by Ronald Malfi
“He’s a she,” said Cory.
“Sorry.”
“That’s why she’s named Patsy.” Cory took the cat out of his arms. The boy’s hand briefly grazed his, and he felt an icy shiver trail down his spine and spill like ice water into his thighs. His testicles crawled up into the cavity of his pelvis.
The damned cat hissed and actually took a swipe at Cory with one paw.
He’s not right. Even the fucking cat can tell.
“Yes?” said a woman coming up behind the boy. She placed a hand on Cory’s shoulder and stared at Alan with skepticism.
“Your cat,” he stammered. “I thought … I thought you might be wondering where he’s been.”
“Cat’s a she,” Cory said again, frowning, as his mother pushed him out of the doorway.
“Well, she’s got a cut on her right side. She’s bleeding a little.”
“Thank you,” the woman said curtly. She was the same woman who had been crying in the court while her son ran to her, dripping wet from the lake, his shirt stained with fading blood.
“How’s he … how’s he doing, anyway?” He couldn’t help but say it. “The car accident and everything …”
“Cory’s fine. Not a scratch on him. It wasn’t a big deal. Thank you for asking.” She sounded exhausted and phony.
Wasn’t a big deal? She was hysterical in the street.
From within the house, Alan could hear the cat mewling as if it were being tortured. It senses something’s wrong. Maybe that’s why the smart son of a bitch ran away and wound up in my yard.
“Thank you,” she added, “for bringing Patsy back. We were worried.”
“She’s a house cat,” Cory said, reappearing beside his mother in the doorway. He stared at Alan, one hand raking through Patsy’s ash-colored fur. Some of the fur was greasy and slick with blood. Cory got his hand in it but didn’t seem to notice or care.
“No problem.” He swallowed what felt like a mouthful of gravel. “Glad I could help. Anyway, I need to get home. Just wanted … I just wanted to bring back your cat.”
The woman nodded and slowly closed the door.
Alan shambled off the porch and glanced over his shoulder before he reached the street.
Cory stared out at him from the oval of glass in the door.
As the sky broke open and filled the world with rain, Alan made the unfortunate decision to shortcut between the houses on Strand Street. He had a pretty good sense of direction and a vague idea of where his own house was situated on the other side of the woods, so he wasn’t too concerned until fifteen minutes went by and he was still bumbling around amongst the trees. He stomped down kudzu and brushed heavy pine branches out of his face, then paused at one point, disoriented. The pending rain chased a grayish ground fog down from the mountains and into the woods; it clung low to the ground, obscuring potentially dangerous pitfalls and broken limbs that jutted from the ground like pygmy spears.
He should have emptied out into his yard by now. Was it possible he’d gotten completely turned around, that maybe he had been walking in circles for the past fifteen minutes?
A clash of thunder boomed directly overhead, and the rain hammered down harder. Even the dense canopy of trees was not enough to assuage the sudden and vicious downpour. Rain sluiced through the trees, icy needles stinging his face. His shirt was instantly soaked, hair plastered down over his forehead. He walked in a rough circle, seeing nothing but dense woods all around him.
Alan turned around and, defeated, staggered back in the direction he had come … although nothing looked familiar to him anymore. The rain had already created wide, muddy puddles on the ground, and his sneakers were soaking wet. Then his foot struck something solid and immobile hidden beneath the curtain of fog. Unable to see through the fog, he crouched, the thighs of his jeans already soaked clean through with rain. He ran one shaky hand along the ground. His fingers fell upon something soft and yielding. A series of branches jutting up through the fog rocked a few inches from his face. He pressed down harder on the object, and the branches rocked again. That was when he realized they weren’t branches at all but the tapered points of a rack of deer antlers. His fingers were pressing into its head, sinking into the short, tan hair that covered its stiffened, lifeless body.
He sprung backward, losing his balance and driving his ass through a swirling puddle of mud. Groaning, he looked at his hand and saw the fingers that had prodded the dead animal were black with blood. He swiped his fingers down his shirt and used the hefty limb of a nearby tree to hoist his dripping wet ass out of the puddle. His knees were weak, and he suddenly had to piss like a goddamn Thoroughbred.
The woods opened up another fifteen minutes later—roughly around the time he’d resigned to the fact that he was going to die out here—and he stumbled into his own backyard. Inside, he kicked off his shoes and stood in a widening puddle in the living room.
Sleepily, Jerry Lee raised his head off his paws from where he snoozed beside the couch.
“Yeah.” Alan snickered. “Don’t get up. I’m fine, thanks.”
Peeling off his wet shirt, he crept down the hall toward the bathroom. Dumping the shirt in the sink, he fished a clean towel from the closet. His stomach clenching and unclenching like a fist, he opened the medicine cabinet and located the misoprostol tablets. But before he could even crack the top of the bottle, the pain in his gut exploded. It felt like someone was driving a red-hot poker up through his rectum and pressing it against the lining of his stomach. He took a deep breath, held it, and waited for the pain to subside. His eyes closed tight, he opened the medicine bottle and shook a nonspecific number of tablets into his hand. He dry-swallowed them, and they tasted like hunks of chalk going down.
Out in the hallway, he froze when he saw Heather standing in the doorway to the office at the end of the hall, peering into the room.
“Babe?” he called.
She didn’t respond.
“Honey?” He came up behind her and gently touched one shoulder.
She did not acknowledge his presence.
“You okay?” he said.
“Oh.” As if he’d woken her from sleepwalking. “It’s you.”
“Got caught out in the rain.” He followed her gaze across the room. She was staring at the computer monitor. He’d left Owen Moreland’s pharmacy web page up, the bespectacled, sallow-faced man grinning from the screen. Something about that grin bothered Alan much more now than it originally had.
“That’s him,” Heather said.
“Who?”
She turned and headed down the hall toward the bedroom.
“Who?” he repeated. The timbre of his voice climbed a notch. “Who, Heather?”
“The barefoot hunter,” she said and disappeared into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fever claimed him.
There was a sense of spilling over from one hallucination to another. Unanchored, disembodied, Alan ghosted like antimatter through the house. He transitioned from shaking apart as if in a deep freeze to sweating like a hostage, soaking the bedclothes as glistening globes of sweat burst from his skin. At one point, he dreamt he was floating on the ceiling looking down at himself asleep in bed. Another time, he opened his eyes to find his hands pressed against the bedroom window as he gazed into the yard. Sheriff Landry stood out there staring at him, the shadow cast by the brim of his hat blackening his face.
There was one moment in time when, in his dream, he crept from bed and floated down the hallway. He heard the faint phantom sound of someone talking in a low voice. He could make out a fleeing shadow against one wall. The whole house seemed to be canting to one side, the floors off balance like a ship attempting to shake its crew into the sea. His hands on the walls for support, he made his way into the living room. There, the voice became slightly more audible, and he knew with intuitive certainty that it was Heather.
In this fever dream, Alan felt like the ghost in someone else�
��s reality. He could feel the cold, brutal air in the living room, and he wondered only vaguely where it was coming from. Standing there, he saw the back of Heather’s head as she sat on the couch. He was accosted by the bizarre notion that this was happening to someone else he didn’t know, a stranger in a different part of the country who had been having nightmares about a different lake, and the notion frightened him. Still watching the back of Heather’s head, Alan felt himself go to her, listening to her words … and then realized she wasn’t actually talking but, rather, she was singing. It was the way he imagined she would one day sing to their children.
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word
Mama’s gonna buy you a big black bird
And if that bird does gobble you down
Daddy’s gonna bury you right in the ground
And if that ground does spit you back
Mama’s gonna have her a heart attack …
But the words were all wrong. Horribly wrong.
Alan placed a hand on Heather’s shoulder. Her voice stopped cold. He looked down over her shoulder, down at her lap … where she cradled not a baby but a mound of filthy black feathers. The thing squirmed in her arms, and its black talons clawed at the air. Its hooked buzzard’s beak, sharp as a bull’s horn, snapped as if on a hinge. A shrill, throaty cry ruptured from its throat. The buzzard’s eyes were tiny and yellow but grotesquely human, pinned to either side of a textured, curving, reptilian head that was hideously phallic in appearance.
The bird expelled a burp of blackish-green liquid from its lower half, which spattered across Heather’s bare arm. The smell was instantaneous: overflowing sewer pipes and dead, decaying things. Heather didn’t notice, although he could see the splatter of shit begin to smoke and sizzle, burning through the flesh of her arm.
Heather turned her face up at him. Her eyes were hollow pits, her mouth a ridge of busted, blackened teeth. “Mama’s gonna have herself a heart attack, Alan,” she sang.
In another dream, he stood in the dark above Heather while she slept in bed. He had one hand on her belly. The dream was so lucid he could feel the warmth of her skin, the blood pumping through her veins. Then floorboards creaked out in the hallway.
With the unhinged pacing of a drunken trek, he was suddenly in the hallway, though the sensation of Heather’s belly still lingered against the palm of his hand. He was trembling, burning up on the inside while his flesh froze in the cold. Why was it so cold? A cloud of vapor blossomed from his lips and crystallized in the air before his face. Unable to move, he could only stand in the hallway in his pajama pants and undershirt, his heart strumming like a live wire.
The cold air came in through the front door, which stood open at the end of the hall. He floated out onto the porch and his father was there, sitting on the steps in the dark, his face a pool of black ink. Only the glowing red ember of his cigarette was visible.
“We’re better off without her,” his father said. It was his voice, truly and completely, straight from the grave. He was talking about Alan’s mother … though, for one gut-sinking second he thought he was talking about Heather. “Good riddance. You and me, we’re better off.”
“You’re not here,” Alan said. “I’m dreaming.”
His father grunted. “So? You got some lip on you, talking to me like that.” Groaning, he rose from the porch steps with exaggerated slowness. “Come on.”
“Where?”
But his father didn’t answer. He staggered down the steps and shambled like Boris Karloff around the side of the house.
Alan refused to follow … yet blinked and found himself standing in the backyard nonetheless. The cold wind whipped at his pajama bottoms and caused hard little knobs of flesh to rise on his arms.
His father stood at the far end of the yard, a pale white specter against the black curtain of trees. He was naked, the all-too-visible Y of his autopsy incision carved into the doughy flesh of his torso. His genitals had retreated into the bushy nest of his pubic hair. His face was colorless rubber stretched taut across his skull. As Alan watched, his father turned and faded into the trees.
Then he was there, following him down the dirt path that cut through the woods, the moonlight fractured into laser beams coming down through the trees. The ghostly visage of his father floated ahead of him. He crossed through slats of moonlight and took on a translucence that allowed Alan to glimpse the spidery black shapes of the junipers through the shimmer of his flesh. The white guide stones seemed to radiate a dull, nacreous light. Things moved about in the woods on either side of him, some of them close enough that Alan could hear the guttural rasp of their respiration.
“Dad,” he said.
His father paused. He rotated his head around and glared at Alan from over one bone-white shoulder, the tendons creaking with rigor mortis. But the figure was no longer Bill Hammerstun; slack, empty features hewn into myelin flesh, eyes as haunted as tombs, it was Owen Moreland who now led Alan down the path. There was a long gun slung over one shoulder, and he wore slacks with the legs cuffed, exposing his bare, muddy feet.
He took his shoes and socks off so he could pull the trigger with his toe, he thought.
“Come on, sport,” Owen said, and his voice was still Alan’s father’s. “Just a little farther.”
Alan closed his eyes and willed himself to wake up, wake up, wake up. But when he opened them he was already standing in the clearing at the end of the path, the ground fog unfurling and receding toward the trees to reveal the placid, moon-reflective waters of the lake. An icy wind rolled down from the high hills where lodgepole pines studded the loam all the way to the mountains. Giant birds dripped like tar from the branches of the tall trees.
Piloted by whatever inexplicable force commands such dreams, Alan’s legs carried him through the wet grass to the edge of the lake. The water, black as countless midnights, housed his reflection with specular clarity.
“There are ghosts here,” Owen said, suddenly right next to him. “This is a haunted place.”
“I want to wake up.”
“You’re not sleeping.”
Alan looked down. There was blood on his hands. “I’m dreaming,” he insisted. “I want to wake up.”
“It’s deepest at the center,” said Owen. “I’ve never touched the bottom. Don’t know if anyone ever has. Don’t even know if there is a bottom.”
“No,” Alan croaked, dropping to his knees and plunging his hands into the icy water to wash the blood off. A shudder barreled through his bones.
Owen’s reflection in the lake dispersed into fragments of dust—
“I want to wake—”
Hands against his back propelled him forward. He crashed through the surface of the lake as if smashing through glass—
(there are ghosts here this is a haunted place)
—and sat up in bed, naked and sweating. His heartbeat was so furious it was painful. He raised his hands to his face and could see, even in the dimness of predawn, there was no blood on them.
While his breathing slowed, he eased beneath the blankets and curled himself around Heather, sliding an arm between her belly and the push of her breasts. He was shaking all over, his bones rattling like an old shopping cart. Pushing his face into her hair, he forced his eyes to close and waited for his breathing to regain some semblance of normalcy.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Alan awoke on the third day, and it was like Christ rising from the dead. His illness had vacated his body like a spirit. Muscles rubbery, eyes nearly blind and squinting, he was an infant shuttled straight from the womb.
Heather was watching television in the living room, the sound turned down so low it was barely audible. For a long time, Alan stared at the back of her head. He recalled the fever dream, where she cradled one of those filthy buzzards like a newborn baby against her breast. How it shat steaming black ribbons onto her arm, scorching the flesh.
He shuddered at the memory.
Heather turned and stared at him. S
he was gaunt, hollowed, a wax impression of herself. She’d been steadily losing weight, too, and that frightened him. He had caught sight of her recently coming out of the shower, the twin blades of her shoulders like the plates of a stegosaurus poking through the taut white flesh. The bones of her hips had reminded him of spearheads, of bull horns.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her.
“I should be asking you.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’ve had a bad fever. You’ve talked nonsense every night in your sleep.”
“Did I?”
“About birds. About your father.” She frowned, and at least it was an expression. “Strange.”
“Is there any coffee?”
“Some.” She turned back to the television. “Oh,” she called before he turned away, “I almost forgot. The sheriff came around looking for you the other day. I told him you were sick, and he left his business card. He said to call him when you felt better.”
The news jarred him. Vaguely, he recalled pressing his hands against the bedroom window and peering out at Sheriff Landry as he stood in the yard. At the time he’d thought it had been a dream, but apparently it had actually happened.
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“No. I put the card on the refrigerator.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
In the kitchen he poured himself a cup of coffee from the cold pot, then reheated it in the microwave. Sure enough, Sheriff Landry’s card was stuck to the refrigerator with a Garfield magnet.
In the intervening days since his conversation with Hank, Alan had done an impressive job convincing himself that what had been happening here in town—the Morris kid, Catherine’s miraculous rebound from leukemia, Owen Moreland—could be summed up by a simple series of coincidences. Sure, they were bizarre even as individual occurrences, and when they were all put together … well, it seemed more than strange. But the Morris kid’s neck hadn’t been broken; Catherine had simply beaten childhood leukemia; and Owen Moreland had found that his wife was banging another man so he killed them and then himself. Those things happened all the time. There was no need to attribute them to the power of some ancient Indian legend …
