The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  “Not tonight, though.”

  “No, not tonight.”

  Charles went cautiously forward, his hands out in front of him, until his foot struck something soft on the ground. He stopped, bent over to prod at it with his finger, felt cloth and stuffing. He picked it up and described its shape with his fingertips, which was vaguely like a person.

  “Ms. . . . er, Theodora,” he said, “if you don’t much mind my asking, what sort of trouble are you and Jojo into here?”

  He heard her exhale loudly while he absentmindedly played with the doll he found.

  “I’m not really sure, Charles. Something bad, I think. Something my husband brought to our town, or at least allowed to stay.” She followed his voice, touched him on the shoulder. “Come on.”

  Together they went back to the street where the weak moonlight fought a losing battle with the cloak of night. Still, they could make out one another’s outlines, and Theodora could see the doll in Charles’s hand.

  She gave a frightened shout and swatted it out of his hand.

  “Where did you find that?” she yelled.

  “I . . . it was on the ground . . . back there, behind the theatre. Gee, I’m sorry. I didn’t know—”

  “No, you didn’t. I apologize for sounding harsh, but . . .”

  Her voice hitched into a soft sob and Charles shifted his weight from one foot to the other, at a total loss.

  “What is it?” he asked, peering at the featureless doll on the pavement.

  “It’s . . .” She cut herself off, made a smacking sound with her lips. “Do you believe in magic, Charles?”

  “Magic?” he said, punctuating it with a curt laugh.

  “I do,” came a small voice from the darkness.

  Charles instinctively put himself between Theodora and the owner of the small voice. “Who’s that?” he demanded to know.

  “My name is Margie Shannon. I’m the pastor’s daughter.”

  “Wha—what are you doing out so late, Margie?” Theodora asked, her tone oddly matronly.

  “I saw you at the midnight show,” Margie said. “What did you see?”

  The cold air bit at Theodora’s neck and she felt her spine shift in her back. She stepped away from Charles so that she could see Margie in the moonlight.

  “My father,” she said. “I saw my father.”

  Margie gave a sad, quiet laugh. “Funny. I saw mine, too.”

  Charles said, “Wait a second, what’s going on here?”

  Margie looked at him, and then at Theodora.

  “I think you two better come with me,” she said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Turning over in the damp, cool dark, Jojo’s head sank into a hole in the dirt floor. Loose earth crumbled into his ears and nose, all loamy and warm and rich. He snuffled and coughed, jerked his shoulders to free himself from the hole, and sharp pain ignited in his skull, neck and back. He’d been worked over in more ways than one. The world tilted and he rolled with it, unable to determine up from down, just falling away from the hole into open space until he jammed up against something metal that clanged and smelled of gasoline. A quiet moan escaped his lips and he raised his hands to his aching face. It was, for the first time in years, a dog’s face, concealed by coarse, matted hair. He moaned again, louder this time.

  He wondered, somewhat desperately, how long he had been down there. More than a week would have had to have passed for his hair to grow so long, unless it was another one of the magician’s tricks. Barker Davis, the showman, he remembered. He’d put him in that awful cage again. . . .

  Again?

  Jojo planted his palms on the dirt floor and heaved himself up to his knees. His head swam; his skull felt like it was full of sloshing fluid. An intense heat ignited in the pit of his stomach and he lurched, vomited into the hole in the floor. Not my best moment, he thought ruefully.

  Get it together, Walker, he scolded himself. Fucking move.

  He spit bile on the floor, wiped his face on his shirtsleeve (Where’s my jacket?) and staggered up to a hunched, standing position. The floor canted and he spread his legs, anchoring his feet. Something jagged scraped against his head and he grabbed at it: a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling, broken. He stumbled away from it, his hands out in the pitch. A dry and dusty shelf fell into his hands. He felt along the edge and surface of it, touched at the shapes of mason jars and rusty gardening tools. A burlap bag and a tangle of frayed twine. A shed, or a garage, he concluded. Or a cellar. The mystery was solved in the next moment when Jojo heard creaking steps a few feet above him—dust rained down from the ceiling wherever the footsteps fell. He ducked his head to keep the dust from his eyes and stabbed a hand into his trouser pocket. A soft laugh escaped his mouth: for once, he actually had a book of matches on him.

  Striking one against the strip on the back of the book, Jojo pinched the end of the match and held the tiny, wavering flame up. It made only a tiny globe of light, and he was nervous about getting it too close to the smell of gasoline on the floor. Still, he got close enough to the shelves to see the mason jars and their murky contents—some ancient preserves, he guessed—along with a spade and a pair of gardening shears and all the other things he’d felt in the dark. He also saw a book, leather-bound, brown and cracked. The match singed his fingertips and he waved it out before striking another.

  The book was a thin volume, the pages terraced from tears and substantial wear. The binding was solid, though, despite its apparent age. Jojo reached for it, took it from the shelf. Unlike everything else in the cellar, the volume was not coated in dust: it had seen recent use.

  He was momentarily afraid it would crumble in his hands. It didn’t. He held the match close as he examined the cover, which was bereft of any text or title—there was only a symbol, printed in chipped, fading gold. The symbol was meaningless to him. He jammed the book in his armpit and dropped the now dead match to the floor. With the next one he found the rickety-looking wooden steps, at the top of which was a closed door. A quick survey of the surrounding walls revealed no other means of egress. Jojo made for the steps and began to climb.

  Halfway up he thought he could hear someone crying on the other side of the door. At the top he was sure of it. He tried the knob, which was as rusty as the tools down on the shelves, but it was frozen in position, locked. The crying went on; decidedly male, Jojo decided. He blew out the match and flicked it out into the darkness.

  “Why?” the weeping man asked someone, or no one.

  Jojo clenched his jaw, tightened his grasp on the book, and rammed his shoulder against the door as hard as he could. The wood splintered and the knob came away, banging noisily against the jamb as bright light flooded his eyes and blinded him.

  Theodora and Margie talked about dolls as they walked west along Main. Charles did not understand half of what they said and he didn’t believe the other half. Mostly he just wished they had a car. All the same, he kept up.

  “Do you reckon your daddy made my Russ’s doll?” Theodora asked. She had already explained to the girl everything that had happened with the strange artifact, including what she found inside of it and what she and Jojo suspected it may have done.

  “I don’t know,” Margie answered. “For all I know, he never made any of ’em. What I saw on that movie screen was only what I was supposed to, ain’t it? I mean, somebody wants me to think daddy made ’em, but that don’t mean much.”

  “But it’s the only lead we have.”

  “Lead? Well—ain’t you the little junior detective, Mrs. Cavanaugh?”

  “Call me Nora Charles.”

  “Fine, and you can call me Asta.”

  Both women laughed, the sort of laughter endemic to the exhausted and afraid. Theodora shot a glance back at Charles, whose mild smile was apparent in the moonlight. His face dripped sweat. He had taken his red jacket o
ff and slung it over one arm; his shirt was darkened with patches of moisture. The women’s playfulness calmed his otherwise frayed nerves to a degree, but he knew it belied a deeper apprehension on their part. Something dangerous awaited them, but he was not about to abandon Jojo’s friends when they needed him.

  It was a long way yet to the church, which gave Charles the opportunity to steel himself—he was completely unprepared, however, for the sound of marching feet coming from Franklin Street. Theodora and Margie were still cutting up—gallows humour, he supposed—and did not see the silhouetted figures appear from the side street, moving in time like a military exercise. He opened his mouth and tried to speak, but only a scratchy squeak came out. His eyes fixed on the dozen or so approaching people, Charles lunged forth and touched Theodora on the shoulder.

  She stopped talking mid-sentence and turned to see what he wanted; instantly she stopped, her attention fixed on the coming people.

  “Who are they?” Charles asked.

  Margie walked on a few more steps before she too stopped to see what was happening. A multitude of heads bobbed up and down as the gathering crowd drew nearer. A cloud shifted away and a shaft of white moonlight illumined some of their faces. Margie recognized Phyllis Gates among them, her high, pinned up hair a dead giveaway.

  “Phyllis?”

  The others saw familiar faces, as well: Charles was shocked to see Jake among the shambling throng, dressed in a surgeon’s white coat, and Theodora yawped upon realizing it was her husband who appeared to lead the brigade. She leapt to the forefront of their three person phalanx and stared Russ down.

  “Russell Cavanaugh,” she boomed, shouting at her husband for the first time in over a decade. “What in the world are you doing wandering the streets at this hour with these people?”

  “What did you see?” he seethed through clenched, grinning teeth.

  “What did you see?” Phyllis parroted, her glassy eyes trained on Margie.

  Charles stepped back, glaring at Jake.

  “What did you see, Charles?” Jake asked.

  “Hey man, I wasn’t even there,” Charles hollered as he curled his hands into fists.

  Theodora stiffened, her face a mask of rage and fear combined. The entourage continued on, shuffling toward them, Russ ever at the head.

  “What did you see?” he repeated, over and over. “What did you see?”

  “Muh . . . Mrs. Cavanaugh,” Margie stammered as she began to shake.

  “Charles,” Theodora snapped. “Go get the doll.”

  “The doll?”

  “Just get it!”

  Flustered, Charles sped back up the street from where they had come. As the night swallowed him up, Margie pressed in close to Theodora’s back.

  “What do they want?”

  “I don’t know,” Theodora said. “And I don’t think I want to know.”

  “Is it real?”

  “Shhh.”

  She reached behind her, grabbed Margie by the waist and stepped backward several paces with her. By then the steadily approaching group was close enough for Theodora to clearly make out the bloodstains spattering nearly all of them.

  “We’re changing,” said a fat man Margie recognized from the drugstore.

  Russ regarded his wife quizzically, as though she were the one with blood on her clothes rather than him. He cocked his head to one side and his solid black eyes glinted in the weak light.

  “We’re changing, Theodora,” he said softly. Several others repeated it in staccato fashion.

  “Change, then,” she barked back at him. “Just leave me out of it.”

  The girl Margie identified as Phyllis stepped out of line, walked quickly ahead of Russ and bared her teeth in a snarl meant to be a smile. To Margie, she said, “Look what I can do.”

  The high-haired girl had barely finished speaking before she threw both arms behind her back and jutted her bony shoulders forward; the rounded knobs of her shoulders cricked and popped loose, enabling her to twist her arms around almost three hundred and sixty degrees. She tied them behind her back like loose straps and lurched forward, pushing her ribs out and lifting one of her legs up and over her head at an impossible angle. To Margie she looked like she had been struck by a train, yet she hopped around in a circle like that, all twisted and broken.

  Phyllis giggled—a shrill, high-pitched titter that made Margie’s skin crawl.

  Theodora’s skin crawled too, though largely from the still dropping temperature. She hugged herself and backed up a little more, her eyes pinned on the contorting girl. She could not so much as look away even when she heard the slapping steps hurtling toward her from the right. Phyllis continued to twist and snap into increasingly gut-churning positions, but at least the others had stopped advancing to allow her the gruesome performance. Russ seemed to watch her more closely than anyone. A thin rope of saliva unfurled past his lips and dangled precipitously.

  “Maybe we should run,” Margie weakly suggested.

  “We have to wait for Charles,” Theodora reminded her.

  “I’m here,” he rasped, short of breath. “I got the doll.”

  He jabbed it at Theodora, who accepted it with evident distaste. It was identical to the one she found in Russ’s pocket in every respect, at least externally. As to the fetish’s internal contents, she had yet to see.

  Accordingly, Theodora seized the doll tightly, a fist gripping each of its arms, and yanked with all of her strength. The coarse fabric limbs tore loose and the rest of the doll dropped to the street. At the same instant, Jake screamed.

  Wood scraped against tile and something crashed as the sob-wet voice cried out, “What in hell?”

  Jojo rubbed his eyes with the knuckle of his thumb and groped blindly forward, anticipating a fight. Instead, the crying man scuttled away from him, knocking over every stick of furniture that got in his way in the process.

  “Wha—what are you?” the man bawled.

  “Can’t you tell?” Jojo groaned. “I’m the goddamn wolfman.”

  The man whimpered. Jojo sighed.

  “Christ, it’s . . . I’m not the wolfman. Who’s there, anyhow? Who are you?”

  He fell back against a wall and skirted the periphery to where the light was not shining so directly at his face. His light blindness ebbed and he began to make out the form of the man cowering before him.

  “Don’t . . . don’t,” he blubbered.

  “Look, I already told you. It was a joke, all right? It’s a fucking congenital disorder, that’s all. . . .”

  The indistinct form collapsed in a heap on the floor as Jojo’s eyes adjusted to the light. He rushed forward and knelt down beside the man.

  “Say, aren’t you the pastor?”

  “I don’t know why I did it,” Shannon babbled. “I never thought—I mean, if God isn’t real, then nothing is, right?”

  “You’re not making any sense, Rev,” Jojo said, running a fur-backed hand over his shaggy face.

  “Was it a test? Did he send you?”

  “Did who send me?”

  Shannon’s eyes popped wide and tears spilled down his cheeks, dripping off his jaw in fat dollops. “The Devil,” he said conspiratorially.

  “Aw, Christ,” Jojo said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any hooch in this shack, have you?”

  Shannon wiped his face and shook his head. “I wouldn’t put a thief in my mouth to steal my mind, demon.”

  “Swell,” Jojo said.

  Jake jerked and flew up into the air, several feet above the ground. His face twisted like his head was in a vice; he squeezed his eyes shut and screamed through clenched teeth. His arms stretched out on either side of him, pulled taut by an invisible force, and something cracked loudly like a gunshot. Margie cried out and Charles muttered a half-silent prayer. The man in the air emitted a deep, mournful mo
an as dark spots, black in the moonlight, bloomed on his erstwhile white coat. His body shuddered violently and his hands stretched far beyond the cuffs of his sleeves as he screamed louder and more horribly by the second. A moment later his arms shot off in either direction as though blown off by some great explosion, and he sank back to the street below, bleeding out into a great black puddle.

  “Oh, oh,” Charles moaned. “Oh, Jake.”

  “Forget it,” Theodora reprimanded him sharply. “That wasn’t Jake. Not anymore.”

  The others gathered around the dismembered body slumped on the macadam, forming a misshapen semicircle of mindless mourners. One by one they began to tremble, their shoulders rocking and hands jerking wildly. Theodora glanced down at the split remains of the doll at her feet, at the familiar innards of dry spices and bits of white bone. As if he was reading her mind, Russ snapped his head around and fixed his black gaze on her. He stretched his mouth open as wide as his jaw would permit and spewed a long, crackling groan. Foamy spittle formed on his lips as the groan went on for an impossibly long time, far past the point his lungs should have deflated. The contortionist, Phyllis Gates, straightened up and stared in the same direction as Russ, and she mimicked the same awful groan. In a matter of minutes—which, to the terrified trio in the street, seemed like hours—every one of the throng ended up facing them and groaning deep, low groans that seemed to come from someplace much deeper than their own trunks.

  Margie squeezed Theodora’s arm tight enough to bruise the flesh and squeaked, “We need to go, Mrs. Cavanaugh. We need to go right now.”

  “I’m not sure we can,” she answered sullenly. “Not without a hell of a lot more dolls, anyway.”

  “We can run,” Charles offered.

  “So can they.”

  In fact, they were already advancing again, albeit slowly. Their horrible groaning kept on without break or pause, not even to take a breath. Whatever they were, whatever had happened to them or been done to them, Theodora was absolutely certain they could no longer be classified as human beings.