Barns, Blood and Rock and Roll

by Joe Zito

  “You just lay real still now. This won’t hurt a bit,” the farmhand said menacingly and then roared out an evil and twisted laugh. He kicked her left arm away from her side and stepped on her hand. He raised his axe and she could see her reflection in its chrome finish. It came down hard and fast on her arm at the shoulder. Her mouth opened wide on the impact but she felt nothing; only heard the sound of bone and skin ripping apart. Her mouth stayed frozen in that silent horror mask of shock as he chopped of her other arm. It was as if the shock was shielding her from the pain. He then raised his now bloody axe high towards the sky and took of her left leg. Her body jolted from the force of the sharp blade coming down hard. Her full body white dress was splattered with warm, fresh blood but still her opened mouth ‘O’ of terror remained. He took off her other leg using the same force he used on the other one. He stood back and gazed down on her lying with her limbs severed and steaming under the hot sun. Blood seeped out from her opened mouth, falling down her face and chin. The pain was coming. She could feel it slowly starting to overcome her and then the farmhand said, “One more for the road!” The axe went up high and it landed right in her young middle part and that’s when her frozen expression of terror came alive and she began a slow crescendo hell scream of ungodly pain. A flock of crows burst into the air at the sound of her screams. A fountain of blood splashed onto his brown boot from her slashed vagina. “That’ll teach ya!” He said and then wiped his mouth with the side of his greasy arm. He pulled the axe out from her vagina and left her there to die screaming in agony for the next fifteen minutes until she finally bled to death right there in the cornfield.

  He emerged from the corn, evil and wolf like with his bloody axe in hand. He wiped his mouth with his arm again and looked around devilishly before whisking away in the hot summer wind.

  John Armsworth sat on the edge of a haystack in his barn and sobbed uncontrollably just hours after his daughter’s funeral. She was barely recognizable that morning as she lay in her casket. The coroner had a hell of a time stitching her back together. Stubborn stitches! John kept replaying the horrific moment over in his mind when he found his only daughter hacked to pieces just a few feet into the cornfield behind their house. He ran out of the corn and fell to his knees, screaming at the wind and the blazing sun above him. “Who would do this? What monster would take my Audrey from me?”

  Local police had determined that Audrey’s killer was the leader of a gang that had been wandering about the state of Indiana recently, robbing banks and murdering anyone who got in their way. Little did John know that the devil was right in his back yard, indulging in his wife’s sex and plotting the violent death of his only daughter. He never once thought of Jacob the farmhand as the one to take his daughters life. John liked the young man who seemed very quiet and respectful most of the time when they would work outside.

  A gust of wind blew into the barn where John sat. He heard a faint and distant voice. It said, “Dear father, please don’t cry. We’ll meet again soon.”

  “Audrey?” John said as he stood up quickly and looked around the barn. There was no one there. He quickly ran out of the barn looking all around him feeling spooked by the sound of his daughters voice.

  Weeks later while tending to the duties of his farm, the hot flames of infidelity burned John’s eyes in the barn late one night. As he turned the corner of one of the stables just as Audrey did on the day of her death, he saw his wife’s buttocks arched high in the air, and the farmhand underneath her enjoying her salivating lips. Her wide, creamy white hips puffed out and her slit glistened from the soft glow of a burning candle. Hot and angry tears singed John’s eyes as he watched with a sick stomach. But then a familiar voice of serenity rushed through his ears. “Dear Father, you must contain your anger, for tomorrow night we shall have our bloody revenge.” Terrified once again by the voice he was hearing, he ran out of the barn without being heard or noticed by his whoring, cheating wife.

  “Dear god am I losing my mind? Why I am I being tortured with the sweet sound of my daughter’s voice?”

  He fell to his knees and began to sob under the moon suspended in the summer night sky. “What is this revenge you speak of my dear Audrey?” He felt foolish for asking this question aloud for there was no one around other than inside the barn.

  “It was the farmhand father. He was the one who took my life.”

  And then John saw in the distance a white figure coming towards him in the night. It glowed a soft white as it floated towards him. It was Audrey. She was free of her dismembered arms and legs. They were all intact and her white dress was bloodless. John held his mouth in grief and shock at the sight. She kneeled before him and caressed his face with her ghost hand. He thought she looked beautiful as ever. She spoke to him.

  “Oh dear father in order for you to believe you have to see.”

  In his grief stricken, sobbing voice he said, “What is it I must see to believe?”

  As Audrey stood up, she floated just inches off the ground in front of her father. She spread her arms wide and the images of her death came alive showing themselves on her white dress like an old movie projector. A white haze formed around her and her father, protecting him as he watched in unbelievable horror. First he saw Audrey playing in the barn and then finding her stepmother and the farmhand together in the barn. He saw the farmhand chasing her and then raising his axe high, ending her young life. John screamed in pain and pulled at his hair and face from the sickening scenes of butchery playing silently in front of him. The ghost like haze surrounding him kept his howls of anguish silent. The truth was revealed and now he understood his daughter’s words of bloody revenge.

  “I am so sorry to have broken your heart dear father but it was necessary for you to know the truth of my death and the intentions of your wife and her lover.”

  John’s sobs finally ceased and as he looked at his beautiful daughter, he shook his head slowly, nodding in strong agreement of containing his anger and her forecast of a bloody revenge.

  The next evening John entered the barn after midnight and found Jacob fucking Cassandra from behind making her shapely, wide buttocks ripple under the orange glow of an oil lamp. Audrey floated inches above the floor behind her father. As Cassandra’s vocal chords reached a high female pitch from her oncoming orgasm, John said to Audrey, “Is it time honey?” He held a pitchfork firmly in his hand. “Yes Father,” Audrey said in a lifeless tone and then suddenly morphed into her bloody funeral gown. It was soaked and dripping with blood and her face was a ghost white horror mask of black sunken eyes and a stitched mouth that frowned downward. The cheating couple stopped cold and Cassandra’s moment of intense sexual pleasure was cut short. Jacob cupped her milky white bottom and pushed her away from him hard, making her fall flat to the barn floor. She sat up with pieces of straw stuck to her sweaty stomach and breasts. They both looked on in shock and disbelief at the young bloody girl.

  Audrey began to do a series of acrobatic twists and turns as if performing a show in the barn. She executed two flips in midair and then took a bow. John began clapping and shouting, praising his daughter for her talent.

  Then, Audrey’s ghost force attacked Cassandra, slinging her across the straw blanketed barn floor. She landed flat on her back with her arms and legs spread out next to a wall lined with pitchforks. An Indiana farmer could never have enough pitchforks. Cassandra’s screams filled the barn as Audrey cast her pitch black eyes upon the pitchforks. One by one she telepathically moved four rusty pitchforks from the wall. They spun like twisters above her stepmother’s immobile body before shooting down violently like bullets, piercing her wrists and ankles.

  The farmhand looked on in silent horror as Audrey’s bloody corpse of an afterlife resumed the angelic twists and turns of her bloodshow. She did five complete somersaults in midair and then stopped in an upside down position. She hung there suspended in the air for a few moments and then began slowly floating up to the ceiling of the barn. Her blood coa
ted hair hung in a Vshape. The chilling look of her arms outstretched as she floated upward resembled a bloody upside down crucifix, and that morbid stitched frown had turned upside down making a horror smile that cut through the farmhand’s soul. Once she reached the ceiling of the barn she turned over and hung there suspended for a moment with her death black eyes staring down on the farmhand. Drops of blood fell from her dress to the ground below her. Then, black leather wings spread wide from her back with sharp precision and she let out a hell scream sounding like barbwire on chalkboard. She went in for the kill. Her bloody horror smile bolted downward towards the farmhand. Seizing him by the neck, she returned to the ceiling with her prey firmly gripped in her mouth. It was a slow, agonizing ascension.

  Audrey attacked her killer’s body. He became an arch of flesh as she bent his body backwards cracking his spine. His body ripped open and blood splattered on his chest and face. It dripped into his open shrieking mouth high above the barn floor.

  His ribcage ripped through his torso. A slop of warm intestines began oozing out of his cracked in half body. Pink tubes dripping with blood dangled past his waist. Blood showered down on Cassandra’s impaled body just as a heavy wet mass of gore fell downward, splattering her with a warm gush of rubbery innards. Food and feces stuffed intestines slathered around her lips, plopping in and out of her mouth.

  Audrey released her bloody death grip on Jacob and his lifeless body dropped to the floor, crashing into the gut and gore pile on Cassandra’s chest. Chills rushed through Cassandra when Audrey flew down fast from the barn ceiling; her stitched horror smile and bloody V shaped hair approaching her stepmother. Audrey’s mouth opened wide and she beckoned a scream deep from within hell into Cassandra’s terrified face. Then she drove her fist violently up into Cassandra’s vagina. Her entire arm extended through her stepmothers insides and then out her mouth. A fist wet with blood and stomach lining erected itself from Cassandra’s mouth. Five wiggling and bloody fingers flashed in front of her wide, horrified eyes. Then she died. Her head falling over to the side like a sack of potatoes.

  John boasted a proud smile with a tear in his eye while watching his daughter unleash her bloody torment in the barn that night. Torturous screams along with bones cracking and blood sloshing was like music to his ears. He could feel the knife of revenge slicing through his veins and it felt good. He took his daughter by the hand and they danced all throughout the blood soaked barn.

  The Fire Witch

  The devil was alive the night Gwen Halmuth died.

  Reverend Bill Halmuth murdered his daughter in 1894 on a warm spring evening. He set her on fire behind their church while she was chained to a wooden table. The reverend and his followers watched with sadistic eyes and spoke in tongues as she screamed and burned to death. Her teeth bit down hard in agony on a hot chain that was pulled tight over her mouth and her wide eyes of terror gazed at the star lit sky. She felt the heat of death rising towards her and her long black hair caught on fire. Gwen’s little brother Jonah watched as his sister burned to death. He held a shovel tightly in his hand. He had used it only moments ago when he swung it hard, cracking her in the back of her skull when she was on her knees begging her father for forgiveness in front of his devoted congregation; forgiveness for her moment of weakness in the woods earlier that day when she was caught kissing the boy she liked from church. The boy received thirty swats to the back with a leather whip from the reverend himself; obviously a much more lenient punishment than that of Gwen, the now whoring jezebel of the village in which she lived. She was twenty six and had long black hair which she would let down at night in front of her mirror before bed time. Her skin was porcelain white and smooth as silk. Her body was as curvaceous as the surrounding hillsides of their village. The townspeople said it was a curse for a girl to have such beauty, but Gwen wasn’t a girl anymore. She was a woman and due to her father’s strong and radical religious beliefs and discipline, she had never even kissed a boy. That was until this afternoon in the woods when her curiosity got the best of her.

  As Jonah watched the flames get higher and higher and devour his screaming sister, he thought of their conversation they had two days ago behind their small shack of a home, where Gwen was scrubbing her father’s white church shirts on a washboard in the heat on the day. She was in her usual full body black dress and black boots.

  “Jonah, leave this place with me tonight. We can go together and leave all this madness behind. Father is mad I tell you, with all his venomous preaching’s of adultery, and the devil infecting us with sin. Please Jonah, come with me.” Gwen held her hand out to her brother in hopes of hearing that he would run away with her and begin a new life together free of their fathers stronghold. But then the reverend opened the back door, interrupting the two. “Gwenyth, don’t keep the lord waiting. Hurry up with my shirts. Jonah, you best get tending to those chickens in the barn before revival.”

  A smoldering black smoke looking as black as the sky, rose from Gwen’s charred burnt body. She was dead. Slowly the onlookers walked away from the burning corpse with their backs turned as did Reverend Halmuth and his son Jonah. The boy looked over his shoulder at his dead sister lying on the table. He dragged his shovel behind him on the ground and his father put his arm around him and said, “The sinning witch is dead son.”

  Nocturnal vultures were already circling above, lusting over the carcass they so viciously hungered for.

  Spring had disintegrated and summer had come to life. Weeks went by and Jonah continued his daily chores for his father and never did he think of Gwen that much, although she did visit him in his dreams at night. It was late summer and Jonah was daydreaming during revival one Sunday evening as his father preached the end of times and that’s when the first fire broke out, disrupting the reverend’s sermon. His congregation fled the old wooden church at once, following behind him. Once outside, rich screams filled the night at the sight of the blazing house across the gravel road from the church. It was David Manor’s house. His wife fell to her knees crying with her hands up towards the sky, asking god why he would do such a thing.

  “It’s not our god woman! Look, there in the sky,” David pointed. An ominous black shape hung high above the burning house. It was Gwen. Her arms were outstretched as she floated above the blazing house. Her black hair blew over her shoulder. Someone shouted “Dear god reverend, look. It’s Gwen. It’s your daughter and she’s come back!”

  “The witch has come back,” the reverend said looking up at the dark sky. She whisked away somewhere far off into the night. The smell of burning flesh fell upon the followers down below. Jonah was frozen and didn’t move an inch.

  The fires continued into the fall and would always occur during the reverend’s sermon every Sunday. Each week a new house was set ablaze and Gwen, now called the fire witch by the congregation, would show herself flying high above the fires she would set in her black dress and black boots with her black hair blowing from the heat of the blaze down below.

  Then to everyone’s horror, true hell came to the village November, Friday the 13th in the form of a black dress slowly drifting down from the sky in a shroud of black smoke, landing in front of the towns old wooden church. Gwen Halmuth stood in front of the church with her head down and her hair hiding her face. Her arms were to her sides with her hands turned sharply backward away from her. White smoke lifted from her fingertips. The townspeople stopped whatever it was they were doing, be it churning butter or brushing the mane of a horse. They watched her with eyes of horror. The silence was death like. Jonah trembled as he watched his sister. She began moving forward towards the steps of the church. Her black boots skidded across the gravel road, igniting small fires at her heels that would come alive and then dissipate with every step. She crept slowly up the church steps as the townspeople looked on, never taking their eyes from her. She stood at the doors of the church.

  “I’ve come home father,” she whispered and went inside.

  The onlooker
s stood motionless like mannequins frozen in a nightmare. They were well aware that their leader was inside the church.

  Jonah was certain that time had come to a standstill when the five minutes that had gone by since his sister entered the church felt to him like an eternity. His ears rang. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead. Everything in his vision had slowed to a crawl. The ringing in his ears was turning into a slow crescendo of screams as the townspeople scurried all around him in every which way, panicking as Gwen exited the church dragging behind her a limbless, decapitated and severely burnt reverend Bill Halmuth. A large and bloody crucifix was exiting from his rectum. She held it tight in her hand as she dragged his mutilated body across the gravel road among the screaming horde of followers. Gwen stopped in front of her brother. She put her hand softly on his cheek and looked at him sorrowfully. Her porcelain skin was as smooth as the night she burned. Deathly screams of panic whirled all around Jonah as his sister began to speak to him.

  “Oh my dear brother, why didn’t we leave?”

  Jonah suddenly heard his sister’s voice in his mind. “Jonah, leave this place with me tonight. We can go together and leave all this madness behind. Father is mad I tell you, with all his venomous preaching’s of adultery, and the devil infecting us with sin. Please Jonah, come with me.”

  The church behind her suddenly went up in a blaze of hellish fire, its hot orange flames spitting at the sky. Gwen shot upwards to the sky, leaving behind a spinning black dust devil of smoke in front of Jonah.

  It was early the next morning and the white mist of dawn covered the hill Jonah was sitting on. Below down in the valley lay the remains of his village which was now a smoldering pit of burnt wood and human flesh. He was daydreaming just like he always did at his father’s sermon every Sunday, thinking of him and Gwen somewhere far away in a different place, together again. He could hear her laughter and then her screams in the wind as it blew up from the valley. Screams that would last a lifetime.