A Natural History of Hell: Stories

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Emmett, you’re not well,” said his father.

  “Do the children torment you at school?” his mother asked.

  Emmett nodded. “The whole town thinks I’m touched.”

  “What can we do?” asked his father.

  “It’s the thyme,” said his mother. “You need it, don’t you?”

  “I need it,” he said. “Without it I see something bad all day and night.”

  “Well, I put an order in at Stamp’s Grocery for a five-pound satchel of it, dried. Should be here in a couple days,” said his father.

  The boy got up and went to his mother and hugged her, then his father, who patted him lightly on the top of the head.

  “Now,” said his mother, “do you want to stop going to school? Maybe for a while?”

  “You could help me here,” said his father.

  “No,” he said. “I want to go.”

  On the day the satchel of thyme arrived, Emmett and his father and Jimmy Tooth sat at the kitchen table. Mr. Wallace instructed on how to roll a respectable cigarette. It took the destruction of a half-dozen rolling papers and a scattering of thyme before the boy caught on. When he finally had before him a tightly rolled bone of uniform width, his father handed him a box of matches. Emmett lit one, brought it to the end of the cigarette, and inhaled the way he’d seen Chief Benton do.

  “Easy,” said his father and the boy exploded with a choking cough.

  When Emmett was done gasping and wiping his eyes, he noticed Jimmy Tooth was gone. Just that second, his mother had come in from the parlor and pulled back the chair the skeleton had been in.

  “I hope you two aren’t engaging in strange customs,” she said.

  Emmett took another drag, and laughed along with his father.

  “At night you’ll have the tea,” said his mother.

  Thyme as smoke still had the same dark green taste and subtle bite. The boy could feel it wafting in lazy cyclones through his mind, and after three drags and three long exhalations of the gray-green mist, he felt the tension leaving the muscles of his neck and back. He blew a smoke ring, and as he watched it float out over the table, where his father poked a finger through the widening circle, it came to him that his parents must think him insane or simple or both. Their insipid smiles became clear to him. Were they trying to help him or help themselves in the eyes of the community? It was all too much to decipher. Jimmy Tooth was gone, and the rest he’d worry about later.

  A cup of tea at bedtime took care of the visitations through the night. One roll-up before school and one after kept the day revenant free. On a rare occasion, the doses of thyme wouldn’t quite overlap and Emmett would catch sight of Jimmy, approaching across the barnyard or sitting cramped in the corner of the outhouse, watching the boy with a hollow stare as he shit. These sudden relapses were startling, but once they happened, Emmett gained control of himself, knowing there was plenty of thyme left in the satchel.

  The protocol worked smoothly into November. He was doing better in school, getting sleep and feeling good. The ruckus over “the thyme fiend” died down, and no longer were people shouting at him or saying mean things. Their hot disdain had cooled into a general agreement that he was to be avoided. That change was good enough for Emmett. He didn’t mind going his own way.

  The break from Jimmy Tooth gave him time to get back to reading, and he finished Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. The next day he brought the book to school and afterward to the barbershop to return it and see if he could borrow another. When he entered the shop from the side door, he noticed that Peasi had a customer in the chair. The barber looked over and saw Emmett standing there holding the book. The scissors stopped snipping and with one hand Peasi ran a comb through the customer’s hair. With the other, he motioned for the boy to stand where he was and then put his finger to his lips. Emmett nodded.

  A few moments later the barber was applying a hot towel to the customer’s face. Once that was securely in place, he turned to Emmett and motioned for him to come forward. He nodded toward the bookshelf and again brought his finger to his lips. The boy understood and paced softly on the sides of his shoes. Even with the precaution, he hit a creaking plank right behind the barber’s chair. The customer’s voice sounded, “Someone come in?” Emmett knew immediately it was Chief Benton.

  “No, no,” said Peasi. “Just the floorboards. They creak and pop all day and night. This place is like an old bum with arthritis.”

  “That makes two of us,” said Benton.

  Emmett placed his book on the shelf, and, not wanting to get the barber in trouble for being nice to him, just grabbed the first book to hand. He waved as he crept cautiously back toward the door. Peasi wasn’t watching but was busy with his lather cup and brush. Once out in the lot next to his bike, Emmett quickly looked at the title—Off on a Comet, by Jules Verne. He stowed the novel in his bike bag, mounted up, and headed down the alley for the street. When he came clear of the buildings, he looked across Main at the door of the Handsome Man Tavern and knew he’d taken too long to get home from school.

  There was Jimmy Tooth, standing, facing the plate glass window, showing no reflection. The corpse gave an awkward half turn, and Emmett heard the medallion bounce from across the street. Jimmy focused that cavernous gaze from over his shoulder. He lifted a thin white arm and waved to Emmett as if to follow. The shreds of blue shirt rippled with the motion, and he did it again, twice. Emmett took off down Main for the dirt road that led out toward the farms.

  A half hour later, he was sitting in the hayloft, smoking a thyme roll-up and paging through the Verne book. He’d have loved to start reading it, but something bothered him about his encounter with Jimmy Tooth. The specter hadn’t followed him as he fled home for his cure. He wasn’t waiting in the barnyard, slouched against the white oak, wiggling his sharp fingers at the sun. He was nowhere. As Emmett smoked the rest of the cigarette, he pictured the figure waving for him to follow. In that arm motion and that hollow gaze there was a purpose.

  There was still snow on the ground the following week when he left school and rode into town instead of going home. A freezing wind shrieked across the fields and made pedaling difficult. There weren’t many people out, but those there were, Pastor Holst and Mr. Dibble, both in turn crossed to the other side of the street when they saw him riding toward them. Emmett noticed that the pastor had taken to wearing the hat and veil all the time now, stumbling along partially blind, grazing the poles of the gas lamps and keeping his right arm extended.

  Emmett rode his bike to the edge of town where it bordered on a tract of woods. There was a bench there, down an embankment, by the edge of Wildcat Creek. It was out of the wind. He watched across the frozen creek, scattered with leaves, trying to catch the moment when the influence of that morning’s thyme smoke would finally pass. He felt no change. Leaning back, he closed his eyes, sighed, and conjured a recollection of a moment he spent with Gretel Lawler after school the day before. He always stayed in the schoolhouse and waited for the other kids to clear out before going to his bike. When they were gone, he slipped out, and she was there, next to her bike, which was next to his, waiting for him.

  Her hair was in a single long braid, and her red winter hat framed her face, set off her green eyes. Emmett noticed that her freckles had faded, and instead her cheeks were dotted with glitter from the day’s Christmas project. “Emmett Wallace, we should go for a bike ride some day after school,” she said.

  He stopped walking, numb with surprise. Finally, he said, “Don’t you know I’m the thyme fiend?” He forced a laugh, but it came too quiet and flat.

  Gretel laughed. “What’s the sin?” she said. “It’s like eating grass. My old man drinks Overholt till he’s blind drunk and nobody bats a lash.”

  “When?” asked Emmett.

  “You say,” she said.
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  “Next Wednesday.”

  She laughed again. “Why Wednesday?”

  “That’s what came to me.”

  She reached out and touched his shoulder, and Emmett came awake with that touch to see Jimmy Tooth standing over him, quickly withdrawing his hand. The boy gasped and reared back, pressing himself into the bench. He was startled and confused as to whether the touch he felt on his shoulder was merely the one from the daydream or if the specter could now make contact. Sunset was coming on. The corpse turned and motioned for the boy to follow across the frozen creek.

  His parents would be wondering where he was. He’d miss dinner. He was frightened, but he leaped up, leaving his bike, and hobbled down the bank, slid across the ice, into the woods beyond. Jimmy Tooth was waiting for him in a small clearing. When Emmett caught up, the skeleton reached out as if to shake hands. The boy was stunned for a moment and then backed up a step. Jimmy held his posture, waiting, skull cocked to the side like a marionette at rest. A minute passed in silence, and then Emmett stepped forward. His hand passed through its skeletal partner. It wasn’t merely thin air, though; he felt something like a mild turbulence when his fingers failed to grasp Jimmy’s.

  In that instant, the two of them turned to salt and were whisked up into the sky in an insane whirlwind. They were moving fast through the dark, and how Emmett knew he’d been turned to salt, he didn’t know. He saw the lights of the town below and in the distance the last line of pink on the horizon. Then they descended and were standing in the dark, again by the creek, but somewhere different from where they’d started.

  “What was that?” asked the boy, working to regain his balance.

  Jimmy put a finger to his bottom jaw to signal silence and led the way.

  They came out of the woods on the opposite side of town in the field behind the church. Off to the left was a stand of half a dozen horse chestnuts, and from within their cover, Emmett spotted a lighted window. Jimmy headed directly for it, and the boy had to run to catch up. In under the barren branches of the trees, drawing closer to the glow of the window, they slowed and crept to avoid breaking sticks underfoot. Each took a side and peered in—a skull in the bottom left pane and Emmett Wallace in the bottom right.

  In lantern light, Mrs. Holst sat with her back to them at a vanity with a large oval mirror. Emmett could see the reflection of her face in the glass as she brushed her hair. She never appeared in public with it down, and he couldn’t believe how much of it there actually was. He wondered how she stowed it on her head. She had remained kind even after the town and particularly the pastor had turned against him. There had been more than one occasion when he’d gone to the back door of the very house he now hid beside, and if her husband was out, she’d give him two pocketfuls of thyme from the supply they kept for wakes. He had a crush on her smile and the way she drove the white Studebaker, speeding along once out of town.

  A heartbeat later, Jimmy Tooth was inside the room, and Emmett leaned dazed against the house. He watched as the skeleton slowly walked up behind the pastor’s wife. She was brushing on the left, holding the hair back away from her ear and neck. Jimmy descended with grace, turned his skull head toward her cheek, and gave her a quick kiss. Before her brush rose to the top of her head again, he was up and away, walking back toward the window. Just as the corpse stepped through the wall of the house, Emmett again caught a glimpse of her reflection and noticed that where Jimmy had kissed her, she now bore a black spider of a scar.

  So intense was his focus on the mark that he didn’t notice at first the figure in a black hat and handkerchief mask enter the room. Jimmy obviously did, though. He grabbed Emmett by the wrist and pulled him back. “How?” Emmett wondered, feeling the hard bony grip on his arm. In the next moment, the pastor was at the window, peering out through the dark scrim and glass into the dark. He lifted off his hat to see better, and that’s when the boy and skeleton again turned to salt and were whisked upward into the sky.

  When they coalesced this time, they were standing in front of an ancient structure that Emmett, even at night, was able to identify. It was the old Threadwell icehouse, the one that had been on the farmland that the town was eventually built on. It happened to sit behind the Williams place, a hundred or so yards behind the carpentry shop. His father had brought him back to see it one time when they’d been to visit Mrs. Williams about building a dresser for Emmett’s mother. Mr. Wallace had explained that there was an outer and an inner wall, separated by about a foot all around, and that space was filled with sawdust for insulation. As old as the icehouse was—built in 1887—and as hard worn, it was still intact. The big door was on its hinges, the walls stood save for splintering and wormholes, and there were no windows, so no glass to be broken.

  Jimmy Tooth pointed to the door and motioned for Emmett to open it and go inside. The boy looked at him, and, thinking about how the specter had physically seized him before, he was skeptical. Tooth put his palms together in the sign of prayer and then pointed to the door again, as if begging. After seeing the mark he’d left on Mrs. Holst’s cheek, Emmett wanted nothing but to be home, a roll-up in the corner of his lips, paging through Jules Verne. He’d thought he wanted to know what it all meant, but that was forgotten. Jimmy clasped his hands with a click in front of him again, and a voice came out of the night from up by the back of the carpentry shop.

  “Who is that over there?” it called.

  Emmett knew it was Mrs. Williams.

  “Get away from there.” It sounded as if she was getting closer.

  The skull gazed directly at the boy, and in its empty sockets, something strange was happening. Emmett saw the colors of sunset deep inside Jimmy’s head. Then he felt a cold wind, the one everyone had wished for in July, rushing around him. Mrs. Williams bellowed, “Emmett Wallace, is that you?”

  “Run now,” whispered Jimmy.

  The boy moved his legs, up and down, up and down, and looked across the fields to the sunset. Jimmy’s diminishing whisper was still on the wind. A moment later, Emmett came to the realization that he was riding his bike on the dirt path homeward from town and the sun was still an hour from setting. He’d not missed dinner. In fact, he would hardly be later than usual. The entire episode seemed a dream, and yet he was certain it had all really happened.

  His conviction was borne out at Sunday mass when Mrs. Holst appeared, bearing the mark on her face. He was certain that no one else was seeing it as no one else seemed disturbed and it was perfectly disturbing—a black center with thin black cracks radiating away from it. He was sure it had grown larger. Still, he wondered why it was that he had to be there to witness Jimmy Tooth kiss the pastor’s wife. And how did it involve the old icehouse? His mind wandered for a moment and he remembered that the day he’d discovered Jimmy, he was heading for the icehouse on the Addison property. His vision of eternal ice came back to him, but none of it led anywhere, and it turned to salt on the wind.

  After mass let out, the parishioners stood on the church lawn in small clusters, catching up on news and gossip. Emmett stood off by himself near the buckboard while his parents passed the time with the widow Alston. Studying the scene from afar, he closely followed the actions of Mrs. Holst. She had knelt on the cold ground to put her arms around the youngest Fenwick girl. “She’s going to die,” he said to himself. “That’s what the mark is.” He watched as she rose, her beaming smile nearly a distraction from the horror on her cheek. “No,” he whispered. “Someone’s going to kill her.”

  Emmett thought frantically about how he could warn her, but his concentration was broken by a voice close by. He looked up and saw Mrs. Williams standing a few yards off. She was dressed in a blue, man’s roll-collar coat, beneath the hem of which showed the striped design of her dress. Her long frizzy hair undulated in the wind. She was wide in the shoulders and slim at the waist, and her eyes crinkled down to mere slits wh
en she spoke.

  “You know something, don’t you, Thyme Fiend?”

  Emmett was caught off guard. He stared at the ground and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I know you know something,” she said and then walked off to join the others.

  He spent the ride home in the buckboard and the better part of the afternoon trying to figure out what she thought he knew.

  On Wednesday, he left for school prepared for the afternoon, with a thyme roll-up and a box of wooden matches in his pocket. The smoke he’d had after breakfast took him through the school day and after, when he met Gretel Lawler by the bike rack. They made for town, pedaling through the golden last light of the afternoon, heads down against a fierce wind. There was a light dusting of snow on the frozen dirt road, and their bikes skidded here and there, which they pretended was hilarious. He led her to the bench in the woods at the edge of town, next to the creek, and proceeded to tell her everything.

  Every few minutes out of the forty-five it took him to tell her pretty much the whole strange saga of his doings with Jimmy Tooth, he asked her a question. “You following this?” “You scared?” “You think I’m crazy?” To all of these, she answered by shaking her head. He could tell she was getting it, and better yet, could picture it, by the gleam in her eyes. The relief of being able to share all of his fear and confusion nearly brought tears. She didn’t laugh or act stupid about it. She listened so intently, at one point he wondered if she was crazy.