by Tom Reamy
On the third day he began to quieten and I knew it was almost over. He hadn’t moved in several hours except for ragged breathing. There was a sharp cracking sound, like Carnehan biting into a new apple, only louder. The now ugly body trembled violently for a few moments, and then nothing. He lay facing me, his eyes open, the color of clay.
The breathing stopped.
It was finished.
I got out of the chair and walked around to the other side of the bed. The hump on his back had split and something white was sticking out. I reached down and pulled on it. It was a wing, a large, white wing covered with feathers. No, not feathers. Soft, white silky hair.
There was a second wing but it was twisted and not properly developed. I pulled away all of the body and exposed what was inside it.
I cleaned up the cabin so no one would know it had been occupied. I packed everything back in the Dart. I buried them both in the woods, the body of the dead winged thing, and the husk that had held it. I drove back to Hollywood. It seemed as if I passed a wreck every half mile. I went into my apartment without noticing the apple cores in the yard. I unlocked the door, went straight to the toilet, and vomited.
I was splashing cold water on my face when I heard her.
“Lou? Is that you?” She walked in wearing a slip, her eyes red from sleep, and her hair sticking out on one side where she’d been lying on it.
“Margaret! What the hell are you doing here?”
“Oh, Lou!” She pressed against me. “It’s been awful! Alfred found out about us!”
My head was spinning. “Who the shit is Alfred?”
She looked puzzled. “My husband!”
Jesus Christ! I’d forgotten Carnehan’s first name. She was right. It was awful. “What’d he do? Do they know at the Department?”
“He hit me!” She began to blubber on my shoulder. “I was afraid. I’ve been hiding here for three days! He keeps pounding on the door but I stay quiet. He doesn’t know for sure I’m here.”
“How did he find out?”
“I don’t know! He came home from work three days ago, screaming at me and hitting me. Oh, Lou. I was so frightened.” She kissed me and her breath was bad. His breath had had no odor at all. “Come to bed with me, Lou. It’s been so long,” she whined.
I felt her doughy flesh through the thin slip. But it was woman flesh and I had to forget about him. I led her to the bed and began undressing. I was sticky. I hadn’t bathed or shaved since he started… Stop it!
She pulled the slip over her head, unhooked her bra, and peeled down her pantyhose. Her tits were beginning to sag, her thighs were puffy, and there was a small roll of fat around her waist. Her skin looked muddy, not clear like… Stop it!
She walked toward me, smiling coyly. I wish I had been able to see… Stop it!
I pushed her roughly onto the bed and she squealed. Margaret liked it rough. I was about to make her very happy. She gasped deep in her throat every time my pelvis slammed against her flabby flesh. It was good—but… Stop it!
I lay on my back, half asleep. Margaret lay on top of me, licking my nipples and trying to coax it back up again. It hadn’t lasted long enough for her, but she was wasting her time and she was heavy. I closed my eyes, trying to stay awake. I felt her hair on my face. There was a noise and her head hit mine. Her breath rushed out in one stale puff and I felt something dripping on my cheek.
I focused my eyes. Carnehan was standing over us, his nightstick raised. I couldn’t move Margaret’s dead weight. “Carnehan! Don’t!” I yelled. The stick came down. I remembered I hadn’t locked the door.
When I came out of it, it was dark. I was in a moving car. My head hurt and the car sounded as if it were driving in the bottom of a well. I could feel dried blood in my left eye; maybe mine or maybe Margaret’s. I tried to wipe it away but my hands wouldn’t move. I heard the clink of handcuffs and felt the door handle. My head was leaning against the glass. It felt cool. I opened my eyes and saw brush going past and a sea of lights spread out below. I could see a dozen fires burning. We must be somewhere in the Hollywood Hills.
I turned my head and looked at Carnehan driving the car. He stared straight ahead. “Carnehan, what do you think you’re doing?” The words didn’t come out as forcefully as I had intended. He ignored me. “Carnehan, Margaret doesn’t mean anything to me.” That was the wrong thing to say. Think straight! “She’s not worth it, Carnehan. I’m not worth it. Neither of us is worth destroying yourself.”
He wasn’t listening. “You can’t hope to get away with this.” Of course he didn’t. “Why don’t you just write it off as a mistake?”
The car had been bouncing around for a while. We must not have been on a main road. I couldn’t raise myself high enough to see ahead. After a bit Carnehan stopped the car and got out. He opened the back door on my side and began dragging out Margaret’s naked body. She must have been already dead, the way she flopped around like a rubber dummy. He dragged her a few feet from the car and rolled her down a hill. I could hear her crackling the brush, then silence.
Carnehan opened my door and the handcuffs pulled me out. I felt sharp rocks digging into my butt and realized I was naked too. He pulled out his revolver.
“Carnehan! Don’t be a fool!”
He shot me in the stomach. Good old Carnehan. He remembered what we’d been taught: always aim for the gut.
He unlocked the handcuffs and pulled me to the edge. All I had to do was overpower him and get away, but I decided to wait because I was very tired. I rolled down the hill like a sack of potatoes. I didn’t feel the prickly pears and sharp brush. The pain in my belly was too fierce. I hit something hard and I think my shoulder broke.
I was lying on my back, my head leaning against whatever I’d hit, looking back up the hill. The car drove away. Carnehan, you bungler! I’m not dead! You wasted it all!
The sound of the car died away. It was very quiet, just crickets and the faroff rumble of traffic. You couldn’t get away from that sound anywhere in Los Angeles County. A slight wind was blowing, making some loose sheet metal creak and groan somewhere near by.
I couldn’t just lie here. I was bound to die if I didn’t get help. I tried to move and looked up. An immense “Y” loomed over me. I was under the Hollywood sign. I couldn’t see Margaret anywhere. Let me rest a moment more and get my breath back. Damn fuckin’ Carnehan. Are you gonna be surprised when they haul you in and I’m there to point the finger. I looked down at my stomach. A mistake. But it doesn’t hurt so much anymore. I must be in shock. I’ve heard that happens.
I can see my prick. It looks wrinkled and shrunken, even smaller than Cunningham’s. This is a hell of a time to be thinking about pricks! My shoulder hurts worse than my gut. I can feel blood on the ground under my back. I’ve rested long enough.
What’s that noise? Sounded like a twig cracking somewhere in the darkness. What if it’s a coyote? I wonder if it will attack me. Probably not. Do coyotes react to the smell of blood the way sharks do?
Footsteps. Not a coyote. People. More than one. I’m saved! Up yours, Carnehan!
There are four of them: four redheaded young men who don’t look a day over twenty. Four perfect faces that I used to think were overwhelmingly beautiful—until I saw the face of that dead winged thing. But I did see it. And I had to cover it because the beauty was too painful to look at.
Four magnificent bodies that only a few days ago would have sent the blood rushing to my penis—if I hadn’t seen the pale body of the winged creature, all the more beautiful because it was sexless. A body I knew would have gleamed had it been alive.
Now these four faces seem drab and plain and the four bodies might belong to trolls.
But the eyes! They stand around me, watching me with eyes I still think beautiful because the winged creature’s eyes were closed in death.
Those four pairs of beautiful, bland eyes look at me the same way Carnehan looks at an apple he’s been saving for a special occasion.
Prologue
It was born; though “born” is perhaps not the right word.
—1—
At 2: 17 P. M. on Thursday afternoon, Danny Sizemore killed and ate the Reverend Mr. Jarvis in the basement of the Church of the Nazarene in the township of Morgan’s Cleft, North Carolina. Danny was fifteen years old and incapable of speech. He washed the blood from his face and hands the best he could in the rain barrel behind the parsonage. There was little he could do about the mess on his shirt and it worried him. If there was one thing the Reverend Mr. Jarvis had drilled into Danny’s mist-enshrouded brain, it was cleanliness and neatness.
Still wiping at his sodden shirt, Danny started home, now and then pausing to chunk a rock in the creek. He scooted his bare feet along the road; he liked the velvety feel of the dust. He had just stopped, balancing clumsily on one leg to pluck a grassburr from his big toe, when his stomach began to churn. He leaned against the split rail fence and threw up.
He stood for a moment in confusion, pink saliva running down his chin, feeling the hollowness in him and the tingling in his puffy face.
Then he thought of the quarter and took it from his pocket to look at it. The Reverend Mr. Jarvis gave him one every week for cleaning up around the church. A quarter a week wasn’t much money, even in Morgan’s Cleft, but, at that, Danny was overpaid. The Reverend Mr. Jarvis used the hypothetical job as an excuse for charity even though he was reasonably sure the boy’s mother wound up with the money.
His mind blank of everything but the shiny coin, Danny continued home. When he passed the Morgan’s Cleft School he ignored, or perhaps was unaware of, the screams and running children.
—2—
At 2: 17 P. M. that Thursday afternoon, the entire first, second, and third grades, under the tutelage of Miss Amelia Proxmire (a dour-faced warper of young minds), arose from their desks and devoured her.
Mrs. Edith Beatty (fourth, fifth, and sixth grades) heard Miss Proxmire’s gurgling screams from her adjoining classroom. She lifted her copious bulk and waddled rapidly to investigate, but her way was blocked by Mandy Pritchard, age ten. Mrs. Beatty reached out her arm to gently remove the child from her path, but Mandy grabbed the arm and bit a bleeding chunk from it.
Mrs. Beatty, momentarily immobilized by shock, was dimly aware that some of the children in her classroom were attacking the others. She watched in fascination as Mandy bared her pink teeth for another bite. But she had had enough of this nonsense. She pulled her bleeding arm away and kicked Mandy in the shin with her heavy walking oxford. Mrs. Beatty kicked her again, in the head, opening a gash in her scalp, and catapulting her underneath the front row of desks.
She waded into the mass of screaming children, pulling them apart, but she could see that little was being accomplished. As soon as she released one, the child would attack again. She calmly removed her shoe and, holding it by the toe, went to each child who seemed to be the aggressor and bashed it in the head.
There were only five of them, counting Mandy. Six of the remaining seven were hysterical and Bobby MacDonald seemed to be dead. His throat was torn open. The six still on their feet were bleeding from numerous bites and scratches. Mrs. Beatty tried to calm them but the bedlam in the hall made it impossible.
Miss Proxmire’s class had erupted from her room looking for plumper prey. They found Mrs. Agnes Bledsoe (junior high) and Miss Clarissa Ogilvy (high school), accompanied by their students on their way to Miss Proxmire’s room. They attacked like wolves and gained a momentary advantage because of the stunned inaction of the older children.
Their attack was tenacious but not suicidal. Some of the children fought back and some of them fled. Mrs. Beatty’s class had had enough and evacuated the building quickly. The entire melee rapidly moved outside with children scattering in every direction and dozens of townspeople converging on the school. The battle was brief. The three surviving teachers and the remaining children found themselves standing in the playground, numb with shock, and no one left to fight. Miss Ogilvy leaned against the johnny-stride and then slipped slowly down the pole in a faint.
There were three casualties in the school: Miss Proxmire, Bobby MacDonald, and Eloise Harper whose ill-advised flight led her down Sandy Lane. She was overtaken by six of them.
Mrs. Beatty returned to her room to find it empty. Mandy and the four others had gone, taking Bobby MacDonald’s body with them. Mrs. Beatty felt very tired and weary. Her arm hurt fiercely but she was too exhausted to do anything but clutch at it. She sat at her desk and leaned back in the chair.
—3—
At 2: 17 that afternoon, Betty Whitman was nursing her thirteen-month-old son. She sat rocking gently, dreamily reading of Jean Harlow in a movie magazine. She jerked and gasped when the baby bit her. He had teethed early and it was happening too often. She promised herself this was the last breast feeding and went back to her magazine.
The second time he bit her she cried out. She pulled his mouth away and watched the blood gush down her side. She put the baby on the floor and stood up. She took three steps with her hand clutched to her breast and fainted. The baby looked at her a moment and began toddling toward her.
—4—
Mavis Sizemore was a slatternly woman of indeterminate age, who managed a tenuous existence by washing and ironing for other people. Her small house, connected to the town by a narrow foot bridge across Indian Creek, was as weary and woebegone as she. The backyard contained a small vegetable garden, an outhouse, a pen of disreputable-looking chickens, two scrawny pigs, and several clotheslines partially filled with drying clothes. Two black cast-iron washpots sat on kindling fires, each nearly filled with boiling water. Into one Mavis poured a can of lye and a syrup pail of cracklings left over from lardmaking. She stirred the mixture with a wooden paddle and then wiped at her pewter-colored, sparrow’s nest hair with the back of her hand.
She moved wearily to a galvanized washtub and drew soapy clothes from it, scrubbed them on a rub board, and then transferred them to the other boiling pot. She punched at them with a cut-off broom handle, long ago bleached white and fuzzy, to make sure they were submerged. She left the clothes to boil and returned to the first pot, testing the contents with a chicken feather. The feather emerged blackened and curled. She added more cracklings and again stirred the thickening mixture. Her face was red and sweaty from the heat and her hands were mottled from too much lye soap and stained with bluing.
Mavis had faulty genes and in her hazy lifetime had produced eight still births and Danny. She had never been married. Danny shuffled across the footbridge and came around the side of the house still lovingly engrossed with his quarter.
Her suet-colored lips began moving, making sounds at Danny. He heard them vaguely, but they meant nothing. He had long ago stopped trying to make sense of the sounds or of the woman. This was only where he went when he was sleepy or hungry. She knocked the quarter from his hand and slapped his face.
Her flesh was like putty and tasted of soap.
First Interlude
Not far from Asheville, North Carolina, an unpaved road leaves the state highway and wanders upward into the Blue Ridge. The road follows the path of least resistance; around hillsides of rhododendron; over ridges of white pine, yellow pine, and spruce; through valleys of hemlock, laurel, and dogwood. For the most part it follows Indian Creek, a wild mountain stream which eventually flows into the French Broad. It crosses the stream numerous times on trestle bridges of ancient timber, and then will stray away when the path of least resistance leads elsewhere.
The road passes through a few scattered villages and skirts an occasional farm or logging camp. There is less and less traffic as it penetrates deeper into the mountains. Those who don’t live there have little reason to enter. The road rejoins Indian Creek near the logging town of Utley and becomes even more tentative as it passes through the village.
From there it rises sharply for some twenty miles to pass, with
the creek, through a gap in the mountain called Morgan’s Cleft. The pass and the village beyond were named for Cleatus Morgan, leader of the original settlers in the highvalley. Once through the gap, the road and the stream straighten and follow the approximate center of the wide valley to the township.
Past the Church of the Nazarene, the road dwindles to little more than a pair of wheel ruts separated by grass and wild flowers. It divides many times along the fifteen mile length of the valley; each division ending at a lonely farm.
The Colonials who settled here had intended to go on to Tennessee but found themselves at a dead end. After a brief consultation with the other families, Cleatus Morgan decided this rich and fertile valley, though practically insulated from the outside world, was a definite windfall. So they settled in and prospered by their own standards. Indian Creek, which ran pure and bright and teemed with fish, provided power for a gristmill; the valley and surrounding heights were thick with Virginia deer, wild turkeys, dove, and quail. Little was needed from the outside.
—5—
Orvie Morgan, direct descendant of Cleatus Morgan and heir to the choicest farm in the valley, drove toward town with his five-year-old son at his side. The shiny black Model A Ford, one of only five automobiles in the valley—not counting the Mercantile’s Model A truck—clattered and bounced in the wheel ruts. The tufted tops of the wild grasses in the center flicked against the axles with small unheard sounds. The time was 2: 17 P. M. on Thursday afternoon.
Little Cleatus Morgan, this generation’s proud bearer of the ancestral name, took his father’s arm in his small hands. Orvie turned his head and smiled fondly at his son. The smile became a grimace of consternation when Little Cleatus’ tiny sharp teeth sank in. Orvie’s arm was hard muscled but the bite still brought blood.