by Harvey Click
Her face was worse. One of her ears was mostly gone, and the little bit that was left was black and seemed to be rotting. Most of her nose had rotted off too, leaving a gaping triangular hole, and below the hole a toothless mouth sagged open with drool hanging from its blackened lips. Her eyes were open but looked vacant and lifeless.
At first Amy thought the young man was wheeling a rotting corpse around the corner. But then the corpse began to cough and blood trickled out of her mouth.
The young man noticed Amy staring and gave her the finger. His eyes looked lifeless too.
She turned right at the intersection and crossed the metal bridge to Wellman Road. But she wasn’t going to Billy’s house, at least not now. She was going to Secret Place. She was gripping her steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles were white. She wanted to turn around and head back to Columbus and never return. But Billy was missing, and maybe Marci would tell her something useful.
Secret Place had been their private hideaway since grade school. The old logging road that led to it was about three miles out of town, which made it about halfway between Amy’s childhood home and Marci’s home in town, and not very far for either of them to bicycle. The road hadn’t been used by loggers for decades, but when Amy eased her Toyota onto it the tire tracks between the weeds told her that someone was still using it, most likely teenagers wanting a place to have sex.
She heard weeds scraping the bottom of her car as she bounced slowly along, first downhill and then steeply uphill to the flat area just large enough for two or three cars to park. And it was obvious that cars had been parking here, because as she got out she saw used condoms and a pair of pink panties littering the weeds bent by tire marks. So teenagers knew about this little parking place, but maybe they hadn’t yet discovered Secret Place, which required a bit of climbing and hiking to reach.
The air was hot and damp now, and she was sweaty before she reached the little clearing surrounded by maples and pines. For some reason the grass wasn’t terribly high here—it never had been—and instead of weeds there were wild violets, daisies, coneflowers, and purple phlox, and they looked especially colorful today, freshened by last night’s rain. In the center of the clearing was a large flat rock just the right height for sitting, and she went to it and sat. Secret Place was on top of a hill, and up here there was just enough breeze to play gently with her short hair and cool the sweat on her neck.
Last night in her old bedroom at Billy’s house she had felt a throng of unpleasant memories sweeping through her, but now for the first time since returning to Blackwood she felt something like nostalgia. How many afternoons had she and Marci spent here, talking about anything and everything but mostly about boys? This was where they had practiced kissing; this was where they had become blood sisters.
The words of their oath came back to her: “Each one for the other, no matter the peril, bound as best friends and blood sisters for life.” Their ceremony, which included an unsanitary bit of blood-letting, had been as solemn as a nuptial and surely at the time they had both intended their bond to last as long as they lived.
But then shit had happened. And the shit that was happening here in Blackwood seemed way too deep for blood sister vows to survive.
It was a few minutes past noon, and still no sign of Marci. Amy started to feel uneasy, as if she was being watched. The thing she had seen could be hiding anywhere in the circle of trees that surrounded her. So could any sort of human brutes, and she suspected Blackwood had its share of those. She was in the middle of nowhere with no defenses, and she wondered why she had always felt so safe here as a teenager. But then the town had been different, remote and impoverished but generally safe. Now it was…
She looked at her watch again: 12:25. For one ugly moment she wondered if Marci had lured her up here to be ambushed. Why should she trust Marci after all these years?
She was about to leave when she saw Marci’s head bobbing up the steep path between the trees. Amy got up from the rock and hurried to meet her.
“Sorry I’m late,” Marci said. “Most mornings if Buddy ain’t sleeping he goes to his shop and works on motorcycles, but today he just sat around watching TV till noon. I think he was hanging ‘round to keep his eye on me. I can’t stay long ‘cause I don’t know when he’ll get back. I’m sorry he threw you out, but I told you he would.”
“Why do you put up with him?” Amy asked.
“’Cause he protects me from people a whole lot worse than him. Buddy ain’t so bad, it’s just he’s been kinda strung out lately, and when he’s strung out he can be a fucking bastard.”
“Strung out on what?”
“Smack and crack mostly.”
“Marci, what’s happened to this town anyway? Everybody seems to be doped up and ready to kill someone. I just saw the Blevin boys beating the crap out of Jerry Jefferson in the alley behind Shawn’s Saloon. It sounded like they were threatening to kill him if he didn’t give them some money by tonight.”
“Welcome to paradise,” Marci said.
“But they were doing it right there in broad daylight, like they didn’t care if anybody saw them or not. And then a minute later I saw something really weird on the sidewalk. There was a guy pushing a woman in a wheelchair, and it looked like her body was rotting apart. Her fucking bones were sticking out of her foot!”
“That musta been Katy West. She’s been shooting up krokodil for two, three years now. I’m surprised she’s still alive.”
“What’s krokodil?”
“Some kind a fake heroin you can cook up in your kitchen. It eats you up from the inside out. Pretty soon your body parts is falling off and your bones is sticking out right through your skin.”
“Why on earth would anyone take it?”
Marci shrugged and said, “It’s cheap. Look, Amy, everybody ‘round here gets high on something. It’s either that or go insane.”
“So what are you using?” Amy asked. “Crack? Heroin?”
“No, I don’t touch that shit anymore except maybe once in a great while. I’m staying pretty clean these days, just use a little meth now and then to pep me up.”
“Now and then? Marci, I can see what it’s doing to you, and I can see you’re using more than just a little.”
They had both sat down on the rock, but now Marci sprang up.
“I didn’t come here to be lectured,” she said. “I’m doing you a favor, so don’t get high and mighty with me. If anybody finds out I’m here talking to you, my ass is grass.”
“Who’s anybody? Buddy?”
“Anybody means most of the people in this town. Look, Amy, everybody here is either taking drugs or making drugs or doing both. There’s a whole lotta drugs being made here and a whole lotta drugs being trucked away somewhere, and the people who make ‘em and sell ‘em will fuck you in a New York minute if they think you’re getting in their business. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your brother was cooking up crank and everybody in town knew it. Most likely he crossed somebody and got himself shot, and most likely half the people in town know who it was that shot him. And if they see you snooping ‘round trying to find out what happened to him they’ll put you down so fast you won’t know what hit you. You can be driving in your car or you can be sitting on the toilet, they’ll blow a hole in your head and they won’t lose no sleep over it neither. You’ll just be one more dead body.”
“Jeez, Marci, if it’s that bad why don’t you leave?”
“I can’t, Amy, I already told you that. I know too much. They probably don’t think you know anything yet, and they want you to hit the road before you do know something. But if you hang ‘round much longer they’re not gonna let you leave—not alive at least.”
“Surely people can leave if they want to. All they have to do is get in their car and go.”
“That’s what you think. Some got out when the getting was still good, but them that stayed are stuck here till hell freezes over. They keep themselves stoned and keep the
ir mouths shut. What time is it? I wanna get back before Buddy does.”
“Almost 1:00.”
“If he gets back before I do I’m gonna tell him I went fishing. I even put some tackle in my trunk. He ain’t gonna believe me, but then he never does.”
“What will he do if he doesn’t believe you?”
“Beat the shit outta me most likely.”
“Then I guess you shouldn’t have come here.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t’ve. You know why I did? ‘Each one for the other, no matter the peril, bound as best friends and blood sisters for life.’ Bet you don’t even remember that, do you?”
“Oh yes I do. Look, Marci, I’m going to take you away with me, you and Joey. I’ll put you up in my apartment until you can find some kind of job. I don’t think you’ll miss Buddy all that much.”
“You ain’t been listening to a word I said, have you? I told you, they won’t let me leave.”
“Well, they can’t be watching every road twenty-four seven, can they?”
“They don’t need to watch. They got things to do their watching for them.”
“What do you mean?”
“That thing you saw in Billy’s house last night? That wasn’t no possum, and that’s all I’m gonna say.”
“Marci, this isn’t making any sense to me.”
“It don’t haveta make sense, it’s the truth. The bosses ‘round here got more than guns to protect them. I’m not saying no more ‘cause something could be hiding right here in these trees listening to me. If I had any sense I wouldn’t be here, but I wanted to warn you to get out while they’ll still let you go. I laid in bed thinking about it all night long and I decided if any place was safe to talk it would be Secret Place. This was always our safe place, wasn’t it?”
“Yes it was. I hope it still is.”
Amy looked around at the circle of trees, their branches waving softly in the breeze, and wondered if anything was hiding behind them.
“Whatever you do, don’t let ‘em get ahold of any of your hair or fingernails or anything like that,” Marci said.
“Huh?”
“That’s what people say. They say if they get ahold of some of your hair or fingernails then they can find you anywhere. They can track you that way.”
“You keep saying ‘they.’ Who are ‘they’? Who’s running this show?”
“I said too much already. It don’t matter who they are anyway, ‘cause you’re getting outta here today and you ain’t gonna ever come back. Tell me that’s true.”
“I don’t know, Marci. Billy’s my brother, and I need to know what happened to him.”
“Then I wasted my time coming here.”
They stood up and embraced. Marci’s body felt frail and bony, eaten away by meth.
“Goodbye, my blood sister,” Marci said. “I have always loved you. Whether you leave or you stay, I’m sure I will never see you again.”
She turned and walked quickly away, and Amy watched her until she had disappeared down the path.
Chapter 4
As Amy hiked down the hillside to her car, she had no idea which direction she would drive. If she drove home now, she doubted she would ever know what had happened to her brother. If she stayed, she wasn’t sure she would survive. It seemed a simple decision—being in the dark was better than being dead—but fierce determination had always been one of her traits, and whenever somebody tried to keep her from doing what she believed was right, she would become all the more determined to do it.
She turned her car around in the little parking area, drove down the rutted logging road, and sat at the bottom staring at Wellman Road for a minute. Turning left would take her back to Blackwood and eventually to the highway that led back to Columbus; turning right would take her to Ebbing Road, where Billy’s house sat waiting, maybe holding some clue within or maybe holding some monstrosity.
She turned right. She told herself that this was a sort of compromise: she would have one last look at Billy’s house and then, whether she found anything of interest or not, she would head home knowing that she had faced her fears and had done what she could. Back in Columbus, she would notify the authorities and hope that they would alert the FBI or the DEA about this little town of horrors.
The word things was stuck in her head like a thorn. Despite her college education, she wasn’t a skeptic. Maybe nobody who grows up in an old house out in the middle of nowhere is really a skeptic. Folks whose families had lived out here for generations all had tales to tell that their parents and grandparents had told them, and probably most of them believed the tales even if they wouldn’t admit it. The tales peopled these hills and hollows with ogres and trolls and things too horrible to have names. People in cities could collect the tales for their folklore classes and chuckle over them all they wanted, but maybe they wouldn’t chuckle if they had to spend just one night alone out here in one of these old houses.
She turned onto Ebbing Road. At the house on her right, old Sam Ebbing was sitting on his front porch smoking his pipe, and the big dog that had barked at her car last night was sitting beside him. They both stared at her, and she wondered what the old man thought of the changes that had come to Blackwood. His family had raised tobacco here since before Blackwood was big enough to be called a town. Sam was still here, but the peaceful town he had gone to school in no longer existed.
Amy was thinking that people were right when they said you can never go home again. She had tried, but instead she had stepped into an alien world. Her childhood home was gone forever, just as her parents were gone forever and probably her brother too, and what was left nobody but a lunatic would want to call home.
She pulled into the long cinder driveway of Billy’s house. Even in daylight it looked dark and forlorn. She went to the barn and found a long pitchfork. If the thing was still in the house, it was going to get a taste of steel tines.
She looked around the barn for a few minutes but saw nothing of interest. Billy’s truck had left tire marks in the dust of the threshing floor, but they told her nothing. Maybe a detective would be able to determine how fresh they were, but to her they were just tire marks. She climbed the old wooden ladder far enough to stick her head up above the floor of the hayloft, but there was nothing up there except a few ancient bales of straw.
She could think of no further excuse to procrastinate: it was time to go back into the house. Last night she had shut the front door, hoping to slow down the thing if it was pursuing her, but she hadn’t locked it. Clutching the pitchfork tightly in her right hand she eased the door open and stared inside. The ceiling light was still on, the way she had left it, and the sunlight through the windows brightened the grimy living room and illuminated the corners that had looked so dark last night, leaving no place for the thing to hide.
She shut the front door as quietly as she could, locked it, and tiptoed to the dining room. The old chandelier was still lit above the table, which was still littered with the same beer bottles and unwashed plate. There wasn’t enough space behind the china cupboard for the thing to hide, but she bent down to peek underneath it anyway.
She peered through the kitchen doorway and saw that the long blacksnake was curled up beneath the table again. Maybe it was used to catching mice there that sneaked out of their holes to look for crumbs under the table, but by now the crumbs were all gone. Instead of feeling afraid of it, now she felt a bit sorry for it because she doubted that even a snake would want to live in this creepy house alone.
Or maybe not alone.
As soon as she stepped into the kitchen, it slithered away and slid under the hutch again. A putrid smell was coming from the bag of Billy’s spoiled food still rotting on the table where she had left it. With her pitchfork ready to jab, she forced herself to open the small broom closet—nothing in there but two brooms, a mop, and a bucket.
No creature from hell, but also no shotgun. Her father had always kept a loaded Browning twelve-gauge Auto-5 in the broom closet, and sh
e had been hoping to find it. Somewhere in the house Billy surely kept a shotgun and probably a few other guns as well, and right now she’d feel much safer with one of them in her hands. She looked through the cupboards and drawers, even the drawers in the china cupboard in the dining room, but found no gun.
The door to her parents’ bedroom was shut, and she decided to leave it shut for the time being. For some reason she dreaded that room even more than the upstairs, maybe because she remembered it was crammed with boxes that the thing could be hiding behind or maybe because it had the roomiest closet in the house. She wedged a dining room chair beneath the doorknob so if anything was hiding in there it couldn’t get out without making some noise.
Time to go upstairs. There was no sense in tiptoeing now because she had made plenty of noise opening drawers, but she did anyway. The door to Billy’s room was shut, and she tiptoed past it, wanting to check her room first. Its door was wide open, and she spent a minute or more peering in before she stepped in.
Her suitcase still lay open on the bed, and her blouses were still lying on the floor beside the closet where she had dropped them. But the closet door was shut, and surely she had left it open when she ran out last night?
Every instinct told her to leave the door shut, but she hadn’t forced herself to enter the house just to learn nothing. Holding the pitchfork like a spear ready to strike, she held her breath and yanked the door open.
There was nothing in there except a few empty coat hangers and a rancid smell that reminded her of rotten cheese. She had smelled the same odor last night when she had seen the thing in there.
She looked quickly behind her, half expecting to see it crouching somewhere. She knelt and looked under the bed: just some dust and an old red sock. She picked up her blouses, loaded them in her suitcase, and latched it. As she was glancing around the room one last time, something struck her as odd about the dresser.
