Southern House

by Mark Deloy

  “Thank you,” we both said in unison.

  “You family?” she asked, as we were walking away.

  “No,” I answered. “Is that alright?”

  “Yes. It’s just that Talbot hasn’t had a visitor in over a year. He claims he’s outlived all his friends and family. He’s got a girlfriend, though. We have to separate them at least once a week. If you see any Viagra in his room, you let me know. It’s bad for his heart.”

  I thought about asking her if she meant the Viagra was, or the sex, but I just nodded.

  We found the elevator and it chugged up to the second floor. I think we would have been much safer taking the stairs.

  Talbot’s room was just outside the elevator, and, thankfully, his lady friend was absent from his room. I half expected him to be bedridden, but the old man was sitting by the window reading a book. His hair was thin and white, but mostly there. He wore chinos and a buttoned up, flannel shirt, even though it had to be eighty degrees in his room. He had a large bookcase, which I guessed wasn’t normal hospital décor. It was jam-packed with hardback and softcover books. Some of them were fiction, but the majority of them looked to be history books. His reading glasses sat low on his nose and he looked at us over them when we knocked on the doorframe.

  “Come on in,” he said. “Are you lost?”

  “No, sir,” I responded, liking the man immediately. “That is, as long as you’re Talbot Simms.”

  “All my life,” he said, grinning toothlessly. “Except for a stretch in nineteen sixty-nine when I was Carlos, international man of mystery. That was popular with the ladies. What can I do for you young folks?”

  “I’m Hickory Grimble. You probably knew my Papa. We had the same name. I inherited his house and farm. And this is Lisa Corey.”

  “Good to know you,” he said, taking my hand in more of an embrace than a shake. “Yes, I knew your Paw, Hickory, although not well. And you, Miss Corey. I’ve read your work. It’s a bit wordy, but you’re just starting out in the newspaper biz. You’ll be a damn fine writer in no time.

  I thought Lisa would take offense, but she just blushed beautifully, smiled, and thanked him, taking his other hand.

  I thought there was something, some shadow that passed over his face, but then he grinned again and it was gone.

  “You may have heard about the missing kids that were kidnapped and recently recovered,” I said, watching for the shadow to return. “We were wondering if anything like that has ever happened around here before?”

  “I hadn’t heard they were back,” Talbot said, looking down at his hands. “Were they okay? I mean did they come back same as they left?’

  “Not exactly,” Lisa said. “They are catatonic. They haven’t said a word since they’ve come back.”

  “Where are they?” Simms asked.

  “They went home with their parents,” I said. “Why?”

  That shadow passed over his face again and he lowered his eyes. This time it stayed.

  “Because the last time this happened, they were dangerous, the children, I mean”

  I thought at first he’d meant to say they were in danger, but no, he said they were dangerous.

  “It was three the last time as well. I’d hoped this time it actually was a normal kidnapping. Those kids woulda’ been better off than with him.”

  The hair raised up on my arms and a chill worked its way up my back.

  “Him, who?” Lisa asked, beating me to it.

  “You have to understand. This isn’t something people ‘round here talk about freely. Every place holds secrets and this town is no exception. By the look on your faces you already know who I’m talking about.”

  We both nodded.

  “The man with no face. Back in my day we called him ‘Mr. Shift’, but he’s been known as the Shifter, Mr. Black, Mr. White. I’ve even heard some call him the Lobotomist, but not for a long time. It’s all the same. He’s come back twice in my lifetime. Once when I was a boy and again in sixty-five.”

  I pulled out the photograph Jim found in my house and set it on Talbot’s tray table in front of him… my hands were shaking badly.

  “Is this who you mean? Is this him?” I asked, pointing at the dark space between the trees in the photo and the thing that lived in that darkness.

  Talbot put his wrinkled, liver-spotted hand over his mouth as if he was about vomit. His eyes grew wide and glassy. He just nodded his head as if unable to speak, but then he managed to find his voice.

  “That may be the only image I’ve ever seen of him. When I was a boy, I saw him in the flesh, or whatever vile stuff he’s made of. I thank the good Lord I didn’t see him when he came back again in sixty-five, or I might be at the loony bin instead of Willow Bend. Both times kids came up missing and then came back, changed. He takes them in threes, always in threes.”

  “Changed how?” Lisa asked.

  “I’ll get to it,” Talbot said, raising his hand in a halting gesture. He was obviously a born storyteller, but he was going to tell the story in his own way, and in his own time.

  “It was nineteen forty-one. I’m not going to say it was the first time he appeared, either. My own Pawpaw said the Shawnee Indians called him Tepeki Hileni, or Moon Man, probably because of his white face that’s always changing.”

  I thought of my own experience with seeing the ‘Moon Man’s’ changing face and another shiver passed through me.

  “In forty-one a man named Hiram Ellis lived in your house. He ran a nature conservatory in Linden. Hiram loved nature, and loved children and thought it was his duty to bring the two together. During the summer he would organize long nature walks for most of the kids in town. He’d point out the local flora and fauna, and taught those kids more than they ever learned in school. He had large groups of children that would follow him deep into those woods. There were some parents that went, but not many. Most of them were happy to get the kids out of their hair for a few hours during summer break.

  “I believe Hiram was a good man who got blamed for what Mr. Shift really did. He was taking a group of about twenty children on one of his nature walks. He had several different ones. Some were plant-identifying hikes, some were to spot birds. This particular one was for the Boy Scouts, mostly. It was wilderness survival and it was his most popular walk. I was trying to earn that particular merit badge that summer and the walk would have qualified me. Badges weren’t as easy to get back then as they are today, and we took it seriously. Hiram taught us kids what to do if we got lost in the woods. What plants we could eat, how to make a fire with a tree branch and a bootlace—those sorts of things.

  “I remember we were resting by one of the natural springs, eating lunch when one boy screamed. He’d gone off to take a wiz behind a tree. When Hiram and a few of us older boys rushed to see what had happened, that’s when we saw him. I’ll never forget it. Mr. Shift had the squirming boy under one arm. The creature was slightly hunched over, because of a tree branch over his head, which had to be seven feet off the ground. Shift was dressed in all black, and his face was white at first, but then changed and looked like an oil slick, or a soap bubble when it catches the light just right. Colorful but greasy, you know? Then his face shifted again, and I was looking at myself. I never did ask those other boys or Hiram, but I’d guess each of them was also seeing themselves in that monster’s face.

  “I turned away to run, but the others seemed hypnotized. I tried to grab one of the other boys as I passed, but his feet seemed to be planted in the ground and he was still staring at the monster. It was as if the boys and the whole forest were frozen around us. He didn’t move an inch. I finally gave up and ran. Some of the other kids did follow me, I guess, because a minute after I crashed out of the forest, they did, too. We waited there, breathing hard and scared to death, unsure what to do, all of them asking me what happened. I just said I didn’t know. Ten minutes later, Hiram burst out of the underbrush, scaring us all again. His face was as white as flour and he just kept say
ing, ‘He took them, he took them’, over and over like a mantra.

  “One of us, I can’t remember who now, ran to the house and called the sheriff. That would have been Wil Oslow back then. I don’t think Sheriff Oslow liked Hiram to begin with, and after those kids went missing, it was only a matter of time before the sheriff arrested Hiram. The only problem was, Hiram didn’t do it. Things were a lot different back then, and it was fairly common for the police to beat a confession out of someone, especially if a crime against a child had occurred. Folks were more apt to look the other way.”

  “Old Hiram never did confess, though, and stuck to his story as far as anyone knew. He died of a brain aneurism that night as a result of the sheriff’s interrogation techniques.”

  “That’s horrible,” I interrupted. “Didn’t anyone listen to you, or any of the other kids?”

  “No one asked us much. I was the only one who actually saw anything, besides Hiram and the kids that were taken. I told my folks what I saw, but no one believed me. I was scared everyone would think I was in cahoots with Hiram somehow, and start trying to beat another story out of me as well. I can remember waking up from nightmares about Mr. Shift and also nightmares about Oslow beating me senseless with that ironwood billy club he always carried. I should have done something, but I was just nine years old back then. No one was going to listen to a nine year old. I was scared, not just of what I saw, but of the town and the sheriff. ”

  “How long before the kids came back?” I asked, already anticipating where this was going.

  “Five days,” Hiram said. “The town sent out search parties, just like they did this time and with the same results. There wasn’t any sign of those kids, or who took them. Some of the men came back telling tales of strange animals they’d seen while looking, but nothing else.

  “I’ve seen those animals, around the farm,” I said.

  Talbot nodded, obviously not surprised. “The big wolves, the six-foot-tall rabbits with horns, the ape man. Yeah, there’s stories that go back to them Indian days. If you get up into those caves, there are drawings of some of them on the walls.”

  “Anyways,” he continued. “Those boys came back on the fifth night. They were dehydrated and blank faced, but alive. They just came walking down Main Street as if they’d just come back from a camping trip or something. They wouldn’t say anything about what happened to them, or who took them. Their parents collected them from the sheriff’s station and took them home and everything was all right for the first few days. The three boys were Bennie Dent, aged eleven, James Franks, aged eight, and Tom Markow, aged nine.

  “Are you sure you want to hear the rest of this?” Talbot asked. He was looking at Lisa, who just nodded, slowly. I could tell she wasn’t sure, but her journalistic curiosity wouldn’t let her say no.

  “Tom, the nine-year old was the one who went bad first. His folks left him alone with his older sister while they went to church, two Sundays after he came home. They tried to take him the Sunday before and he threw a god- awful fit in the Methodist church’s parking lot when he saw where they meant to take him. He started screaming and slamming his head into the seat in front of him. He wouldn’t stop until they left. It was the first time he’d shown any emotion about anything since he’d been back. He still wasn’t speaking, but his outburst was enough for his parents to think he was coming out of his fugue state. They brought him back to the house, but once he was away from the church, he went back to being a human turnip.

  “His sister was happy to stay home and take care of her little brother. She was twelve and loved her brother dearly. She wouldn’t listen to anyone’s negative mental diagnosis of him. She talked to him as if nothing was wrong, completely ignoring the fact he never answered her back. That bright Sunday morning, she decided the two of them would play school. She apparently sat little Tom down at a play table in her room and was using her small chalkboard to teach a math lesson.

  “That afternoon, their parents found the overturned play table, along with a lesson sheet she had carefully written up and her chalkboard in pieces on the floor.

  “Tom must have knocked his sister out when she wasn’t looking. He tied her to the bed and somehow raped her with several objects from their play area. They found some of them still inside of her. I’ll spare you the details. Then he slit her throat with his trusty Boy Scout knife. They determined from the ligature marks on her wrists and the bruising that she’d been awake until the end. I read the police report several years later, while researching the case. The bed was red when her parents came home and discovered her. They found Tom crouching in the corner of the room. He was growling and had his sister’s blood caked in his hair and covering his hands, arms and face.”

  I heard Lisa draw in breath, as if she wanted to say something, but didn’t.

  “Their father didn’t ask what happened, he didn’t call the police. He calmly walked past his hysterical wife, went downstairs, grabbed his Model 94 Winchester, came back upstairs and promptly blew his son’s snarling head off without saying a word.

  “It was the quickest and easiest ending of the three boys. Are you sure you want to hear about James and Bennie?”

  “Yes,” I answered for both of us. “We need to hear it. All of it.”

  Talbot rubbed his eyes, then put up one finger. He got up, went to the doorway, peeked out and looked both ways. Then he came back into the room, reached up and shuffled around items on the top of his closet. After a minute, his hand found what it was searching for and brought down a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Whiskey.

  He came back over to us, filled a coffee cup nearly half full, then downed it all in one gulp. Then he offered us the bottle. I shook my head, but Lisa got up, got the water glass from beside the sink, then held it out to Talbot, who gave her two fingers’ worth. She promptly drank it down.

  “Bennie Dent,” Talbot said. “He was a good boy. A good friend to me and to most of the other boys in our troop. He was quiet, kind and thoughtful. Nearly everyone liked him. He was older, like me, so all the little kids looked up to him. He had what folks today would call an abusive parent. Bennie’s old man would get drunk and sometimes we would see bruises on his back when we all went swimming. But, of course, everyone kept their own business back then. Bennie’s momma was a meek woman, as is usually the case in households where the father uses hand, or belt, or rod to keep order. When Bennie came home, she knew her husband wasn’t going to stand for his son to be a mute. She knew he’d beat the life back into him. So she took the boy to stay with her sister until he got better.

  “The woman, I forget her name now, was a widow and she lived alone. She took Bennie in and promised she’d take care of the boy. She loved him as much, or more, than everyone else. Things went fine for a few weeks, or as fine as things can be when you’re taking care of an eleven-year old who just sleep, eats and shits and pisses in his drawers.

  “Bennie’s momma would come and visit the boy once a week, every Saturday in the afternoon. When she arrived one Saturday, she found a blood trail leading from the house to the cow barn. She followed it and when she opened the barn she found her sister crucified on the barn’s rafters, high above thirteen headless milking cows.

  “Bennie must have killed the old woman inside, then dragged her to the barn, slaughtered all of her cows, then hung his aunt. No one ever figured out how he got her up there, neither. I only hope she was dead when he did. The thought of him crawling around on those rafters like a spider still gives me nightmares.

  “He found some barbed wire in the barn and wrapped it around her head like a crown of thorns. He pinned her to the beams with some old railroad spikes. The aunt’s husband used to work for Union Pacific before he died and had those spikes in a big rusty pile in one corner of the barn.

  “Bennie’s momma ran for the car and in her haste to leave forgot to check the back seat. She didn’t see the bloody handprints on the back door handle, neither. Bennie let her drive him back to the home place and
waited until she put the car in park before he raised up from the back seat and shoved one of those railroad spikes through the back of her neck. Then the boy went inside, grabbing the splitting maul from a stump in the yard. He chopped his father into pieces too small to recognize as human. The doctor at the scene told my daddy they found pieces of that man in dresser drawers, kitchen cabinets and found his head in the sink with his eyes removed. Thank God, Bennie was an only child.

  “Did they find Bennie?” Lisa asked.

  “No, they didn’t. He ran into the woods and they never did catch him. They held a manhunt, but, truth be told, I don’t think they looked very hard for him. I don’t think anyone really wanted to find him. I hope to God he died of exposure within a few days of being out there. There were no reported sightings afterward, so…” he trailed off, shrugging.

  Talbot poured himself another drink, and then drank it down. He’d probably had the equivalent of ten shots of whiskey now. He had to be feeling it, and honestly, I felt like joining him, but I had to drive us home later. Lisa however held her glass out again and Talbot filled it.

  “James Franks was the last of them, and perhaps the worst. He was eight when they were all taken. He was nine when they came back. He spent his birthday in the company of a monster. I think about that sometimes, you know, how awful it must have been, spending what’s supposed to be your happiest day with a creature that drives you insane.”

  “Anyway. Let’s get to it,” Talbot continued. “James was the youngest, and probably the weakest of the three. He went home with his parents, just like the others, and he turned just like the others, in about the same way. His daddy caught him trying to beat a neighbor girl to death with a rock. He was able to stop the boy before he did any real damage. She just had a few cuts and scrapes, but the girl’s father had called the police, especially after hearing the stories of the other two boys.

  “When the police showed up, Mr. Franks told them they boy had run off into the woods near their house, and that it was good riddance. The police agreed and never searched the house. If they had, the forthcoming tragedy may have been avoided.