Mr. Shivers

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  He buttoned up and walked to the copse. The trees were enormous, all firs at least a hundred feet tall, each of them a green so dark they were nearly purple. There had to be at least a dozen of them. He walked into their center. Stones and lumps of earth lay scattered in the little clearing. He stood in the center and looked about and noticed there was a gap in the trees that opened on the side of the mountain, and through it he could just make out the roof of the abandoned farm.

  He was about to leave when he noticed a marking on one of the trees. A circle with two parallel arrows, gouged in the bark. Connelly ran his fingers over it and looked at the stones and the small mounds and then up at the farmhouse above. Then he turned back and studied the town for a long, long while.

  “What are you doing, Connelly?” said a voice.

  He spun around. Roosevelt was sitting beside one of the trees.

  “Rosie?”

  “You should be asleep,” Roosevelt said.

  “So should you.”

  “I am asleep.”

  “You should go back and sleep in the barn, though.”

  “No. I wanted to be where everyone else was sleeping.”

  “What?” said Connelly.

  “Everyone’s sleeping,” said Roosevelt, and gestured into the trees. “Everyone sleeps.” He smiled and looked back at Connelly. “You should sleep, too, Connelly. It would be better.”

  “I will,” he said. “Just once I get something figured out, I will. Stay here, will you, Rosie? Just stay right there.”

  Connelly walked quickly to the barn to rouse Pike. He prodded him with his foot until the old man’s eyes snapped open.

  “What?” Pike muttered.

  “Something you should see.”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  Pike stood to his feet. “Should we wake Hammond?”

  There was a quiet moan. “I’m already awake,” said Hammond’s voice. He sat up in the hay and smacked his lips. “What are you doing stomping around in the middle of the night, Con?”

  “Found something,” he said. “Follow me if you want.” He thought and added, “Bring your guns.”

  Pike and Hammond shared a glance but did as he asked.

  “Christ, I got a headache,” Hammond said as they stumbled out the door. “My head pounds like no tomorrow. There’s no waking Peachy, he’s snoring away.”

  “Roosevelt was up,” said Connelly. “Saw him not more than a minute ago.”

  “Roosevelt doesn’t sleep anymore, I think,” Pike said. “What’s this you want to show me?”

  “Some markings. Thought you may know them. Over there, in the trees.”

  He led them to the glen. Roosevelt was nowhere to be found. Connelly searched for the markings again and showed them to Pike. He grunted and went down on one knee before them.

  “This is hobo code,” Pike said, tracing them with a finger.

  “Markings?” said Hammond.

  “Yes. Markings in chalk or scrawled in wood, left behind for other hobos. They can mean all sorts of things. Cross means this house serves food to hobos after a party. Triangles on a line like teeth means a dog. Cat means a nice old lady lives there. You see?”

  “And these?” said Connelly.

  He rubbed them with a thumb. “These mean get out fast. Danger.”

  “Danger from what?” said Hammond.

  “I cannot say.” Pike got to his feet and looked around. “It’d be something close. Something for us to notice. Here.” He stood in front of where the man who drew the markings would have been and looked around. He leaned to the right and to the left and waved. “I don’t know. Something over there?”

  They looked with him. There was nothing there but the stones and the small mounds of earth.

  “Come here,” said Connelly to Hammond. “Get your knife out.”

  “Why?” said Hammond.

  “Just do it and give it here.”

  He handed Connelly his buck knife and Connelly knelt beside one of the small mounds. He ran his fingers over the grass and began digging with the knife, pulling up stones and rich black earth.

  “What are you doing? You’re going to ruin the blade,” said Hammond, but Pike shushed him.

  The knife struck something small and hard. Connelly dug it out and brushed it off and held it up to the light.

  “What is that?” said Hammond.

  Connelly examined it. It was gray, its ends hard knobs, its center rough like sandpaper.

  “A finger,” he said. “Or at least it used to be. Long ago.”

  They leaned in to see and then turned to the other mounds. Hammond reached down and touched one and withdrew his hand as though burned. Connelly walked over to another and plunged the knife in and wrenched it around in a circle. He reached in and pulled the mound apart, the grass thick and the soil dark and fragrant. He thrust his hand in and clutched at what he felt there and tugged it out. He cupped his hands to his chest and blew the dirt away from his find.

  Rib bones. Curled and smooth. They looked strange jumbled together, no longer adhering to the structured, concentric arcs of human anatomy.

  “What is going on here?” said Pike softly.

  Connelly threw the bones away. “Peachy.”

  “What?”

  “We got to get Peachy out. We got to get out of here. Now. Right now.”

  They got low and crept back to the barn but found that there were men there already, at least a dozen figures lurking in the shadow of the building. A few took a long board and blocked the door with it and jogged away. Connelly could see something shining in the moonlight, something metal. Rifle of some sort. Maybe a shotgun.

  “What are they doing?” whispered Hammond.

  “Get down,” said Pike.

  “Peachy,” Connelly murmured. “What are they doing to Peachy?”

  One figure’s hands lit up bright, then another’s. They stepped back and before Connelly could move or cry he saw bottles with flaming rags in their hands. They lobbed the twirling bombs through the open windows up above in the barn.

  There was a tremendous thud as air was split and pulled back together, then a wash of fire dancing bright and begging to lick the roof. A hoarse cry escaped from Connelly’s throat but no one heard. Two more men lit ragged fuses and hurled the bottles in. The faces of the men were strangely lit by the fire but even from there Connelly could see they were the very churchmen who had been friends earlier.

  Connelly got to his feet but Pike jumped forward and wrapped up around his legs. They grappled but the old man was stronger than Connelly would have ever believed and he pinned him to the ground.

  “Listen to me!” Pike whispered into his ear. “Listen! You run out there now and you’re dead. You try and do anything and you’re dead. They’ll shoot you down like a mad dog and not think again on it. Do you hear me?”

  Connelly gasped and choked as he struggled to stand. Behind him the barn began to collapse. They heard no screams. It seemed a terribly unfair thing that Peachy should be killed in such a cowardly fashion and his killers would not even hear his cries. They would not know the pain they had inflicted, have no notion of what they had done.

  “What the hell is this?” Hammond said. “What the hell are they doing?”

  “Mr. Hammond, have you ever wondered how a town on the dry side of a mountain could stay more lush and more safe than any other place in the country?” asked Pike as he released Connelly.

  “N-No…”

  “Because they made a trade,” growled Connelly from where he lay. He lifted his head to see the remains of the barn. “Because they did what they had to to keep to their own.”

  “Yes,” said Pike.

  They sat hidden in the glen, watching the fire burn low. The men began to depart, leaving only a few to make sure the fire did not spread. Hammond said he had wondered why the barn was so far out from the rest of the town. Pike and Connelly sat so still they might not have heard.

&nb
sp; “You still got that knife?” asked Connelly.

  “Yeah,” said Hammond.

  “And the guns?”

  “Yeah. Why? What do you have planned?”

  “Trouble,” said Connelly, and wiped his hands on his pants. “Lot of it.”

  They went around the outskirts of the town like wolves on the prowl and crept up through the lanes in shadow. They draped rags over their guns and the knife so they would not glint in the light, spoke with hand gestures and glances. Hammond picked the lock of the church with ease and they moved through the halls silent as ghosts, eyes dead, shoulders hunched.

  They found the pastor’s bedroom and moved in quietly and gathered around his bed. He sensed them and awoke but before he could speak Connelly said, “Shut your fucking mouth.”

  “What’s goi—”

  Pike struck him on the temple with the base of the knife and his eyes went dull. They picked him up and bound him and carried him to the glen. There they tossed him down roughly and undid his gag and Connelly cut off his right sleeve. On the inside of his forearm was the mark they had seen on the sheriff’s arm weeks before, the crude symbol of the serpent madly devouring itself.

  “My friend was in that barn,” Connelly told him softly.

  “Wh-what are you going to do to me?” Leo asked.

  “Don’t know. What’d you do to all those folk back there who’re being eaten up by the trees?”

  Leo looked behind them. His face went ashen and he said, “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand plenty. This is his town, isn’t it? It explains the sleeves. There’s a deal with him. Scarred man in black and gray. He said he can keep things green and growing. Keep everyone in this town healthy. Longer lives, even. Is that it?”

  “How… how do you know?”

  “I met a sheriff who was almost a hundred but didn’t look older than fifty. He had the same setup. And you don’t want to know what he lived on top of but I’m willing to bet you got a guess. Because see, I’ve figured it out,” he said, and hefted the knife in his hands. “Something’s always got to die. Always. If something’s going to live there’s something else out there that’s got to die. If it’s something small that’s got to live then a little thing’s got to die. But a whole town? Hell. That’d be something. So what goes under the knife? Who’s out here? Drifters? Criminals? All out here under this strange little altar?”

  Leo said nothing.

  “How many of them know?” asked Connelly.

  He didn’t answer. Connelly took the knife and pushed it a quarter inch into his sternum. He squealed and tried to wriggle away, a thin trickle of red running down his chest.

  Connelly removed the knife. “How many?”

  “All of them!” he cried. “The entire town! All of them.”

  “Christ,” said Hammond. “Jesus goddamn Christ.”

  “Reap day,” said Connelly softly. “Reap day. And what does he get in return? Safe haven? A place to stay when he needs it? Where is he? Where’s the scarred man, Pastor? You’ve been feeding him all this time, so you got to know where he is.”

  “I thought you a man of God, Pastor,” Pike said over his shoulder. “Do you know what I would like to do to men who claim the name of the Lord and then do acts such as these?”

  “You’ve seen what’s out there,” Leo snarled. “You’ve seen how hungry this world can be. Wouldn’t you do everything you could to keep what you loved fresh and alive? Wouldn’t you? We haven’t had a child or a mother die in labor in thirty years. No more sickness, no more accidents. The guns we have are all older than their owners, near enough. The youngest death we’ve had has been seventy-six, in bed. And in return for what? Drunks? Criminals? Thugs and vagrants? Tell me you wouldn’t do the same.”

  “Maybe,” said Connelly. “That doesn’t matter anymore. You killed my friend. Tried to kill us. Makes things pretty simple, doesn’t it?”

  Leo bowed his head and tried not to sob. “God… You’re not… not going to…”

  “Where is he, Pastor? Where’s he at?” asked Connelly. “Or do I even need to ask? He’s up in that farm up there, ain’t he? Where the wolves are supposed to be? Where it’s not safe to go, yet it looks down on this very town right here?”

  “You can’t go up there,” said the pastor. “You can’t.-H-He’s getting ready. You don’t know what’s happening up there.”

  “When’d he come in?”

  “Two days ago. He was falling apart. You’re killing him, you know.”

  “Yeah,” said Connelly. “Yeah, we know. And he said to get rid of us, didn’t he? Said some boys would be hot on his trail and wouldn’t it be nice if they wound up dead. Right?”

  The pastor nodded.

  “Right. Okay,” said Connelly. “Okay, then. I want to know one more thing. Where’s some kerosene?”

  “Kerosene?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Where?”

  “I don’t know. There’s a garage over where you all came in.”

  “Okay. Fair enough.”

  The pastor shuddered. “-I-I have a wife. Children. A little girl—”

  The knife flashed forward and Connelly buried it up to the hilt in the pastor’s neck. Warm red sprayed from his collarbone and his eyes went wide and he coughed and soon it dribbled from his mouth and nose. Connelly twisted the knife in his neck until there was a thick red river running down his shirt and the man quivered and pissed himself.

  “I had one, too,” Connelly said to him as the man died.

  He lay still. Connelly wiped his hands and the knife on the dead man’s nightgown and stood.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Hammond.

  Connelly put the knife back in its sheath. “Show them what they’re worshipping.”

  * * *

  They found a drum of kerosene in the garage and they filled up three tanks with it and divided a box of matches between them all. Then they split up, each working the outskirts of town, splashing the houses and the fields and the church and the barns. They moved quietly, carefully rationing out the foul-smelling fluid.

  Connelly carried a shovel with him, digging small trenches to carry the kerosene, running under porches and bushes. He made a crude sort of irrigation that might or might not really work, he was not sure. He labored quickly but carefully. The town seemed deserted. After they had killed the fire in the barn they must have gone home to peaceful slumber.

  “Everyone sleeps here,” he murmured to himself. “Bastards. All of them. Bastards.”

  He was dousing a trellis of one house when he heard a voice say, “What are you doing?”

  There was a young girl at the side of the house, no older than Hammond. She leaned around the corner and then took a few steps out to see. She wore a white nightgown and her hair was gold and her features sharp and childlike. Her eyes were as green as the hills around her, like sunlight filtering through leaves. When Connelly turned to see her she took a step back.

  “You!” she said. “You’re the drifter-man. You ain’t supposed to be out here.”

  “Go back to bed,” said Connelly.

  “You’re supposed to be dead,” she whispered. “Dead and gone.”

  “Don’t you… Don’t you cry out or damn you, I’ll beat you raw,” Connelly said.

  She smiled. “You wouldn’t. You ain’t the sort of person to hit a girl.”

  “I would.”

  “No you wouldn’t. You’re just a big softy. Just a big old softy.”

  Connelly stood up to his full height. “Don’t you do nothing,” he said quietly, “or I swear… I swear to God…”

  “Swear what? That you’ll kill me?” She laughed. An angelic sound. “You ain’t the type. Why, I bet I could open my mouth right now and holler bloody murder and they’d come running, wouldn’t they?”

  Connelly did not move.

  “Sure they would. And you wouldn’t do nothing. They’d find you and cut you to ribbons,” she said, and smiled wide.

  Cold gr
een button eyes, mean and merciless. Flat and shallow like a muddy pool.

  “Watch,” said the girl, and took a deep breath.

  The shovel bit deep into her skull under her right eye and the force of the blow sent the eye flying out, spiraling away and down onto her cheek. A gout of blood poured from her mouth and nose and she fell to the ground and began madly twitching and a ribbon of black began seeping from her exposed sinus. In the moonlight her crumpled head made her look far from human, some twisted, mindless inversion, and Connelly stood over her and brought the shovel down again and again on her neck. Soon she stopped twitching and he was glad. It was as though in decapitating her he made her human and recognizable again.

  He stood over the slain girl and dumped the kerosene out and lit a match and tossed it behind him. Then he started to run.

  Exactly when it happened he could not say. He saw the firelight flickering on the trees ahead and felt the heat on his back, but it was not until he heard the guttural burp and the shrieking roar that he knew it had really caught. He turned and backpedaled and saw jets of fire shooting into the night. Twin blazes were on his left and right and he knew somewhere Hammond and Pike were making for the woods.

  He ran into the hills of the mountain and climbed a ways. Then he heard the screams. Maybe a man, maybe a woman. A child, perhaps. Then more. He turned and looked out on the inferno he had left in his wake, the crumbling cottages and the blackening church, the thick pillar of black smoke that reached up into the sky. He tried to silence the dreadful part of his heart that sang and danced joyfully at the sight of his hellish wreckage but found he could not.

  “Look at that,” said a voice.

  He turned back around. Roosevelt was sitting on a stone, smiling at the fire.

  “You made the sun come up, Connelly,” he said. “You made the sun come up.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  They headed for the farm and on the way there they came upon Pike and Hammond struggling through the brush. Hammond grinned at him wickedly, his face sooty and mad.