by Tim Curran
“‘What you got up there, Mrs. Crossen?’ he says to her. ‘What you got inside that house?’
“‘Wouldn’t you like to know, Tommy Godfrey,’ she says back at him. ‘What I got I ain’t sharing with nobody. You get your own.’
“Now it was my old man’s turn: ‘You got Pearl in there, Genevieve?’
“‘You never goddamn mind!’
“‘Dammit, Genevieve,’ my old man says, ‘Pearl’s dead, you gotta know she’s dead.’
“At that, Genevieve just laughed. ‘So you say, so you say. But you don’t know, you don’t know anything. I knew’d it were my baby when she wandered into the yard. And since she come back…it’s never been so good.’
“Tommy said he knew then, as maybe he’d been suspecting all along, that Genevieve didn’t really have Pearl in there. You see, what it was was one of them things from the ruined village, one of them from below. A young one, a female. It wandered into the yard as Genevieve said and Genevieve, just plain out of her head, adopted the thing. Cared for that little horror. Loved it and dressed it up like Pearl. But, dear God, it wasn’t Pearl, it wasn’t even human.”
“What did they do?” Kenney asked.
“Nothing they could do. They left. Maybe they could have gotten a warrant, said Genevieve was crazy or something. She surely was. Regardless, they just got the hell out of there, weren’t sure what to do. But then something happened that brought it all to a head.”
“What’s that?”
“A child disappeared. A kid named Ralph Blodden. I knew him. His old man ran the Exxon station in Haymarket. Ralph disappeared one night and the facts are pretty tangled up, but I’m guessing he wandered out after dark and went missing. Two days later he still hadn’t shown. What I tell you now is from my uncle Tommy. He got it from Willy Chalmers, who used to run an apple orchard outside Haymarket. Willy told my uncle this story when he was dying of cancer, figured he had nothing to lose. Nothing at all. Wanted it off his soul, I guess.
“What happened was, people were pretty much up at arms about the Blodden kid gone missing and it didn’t take much of a leap on their part to tie it up with Genevieve and Pearl. So they went out there one night with guns and cans of gas and dogs. I think you know what happened next. They found the Blodden kid in a shed behind the house, just hanging there, seasoning up, I guess. Willy said he was getting pretty ripe…whether Pearl killed the kid or Genevieve did, figuring she had to provide for that ghoul she thought was her daughter, nobody knew and nobody gave a shit.”
No, Kenney figured, I bet they didn’t. I’ll just bet they didn’t.
Not that he blamed them for what he knew was coming next. Something had to be done and the law was pretty much useless, so Willy Chalmers and the boys—probably liquored up to give themselves the sort of steel that would be needed—did the job themselves. A small town and its horrendous secrets. You just never knew, never suspected the sort of things crawling under its surface. And most towns had secrets, Kenney knew, dark, awful truths kept buried so the townsfolk themselves could sleep at night.
Godfrey sighed. “Genevieve came out on the porch and Pearl came with her. Willy didn’t describe exactly how the girl looked, only to say that she was full of worms, crawling with bugs and her eyes…that’s what had stayed with him all those years…eyes shining yellow and behind them, something terrible. Genevieve told the child to get inside. The men were crazy and she knew it. Guns started going off. Willy said he didn’t know who fired first, but Pearl took two or three rounds and Genevieve took a few more. A shotgun blast tore her belly open. Pearl…that thing…dragged her mother into the house and the men started dousing the house with gasoline. It was an old place and it went up pretty quick. Willy told Tommy that his last sight of Pearl and Genevieve was when the house was engulfed by flames. Through the blazing doorway, Pearl was holding Genevieve’s corpse, screaming and cackling and shouting out awful things and then the roof came down on them and that was it. They burned up with the house.”
25
Kenney swallowed. “At the time…was there an investigation?”
“Yes, a very quick one, Tommy told me.” Godfrey was grinding his teeth. “I remember when the Crossen place burned. I remember it very well…people were glad. They talked about it real quietly for a day or two, then purged it from their minds. It was like a tumor had been burned out. They were content that the house and what it contained was history.”
“One last question,” Kenney said slowly. “When you went into that house…how did Pearl know your names?”
Godfrey smiled thinly. But not for long. He shook his head. “That’s troubled me badly over the years, Lou. I don’t have an answer for it. Maybe those from below have gifts of a sort and maybe what’s inside them, maybe it’s something that don’t belong here.”
Kenney didn’t argue the point. With what he’d heard and what he’d seen…who was he to argue anything? If somebody told him the moon was indeed made of cheese, he’d probably believe it, ask if it was Munster or Pepper Jack, and was any good in party dips. Reality had been shattered. He believed and he didn’t believe. He knew something had happened here, some sort of genetic degeneration had overtaken the people of Clavitt Fields, that their descendants crawled like worms through holes in the earth. He accepted that, much as he wanted to completely dismiss it.
“Well, Lou,” Godfrey said, sounding satisfied, “now you know it all. All the things this town, this county has kept secret. It’s high time this shit ends. I’ve broken the sacred trust given me by every sheriff who held this post before me. And you know what? I don’t give a happy shit. I’m glad it’s out. That file in my office is going into my woodstove and when all this…madness comes to light, I’ll be just as ignorant as anyone else.”
“It’s getting dark,” Kenney said, without knowing why.
The shadows were elongating, bleeding out in nighted pools from crypts and monuments and thickets of blighted trees.
“We should go,” Godfrey said. “But, being that you’re in charge of this investigation…what do you plan on doing now? Or should I even ask?”
Kenney sat there, noticing how the shadows were netting the cemetery, how they seemed to sprout in unwholesome tangles. “Oh, I think you know what comes next, Matt. I think you know very well.”
26
It was funny how as age advanced you could know things you couldn’t know before and funnier still how you could see the truth of things that you had long been blind to.
Elena could remember when her husband, old George, was dying, how he lay on the couch that final week, refusing both doctors and hospitals, saying in his breathless voice how he would either shake off what plagued him or it would be the end and if it was, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing because he was accepting of things, accepting of nature’s way. George was a farmer and the good earth was everything to him. He had turned it and seeded it year after year and never was there a happier man than he when his hands were soiled with black dirt. Maybe that’s how it was. A woman had her children, but a man had the earth that he tilled and sowed and reaped.
As he lay dying—something she refused to accept and something he was perfectly comfortable with—on the couch, covered in the frayed quilt his mother had made them as a wedding present, she refused to face the fact that he would soon be gone. He was old, he was tired, he was used up by the land and by life. Not only were his hands callused by long years in the field, but his entire body. And his eyes…no longer young and bright, but unfocused and dimming with that peculiar rheumy shine to them like those of an old dog remembering long golden summers many years gone. Yes, she knew what was coming but she did not want to know. He had been the only constant in her life for so many years that the idea he would soon be gone was not something she could let herself consider realistically.
But George had known.
Oh yes, he had surely known just as he knew that no doctors or hospitals could change fate or alter nature’s plans for him. They could
delay it and turn him into an invalid, who would shit his pants and have to be spoon fed, but the course was set and he wanted to face it with a certain degree of dignity.
George knew just as she knew now.
This was the final year, the final month, the final week, and—she was certain—the final day. The pain in her chest was tightening by the hour and her old lungs were having trouble drawing in breath. It was close now. The shadow of death was creeping ever closer and she was too weak to stave it off.
George had been dead for years now, seventeen to be exact, and his namesake, her oldest boy, Georgy, had been gone for three. She missed them both, but mostly she missed Franny. He was her youngest. A kind boy, sweet, sensitive, and wonderful in nearly every way. He had joined the marines in 1967 and been sent to Vietnam in April of ’68. He never came home. And this was the greatest pain she had ever known and one that had never left her. Though he had been gone forty-five years now, his death was only yesterday to his mother and she still saw his smile and heard his voice and the pain of it all, dear God, it still cut deep.
A smart boy. She could tell Georgy and his sister, Betty, all that business about the Ezrens and the ruins were just spook stories twice told, but Franny did not believe it.
“There’s monsters over there, isn’t there?” he would ask. “Things that live under the ground.” To which she would always reply that that was plain foolishness. Monsters. Nothing but stories told by weak minds and there was no more to say about it than that. There were no such things as monsters and he was certainly old enough to know that, now wasn’t he?
But Franny could never be put off quite so easily.
Maybe such pat little rationalizations would work on his older brother and sister, but never him. He was far too smart for that. He tended to question things. Which always got his father’s ire up because he thought Franny simply thought too much, questioned too much. Such things were unthinkable to George, who was a creature of instinct and impulse.
“But, Mom,” Franny would say, “if there are no monsters, why do you leave things for them? Why do you put out scraps as offerings every night? Why do you feed them if they don’t exist?”
Of course, Elena had no answer for that. Not really. She would just tell him that she put the scraps out for the forest animals because they needed to eat, too, and if worse ever came to worst, and times were tough, the family would be eating those animals so she wanted them fat and healthy.
It was thin as hell and Franny knew it. But he would consider it and then later, always later when she thought he had forgotten about it, he would ask, “Why is it easier to tell lies than to admit the truth?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she’d say.
To that, Franny would only smile as if she had just confirmed things for him.
Sitting in her rocking chair by the window, remembering and remembering, Elena missed that boy terribly. It still broke her heart to think of him wasted on some dirty battlefield in another senseless war.
Breathing was getting difficult now. She knew she should call Betty but Betty would nag her to death about going to the hospital and Elena did not want that. The end was close and she wanted to face it as George had faced it: peacefully, with no drugs to blur her perception of the next world.
27
There were eight men down in the cellar of the Ezren farmhouse that afternoon. Hyder and Godfrey, Kenney and Chipney, an assortment of state and county cops who carried pickaxes and crowbars. Electric lights had been strung up now, but the place was still gloomy as a crypt. It had about the same ambience, too. Water was seeping from the foundation stones and the masonry was dropping away in wet clots.
Godfrey said, “I guess we’re going to do this, then?”
Kenney didn’t look at him. He was looking at the cistern set in the floor. “This can’t be the original well that Elena Blasden mentioned. This isn’t that old.”
“No,” Hyder said. “You can see it’s been worked on.”
“Probably old Charles Ezren. Maybe he fixed it like this,” Godfrey said.
And that was a possibility. The shaft of the well had been reinforced with concrete, a metal flange placed over the top. Gray, splintered boards with spreading water stains had been bolted over it. From the looks of it, that was many, many years ago.
Kenney stood there, a cigarette dangling from his lip, wondering why anyone would build a house atop something like this. But after hearing what Elena Blasden had to say, not to mention everything Godfrey had showed him and told him, he supposed there were reasons.
“All right, boys,” Godfrey said. “Have at her.”
Stripped down to shirtsleeves, the deputies with the pickaxes started swinging and the wood came away in damp chunks, rotten through and through. They kept swinging and chips kept flying and soon enough the others with the crowbars got into the act. Within ten minutes, the first boards came free. And with them, like breaking the seal on a moldering coffin, came the smell. All the men in the dank, shadowy cellar were used to the smell of death; the farmhouse and its fields were ripe with it. It got on your clothes and in your hair. It got so you could taste it every time you swallowed.
But this…a hot and boiling fetid stink, a black and pervasive odor of putrescence.
“Jesus Christ,” Kenney said, turning away, his belly rumbling with waves of nausea.
Everyone backed away, complaining as the stench filled the cellar like some toxic sludge. A few of the younger men started gagging. One of them broke into dry heaves that didn’t stay dry for long. It was that sort of smell. Even blocking your nose didn’t seem to help for it laid over your skin in a slimy sheen.
Hyder looked like he’d just swallowed a dead mouse. He kept his distance, a funny look on his face like he needed to vomit and couldn’t find a bucket.
Well that’s it, isn’t it? Kenney found himself thinking. That’s what dirty little secrets smell like when you finally bring them into the light. Did you boys think the stench would be any less? That all your lies and secrets breeding down here in the damp darkness would not smell as rotten?
Godfrey was watching Kenney. “You got something on your mind, son?” he asked.
But Kenney shook his head. No point in saying anything, no point in stirring the pot…what was wafting off it was bad enough as it was. Yet…he couldn’t help feeling angry at these people, their backwoods ignorance and clannish bullshit. We got us a fat, filthy black tumor on the underbelly of this county, boys, so let’s just keep quiet about it, feed that sucker in the darkness and see how big it gets, see how far the infection spreads and how many lives it destroys. What say? Jesus, it was that very sort of thinking that had created all this and was making Kenney do what he was now about to do and, thinking about it, he hated every one of these peckerwood John Laws for being too goddamn afraid to do their duty and cut this cancer out by the roots like they should have fifty years ago…or a hundred and fifty.
“Christ, what a stink,” Chipney said. “Smells like roadkill on a steam tray.”
A couple of the men laughed, then gagged, laughed, then gagged yet again. Yes, that about summed it up.
Kenney and Godfrey sucked their revulsion down deep to where it was manageable and took up the crowbars. Breathing through clenched teeth, they worked the remaining boards free. The last few came apart in their hands and dropped down into the blackness with splashing sounds. Rancid fingers of putrid reek misted from the mouth of the cistern like smoke from a smoldering crematory pit.
Kenney shined a flashlight down there. The beam barely cut the miasmic blackness. It reflected off water down deep. It looked like a room or passage opened up at the bottom of the shaft.
“Must be a lot of bodies down there,” a deputy said, “to smell like that.”
Hyder just nodded. “Yeah, or a lot of something.”
Godfrey had one of the deputies go and fetch about fifty feet of rope and a brick. He tied the brick to the end of the rope and lowered it down there like a
n old-time depth marker. When he hit bottom, he pulled it back up and measured three feet of wetness on the rope.
“Not too deep,” he said, looking at the pinched and dour faces around him. “I guess…I guess somebody has to go down and have a look.”
28
Six of them went down.
Kenney, Godfrey, three deputies that volunteered—Iversen, Beck, St. Aubin—and Chipney. All willing to throw caution to the wind for a taste of something they’d never forget.
Kenney didn’t like Chipney going along because he was due to get married whenever and if ever this clusterfuck was wound up. He did everything he could to talk him out of it, but Chipney just said, “Now what kind of cop would I be if I turned tail now, Chief? How the hell would I be able to look at myself in a mirror if I didn’t go? Don’t leave me out of this one. I want to see same as you want to see. Shit, I have to see.”
There was no arguing with that, so Kenney didn’t bother.
He could have ordered him not to go, but Chipney was his friend. They’d caught more shit together than your average public toilet. Leaving him out would have been an insult, even though a voice in the back of his head kept saying, he’s going to die down there and it’ll be your fucking fault. You know that, don’t you?