A Penny Down the Well: A Short Story Collection of Horrifying Events

by J. A. Crook

  ***

  “We should bless the meal before we eat it, don’t you all think?” It was less of a challenge for Harriet to think about giving a moment for God despite all of the recent trauma. In any case, she saw this small opportunity as a blessing, a gift from God in the bleakest of moments in her life.

  Jasper and Chance didn’t say anything in dispute of the consideration and lowered their heads as they all stood around the small, wooden table. They clasped their hands together and waited for the benediction of the unlikely meal to begin. Floyd did the same and closed his eyes, waiting for his wife to give the prayer.

  “Dear God. We want to thank you for this meal and we want to thank you for your continued protection of us that are still here. We know that you have a divine plan, one that we aren’t meant to understand, but we know that always you are doing your work by grand design.” As Harriet continued with the vibrant prayer, Floyd felt a subconscious buzz about his face. He opened his eyes in the middle of the prayer to look across the table, to see that both Jasper and Chance were staring directly at him, both with a twisted smile on their face. Floyd swallowed hard and closed his eyes once again, only more tightly this time, until the prayer was over. When the prayer was completed, Floyd and Harriet both finished with a conclusive “Amen,” while Jasper and Chance simply sat in front of their plates.

  Floyd thought to break up the discomfort from the look a moment prior. “So, what sort of animal was this? It smells delicious.”

  Jasper didn’t waste any time cutting into the meat on his plate, stabbing it with his fork and shoving it into his mouth. “You’re ‘bout the most questioning man I’ve ever met, Floyd Greyson. You ain’t eatin’ in what? Two days? And you’re concerned now about what it is? It’s meat!” And he laughed, nudging Chance at his left, who also laughed and chewed away.

  Floyd grinned a bit, still very uncomfortable. “Right. I don’t think I could learn anything that would make it any less appetizing.” And he cut into the meat and took a bite. The meat had a sort of greyish tone about it, similar to veal or lamb when cooked. It tasted very much of veal, but Floyd wouldn’t be able to identify what animal it really was, and suspected it was likely an animal he was less familiar with from the foreign parts of the country. “It’s very good.”

  Harriet took a bite herself and smiled. She took in a breath, then allowed the warm, steamy food to travel down her throat to her grumbling belly. Harriet did her best to remain as ladylike as she could, despite her will to eat ravenously after having gone without for so long. After the initial silence necessary for getting a little food down passed, Harriet asked, “Why haven’t the Shoshoni come into the Fort? It seems like that would be something they would do, especially if they attacked our camp.”

  Chance shook his head, cutting away the sinewy pieces of meat, one by one. “Nah. Those savages are afraid of our weapons. I don’t think they know how many we have, or don’t have, and decided the best thing they can do is pick us off while we’re outside of our gates, as armed as men can be away from a more permanent armament.”

  Harriet nodded, not thinking much about the answer, but supposing it made sense.

  Floyd chimed in, despite being called out as someone who asks too many questions. “And there were many people here at Fort Bleck before it became just the two of you?”

  Jasper nodded, swallowing a hunk of meat. “Maybe fifteen, steady. Slowly dwindled down. People would disappear in the night, either to run off or maybe they were taken. Some never returned from hunts or any trip outside of the walls. Eventually it was just us here. We had provisions, you know, but eventually those things run out. Anyone coming through that might have given us a hand, well, you see what’s probably been happening to them. We’ve become isolated. We’ve written letters to the government, asking for assistance and all, but it doesn’t seem any of them get out. Or, maybe no one receivin’ them cares enough to do anything.”

  Floyd thought about which of the two it likely was. The Western frontier was a place that existed in isolation. Those that dared it accepted its features. He sighed and remained silent after the question, becoming thoughtful. They all became quiet for a long time. Nothing else strange happened there at the dinner table, and when they were done, fat and happy for the first time in a long time, the Greyson’s returned to their cabin.

  “They gave me the strangest look, Hattie. You should have seen it. They may have lowered their heads for God, but they weren’t praying with us. I can promise you that.” Floyd confessed what he’d seen at the dinner table as he rolled over in his bed, tired after not having slept much the night before, or the night before that. He was exhausted, made even more lethargic by finally having something to eat, and something hearty and full like a slab of meat.

  Harriet sighed. She glanced to the gun on the small table beside the bed, right beneath a simple, white candle flickering back and forth even with the absence of wind. “These men are probably as lost as any, out here, under the conditions they’re in. God will find a way into their hearts when they’re ready to open them.” Always faithful and always devout.

  Floyd closed his eyes, slowed his breathing and thought about her words as he began to drift to sleep, and then was, heavily. Harriet smiled to her husband and watched him for a few minutes before she leaned over to blow out the candle. She, too, fell asleep promptly.

  That’s when something unexpected occurred.

  What may have been expected at this point was that a person’s sleep was never a certain thing. It was a gift that came when the many worldly disturbances abound managed to keep themselves away for a long enough time for a person to rest. The past few nights were unrelenting with their disturbances, but the one that roused Harriet Greyson this night were different than the disturbances before. This one, for one, wasn’t immediately threatening. There wasn’t an armed native man seeking sacrifices for a ritual standing over her and her husband, nor was there a frantic American frontiersman shouting about a deviant guide; tonight it was the sound of chopping.

  Harriet sat up in bed, listening as the sound echoed in the middle of the night.

  Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop.

  The successive pounding reverberated through Harriet’s body and soul. She leaned over and whispered toward Floyd.

  “Floyd.” She said with a soft urgency in her voice. “Floyd, do you hear that?”

  Floyd responded with a sort of incoherent grunt and started snoring loudly. Her attempts did nothing to wake him. Harriet looked down to her exhausted husband and considered investigating the matter on her own, something her husband clearly would have disapproved of, but Harriet hadn’t given him the chance to do so.

  Harriet carefully swung her legs out of the bed and stepped onto the cool, wooden floorboards. She dressed herself and picked up the gun that sat on the corner of the table beside the bed. Harriet quietly moved across the room and opened the door to hear the sound grow louder now. Her eyes cast back to her sleeping husband, still completely unaware of the strange circumstance, before Harriet slipped out of the cabin to move toward the source of the sound.

  Harriet remained near to the walls of the cabin as she tried to identify the source of the sound. In her hand, she held fast to the loaded weapon, prepared to fire the thing (or was prepared in theory) if anything should have gone awry. What Harriet expected was that the sound would be coming from some sort of late night work on behalf of Jasper or Chance, and not something worse, such as a raiding tribe trying to hack away at walls with a hatchet. The sound seemed closer when she rounded the main cabin, which housed Jasper and Chance, and which was the same place Harriet and Floyd had shared dinner with the two men earlier. Cautiously along the walls, she turned the corner to reveal what was making the sound.

  Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop.

  Each successive strike of that cleaver came down to further sever a piece of meat from the dismembered and disfigured human body, still in whatever clothes the person had been wearing when likely murdered. Ch
ance took his time, even whistling as he worked, bringing that sharpened cleaver down slightly below the carcass’s shoulder until the limb fell away like a cut branch from a tree. Blood spattered and shot about Chance’s face, which didn’t seem to make much of a difference from the moment that Harriet had first seen the image. By the time she arrived, he was already thoroughly painted in the crimson fluid, a sort of imagery that made the war-paint of the raiding party from the camp seem like children’s finger paint.

  Harriet could not help but feel an urgency to scream aloud, but she prevented herself be covering her mouth firmly with her free hand, using the other to clench her weapon as tightly as she could. This restraint on her part gave a moment later when a particularly grotesque sound echoed from behind the main cabin, before a silence and a sudden, unexpected rolling of a man’s head happened to halt somewhere near the corner of the building, near to where Harriet stood in hiding. The face of the eternally terrified, decapitated head revealed the identity of the carcass being cut asunder: it was Grant Vickers, a family friend and the Greyson party’s cartographer. No longer could Harriet stand by, nor could she compel herself to return to her cabin to wake her husband. A rush of uncontrollable emotion surged through her body as her face burned with fear, anger and confusion. She turned the corner suddenly and pointed the gun out in front of her, with her eyes targeting the blood-soaked frontiersman, Chance. Chance looked up to notice the woman, a cleaver in one hand, a severed arm in the other. Suddenly, he lifted the cleaver high into the air in preparation to send it Harriet’s way but in a single, perfect shot, a bullet went flailing from the end of the pistol, through the thin epidermal and vascular tissue at the skull, shattering bone, sending brain matter askew within his head, all before breaking free and sailing into the wall behind Chance. As the electrical signals in Chance’s head fizzled, his body collapsed to the ground amid the violent turmoil of his previous action, before ushering an unbearable silence.

  Harriet’s hands became limp and her lip began to quiver, involuntarily now whispering to the one she claimed, “Oh God. Oh God. Oh no...” And as it would with shock, everything came rushing in like a river from a broken levee. The silence did not last long. A sound was heard from the front of the main cabin, which likely signified Jasper was awake and heard the noise. Another sound came from the cabin Harriet and Floyd slept in before she woke. “Oh no!” Harriet shouted.

  “Harriet? Harriet?! Are you out there? Jasper. Jasper, have you seen my wife? I think I just heard a—” but his voice was cut off with a second blast of a weapon.

  Harriet covered her mouth once again, restraining a scream. Tears welled in her eyes and she shook her head in disbelief, clutching the warm-barreled weapon to her chest like a prized possession. Harriet couldn’t believe what happened. A moment ago, she put a bullet through a man’s head, only to hear the gunshot from the other side of the cabin that likely ended her husband’s life. Then she heard footsteps.

  Harriet ran behind the chopping table, now covered with gore and blood. She ducked down behind it, peering fearfully around the side, her entire body shaking from head to toe, making it almost impossible to hold (or aim) the weapon in her hand. Over and over, prayers were muttered internally, asking for any semblance of grace from God, but she hadn’t heard a reply in what now seemed like forever. The footsteps stopped near the corner of the cabin, where Harriet first observed Chance chopping Grant Vickers to pieces. She tried to hold her breath, to calm herself in any way she could, so that he wouldn’t know exactly where she was, but it was obvious that Jasper was aware.

  “Now, now, Ms. Greyson. Ain’t any reason to be shootin’ anybody. We’re all friends here.” Jasper said in a cool, coaching tone.

  Harriet, a passionate woman, couldn’t contain herself and shouted, though she remained “safely” behind the chopping table. “What did you do to Floyd, you monster!” It was now the second time Harriet called Jasper such, only she didn’t realize the level of monstrosity about the two gunmen of Fort Bleck when she said it the first time.

  What sounded like the cocking of a gun was heard around the corner. “Well, I’m afraid Floyd had to die.” Which was telling of the sort of friendship Jasper suggested. “Ain’t fair, I don’t think, two against one like that. I mean, I’m guessing Chance is dead around this corner right here, but I ain’t gonna peek around to see, because I think you might just try to put a bullet between my eyes.” The words were still calm. Unusually calm.

  “You’re right I’ll put a bullet through your head, you son of a bitch!” She shouted a curse, which was unusual of her, but her nerves were uncontrollable. Tears poured down her face and now she was breathing between sobs uncontrollably, thinking about her husband laying in the dirt in front of their cabin. As carefully as she could, she watched the corner of the cabin where she suspected he was, waiting for anything to come out so that she could unload the remaining five bullets.

  “Well, seems we got ourselves a bit of a Mexican standoff then, huh? I don’t very well think I can let you live, Miss. It just ain’t right, you bein’ a murderer and all. Your god. He don’t like those kinds of people, I hear. I hear he sends ‘em straight to hell. You ready to go to hell, Hattie?” Jasper said, provoking her further by bringing God into it, as well as using the nickname Floyd used for her.

  “My God’s a God of justice. And he’ll see you get it, too.” And she slowly aimed her weapon toward the corner of the cabin and waited.

  “Yeah? Well, I think that’s where you’re wrong, Miss Greyson. I don’t think you’re god’s been ‘round much at all. He ain’t here right now and he ain’t gonna save you, either. You do have one thing right, though. I am a monster. You ever heard of Dzoavits?” Jasper asked.

  There was a sudden shake in Harriet’s hand, but she steadied herself. She remembered the word from the raid at the camp, the word the raiders called out when the two gunmen arrived, and the same word that struck terror into them. She said nothing.

  “I didn’t think so. Dzoavits is a demon, you see. A demon that the natives from these parts believe to be pretty evil. Well, they’re right.” And Jasper stuck a gun around the corner of the cabin and fired twice, blindly, in the direction of the woman. One bullet struck the table, another the body atop it, sending a piece of the corpse down on top of Harriet.

  Harriet shrieked and fired two bullets back in instinct, but merely managed to hit the building, leaving her with three bullets left in the cylinder. Her praying continued, only it had now become external and verbal.

  The cocking of a weapon was heard again, likely after Jasper reloaded, which spoke of another lie. It seemed that Jasper and Chance wanted to get a hold of the Greyson party’s weapons, not because they needed them, but because they wanted the group to be helpless. At some point, Jasper and Chance wanted the Greyson’s alive, but it seemed that time was over.

  “You see, Dzoavits is known for takin’ the form of a human or animal. The demon feeds on humans, like you and Floyd over there, or your friend Mr. Vickers.” And the head that landed near Harriet earlier came flying back toward her, hitting the top of the chopping table before sailing over her head. If anything was fortunate out of the situation, it was that when the decapitated head of Grant landed, it wasn’t staring at her this time. “It was pretty good, huh? That meal we had? You really seemed to enjoy it, Ms. Greyson.”

  Harriet slunk back securely behind the table as she listened to the cold, sinister words creep around the cabin’s corner. For moment she didn’t understand, but then she eyed the back of Grant’s bloody head, then looked up to his dismembered body, thought of Chance using the meat cleaver to dismember his body and it all came together in a single shot: Harriet and Floyd were fed a person.

  “N-No. No.” She shook her head, keeling to the side as she felt bile rise in her stomach and she vomited forcefully to her side behind the symphony of Jasper’s laughter. As Harriet heaved and coughed, Jasper spoke again.

  “Ain’t no point in killing me, Ms.
Greyson. Ain’t gonna make a difference. You may kill this body and all, but I ain’t goin’ anywhere. This is where I belong and where I’ll keep belonging. Who knows? Maybe Dzoavits could even find a place in you.”

  Harriet tried to compose herself, breathing through a throat thoroughly raw. She peeked around the table again to see that Jasper was doing the same and immediately, before he did, fired two more shots in his direction, one barely whizzing by his head, while the other was less accurate. She then had a single bullet, as Jasper ducked away, safe again.

  Laughter rang out again, as the man, or whatever he was, seemed unfazed by the attempt at killing him. “What’s that now? You got one bullet in your chamber unless you stuffed a couple extra bullets somewhere when you wandered on out here. You still prayin’ to that god of yours?”

  Harriet quelled her sadness and defeat. She took a deep breath and waited. She had one bullet and she’d be damned, literally, if she didn’t put this one on the mark. She waited and waited through what seemed like an eternal fit of laughter from the man around the corner. When it became silent, Jasper maneuvered quickly from behind the cabin, running out into the open. He fired once and missed. He fired again as she came into view from his new angle, and struck the dirt beside Harriet’s foot. Harriet’s heart pounded nearly out of her chest as the barrel and sight of her gun followed the sidestepping gunman and when she felt that a twitch, right after Jasper’s second shot, her finger inadvertently pulled the trigger, sending her very last bullet through Jasper’s wicked heart, blasting him to the ground in a limp roll from his gained momentum.

  Slowly, with the support of Harriet’s shaking legs, she stood without an ounce of grace. She dropped the gun that was now useless to the ground beside Grant’s severed head and walked around the table. From the ground, Harriet lifted the cleaver that Chance used to dismember her friend. She walked carefully across the bloodied dirt clumps that accumulated around the chopping table in the direction of Jasper’s body, which laid on the ground curled and facing away from her. Her breathing intensified once again as she neared the body and she lifted the cleaver high into the air. “Here’s your God-given justice, you beast!” And she lowered herself over him and swung the cleaver down into his skull, over and over again, sending blood and tissue into the air around her, onto her clothes and face, to her lips and eyes, but she did not relent. The swinging didn’t stop until she could no longer hold the meat cleaver and then she fell over into the dirt, crying uncontrollably into the night.