“Nonononono,” he scratched out.
“Oh, yes, you miserable liar. Oh, yes, and oh, for sure. Ain’t nothing in this Book but my name now,” I snapped, turned those stuck-together, piss-soaked pages. “This here Book ain’t yours at tall. This here’s my Book, and you’ve been hiding it from me all these gotdamned years like you was trying to hide that money, like you was trying to hide that poor little gal’s little gnawed-on bones. You can’t hide nothin’. You can’t hide nothin’ no more. It’s come out now. It’s all come out today. And today is the first day of a new day and ain’t no day gonna be the same forever now, not the same at all.”
“But, it’s my Book. It’s my Book. My Book,” his voice rising to girly-girl highs. “You gonna wreck it; you gonna wreck it all, ain’t yah? Yah gonna wreck it?”
“Gotdamn right, I’m gonna wreck it. Seems it me some things need wrecking. It was your Book, old man, but it ain’t your Book no more. Maybe your name was in this Book once, but it ain’t no more. Maybe this here Book was telling you what to do, and you didn’t do it. Maybe this here Book was saying to wait for me to find it from you, begging me to take it from you and wring your damn chicken neck. I don’t know, and I can’t say I care no more. Maybe I took this here Book for me, or maybe this here Book has taken me. Maybe this here Book is taking me more and more, getting in my blood, changing my blood. Can’t say I care. This here is the new day, the different day, and this here Book is The Book that’s mine, that’s been waiting for me to find it, that’s been waiting to find me.”
And I let my real name roll down my windpipe and fill me with the powers and the knowing and the darkness and the light it all carried with it all together in one piece. It was telling me everything that once happened and everything that was gonna happen if I’d just open up my brain to what it was telling me. I leaned down and whispered; I let a small piece of my name fall into the old man’s ear.
“Oh, nonononononono,” he whimpered and I laughed. He got to die from just hearing a whisper of a piece of my name. I had to hear the whole thing all the time. It didn’t seem fair, so I undeaded the old man.
“nnnnooooooOOOOOO” he continued. I figured I could leave him like that for a while.
I took myself back to the room I’d taken to calling my own.
I went to my room. There had been a day I threw all of Tobias’s junk out the window and told him to find another room, a cave, or a ditch to live in because I didn’t care where he slept as long as it wasn’t in what was from that day on my room. I sat at the junk-pile desk with three legs on the junk-pile chair with missing slats and began to read The Book. It wasn’t in any alphabet I’d ever seen in my 9 whole years of public education, but I could read it like I was glassing a 4-point buck from a hundred yards. Clear. Frosty. Exciting. It was like the words and drawings and diagrams and figures and charts were just leaping into my brain and finding the places they fit, the places shaped like them, the places that had waited so long to be filled by those words.
“You got it all wrong, old man,” I called to the mewling thing stuck back there in his Laz-E-Boy. “The stars ain’t never gonna be right. You got it all wrong. Again.”
I could see some sky out my window, and when I looked it was like heaven itself was changing, was rearranging, was shaping itself to be right, to be more than right, to be perfect. And it wasn’t the stars I was seeing. The Book was telling me to look between the stars, and it was like looking at the sky with brand-new eyes. I could see. I could see everything. I could see the new, black constellations where there weren’t any stars at all. The black spaces between the stars shaped themselves. The Bleeding Sow was one. The Coprophagic was another. The Prolapsed Vagina, The Malformed Sperm, The Flayed Bride, The Malevolent Idiot, The Entrails Speaking, and on and on and on they went until everywhere I looked and everywhere I didn’t look was something new, something horrible, something wonderful.
I don’t know how much time I spent at that window. It was long enough for the whole world to turn and for new black constellations to appear rising over the raggedy horizon. It was all the schooling I needed or would ever need just filling me up like dirty water, like vomit in reverse, and my eyes kept switching fast-like between the sky and The Book, and together they was my new teachers, and I was their best student ever.
I knew what I had to do. I put The Book in the satchel I’d made for hunting, bloodstained on the inside from all the dead animals I’d trapped or shot and carried home. A couple of shirts, some socks, and I headed into the living room to finish off the old man and all his ways of wrongness. Didn’t take much. I just jammed my fist down his undead throat, all the way down his undead throat until his undead corpse couldn’t make more than squeak with his pissy legs clobbering the floor like he was trying to dance one last dance. I grabbed onto something down there inside him, and I pulled and pulled until it came out wet and shining, and he was back to being just dead as dead could be. I couldn’t help myself, but I smeared that foul glob of old man across my face like war paint and then I knew. I was at war. I was at war with the world as it was and as it would never be again once the battle really started.
I found Tobias back in the kitchen with a package of frozen okra pressed against his face.
“Naw wadda ya wan’?,” he garbled.
“Not a gotdamn thing from you, brother,” I answered and my steel-toed Red Wings knocked him to the floor. He made some “glub blub” noises when I started stomping on his face, and I just kept stomping until I’d stomped clear through his skull all the way to bloody linoleum, a Red Wing boot print where his face had been.
The Book said only the dead can really kill the dead. Tobias and the old man fit that description, and, after everything they’d put me through over the years, all the use and abuse and lies and plots against me since I was old enough to remember, I guess I didn’t mind that they’d be all alone forever together. Forever.
I went down to the basement to retrieve Sharon Lebanon’s bones, to stuff them into the game back with the extra clothes because The Book told me I’d need them, Sharon’s little bones, and what I was to do with them when I needed to do the thing I’d need to do.
THE DIDDLEY BOW HORROR
Brad R. Torgersen
The little cabin was nestled so far back into the trees that Grover Petersworth could barely make out the light from the two windows built into the log framework on either side of the cabin’s front door. Grover’s shiny new 1962 business sedan crunched over the gravel as he rolled the car to a gentle stop directly in front of the packed-earth path that led up to the porch. There was a single, use-worn rocking chair resting on the wood slats that formed the porch’s floor, but no moving shadows in the windows which might indicate that anyone was home.
It had been a long day of searching, and Grover wondered if he shouldn’t turn around and head back into town. But now that he was finally here, an almost irresistible curiosity tugged him forward. Robert Jackson Lee Hill was a rather infamous figure in these parts, for the country folklore that swirled around Hill’s youthful adventures. If anyone had ever shaken hands with the devil, it was said, that person was Bobby Jay Hill.
Grover turned off the engine to his sedan and waited, staring at the yellow glow that filtered through the trees. Who knew how long it might take to ask all the questions he’d written down? And there was no telling whether or not Bobby Jay would be in any mood to talk about his past. The country-bred teenagers who’d finally put Grover on the right path, had said that Bobby Jay was notoriously private. He might not like the sight of a stranger from the city walking up to his home. If Grover spotted anything that looked even a little bit like a rifle or a shotgun, he was running for the car.
There. A tiny bit of movement through one of the windows—the barest rustling of what looked like curtains?
Grover pulled a little liquor flask from his jacket—draped across the passenger seat, where it had been resting for the past three hours—and took a swallow. For courage
. Then he opened the driver’s door, slipped his hat and his jacket on, made sure his notepad was tucked securely in one hand, and began to walk slowly and deliberately toward the house of the man who’d supposedly gone to the land of the living dead and returned to tell the tale.
The porch slats creaked as Grover’s black leather loafers touched the wood. He stopped for a moment, waiting to see if there was any additional movement from inside. The glass was filthy, to the point that the windows were translucent instead of transparent. The front door was partially shadowed in the lowering evening light, with only a simple wooden handle where a knob might have been.
Grover stared at the handle and felt his hands grow sweaty. Wiping them quickly on his slacks, he straightened his tie, breathed deeply three times, then rapped politely on the wood.
Nothing. No sound, nor any movement beyond the windows. Grover frowned, and politely rapped a second time. Then a third.
Grover sighed, and determined that he’d just have to retreat and make some additional inquiries. He turned on his heel to step off the porch.
The muzzle of the double-barreled twelve-gauge was a horrible shock. The man holding the weapon was stooped by age, with a face so wrinkled he could have passed for a dried-up apple. Bright, small eyes stared unblinking at Grover, while Grover instinctively put his hands up, palms facing forward.
Two hammers clicked back, and Grover felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.
“Damned bank,” the old man with the weapon said, using a mouth that was missing too many teeth. “If I told you fellers once, I told you fellers a thousand times: my daughter’s got the payment on the loan, and if anyone has a problem with it, they can go talk to her.”
“No sir,” Grover said, hating the tiny crack in his voice. “I’m not from any bank.”
“You came from town, didn’t’cha?” the old man barked.
“In a roundabout fashion,” Grover said, marveling at the inky blackness he could see down the mouths of the two barrels.
“On’y men from town got the nerve to come out here,” the old man drawled, “are the kind wantin’ money. And in case you ain’t noticed, money’s somethin’ I don’t have a lot of these days, you hear?”
“I hear,” Grover said, suddenly sensing an opportunity. “Which is germane to my reason for visiting you tonight, Mister… Hill?”
“You callin’ me a kraut, son?”
“No, no,” Grover said, taking a reflexive step backward, and bumping into the closed door. “I’m sorry. What I mean is, I’ve got a business proposition for a certain Robert Hill, who’s rumored to reside at this location. Would that be you? Or should I head down to the main road and try a little further north? I’m so sorry to intrude at this time of the day. I’ve driven a long way to talk to Mister Hill, and it’s important that I make sure I’ve got the right home.”
The old man still hadn’t blinked, nor had the hammers been lowered back into place. For all Grover knew, he was mere seconds from receiving two shells of buckshot between his front teeth.
“What kinda business you got with Bobby Jay?”
“I’d like to interview him.”
“Interview? For what?”
“My name is Grover Petersworth, but you might know me better as G.P. Grayson, from the All-American Weekly.”
The old man’s eyes didn’t register any recognition.
“I don’t suppose the papers circulate this far from town?” Grover asked, again hating the tiny crack in his voice.
“Nope. And if you don’t want things gettin’ unfortunate, son, you’d best get off my porch and go back to your automobile, and get gone, you understand?”
“Absolutely,” Grover said, “and I do apologize again for the intrusion. I imagine a man such as yourself values his solitude. So, if you don’t mind lowering that shotgun, I’ll be on my way.”
The twin barrels slowly but surely dropped, until they were pointed at the porch.
“Git with ye,” said the old man, who turned and spat off the porch and into the weeds and grass that grew along the edge.
Grover stepped carefully—but quickly—around the old man, noting the threadbare nature of the old man’s bib denim dungarees. Very possibly they were the only ones the old man owned? Grover decided to try one more time to get a bite, and set the hook.
“If you don’t mind,” Grover said over his shoulder, “please pass the word that I’m very interested in meeting with Mister Hill, and that I’m paying generously for the opportunity—as well as for solid leads on Mister Hill’s whereabouts.”
“How much is ‘generous’ to you, son?”
“The All-American Weekly is world-class, sir. To get an exclusive interview with Mister Hill, I’m putting five hundred dollars on the barrelhead. More than that, if the interview is truly in-depth.”
For the first time, the old man’s eyelids fluttered closed, and then opened quickly again.
“That’s a lot of money in these parts,” the old man said.
“I imagine it is, sir. I imagine it is. Well, I’ll see myself off now. Again, so sorry to have bothered you. I’ll be staying at the—”
“Cash?” the old man interrupted.
“Beg pardon?” Grover asked.
“Got the cash on ye?”
“I’m from New York City, sir,” Grover replied, suddenly realizing that his attempt to entice some answers from the old man might wind up with Grover face down in the gravel while the old man went through Grover’s pockets, with the barrels of the shotgun pressing against the back of Grover’s skull. “I’m not in the habit of carrying large sums of currency on me. However, I can have a cashier’s check cut in town. Assuming I get what I came for.”
The old man seemed to consider this information for several seconds, then his thumb, still on the hammers, gradually lowered them back into place on the shotgun’s breach.
“Yah best be good on your word, son,” he said. “If it’s Robert Jackson Lee Hill you came to talk to, you found ’im.”
Grover slowly turned around, and raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t suppose you have any identification to verify that?”
“You handled yourself better than some other men who’ve had my shotgun pointed at their melons,” Hill rasped, “but don’t get cute. You got any way of proving you’re who you say you are? I ain’t never heard of no All-American Weekly and I ain’t never read nothin’ by no Gee-Pee Graystone, or whatever you said you was. Seems to me we got a fundamental question of trust that needs answerin’ first. Since this is my land, I figure I got every right to shoot you dead, no questions asked. I already done you a favor, then, not pullin’ the trigger. You gonna look a gift horse in the mouth?”
“Of course not,” Grover said. “I apologize again, if I’ve further offended you, Mister Hill. Being from New York City, one learns to not be too credulous.”
“What’n hell’s that mean?”
“It means I’m nobody’s fool, Mister Hill.”
“That makes two of us, son.”
“Good. Then I hope you won’t mind me asking you some questions about the Diddley Bow Horror of ’23?”
Now it was Hill’s turn to reflexively back up, until he bumped into the front door.
“How in hell d’yah know about that, boy?”
“I’m the curious type, sir. Occupational necessity, you might say. Judging by your reaction, I think I’ve found just the man I came to see. Now—”
Grover took out his wallet and fished for a crisp, new fifty-dollar bill he’d reserved for just this occasion.
“—how about I make a small down payment, just to reassure you?”
Hill eyed the bill, which was now visible in the dusk only because of the yellow light coming out of the filthy windows.
“Ye can come inside,” the old man said, turning and opening the door—which had not been locked, nor did it appear to have anything in the way of a fastener. “But I got to warn you first. If it’s the Diddley Bow Horror you want to
hear about, this is one story that’s gonna stay inside your head long after you don’t want it to. Trust me, boy. I’ve been living with it for forty godforsaken years.”
Grover had heard and seen a lot of disturbing things in his time—enough to be sure there wasn’t much that could spook him. But the expression on Hill’s face made chills run up and down the back of Grover’s neck.
***
“We was just kids then,” Bobby Jay said, his shotgun replaced in its customary spot over the fireplace mantle, and two oil lanterns burning at either end of the small, battered table that was positioned in front of the cold hearth.
“Fresh back from the war?” Grover asked, sitting across the table from his subject. The old man hadn’t offered anything—no water, nor whiskey. He’d just taken and pocketed the money, then demanded that they get to work. This wasn’t a courtesy call.
“The Big One,” Bobby Jay said, nodding his head vigorously. “You might say I was a little more idealistic in those days. When news came that General Pershing was going to France, all us folk who grew up hearing about our grandpas who fought for General Johnston, or Stewart, or Longstreet, we couldn’t wait to enlist—get our piece of history. Well, some of us got a little more ‘history’ than we bargained for, if you know what I mean, son? Left our bones in those trenches. Anyway, you shoot and get shot at, that changes ye. I came home and found I had a hard time talkin’ to fellers who’d not seen what I’d seen. And some of my friends who’d gone over, they didn’t like talkin’ ’bout the war at all. Used to make me mad. Then I ran across Blind Izzy Brown.”
“Who’s that?” Grover asked, scribbling shorthand on the pages of his notepad with one of the many already-sharpened pencils he’d stuffed into one of the inner pockets of his jacket.
Redneck Eldritch Page 37
