Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  Crickets and peepers provided an eerie soundtrack to the film spliced together in my head. The ghost-boy. The webbing. Herman licking his teeth. Then I broke the spell by swearing. In my preoccupation I had managed to slice the pad of my thumb.

  I held my hand up to the light of dusk drifting through the doorway and watched my blood form a bead. It threatened to drip.

  That happened. It all happened.

  A memory welled in that drop as it fell. A small boy exploring the collapsed shell of a mountain cabin, feet crunching on rotten boards. A noise rising in my ears like the plaintive dial tone after a hangup. Darkness congealed into a face. The freezing fire of a ghost’s touch.

  I remembered: my tiny foot settling on a board that snapped even beneath the slender weight of a five-year-old. The sudden noise froze my heart. Inside the cabin, that hollow moss-caked husk that squatted in the woods above the ancient cottage of my mother’s mother.

  Even in my childhood my grandma’s house creaked with disrepair, central crumbling landmark on the farm gone to seed since my grandfather died, years before I was born. Her house fascinated me with its unending supply of nooks and crannies, with its leaning outhouse, with its chickens behind frayed wire, with its covered well.

  But nothing fascinated me more than that dark relic in the woods, its shadow always drawing my eye from beneath the elm trees whenever I slipped out the back door to play.

  Grandma was a tiny woman, her waves of grey and black hair always tied back in a frayed ponytail, face chestnut brown with wrinkled webs around her eyes and mouth, eyes a startling blue beneath thick black eyebrows. She frightened me; I didn’t like to be alone with her, though she was always kind. There was a tension between her and my mother, who took after her late, lighter-skinned, taller husband; a cold barrier that I sensed in some instinctual way but did not catalogue consciously until I was much older and noticed how mom fell quiet on the rare occasions someone spoke of her mother. Not so dearly departed, I could see. I came to believe it was all about skin color.

  But, when grandma was alive, she had insisted on visits, insisted on every opportunity to see her grandson, and my parents had dutifully obeyed, making the long trek on those horrible rutted roads in the rusted VW Beetle that was all they could afford when they were young.

  I asked Grandma many times about the caved-in cabin in her woods, and when she answered it was always the same. “Leave it alone, little panther.”

  I never asked her permission, but decided I would see for myself all the same. Toward the end of one week-long stay I snuck away from my cot in the middle of the night. I had no flashlight, but the moon was bright enough to let me find a way in.

  I barked my knee crawling in through that hole in the wall.

  What was I hunting there?

  I remembered: a face formed from darkness. That terrible touch, cold lightning through every inch of me.

  I couldn’t recall what happened after. More blood dripped as my hand trembled.

  A snatch of an image: my grandmother’s eyes, practically glowing in the moonlight, her nose inches from mine. She had pulled me from the ruined cabin. Inside it, something whimpered.

  I clenched my bleeding thumb in my fingers, once again aware of the fruity tobacco scent, the reep reep reep of the peeper frogs.

  I was a fool on a fool’s mission. The old man was right—by the time I reached Massachusetts the trail would be smothered in snow. The world I was trying to escape into would flush me out without a sliver of sympathy.

  That creepy storekeeper had the better of me in more ways than one.

  I’ve always felt alone, been aware of a boundary that cordoned me off from others, evoked awkward silences and downcast eyes when I’ve tried to bridge the gap. I once chalked that up to skin color, my mother’s shame.

  I didn’t learn what a Melungeon was until my senior year in high school. My blood was mixed, yes, but not in the way I’d come to believe.

  Melungeon was once an insult, now defanged by virtue of being mostly forgotten. They called themselves Black Dutch or Black Irish, but people believed they were a mix of Indian and Negro, and in some towns in eighteenth-century Tennessee the government took away their property rights. The Melungeons did intermarry with blacks, because of the societal forces that throw outcasts together, but their origins weren’t solely African.

  Some claimed them to be descendants of Moorish sailors from a marooned Portuguese vessel, taking Cherokee and Powhatan wives. Others sources point to the lost Roanoke colony, with its cryptic CROATOAN; some fancifully go even further back, much further, to Carthaginians fleeing the Roman tyranny, to the Phoenicians, even to a certain lost Biblical tribe. And there are tales that supposedly originate among the Cherokee of a tribe from under the hills, a tribe with features that could be called a combination of white and black and Asian, who walked without fear among the beasts of the spirit world, and did not know death until they came to live above ground.

  My grandmother was unmistakably Melungeon, and she met death when I was little and didn’t come back. I knew nothing of a spirit world or any beasts within it.

  But I thought about that webbing in the shop door, and the way the Crabbes had known what I was without asking, and it frightened me.

  Then a shadow flickered beyond the doorway to the shelter, and I knew a different kind of fear. My gasp of surprise caught in my throat.

  I saw nothing through that opening but the jumbled blur of trees in deep twilight, but at the same time I saw, unmistakably, the scrawny figure of a boy, etched out of the darkness.

  He stared at me, wide-eyed.

  I started to say his name, but he had vanished. A breeze shifted the branches.

  I heard a rhythmic rustling of leaves, somebody walking through the brush. A stench of rotten eggs assailed me.

  My bleeding thumb forgotten, I opened the Buck knife and crept to the door.

  On the crest of the hill high above me, in a gap between trees, a figure stood in silhouette against the bruised twilight. The figure—a man, I thought—turned and walked below the line of the hill.

  It was a strange thing to think at that moment, strange especially for a twenty-year-old man facing the unknown with his heart in his throat, but it’s what I thought: Grandma would know what to do. A woman who was little more to me than scraps of eerie memory, yet there was strength in those memories. A tiny old woman who had ventured out in the middle of the night to pull a frightened little boy from a place he didn’t belong.

  I stepped outside, avoiding leaves and brush as I stalked up the hill. As a child I’d had a gift for padding silently that drove my mother crazy. This gift did not fail me now.

  On the hilltop I peered down into a long, narrow gully, dug by uncounted centuries of converging water runoff. The bottom of the gully widened into a clearing, shrouded by encroaching night. Though my vision reduced most everything to mottled black and white, somehow without squinting I could see Herman Crabbe in the clearing. Gaunt, an animated skeleton, he spread his arms, and a ring of what appeared to be blue smoke stretched open in front of him.

  It was as if his hands had pierced a membrane, and he was forcing the hole to gape large enough to pass through.

  A bewildering double image confronted me. Though I saw Crabbe using both hands to hold the opening, other limbs were reaching through, spiny arachnid limbs.

  Then he stepped completely through, and changed. What crawled out the other side of that smoky opening was not human at all.

  The monster ascended the far side of the gully on legs like arched lightning, climbing into the murk at heart-stopping speed. The vast spider I beheld was formed of shadow and movement, like my ghost-boy.

  Once the Crabbe-thing crawled out of sight, my heart didn’t slow its pounding. But the opening he made, the blue smoky ring, still hung in mid-air, slowly shrinking.

  Knife held before me, every nerve screaming at me to run the other way, I descended into the gully, stepping as light and catlik
e as I think I’ve ever managed. I expected the Crabbe-spider to lunge from the shadows any moment. But nothing like that happened.

  When I reached the opening it was little more than an wispy curl of blue light, dangling before like bait in the deep woods abyss. I poked my finger in it, and felt a mild jolt, that nerve-chilling shock that was starting to become familiar.

  I shoved in two fingers, then both hands. The substance yielded to my touch. I spread my arms, as I’d seen the storekeeper do, and opened the hole in reality.

  Through the hole, the trees, the gully, the shadows all looked the same, but another world was superimposed over them in double-exposure: a landscape of sourceless silver light, of odd refractions that twisted objects into shapes that hurt my eyes if I stared too long.

  I put one foot in the opening and stretched it to the ground, then paused. If I passed all the way through, would the opening still be there when I returned? Would I be stuck on the other side, in the spirit world, like poor Tommy Saunders?

  For now I was certain what had happened to this poor boy. Not all the pieces fit, not yet. But I was sure that Tommy Saunders, against all odds, was still alive.

  The Crabbes had brought him into this shadow world, somehow, for who-knew-what horrible purpose, but he’d escaped them. Maybe they’d believed him dead, but from my meeting with them they’d gleaned in some arcane fashion that their prey still lived. And now Mr. Crabbe had returned to the shadow world, to hunt the boy. Tracking in his true form.

  I didn’t dare leave the opening to search in that unfamiliar space. But I’d seen the boy just minutes ago. He couldn’t be far away.

  Holding out my knife in the direction Crabbe had crawled, I yelled Tommy’s name.

  The woods fell silent. I threw away all caution, shouting, “Tommy? Can you hear me? Tommy?”

  “Here!” A boy’s voice.

  Something stirred nearby, something large. The sound made my guts flip-flop.

  “Run to my voice!” I screamed. “Run! Run! Now!”

  I couldn’t tell if Tommy heard me, the commotion in the woods became so loud. I clutched the knife in a white-knuckle grip and kept shouting. Then the boy appeared, stumbling pell-mell out of a tangle of silvery gloom. He pitched himself headlong into the gully. Behind him the tops of trees whipped back and forth, as something giant shoved its way between them.

  But the thing that emerged from the shadows a moment later wasn’t the gigantic spider I’d braced myself for. It stood upright on two thick legs. Thorns covered its body.

  The gully flooded with a rotten egg reek.

  Tommy tripped and landed on all fours. I yelled for him to get up. Then the thing chasing him stepped down into the gully, and I lost all coherent thought.

  Wicked hooks of bone protruded at every joint from a hide like layers upon layers of burn scars. The pulpy mound of its head spilled over its chest and shoulders in a cascade of sucking mouths and writhing eyestalks. Spined organs that had to be genitalia jutted from its abdomen like tusks.

  A spike of nausea and terror hammered me between the eyes. I shrieked something, I don’t remember what. Tommy shrieked too, and scrambled to his feet.

  Repulsive as the demon was, something rang false about it, a hint that what I was seeing wasn’t real, that it wasn’t a monster so much as a costume, or a suit of armor. Somehow I knew this, and the thought held me fast, as did Tommy’s wide, terrified eyes. But whatever hid inside it, the thing was a murder machine, and I was just flesh.

  I screamed for Tommy to move. Then they were both running toward me, the creature just yards behind its prey.

  Tommy bowled into me as the demon’s spike-studded fist descended. I stuck my arm out through the hole in the world and slashed blindly with the knife.

  A sledgehammer kissed me.

  A howl split the night.

  Then I landed on my back in the wet earth, panting, with Tommy’s warm weight on top of me. Nearby, a muffled voice groaned in pain.

  I put an arm around Tommy’s shoulders and hauled us both to our feet. As I did so, someone put a hand to my back and helped me up. With a cry I turned, holding out the knife, and found myself face to face with Herman Crabbe. The shadows and highlights cast by the flashlight he carried amplified his ugliness tenfold.

  “Whoa, there, tiger,” he said, as his flashlight beam found the blade.

  I backed away, keeping the knife between myself and Crabbe, my other arm cradled protectively around the shivering boy. Tommy pressed his face against my stomach. His clothes were wet, and he reeked of sweat and urine.

  The muffled voice groaned again, then coughed. Crabbe turned his flashlight in the direction of the noise. “You did quite a number on him, tiger,” Crabbe said. “I’m impressed.”

  The hole in reality still remained, but had thinned to a wispy blue outline. Beyond it, a man lay on the ground, wearing jeans and a torn flannel shirt. At first I thought he had the palest face I’d ever seen, but then I realized he wore a papier mâché mask, painted white.

  Gertrude Crabbe stood over him, pressing the business end of a shotgun against his chest.

  The man’s shirt was shredded down one side. The flesh revealed there bled from a series of deep, parallel gouges. Claw marks.

  I held up my knife in wonder. The blade was clean. Despite that little boy cuddled against me, I said a few choice words, several in a string.

  Panther, my grandmother always called me.

  And then, as if not focusing on it somehow made it easier to see, a scene unfolding in shadow-forms edged onto my awareness.

  Before me, the thorned demon lay twitching. Huge though it was, it was dwarfed by the tremendous spider crouched over it. Clearly female, its grotesquely swollen abdomen blurred the moon. With its forelegs, it was winding, winding, binding the monster beneath it in a tight cocoon.

  “It’s like she says,” said Gertrude’s husband. “It’s amazing, how perfect we are for each other.”

  He aimed his flashlight at me again. “Looks like you took his prey away, and a good thing, too.” He laughed, a harsh, alien sound. “You get that boy back up to the store. Clean him up, put some blankets on him. Give him some water, make sure it’s in small sips, maybe a candy bar if he can hold it down. When we catch up to you, we’ll drive you both into town.”

  Had the Crabbes been watching as my face-off with Tommy’s abductor went down? They must have. What would have happened had I lost the face-off? The balance of events seemed too delicate to disturb. I didn’t dare ask. Instead I tilted my head toward the man on the ground. “What about him? He’s bleeding pretty bad.”

  Herman’s lips peeled back in a toothy grin. “We’ll take care of him. You go on.”

  I was still trembling with revelation. “How am I going to find my way in the dark?”

  Though his face was hidden, I’m sure he kept onsmiling. “I think you’ll find that you can see just fine.”

  I didn’t see fit to argue. I glanced back once as I carried Tommy up the trail. The demon, still twitching, was almost completely encased in Gertrude’s webbing.

  * * *

  I’m still amazed I made it up that hill, carrying that child. My mind reeling the whole way.

  The pieces fit now, at least as well as I would ever understand them. The man who I had…slashed…was something like yet unlike the Crabbes, a self-made monster who had turned Angel’s Leap into his stalking grounds. He had stolen Tommy into shadow with the worst of intentions, but his quarry had escaped. A terrified boy, snatched out of the world, but still resourceful enough to stay out of this demon’s clutches for what time he had left to him.

  I was both chilled and completely unsurprised when the Crabbes arrived at the shop without their captive in tow. They made no mention of him, and I chose not to ask as to his whereabouts. They had retrieved my gear from the shelter, though. I thanked them. Gertrude Crabbe fussed over Tommy while Herman readied the Jeep. He indicated I should follow him.

  As the engine warmed u
p, he put a hand on my shoulder and leaned close, so that I was staring right at his crooked teeth, ghoulishly lit by the Jeep’s headlights. His acrid breath assaulted me as he spoke.

  “We’re going to drop you off a block down from the dispatch center. You go in, tell them you found the boy wandering in the woods. Don’t mention us, and don’t mention anyone else. Tommy won’t remember anything different than what you say. Gertrude’s made sure of that.”

  Given everything I had been through that day, I had no problem swallowing the idea that Gertrude Crabbe could hoodoo a boy’s memory.

  A question burned in the back of my mind and it escaped before I could stop it. “Why didn’t you stop this? You could have ended all these terrible things a long time ago.”