by Hank Early
I kicked him in the knee. Hard enough to double him over. He moaned, grasping his leg. I put my palm on the top of his head and pushed him over until he was lying on his back. I put a foot on either side of his chest, straddling him and pointing my gun straight down at his face.
“Do you know of anyone around here who makes snuff films?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He started to cry then. “I wish I did. I swear, I wish I did. The only thing … the only thing is that I’ve heard somebody’s making one.”
“Who did you hear it from?” I leaned forward, putting both hands on the gun, as if bracing for a shot.
“Just some guy at a bar. I don’t even know his name.”
“What bar?”
“The brewery down the road.”
“So a rich dude?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Who did he say was making it?”
“He didn’t say. He just said it was going to be about Old Nathaniel killing some black kids.”
“And what did you say?”
He held up his hands. “I told him that it sounded good and asked him how I could get a copy.”
“I ought to shoot you right now,” I said, and I meant it too. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so angry, so out of control. What kind of a man was I dealing with here?
“No, no. I’m not a bad guy, okay? I just … I just like to watch. That’s all.”
I took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay, this is the way we’re going to do the last question.”
“I’ve been honest,” he said. “So honest.”
“Just listen. I’m going to ask the last question, and you are going to tell me the truth or I’m going to shoot you.”
“What? What if I tell you the truth and you think I’m lying?”
“Too bad.”
“No, please!”
“Just don’t lie,” I said. “If I was going to leave here and go see someone who would know about this snuff film, who should I go visit?”
He stared at me, and I could tell he knew. He was trying to think of a way he could lie, or maybe he was trying to determine just how crazy I was. If it was the latter, it meant whoever he knew was pretty damned scary too. I didn’t doubt it.
“I need an answer,” I said.
He nodded. “Okay. There’s a little house down in the valley.”
“The valley? Which valley?”
“The Devil’s Valley. Corn Valley, whatever. Where the blacks live. Except this house is on the other side of the cornfield. If you go there, you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
“What will I find? Be more specific.”
“You’ll find the man you’re looking for. He’s the one that can get you the movies.”
“Like he got them for you?”
“I don’t own nothing. He showed it to me there. At his house.”
“What’s his name?”
“Hell if I know. He’s a scary dude. Tall. Tattoos.”
“Tell me how to get there.”
“It’s … shit. Go like you’re going to the cornfield, but instead of turning left on the road with the old water tower, stay straight. It looks like just woods, but those go away after a while, and you’ll see the cornfield again. Keep going until you see a little unnamed road. It’ll take you right to it.”
“If I get there and don’t find anything helpful or it’s some kind of trap, I’m coming back, Frank. Do you understand?”
“Sure. Yeah. How did you find out about … Who are you?”
“I already told you. I’m the Preacher, Frank. Don’t forget. Preachers always know.”
“I understand. You won’t be disappointed.”
“I’m disappointed just looking at you,” I said.
He shook his head. “I’m not a bad guy, not like him. Like I said, I’m a just watcher. I can’t get too close to the real action. I have to keep my hands clean. See, I’m not so—”
He was probably going to say bad but I slapped him with the back of my hand, and whatever he meant to say turned into a groan. I got off him and walked out of his house, knowing I didn’t have much time to get out of the neighborhood before I wouldn’t be able to get out at all.
39
I stayed straight instead of turning on the road that would take me to the water tower. The landscape was just as Bentley had described. It looked like I was going into a deep forest, but the dense trees didn’t last too long before they scattered and gave way to long, rolling fields. I drove another mile before spotting a gravel road on my left. It ran between scrub pines on one side and a winding creek on the other. I made the turn, creeping along the gravel road, gripping the wheel tightly, hunched forward, alert and tense.
It was a trap. I knew that almost as soon as Bentley had mentioned the place, but I didn’t care. I was willing to take my chances with a trap. I’d survived them before, and I figured knowing was half the battle anyway.
Holding the wheel steady with my knee, I withdrew my 9mm and double-checked to make sure it was loaded. I took the safety off and laid it on the passenger’s seat next to me.
On my left, the creek had wandered away and been replaced by the ruins of old homes, some wrapped in kudzu vines and others roofless and burned to husks.
On my right, the scrub pines vanished, and now scattered cornstalks stood in their place. As I eased forward, the road became rougher, and tiny pieces of gravel pinged off the undercarriage of the Honda. The cornstalks grew more dense like a gathering storm, assembling its wrath, slowly, methodically, and I felt a chill opening up inside me as I realized where we were. This really was just the other side of the cornfield. The best I could tell, we were on the opposite end, as far away from the Blackclaw River and Deja’s trailer park as possible, just as Bentley had described it.
The gravel road turned to dirt and then to just tire ruts. Ahead was a tiny house with a light on inside. It was in much better shape than the ruins I’d passed earlier, but it still didn’t exactly look like a place suitable for living. Pieces of the roof were missing, and the shutters near the front windows had been torn off, most likely by a storm.
There was a Corolla parked in front of the house. Several lights were on inside and there were no blinds. I saw a kitchen and what looked like a den.
I scanned the area again before getting out of the truck. Other than the car, I didn’t see anything. I decided to stay put anyway. That was when I saw someone in the kitchen, a man, standing in front of an open refrigerator, peering inside.
The yard was deserted. The cornfield was on my right. It waved silently, as if in greeting. From where I sat inside my truck, it appeared to stretch around the corner of the house and into the backyard. I looked left and saw only open space, the land dipping and rising before a line of darkly outlined pines like bottlebrush cleaners stood against the shredded wreckage of fading silver clouds.
I slipped out of the truck, gun in hand, and started toward the house. I could still see the man—he looked on the young side—through the window. He was drinking from a can now, unaware of me, or at least pretending to be. A bristling sound came from the cornfield on my right, and I spun, clutching the gun with both hands, ready to fire, but the sound was gone, and the cornfield stood unmoving. Gradually I lowered the weapon and stepped toward the door.
It was cracked—a sign that he was expecting me? A sign that I could literally be walking into a trap, but I couldn’t stop myself. It seemed like Mary had been gone for months instead of days, and for the first time since she’d been missing, I felt close, really close, to finding out what had happened and where she was.
The door groaned as I pushed it open, and I stepped into a darkened room. I reached for the light switch, but when I flipped it, nothing happened. Burned out.
“Knock-knock,” I said.
No reply, just the wind picking up in the cornfield.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m coming in.”
I he
ard footsteps in the next room, and then a door opened, and he was in the hallway. He didn’t turn to face me; instead, he walked down the corridor and made a right, disappearing into another room.
“Come out of there. I’d like to talk to you,” I said, but in the silence of the house my voice sounded weak and impotent. He wasn’t coming out. I knew I should leave.
In fact, this sudden urge to leave was nearly overwhelming, and I recognized it as originating from the same place my prophetic dreams came from—the snake venom, the life-changing moment of being struck down by a serpent, the poison still swimming somewhere in my bloodstream.
The black water, still rising …
But even as I recognized the source of the feeling and realized the urgency of it, I chose to ignore it. I was too close.
Too close to turn back.
I made it to the end of the hallway and saw that, again, he’d left the bedroom door ajar, an invitation … there was no other way to interpret it.
I pushed it open and saw that the room was nearly dark, but not quite. A single bare bulb burned dimly from a bedside lamp. A stripped mattress lay on the floor. On top of the mattress was a calendar and some faded yellow papers.
But as much as I wanted to look at those, my eyes were drawn to the other side of the room, where a door leading to the backyard had been left open. The wind blew slightly, causing it to creak and open far enough to reveal the man, standing beside a picnic table in the backyard, his face lit momentarily by the orange flare of his cigarette as he took a drag.
I recognized him. He was the kid from the bathroom at Jessamine’s, the one I’d been in the process of beating down before Jeb Walsh and Preston Argent had come in.
He was looking at me and waved me out to join him with a quick, casual gesture.
“Remember me?”
“Yeah.”
I opened the door all the way and stepped into the backyard. There wasn’t much of it. Just some weeds surrounding the picnic table, an old shed, and behind it all, the giant stalks that I knew stretched on for miles, all the way over to the train tracks and the trestle, where I was becoming increasingly sure I might die, assuming I survived tonight, that is.
A single floodlight illuminated most of the backyard and a swath of the cornfield, turning the husks and tassels to pale flames that flickered endlessly.
“We didn’t really get properly introduced in the bathroom,” he said. “I’m Jason.”
“I was told to come here. I want to know about the snuff films.”
Jason laughed. “You do? Well, shit.” He put a knee up on the picnic bench and watched me. He smiled around his cigarette and gestured at my gun. “Why don’t you put that away? You said you wanted to talk. You don’t need a gun for that.”
I circled him and the table until I was on the other side, my back to the cornfield, but I didn’t lower the gun.
“I’ll hold on to it, thanks,” I said.
He shrugged. “Okay. Have a seat.” He sat down on the picnic bench across from me, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out another cigarette. “Want one?”
I shook my head.
He returned the cigarette to his pocket and continued to smoke, seemingly relaxed, taking his time, watching the smoke rise into the night air and dissipate out over the cornfield.
“You wanted to talk?” he said. He glanced at me. “Still with the gun? Jesus, man. Put it down. You and me both know you’re not going to shoot me. Right? I mean, you didn’t shoot me that night in the bathroom, did you? Shit, you didn’t even hit me all that hard. Mr. Walsh has a term for men like you.”
“And what’s that?”
“Limp-dicked liberal,” he said, giggling.
I put the gun on the table between us.
It was a trap, right?
Fine, I thought. Bring it on.
I sat down on the opposite bench. He leaned forward, smiling. “Ask me anything.”
“Where’s Mary?”
He cocked his head to one side as if he hadn’t heard me. “Who?”
“Mary,” I said, “my girlfriend.”
“Ohhh, you mean the negress.”
“Excuse me?”
“You don’t like that term?”
“No,” I said, and my mouth felt sour and dry with anger and something else aching inside of me, rumbling.
“Well, it won’t matter in a few days now, will it?”
“Where are they keeping her?”
He laughed. “I heard they had her right in the belly of the beast.”
“What’s that mean? The belly of the—”
“Skull Keep. It’s the place where he puts all the skulls. It’s a bunker somewhere out there.” He motioned nonchalantly toward the vast cornfield behind me. It’s well hidden they say, which is probably why they’re keeping her there.”
“Jeb told you this?”
He shrugged. “I heard it from lots of people. Important people. People who actually see potential in me.”
“You said they put her there. Who is they?”
He leaned across the table, as if he was about to share something confidential with me. “Can I ask you something? Just between you and me?”
I held my breath. Made no movement at all other than my fingers flexing involuntarily toward the gun that lay between us.
“You know what they say about black men, you know big dicks and all? I was wondering if there was anything special about the women. You know, maybe like they’re—”
I picked up the gun and swung it at his head in what amounted to one smooth—and ferocious—motion, clipping him across the temple with a dull thunk. He sat up straight, his mouth still moving but saying nothing.
His mouth snapped shut and his hand moved to the wound the gun had left on his temple.
“What did you do?!” he said. I was on my way around the table, to beat the information out of him, when a cornstalk snapped behind me.
I spun around, gun raised, as the wind drifted out of the field and cooled the sweat on my brow. The three-quarters moon hung low over the cornstalks. The breeze died against my skin, and a hush fell over the backyard and the furrows of corn that stretched away as far as the eye could see.
Another sound, this one a rattling. One of the stalks, a few rows deep, moved, bending sideways, as something seemed to slide into its place, a walking scarecrow, now still and silent, blending into the field. It sounded like what Mary and I had heard moments before she disappeared.
And now, there was more than hearing. I’d seen something too. The sliding into place. The stalk or scarecrow or man. Right there, pulsing ever so slowly with every beat of the field.
Or was it just a trick of the eye, so many stalks sweeping their tassels against the dark canvas of the night that I was bound to see something else?
I lifted the gun again, aiming it directly at the strange stalklike man and squeezed off a shot.
The night cracked open. Bats burst free of the field, leaving gossamer strands of corn silk floating across the swollen moon.
The cornstalk did not move. Just a trick of the eye, I decided, and was about to turn back around to deal with Jason, when I suddenly realized he had gone strangely quiet.
He led with his shoulder, crashing into my side and knocking the wind out of me. My legs went weak, and I fell to the ground.
The gun.
It came free from my hand. I patted the ground for it but found nothing, my hands landing hard on the dry, dusty ground.
Jason loomed over me, and I was about to reach for his leg to pull him down with me, when he suddenly stepped away. Something was really coming through the corn. There could be no denying it now.
I turned, still trying to catch my breath, and saw a tall figure striding through the stalks. The man—or woman because it was impossible to tell which—stood at the edge of the cornfield, holding a large, curved knife. The reason I couldn’t determine if the figure was male or female was because there was a burlap sack over the person’s face.
Eyeholes had been cut into the sack, and the bag had been cinched tight around the neck with a thin rope. The remainder of the outfit was a gray uniform, like one that a confederate soldier might have worn a hundred and fifty years ago.
“Shit,” Jason said. “Took you long enough.”
My breath came back all at once, and I rolled away from the masked figure, scrambling to my feet.
“Who are you?” I said. “Take off the damned mask.” I didn’t expect an answer; I was only trying to buy some time in order to locate my gun, so when the male voice responded, I gasped.
“You can call me Nathaniel.”
Old Nathaniel lunged at me, leading with the knife. I dove to the right—not daring a dive into the cornfield, where I felt certain I’d never come out alive—and collided with Jason. We both went down, tangled together.
Old Nathaniel loomed over us, and despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to extract myself from Jason, who was now on top of me.
Old Nathaniel brought the knife down, and I heard Jason gasp. I pushed him off me and slid away.
“Why?” Jason said, as blood ran out of his back into the grass, pooling quickly.
Old Nathaniel didn’t answer. He only brought the knife down again, this time burying it in the boy’s neck.
When he turned his attention back to me, I was already in the air.
I’d launched myself with everything I had into Old Nathaniel’s midsection, taking my cue from what Jason had done to me just minutes before.
I knocked him back, but not down. Something cold and then hot seared my hip, and I knew he’d cut me. I reached up for his mask and got a hand on it, wrenching it with all my might. The thin rope that kept it tied in place came loose, and the mask twisted in my hand, revealing a patch of flesh just below the assailant’s ear. The neck that revealed itself in the floodlight was thick and patched with five o’clock shadow. I glimpsed a dark tattoo in the shape of a strawberry and then my fingers lost their grip on the burlap and the mask fell back over the man’s face, covering it fully.
He swung the knife again, this time nicking my side, shredding the hem of my shirt. I reached in again, risking another cut from the knife, and grabbed the sack a second time. He sliced down, meaning to cut my arm clear off, but I twisted and rolled out of the way of the knife, still holding the burlap sack, but not for long. My fingers burned as the rough sack slipped free again.
