by Неизвестный
Even in the midst of chaos her voice had power, and some sat. James had to cajole the wife a little more to get her to sit with her children, the eldest daughter helping James, whispering soothing things into her mother’s ear.
Like all the rest I was shocked. But not paralyzed. I had it in my head that I would flee. Whatever was happening here I did not want to see it. I did not want to see Lucretia, whom I’d never even witnessed smack down a fly, callously strike children and rip them so violently away from their parents. I could not, in those wild moments, think of what the children had done to warrant their fate. I could not think of the blood, or the sounds they made, or the pale, stony look of their small, blank eyes.
I stumbled backwards into something and tripped. It was the little girl in the white dress; I’d tripped over her prone body, landing bottom first on her small thighs. The stink coming off her was awful; it reminded me of the smell of a freshly slaughtered pig. Hand to my nostrils, I bent to examine her, to help her, and she jerked up. My heart caught in my throat as her ruined face shot toward me; I do not think I had time even to yell. But someone else’s hand was quicker, catching the girl under her chin and flinging her back so forcefully that her already damaged skull cracked hard against the floor. Then those hands were on me, pressed against the sides of my shaking cheeks, and I was looking into a woman’s eyes, and it was Lucretia.
“Cady,” she said. “Cady. Did she bite you? Tell me—oh, Lord, please tell me!—did she bite you?”
I think I made a sound, something like a whimper or a bleat, and then all I remember is a welcoming darkness as my body invited me to black out and I, with proper feminine grace, accepted.
Waking up was something of a dream. The soft light of the setting sun peeked through the half-shuttered windows of the pastor’s office. The fogginess of my recent unconsciousness had not quite left me, and the haze of my vision combined with the light made Lucretia’s features as she worked diligently to undress me appear absolutely angelic. She gently untucked my blouse from the waistband of my ankle-length skirt. Her other hand swirled a bit of rag in a small porcelain water dish near my elbow. She began to unfasten my buttons. I allowed her to undo all but the final two over my chest before I grew nervous.
I cleared my throat. “Lucretia—”
She drew her hands away from my breasts. “Try not to move too quickly.”
I was sprawled atop the pastor’s modest wooden desk. Lucretia supported me by my shoulders as I sat up. As blood rushed back into my brain and my wits returned, so too did the images of the horror I’d just witnessed in the church. My hands began to shake with the memory, and Lucretia held them between her own, her palms damp with water from the washbasin.
“Tell me it was all a hallucination.” I could not bring myself to look into her eyes, into the eyes of someone who could hurt a child. “Tell me I am going mad, please. You could never do what I have seen you do.”
“Madness would be a simpler explanation,” she said. “But a false one.”
She wiped her thumb across my cheek, and as my pulse quickened I turned my face from hers.
“Elizabeth, I must examine you for bites.”
“Bites? What sort of bites?” I could only think of mosquitoes. “Do you think— Was it malaria? That fevered girl—?”
“It’s no fever,”4 Lucretia said. Her fingers went to my final two fastened buttons. “It is an infection. That unfortunate child had it, and the Cooke child as well. And now the father is infected. The disease is spread through a transmission of bodily fluids. One bite—the saliva of the infected introduced into the veins of the victim—is all it takes.”
She spoke low but sternly, inviting no debate, while her fingers brushed the skin along my breastbone, inviting goose pimples. My blouse slipped down my shoulders and I arched my back, a reflex that once I realized I had done it I was too embarrassed to undo. Lucretia placed a gentle hand between my shoulder blades and slowly ran the fingers of her other hand underneath my undergarments. It was here that I gave serious consideration to the idea that this “bite examination” might be pretense, but I was certainly not going to deny Lucretia her pleasure.
“What,” I forced my tongue, gone dry, to move. “What does it do? The infection.”
“First, it kills you. It attacks your organs, beginning with your heart.” Lucretia’s hand rested against the flesh covering my own heart. Her eyes found mine, that unnatural green vibrating with purpose. “Once it has shut down your body, it reanimates your corpse.”
I gasped, raising my chest against her palm, and she turned to the washbasin as she continued. “That girl you encountered out there—I’m positive she is the pastor’s granddaughter.” She brought the moistened rag to wipe away a crimson spot on my collarbone—a droplet of the granddaughter’s stained spittle, most like. “When we first met Pastor Simon and heard his granddaughter’s wail, I feared she might have been succumbing to the illness. But this is the Devil’s disease,5 and if anyone would be spared, I thought, certainly it would be the granddaughter of a man of God.” She dropped the bloody rag into the washbasin and pulled my blouse back over my shoulders. “I was foolish to hope such things. The Devil’s disease spares no one.”
She began to refasten my buttons. I asked, “Where are Pastor Simon and his family?
“I’ve locked them in the basement.” She ran her hands down the length of my skirt, checking for rips or tears the size of a little girl’s teeth. “I fear they are all sombies now.”
I bent forward and caught her wrist at my knee. “Sombies?”
She pulled away from me and continued her skirt check. When she reached my ankles, she moved her hands beneath my hem and felt the flesh there. “Somnambulists. Walkers through the repose of death. The shortening to ‘sombie’ was a crude jest of one ancestor or another, but it persevered.”6
Slowly, she walked her fingers over the flesh of my calves, circling every inch at least twice as she moved up toward my knees. I closed my eyes and shivered through the heat.
“How do you . . . ” My breath caught in my chest as her fingers found the sensitive skin at the back of my knees. “How do you know all this?”
“My family belongs to a secret order of sombie quellers.”
I could not stop my breath from coming in rapid, shallow bursts as her hands crested my knees and skimmed over my thighs. My breath catches even now, writing this some forty years later, and I am tempted to embellish the truth. Alas, her hands stopped abruptly. I opened my eyes to watch her pull the hem back to my ankles and settle it prudently.
“The Mott family are quellers as well. Our history with the Devil’s disease dates back centuries.”7 She patted my leg as though I were a treasured pet and she my doting grandmother. “No bites,” she said.
She moved away from me and all my heat went with her. I pushed myself up from the pastor’s desk to stand beside it. “If the disease dates back centuries, that means there is no cure.”
“No.” She took the tainted wash water to the window to release it, but encountered some difficulty opening the pane and so left the dish on the sill. She sighed heavily and turned back to me. “There are no preventative measures either. Once a person is bitten, they are already dead. When they reanimate as a sombie, it is important for you to understand that what you are seeing—the thing that looks like a person and walks like a person and hungers like a person—that thing is only a corpse. Do you understand, Elizabeth? You cannot kill a sombie. You only de-animate it. Understand?”
“Yes.” I swallowed hard, thinking of the pastor’s granddaughter, the viscera lacing her chin. “I think so.”
Lucretia stepped toward me and gripped my upper arm. My breathing quickened again and I brought my hand to her bare neck. She did not stop me, but stared me down with her emerald eyes, asking, “Can you do it?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, leaning into her. My lips barely grazed hers before she stiffened her arm and held me at bay.
“No, Cady. De-a
nimate a sombie. Can you do that?”
Sighing, I leaned further into her, resting my forehead against her chin because, in my distraught state, she was finally allowing me to touch her. “Lucretia. I do believe I have gone mad.”
One finger beneath my chin, she titled my head up to look at her. “And I with you,” she said. Her breath was hot against me, her mouth so close I could fight against it no longer. I brought my mouth to hers and kissed her. When she did not resist me, I opened our mouths and gave her my tongue and kissed her as deeply as my shame would allow.
After a time—an oasis of bliss amongst the terrors behind and awaiting us—Lucretia broke our kiss and stepped away from me. She retrieved a thick disciplinary paddle that hung on one wall of the Pastor’s office and handed it to me. “Will you help me, Cady?”
Her taste was fresh inside me, and tasting her, I wanted more. Taking the paddle, I could think of only one thing standing between us. “Wouldn’t you prefer your husband?”
“He has an entire congregation to keep calm.” She took up one of the tall brass candleholders that sat near the door and tested its weight by slapping it several times against her palm. “I think we drew the longer straw on this one.”
It was rare to hear such a jest from her, at least lately. I hefted the paddle. “What do I do?”
“Stay behind me. Sombies are slow but do not let them get too close; if they can smell you, their hunger quickens and so do their reflexes.”
“You keep saying that, about their hunger. For what do they hunger?”
Lucretia reached out and with one hand fastened a button near my neck that she had missed. “Your flesh.”
She tore her eyes from me and cleared her throat, heading toward a door at the back of the Pastor’s office. “You can break as many bones as you like,” she said over her shoulder. “But the sombies will not stop moving until you take out their brains.” She threw open the door to the darkened basement staircase. “Aim for their skulls.”
The stench reached us first—the granddaughter’s slaughterhouse odor tenfold. I put my arm around my face and breathed into my elbow as I followed Lucretia’s descent down the staircase. There was a scuffling some yards away from us in the darkness and a symphony of low moans started up the instant our feet hit the basement’s dirt floor. I clutched at Lucretia’s back, on the verge of shouting that we should go back up for a candle, but Lucretia was ahead of me. Deftly, she turned and struck a match against the rough edge of my disciplinary paddle. The match head was a pinprick of light until she threw it out into the darkness and it caught in the soiled rags of the thing that used to be Pastor Simon.
He was on his knees in the dirt—I saw quickly that his kneeling was not in prayer but rather due in large part to his vivid lack of either calf. The match’s flame licked along the lapel of his torn shirt. As I watched it dance up his torso toward his gaping, black hole of a mouth, another pinprick of light flew against him, and another, until he was engulfed. Strangely, his moaning remained steady, a yearning rather than a wail of pain.
“Here they come,” Lucretia said.
And come they did.
By the wavering light of the burning pastor, I followed the slow progression of three shadows further back into the basement until they revealed themselves as the shambling forms of the pastor’s unfortunate family: An older woman, the pastor’s wife, whose face was half gone, replaced by pulsating fly larvae; and her adult children, the man moving with sure strides on his supposedly dead legs, the only indications of his corpsehood being the loss of an arm that had been messily amputated at the shoulder and a fist-sized hole bored straight through his neck; his wife, the pastor’s daughter-in-law, was more pieces than wholes; it looked as though rats—or perhaps her own forsaken daughter—had gnawed at every exposed bit of flesh.
The son moved ahead of the others, taking no care to avoid stepping over his aflame father, who writhed miserably in the dirt. The son’s trouser leg caught fire but this, too, did not slow him down. When he was within striking distance of Lucretia, she brought the brass candlestick down a fraction of a second too late. It glanced off his left ear and smacked down onto his shoulder; I heard the bone splinter and saw the blood spurt, but the sombie son did not even recoil. He held his arms out for Lucretia and bared his dripping teeth at her. She wound up for another shot, but I saw the pastor’s wife closing in on her flank.
“On your right!” I shouted to her, and moved in to block the son’s path. I swung low to take him out at the knees, but misaimed and found his hip. This tripped him up slightly but he did not fall; his moan renewed itself.
Somewhere behind me, I heard the thwack of Lucretia’s candleholder against soft flesh and decaying bone. I swiped again for the son’s knees and to my astonishment he sidestepped me. Then his hands were gripping my shoulders and his moan was directly against my ear, the smell of death striking me like a physical thing.
In a panic, I threw my elbow up and connected with his jaw, which clacked and splintered. I swatted at his head with the paddle, connecting a few times until his grip on me loosened enough so I could stumble back. My ankle began to burn, and I looked to see a hand of flame curling around my flesh.
Pastor Simon had managed to crawl his way into my fray. Furiously, I stamped on his arm, as if trying to put him out. The arm broke off at the elbow and I was able to rip free. I backed up a pace but he continued to pull himself forward on his remaining arm.
I wanted to shout for Lucretia but she was somewhere in the shadows, grappling with the wife and daughter; I could hear her candleholder thwacking, a reassuring sound in the near-darkness. I will confess—for near the end of one’s life is the time for confessions—that I not only thought about fleeing from that basement but took several steps toward that end. The son caught me, however, and clamped his injured jaw upon my shoulder, but could not summon the pressure enough to break my skin. A few well-placed whacks with the paddle, punctuated by my own hoarse screams, and the son finally fell. I did not stop whacking his head until there was no head left to whack.
The flames had nearly died away upon the Pastor’s back. He was nearly a skeleton, his moaning died out too, as he struggled, even then, to pull his bones across the floor. I brought the paddle down edgewise and severed his skull from his neck. The final flame whiffed out and I was sheathed in darkness. I listened for Lucretia’s thwacking but was met with silence: no grunting, no scuffling, no moaning.8
Backing toward the staircase, I called for her. Nothing. I held the paddle out before me, prepared to start swinging wildly, and backed up until my heels met the bottom stair. I turned to ascend, too cowardly to wait or to search, but something pulled against my elbow and I sliced the paddle through the air. It slapped hard against Lucretia’s palm as she caught it. A little light from the office upstairs revealed only one side of Lucretia’s face, slick with a sombie’s excretions, one emerald eye gone dark. She frightened me then, more than any walking corpse.
“It’s finished,” she said.
We ran up the stairs and locked the door behind us. Lucretia held me tightly as I struggled to control my breathing. Repeatedly I closed my eyes against the things I had just seen, the things I had just done. I dropped the paddle on the floor.
“You do this,” I said, forcing myself to look at her dirtied face. “You do this so easily.”
She wiped some of the horror off onto her sleeve. “Why do you assume because I do it well that it is easy?”
I felt the gunk smeared across my own face. “Lucretia, I . . . I don’t think I can do this again. Mister Cooke is my neighbor. He’s not altogether a bad man, only uneducated and poorly—”
“James can handle the Cookes.” She leveled her eyes at me and instantly they softened. “You were braver today than I have ever seen you. I would not ask any more of you today.”
“And tomorrow?” I wiped my thumb across her bottom lip, which trembled beneath my touch. “What will you ask of me tomorrow?”
&nbs
p; She leaned closer, but stopped herself. “Cady. Your husband.”
I pushed away from her, exasperated. “You hide behind him like a shield. What of your husband?”
“James and I have an arrangement,” she said. “We married out of familial obligation. We are, neither one of us, bound to the other.”
I smiled and reached for her. “All settled then.”
She held me back. “Cady—”
“Do you think I want to hurt my husband? I do love him, do not mistake me. Only . . . only he is not here. And I . . . I . . . I am so hungry.”
We were pressed together again, and her mouth was almost mine, but just then the office door creaked open and Martha strode into the room. Lucretia spun away from me as if I were aflame.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Martha said unapologetically. She looked at Lucretia. “Pastor Simon?” Lucretia gave a curt nod. “Good. We need your help out here. The Cooke wife is insisting we release her husband and son, and everyone is restless to leave. James can’t convince them alone. We need both of you.”
Lucretia nodded again and followed Martha out of the office. Wearily, I stooped to retrieve the well-used disciplinary paddle and left the office as well.
In the spirit of confession, I must tell you I have paused in my retelling to pour myself a glass of brandy. A tall glass. All that I have recounted to you here is nothing in comparison to what I must now put to paper for the first time. Not to belittle the lost lives of the Simons, or the horrible sin Lucretia and I perpetuated in that basement, but what we allowed to become of the Cookes . . . . Lucretia would say—and did say then—that it was an unfortunate but necessary sacrifice. She spoke a lot about sacrifices that night. I did not possess the constitution to argue against her then—in anything—but I worry now. Will I be denied the Kingdom for my sins that night? In the fight against the Devil’s disease, are all sins forgiven? Or is it just your poor luck—your pitiable fate—to fall into such a mess and be forced to choose between Eternal Life and “sacrifices”?