Little Ray-Ray wasn’t brown-stained-underwear-sticking-out-above-his-baggy-pants weird like some of the occasional deep woods kids they bused down to school that no one talked to or anything like that. Those kids’ families just moved away deeper into the woods after the authorities found them, and pretty soon the kid wouldn’t come back so no one worried about them. He was his own weird. Ray-Ray walked stiff—like a machine, a robot—with a straight stare that made me mad. He’d tilt his head back and forth like a bird. And his face was lean, with cheekbones sticking out, which looked robotish too.
Mostly, the thing was, he wouldn’t let things be. He was always coming up to me at recess and trying to talk to me about stupid stuff. My friends laughed at him, but he still stayed until they just got bored and irritated and then they didn’t want to be around me. I’d pinch him and kick him when the lunch ladies weren’t looking, but it was like having lice in your hair—nothing short of cutting things off completely would do.
My family had known their family for near five years, back to just a couple of years before my dad left. Ray-Ray hadn’t gone to my school until he reached fifth. He had been home schooled, but now his mom said it was time for him to socialize, meet girls. The moms would laugh at us when they said the last. They always added that to embarrass us.
“You have any little girlfriends?” Mrs. LaRouche would ask.
“No, Ma’am,” I’d say, trying to keep it short. That always made them ask more questions until we squirmed.
“You had your first kiss?” Noises behind hands to each other and laughing.
“You keep it in you pants, hear?” My mom would hit Ray-Ray’s mom lightly on the arm when she said something like that and say, “Now, come on now,” which meant it was about to all end this time, but didn’t really mean she should stop saying it ever.
“Denny will watch Little Ray-Ray, won’t you, baby,” my mother said when Mrs. LaRouche said Ray-Ray would be in school with me in our first through eighth building tucked into the hills off the highway, only about half a mile from our dead-end houses. “You walk him to school and watch out for him,” she said. “That’s kindness.”
She hissed out of earshot of her friend when I protested. “You watch that boy or there’ll be trouble. His family is like family to us.”
My mom always repeated these warnings to me in the morning, when she had her hair tied up so it wouldn’t blow wild in the winds off the ocean. A handkerchief, blue, usually, or green, tied at the back. She wore jeans with the cuffs rolled and plaid shirts hanging out. I thought she looked beautiful, but cold, like the sea.
“Yes, mom,” I’d say, defeated.
I’d trudge out to the street and off toward school, hoping Ray-Ray wouldn’t appear. But I would hear his door slam before I got anywhere, and he always came running up behind me. And then, only then and at no other time during the day, he would start in on the bodies buried in the basement. It was so damn weird, and felt so cut off from everything else I never considered telling about it—my mom didn’t want to hear it, and it was done in a secret way, too hard to even explain how it came up. I figured Ray-Ray had finally figured out how to get a rise out of me. Making me hit him was better than having no friends at all, is the thing.
“Do human bodies run around like chickens after the head’s cut off?” he asked.
“Shut up,” I said, already balling my fist like a dog trained to eat by a bell.
“Does the head still try to talk?” And I hit him so he bent in half. I’d seen that, a headless chicken, with Ray-Ray, of course, out by the coop under the bare electric bulb sticking out the side of the building.
“They’re prepping a chicken over there,” my mom had said one day. “Go watch.”
That’s how it started—my having to go over there and see, and bury the heads. When I said that was gross, she said to get my ass over there—I didn’t have a daddy anymore, so it was good to spend time around Mr. LaRouche. It was man stuff, she meant, “prepping” the chickens, something my dad would have shown me.
Ray-Ray’s dad never let us in the coop. Not that I wanted to go in, though it was usually cold outside of an evening. It smelled in there, and a sort of sticky rust coated the wooden walls while the chickens clucked. I saw that much. He had unclean tools and a table in there, too, beyond the chickens. He was always building stuff in there, but must have taken it apart again, unsatisfied. He didn’t want to show us any of that. We waited, close together, by the side of the coop. Trying not to wrinkle our noses and make him mad, just keeping our faces blank.
Ray-Ray’s father had chosen his chicken carefully, handled it casually, lifting it with one hand round its neck. He knocked it against the cutting stump, dazing it, then struck fast with the axe, making me flinch. Ray-Ray didn’t flinch. His dad held the head in his hand, constricting the blood. The chicken had run one way, then another, almost as if it still had eyes, seeking escape, almost as if anything mattered anymore. Then it seemed to get tired of thinking without a head and just lay down and twitched. Mr. LaRouche laughed but it didn’t seem to be because it was funny.
After a while, a dark look came into his face and he told me to stop crying and go home. I didn’t even realize I was crying. I had thought I was just standing there, like Ray-Ray. I didn’t cry after that first time, so he came up with putting the heads in a bag and getting us to bury them, even deeper than last time, finding places in the yard not already piled with dirt. He hadn’t really dug up the yard, I learned. It was more like he piled up dirt from somewhere else. But at the time, I just knew to stay away from the piles, however they came to be there. I just needed a new place to bury the chicken heads.
Again and again, as I trudged to school, Ray-Ray would run up behind me, then start speaking about the bodies.
“It ain’t pink,” Ray-Ray would say, “the hair of the dead. But it is sticky like cotton candy—brittle, sticky—maybe from blood?”
“Shut up,” I said.
“They whisper to me about things they did when they was alive.”
I hit him in the stomach. He doubled over for a while, but soon he had caught up to me. We walked on in silence until we reached the school.
Ray-Ray had brown eyes, wide set, and a large nose. He was lanky and awkward, but that was hardly anything to set him apart. It was more how he stood too close when he talked to you. How he stared at you like an adult does, judging you, not like a kid who doesn’t care. How he grinned wrong, or stood swaying in one spot, or picked some sort of red thing growing on his eyelid until it just got bigger and bigger, though his mom said it was harmless.
“The bodies smell like old socks and vomit.”
“Shut up.”
“Why didn’t he bury them deeper? They tell me to stop touching myself.”
I slapped him so his head snapped to the left, his neck cracking. It scared me but exulted me when he just came along quietly after—and that feeling of joy then scared me in a different way. Not the face, I reminded myself... not the face.
I tried sometimes to reason with him to make him stop talking to me about dead bodies in his basement.
“So you’re telling me your father killed people?” I said one day. “That’s who you mean must have done it, isn’t it? He killed them and buried them in the basement?”
He didn’t answer, just grinned wrong at me. His eyes would almost cross when he did that. We were the same age, but I was bigger than Ray-Ray.
“I’ve been in your house. Nothing smells funny. I’ve been in the kitchen where the door to the basement is—nothing there.”
“There’re scratching like rats in the floor,” he said.
“Shut up, you fucking freak,” I yelled.
“There’s a dry smacking when they move—like old people’s lips when they’re hungry.”
I hit him into uneasy silence, a break from his madness. The next day he would always be back to tell me more.
“They moan in the wind for lost things.”
“Shut up,” I said, defeated.
“They cry like waves rolling.”
I punched him and stood there for a while with my fist in his stomach, wanting to crawl into the grave myself. My friends wouldn’t talk to me anymore. Ray-Ray always came up to me in the playground and we stood there together, numbly and dumbly, waiting for the day to be over.
“The dead miss me when I’m at school,” he said.
“Shut up.”
“They think if I would come down, turn them a bit, they’d rest more easy.”
I gave him a quick punch to get it over. No malice, just a duty and then a hurried march to school and a waiting for the day to turn ’round to the next one when Ray-Ray would come up behind me as I set out for school again, his feet dogging my steps until his thin voice would break the silence and give me purpose again—to strike him.
“Their skin is stretchy to touch, like old rubber gloves my dad uses when he preps the chickens.”
“Shut up.”
“The dead taste rancid, like—”
He didn’t get farther then that—it was the line crossed. The point of breaking, the last straw. Why that day? It was gross, the tasting them, but he had been gross before; it was the end, was all. That was the day, a late November day when the pumpkin work has given way to the tree farms, when I hit him again in the face, like the first time I hit him. When I would hit him for the last time, eventually. How many hits were in between... I can’t count them. I can’t remember how many I piled on him that day—as many as I could until my arm grew sore.
“Deeper,” I shouted, “bury them deeper.”
Lips balloon faster than you might think when you split them against teeth with your fist. Blood splatters like paint on a canvas of skin. A tooth chip lodged in my hand but I didn’t stop. Bruises marked his eyes and cheeks. An eye gets loose in its socket when you break the thin bone along the outer corner. Finally, his eyes uncrossed, even as he grinned at me wrongly. The skin begins to be like a softened steak—tender in its welting, soft and pliable. The blood streaks the face but also runs along inside the eyes with bursting vessels, while streaked spit smears red around the mouth. I couldn’t feel my hands, I hit him so much. I blubbered until tears fogged my vision and wet snot and spit dripped from my chin. I didn’t know at the time who took me off him—some older kid from the high school, Tom something, who wouldn’t have normally thought twice about us kids fighting, but my determination to hit Ray-Ray until the dead stayed dead had moved him to drag me off my unconscious doppelganger.
In the time before I was taken away from that place, that town, Tom told me about it once, but he seemed shaken. He had weak blue eyes and a dusting of freckles; telling me the story of the fight made him so pale he looked ill. “You just kept repeating as you hit him over and over, ‘Bury them deeper, bury them deeper.’” He shook his head and took a long drag on his cigarette, trying to exorcize things. “‘Bury them deeper.’” He exhaled a long stream of smoke into the fog.
When Tom had finally stopped holding me back after the beating, I had run into the woods, back past my house, past the rusty car and the chicken coop, over the drop off and away. I shivered at night but no one found me, huddled under a tree, far away from everything. I sat and stared at the dark... and the dark stared back.
I had dreams after that—peaceful dreams of postcard scenes that filled me with anxiety because I felt something had been forgotten; maybe just out of frame, or below the ground, or behind the trees, or behind me looking on, they waited, the restless, unseen, pushing into the frame at just the next moment. A hand from the earth. A touch at the nape of neck. An eye staring from deep cover. It waited only a moment before it struck.
“Bury them deeper!” I would awake shouting, striking out.
There were no bodies in the basement. No. They were below the chicken coop. No one found them until after we had moved away. Mom read the newspaper reports and I read them over her shoulder, trying not to tremble with memories of terrible walks to school with an imp poking me until I beat him senseless. For a while I worried that cops or reporters would track us down and ask me, the neighbor kid, if I suspected anything. I would answer with the truth: I knew nothing. I can’t even truthfully quite describe Mr. LaRouche to you. I never really looked at him—just at the chickens running without heads. Mr. LaRouche had never dropped any dark hints. I had seen no mysterious goings on—no body bags hastily buried at midnight hours, no “missing” reports piling up, no serial killer trophies in a pile like on TV. But I knew another truth: I had been told every day for months on end about the bodies. I had been told and refused to listen, with violence.
But what I really feared was when I heard Mr. LaRouche had buried seven young women under the coop and along the dry creek bed—women he had met in his job as night clerk at hotels along the coast, or picked up hitchhiking along the beautiful highway—all I wanted to do was beat Ray-Ray in the face.
Somehow I knew that was the thing to make everything all right. Strike until they stopped. Until the dead stayed dead. I wanted to bury them deeper.
I wanted to beat Ray-Ray until he was in the hospital again with all the tubes in his face and arms. And I would tell him “sorry” again, like I did the last time I saw him, with his mom glaring at me and my mom shaking my arm. Ray-Ray never returned to school, and I left by the end of the year, friendless and alone, and my mom and I moved down to Oakland by the Bay. And I wasn’t sorry about it at all. Like the beating had gotten me out of that place, and away from his nagging. I wanted to beat him until he stopped bugging me, until he shut up, until death stopped dogging me. I wanted to beat his face from my dreams, to stop his broken, bloodshot eyes from looking at me and to wipe his all-wrong smile from his busted, bloated lips.
I wanted to beat him so I never had to know about men like Mr. LaRouche—a man acting just like a chicken with its head cut off, running just to run, no thought, just mindless action; I didn’t want to know about the women; I didn’t want to cry; I wanted to beat Ray-Ray until I didn’t have to remember that all I wanted, more than anything, was to beat him until my heart, pounding against my chest like a fist to the face, finally burst and I could stop wanting anything and could rest without remembering. I wanted nowhere to walk to, no one behind me about to speak about the bodies and what they wanted, or what they were doing now: I wanted nothing. I wanted to hit and hit.
I wanted to stop thinking about hitting him. I would ask someone, I don’t know who, someone: bury me deep, and bury me deeper. Because I don’t want to know, bury me deeper still. Dirt over my head—bury me deeper than everything—and maybe everything would finally make sense.
But even there, in the grave, I would hear, behind me... a voice, calling: I hear them, the voice would whisper, the bodies. And I know what they want. And I would struggle, against myself, my death, even in the confines of my coffin, to turn and strike and make it stop. But, no.
I will hear them, all those bodies. And they will smell like sulfur and sweat. And they smell like bile and urine. Like fear.
I bury them deeper in the basement, the bodies. But I don’t want to talk about them. I bury them where they can’t be heard. I bury them deeper. I bury them deeper still.
David Sandner is a member of the HWA and SFWA. His work has appeared in leading magazines, anthologies, journals, websites, podcasts, and radical zines. He is a Professor of English at Cal State Fullerton. He has written and edited books on the history and origins of the fantastic and its genres, including Mythopoeic Award Finalist Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831. He recently Chaired the 2016 Philip K. Dick Conference and curated the Philip K. Dick in Orange County website. He is working on a novel, on a scholarly collection, Philip K. Dick, Here and Now, and on a site called The Frankenstein Meme, exploring the influence of Mary Shelley’s novel. He can be found at davidsandner.com.
THESE BEAUTIFUL BONES by Betty Rocksteady
BETTY ROCKSTEADY
The crack zig-zagged acros
s the basement, ripping it nearly in two. That was definitely where the draft was coming from. Rather than fixing the fucking thing, the landlord had covered it with boxes stuffed with junk, cutting corners wherever he could. Suzanne was sick of this dingy place already, but it was the only thing she could afford. Well, the only thing her mother could afford, and that cash was running out quick.
How did the landlord even get insurance on this place? The dirty floor smelled awful. Musty, but in a very human way. If she was being honest, it smelled like an unwashed cunt. The opening ran deep into the earth. It was probably full of bugs and rats. The piles of boxes concealed it at a glance, but there was no hiding it once you got down here. There was no hiding anything down here. Tacked up posters peeled away to reveal walls covered in graffiti or drawings or something.
Suzanne sighed, shoved boxes back in place. They must be creating at least a little bit of insulation. The stack of cardboard wobbled, spilled out a mess of torn clothing and dirty magazines. Suzanne grabbed a handful of clothing and dropped it again. Bits of lace and pliant leather, combined with nudie magazines… gross. She stood up and brushed her hands on her jeans, frowned at the mess. This was disgusting. She tried to shove the pile aside with her foot and just made things worse; more boxes tumbled and spilled—a stack of photos that she didn’t even want to look at, stained paintbrushes, a dagger. She paused.
It was dangerous looking, even in this pile of junk. She reached for it, but drew her hand back when she noticed the handle—it was intricately carved, and right where she would wrap her hand around it, it was shaped like a gigantic, exaggerated penis. Her cheeks went hot. She kicked it back into the pile with the rest of the stuff. What the hell was wrong with him, renting the place out like this?
She yanked out her phone. Anger churned in her stomach, but what good would calling him do? He must know about the crack and all this shit already. He was the one who hid it. Who else could she call to complain? Her mom was already worried enough, and Eric...
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