by Bryan Smith
“Uh-huh, that’s right,” Cletus added. “We heard what happened to Janelle and figured you might be in the market for a replacement bitch.”
The goddess was staring into Daphne’s eyes with an avidity that mirrored the expressions of the diner’s patrons. But Daphne had a feeling hers was a different kind of hunger, a hunch given extra credence when the woman’s eyes went to her bosom and lingered there. “You may be right, boys. Get her clothes off.”
“Yes, ma’am, Mama Hunt,” Floyd said.
Daphne ignored the impulse to resist when she felt the men’s hands tugging at her clothes. She didn’t even react when Floyd ran his callused fingers up her leg after removing her denim shorts. She expected violation by now. Struggling would only make things worse in so hopeless a situation—said hopelessness being emphasized by the fate of the woman the butchers had taken down from the beam. She was on a wooden table with a clean strip of wax paper stretched across it. One of the butchers wrenched the blade from her back and forced her to lie flat on the table. She screamed and struggled, the bloody bandages affixed to her ankle stumps sliding over the wax paper. This lasted until the other butcher took the cleaver from his partner and separated her head from her shoulders with a single practiced whack.
But another factor contributed to Daphne’s disregard of the molestation being visited upon her. “You’re Mama Hunt?”
The goddess smiled at Daphne’s incredulity. “I don’t often converse with sows, but the boys are right. You may be a special case. I am actually the fourth Mama Hunt. My name is Vivian Hunt, and I am the latest in a line of Hunt women to run this proud establishment.”
“Why am I a special case?”
Mama Hunt snapped a hand across Daphne’s face.
“That’s for your insolence,” Vivian said, glaring at her. “I said you may be a special case. Your true value has not been determined.”
Vivian cupped one of Daphne’s now bare breasts in a blood-flecked hand. She squeezed it and pushed at the nipple with the ball of a thumb. This time Daphne had to work a little harder to conceal her distaste for the way she was being handled. There were other explorations as the woman’s hand came away from her breast, her fingertips trailing lightly over Daphne’s taut stomach muscles before sliding between her legs. She probed at Daphne’s sex for a few moments before she abruptly withdrew her hand.
Floyd coughed nervously. “There a problem?”
Vivian snorted. “She’s dry as a bone.”
“Well, hold on a minute,” Cletus put in, sounding concerned in the way of a used car salesman who senses he’s on the verge of losing a commission. “She’s just scared. You get her settled in up at your place, you might have a whole different situation.”
A thoughtful look crossed Vivian’s features as she gave Daphne another up-and-down appraisal. “Possible. I need to think on it some. For now you boys get the standard rate.” She cut a look at the kidnappers to head off additional protests. “If I change my mind, you’ll get the bonus. In the meantime…” She snapped her fingers at one of the aproned men. “Klaus! Hoist this one up.”
One of the butchers turned away from his bloody work. Clutched in his right hand was a bone saw. He had been using it to cut through the dead woman’s ribs. Klaus shook the bone saw, flinging bits of slimy tissue from the blade. He glanced at Daphne, his gaze briefly flicking downward in a meaningful way. “Shall I remove the feet?”
Daphne started shaking. “No. Please. No. Whatever you want, I’ll--”
Vivian slapped her again, harder this time. “No, Klaus. I may yet have an alternate use for this one. I’ll decide what to do with her in the morning. Get her hoisted.”
Klaus nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
The butchers abandoned their work on the dead woman and approached Daphne. Floyd relinquished his hold on her as he and Cletus moved out of the way. Daphne started crying as the butchers got to work, pleading insensibly while Klaus shackled her wrists and affixed the iron manacle to the long length of heavy chain. Once this was done, the other man started turning a crank and the chain began to rise, sliding inside the pulley wheel’s groove.
Daphne shot a pleading look at Vivian. “Don’t do this. Whatever it is you want from me, you can have it.”
Vivian said nothing.
Floyd scowled at Daphne. “My advice, girl? Next time your pussy better be wet.”
The last loop of coiled chain came off the concrete floor and began to rise, tugging Daphne’s wrists upward with it. “What?”
Cletus brayed laughter. “You sure are slow on the uptake. Next time Mama Hunt plays with your lady parts, get turned on. That way, you get to live, maybe, and we get paid.”
Then they were all laughing—Vivian, the redneck goons, and the blood-spattered butchers. The chain kept rising and Daphne’s feet came off the ground. Soon she had an aerial view of the cluster of grinning maniacs. She was surrounded by madness, trapped in a place where cannibalism was a proud tradition, and her best hope was that one of these human monsters would opt to keep her as some kind of sex slave rather than eating her.
Daphne finally started screaming again.
And the monsters kept on laughing.
7.
Sienna Baker struggled with the weight of a heavy, loaded-down backpack as she trudged down the long, tree-shaded country lane leading to the old antebellum home where her cousin Arlene lived. From a distance, the house looked as grand as she imagined it must have in the pre-Civil War days, with its gabled roof and tall columns. But she had been here many times before and knew the illusion crumbled well before visitors could reach the porch. Some of the windows were boarded and paint was peeling everywhere you looked. Walking on the porch was always an exercise in queasiness, with the way the old planks bowed beneath even a light tread. Sienna always fancied she could hear the termites chewing their way through the ancient, rotting wood.
There was no evidence of anyone around as she climbed the steps to the porch. In the olden days there would have been a constant buzz of activity. Her imagination supplied vivid images and sounds from that bygone time. She could almost hear the barked commands of the white minders the family had employed to oversee the activities of the slaves. And if a slave failed to adequately perform his or her duties, the crack of a whip would have resounded through the countryside. Sienna didn’t have to close her eyes to conjure the image of the whip biting into brown flesh or any of the rest of it. History was very close here and ghosts were all around her.
And so was the lingering legacy of all that human misery. Sienna was a student and fan of the dark side of history. All that endless pain and suffering down through the ages fed into her own darkness, which had been growing ever since the death of her father and the fall of Hopkins Bend. And soon it would be her turn to inflict misery on a great many people, including some of her kinfolk.
Sienna’s scheme revolved around the wild notion that she could raise the dead. Most folks would have deemed this a dubious idea at best, but she had never shared her plans with anyone. This was in part because she had no one to tell. Her sister was a useless idiot and she had no close friends. But the secrecy had more to do with her intent to resurrect her father, which would have been perceived as crazy by just about anyone, the man having been dead for years.
People in these parts had good reason to believe in the existence of the supernatural, but true command over unnatural elements was believed to be a rare thing. You had to have the knack for it in the first place, which few did. And even if she had been known to possess the talent, it was unlikely anyone would have believed her experienced enough to have mastered it.
But that impression would have been wrong.
She did have the knack and she had developed it to an extent even those who knew the truth about supernatural things would have found shocking.
Sienna had known it since an early childhood visit to Mama Weeks, the old witch who’d lived out in a remote part of the woods around Hopkins Bend back then. H
er father had taken her to meet the woman as a special treat. Everyone in Hopkins Bend knew the stories about Mama Weeks and her special talents, and Sienna had grown up enchanted by the tales. The old crone had sensed her latent ability and had counseled against letting any of the adults in her life know about it, advice Sienna had heeded to this day.
She banged on the old plantation home’s weathered door with the base of a fist. The door rattled in a disconcerting way. Kicking it open would be a simple matter. The flimsy door didn’t offer much in the way of security, but it didn’t matter much. The home’s remote location made it an unlikely target for robbers. Also, people in Bedford knew Arlene Baker didn’t have much worth stealing. All the treasures formerly housed under this roof were long gone, many taken by a rampaging Union army in the wake of the War of Northern Aggression. It was a wonder Arlene had been able to hang onto the place this long.
Total silence from the other side of the door.
Sienna eased the backpack’s straps off her weary shoulders. She had been walking for hours and though she had the stamina typical of a person her age, she was feeling the strain. Also wearing on her was the lingering anger caused by the confrontation with Jodi. She hadn’t planned to flip out the way she had, but something about walking in on her sister while that idiot cousin of theirs was taking the hypocritical bitch from behind set her off.
Oh, well. It was probably for the best.
She had been yearning to get out from under Jodi’s thumb for a long time. And anyway, it was past time she started putting her resurrection scheme in motion. Getting the boot had given her the proper motivation. She just needed a temporary place to stay while she finessed the last details of how to make it happen.
Arlene Baker was a woman who’d endured more than her fair share of misfortune. Her husband, Delmont, was tending to his husbandly duties less and less all the time, leaving his crippled wife to fend for herself. It was shameful, really, though for Sienna’s purposes his neglect was a good thing. It meant Arlene would be lonely and desperate for company. Surely she’d have no problem letting her young cousin stay with her a while.
Sienna banged on the door again.
Still no response.
She put a hand on the doorknob and gave it a tentative twist. The knob turned easily in her hand and the door’s ancient hinges creaked loud enough to make her cringe as she began to ease it open. She called out for Arlene as she poked her head through the opening and peered into a large foyer shrouded in gloom. When no one answered, she entered the house, cringing again at the squeaking of the hinges as she closed the door behind her.
Thanks to the bright sunlight filtering in through the few windows that weren’t boarded, the foyer wasn’t completely dark. Sienna found a light switch by the door. She flipped it and was relieved to see electric lights flicker on. That the power hadn’t been cut off struck her as a minor miracle, given the state of the place, which looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in many months, if not years. There were cobwebs in the corners and dust everywhere.
The filth didn’t bother her overly much, having spent a portion of her childhood living in an ancient shack in the woods. Her branch of the Baker clan had moved on to better things even before the army cleansing of Hopkins Bend, but she remembered well how it was to live without electricity and modern conveniences. She would have no problem tolerating an extended stay in this place. And, hell, if worse came to worse and Arlene sent her on her way, she could sleep in the woods. She had done it before and could do it again.
But hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
She called out to her cousin again. “Arlene! It’s Sienna. I need to talk to you!”
At first there was only more of that maddening silence. Moments later, however, a faint groan emanated from somewhere indeterminate.
Sienna raised her voice. “Arlene, is that you? Let me know where you are and I’ll come help.”
The groan came again, marginally louder this time. Sienna turned her head in the direction of the shadowy spiral staircase that led to the second floor. The sound had come from up there, she was pretty sure.
Carrying her backpack by a strap, she started up the winding staircase, wincing at the way the rotting wood groaned beneath her footsteps. Some in her family believed this place should have been demolished long ago. At times like this, it was hard not to agree with that sentiment. She hoped like hell she wouldn’t fall through the goddamn stairs. That would put a serious crimp in her plans, in addition to maybe killing her. One of the steps bowed so deeply when she put her foot on it she had to hop over it. She nearly stumbled when she did this and reached out in panic to grab the banister. The way the bannister wobbled when she seized it indicated it wouldn’t take much more pressure for the slats to crack and give way.
An impulse to turn around and get the fuck out of this place came and went. She was always saying how she wasn’t afraid of death. To the contrary, she was fascinated by it and spent many hours every day fixating on the subject. While this assertion wasn’t without some basis in fact, she often said such things just to freak people out. The truth was she reveled in her weirdo image. And in order to keep buying into her own image, she couldn’t let a little thing like fear of grievous bodily injury sway her from doing what she had come here to do.
So, once she had steadied herself, she carefully released her grip on the brittle banister and continued up the stairs, holding her breath until she reached the second floor landing. Warped floorboards creaked beneath her feet as she started down the long hallway. Arlene groaned again upon hearing the creaks. There was a distinct tinge of suffering in the sound, a suggestion of something direr than simple discomfort. Sienna wondered how long it had been since Delmont had last checked on Arlene. It did seem as if he’d been spending more and more time at Jodi’s house in recent months, almost to the point of being an unofficial resident.
The smell hit Sienna before she had taken more than a half dozen steps. Her nose crinkled against the foul odor, an apparent intermingling of piss, shit, and vomit. By the time she reached the hallway’s halfway point, it was making her eyes water. She had another impulse to turn and flee. Taking up residence in a decaying house was one thing, but she had serious doubts about her ability to cope with the human mess that was about to confront her.
The doors to most of the second floor rooms stood open. There was no furniture in any of the rooms she passed. They had been stripped bare decades ago, the items that had survived the war looting having been sold off to pawnshops and antique dealers. Most of the windows she saw were boarded. The one room that was still furnished and occupied was at the very end of the hallway, which struck Sienna as awfully damned inconvenient for an invalid.
Sienna entered the room and gasped as she saw the wasted form of her cousin sprawled across the sagging mattress of a very old four-poster bed. The sheets were soiled with stains of varying colors, the predominant one being diarrhea-brown. Arlene lifted her head off a thin pillow and groaned again as Sienna approached the bed with great reluctance, walking slowly after setting her backpack on the floor just inside the door.
The woman was only some dozen years her senior, but she looked decades older than that. Her hair was frizzy and brittle and had fallen out in clumps from a scalp dotted with raw-looking scabs. Her skin was a disturbing shade of gray. The legs were the worst, emaciated with badly atrophied muscles. She had been paralyzed below the waist for years, but the advanced state of deterioration was well beyond anything Sienna had expected. Delmont could face charges of neglect for letting this happen. Even in a place as backwards as Bedford, you had to face the music if this kind of thing came to light. For that to happen, however, someone would have to alert the authorities.
And Sienna had no intention of doing that.
She had no idea who would have legal control over this property with her cousin out of the picture, but it wouldn’t be anyone inclined to do her any favors. The truth behind Arlene’s “accident” was well-known
within the family. Delmont had tossed her down the stairs after a drunken late night argument about his fooling around with Jodi. Arlene, being a typical codependent alcoholic herself, had covered for him, saving him from legal consequences. Sienna was pretty sure that wouldn’t be possible this time, which might lead to the law taking a closer look at the previous incident. And if that happened, she really would be permanently cast out of the Baker clan, which, yeah, would make staying here problematic.
Arlene coughed and hacked up a huge wad of green phlegm that spattered the front of her already slime-encrusted gown. She braced her palms on the mattress and her scrawny arms shook as she struggled to raise her torso. There were tears in her beseeching eyes as she looked at Sienna and said, “Please…help…please…”
Sienna forced a smile. “Oh, I’ll help you.”
More tears from the pitifully withered woman. “Oh, thank you. Thank Jesus.”
Sienna infused her voice with the most sincere-sounding fake sympathy she could muster. “Don’t strain yourself, you poor thing. You’ve been through a lot, but it’ll all be better soon. Lie back and close your eyes. I’ll take care of everything.”
Arlene sniffled as she ceased struggling to sit up. “Bless you, child. Bless you.” Some more hacking and coughing followed this outpouring of gratitude.. She then heaved a rattling breath and said, “You’re Jodi’s sister, aren’t you? What do they call you?”
“Sienna.”
A weary smile dimpled the corners of Arlene’s mouth. “Yes. That’s right. I remember now. Such a lovely name. Sienna?”
Sienna cocked an eyebrow. “Yes?”
Instead of a reply, more hacking and coughing ensued. This time it was coming from deep in the woman’s lungs. She was having tremendous difficulty bringing up whatever she was trying to expel (an actual chunk of lung, from the sound of it). Her eyes got big and she appeared to have trouble breathing for a long moment. Rather than rushing to help, Sienna stayed at the foot of the bed and watched Arlene struggle, thinking what a huge favor the busted-up old bitch would be doing her by expiring right here and now. But then a yellow froth bubbled out of her mouth and she subsequently spat out an enormous wad of phlegm.