Knives.
Squinting, hissing through her teeth at the pain, she raised herself up on one elbow, and like a barrel full of rocks falling on its side, the pain seemed to tumble through her, settling in one half of her body, adding weight to the arm she was using to hold herself up. She took a series of short painful breaths as the light grew hazy and spun away from her, then she slowly, slowly opened her eye fully, willing it to focus on the small metal tray by the bed.
Knives. Lots of them, some still wet with her blood. The tools they’d used to fix her, sew her up so they could tear her stuffing out again.
She tried to smile but her lips felt like taut rubber, so she settled for a huffed laugh and the momentary surge of warmth that almost dulled the pain in her chest at the thought of what she was going to do with that knife—a scalpel, she noted.
Any minute now…
Yes, any minute now, they would barge into the room, those dirty seething bastards, but no matter how fast or how strong they were, they would not get her again.
They would not get a second chance to kill her.
Because she was going to do it for them.
-6-
As he approached the girl’s room, Wellman heard the front door slam shut. Jack was gone, and that was good. His account had shaken Wellman, threatened to drain him of his resolve, imbuing in him the temptation to just drive the girl ten miles up the road and dump her somewhere, to avoid whatever her presence might call down upon him. But he was not going to do that, felt guilty for even thinking it. Once the girl was fit to be moved, he would put her in his car and drive her into Mason City, to one of the hospitals there, and once she was checked in, his next call would be to the police. The girl would have to be identified, her family told where to find her, so they could begin the long heartbreaking and arduous process of rebuilding their lives. He knew what that was like. He had been there himself. Hell, still was there, and he didn’t envy them the journey.
What he didn’t know was what would happen when he returned home after doing what he knew in his heart was the right thing. Would the Merrill clan be waiting for him? Would they simply demand to know what he’d done with the girl, or would they already know, having forced the information out of Jack? Surely, if they were indeed responsible for what had happened to the girl, wouldn’t they now be too busy uprooting themselves and moving elsewhere in anticipation of a major manhunt once she was found?
He couldn’t think about that now. He was old, and he was scared, and given too much consideration, the fear might consume him. All he knew was that he had watched a woman he had loved, still loved with all his heart, die in that room once and had never recovered from it, despite doing all he could to ease her suffering. He had prayed for Alice Niles’s forgiveness the night he refused her request for help, and she had died too. He would not idly stand by and watch another human being perish if it was within his power to prevent it.
The screaming stopped.
He hesitated at the door, listening. The silence in the wake of her scream seemed bottomless, and unsettling. After a moment, he gently gripped the handle of the door and eased it open.
“Miss?” he asked quietly, like a bellboy afraid of disturbing a guest, which was, now that he thought about it, not all that inaccurate, for until she decided whether or not to live or die, he was bound to serve her.
He stepped into the room.
She was awake.
Steel gleamed just above the covers.
Her body convulsed, just as he saw the scalpel in her hand, just as he noticed the fresh blood on the sheets.
Rain sprayed the glass as he hurried to her side.
She looked at him, frowned slightly, her face the same shade as the pillow beneath her bandaged head.
“My name is Doctor Wellman,” he said, struggling to keep calm as he sat down on the bed and gripped her wrist. He was relieved to see that she had not had the strength to make more than a superficial cut, but it was bad enough. “I’m here to help you. You’ve been badly injured.” A quick inspection of her other wrist revealed a deeper wound. It was from this the majority of the fresh blood had come. Still looking at the dreamy puzzled expression on her face, he reached blindly out and tugged open the nightstand drawer, fumbled inside until he found the bandages, and began to unwind them from the roll. As he wrapped her wounds, a flicker of pain passed briefly over her face.
“Am I dead?” she asked him in a whisper.
He summoned a smile. “You’re going to be fine.”
“I shouldn’t be. Don’t touch me.” The struggle she put up was child-like, and not hard to restrain without causing her further discomfort. After a few moments, the strength left her.
“Hush now,” Wellman soothed. “I’m a doctor. I’m not here to hurt you. I want to help you.”
“Are they here?”
“Who?”
“Those men. They took the skin from Danny’s hands. And his face. They pulled it off like it was a Halloween mask.” Her breathing caught. Her face contorted into a grimace as a tear welled in her uncovered eye. “They hurt me. All my friends are gone. Everything is dead. Make it quick.”
His smile faltered. “Honey, I’m not one of them. Listen to me now.” He gently stroked her hair. “I’m a friend.”
“All my friends are dead.”
“How many were with you?”
She didn’t reply. At length, she seemed to drift off to sleep, but whispered, “I have to die now. If I don’t do it, they will and I can’t let them.” Her eyelid fluttered. Wellman did not panic. She wasn’t going to die. He knew that. Her pulse, though weak, was constant. Her breathing was fine, her pupil no longer dilated. Unconsciousness was probably her only solace from the pain and the horror, and he permitted her the escape. While she slept, he wrapped her wrists and injected her with a dose of morphine in the hope that it would ease her dreams and numb the pain, at least for a little while. Then he set the tray with the instruments against the far wall, pulled a chair close to the bed, and listened to the rising wind trying to drown out the sound of her peaceful breathing.
He would wait a while for the bleeding to cease, before he sewed her up again.
Until then, he would pray.
And when he was done, he would take the girl to his car and head for Mason City.
We’ll get you home, he promised.
-7-
Her room was in darkness.
Luke stood by the door, fists clenched so she wouldn’t see them trembling, because even in the dark he knew it would not escape her attention. The room smelled of sweat and bodily fluids, but he did not mind. It was his mother’s perfume to him, and ordinarily soothing.
But not this evening.
Now he craved the smell of cooking meat and kerosene, of wood smoke and sizzling fat that would soon permeate the air outside as his brothers burned the bodies. It was a ritual he had been a part of for so long he had ceased to appreciate it. But he appreciated it now, would rather be drawing that pungent mixture of aromas into his nostrils than the smell of shit and piss and vomit that hung in the air in the small squalid room his mother called her own.
From the wide bed, shoved into the corner farthest from the window, where the darkness was thickest, he heard the sound of her moving, just slightly, maybe raising her head to look at him, to peer at him through the muddy gloom. The bedsprings did not so much creak, as whimper.
“Momma?”
“Boy,” she responded in her bubbling voice, as if she was forever gargling.
“Momma I—”
“Come ’ere.”
He pretended he hadn’t heard because it was safer by the door, and that in turn made him feel guilty because he knew if he stayed here she would not rise up and come get him. She couldn’t. In over two years she hadn’t left that bed, not once, and in daylight, when the clouds covered the sun and the flies obscured the window, it was hard to tell where Momma ended and the bed began. It was all darkness, with lumps of paler matter here
and there.
That bed, like the woman in it, dominated the room. Papa-In-Gray had told them in the same reverential tone he used to begin their prayers every night before supper, that their Momma was a saint, a suffering martyr not yet found by the grave. Wires’n springs’n flesh’n fat, he told them, like it was the opening line of some long forgotten nursery rhyme. There was no Momma anymore, he said, not the way they remembered her. Now she was a mass of suppurating bedsores, fused to the mattress where old wounds had healed and the torn flesh and pus had hardened to form a kind of second skin around the material and bedsprings beneath. The mattress, once plump and soft, had been worn down by her weight to almost nothing, a wafer thin slice bent in the middle, pungent, soggy and stained by the fluids that had soaked down from her corpulent body over the years. The boys took turns washing and tending to her wound, grooming her, scooping out the large quantities of fecal matter that gathered between her enormous thighs, then giving the remaining stain a cursory, half-hearted scrub before leaving her to wallow in the vestiges of her own waste.
She complained endlessly, spoke to herself day and night, sometimes sang little songs in a voice barely above a whisper, and was quiet only when they brought her food.
Waves of stink rolled from the crooked sagging bed. He had long ago stopped suggesting that they let some air into the room. He didn’t even know if the windows would still open. Some kind of putrid brown grease had started climbing the foggy panes, like corrupted spirits risen from the heaps of dead flies, and had gathered in the cracks like glue.
But God, how he loved her, despite the fear she instilled in him, and despite all she had done to make him sorry for his sins. He loved her more than life itself, quietly believed that he loved her most of all, more than his brothers did, though he would never say so. He believed himself the favorite, even when she challenged that belief by hurting him.
“You hear me boy?” she said, and he licked his lips, felt his tongue rasp against the lack of moisture there, and when he drew it back in, he tasted something foul, something he had tugged from the air into his mouth.
“I hear you Momma,” he said, and took a few steps closer to the bed. Beneath his boots, the floorboards creaked and breathed miniature puffs of dust into the air. Shouldn’t be no dust, he thought, staring down at the dissipating clouds. Floor’s well traveled. And it was, but like the intricate but drooping black cobwebs that hung like dreamcatchers from every corner of the room, he knew this room held onto every particle of skin that fell or rose from his Momma’s body, then waited until dark to begin fashioning them into elaborate constructs to convince the world that time was passing faster than it really was, hastening his Momma toward her death. Trying to make her believe she’d been forgotten. Which of course was Momma’s only true fear. That they would abandon her. That one day she’d wake and find herself calling out to an empty house, listening to the echoes of her voice coming back to her with nothing to obstruct it. Listening to her frantic cries slithering out into the woods to get lost among the trees, to be heard by the deer, the squirrels, the jays, and ultimately, the coyotes, who would sense her panic and follow it to the source. Then, as she had told her sons a thousand times, the coyotes would eat her, and scatter her bones across the land so her spirit would never find peace.
“Sit,” she commanded, and he squinted down at the bed to be sure when he obeyed he didn’t end up pinning a flap of flesh from her arm beneath him. He sat and the bed hardly moved, but the stench from the damp mattress and the body upon it was strong enough to make his eyes water. Whenever Aaron and the others came to see Momma-In-Bed, they wore bandannas tied across their lower faces, but Luke refused to show such disrespect, and wondered why she let them get away with it.
In the gloom, Luke could only make out her eyes, small dark circles in a doughy face almost indistinguishable from the pillow.
“Girl got away, Momma. She tricked Matt’n kilt him. Then she got loose. Didn’t think she’d get far, not the way we had her cut up, but she did. Got to the road and someone picked her up.”
There was silence so deep that Luke, perched precariously on the hard metal edge of the bed, feared he might fall headlong into it and be devoured. Then Momma began to sing, a low growl that was not in the least bit melodic, and chilled him to the core of his being. The song had only a few notes as far as he could tell, but the way she sang them reminded him of the sound a fire truck made when it flew by, the way the song changed, grew lower and lower as it got farther away. He swallowed and his throat clicked. As if it had been a signal, Momma stopped singing.
“Someone picked her up,” she repeated. Then, “You ’member what happ’ned to yer pizzle, son?”
He felt his face redden and was glad she couldn’t see it, but couldn’t prevent his head from lowering, his shoulders from tightening at the mention of that horrible day he had tried so hard to forget but never would, not as long as he had to see the mangled thing that emerged from his pants every time he had to make water.
“I ’member.”
“You ’member why it happ’ned?”
Again, he nodded, but felt his throat constrict.
“Tell me.” He flinched as her hand, almost the size of his Papa’s hat, but white as fresh snow, found his knee. After a moment, he felt the damp from her moist skin seeping through his jeans. “Tell your poor Mama what happ’ned.”
“It—” he began, then tensed as her clammy fingers tightened on his knee. “It were my thirteenth birthday. You threw us a big party, with cake’n balloons’n streamers. You got the place lookin’ real nice, and Papa were home. I ’member he even took off his hat for a spell.”
“That’s right,” whispered Momma, lost in a memory she clearly enjoyed. “Go on now.”
“Me’n Aaron rode the horses through the woods that evenin’. Susanna were on the back of my colt, hangin’ on to me fer dear life. We kept goin’ faster’n faster, and ’fore we knew it, we was racing, Aaron and me. Racin’ like the wind, and Susanna screamin’, but a good kinda screamin’ like she was enjoyin’ herself.”
“She liked the horses, and loved you boys, didn’t she Luke?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“Tell me how much she loved you, Luke.”
The memory to this point was a good one. It had been, as far as Luke could recall, the most beautiful day of his life. The sun had been shining through the leaves, cooking the red clay so it was spongy under the horses’ hooves and flew in their wake. The air was warm, the sweat cooling on their faces as they flew through the woods, laughin’ and screamin’ at the top of their lungs, mimicking loons as bugs smacked into their faces and leaves caught in their hair. He remembered Susanna’s grip, her skin warm and slippery against his belly, her breasts soft against his back as he angled the colt toward the creek, then down the embankment. The horse, more machine than animal, like a series of cogs, pistons and hydraulics beneath a black tarp, muscles rolling fluidly, didn’t pause as the soft earth changed to rock and water. Instead it plowed straight through, head low, snorting as the cold spray soaked the children. Luke had never had such fun in his life, and he delighted in the look on Aaron’s face as he rode his mare a few paces behind. His brother was red from the exertion of trying to keep up, eyes wide from a mixture of fear at the breakneck pace and excitement that they dared go so fast.
“We came to a clearin’,” Luke said, his voice low. The stench of death and sickness abruptly filled his nose and tickled his throat, making him want to gag, but he resisted, and turned away, discreetly sucking in air that was not much cleaner. If he vomited, he knew he’d be no better than his brothers with their insulting bandannas. So he took small short breaths, cleared his throat, spat a sour wad of phlegm on the floor and continued. “The Lowell Creek clearin’ where Papa used to hunt rabbits, ’fore they was all gone.”
“Beautiful place in the summertime,” his mother said.
“Sure was.”
“Was?” she asked with mock surprise. “Ain�
��t no more?”
“We rested there for a spell,” he said, joining his hands and secretly chiding himself for the uncharitable thought that had just come over him. He had wished, just for a second, that his mother would take her hand off his knee. The weight of it was cold, and unpleasant, as if while dampening his flesh with hers, she was, at the same time, leaching something vital from him. He could almost feel it leaving.
“We rested there some,” he repeated, trying to regain the thread of his thoughts. “Played around for a couple of hours, till the sun started goin’ down. Aaron got bored. Wanted to go home, and Aaron, you know, he don’t like bein’ bored. Gets riled up real easy that way. So he started teasin’ Susanna somethin’ fierce when she says she don’t wanna go home yet, callin’ her names, peggin’ sticks at her. He even threw a dead possum he’d found that had all its guts hangin’ out. That was all she wrote right there. Poor Suze had all its insides stuck in her hair, maggots on her dress, and she went crazy. Damn near chased Aaron all the way home and ten miles farther.” He smiled, just a little. Then it faded as Momma shifted a little in her bed, those dark eyes gleaming like beetles in the moonlight.
“He stayed home; I stayed at the creek, feet up on a rock, in no hurry to go nowhere, not on my birthday, which the way I saw it, was the best damn day of my life so far. The horses was with me, and they seemed pretty satisfied too, standin’ in the shade as the sun went down. I might even have dozed some.”
“And where was Susanna?”
Momma-in-Bed knew the answer to that already. She’d heard this story a thousand times, but her eagerness to hear it again never waned. She was prodding him, impatient to get to the important part, the part where everything went wrong.
“Somewhere in the woods,” Luke said somberly. “I thought she’d gone home after gettin’ bored of chasin’ Aaron.”
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