Devil's Creek

by Todd Keisling

  Maybe, maybe not. Maybe what Genie told him and what she believed was nothing but a farce.

  And maybe…well, that would be something, wouldn’t it? Wasn’t the moon currently in its full phase for the next few days? Maybe he could ask her himself.

  “As above, so below.” He wiped a tear from his eye, tracing a wet finger along her face, leaving a smudge on the glass. “My God, Genie, I hope you were wrong.”

  7

  Chief Bell missed the turn-off for Devil’s Creek Road, going nearly as far as the old road to Cumberland Falls before realizing his error. He was deep in thought as he drove, reliving the days of his youth, all the times he’d taken girls out to Devil’s Creek to get high and screw.

  The Cumberland Falls Highway made such reveries easy, of course. The road was mostly a straightaway running east to west, carrying travelers beyond the city limits and into the wilderness of Whately County. There was a whole lot of nothing between the town and the turnoff for the state park, fields and farmhouses and the Stauford Speedway, where rednecks from three counties away were already parking to get a good seat for the night’s race. In the great cultural desert of Kentucky, Stauford itself was an oasis, if a somewhat dubious one. Beyond its borders, there was plenty of nothing for travelers to get lost in their thoughts, hypnotized by the doldrums of the road, and Ozzie Bell was no different.

  When he doubled back to the turnoff for Devil’s Creek Road, Ozzie was struck with a memory from his high school days. He’d driven out here one night—was it after a football game? He couldn’t remember—with one of the cheerleaders, Peggy Darling. They’d dated briefly during his junior year, what couldn’t have been more than a couple of months but might have been years to their young love-struck hearts, and they’d driven out here for some quality “alone” time.

  Ozzie couldn’t keep himself from smiling as he passed the old barn on the right with the sign reading “Devil’s Creek.” He’d fucked the hell out of Peggy on the other side of the barn, amidst the sour smell of mildewed haybales and the faint aroma of cow shit wafting in the air around them. She’d gotten pregnant, and he’d taken up selling weed to pay for her abortion. They didn’t talk much afterward, and Peggy dropped out of school a few months later amid rumors she’d miscarried Ozzie’s child. His reputation as a star athlete for the football team protected him from such scrutiny, but the cheerleaders were fair game in the eyes of the Stauford elite. They didn’t bring in the money like those Stauford boys did. Last he’d heard, she was living in a trailer park somewhere in Landon, collecting welfare.

  What a shit-show, he thought. What was it he’d said to his pal Ronny Cord after the deed was done? When Ronny said he couldn’t believe it?

  A wicked laugh erupted from his throat, causing him to swerve into the other lane.

  “I kid you not,” he cackled, laughing so hard tears spilled down his cheeks. He jerked the wheel, guiding the cruiser back into its correct lane. A mile past the old barn, the pavement gave way to gravel as the road snaked its way into the forest. Not too far now.

  Another thought crept into his balding skull, on the heels of the wreckage he’d made of Peggy Darling’s life. Hadn’t he dreamed of Devil’s Creek last night? The phone call from Officer Gray pulled him out of it, and in his grogginess, he’d nearly forgotten about the horrible picture show going on behind his eyes. In the dream, he was tied to Susan’s bed (which wasn’t out of the ordinary—she liked to be on top), but there was something wrong with her. Her skin was wrinkled, her entire body pruning like a finger held underwater for too long, and she looked as though she’d aged fifty years. The bed rocked and creaked with their motion, but somehow, with the impossible logic of dreams, he knew they weren’t in her bedroom. No, they were in a large cavern of some sort, filled with a radiant blue light. And Susan—who wasn’t really Susan anymore, at least not by appearance, but instead an old crone having her way with him—chattered and gnashed her blackened teeth as she ground her hips against him. Maggots and flies fell from her mouth and nostrils. He lives, she’d cried. He lives!

  Officer Gray’s phone call saved him from the rest, but now, as he approached the end of Devil’s Creek Road and the trail leading toward the old church site, Ozzie realized he and Susan were here in his dream. Somehow, even though they were in a cave of some kind, he was gripped with this impossible knowledge they were at Devil’s Creek, deep down in its womb.

  “He lives,” Ozzie whispered, slowing the cruiser to a stop. “And what do we have here?”

  The fragments of his dream fell away in favor of the present. There was a truck here, parked alongside the road. He recognized that rusty yellow pickup truck. Most of Stauford’s sleazier residents would, too.

  Ozzie parked the cruiser and climbed out. He unbuckled his holster but did not draw his weapon. Not yet. Had he made a mistake in driving out here? A pair of crows cawed overhead, answering the unsettling question he’d asked himself. The last thing he wanted to do was interrupt Waylon and Zeke’s little operation, especially since he’d been the one to hire them in the first place, but there was the matter of the missing boys to consider as well. He stared at the truck for a few minutes, contemplating what to do.

  The crows cawed and cackled again from somewhere nearby, startling him from his thoughts. Ozzie approached the pickup, walked toward the front, and placed his hand on the hood. The surface was cold.

  Did you boys cook here all night?

  A soft breeze swept by him, forcing a whisper from the tree line. He looked toward the old trail, wondering if the forest had any secrets it wanted to share. The scattering of branches waved to him in the wind like gnarled bones. Come and see, they said. Come and see.

  The last thing he wanted to do was wander across a cook site, especially while on official business. Sure, he was the chief of police, and he could come and go as he pleased, but he preferred to keep a layer of separation between himself and the “side hustle,” as kids today were fond of saying. Politicians might’ve called it plausible deniability, but Ozzie preferred to think of it as being smart. The less he knew about how and where his drugs were made, the better.

  He wiped sweat from his balding pate, wishing he’d brought a joint with him. Branches snapped beyond the tree line, punctuated by a rustling of dry leaves in the breezes. That same pair of crows cawed once more in the distance, mocking him.

  What’s all this, his inner voice chided. Stauford’s greatest chief and good ol’ boy, Ozzie Bell, afraid of a stroll through the woods? Say it ain’t so.

  It was so, and he knew it. The dream had set him on edge. He didn’t understand why and honestly didn’t care to. All he knew was the dream left a sour twist in his guts, and finding Waylon’s truck here was like…what, a bad omen? Devil’s Creek wasn’t far from the campsite, after all. And for as much as Ozzie wanted to backhand the little shit, Riley Tate’s testimony was all they had to go on. Two men carried off those two boys from the camp. Two men.

  Two. Men.

  The crows cawed again, now overhead. One of them shit on the hood of the truck. The loud splat startled him, and he took a step back in disgust.

  “Ah, fuck this,” he growled, starting toward the path in the forest. He pushed his way through the underbrush, swatting away errant weeds and limbs, barreling through a trail of flattened leaves with the grace of a bulldozer.

  He’d gone as far as the footbridge when he spotted the lone figure standing in the bushes on the other side of the creek. Ozzie froze, dropped his hand to his hip, and drew his firearm.

  “Police,” Ozzie said, his voice nearly crowded by the babbling waters. “Come out of there. Slowly. Keep your hands up.”

  His voice sounded mechanical in his ears, a flat vibration filling his skull in the pattern of words. Ozzie blinked sweat from his eyes. A cloud of gnats hummed around his ears.

  The figure in the weeds did as he’d instructed, pivoting in place with an almost leisurely gait. Zeke Billings met Ozzie’s stare with deadened eyes and
a pallid face, but he wore a big smile that seemed wrong somehow.

  “Zeke,” Ozzie said, ignoring the tremor in his voice. He resisted the urge to holster his weapon. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “Afternoon, Chief.” Zeke’s dead stare betrayed the jovial nature of his smile. It was too wide. Too happy, too euphoric for Ozzie’s taste. Fuck, he wondered, has this dipshit been sampling the goods?

  Ozzie swallowed back the lump in his throat. He repeated himself. “What are you doing here, Zeke?”

  “Waylon sent me up here to keep watch. In case anyone tried to crash our party.” Zeke giggled, his dead eyes staring straight ahead, into Ozzie’s skull, through him. “But you’re invited, of course.”

  “You’re cooking down there?”

  Zeke nodded. “Uh huh. We’re cooking real good, Chief. It’ll be the best stuff you’ve ever had. It’ll give you a religious experience. You might even see God.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Oh yes,” Zeke said, drawing his gaze down toward the creek. “It’s like my father used to say. Old lies above, new love below.”

  “Right,” Ozzie said flatly, squinting to get a better look at the husk of a man standing before him. Dark veins splintered outward from the corners of Zeke’s eyes, fracturing the flesh of his face into pale shards like a dried riverbed. “You look like shit, Zeke.”

  “But I feel wonderful, Chief.”

  “Uh huh,” Ozzie said, tightening his hands around the pistol grip. The weapon felt heavier now, a fifty-pound weight in his hands. He sucked in his breath and exhaled slowly, telling himself to keep cool, keep it together, don’t let this doper see you rattled.

  “So, what brings you out this way, Chief Bell?”

  “A couple boys were kidnapped last night. From a campsite a few miles from here. You and Waylon wouldn’t have anything to do with that, would ya?”

  The smile on Zeke’s face, an impossibly happy thing, widened even more. Thin black lines drew across the man’s cracked cheeks. “Not at all, Chief. Waylon and I have been here since yesterday, doing as you asked us to. Cooking up magic for you. For everyone.”

  Christ, he really is stoned out of his mind.

  “Where is Waylon?” Ozzie asked. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, wincing at the sudden pop in his knee. “I think I’d like to see him. Talk to him, I mean.”

  “Waylon is busy, Chief. He is cooking his magic for you. But you will see him tomorrow. I promise.”

  The official part of Ozzie Bell, the part commanding the authority of the Stauford Police Department, wanted to insist on seeing Waylon right now. The rational part, however, saw something entirely wrong in Zeke’s eyes and face, and demanded Ozzie leave immediately, haul ass back to the cruiser, and forget he ever drove out here. Something wasn’t right. The smile, those eyes, the cracks in his face—Jesus, had they poisoned themselves making the meth? Had they mixed the chemicals wrong?

  Ozzie’s head swam from the sudden heat clouding his face. The hum of gnats in his ears and the babbling of the creek collided in a swirling vortex of auditory overload, and the burning sickness in his guts roiled upward.

  “Something wrong, Chief Bell?”

  “N-Nothing,” Ozzie said, finally holstering his weapon. “Go get back to work.”

  “I will,” Zeke said, grinning. He stood in place, his skin waxen and cracked like a discarded storefront mannequin. “We’ll be seeing you tomorrow, then.”

  But Ozzie was already walking back up the trail, away from the creek, away from the unnatural visage of Zeke Billings.

  Just before wandering back up the slope into the thicket of trees, he looked over his shoulder toward the creek. Zeke wasn’t there.

  Ozzie muttered “fuck” under his breath and ran back to the road, his cruiser, and away from Devil’s Creek.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1

  By midday, the sky over Stauford was a delicate shade of gray, the clouds forming a thick blanket that showered in some areas and merely sprinkled in others. The late summer heat did not relent, the air pregnant with a kind of humidity that clung to one’s face like a wet pillow. Those mid-September days in southeastern Kentucky were oppressive, the nights a teaser for what fall might bring.

  And like the weather, the greater tri-county area bore some semblance of predictability. The gears of late Saturday machinery spun as they always had, cogs greased by the hopes and dreams of a populace saturated in their own self-importance. This wasn’t to say Stauford was like any other small Kentucky town. Quite the contrary, in fact.

  Founded in 1885 and later incorporated in 1905 at the height of its economic affluence, the city sat upon the nexus of county borders, earning itself an early nickname of “Kentucky’s Tri-County Oasis.” A pair of railways bisected the city and ran parallel along US 25, diverting through Stauford’s train depot which served as a popular stop for many visitors on their way to and from Chattanooga and would do so for a period of fifty years before the decline in railway travel.

  In its day, Stauford was a bustling epicenter of southern life, its main thoroughfares lined with storefronts, several of which were still around when Jack and his siblings were children. Even after the passenger trains ceased operations and tourism dried up, Stauford continued to thrive thanks to the old highway slicing through the town from north to south.

  Sadly, the construction of I-75 to the west of town in the mid-60s and early 1970s leeched vital business traffic from the town, and old US 25 became just another road for local travel. The new highway drove home a harsh reality for many: despite being the center of the region—and the known universe for its small settlement of residents—Stauford was still a long way from anything of significance, and for a long time, the local economy suffered because of it.

  If asked, some of the old-timers like the Corbins and the Hudsons and even the Taswells, families who’d lived in Stauford for generations going all the way back to its founding, would’ve said the downswing in jobs and prosperity had more to do with the “Masters Curse” than the economy. No oil embargo in the early 70s, or even a shift in preferred travel in the 60s, had much to do with the rise of unemployment, they’d say.

  They’d say it had more to do with Jacob Masters and the curse his people placed on the town. They’d say his father, Thurmond, couldn’t hack it in the city limits as an honest preacher, so he’d guided his flock out to the wilderness like Moses. They’d say he blamed the people of Stauford for his failures, for not being pure, for their fine little town being a bed of sin.

  And they’d say Thurmond’s son, Jacob, turned away from the god of his father. They’d say he’d turned toward something older, something far more dangerous, something malignant sleeping beneath the earth.

  These days, Stauford’s old-timers knew better than to whisper about such things. They’d dismiss such claims, change the subject, or flat-out refuse to answer. Those tales were ghost stories for another generation. The youth today were better off not knowing. There were bigger boogeymen in the world than the ghost of a crazy dead preacher. May the ashes of his madness remain buried in the dirt.

  Besides, they were just stories. And like all good stories, seeds of truth were buried in the fiction. They’d taken root there, fed with the blood of the innocent, and after decades of gestation they were soon ready to sprout.

  2

  Skippy Dawson remembered the stories. He’d seen a change befall the town once before, and there were hints of it in the air now, a bitter taste on the tip of his tongue like those sour candies he used to buy for pocket change. Just like last time, he thought, wandering along the empty sidewalk of Main Street. There was a bad man—there was always a bad man—but he couldn’t remember the how or the why.

  What happened before? Skippy searched his memories, struggling to put his finger on the one thing nagging at him. An itch inside his head, a thought screaming to be heard, but he’d be damned if he could remember its name.

  Sk
ippy wandered as far as the park across the street from where First National Bank used to be. There, he took a seat on a bench beneath a poplar tree and focused his efforts.

  Something happened with a bad man. He hurt children and people died. But why did everyone seem upset?

  The children were safe.

  The children…

  “Ah ha!” Skippy snapped his fingers, startling a pair of squirrels frolicking in the grass beside him. “I found it!”

  Indeed, Skippy reflected on a simpler time, right after his accident. This was back in the mid-80s, during the height of the so-called “Satanic Panic,” when Main Street USA was under threat not just from the Soviets, but from the Satanists as well. In a small town like Stauford, the threat was even greater than most realized, what with the children of a devil church being allowed to roam free, to integrate with the town’s own Christian sons and daughters. Those were trying times, friends. And no one in town knew it more than Skippy.

  Most days, Skippy wandered around town, smiling and waving at passersby, welcoming them to his favorite town on earth. He’d taken to that routine ever since his accident. He was lucky to be alive, a fact which filled him with an unmeasurable happiness too good not to be shared.

  In the years following his recovery, Skippy Dawson took to the streets to spread his joy with as many people as possible. He was ignored at first, dismissed as the town retard despite his prior reputation as the best quarterback Stauford’s football team had ever known. So quick were the townsfolk to forget their heroes, but Skippy wasn’t dismayed. He’d win them over, one smile, one wave at a time.

  But something was wrong in Stauford. There was a poisonous cloud hanging over the town setting everyone on edge. He couldn’t see it, but it was up there somewhere, making everyone frown. Making everyone angry. Even James Isaacs, the short chubby man who watered the flowers on Main Street in the summertime, didn’t return his smile or even wave, and Jim always waved at Skippy when he could.