by Victor Allen
**********
Over the years, he reckoned that it was guilt that turned him into an outsider in his own family, but his mom and dad never seemed to blame him. They seemed, indeed, to make a combined effort to believe that Jesse had never been born at all.
Hunter couldn’t do that. He spent year after year on his own, trudging through the woods, trying in vain to recall what had happened. The only concrete connection he could ever make was his rabid dislike of goats. Before Jesse’s disappearance, he had been very fond of the goats that frolicked on the Coleman farm. The little kids with the floppy ears were just so cute. He even had a favorite, Nan, who would follow him around and sometimes tug at his belt loops with her mouth when she wanted to be petted. Now, whenever he looked at their spiky horns and eyes with vertical slits for pupils, he almost shuddered.
His dad had seemed to try almost too hard to mend fences with Hunter, teaching him to hunt and fish when he had time away from his managerial duties. Hunter soon lived up to his moniker, his father teaching him to become proficient with both knife and rifle. His father seemed to be struggling with guilt of his own, perhaps thinking that had he spent a little more time with the boys, the entire tragedy could have been staved off.
His mother, never the warmest of women, remained cool and distant, though not cruel. There had been no more children since then, the three youngest girls packed off to prep school for most of the year.
As an outsider, Hunter saw things that were off true, skewed from normality. While others in Golgotha struggled, there was a new vehicle in the Key driveway every couple of years. The food on the dining room table was always top-grade, the best beef and lamb supplied at a discount from the Coleman farm. The little boutique his mother now owned seemed to remain always profitable, even with the paucity of customers that came in to buy the pottery and various odd little knick knacks. No matter how bad things got for everyone else in Golgotha, there were always guests in the lobby and cash in the register. The boutique actually seemed more of a gathering place for the wives of Golgotha’s upper crust; women who in times past had hired his mother to wash out their skid-marked underwear and who his mother would normally have dismissed with disdain in the time before Jesse’s death. Now she seemed to be one of them, a pod person, glad handing at social events and enjoying a full belly in the evening and a cool house in the summer.
One October day in his eighteenth year, the girl who irrevocably altered all their lives walked into the boutique. Marie Moreau hailed from the nearby town of Demopolis, a small city founded by the Napoleonic exiles. She had the most amazing, large eyes that held a hurt that Hunter saw every day in the looking glass. They hit it off right away and his mother viewed their budding relationship with distaste, referring to her scornfully as “the Big-Eyed French girl” and once remarking that maybe she and Hunter would get married and they could “have Big-Eyed French babies from her Big French Butt.”
Hunter didn’t understand his mother’s immediate dislike of Marie, but he shrugged it off. For some reason, he felt like the ever-turning wheel of destiny had somehow brought them together for a purpose and it turned out he was to be proven right in spades.
He didn’t know it at the time, but on their final date she had confided her real purpose to him.
“I know who you are,” she had told him, her large, almost alien eyes glistening in the dim light of the car’s dashboard lamps. “And I know what happened to you. The same thing happened to me. My brother. He disappeared five years ago. He was never found.”
“I’m sorry,” Hunter said. “I know how you feel.”
“There are things in this world,” she told him, “that are too terrible to believe. So terrible that people refuse to believe they’re happening. Things dismissed as myth and legend. But they’re real. I’ve seen them. And you have, too. I’m not strong enough to do anything about it, but somebody has to. Somebody has to start.”
“What are you talking about, Marie?” Hunter was uncomfortable, knowing that he had always skirted the real issue, shoving it to the back of his mind where he wouldn’t have to look at it too closely.
Marie paused for a few moments before finally looking directly into his eyes and said:
“Have you ever heard of Moloch?”
And after she told him, Hunter knew his life had changed course as drastically as a river ripped from its banks and completely re-routed. Things could never be the same. He thought briefly that he had finally found an ally, but he never saw Marie again.
