Kornwolf

by Tristan Egolf

  For the life of him, Abraham couldn’t understand it. This was unlike his wife, he claimed. Normally, he would’ve had to assume, by now, that they’d gotten into an accident. But no reports of a crash had been filed, and the hospitals hadn’t admitted them either. It didn’t make sense. Half of their district was combing The Basin in search of an answer. The Hostlers’ oldest daughter had set out to look for them only moments before, while Abraham himself, with two of their children, had been left behind to watch over the house. So far, no update—not one piece of news—had come back. It was driving him mad with worry.

  Fatty was just beginning to feel for the man when a roar broke out from the west: what sounded at first like a chain saw at three hundred decibels, tearing and grinding in starts, soon to lead into a gigantic trash can lid being smashed by a hundred-pound hammer, and on—to a ruptured fan belt slapping the underside of an engine hood …

  Fannie was emerging from a narrow path through the corn to the edge of the Schlabach property the moment a scream pierced the deafening roar, like a thousand demons plummeting hellbound …

  The first things she saw were the torches: what looked to be three different martin houses wrapped in gas-soaked bedsheets, burning on twenty-foot poles. An array of movement proceeded within their field of illumination below. Even from two hundred yards, she could make out the overturned cruiser, off to the left. Figures were gathered around it, thrashing in time with the music while beating the vehicle’s underside with sticks and pipes. Their movements flared in a wash of red. They were baying like coyotes. One of them reared up and, hollering, shattered a passenger window.

  Behind them, between a stack of boxes and what had to (appeared to) be a tractor, standing directly beneath a torch, someone (a young man) dressed in a flowing gown was spinning around in circles. Somebody else (a young woman) ran by with a sack on her head, trailing a parasol. Surrounding a second pile of lumber between the house and the barn stood a crowd. A couple of bare-chested young men were splashing the wood with pints of lighter fluid. Behind them, piles of assorted merchandise filled the clearing. On drawing nearer, Fannie discerned the outline of common garage appliances: rubber hoses and motorbike helmets, and plastic rakes—and everyone freely picking through them, throwing together unlikely costumes: a couple of girls in inflatable life jackets, bathed in the firelight, guzzling spirits—behind them, young men with pails on their heads, thrashing in time with the hellbound descent.

  Fannie had never heard anything like it. The tempo was unbelievably furious. The instrumentation was truly unreal. It sounded like some kind of killing machine: a corn thresher vaulted by nitrous oxide, storming the hills at a thunderous charge—visions of indiscriminate slaughter, a marching of thousands, unbridled savagery.

  Fannie couldn’t begin to conceive of it—even though, yes, it moved. It rocked. There was something so wholly malevolent driving every measure, it made her sick.

  The young men, with cans of kerosene, gas or whatever it was they were splashing the wood with, backed away from the pile as a pair of headlights spilled from the opposite cornfield. A match was struck. The side of the barn flared up in a blaze of yellow and orange. The vehicle, badly beaten, a junker, slid into a fishtail, spinning mud. Over the amplified clamor of music, a buzz of cheering arose from the crowd. Several more people came out of the barn for a look of their own, stepping into the light. Most of the field was now glowing yellow. Fannie could make out the vehicle now—the one Colin had picked up her mother in while driving.

  Something was wrong with her equilibrium. Suddenly, the world was stuck on an angle. Her legs felt weak underneath her, like she was slogging through quicksand. She struggled to keep her footing. The closer she drew to the gathering, the more she could feel herself drawn by the madness sustaining it. Just as, in turn, she felt strangely aware, as never before, of the glow of the moon—that atrocious music, damn it to hell, continued to pain and captivate her.

  She halted, trying to gather her wits—to breathe, to recover / regain her senses. She was still thirty yards away from the barn. No one appeared to have spotted her yet.

  Hundreds of objects all over the yard were now visible. The most conspicuous being: a towering stack of beer cases, flanked by a pair of metal kegs, and surrounded by people in varying states of undress, all rearranging their makeshift costumes. Around them, a line of English bicycles lay like dominoes splayed in the grass. Someone ran by in a sequin dress. Somebody picked up a pogo stick, laughing. A group of young women—Mary Brechbuhl, Fannie’s replacement instructor among them—sat routing through baskets of jewelry and hatpins. A giant rug was spread out in the grass. There were Styrofoam coolers and kerosene lanterns and TVs and dozens of bottles of liquor. Someone was casting a rod and reel. The door of a soda machine hung open. The stuffed head of a moose was lifted above the crowd and twirled about. A grandfather clock was thrown onto the fire. A body—what looked to be Samuel Hoff—leapt over it, cutting through roaring flames. Uninjured, he came down, whooping. He turned on the others and shouted.

  And here they came …

  A second and third body shot through the flames. Soon to be followed in rapid succession—from every direction, hooting and hollering—over the blackening grandfather clock. Somebody’s costume—a fabric streamer—caught fire. Then came a midair collision, a crunch that left Amos Yoder (by the sound of his squalling) in the coals below, at a scramble. Around him, shrieks of laughter went up. The car was still spinning mud by the creek. A mob was still beating the cruiser with sticks: its windshield hung together in shards. The impact of iron on buckling steel carried over the fields in a rhythmic clatter. Someone appeared from the barn in an officer’s hat. He pointed a gun at the overturned vehicle, shouted and, waving, fired. Everyone jumped on him, kicking and yelling. Disarmed, he was forced to the ground and beaten. The car horn wailed from the edge of the field. The music’s tempo quadrupled explosively.

  Fannie knew that this couldn’t last. The Crossbills were making a big enough racket to draw every cop in The Basin in minutes. One could only assume they’d intended as much.

  Or were they completely oblivious?

  Yes, she decided at length, they were. They were out of their minds: whirling amok in a poisoned delirium, gone to the world—they appeared to be under a spell of sorts: hedonic enchantment.

  She skirted around them.

  Blocking the open door to the barn, a back-turned Samuel Hoff stood, chin to the sky and a bottle of whiskey upturned, with his legs spread, urinating all down the door frame. Somebody nudged his back in passing. Fannie managed to squeeze through the opening.

  Into a corridor, flanked on either side by stables and pens, she tripped. The music was painfully loud. Bodies were moving around in the dark all around her. Some were lined up on the stable railings, peering down in motionless silence.

  She crept to a gate and looked over the wall. There were three of them. And one old goat.

  She backed off.

  Stumbling on in disbelief, she emerged from the stable hall into the open, torchlit expanse of the barn’s interior. The roar of the chain saws cut as she entered. A beating of drums rumbled out of a column of speakers and ricocheted all through the building. The smoke from the torches went up through a hole in the roof, obscuring the rafter beams. A staircase ran from the highest loft down three crooked flights to the scene on the ground floor …

  The roar of the chain saws—again, a rampaging thresher at large—resumed from the speakers: sure to brand the attending image indelibly / brutally / clearly / eternally: strung from the rafters, bound by his ankles and wrists in an upended fetal knot—maybe five or six feet off the floor—hanging gagged with electrical tape in a quivering, naked mass of lashed and bleeding fat: the English policeman—the one they called Beaumont.

  A large red candle was jammed in his rectum. The gap in his buttocks was clotted with wax. The wick of the candle was burning, searing the flesh on the backs of his legs and ankles. He squirm
ed on the rope. But in trying to redirect the flame, he worked up momentum. He started to spin. He was squealing in pain. Below, three figures stood lashing him with switches. Behind them, a girl in a ski mask was shoving a sweet potato into a sock. Over by the stereo, gathered directly in front of the speakers, in the blast of it all, a couple of boys lobbed rotten onions, targeting parts of the cop’s anatomy.

  All the while, the music continued, screaming and tearing its way to conclusion:

  Angel of death

  Monarch to the kingdom of the dead

  Infamous

  Butcher

  Angel of Death …

  The final line was repeated as Fannie backed away in mortified silence.

  The rope from which the cop hung bound by his ankles and wrists twisted into a knot. Slowly, he drifted out of his spin. His face was blue.

  The music ended.

  Groaning went up from the stables—a muffled, heavy breathing …

  Soon, the girl in the mask came forward to pummel the cop with her sweet potato. Hovering still, he whimpered. He looked like a bulging maggot in possum wire. For an instant, he lifted his face to the light. One of his eyes had swollen shut. The other rolled back in his head as he gulped in voiceless futility.

  Silence lingered.

  And in that silence, Fannie heard Jonathan.

  Back from the blackening void came the chain saws. The group by the stereo speakers jumped. Slowly, the cop drifted into a counterspin, flinging mucus and tears in an arc. The hurling of onions resumed. Along with a rain of blows from the sweet potato. Followed as soon by the lashing of switches. The music was even more frightening now.

  Yet still, in plummeting hellbound again, Fannie was certain she’d heard his voice: somewhere in here, adrift on a break in the chaos, Jonathan’s cry had gone up. Bound and gagged, he must’ve been—tied up in one of these pens.

  She reentered the stable hall.

  Ephraim was nowhere in sight. And her mother would never have been here. But Jonathan was. She could feel his despair. Somewhere, in one of these pens. He was calling.

  She walked to the end of the main corridor, past the spectatorship lining the rails, into darkness, clear to the opposite end. And there, bound by his neck to a watering trough on the floor of a stable, he lay.

  His hands were tied. His mouth had been gagged with a handkerchief. His face was beginning to bruise. Someone had beaten him up, to be sure. But his bearing was clear. He looked rational, sober—if greatly relieved by the sight of Fannie.

  Gasping, she fell to her knees at his side. At once, the look on his face was clear: she wasn’t to worry about his condition. His injuries, none of them permanent, might be tended to later. Right now, they had to get out of this place while they still had a chance.

  In compliance, she fumbled to untie his bonds. But the rope was too tight. His eyes went wide. He was signaling to take off his gag at once. She worked at the handkerchief, pulling it out.

  He gasped.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He nodded across the hall. “There’s a knife over there.”

  Never flinching, Fannie crept through the dark and lifted a knife from a rack. She came back quickly, dropped to his side and started working the blade to position. The rope around his neck was thick. It took her a minute to make the cut. Freeing his ankles and hands was easier.

  Standing, she helped him get to his feet.

  They embraced for an instant. His body was trembling.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Fannie told him, turning slowly around toward the gate.

  With one arm clutching his ribs and the other in Fannie’s grasp, he followed her lead. They emerged from the pen. They cautiously followed the opposite wall toward the exit door. The stalls to their right sat empty, the doors wide open. The hallway around them was clear. Torchlight spilled through the herding gate, up ahead, lighting the path in a wash of yellow, beyond which a line of backs surrounded a four-way exhibition in progress—everyone huddled in rapt attention. Fannie and Jonathan moved to elude them by staying in the shadows to the edge of the doorway.

  They might have made it, too—albeit to God only knew what next, outside—had Isaac Hoeker not stumbled by at that instant, the worst of all possible moments.

  As it happened, his passing was so abrupt, and so shadowed, he almost missed them. In fact, he did walk by altogether, and was heading for the door—when it started to dawn on him. Flinching, he slowed to a halt. He was already turning before they could break to run for it.

  “Fannie?” He squinted in visibly drunken confusion, gripping a bottle of spirits. “What are you doing?” He swayed, then caught himself, snapping to attention on noticing Jonathan. Looking him over: “What is he—” Uncomprehendingly, Isaac turned to Fannie. “What are you doing with him?” His expression had shifted from puzzled to fully alarmed.

  He dropped the bottle and started forward.

  Bracing, Jonathan edged away from him.

  Fannie stepped in between them. “Stop it, Isaac.”

  He pushed her out of the way and continued for Jonathan.

  She jumped in between them again: “Stop it!” She pitted her weight against him. “NO!”

  He still didn’t listen.

  A holler went up from the crowd on the railings, lost in the blast of the hellbound descent.

  Isaac pivoted, whirled by Fannie and dove for Jonathan. Down they went. Jonathan’s head hit the floor with a crack. Isaac scrambled to straddle him, pinning his arms down. Then he was punching his skull—repeatedly, blow after blow, with abandon.

  Fannie jumped on his back and, screaming, clawed at his face and eyes from behind. Jonathan managed to squirm out from under his weight, then level a kick to his stomach. Isaac heaved. He went over—and along with him, Fannie—sprawling headlong to the floorboards.

  Jonathan heard her cry out on impact. She rolled, gripping the back of her head. Recklessly, Isaac struggled to get to his feet, falling over her. Once more, she cried out … Everyone crowding the stables looked over.

  It was the first time Jonathan Becker had ever thrown a punch in anger. It would have surprised him no less than the crowd to see Isaac, the bully, go down before him had Fannie’s honor not been at stake. Never would Jon have struck anyone, much less Hoeker, without such provocation.

  Isaac went stumbling backwards, falling. Into the column of speakers he crashed. They tumbled. He fell to the floor, unconscious. The music died with an echoing clang.

  For the very first moment all night, there was silence, if only for one resounding instant. Everyone crowded around the pens had turned to gawk in breathless shock. The pounding outside was in deafening absence. Then came a rumbling rush through the doorway, everyone flocking to see what had happened …

  The crowd would be left to deduce as much by the overturned speakers across the floor as by Isaac, beside them, flat on his back, as by Jonathan, now, carefully helping Fannie, his verschproche, get up.

  Holding on to one another, they turned to the crowd on wavering legs.

  Before them, eleven Crossbills and two dozen others—many of whom they had known since childhood—gazed back in quiet alarm. Their expressions were suddenly clear—as though Jon’s uncharacteristic use of force had triggered in each of them an awakening.

  Sensing as much, Jonathan broke the calm with an open-ended suggestion: “You know, it’s not too late to get out of here.”

  No elaboration was needed: only the as-yet sirenless calm—itself underscored by the incontrovertibly damning spectacle Beaumont presented.

  Lord, Beaumont. Someone would have to pay for that. There was no way around it …

  But better to deal with it elsewhere and later than up against the police tonight. One look at Rudolf and Buster Highman would probably have had them all shot on the spot.

  Such, in essence, was Jonathan’s point.

  And, just for an instant, they paused to consider it: everyone standing in wall-eyed shock,
as though lifting from ages of senseless derangement—some of them draped in feed sacks, others with buckets and snowmobile masks on their heads, most everyone painted (or charred) in some manner, and all looking frightened, bewildered and lost.

  In the midst of which, a patter of trickling liquid rose into audibility.

  Everyone looked around. The floor beneath Beaumont was spotted with blossoming droplets. Still in a spin, he was urinating—hosing the air in a figure eight. It sprayed down his chest and face to the ground. The trickle ebbed as he slowed from his whirl.

  That’s when they heard it: up from the dwindling pitter-patter of liquid in dirt: an arrhythmic slapping of footfalls, approaching from the south in lengthy, bounding strides.

  A unified gasp went up. The crowd backed away from the wall. A slam rocked into it.

  Everyone screamed.

  Something was scuttling up the sideboards—clear to the roof. Obscured by smoke and shadow, it dropped through the hole in the ceiling. It landed on a rafter beam, then darted left.

  Jonathan made for the overturned speakers. He dug into one of his pockets while moving. Around him, people were scattering blindly—off to the corners, they huddled in terror.

  Fannie was left at center floor. Standing alone, with a drained complexion, her hair in a sweat-soaked jumble—as frightened as anyone, clearly—she lifted her gaze.

  At the top of the staircase, her cousin appeared.

  On emerging, at last, from the loft, he was nearly unrecognizable, even to her. He was scarcely a thing of this world anymore. His eyes were alight with a hatred so intense, no human being could harbor it.

  And nothing with such an atrocious hairline belonged in an upright posture at all …