A Natural History of Hell: Stories

by Jeffrey Ford

  When he finished speaking, relating to her his flight above the town with Jimmy Tooth and the peeping tom visits to the pastor’s wife and Mrs. Williams, there was a brief silence before she said, “So you must be wanting to go see what’s in that old icehouse.”

  “That’s what I want to do,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  In his plans for Gretel Lawler, he never imagined it would be so easy.

  They left the bikes and headed across the creek into the woods. The carpentry shop wasn’t far at all from that end of town. They could circle around behind it through the trees, cross the creek again, and come out in ten minutes a few feet from the icehouse. He led the way, bent slightly and whispering because they were on a secret mission. “That pastor is mighty strange, eh?” she said. “My pa says they’ll be sending him off to the loony bin before long.”

  “You think he could have killed Jimmy Tooth and thrown his body in the Addisons’ well?”

  “I can’t see it,” she said. “He seems kind of useless, like it would be too much for him. Best he can do is put on that handkerchief hat.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Emmett.

  “Mrs. Williams, though,” said Gretel, “why’s she so worried about what you know?”

  “She always seemed nice to me, but when she said what she said to me out on the church lawn, it gave me a shiver. I got the feeling she could be as mean as she wanted.”

  “What about the spider kiss the skeleton gave Mrs. Holst?” asked Gretel.

  “I have a feeling somebody is gonna kill her.”

  “Like Jimmy Tooth knows the future? Or like Jimmy Tooth put a curse on her?” she asked.

  Emmett had no answer and shook his head. They got down on their hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the treeline. From where they squatted, behind the bole of a long-ago fallen oak, they could see the icehouse, clear as day, no more than twenty-five yards into the open field behind the carpentry shop. From up in the shop they heard the sound of a hammer pounding cut nails. Emmett turned to Gretel and looked at her. He couldn’t believe he had a friend after not having one since July. She smiled at him, and he said, “Let’s go.”

  They crouched as they made their way to the structure, using it to block any view of them from the carpentry shop. When they stood against its western wall, Emmett inched forward and looked around the corner to see if Mrs. Williams was in sight. Eventually he waved over his shoulder for Gretel to follow him. He got his hand on the door and pulled back, expecting it to be locked. Instead it swept open with little more than a grumble from the hinges. They slipped inside, and he said for her to hold it open just a sliver so he could see. There was an old oil lantern hanging from a hook just inside the door. He reached into his pocket and took out the box of wooden matches. There was still oil in the rusted old lamp and the wick was damp with it. He removed its glass globe, thumbnail lit a match, and brought light to the shadows. The sight of the flame reminded him he hadn’t smoked his afternoon roll-up yet.

  The inside of the place, lined with cedar wood, was much smaller that the outside. The walls were in the shape of an octagon. They were standing on a huge trapdoor, and Gretel said, “They must keep the ice down there.” With the exception of a couple of wooden shelves lining each wall, and the remainder of the floor not covered by the hatch being poured concrete, there was nothing much to see.

  “Looks like Jimmy Tooth sent you on a wild-goose chase,” said Gretel.

  “Maybe he meant we have to go down there,” he said, pointing to the trapdoor. He leaned over and tried the handle. It didn’t budge and he tried it with two hands. Gretel walked over when he was done and gave it a tug.

  “Well,” he said, and they stood there close together in silence for a long while.

  “Hey, what’s that in the corner?”

  He lifted the lantern off the hook and followed her. She knelt next to the wall opposite the door they’d come in. Emmett tried to see what she was looking at over her shoulder. She slowly turned toward him, her palm up and her brow furrowed.

  “Is that chips of ice?” he asked and brought the lantern closer to her hand.

  “No, teeth.”

  A moment passed and then Emmett said, “You gotta know what I’m thinking.”

  Gretel nodded. “Jimmy Tooth’s teeth.”

  “The rest must have got cleaned up, but they missed these.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  She handed him the three teeth, each cracked off at the root, and he stowed them deep in his pocket.

  “Let’s get out,” he said, and with that, the icehouse door slammed shut and they heard a key turning in its lock.

  “Wait!” he yelled. “We’re in here.”

  “Hey,” called Gretel, whose voice was higher and louder than his.

  In the silence that followed, as if from a great distance, they heard a woman’s voice. At first they couldn’t make out what she was saying, but slowly her words came clear. “You’ve gobbled your last thyme patch, Emmett Wallace.”

  “Please,” he yelled back. “We won’t tell anyone.”

  “Is she going to bash our teeth out with a hammer?” asked Gretel.

  The friends stood perfectly still, taking shallow breaths in order to better hear their captor. Emmett was sure it was Mrs. Williams. Even in her muffled voice he could detect that chilling thread of nastiness. The time passed, but they were afraid to move. When after a long while, they heard nothing, they went to work on the door by which they’d entered, kicking it and ramming their shoulders into it. It didn’t move an inch.

  “If she comes in with her hammer, we’ll both rush her at the same time,” said Gretel.

  Emmett swallowed hard and agreed, unsure if he’d be able to.

  They wore themselves out pounding and screaming and eventually slumped down together onto the trapdoor at the center of the eight-sided room. She put her arm around him, put her head on his shoulder, and neither of them spoke. The oil lamp flickered now and then, and Emmett wondered how much longer it would be before they were swamped by total darkness.

  An hour later, they heard knocking noises from outside. Emmett crawled forward to the door and put his ear to the thin slit between its bottom and the floor. He barely heard Mrs. Williams’s voice. “We’ll be done with this little peckerwood,” she said. Then another voice answered her. “A blight of a child,” said a man.

  “What about Miss Angel Cake?”

  “I fixed the brakes, and I’m sending her on an errand to Mount Victory,” he said.

  “More kerosene around the base,” she commanded. “That dry old sawdust’ll go up in a blink.”

  Emmett felt a hand on his shoulder. “What’s she doing?” whispered Gretel.

  “The pastor is with her,” said Emmett, moving back away from the door as the smell of kerosene sifted in beneath it. He didn’t have the heart to tell her the rest.

  A few minutes later, the cedar room grew hotter, smoke issuing in from beneath the door and between the wall slats.

  “I want to go home,” cried Gretel. She screamed for help and lunged at the door, pounding and kicking. Emmett was paralyzed with fear, unable to move off the concrete. That’s when the lamp went out and they heard the crackling of the fire all around them. She found him in the dark, and they put their arms around each other. They were gasping. Their hearts were pounding.

  Just as the flames began poking through the inner wall, bringing back the light and casting jittery shadows, there was a loud bang. The trapdoor flew open and slammed back on the concrete only inches from them. Jimmy Tooth slowly ascended from the ice hold below. His skull and ribs glowed in the firelight, and the tattered shirt smoldered where embers had landed. Emmett saw him emerge through the smoke, that near-toothless open mouth either screaming or laughing. There we
re tiny fires burning in the hollows of his eyes. With sharp, cold hands, the phantasm grabbed both the boy and girl by the wrists, and they were off.

  Emmett felt himself dropping, felt the heat increasing. He finally mustered the courage to open one eye. They were drifting down through the darkness, into a vast cavern. Everywhere, stretching out to the horizon of the cave as big as Ohio, there were fields of fire, the flames growing individually in rows like corn. Their orange stalks, their sharp white tips bowed and rippled in a strong sweltering breeze. Directly below there was a clearing of black rock where the boy spotted Jimmy Tooth’s farmhouse as he’d seen it in his daydream.

  There was an instant of forgetting and then Gretel and Emmett were standing beside Jimmy Tooth at the edge of the field of fire. The skeleton was sweeping his arm out to indicate his infernal crop. “I got a thousand acres of torment here,” he said, speaking in the voice of the Jimmy Emmett remembered from life. Words came forth from the empty skull in a weak echo. “For every acre’s worth I bring to Satan, he reduces my own anguish a half a dust mote’s worth.”

  The boy had the sense that they’d been on a tour of the farm for a while before he’d come to. “Are we dead?” he asked.

  “You ain’t dead,” said Jimmy.

  “What about me?” asked Gretel.

  “You’re neither dead nor alive. We’ve gotta see.”

  She asked, “What do you mean?” but the skeleton turned away and walked back toward the red barn. On the way they passed a massive creature with six legs and the scaly head of a dragon, chewing flame like hay out of a bale that wriggled with bright intensity.

  “My trusty plough horse, Sacload,” said Jimmy. “You could pet him if you like.” Emmett and Gretel declined. They moved on a few more yards across the adamantine surface before the skeleton announced, “And lookee here. I got a well.” A stone well like the one at the Addisons’ appeared before them where there’d been none a second before. “Maybe someday I’ll find myself at the bottom of it,” he said. His jaw opened wide and laughter, like a trumpet, issued forth.

  “Why are we here?” asked Emmett.

  “You kids make yourselves at home for a spell. I’ve got some pressing business up in the house.”

  “Wait,” said Gretel, more than a hint of desperation in her voice, but before the word fully sounded, Jimmy had vanished. She began crying, and the only thing preventing Emmett from doing the same was his fear. He drew close to her and said, “Come on. I’m going to tell him to take us back home.” He put his arm around her and moved her slowly toward the house. He looked up at their destination—a gray, three-story structure, listing forward, with broken windows and a round cupola on either side of the patchy roof. Green mist curled from the chimney and reminded Emmett of thyme smoke.

  On their way to the house, they passed the sagging old barn, and just as they drew even with the entrance, a man walked out of it. He was middle-aged, bald on top but with a full red beard reaching to the center of his chest. He was dressed in a work shirt and jeans and pair of farm boots. Emmett thought he recognized him from town. “Hey, mister,” he said. “How do we get back to Threadwell?” The figure paid no attention to him and kept heading for the house. “Scuze me, sir,” said Gretel. She shrugged off Emmett’s arm and ran to catch up with the adult. “Can you help us?” she yelled to him.

  The fellow just kept moving forward, not even turning his head to acknowledge their presence. “He doesn’t see you,” said Emmett. Gretel stopped following and watched as the man climbed the back steps to the house, opened the door, and went inside. When that door latched shut again, there came a low roar from out across the fields. Both she and Emmett turned around to see what was happening. At first it was unclear if anything in the strange setting was different, save for the fact that the wind had picked up considerably.

  In an instant, it grew stronger yet, and there was a howling that echoed throughout the enormous cavern in which the farmland lay. It was Gretel who noticed it first. She pointed to the boundary of the field and shouted over the noise, “It’s moving toward us.” Emmett focused and realized that the crop of flames had grown higher, become more violent in its crackling and waving, and was rolling toward them now like an ocean wave. Gretel moved first, running back to grab Emmett’s hand and pull him in the direction of the house. Her touch woke him from his stupor, and they ran.

  By the time they made it to the steps, the back of the barn was on fire. They got through the door and slammed it behind them. For all the din of the blaze outside, it was silent in the kitchen, the only sound the slow ticking of a clock on the wall with chains and pinecone weights. Each second sounded like a drip of water. The room was lit by the light of the fire outside slipping in through two windows. The dance of the flames as they consumed the barn cast wild shadows on the walls.

  “Jimmy Tooth!” Emmett yelled. He and Gretel left the kitchen, ran down a dark hallway, and stepped into a parlor. “We want to go home,” he was about to call out, but the phrase never made it past his lips. The man they’d seen exit the barn was on his knees, his fingers on Jimmy Tooth’s wrists, trying to pry the grip from around his neck. His face was blue, his eyes popping, and foam and drool dripped from his lips. Jimmy’s eyes widened, and the empty mouth was a grimace of exertion.

  The gurgling noise coming up out of the victim filled the room, and his body jerked and writhed with its last pulses of life. When the figure eventually went limp, Jimmy released his grip and the corpse fell to the floor with a thud. Emmett just then realized that the house was on fire around them, flames coming up through the floorboards, piercing the lathing of the walls. Jimmy turned toward the children, arms outstretched. The skull snarled viciously. He lunged for them.

  Emmett felt a hand grasp his ankle and he came to, cocooned in heat and thick smoke. He felt himself being dragged, and a moment later a pair of hands under his arms lifted him up. “I’ve got him,” yelled a voice. Emmett’s eyes opened, the lids fluttered, and he caught a glimpse of Officer Johnson before dropping into darkness again. The next thing, sunlight. He opened his eyes and found himself lying on a cot in the police station.

  Benton made him drink a cup of black coffee. Emmett sat, wrapped in a blanket, across the desk from the chief, who smoked a roll-up.

  “Your folks’ll be here soon to get you. I told them to let you stay here for the night. Doc Summerhill looked you over and gave you the okay.”

  Emmett nodded.

  The lawman took a last toke on his butt and then stubbed it out. He sat back in his chair and said, “Your dad showed up here last evening and said you hadn’t come home. He had the wagon and was looking for you. Me and Officer Johnson weren’t doing anything so we took the Model T out and helped search. We just happened to be passing the carpentry shop and saw the flames out back. We carried water from the creek, maybe two dozen times. And I’m too old to be hauling water. You’re a lucky cuss. Johnson heard you screaming in there or we’d have let it just turn to cinders, which in the long run it mostly did anyway. Now, suppose you tell me why we had to pull you free of that burning icehouse last night.”

  “Gretel,” said Emmett. “Is she okay?”

  “Gretel who?” asked Benton.

  “Lawler.”

  “When we put the fire out, all we found was you.”

  “She was with me.”

  “Maybe she slipped out. The back wall had collapsed by the time we got there. You’re lucky you’re not barbecue, son. Where’s this girl live?”

  “Gretel Lawler. She lives out on the Chowdry Road.”

  The chief leaned forward, lifted a pencil from the desk, and made a note. “Okay, now, what were you up to?”

  Emmett sat for quite a while, willing to talk but not knowing where to begin. There was almost too much to tell. Every time he picked a launching point, he thought of some other thread tha
t needed tending if he was to get it all right. His mind was still bleary from the smoke, but while he sat and thought, he drank the coffee and that cleared things a bit with every sip. Benton rocked slightly in his chair, the spring beneath him quietly squealing, and seemed to study something on the ceiling.

  Finally, Emmett said, “It started back when I found Jimmy Tooth in the bottom of the Addisons’ old well.”

  “Good lord,” said the chief.

  It was late morning by the time the boy stopped talking.

  Benton shook his head, and said, “That’s one hell of a tale, Mr. Wallace. Jimmy Tooth come back from the dead to get justice? Ha. I like it, but it’s lunatic. You’re saying that Mrs. Williams killed Jimmy Tooth and because she knew you knew something, she trapped you in the icehouse and tried to cook you? And that’s not even the most absurd part.”

  “Jimmy wanted justice,” said Emmett, “but I think to also confess. It never struck me to wonder why Jimmy Tooth had a farm in hell. He wanted me to know that he choked a man to death.”

  “Oh, right,” said Benton. “Who?”

  “I’ve seen him before, but I can’t place him. A man with a red beard down to here.” He moved the side of his hand across his chest. “Bald head.”

  Benton squinted and leaned on the desk. He smiled with only the left side of his mouth. “You know who you’re describing?” he asked.

  Emmett shook his head.

  “Mr. Williams.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I barely remember him.”

  “That’s interesting,” said the chief. “You know, when he died, I don’t remember being called to the carpentry shop. I can’t remember if the doctor took a look at him. I just heard he had a heart attack and then there was a wake. Mrs. Williams made his coffin and chose a closed lid. We knew her so well, and she was in such grief no one asked any questions.”