by Chris Neeley
James zipped up the fly of his jeans. The voices were ominously quiet. He started for his bedroom to change out of the clothes that he had slept in, noting that his father's bedroom door was closed. He must have made it home sometime during the night. James shrugged off his shirt and dropped it on his bedroom floor. He searched for a clean one, wondering what everything he had just lived through was supposed to mean. He was beginning to question his sanity. No one else heard the voices. He'd finally found a shirt and had one arm in it when he heard the first scream.
James' heart skipped a beat. He raced for the door. Another scream, coming from somewhere outside. The barn, he knew it was the barn. That other voice had tried to coax him out there. He ran down the stairs, hearing his father behind him, and headed straight for the kitchen door. He burst through the door, moving toward the barn as fast as his bare feet could carry him across the gravel. No more screams issued from the barn, but Georgia was squealing like he'd never heard before and there was another noise coming between each squeal that James didn't want to recognize.
His father was running gingerly across the stones behind him. "Who's out there? James, who's in the barn?"
"Cliff!" James called over his shoulder as he shoved through the barn door. Georgia had stopped squealing. James stopped, staring at the stall. The gate of the stall was wide open. "Cliff?" James got no answer. His father rushed into the barn. "Clifford!" his father yelled, looking around.
Georgia came out of the stall.
James stared at the sow. Her piggish face was almost completely covered in blood and she was chewing. She faced him, her eyes wild, and planted her piggy feet.
"Dad?" James said, afraid to move. Where was Cliff? James heard his father moving behind him. He heard the sound of shells being chambered, then the 'chunk' of metal against metal, as Seph snapped the gun shut. He heard it cock.
"Don't move, James," his father said from behind him.
Georgia lowered her head, scraping the ground with one hind foot.
James kept pleading in his mind, 'shoot her, shoot her, SHOOT HER', as he watched the sow ready herself for a charge. He felt his father come up close behind him, a little to the right.
Georgia squealed hideously and made for James, head down, in a full-out charge.
The shotgun blasted beside James' ear and his ear went deaf. He watched Georgia's head explode in a spray of pink, red, and white gobs, pieces of skin and skull flying through the air. Her font legs buckled out from under her, her hind legs still running, unaware that the front of her had just been blown to Kingdom Come, and what was left of her head did a nose dive into the ground. A piece of one of her ears landed at James’ feet and he stared at it. He felt someone grab his arm and he looked into his father's face. His father's mouth was moving, but James could barely hear him. It sounded like a whisper, then James made out the words, "Are you okay?" and he nodded his head.
He heard a faint scream from behind him and he turned to see Fern, standing in the doorway, her hands over her mouth, tears already coursing down her cheeks and he knew then that she, too, had seen Georgia as his father had killed her.
He turned back to the scene in front of him.
The hog lay in the floor, most of her head blown away. One eye hung out of its socket, still attached by a ropey red string of sinew. Jagged edges of bone stuck out here and there and where her brain used to be looked kind of like bread pudding, only soured and red.
James was numb. Where was Cliff? The hog's face had been bloody before his father had blasted her crazy head off.
James moved jerkily, feeling as if his body was full of crystallized ice, and walked toward the open gate of the stall. His father was already there. James could tell that there was something wrong, something very wrong.
Seph was stooped, leaning on the stock of the gun, his other hand on his chest. When James came up to him, his father's mouth was slack, his face stark white and he pointed a shaky finger toward the inside of the stall.
James turned to look. His stomach lurched. He wanted to scream, even opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out except a few tiny choking sounds and the thought that Fern mustn't see, mustn't see....
The stall was covered with enough blood to fill a horrible bathtub. It dripped down the sides of the wall, not yet starting to congeal. The stall smelled like shit and the coppery smell that James associated with the slaughterhouse. But that wasn't the worst thing, not at all. The worst thing was Cliff. The body that had once been his brother was in the back corner of the stall, looking very much like it was just sitting there, except for the expression of the face and the huge, gaping hole in the stomach. Intestines, Cliff's intestines, a bloody white, with bluish-purple streaks, snaked out of the hole that the hog had torn in Cliff's stomach and trailed across his thighs. Cliff's lungs peeked from under the ribcage that now had no skin to cover it. Everything else that should have filled the hole--stomach, liver, spleen--was gone. Georgia had eaten it, including part of the shirt that hung in tatters from Cliff's shoulders.
James took a step into the death chamber. His father made some kind of squeaky, choking noise behind him, but James didn't turn around.
His eyes were glued to his brother's face. His face, although untouched by the sow's teeth, was the worst thing.
Cliff's face was ghostly white, so white that it reminded James of the white marble statue of the soldier that stood in the middle of what was called the Soldier's Circle at the cemetery in Rockside.
But, the whiteness was the only thing that resembled the statue.
Cliff's lips were drawn back across his pearly white teeth so tightly that they almost disappeared. His whole mouth was stretched into a horrendous death grin. There was a tiny drop of blood, shiny and wet, hanging from Cliff's top front tooth and as James watched, the drop of blood shimmered, glistening for a second, elongated agonizingly slow, then fell in a silent splash onto Cliff's upraised chin.
Cliff's eyes were wide with the terror of what had to have been the most horrible moment of his short, lived life. They were made of shiny glass, bulging, the pupil’s opaque, looking toward the sky and James thought that maybe he had been asking for the help of God, but James knew that there was no God in this stall today. There was only the blackest of evil.
And James should have been able to stop it, but he had been too busy trying to figure out if he was crazy and now he knew for sure that this was real, all too real. It was James that was supposed to come out here, not Cliff. The other voice had kept calling him, coaxing him, teasing him, to come out to the barn, but Aunt Doll had cut in, warning him. Why couldn't she have warned him about Cliff?
"A' cause the wheels had already started their spinnin', James, they were set in motion. It's you I had to stop a' cause it's you, boy, that will put a stop to the whole of it," Aunt Doll whispered in his deaf ear.
A hand grabbed roughly at his shoulder. James jerked around. His father, too pale, croaked at him. "F-Fern. Don't let...." He pointed a shaky finger. James followed the finger. Fern was walking toward the stall, her hands still clasped to her mouth. James' father shook his head 'no' at James, then clasped his hand to his chest again and groaned.
James had to stop Fern before she saw, before she saw what her pet had done to her brother. He headed her off, putting his arm around her shoulders and led her back toward the door and away from the bloody carnage. Her shoulders hitched, silent tears streamed down her face as she looked up at him with the eyes of a scared two-year-old.
"Do you think that you can call an ambulance?" James asked her when they got to the door. He heard himself speak the words inside his own head and wondered, vaguely, if his hearing would ever return to the one ear.
Fern was nodding her head up and down so fast that James thought she would bruise her brain. "C-c-cliff?" she stuttered thickly, her voice full of tears.
James nodded. "Cliff."
Fern's eyes widened, then she turned, and raced over the gravel for the house.
> James turned back to the scene that he knew would haunt him forever.
His father stood just outside the stall, hunched even further over the stock of the gun. It had to be totally supporting his weight by now.
James started walking toward him, trying to remember if he had heard his father put two shells or one in the gun and hoping that there wasn't another round still left in it because, if his father fell....
Seph doubled over, letting the gun fall to the ground. The gun went off. The wild shot whizzed into the stall and blew out a piece of the barn wall. His father crumpled onto the floor, a rag-doll clutching its chest.
James ran to his side, dropping down on the ground beside him.
Seph was curled on his side, his knees drawn up to his chest.
James kneeled over his father and tried to cradle his head from the hard floor. He got his father's head into his lap. Seph looked up at him, his eyes wide and scared. "Dad?" James asked, "Dad, what is it?"
His father's mouth was moving but only a raspy whisper would come out. James leaned over, placing his good ear close enough to his lips that his father could have kissed him had he been of a mind to.
"Hearttt...." his father hissed through clenched teeth. James started to pull away from his father, but he grasped his shirt and pulled him back down. In a voice like stoney grit, Seph whispered, "The girl...she," he sucked in a ragged breath, "witch...her babe...my babe...s'under oak, rocks," his father coughed, clutching his chest, "have to dig...dig it up...the babe, by the...creek...the girl, she...won't stop...." Another ragged breath. His father clutched him closer. "The girl will kill us all if the babe doesn't get the Mayhew name!" Seph went limp.
James drew back from his father. He had passed out from the effort of talking, but he was still breathing, not real well, but breathing just the same. James wished that the damn ambulance would hurry the hell up. There wasn't any hope for Cliff, he was already gone, but his father's heart couldn't take the sight of his son, half-eaten by a hog.
James looked at his father's slack face, small slivers of white showing from beneath his half-closed eyelids.
So, he did have something to do with everything that had gone so insanely wrong. His mother's death, the hogs going wild. And now, poor Cliff, dying a death more terrible than any horror writer could possibly invent. Everything added up.
James knew now that he had a job to do.
It had to do with the girl he had seen kneeling in the raspberries, of that he was certain. What a baby, an oak tree, and rocks down at the creek had to do with it, he wasn't sure, but he'd figure it out.
He just hoped that he could figure it out in time, before something else happened to continue the destruction of his family.
James knelt on the barn floor, his ailing father's head in his lap, his brother, gutted by a wild hog a few feet away, and listened to a siren's wail, far off and getting closer.
PART THREE
RIGHTING THE WRONG
Chapter Eleven
Anna had watched and waited, there in the hollow log.
The sun was climbing the sky, warming the air, even where she lay under cover of the woods. The odor of the rotting log was overpowering, but she stayed huddled inside, concentrating. The strain showed on her face, beads of sweat oozing from her forehead.
She kept calling the boy James' name, but something was blocking her.
She opened her eyes, squinting when a glimmer of the sun broke through the canopy of leaves above her. Someone had come out of the house. She rose up as far as she could, trying to make out who it was.
It wasn't the James boy, it was the other one.
Confusion creased her brow.
"LEAVE MY JAMES ALONE!" a voice boomed inside her head, making her jerk. She cracked her head on the ceiling of her hiding place, sending pieces of rotted wood and bugs raining down on herself.
It had been the voice of 'Mommadoll'. She was protecting the boy.
Anna smiled, though, when she saw the other boy go into the barn. 'Mommadoll' had forgotten about this one. He would do just fine, this one would.
He was one of Seph's own, too.
It wasn't long before she heard the first screams coming from the barn.
She lay inside the hollow log with its bugs and its rotting smell and watched gleefully as the boy James, then Seph, ran toward the barn. Then, the girl had come out. The shotgun boomed, echoing its concussions through the woods. The girl stood in the doorway of the barn, screaming.
Maybe she'll be the next, Anna thought, watching her. Anna had lost a daughter. Maybe Seph should, too.
Anna watched the scene unfold: The boy James leading the girl back out of the barn, the girl running for the house and soon after, another blast from the gun and then, the ear-shattering wail of the ambulance truck, coming to take away the product of her labor.
She watched the men in the uniforms load the table-thing back into the ambulance truck. The table-thing hadn't been empty either.
Anna crawled out of the hollow log as soon as the men in the ambulance truck set their siren to screaming again. She knew the boy James wouldn't be able to hear her over all that caterwauling, so she wasn't concerned with being quiet.
She took off through the woods, heading back to her shack.
Her day was going well, all except for one thing.
She hadn't seen Seph come out of the barn.
***
Seph opened his eyes and looked through a mist.
Something covered his mouth and it hissed air at him.
Sound, a loud screeching wail, burst into his head and he was moving, jiggling. Where was he?
A face leaned over him, but he couldn't make it out. It mumbled something that he couldn't understand. He shook his head. His chest felt like someone had hit him with a sledgehammer.
The mist over his eyes started to clear and he could see a little. Tubes dangled from the ceiling above him, swaying back and forth. He remembered. An ambulance. He was in the back of an ambulance. His chest squeezed, the pain was like a vise. Heart-attack. He closed his eyes.
That was a mistake. He saw his Clifford, torn to pieces, in the stall of the barn. Everything started to come back to him as the siren assaulted his ears and the world swayed and bumped as they took him to the hospital.
The girl hadn't been bluffing.
She had seen to it that Cliff was dead. His Cliff. He had to do something. He had to go get that babe. It was the only way. He tried to sit up, but someone held him down. His head started to swim. The light started to go dim and he thought, don't let me die, don't let me die, not yet.
"Hang in there, honey," Chloe breathed against his ear. He was surprised that he could hear her over all this confounded noise, then it struck him that it had been Chloe's voice and he got scared. Was he dying? He couldn't die yet! He had to talk to James, tell James what to do. James was the only one who could stop her.
James had to stop the crazy girl, give the babe a name, because Seph surely couldn't do it now.
"James," Seph said from under the oxygen mask.
The face leaned over him again. The face hadn't understood him.
Seph's world tilted and he was on his way back down to unconsciousness. His last thought before he blacked out again was Chloe, please don't let me die.
***
James watched the ambulance pull away, siren screaming before they even got out of the driveway. He stood in the gravel, his arm around Fern, holding her while she cried. He silently wondered if she was going to dehydrate. The EMTs had told James that he couldn't go with his father, someone had to stay at the farm and wait for the coroner. The EMTs themselves had almost lost their cookies when they had seen Cliff. They had known even before the bravest of the two went into the stall to check, just to make sure, that Cliff was not for this world anymore. All it had taken was one look. They had called the coroner on their radio and set about taking care of his father. It had been a heart attack. No wonder, after seeing his son in that conditio
n, even if he was awful young for a heart attack, one of them had said. They asked James if he was all right. He had told them that he was, but they still had watched him out of the corners of their eyes.
One of them had given Fern a shot, to calm her they had said. Then, they had rushed off.
The ambulance was out of sight now, but he could still hear it, echoing through the Hollow. Fern was starting to quiet down, and her eyes looked a little funny. James thought that the shot must finally be taking effect and he led her into the house and put her on the couch. She fell asleep almost immediately. James wandered back outside and sat down on the back step, leaving the inside kitchen door open so that he could hear the phone.
He couldn't figure out why Aunt Doll hadn't warned him about Cliff. She had said that the wheels had already been set to spinning. What was that supposed to mean? The image of the girl that he had seen that day in the raspberries blinked into his mind. He hadn't actually seen her, not clearly anyway, but he knew that she had long hair and was dressed differently. A long dress, and what he had envisioned as a shawl. He remembered the few words his father had said before he had passed out. Something about a girl's babe, his babe, and digging it up from under some rocks and an oak tree down by the creek. Had his father got the girl pregnant? Seph had called her a witch. Aunt Doll had said something about a witch.
Maybe this girl was a witch and maybe, his father had gotten her pregnant. His father had said to give the babe the Mayhew name.
James still didn't understand what he was supposed to do. He needed to talk to his father, get some more information out of him. Then maybe he could stop this thing.
The phone rang inside the house, making him jump.
He raced through the door, thinking it might be the hospital, and grabbed it before it could ring a third time.
"Hello?"
"James, that you? This is Doc Varner," the Doc said on the other end of the line.