Somewhere someone was playing their drums too loudly. Or they had the stereo on too high. And whatever song it was, it was weird. They sounded like jungle drums, being played by primitives on a savanna somewhere. Like the drums in old movies about cannibals. It was a haunting beat that would have sent shivers down the spine of every white man. The beat sent shivers down the spine of every civilized man.
The beat mirrored the black heart in every soul. It was the rhythm of a witch doctor, dancing under a blood red moon.
No, Sam told himself. It was just some snot nosed punk playing his drums too loud. That was all. It had to be. Still, they mixed in well with that tiny whistle that would not stop until it had burrowed all the way down into his soul. The two were joined. They formed a bizarre song that could not be ignored.
Sam did his best. He drank his beer and watched his TV. Mabel would be home soon with the kids. He had to enjoy the quiet time while he had it.
Fucking kids. They were always screaming and crying about something. Hell, next year one of them would want a drum set for Christmas and the cycle would continue.
Sam drank his beer.
A cold breeze came in through the window, lifting the cheap drape that hung over it. Lumbering like some lost leviathan he stood at the window, stared at it, then drunkenly slid it shut. The heater was another thing that they never turned on, relying solely on the insulation of the trailer to keep them warm. Bills. He did not need any more bills. Luckily the television did not cost much, especially since he had Pat hook up the cable illegally. It was a necessary crime. He needed the TV. It was the only thing that kept him sane.
The whistle grew until now it was painfully audible. It was thick and burning inside his ears, floating on the night air like a lone eagle. Sam lifted a finger and plugged his ear, but it did not stop. Instead it grew louder until it reached a feverish pitch, like the whistle on a tea kettle.
Jungle drums beat to the rhythm of his heart.
“Damn it.” He was going to find that kid and shove those drum sticks up his ass. Sam was just drunk enough to do it, too. He looked out the window. A reptilian face was looking back at him. Unblinking eyes peered into his soul. The snakes forked tongue licked the sky.
Sam stumbled back into the chair as the drums became louder. The whistle was now screaming. He was crying.
A scream got lodged in his throat. He knew what it was outside. It was a giant boa from the bayou. He had been hearing stories about them since he was a child. It had come to steal his soul. Both his eyes grew wide like greasy eggs on a Sunday morning, poached in their own fat. The beer can fell from his hand and spilled onto the floor. The rope slid around his neck like an African python. The drums were louder. The whistle was shrill as the rope went tight and pulled him. Sam reached up and grabbed it, but it would not let him go. Soon his fingers were chafed and burned.
Wildly he started to struggle as the rope pulled him back into the wall. A stray kick knocked the television off its pedestal. It exploded, and the trailer went dark.
“Know that she has named you Drunkard. Know that the time has come for payment. The Loa demand it.”
The rope was talking to him. But it was not a rope. It did not feel like a rope. Sam reached up and felt scale. The snake was wrapped around his throat.
“The Loa need your blood tonight.”
But Sam could not hear whoever was saying that. All he could think of was Hal. This must have been how he felt when they lynched him. The rope crushing his wind pipe, stealing all the air from the body. The bones being gnashed together until they scraped. The jungle drums pounded harder, hitting him like a hammer.
Sam hung from the ceiling with his toes dangling from the floor. His neck was broken like a twig and tiny droplets of blood trickled from his nose like snot. Outside the serpent laughed with its lipless mouth. Slowly his heart pulsed a final time and then it was still.
The drums stopped with his heart. The whistle was silenced. Sam the Drunkard was dead.
***
Her heavy fist slapped the hollow door of the trailer hard. “God damn it, Sam!” she roared as the children behind her huddled in fear. They had their ears covered because they hated listening to their mom yell. None of them wanted to hear her swear at daddy. “You open this fucking door right now!”
Only her calls went unanswered. When she fell silent the trailer park was silent with her.
“Ah, shit,” she mumbled and dug around in her purse until she found her keys. “That asshole drank himself to sleep again. That bastard. This is the last time, Sam! Do you hear me?”
She opened the door. Inside all was quiet. She could not even hear him snore. The television was off. Everything was still as a tomb.
“Damn you!” she shouted again as the children filtered in. Each of the had a bag of groceries to carry. “The ice cream is melting, you cock-sucker!”
She flipped on a light. It took a moment to process what she was seeing. The shape hanging from the ceiling, well it might have been a pinata, like the one they got for little Carl on his birthday. Her mind wondered then she knew what she was looking at.
Her husband was dead.
She began to scream.
Mabel stumbled backwards out of the trailer. She closed her eyes, but she could still see the image of her husband slowly turning with blood seeping from between his lips. His eyes were bulging from his head and looking at her, dead. Stocking covered feet hovered only inches from the floor, twirling. He always had been a slob. Sometimes Mabel wondered what it might have been like to marry Hal Robson. Sure, being a darkie’s wife probably would have sucked, but at least his giant horse cock would have taken care of her.
Hal Robson was dead. Funny, she had not thought about him in years. Something about the red in the moon was dredging up all sorts of awful memories. But Mabel was a mother. This was no time to remember anything. There were children to worry about.
And there was a dead body in her trailer.
“Don’t look!” she said, rushing them back inside. “Don’t look at it!”
The three of them started to cry as the grocery bags fell from their arms, breaking open on the linoleum tile. She grabbed them and yanked them outside before slamming the trailer door shut. The only person she knew to call was Pat. Pat would know what to do. Pat always knew what to do.
It was Pat’s idea to hang that Hal Robson character. And they had survived that. They would survive this.
***
Pat lifted his hand to his mouth and coughed into clenched fingers. If there was one thing he hated about bars it was the smoke. It was that heavy sort of cigarette smoke that got into lungs and clothes and could not be removed no matter how many times one showered or washed. It permeated everything and left no man unscarred.
Ahead of him stretched the bar itself, like a long road made of wood that could only be followed, never to find the end. Here men drowned their sorrows in thick booze. Counting himself among such men, Pat raised his own glass and took a drink of beer. He could taste it. It tasted flat. And it was warm.
“Something on your mind, cowboy?” Taylor asked as she wiped away a stain on the counter. Only moments before a man had thrown up there and fallen over. Pat watched as Taylor herself dragged him out. Taylor was tough, for a chick.
“Nah. Nothing,” Pat said.
“Hey, you seen that moon outside?” she smiled at him. “I ain’t seen a moon like this since I was a kid. They call it a hunter’s moon, you know? ‘Cause of the red. It’s supposed to be blood.”
“None of that superstitious bullshit, now. It’s just another night at Archies,” Pat said. Taylor was still young. She would learn these things. “The finest bar in all of Saint Fucking Sebastian.”
With that he swilled down the rest of his glass, tossing it all into his stomach with a flick of the wrist. Some beer spilled past his lip and reached his slacks, adding another stain to the collection.
“Hey, what’s bothering you? You’ve never complained abou
t Saint Sebastian before.”
It was a slow night at the bar called Archies. Now that the drunk asshole was gone there was time for talk and Taylor was a good girl to talk to. Over the years they had gotten to know each other. The aging door to door salesman and the tougher than nails barmaid were a match made in Heaven. Sometimes Pat was here like clockwork. He would wander in, order himself a beer, which would become the first of many, then stumble out to his old pickup truck and drive home. It was a habit. It was a routine. It was one that Pat enjoyed.
“Just tired I guess,” Pat sighed. “Haven’t been sleeping too well lately. Weird dreams. Could I get another?”
“What you need is a good woman,” Taylor said as she poured the beer. For years she had thought of taking Pat into her bed, only there seemed something distant about him. Besides, her mother had warned her about dating salesmen. Slick bastards, all of them.
As always, her attempts to flirt rolled off him like water off a duck’s ass. She set the beer down in front of him and he drank as if he was trying to douse a fire in his soul.
Because he was. Inside the darkest part of his mind were the memories. They raked at his psyche like claws from a malevolent demon, trying to tear him down. He didn’t want to admit it to Taylor, but in his head men in white costumes walked and men hung from trees. Lately the recollection had grown from a tiny nagging in the back of his head to a raging inferno. But it all happened so long ago. It hardly mattered now, did it? Besides, it was years ago, and he had been as drunk then as he was now. Life had moved on. He had a job, and a good one. He had earned the right to move on.
Only the question remained. Was it really a mistake or a moment of glory? Was it something that he should feel ashamed of or take pride in?
The blacks were devil children. He knew that. The Bible told him that. They would stab him in the back just as soon as look at him. The black man was here to steal his children in the night and rape his wife. They were here to take his job. At the time, stringing up Hal Robson had seemed like the right thing to do. Especially after all the shit he said to Mabel. That just was not right. Hal Robson deserved to swing for talking to a white woman that way.
Then why did it bother him so? And why now, years after the incident itself.
The telephone rang. They looked at each other and then Taylor went to answer it.
“Archies,” she said the name of her bar with a proud smile, as if she was trying to flirt with whoever was on the other line. Then her smile turned grim. She looked over at Sam as the blood drained from her face. “It’s for you.”
“For me?” he asked and accepted the receiver. “Who the Hell …” Mabel was on the other end. She was hysterical. “Okay, okay. I’ll be right over.” He handed the phone back to Taylor and gave her a cross look. “That was Mabel, you know? Sam’s wife. Something happened.”
“Well, you better get over there,” she said. “Don’t bother about your tab, cowboy. You can get me next time.”
“Thanks.” She was a good woman, he knew. The way to his heart always had been through his liver. “I gotta go. Have a good night, Taylor.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, hon.”
Outside he got into the old car that he drove from door to door selling vacuum cleaner attachments. Across the rear window he had his old sawed-off shotgun. He took a deep breath and turned the ignition. Sam lived out in the boonies, far from civilization. That was the way he liked things. Sam always had been a strange one. He enjoyed his privacy.
Pat always wondered what sorts of things went through his old friend’s mind. He seemed to sometimes take a sadistic glee in harming things. He wondered what Mabel had been screaming about.
***
The trees of the swamp rose in the darkness when his light strafed past them. Shadows were cast by the bright beams of his headlights. Two people sat beside a dirt road, a boy and a girl, shivering in the cold. This was nowhere, and they didn’t have a car. It could be hours, even days before someone else came by. So, Pat pulled up beside them and turned the truck off. They were already on their feet when he climbed out. He got a good look at the moon above. It was like a single bloodshot eye, watching everything that went on beneath.
Him. It was watching him.
“Howdy,” the boy said as Pat got his first look at him.
“What is going on here?” he asked. They were both covered in muck. Their pants were encrusted with slime. It looked as if they had been wading through miles of swamp and they would be lucky if they had not caught a leech or a snake. The fact that they had not happened upon a stray alligator was a small miracle.
“We were out hiking when we came across this old shack,” the girl started. “Then this big dude came running out, screaming at us. We thought he was going to kill us!”
“He was definitely on something,” the boy said. “His eyes were all bugged out like some freako.”
Like every other kid in Saint Sebastian these two were only out looking for a good place to screw. Hiking at ten o’clock at night was a whopper of a lie to tell. But Pat couldn’t blame them. He had fucked many a girl in these swamps. In fact, there was a little island not far from here that was beautiful in the daylight with a little bit of grass and lots of trees. He thought about taking Taylor back there one of these days.
Pat had also been there at night. It was truly terrifying. That was why they went there. The thrill was stronger than it was when they were in the back of their parent’s car.
“I’ll go look,” Pat said, and he pulled the long mag-light from his trunk. He took the shotgun down from the rack. “You two get home and get cleaned up. Your parents are probably worried sick.”
They looked at each other and then they were gone. Pat was alone with the swamp. But he had his gun. That was enough.
The bayou had always seemed like a place of evil to him. It was something to be dreaded and feared. Maybe it was the stench of rotting wood in the air, thick like decaying bodies in a tomb. Or maybe it was the creeper vines dangling from the trees, like giant strands of cobweb. Maybe it was the force of mother nature herself, the strength of her beauty and the awe of her terror. Stories had been circling through these swamps since he was a boy. They told about men lost here who came back different. They returned without their souls to walk the earth forever undead.
A rotted wood bridge lead deeper into the morass. He crossed it and found a trail of grass that lead to the island. His flashlight cut the woods wide open like a scalpel and he inspected everything, taking his time to make sure there were no surprises. The gators would be out tonight. Some were so big they could take a grown man’s leg with a single bite. Moving too hastily was a sure way to step on one. Stepping on one was a sure way to get killed.
The shack rose out of nowhere. It was on stilts above the bog and, like most wood out here, it was rotting. Soon it would collapse. Pat was surprised it hadn’t done so already. Tomorrow he would complain to the first cop he met. This place had to be condemned.
And there was another reason this shack had to be condemned. Something had happened here ten years ago. Something that he did not like to think about.
Besides, dumb junkies were always out here, looking for a quiet spot to get high. That was all those kids saw. Some junky darkie whacked out on whatever the drug of the moment was.
His entire foot plunged down into the muck. “Damn it,” he spit as cold water seeped into his shoe. Pat’s heart nearly froze. Carefully he pulled himself free. Every year they dragged hundreds of bodies from these swamps and they were all idiots like him who had dared to come out here alone. If people weren’t careful they stepped in quicksand and drown. There wasn’t anything they could do. They would just be walking along and suddenly vanish, as if they’d never been there at all. The last thing Pat wanted to be was devoured by the swamp.
Finally, he got his foot free and approached the shack. It was small, barely the size of a good tool shed. A rope bridge lead to its porch and there was a door. From the corner of
his eye he saw the tree. If he had dared look closer, he would have still seen a bit of rope dangling from one of the lower branches.
Pat climbed onto the embankment and heard the wood whine. He rapped on the door, hard. Whoever was inside might be asleep. Or stoned.
The door sagged. It gave. Pat looked closer. It was nothing, just some old planks shoddily nailed together.
“Hello?” he called into the shack then used his flashlight to shove the door all the way open. “Hey, anybody here?”
He flashed the light around and nearly dropped it. A shrunken head sat on a spike in the center of the room. The stick had been shoved right through the poor soul’s mouth. But the man underneath it was the real surprise.
He was as black as a vulture’s wing and the darkest man that Pat had ever seen. He was thin to the point of sallow. His head was devoid of hair and his baldness shined in the red light. Both eyes stared forward, lifeless, past Pat and into the swamp. He shined his light on them. They did not blink. The iris did not shrink.
Gore Suspenstories Page 7
