed. “There’s nothing wrong with family, Win Leake. You happen to part of this one and you ought to start acting like it.”
“I ain’t your family.”
“Don’t be stupid. You’re Del’s cousin and that makes you kin to us.”
“But I ain’t, Imogen. I ain’t nothing to Del, never was. I never even laid eyes on the man, I swear it.”
“You stop that, now,” she barked, stabbing the flat tip of the tongs at Angel. The latter shrieked, which elicited a cry from Win. “You men will say anything to get your way. Any old thing at all.”
The end of the tongs pressed up against the crusty wound in Angel’s abdomen, and she flailed her crooked hands at it, kicking up a flurry of white maggots. The response did her no good: with a little exertion Imogen pushed the lipped iron into the wound with an audible crunch. Angel tossed her huge, lumpy head back and screamed loud enough to shake dirt loose from above. Grace followed suit, absorbing her sister’s anguish and unleashing a jarring screech of her own. Imogen clicked her tongue against her teeth and said, “Land’s sakes.”
With that she gave the tongs another sharp thrust and then wrenched the handles apart. Angel’s trunk split down the middle, sending her drooping breasts careening into her armpits. White foam frothed out of her gaping mouth as she screamed and whipped her head back and forth. Win scrambled for the wall behind him, pulling the chain taut. He had begun to hyperventilate. He was vaguely aware that Angel’s black insect eyes were fixed on him.
“That’s a girl,” Imogen cooed as she tensed her shoulders to hold the massive wound open. “That’s a good girl.”
Win tried to look away but the slick red mass bubbling out of the opening transfixed him. His mind reeled—he was dizzy with the insanity of Imogen capturing him to forcibly marry her malformed daughter only to murder said daughter in the worst way imaginable. The poor creature’s guts were boiling out of her torso, all slippery and wet and befouling the already fetid air. Win felt his gorge rise, bile burning a path up his throat. Frozen with fear and revulsion, he simply vomited where he crouched, most of it washing over him even as he stared at the gruesome tableau Imogen made of Angel.
The mother grunted under the strain of holding the girl’s trunk open; the girl keened mournfully at the roots hanging down from above. Win moaned with fright as Angel’s voice receded, melting back into her. She was dying, he was sure of it. Angel was dying and her mother was killing her and Win’s brain pulsed with fear-induced madness, horrified at the limitless possibilities of Imogen’s senseless plans for him.
“Don’t,” he rasped. “Imogen, stop…”
Then the voice grew again, built in intensity and rage. The scream filled Angel, filled the hole in the earth beneath the tarpaper compound. The girl’s twisted body shook and her face went slack. Behind her, Grace babbled an endless stream of nonsense, her voice getting higher and more manic as she went on. Henry shrieked.
Imogen said, “Come on, now. It’s all right, baby girl. Come on out.”
The red mass shifted in the shadows of Angel’s split torso and the keening voice erupted from within. Win’s shrieks eclipsed Henry’s, pierced the dank air like a thousand hot needles, tore out of him until his raw throat bled. Even after his vocal chords gave out and the only sound to escape his lips was a scratchy whistling, Win kept screaming his silent scream at the dripping claws that unraveled from Angel’s guts.
They were pincers, like a crab’s, with saw-toothed edges that wrenched open and clapped shut with stunning rapidity. The pincers spun around madly, driven by the ropy tendrils Win mistook for entrails. They snapped at him and he flattened against the hard packed dirt, his eyes bulging out of their sockets. He swatted a hand at them, a reflexive action, and a pincer clamped down on his fingers, holding tight. The bones in his fingers crunched apart as something in the girl’s gaping cavity hissed.
“There you are, you shy thing,” Imogen said. There were tears in her eyes.
Between the red, writhing ropes of flesh that lashed from Angel’s open chest came a wailing mouth, a gummy black tongue undulating past double rows of jagged white teeth. The mouth pressed forth, bringing the rest of the face into view like a baby emerging from its mother’s womb. In sharp contrast to Angel’s tiny obsidian eyes the creature stared with enormous crystalline orbs, blue as the ocean and wiggling about as they took in their surroundings. Its small, round head was the same blood red as the writhing arms that preceded it, deeply wrinkled like a bloody prune. A prominent ridge jutted from the center of the crown. It had no nose and no ears. It bawled at Win, setting its gaze on him as the claw retracted, tugging his destroyed hand toward the slavering mouth.
“No!” Win gasped. “Christ, no!”
Win jerked, tried to pull his hand back, but the thing’s hunger was more powerful.
“It’s just a taste, you big baby,” Imogen scolded him. “She ain’t fixin’ to kill you or nothin’. Henry’s still here, ain’t he?”
By way of response, Henry whimpered.
And then the creature inside Angel bit down on Win’s thumb, severing it between grinding teeth and moaning with pleasure as it chewed the digit to pulp. The claw released his broken, bleeding hand and he retreated to the wall, the chain at his ankle clattering loudly. The monstrous thing swallowed, smacked its blubbery red lips and sighed with satisfaction.
“Goooood,” Angel groaned.
Imogen eased the tongs out and dropped them to the ground as the snapping pincers wound back into Angel’s trunk and the grotesque face sank into the throbbing crimson network of her entrails.
“Such a good girl,” said the mother. “Been ages since she et, poor thing. Not since she finished off our Del.”
Angel slowly lowered her head, made a soft burbling noise and used her upper arms to close the flesh over her body as though she was putting on a coat. Her face turned to Win and he gave a violent shudder, certain that she was grinning at him.
“You’re gonna make a fine husband, Win Leake,” Imogen said proudly. “One of the best my baby ever did have.”
A jet of red-black blood spurted from the stump where his thumb had been. It was Win’s last sensation before the cellar went black.
8.
Henry died in August after a long week of incessant convulsions. By then the creatures inside Angel and Grace had grown considerably and came out on their own to feed whenever they wanted. The larger they grew, the worse the sisters got; their pallid skin turned an ashy gray and they fell silent and still. Win found himself strangely unfazed by the regular appearance of the hellish red things, even welcoming. For the most part they were the only company available to him, his sole contact with anything beyond his own lonely thoughts. And, in the dark, damp hole beneath the tarpaper shack above, Win had gradually come to accept Imogen’s understanding of what it meant to be part of a family.
Angel took Win’s hands and feet, his arms and legs. Imogen bandaged him up but Angel always came back for more. Soon he fell ill, weak and unable to keep food or water down. For a time Imogen kept him secured to Angel by way of a leather harness around his ribs, but his failing health rendered it unnecessary. He could do nothing but lie still on the dirt floor and watch as Angel and Grace gradually withered away while the devils inside of them grew strong.
In time the cutting claws rotted off and the girls breathed their last
, a development ostensibly expected by their mother who came down the ladder to help the slippery things slough the dead sisters’ off like a snake sheds its skin. They too were conjoined at their backs, and as the blood dried and the mutants continued to grow Win came to realize that Imogen had every reason to call them by her dead children’s names. They had not merely replaced Angel and Grace, whose remains were taken away as one takes out the garbage—they were Angel and Grace, born anew. And though their misshapen heads and gnarled hands belied the same pitiful abnormalities of their predecessors, Win was sure they were getting better. Less deformed. More intelligent.
The night the drifter came down after a hot meal in the dining room above, Win knew Grace finally had a new beau. He hollered and shouted at the emergence of the snapping claws and mewling face, of course, and Win would have told him not to bother if he had any voice left in him. But he didn’t, and the drifter—name of Adlai—kept right on bellowing to the high heavens while Grace’s parasite gobbled him up, piece by piece, gathering its strength to become her. A better Grace, new and improved in nearly every way. Someday, Win figured, she might even transform into a comely girl of gentle manners and a beguiling smile. They both would, her and Angel. Lovely girls to make a lucky pair of fellows proud. The belles of the ball. Queens of East Texas.
Tears scored paths through the dirt on his cheeks as he privately acknowledged that he would not live to see them thrive. But Win was overcome with a deep satisfaction that he was a contributing factor to their coming out, however small his contribution was, and he died feeling he would always be with them, his perfect little Angel in particular. It was madness and grief that stoked the embers of his adoration, and he would not be the last to die in love with a monster in the ground beneath a tarpaper shack deep in the pinewoods.
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 43