And I was in, pantin’ and heavin’ and wishin’ I was anyplace else. Hell, I woulda been happy to be back at home in Jackson, Mississippi, takin’ care of Dad’s pawn shop and flirtin’ with all the pretty girls who came in to sell their mamas’ jewelry.
Damn, but those Mississippi girls could turn a head or two, let me tell you. Good Southern girls with big hearts, big smiles and even bigger—
“Mr. Rat?”
“What? Oh, yeah.” Woolgatherin’ at a time like this? What was wrong with me? Next thing you know I’d become a Catholic. I slowed almost to a walk and had to pick up the pace again so I could get to the dubious safety of the crevice. “Thanks.”
“No problem, sir.”
The narrow confines of the crevice pressed in against me as I trotted in, and immediately the world around became dark, the sourceless light not darin’ to enter with me, even though the crevice was exposed to the uniform blueness of the sky. I had Ghost-Lite power up the nightvision.
The crack went farther than I thought, runnin’ straight and deep as far as I could see with the DRAFTlite. Up and up went the walls—sheer, unclimbable, and dark gray in my enhanced vision. From behind I heard the howlin’ of the critters, but they didn’t get closer and that bothered me a bit.
I took a peek and saw strange things I can’t describe hoppin’ and clamorin’ and tunnelin’ about like their asses were on fire and their heads was catchin’, but they didn’t bother to come close to the crevice. That made me happy, or at least less desperate, because the only thing that would make me happy would be findin’ my sorry ass back in the U.S. of A. bumping uglies with a girl with nice legs. That and a shot of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon.
“They look like they don’t wanna come in,” I murmured.
Ghost-Lite chimed in, “That would lead one to conclude that there is something here that they do not wish to confront.”
Damn, but that burst my bubble. I spun about and saw … nothin’. My heart hammered in my chest so hard that it felt like it would burst through my ribs. I turned back to the monsters, but only saw a cloud of blue dust.
“Can you do somethin’ about seein’ through all that?” I asked.
Blobs of orange, red, and yellow sprang into view and near knocked me sideways. It took a few minutes for me to understand that I was lookin’ at the world through the DRAFTlite’s thermal vision. Shapes better left undescribed bounced and rolled and blundered all through that cyan cloud, but they didn’t come too close to the crevice. One would break away from the mob of about a dozen critters, streak toward me, but stop abruptly before it got within ten feet of the cliff face.
Enough of this, I thought. Ain’t doin’ myself a bit of good lollygaggin’ around this place, and Daddy didn’t raise no lollygaggers.
Turning my back on the crowded scene outside, I made my way deeper into the crevice.
I went a few twisty steps before comin’ to the first branch, a soft angle to the right, but I stayed on the straight-ahead path. Gettin’ out of these bluffs or hills or whatever they were had to be my first priority. My breath came loud to my ears, harsh and deep, and I realized I was as scared as I’d ever been, more scared than at any other time in my life. Even more scared than when I lost my cherry to Elizabeth Moffat in 8th grade.
Elizabeth Moffat. Now there was a blast from the past, let me tell you. We were so young, but Lizzie knew what she was doin’, that’s for sure. Damn, when she touched my bare chest for the first time with her tongue I shook so much that I couldn’t hardly get that condom on. But Lizzie said ‘No glove, no love,’ so I got it on despite my tremblin’ fingers, and we commenced doin’ what people had been doin’ since the first of us walked upright.
“Oh, Rat, not you too!”
My skin went colder than the North Pole in January. I knew that voice, knew it better than I knew my mama’s. It was Tweezer, my best friend and Omicron’s Magician. What the [DELETED]?
I called out softly, “Tweeze, man, is that you?”
Somehow the voice came back to me faint but crystal clear. “You shouldn’t oughta come, Rat. It’s bad, worse than Truth or Consequences.”
What? Truth or Consequences? My stomach performed a slow roll as another, very different, blast from the past hit my brain with the force of a thrown brick.
Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, had been a mission requirin’ two teams, one on point and the other as backup—an op from ten months ago after the word got out about the Bureau. The op was to track down and kill a nest of Scorpion Men (body of a scorpion/torso, arms, and head of a man—gross as all get out to look at) that kidnapped and presumably ate a few of the local Straights. If it had been one, only one team would’ve been needed, but reports showed that at least eight were involved.
Thing about Scorpion men is that they like their lairs underground, away from the hot New Mexico sun where summer temps could reach an easy one hundred ten degrees Fahrenheit. Team Alpha went down the hole to clean them out and to make sure there were no more. Team Etta’s job was to hang back and provide support in case of need.
Boy, was there ever a need.
Turned out there were thirty-two of those chiton-plated critters. Alpha took a pastin’, losin’ two guys to an ambush when the Scorpion Men broke through a tunnel wall. Joshua Delacroix and Peter Wynman were torn to bloody pieces by the hyper-strong, ten-foot-tall [CENSORED] critters. Alpha had a minigun; it was just a cryin’ shame Delacroix happened to be the one packin’ it when he got killed.
T or C turned out to be a crap party that culminated in the deaths of four Agents and the cripplin’ of two others, and that whispery voice that claimed to be Tweezer (I wasn’t sure it was old Tweeze by a damn sight, that’s for sure) said this was worse. I looked up at the narrow slice of blue sky shinin’ down between dark-blue rock and agreed wholeheartedly.
“Get out of here, Rat,” said Tweezer’s voice. “Get out before you get trapped in this place forever. Before he gets you.”
Before he gets me? “[BLEEP] my life,” I muttered, shaking my head.
Yeah, things were way worse than in Truth or Consequences.
Chapter Thirteen
Dove
Don’t You (Forget About Me)
Summer smelled like hay and straw—musty, dusty, and slightly green. Underneath that pleasant smell lay the odor of horse manure and the ammonia stink of old urine. The ranch near Loveland spread across six hundred acres of Colorado prairie and was home to a herd of quarter horses and a handful of Arabians.
“You okay, hon’?” Dad asked, cupping my chin in the palm of his too soft hand. Hair the color of wheat fell to his shoulders, shot through with a liberal amount of gray. Heart Jacobs didn’t have a mean bone in his aging body and that was reflected in the kindly smile lines around his eyes.
I nodded. “Want to stay with you, Dad. Can I, pleeease?” Like every twelve-year-old girl with her father, I went for the big doe eyes. It worked about fifty percent of the time.
This was not one of those times.
He shook his head. “Sorry hon’. I have to lay new carpet at Heritage Apartments and the company can’t allow kids in the workplace. You know that.”
Yeah, I did. Dad’s flooring business did well, but times were just tight enough that he couldn’t afford a fulltime babysitter during the busy season. Our family suffered from a common ailment at the time—being land rich and cash poor. The mortgage on our house was almost crippling, but Mom and Dad would’ve rather slit their wrists than leave the house their kids were born in.
“Free gets to stay with Mom,” I pouted.
“Your brother is small enough not to be too much of a bother to your mom. She can stay put and look after a baby at the office, but a twelve-year-old girl is a different story altogether, right?”
My brother Free was only a few months old, an eating and pooping machine. I wanted to feel resentment that he got to stay with Mom, but Dad had a point. The office was boring and tedious and I’d go mad there because I wasn�
�t much for sitting still or reading or behaving. Staying at the office would drive me nuts.
“You’re right,” I conceded meekly. Still, Uncle Carl, my mother’s brother and owner of the Bar C Ranch, inspired a terror so deep in me I thought it would surely dissolve my bones.
“Okay, sweetheart.” Dad smiled, too soft and trusting by half. It had been ages since he actually did any real carpet laying, having reached an age where he’d rather supervise than haul shag. “Get going. Your uncle will have lunch ready.”
How could I tell him about Uncle Carl? How could I tell him that his brother-in-law liked to touch me and … do worse than that?
On trembling legs, I walked down the gravel driveway to the old ranch-style house where Uncle Carl lived. White paint faded and peeling, it looked as rundown as its owner. After Aunt Anne had died three years previously of a heart attack, he let himself slip into drink and … my mind shied away from the other things.
The sun slid across my skin—a perfect summer day and I hated it. Why should it be so nice as I approached the closest thing to a little kid’s hell on earth? I tried not to cry, but with every step the lump in my throat grew bigger and the pressure behind my forehead built up, growing so much that I thought my skull would burst like a water balloon. My eyes felt hot and scratchy and the tiny tremors in my hands worsened into all-out shaking as I reached for the door.
Locked.
Oh god, no!
The front door being locked meant one thing and one thing only: he was waiting for me in the barn. The barn. The damned barn, that place where evil things took place, things I kept secret, thinks that festered inside me and grew ever more malignant, more pus-filled like an enormous abscess of horror. Soon it would rot me away and I would die, filled with maggots, my soul a gangrenous lump. I could already feel the muscles of my legs twitch and spasm, the last firing of soon-to-be-dead nerves.
The lump in my back pocket underneath my extra long T-shirt felt like a hot coal burning a hole in my left butt cheek.
Weather-beaten gray boards and a galvanized steel roof, big enough for ten horses and a couple hundred bales of hay, straw, and alfalfa. The barn loomed large and threatening. It was a structure sturdy enough to stand for another hundred years, but looked like it was ready to fall into a heap of toothpicks any second. The large sliding door was open, the rollers shining and clean in a track kept free of rust and grime.
Closer and closer I came, and with each step my heart thudded harder. A light sheen of sweat coated my skin. Any second now, any second ….
Any second.
He knew I was here. He always knew.
His hateful voice, full of thick and rotten cheer, boomed out of the open barn door. “C’mon in, Lovey-Dovey. We got some chores to do.”
Chores. That’s what he called it. Chores.
Somehow my voice emerged strong through a throat tighter than a miser’s purse strings. “Coming, Uncle Carl.”
Feet steady but hands trembling, I entered the cool darkness of the barn. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust.
Uncle Carl stood in the middle of the feeding stall, a large 45x15 section that took up the entirety of the right half of the first floor. The other half was divided into smaller stalls and a tack room. He held a pitchfork in one hand, the tines filthy with manure and straw. A grimy, sweat-soaked T-shirt clung to his broad chest and equally grimy jeans covered legs stronger than tree trunks. A former college linebacker, Uncle Carl was always diligent about maintaining the physical condition he had in his glory days at Baylor.
The rot and dissipation lay within.
“Just cleaning up, Lovey-Dovey,” he said with his hateful, lopsided smile. Some found that mouthful of shiny teeth charming, but to me it looked broken, the grin of mentally damaged bear. “Want to grab a shovel?”
Oh, good. He wanted to work. For a few hours I would be safe. Nodding, I retrieved a spade from the tack room and began hauling manure to the compost pile in the back near the apple orchard.
It was sweaty work, but clean in a way I couldn’t describe, and for a while I forgot all about Uncle Carl as I kept my focus on the horse manure and the smell of apple blossoms. The heat of the barn quickly brought sweat to my skin, soaking my T-shirt. I’d been working Uncle Carl’s spread for a few years and the hard physical labor had given me muscles most boys would envy. It had made me strong, made me appreciate the effects of such clean labor.
Then two years ago had happened.
My mind shied away from the afternoon of the horror and I lost my peaceful, Zen concentration. After that the worry returned and the fear began to eat at my stomach again. The smell of apple blossoms became cloyingly sweet while the grassy smell of the manure took on a hard, almost foul stench like when I’d found a dead raccoon in the attic.
The spade became a grave load in my hand, slowing me down, and my arms shook with the strain because I knew what would happen soon. I knew the labor would end and hell would begin.
Too soon the floor was cleaned down to hard-packed earth and I rapped the spade against the ground to shake off the last flakes of manure. Next came straw, the twine on the bale having already been cut by Uncle Carl. I pulled a flat section free from the bale and broke that up, scattering it on the floor. In another couple of months it would become heavy with manure and urine and the barn would have to be mucked clean again.
Uncle Carl’s long shadow fell across the floor. “Good job, Lovey-Dovey,” he said softly, his grin a broken slash across a long face. “Why don’t we go into the loft and play a game?”
My skin goose-pimpled and I tasted blood at the back of my throat. When it was lighthearted, when he had no time for skin, it was ‘chores.’ When he wanted to become penetrative, it was ‘game.’ I tried not to cry.
“Okay, Uncle Carl,” I replied meekly, keeping my eyes fixed on the floor. The weight in my back pocket threatened to topple me over.
“Good girl.”
I climbed the wooden ladder to the hayloft, which was stacked chock full of bales. The smell of alfalfa became almost overpowering and I resisted the urge to gag. At the top I found him waiting for me. His T-shirt was gone and his bare, hairy chest gleamed in the faint light. I fancied I could see the motes of dust falling through the beams of light streaming through the windows avoiding his tall muscular form as if they knew how poisonous and completely ruined he was.
“Come here, girl.”
I moved closer.
“Good girl.” His breathing quickened and he laid a large, callused hand on my shoulder. It felt heavier than a boulder. “You look overheated. Why don’t you take your top off?”
My eyes traveled upward, stopping briefly at his crooked smile, before meeting his. I summoned every ounce of courage in my twelve-year-old body to say, “Why don’t we try something different today, Uncle Carl?” It was all I could do to keep my voice light. The smile on my face felt wooden, wrong.
He didn’t see the revulsion I felt. “Ah, Lovey-Dovey, what do you have in mind?”
I shrugged out of my T-shirt, exposing my small breasts to his corrosive sight. I’d deliberately worn no bra, hoping that the sight of me would distract him, make him pliable.
Face shining with delight, he removed his hand from my shoulder, fingers twitching with eagerness.
“Now,” I began, “get on your knees.”
It was amazing how quickly he complied, both knees thunking on the floor of the loft.
The next sentence I said made me want to throw up. “I want to feel your mouth on me as I hold you.”
As if captivated by a magic spell, Uncle Carl waddled forward on his knees and put his wet, horrid mouth on me. I resisted the urge to scream as I felt his lips work against my skin. I lifted my arms as he wrapped his around my torso and held tight. Slowly, so not to startle him, I put one hand around his neck as I reached into my back pocket.
“Oh, Lovey-Dovey,” he moaned as his tongue darted.
“Lovey-dovey this!” I replied harshly as
I drove the Phillips head screwdriver that had been resting in my back pocket into his neck. At first there was an initial resistance followed by a horrible giving as muscles honed from hard work buried steel into soft flesh.
Uncle Carl spasmed and thrashed, trying to throw me, trying to get away, but I held on tight with my other arm, burying his face in my chest as I yanked the screwdriver free with a dull popping sound and thrust it home again, this time in his ear.
He screamed.
I didn’t let go and I didn’t stop stabbing, stabbing, stabbing, and blood spurted, coating my hand and belly and I knew when an artery gave because suddenly red was everywhere and it was sticky, hot and thick, getting into my eyes and mouth while I yelled, rage replacing fear as years of abuse lent me strength to keep stabbing, and I did and it felt so good—the relief, the release better than anything I’d felt in a long, long time.
When it was over, Uncle Carl lay on the floor, unmoving, hazel eyes staring at the ceiling. I smiled, the blood dripping from the screwdriver and my skin. I fished into the front pocket for his cellphone and BIC lighter he used when he wanted to light up a joint. A ritual he’d always observed after a hard day’s work.
“Hello, Dad?” I said into the phone when he picked up. “You’d better come over to Uncle Carl’s place. There’s been an accident.” I hung up.
The Spirit in St. Louis Page 13
