Then Hank saw Zeus and he shed a tear, which thankfully nobody noticed. Pitch black and thick as a semi truck, Zeus was an obvious veteran fighter. He approached the ring like an old friend. He had soulless eyes and scars all over him. This was a true killing machine. This was why people feared pit bulls. He looked at Boris, who trembled with fear and tried to cower behind Alan’s legs. Zeus sat calmly on his back feet, waiting patiently. His owner so confident in the dog’s absolute loyalty that he didn’t even enter the ring with the black beast of a dog.
Alan took the leash off of Boris and stepped over the barrier out of the ring. A bell dinged and Boris whimpered as Zeus stood up casually and slowly. Hank averted his eyes, he could not watch but the noises he heard told him all he needed to know. Boris did not even put up a fight. Zeus had toyed with him, not even seeing him as a challenge. After the commotion of the crowd subsided and everything was calm again Hank opened his eyes and saw his dog lying in a pool of blood. His fur matted so thick with his own blood that Hank could not believe that he was still breathing, but he was. Alan was having a friend scrape Boris up off of the ground and they put him on a stretcher. Hank followed, in a daze, and watched as they put his dog into the back of Alan’s truck.
Alan looked back at Hank and said, “Well come on buoy. We gotta get my dog to the vet. You should call Amy ‘n let her know that Boris was attacked by coyotes and that she should meet us in Danville at the veterinary hospital. You’re good buddy Alan’s got yer back and done gave you a ride.”
Hank was flabbergasted. He didn’t know what to say. He just got into the truck’s passenger seat and left with Alan. Only when they were down the road did Alan bother to tell him that he didn’t need to worry about the prize money from his bet against Boris. It was all taken care of. Hank felt nauseous. He hated Alan more deeply than anyone he had ever known. In that moment he knew for sure that the sadistic madman driving them to the vet was the one driving the truck that had gunned down Phyllis. Hank knew he was in the clutches of a true psychopath and there was nothing he could do about it.
After driving for what seemed like an eternity to Hank they finally came to Danville and the vets office. Amy was already in the parking lot. Hank forgot that he had called her on the way. She closed the store early and headed to Danville as soon as she got the news about poor Boris.
Everything seemed to occur so fast that Hank didn’t seem to notice what was happening, still somewhat in a daze from the traumatic events of the day. Amy and Alan rushed Boris inside, but it was likely that he was already dead. Hank didn’t even know that dogs had that much blood in them, let alone that they could lose so much. He stood in the parking lot, next to Alan’s truck, smoking a cigarette with shaky hands cold from the summer night’s air that was thick with moisture. When his cigarette was done he lit another one off of the butt, smoked half of it and then proceeded inside.
Alan and Amy were just emerging from the back room. Hank could tell by the looks on both of their faces that Boris didn’t make it. Amy was crying a steady stream of tears and sobbing uncontrollably. They left the vet’s office in silence. Hank went to give Amy a hug in the parking lot but she brushed him away and gave him a look that turned his heart to stone. He knew that she knew the truth. Either Alan had admitted it to her, the vet had figured it out or both. Either way Hank knew his marriage was over; Amy conveyed everything she was thinking with one look. A look of absolute disgust as she went to her car. Neither of them said a word to Alan and Amy just nodded her head, indicating to Hank that he was to get into the car with her. He almost failed to notice, he was still in somewhat of a daze.
They rode home in silence. Hank fidgeted with his cigarette lighter nervously. When they got to his house Alan dropped him off without saying a word. As Hank opened the front door he broke down crying, sobbing loudly, choking on his words. He began to hyperventilate as he gasped, failing to form words. Not that they would have done any good.
He went straight for the living room, intending to sleep on the couch. He was surprised when Amy spoke, “We are done Hank. I don’t know if it is for good. I don’t know if we will ever repair this marriage, but as of now we are done. I’m going to call mom tomorrow and see about going to Illinois for a while to live with her. Or maybe I’m going to go back to Lexington. I haven’t decided yet, but I am getting the fuck out of here Hank and for right now I don’t want to be with you anymore. I’m going to give it some time, but I might be filing for divorce.” As Amy’s words found Hank’s ears he knew that she had practiced every word of the speech on the way home from the veterinarian’s office. It was too well organized of a speech for such a heavily emotional thing to say. Hank understood that it was way more than just Boris, but that losing Boris was also more than she could bear to take. It would crack her like an egg no matter what kind of foundation their marriage rested upon.
He nodded in agreement, got a blanket and pillow out of the closet in the den and sacked out on the living room couch as Amy retired to the bedroom. It wasn’t long before he realized that Amy must have had those words, or something very similar, prepared for a long time. Boris’s tragic death was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or rather the cement truck that broke the camel’s back.
Hank knew that he was much weaker without Boris and Amy. Without his family. He knew that he was wide open for attack from every form his mental illness was taking. Ghosts, demons, redneck hillbillies. Every threat to his health and sanity seemed to mesh into one paranoia in his mind. He was as afraid of the things in the woods as he was of the Cornbread Mafia and he knew that made him insane. Again he gave up on everything he was holding onto, embracing mental illness as the only sane explanation. With Amy leaving he would be alone. Alone in the house to face his nightmares and fears, to endure his seizures and to grow the clones for people who would kill him if he didn’t.
As he huddled on the couch Hank felt more alone than he ever had in his life. He realized that he should have seen the situation with Boris was a setup. “What do these people want from me? If it was really all about business then they woulda just killed me.”
Hankwas alone with all of his thoughts and even before he fell asleep he descended into a nightmare. He smelled the foul, acrid stench of his basement seeping up through the floor. It carried on its back a tinge of that strange and sickening musk of the giant maggot-demon Larvamog. Hank told himself that he was just freaked out after the days events but the smell drove him mad as the hours passed on.
He finally fell asleep not long before dawn. He dreamed only of drowning in a sea of black sludge, unable to breathe or swim through it; he suffocated until he awoke. Amy was already in the kitchen making coffee and was on her phone, already making arrangements to get help moving.
15
The Apprentice, the Junkie and the Microbiologist
After Amy left him Hank fell into a depression that he found difficult to comprehend. He had never felt so low, especially since Amy saw Boris’s blood on Hank’s hands. Being in such a low place, constantly feeling the weight of his financial ruin and having nobody to turn to Hank became extremely susceptible to being overtaken by Quan. There were days when he would experience most of his waking time completely under the control of the mad spirit of the railwayman. It was not easy for him to admit to himself that it was happening and he chalked it all up to his own madness. Insanity again being the only rational explantation for what he experienced.
During those dark times when he was not wholly in control he was aware of what his body was doing. Quan had more or less decided to leave his life alone. No more explosive outbursts like the one that ruined Hank’s crop. Not only had Quan ruined Hank’s financial future, but his marriage had fallen apart as a result and he was still beholden to the Cornbread Mafia. Hank had to constantly remind himself that Quan might be a personality that his own brain had devised after dealing with trauma, but he was completely capable of bringing absolute ruin to his life. He no longer even considered the pos
sibility that he was dealing with real events, that he lived in a house of ghosts and demons, that he lived where the most heinous things had occurred and left their imprint upon the fabric of reality.
The life that Hank had imagined had slipped right through his fingers and he found himself in a pit of despair. Nothing seemed to matter to him, even his grow room and his clones were little solace from the overwhelming mountain of fear and paranoia that consumed his life when he wasn’t possessed by the builder of the house.
He began trading his highest grade marijuana for heroin. Hank’s desperation found some ease with stronger drugs. Still he consumed a substantial amount of pills, but heroin became his favorite thing quickly. He could drift away into another land, where there was no pain and no paranoia. The locals he had been selling weed to since he moved to Gravel Switch were more than happy to trade with him and there seemed to be no shortage. No shortage and steady trade partners meant little chance of a dry spell and therefore withdrawals. He knew that even if it did come to all that then he could stave off any symptoms of dope sickness with his prescription opiates.
Living on the edge of death and sanity Hank no longer cared about things such as his seizures getting in the way of driving. He could care less if he wrecked and so he bought himself a Jeep Cherokee to get around. Without Amy to drive him places what choice did he have? He had always liked driving and even after he started having regular seizures he would take country drives with Amy. They had a system worked out where if he felt a seizure coming on he would slow down, pull over and she would take the wheel from him as he applied the brake. They had practiced it so many times it had become rote. He had to remind himself that he could no longer rely on her. He often thought of just driving head on into a semi truck, but never quite found the compulsion to overcome his cowardice.
After a few months of living alone he had gotten his grow room up and running again, despite all the hell Quan had wrecked upon it. Hank found the duties of producing the clones for Alan and the Cornbread Mafia to be about as much as he could handle by himself. He also had to produce a crop of finished flowers to continue paying his rent and bills and to eventually come out of debt. While visiting his friends in Lexington, the Wilsons, he was introduced by Chris to a young man of nineteen named Lief Gutsell. Chris had explained to Hank on the phone before he went to town that Lief might make a good helper or apprentice for Hank. Chris had figured out all of the details before Hank even got to his house after the two hour drive to what seemed like Hank to be the “Big City” after so much time in Gravel Switch.
Lief would live with Hank, as a rent paying roommate. He would look after Hank as a caretaker and be there in case medical assistance was needed. In exchange he would help Hank grow his crop and Lief would be taught everything about growing cannabis and also be taught how to blow glass, if Hank was up to it. All of it sounded too good to be true to Hank. The kid was even willing to let Hank have all of his glass work that he produced for the first year of his apprenticeship under him. With all of the details ironed out Hank realized that all that remained to be seen was whether or not he was compatible with Lief.
Hank was happy to find that they were compatible indeed. They sat up for hours at Chris Wilson’s house, even after Chris had gone to bed himself, talking about B-grade horror films from the nineteen seventies and eighties. Lief even loved Hank’s favorite psychedelic jam bands and also knew a lot about old school punk rock groups that Hank had listened to in his younger years but had always been afraid to share with Amy. Hank had found a kindred spirit in Lief and it made him feel just alive enough that he realized that he wanted to grow, he wanted to progress, he wanted to live and to love and to be happy. Most of all he wanted to get the debt paid to the Cornbread Mafia and Lief was the perfect instrument to help him achieve that goal.
They wasted no time getting started and got Lief moved down to Gravel Switch and situated within a week. To show his gratitude to his loyal old friend Hank gave Chris two ounces of his top shelf marijuana. The stuff he always reserved for his own head stash. Chris was extremely thankful and explained that it would save him a lot of money over the next couple of months. It really was no big deal to Hank and he was glad to do it. In that moment he remembered why it was that he did what he did. He had always loved that sense of family that came from the hippie scene. He remembered a time long before then when he had given someone else the shoes off of his own feet because that person had cuts and bruises all over their own naked feet and still had many miles to walk. Hank, for the first time in years, felt once again truly in touch with his own values. He considered that perhaps Amy leaving him might have been the best thing to happen to him.
Lief had immediately noticed that Hank was unable to get rid of Amy’s presence in the house, even if he had wanted to which he clearly did not. Amy had become a terrible hoarder and took little to nothing with her when she left the house. Hank had assumed that she meant to come back to him some day. But with Lief there he seemed to just want the space to himself so that he could move forward with his endeavors. The new kid was great at helping him to pack her stuff up. All the random things that she had hoarded over the years that they had lived out there were put in boxes and Rubbermaid tubs and put away out in the two shacks in the back yard. Hank found quite a bit of piece of mind when his space felt like his own again and not a reminder of some past conflict. He had felt like he had been living in a holocaust memorial or a shrine to some war long ago.
Lief, to Hank’s surprise, did not judge Hank at all for his heroin use. He understood it to be just another opiate, the strongest opiate Hank could get. As far as Lief was concerned Hank was suffering terribly from a horrible disease and needed all the help he could get to deal with it. The relief Hank felt at the situation made him all the more comfortable with the new kid.
Lief was lanky and tall, a good six inches taller than Hank was. He had dark hair, a shade of brown that was almost black that he kept in a tight pony tail which almost reached his waist. His face was slightly long, like a horse’s face a bit and he talked a little too fast for Hank’s liking but it wasn’t a problem. Everything Hank showed him about growing cannabis he absorbed like a sponge taking in water. The young man was a natural. When they went out to the garage and Hank fired up his glass blowing torch and turned on his kiln for the first time in months he saw that blowing glass suited Lief just as well as growing marijuana. The Gutsell family had quite a large fortune and were well known in Lexington and the surrounding areas. They bred thoroughbred Arabian horses as the family business but Lief had wanted nothing to do with it. Still they were happy to give him all that he needed financially and emotionally in order to pursue his goals of becoming a glass blower and a cannabis grower. His father had been at Woodstock when he was a kid and his mother had lived in the Haight Ashbury in the early seventies, although she hardly remembered it. They were very non-judgmental and Lief was thankful for their support. He had other friends with parents which were much older, like his own. But they were usually not so open minded nor were they usually as liberal.
Because of their own hippie background Lief’s parents loved Hank and were tickled to death that he was willing to take their son on as an apprentice. Their own Bohemian worldview and child rearing environment had lead to the perfect storm for Hank. Everything was getting done. Alan was getting paid, Hank didn’t even have to look at him. He just gave Lief tray after tray of cuttings when they were rooted and the apprentice drove them over to Alan’s house. Hank was nearly caught up on his quota by the February due date, though he still was short two thousand clones. Alan informed Lief that it wouldn’t be a problem and that Hank had stepped things up in a way that the Cornbread Mafia neither foresaw nor expected. They conveyed to Lief that they were going to adopt a much more lenient stance with Hank.
After Hank had been working with the young man for a few months Lief had more than tripled his revenue stream. The apprentice had quite a few customers in the Lexington area and th
ey loved the quality of Hank’s product. More than just smokers and casual users, Lief opened up channels to distributors. It wouldn’t be long until Hank was looking at having all debts paid to the Cornbread Mafia, at least the ones that they had overtly revealed. He would never forget that Alan Fox had told him that he was owned by them. He knew there was more to his debt than simply just the cuttings he had to root. Still he wondered what terrible price they might ask him to pay, “Was Boris not enough?”
After a very long day of working in the grow room and dipping cuttings into the rooting solution, planting them in rockwool growing medium and placing them in humidity trays Hank and Lief decided to take the night off and go into town and hit some strip clubs.
Rather than go to Danville to the one bar that was topless they drove on to Lexington and had their pick of several establishments. Hank had never been to a strip club, but he wasn’t going to tell that to his apprentice. Even though it was a twenty one and over club Lief found it easy to get in just based on the fact that he was a Gutsell and his father knew the owner. At least that is what he told the doorman, but whether or not it was true Lief neither knew nor cared. The club was called Pure Gold: A Gentleman’s Club. Upon entering the place Hank was sure that there were no actual gentlemen in the vicinity. Just greasy older men in sweat pants who stared lustfully, drooling over topless women less than half their ages. They took seats at the main stage as a gorgeous young black woman in leather bondage gear did a pole dance that gave Lief an erection and would have given Hank one if he were still capable without medication. Still he had brought a Viagra just in case he was lucky enough to take home a stripper.
A well endowed topless waitress approached them and took their drink orders. Hank had a beer and Lief got a whiskey and coke. They both found it hard to make eye contact with her as they drooled over her large yet supple breasts. When she brought their drinks Hank tipped her fifty percent of the tab and got forty dollars in dollar bills for two twenties. He felt dumb for not bringing small bills to a strip club.
Gravel Switch: the black goat chronicles book 1: a Weird Tale of Extreme Horror Page 13
