by J. D. Horn
A remarkable face surfaced in Wilson’s memory, a young man with golden curls, nearly indigo eyes, hollow cheeks, and Roman nose. Any number of people might have made fools of themselves over that face. Really, it came as no surprise that a beautiful, bored girl like Ruby had fallen under his sway and attached herself to his dreams.
“I’ve asked myself a thousand times,” Ovid continued, “where I went wrong with her. I thought I’d raised her better than that. But when it came down to it, she ran off like a blue-tick bitch in heat.”
McAvoy decided to let Ovid pretend he’d been a good father. Ruby was gone and buried. No good would come from criticizing the man now, and maybe a little pious fiction would help Ovid pull himself back together. And who was he to cast stones? McAvoy had his regrets, just like Ovid did. “Well, what’s done is done. Now we need to work on getting you well again.”
“I just can’t figure out how they got their hands on the money to leave town. That boy never earned an honest dollar in his life.”
“Well, Ovid, there are many ways to turn a dishonest dollar,” Wilson said, instantly regretting the irony of his words, but Ovid seemed to take no heed. “We need to get you up to your room. You think you can make it if I help you?”
The Judge stayed deep in thought, and it wasn’t clear whether he was considering the weighty issue of his daughter’s fate or the question of his own remaining strength.
The doctor turned at the sound of approaching footsteps. Whoever had entered the house must have come in through the kitchen. “Lucille?” he called out.
“Yes, sir,” Lucille responded. “Oh, Doctor McAvoy, it’s you,” she said as she moved into the room, a mixture of pity and fear crossing her face as she took in the sight of her employer. “It’s good you came.”
“You should have called me, Lucille,” Wilson said, taking care to sound duly stern.
“I know, sir. I wanted to, but . . .”
“No buts, Lucille.” The severity of his tone caused her to wince. “No excuses. Now I need you to help me get the Judge up to his room.”
“Yes, sir,” she said and rushed forward to assist him.
“How long has he been like this?”
“Well, sir, he ain’t really been himself since . . .” she started, then stopped herself. Wilson understood the rest. Just after Ruby’s passing. “But he didn`t start feeling poorly till last week. He’s much worse than when I seen him last, at Saturday lunch, that is. He just said he was a little tired when I was leaving, but . . .”
Wilson calculated the amount of time the Judge had been on his own. Just shy of forty-eight hours. “Okay, Ovid, on three,” he said, although he wasn’t sure the Judge had even heard him. He positioned himself on the Judge’s right side and signaled with a nod that Lucille should support him on the left. “One, two, three.” Wilson nearly toppled over when the weight he’d been expecting didn’t manifest itself. He was amazed by how light the man had become. The Judge was wasting away. “Lucille, you run up and make sure his bed is ready. I think we can manage on our own.”
Lucille acknowledged the command with a curt nod and headed immediately toward the stairs. “I don’t want to sleep,” the Judge murmured into Wilson’s ear.
“You need your rest. We’re putting you to bed so that you can get it.”
“But the nightmares. I can’t stand them.”
“They’re only dreams. They’ll pass.”
The Judge grasped his upper arm, much more tightly than Wilson would have suspected his remaining strength could manage. “She comes to me, Wilson. Ruby comes to me, and her eyes are on fire. Blue like the center of a flame.”
“That’s enough, Ovid. It’s only your illness working on your grief. Speak no more of it . . . to anyone.” Wilson assisted the much younger, but strangely aged man to the foot of the stairs, then helped him begin the arduous climb. Lucille met them at the head and, slinging the Judge’s arm over her shoulder, helped him the rest of the way to the foot of the bed.
Once the Judge was sitting steadily enough, Wilson pulled Lucille aside. “The Judge seems to be suffering from anemia and exhaustion,” he said under his breath. He reached into his own wallet to pull out a five-dollar bill. “You get on down to the butcher and pick up some liver—chicken, beef, I don’t care what kind. Fry it up light so it’s still good and pink and get it up here as quick as you can.”
She nodded and lowered her hand so that he could place the bill in it. “And Lucille,” he said as she was about to leave the room, “tell no one about the Judge’s condition. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir.” She turned and hurried down the stairs. He heard the door close softly behind her.
“Let’s get you undressed,” Wilson said, turning again toward his patient, who didn’t seem to have processed what was happening. He pulled off Ovid’s scarf and removed the man’s coat, revealing the dirty white shirt and gray pants he had on underneath it. “These things, too.” After helping Ovid out of the shirt, he shifted him so that he was lying flat on the bed, his head cradled in a pillow. That done, Wilson tugged off the patient’s pants, leaving him in nothing but an undershirt and briefs. Ovid’s right thigh was marked with a streak of dried blood, which he tried to hide with one hand.
“Let me see it,” the doctor commanded, pushing his hand aside. The flesh on the thigh had been severely bruised. Wilson leaned in closer to investigate the wound. “Son,” he said with a whistle, “any idea how you got this?”
Ovid closed his eyes tight and shook his head.
FIVE
Death, everyone knew, was meant to be the end, but it wasn’t, at least not for Ruby. She was awake and aware. She felt both pleasure and pain. Only those things she’d previously counted as essential, breath and a steadily beating heart, had deserted her. Still all the old angers and attachments clung to her. She nursed the same wrongs. Ached over the same missed opportunities, felt shame over the same missteps, mistakes that now surely should no longer matter. No, the grave had brought her neither eternal rest nor release.
At first, Ruby would have rather died out in California, her cold body incinerated—just as those who had infected her with the parasite had planned to do—to keep her from coming back. But she hadn’t died there. She’d been brought back to Mississippi, back to the Judge’s house, even though she’d sworn to herself she’d never spend another night under his roof.
If her father had let her go, the nightmare would have ended, but he had seen her as his personal property, and there was no way he would have simply allowed her her freedom. So he had her transported home, where those ignorant of her condition had allowed her body to transition from the life into which she’d been born to this new tomb-born existence.
It had almost felt like flying as the pallbearers lifted her casket up, and like being rocked in a bassinet as their uneven steps caused her body to sway inside the metal box. Even though she was swaddled by padding and secured by steel, even after she’d felt them rest the coffin on the waiting bier, her hearing remained clear so that each voice reached her. Each tiny laugh. Each whispered expression of joy that she was now gone for good. Only Lucille’s voice, raised in song, carried tones of loss, of regret.
Hardest of all had been Elijah’s absence. She’d let her mind pick its way through the insincere platitudes, and all-too-sincere expressions of joy, trying to uncover a single utterance that might have belonged to Elijah. She imagined that he’d been too devastated to come, or perhaps that he’d taken his own life so that he could join her in whatever world awaited. She’d since learned that both suppositions had been laughably wrong. The thought of her naïveté led her to reach out and claw plaster from the wall beside her. The thing within her listened on, communicating through images the pleasure it took in her plans of vengeance.
It had seemed like an eternity before she felt the first tremor of movement play out along her fingers. She came to learn that it had actually only taken around three days from awaking in the funeral parlor to
regaining full mobility. In between, she lay motionless in the dark, with nothing to comfort her other than the entity’s presence. Quickly she grew used to sharing her mind and body with it, coming to think of it less and less as a parasite, and more like a twin soul, a part of herself that had been missing, a partner in the devastation she was about to let loose on the place of her birth.
She had come to rely on its instincts, on its magic—for that was the only word she could think of to describe its abilities—that it seemed to delight in sharing with her. It freed her from the casket, and unlocked the gate of the mausoleum with only a touch. It showed her how to hide from the daylight, and how to feed off the blood of dumb and lumbering animals until together, they were strong enough and quick enough to take down a running man. When it led her to come to this house, she didn’t question it. She followed its tug without a single qualm.
This place seemed to have been created for her. While the houses of the living rejected her—a force she didn’t yet understand held her just beyond the threshold—the old Cooper home had wanted her, welcomed her. It called to her almost as if it were a radio station broadcasting on the same frequency into which she was tuned. The thing within her had heard the house’s call, and caused her to bound along, her feet rarely touching the earth as she tore through the wooded ravine that separated the cemetery from the edge of the farm, the fields long since fallow, where the house sat.
Nearby, the train tracks took a sharp turn to avoid the bend of the river. Trains had to slow at this point, so it had become a customary place for the dirty vagabonds who traveled in boxcars to jump on and off. This area proved prime hunting territory, as the hobos often traveled alone, and were sure never to be missed. No one would come looking for them, so there was no chance of discovery.
Kudzu vine, rapacious and never sleeping, had nearly swallowed the old Cooper house whole. The slanting wood structure would’ve long since disappeared from sight were it not for the teenagers of Conroy, who came, year after year, wave after wave, drawn at first by the thrill of visiting a place where multiple murders had taken place, then by the convenience of a spot where most adults who’d known the Coopers couldn’t bear to visit. For years, the teenagers had kept the front porch and entrance clear of the vine, but they’d stopped visiting the house since Ruby had claimed it, even if they themselves couldn’t quite say why.
Darkness calls to darkness, horror to horror. Ruby once thought of houses as lifeless structures, nothing more than a joining of wood and stone and plaster. Void of personality and incapable of feeling or memory. She knew better now. She’d been drawn to this suffocated and decaying house, left so long without regular inhabitants, and stained, physically and psychically, by bloodshed. The Cooper family murders had taken place in a time before Ruby could remember, twenty or more years before, but the stains left by the slaughter, both mundane and mystical, were still there for anyone who cared to look. Before, Ruby had never cared to, but the thing within her seemed to relish the crimes it could still taste, nearly as fresh as the day they’d been committed. And the house tried again and again to speak to her, eager to replay its trauma.
Pay it the slightest attention and shadow would thicken, edges sharpen, and the image of Mr. Cooper would appear, limping and bleeding from where his wife had managed to stab him in the thigh before he ended her with his axe. The visions that arose didn’t match the timing of the sound that accompanied them; Ruby had many times watched Cooper’s lips moving, calling sweetly out to his children, long after she’d heard their terrified cries.
A few precious yards of the house’s entrance remained bare of the creeper vine, but growth over the rest of the place had been left unchecked. Ruby had ordered the boy Merle to see to it that the front window was boarded over, making it safe for her to visit the front of the house during the day. She could move freely through the rest of the place without further precaution. What little sunlight pierced the house’s other windows was dyed a dim bottle-green by the leaves of the knotted kudzu that had covered them over.
Ruby examined the blue pallor of her skin given an even more otherworldly sheen by the filtered viridescent sunshine. She could bear this sunlight; it didn’t scald her and send her fleeing for the closest source of cool and comforting shade. Ruby didn’t know why this light should be different from sunlight filtered by shades or curtain. That light still caused her skin to redden painfully within moments of exposure. Perhaps the plant fed on and absorbed the wholesome part of the light that was noxious to the thing inside her.
The thing to which she’d been joined relished the procession of images, turning its focus to the bloodshed again and again, like a child demanding to be told the same bedtime story night after night. Ruby, fascinated at first, now found the house’s reminiscences tiresome. She coaxed the thing within her to look away, knowing that the seemingly solid man, once ignored, would dissolve back into shadow. Besides, Cooper’s bloodshed only amounted to two tears in a bucket compared to the fate she’d planned for Conroy.
SIX
A horn sounded outside, and Ava Dunne removed her soiled apron, folding it to hide the blood from the chicken she’d just cut up, and laying it on the counter. She swatted away a fly that circled the dismembered bird. The horn sounded again. “All right, all right, I’m coming.” She smoothed her dress and headed toward the sound, the heels of her black flats clacking out a staccato beat on the newly laid linoleum. She pushed through the swinging kitchen door and headed down the Oriental runner that led to the front door.
She looked through the door’s window to see Charlie standing next to his red truck, one hand snaked in through the open window, preparing to honk the horn again. She opened the door wide, and reached up her right hand to touch her throat. “Charles Aarons, if I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times. This is a civilized household. I will not have you announcing your arrival as if you were Gabriel himself.” This was not the first impression she had hoped to make on her soon-to-be daughter-in-law. She turned her head slightly in the hope of seeing past the glare on Charlie’s windshield. After catching a glimpse of his passenger, she forced a smile to hide her disappointment. “A drab girl,” she thought. “A practical girl,” she rephrased it to sound better to her own mind. The young woman opened her own door and climbed out of the truck. This Corinne had a sturdy frame, she immediately noticed. “She’s no Ruby,” she thought, and then she breathed a quiet sigh of relief. “She’s no Ruby.”
“Welcome,” she said, opening her arms and stepping down the stairs off the porch. “Welcome.” Corinne placed the bag she’d been holding on the ground and after a few moments’ hesitation circled around and reached into the truck bed, tugging on the handle of a larger case. “Good heavens, Charles. You help her with those bags, and don’t make me tell you twice.” Charlie ran his hand down his beard, mumbling something under his breath as he did so. “Don’t you backtalk me.” She stepped off the final stair and crossed over to Corinne. “Welcome,” she said for the third time, realizing that she was at a loss for anything else to say.
Corinne matched Ava’s frozen smile with her own awkward grin. “Thank you.”
“I am so sorry that Elijah wasn’t able to meet you as he’d planned.”
“I understand,” Corinne said, showing no sign of hurt feelings or resentment. “A breech birth is difficult.”
“Well, yes, and he and Clay, my husband, Elijah’s father, have been with the poor mare since dawn.” The two women regarded each other nervously. “Come in,” Ava said remembering herself. “You must be exhausted after your trip. Perhaps you’d like something cool to drink, or maybe just a short lie down?”
“Oh, no, I’m fine. The sleeper car on the train was quite comfortable. Especially after two years of sleeping on an army cot.”
Ava was surprised at how easily Corinne spoke of two years spent living in a war zone. Elijah still had nightmares. He tried to deny it, but Ava could hear his cries in the night. She always wanted to
go to him when he was suffering, but Clay would never let her. Clay wanted their son to be tough, to deal with his problems like a man; funny since Clay himself tended to look for his courage in the bottom of a bottle. But Ava knew her place. She held her tongue, and did as her husband commanded.
“Leave it,” he’d say. “Elijah didn’t have to go.” That much she knew was true. He was the only son of a farm family. Going to war had been his choice.
“If anything, I’d really like to go assist with the foaling,” Corinne said, pulling Ava back to the present moment.
“Oh, dear, no,” Ava said, amazed by the very thought of it. “Animal husbandry is man’s work. You just come in and freshen up before the men return from the barn. Charlie,” she addressed the old man, “you put Miss Ford’s bags out on the back sleeping porch.” She turned to Corinne. “You will be much more comfortable there. It has been positively stifling around here over the last few days.”
Charlie made a struggle of lifting Corinne’s larger bag. “What’d you pack in here, bricks?” He staggered over to her and held out a hand for her second bag.
“No, I’ll take this one.” Corinne clutched the smaller bag tightly.
“That’s where she keeps the hooch,” Charlie said to Ava and laughed.
Ava shook her head, but her lips tipped up in a small smile. “I must apologize for Charlie. He is a good man. Deep down, at least.” Then her attention was captured by the unexpected sight of Conroy’s new police car—a Hudson Hornet, Clay had told her—pulling down the gravel drive.
“Is everything all right?” Corinne asked, turning to watch as the black-and-white came to a stop.
“Of course, dear.” She tried to smile reassuringly, but the police had never come to her door before. Sheriff Bell, a lean man in his fifties with a drooping gray mustache, exited the passenger’s side. His deputy, Rigby, had grown up with Elijah. Younger but thicker than his superior, Rigby climbed out and followed the sheriff a few respectful paces behind. “Good afternoon, ladies,” the sheriff said, tipping, but not removing, his hat.