by Patrick Best
The darkness in the trailer had given her a glimmer of how the world really is - a disgusting, ferocious hole into which the human race had fallen - and it had given her a glimpse of what she could be in this world. The darkness was coming to her, she was convinced of that.
As she thought about it, her pace quickened to the point where her daddy had to slow her down. She could feel the darkness following her. The long grass moved in her wake. The leaves rustled. Tiny legs silently followed. Tiny eyes watched. Frankie felt them. She could feel the darkness at her back and it gave her strength. Her calmness now was not the silence of defeat. It was the calm before the storm.
"Henry!" her daddy shouted in an amused tone as they approached. "Heinrich! Get out here, you sorry sons of bitches."
Frankie stopped when she saw them emerge from their trailer, looking half-confused and full-drunk. Henry was in a bathrobe. Heinrich wore only dirty underpants, but he was carrying a shotgun.
"What you want, old man?" Henry shouted.
Frankie stood frozen to the spot, but her daddy hit her with his walking crutch and pointed her towards to the trailer. Frankie could feel a pressure building in her head. She could hear a low ringing noise which was becoming more and more intolerable. The darkness was with her and she was fighting the urge to go back to her room to read her books, to pretend her life was bearable, to pretend her daddy still loved her deep down and that the world had something it was going to offer her one day, that she had a future. Every time her daddy hit her and poked her with the crutch, it chipped away at that idea of a future. It made it harder for Frankie to refuse the darkness.
"Your mom home, boys?" Frankie's daddy said. "Me and Frankie here need to talk with her. With you, too."
The brothers looked at one another with sly smiles.
"Come on in," Henry said.
Frankie had been taken to other trailers before. The men who lived in them, Frankie's routes through the park took her nowhere near them. She could see where this night was headed and she was almost relieved. What they were doing, for Frankie, made her thoughts OK. What they had planned, it justified the onset of the darkness that nipped at her heels. She felt like she could give herself to the dark and low creatures of the world completely. She would let them take what they wanted of these men, so that no man would ever take anything of her again.
She didn’t know what the darkness had in store, but it felt big, final.
The interior of the trailer looked like an indoor junkyard and smelled like a cow shed. Oily car parts covered the table, beer cans covered the floor, decade-old pornographic magazine pin-ups decorated the walls and a skinned and treated deer hung headless over the kitchen sink. Frankie stepped inside and Heinrich was directly behind her. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck as he giggled.
Behind the giggling and the small talk and the blaring television which called the plays on a college football game, Frankie could hear a whispering and a sneaking and a crawling. A dark cloud was descending upon the trailer as these men laughed and joked and scratched their crotches and spat on their own floor. Their mother was in the master bedroom. Frankie was led in by her daddy. The woman was sick and lying under a thin, dirty green sheet tucked under her chin, like a gray turtle stuck on its back and doomed to die. At first glance, Frankie thought she was dead, but then she tried to speak. It was German. It was mumbled. It barely qualified as words.
"Looking good, Eva," Frankie's daddy said, standing beside Frankie, cornering her next to the living corpse, the dying turtle. Henry stood at the foot of the bed, watching with his beady eyes. Heinrich's huge frame blocked the doorway. "I hate to bother you,” Frankie’s daddy said, “but I understand there's been some trouble."
Eva said something else that wasn't words, her ashen face barely moving.
Frankie's daddy looked at Henry.
"She says Frankie is a bitch," Henry said without a hint of a smile. Heinrich chuckled.
"I'm real sorry," Frankie's daddy said. "Truly, I am. I don't know what to do with the girl."
Eva stared at the ceiling, passive, distant. She coughed and speckles of phlegm jumped out of her mouth and onto her face.
"Momma says something should be done," Henry said.
Frankie's fist balled up. She stared a hole through the wall almost, looking straight ahead. Her jaws locked together and the pressure was so hard she thought her teeth might bend and break. Her eyes were stinging with tears. She didn't want anything to happen, but she could feel the pressure building in her head. One of two bad things was about to happen, she knew. It would either be the old bad thing - the thing that had haunted her sleep, which she had spent her waking hours trying to escape from both physically and mentally - or it would be some kind of new bad thing.
"How much money you boys got between you?" Frankie's daddy asked.
They looked Frankie over. Henry said, "We got enough."
Teddy's words returned to Frankie in a loop: "They take and take and take and take and take." His words echoed in her head. "They take everything you have, and they get you so scared and so beaten down that eventually you have to convince yourself that you're happy with what you got, because otherwise what's the point in living?"
Her daddy grabbed her arm and shoved her out past Henry and Heinrich and into the other bedroom. The two brothers were laughing. Tears ran down Frankie's face, but she slowed down her actions, made herself aware of her surroundings. There was one dirty window, broken in one corner and too grimy to let much light through. Stacks of detective and pornographic magazines filled much of the room. Cobwebs dangled from the corners.
"You don't mind if I pull up a chair?" Frankie's daddy said.
Teddy's words returned to Frankie: "That's how the white man's world works."
“Lie on the bed,” Henry said.
Frankie sat on the edge of the bed. Her tattoo was a burning pain and a constant reminder of the power she had been promised by Teddy, a power that she could feel growing as the world grew dimmer.
“What the hell is that?” Heinrich said. “The little squirrel got a tattoo?”
He lifted up her sleeve and tore off the bandage. Frankie looked at it. The snake design looked to her to be perfect. It was like looking at the blueprints of a well-designed building, she thought. It had stopped bleeding. It didn’t even look sore any more. It had healed.
It looked as though it had always been there.
“What?!” her daddy stood up and grabbed her arm from the other side of the bed and yanked her over to him, almost pulling her arm out of her socket. “When the hell did you get this shit? What is that? Is that a snake?!”
He punched her in the back of the head and she curled up in a ball. Her daddy’s fury made Henry and Heinrich take a step back.
“Are you trying to make me look bad?!” her daddy shouted as he punched her again.
Frankie lay on the bed curled into a ball with her hands covering her head and her knees drawn up to her chest. She closed her eyes and tried to place her mind elsewhere as another punch landed on her back. The punches stopped for a moment as her daddy removed his belt and wrapped the end of it around his hand. The first strike cracked against her back and opened up her skin and her eyes bolted open. She screamed involuntarily, but she wouldn’t beg. There had been a shift in her mind: I will either die, she thought, or this will never happen again. The pressure in her mind was still building.
Her daddy grabbed her and pulled her off the bed, choking her and slamming her back against the wardrobe. Frankie looked deep into her daddy’s eyes. He looked beyond her, maybe to a life without her, maybe to nothing, and tightened his grip on her throat.
The bedroom was growing darker, as though the day had already retired and night had begun. When Frankie looked beyond her daddy to the dirty window, it looked black outside.
The blackness shifted, she noticed. It wasn’t night at all. Something was covering the window.
Then they entered the trailer.
/> Creatures poured in like black liquid through a broken section of the window and seeped up through the broken floorboards as if the trailer was suddenly drowned in a lake of tar.
“What the hell?!” Heinrich shouted as he was swarmed in insects and spiders.
Frankie was suffocating under her daddy’s grip. Her vision was failing. Her muscles were becoming limp. Her hearing was becoming distorted, as if she was being submerged. But the whispering she had heard earlier was back.
It was a million small voices, all saying her name. She opened her eyes and tried to speak to them. Though she didn’t have the strength to speak, they heard her cries.
The black tar that was filling the trailer started to break off into thousands of little shapes. There were spiders of a hundred varieties – house spiders, money spiders, daddy long legs – and a plethora of insects – black beetles, grasshoppers, cockroaches. A carpet of small snakes and large centipedes writhed around their feet and rose, wrapping themselves around the men. Frankie’s fear overpowered her anger and she felt only joy at seeing them.
Frankie’s daddy dropped her and she fell to the floor with her back to the wall as he tried in vain to brush off hundreds of insects that were crawling up his legs and into his clothes. He started screaming as he felt their legs tickling his body all over and began hitting himself to squash them.
“What the hell is going on?!” he screamed.
Frankie covered her mouth in shock.
“Get ‘em off me!” Heinrich shouted, waving his arms and his shotgun all around in a blind panic. “Get ‘em off me!”
“Stand-” Henry began, reaching for his brother, before a deafening blast of the shotgun cut Henry’s sentence off along with the top half of his skull which exploded against the wall as Heinrich’s finger brushed the trigger.
“Oh, God!” Heinrich shouted as Henry’s corpse dropped into the tide of small insects. Heinrich lifted his gun and fired into a gap in the floorboards where long, brown swamp snakes were swarming through. “You little bastards!” he shouted. He began screaming as they lunged and bit into his legs and crotch.
After a few moments of shock, Frankie, untouched by the insects and the snakes, removed her hand from her mouth to reveal a smile. She stood up.
Heinrich fell to the floor next to the half-headless corpse of his brother. He dropped the shotgun and started writhing in agony and flapping his arms as he was bitten by a hundred snakes and stung by a thousand tiny spider bites. There were no poisonous creatures, for that’s the way Frankie wanted it. Heinrich screamed and his eyes locked on Frankie as inch-by-inch his body was nipped away and his blood merged with the black tide of the dark and low creatures.
“Help me!” he shouted to Frankie. “Do something!”
Frankie waved both hands as if conducting an orchestra and the insects and the snakes scattered away from Heinrich, parting and exposing his shredded flesh. Heinrich looked around in horror as the insects obeyed Frankie. She swirled her right hand and those to her right scurried in a spiral motion up and across the wall. Frankie laughed. Her daddy looked up at her in horror from his position on his knees on the floor as he fought off cockroaches and dragged them out of his mouth and covered his nose.
“I am doing something,” Frankie said.
She looked at Heinrich and stopped smiling.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.
She brought her hands together in a clap and the insects and the spiders and the snakes came together in a wave from either side which engulfed Heinrich. He screamed with a mouth filled with centipedes until a long green-and-brown striped snake slithered out of the pool of blood on the floor and curled around Heinrich’s neck and pressed its head into his mouth. Heinrich pulled at the snake, but it was too slippery to hold. Its tail wriggled back and forth in time with horrific choking noises from Heinrich as the snake tunneled its way deep into his throat and down into his chest. Heinrich’s face turned blue as the tail of the snake disappeared down his mouth and the house spiders followed. He screamed silently, crunching spiders between his teeth as he gasped for air that wouldn’t come. He grabbed his face in agony and tore at his skin with his nails, despairing in his final moments, ripping chunks from himself until at last he stopped moving but for the pulsating of his stomach where the snake and the spiders and the centipedes were squirming within him.
Frankie’s daddy had found respite as the creatures swarmed over Heinrich and he looked back to his daughter with bloody tears in his eyes, his face red with small bites, his legs bleeding with larger ones.
“I’m-” he stuttered, looking at her, “I’m your daddy. You don’t got no-one else.”
Frankie said nothing.
“I love you, Frankie,” her daddy said, raising his hands to her to plead. “You’re my girl.”
Frankie felt her insides turn to jelly and her knees begin to give underneath her. It was everything she had always wanted to hear. One kind word, she thought. I would’ve taken one kind word from this man and I would’ve been happy.
How wrong I was, she thought.
“You’re my girl,” her daddy said.
“I’m not your girl!” Frankie screamed. “I’m not your anything!”
Frankie’s daddy jumped to his feet and pushed Frankie aside, slamming her head into the wall, as he made for the door. Holding her head, Frankie followed. The snakes zig-zagged over the bloodied carpet and into the hallway after her daddy where they leaped up at his legs and tore chunks from his ankles, sending him sprawling on his face into the lounge area. Standing over him, Frankie moved the creatures aside with a swoop of her hand.
Her daddy turned and looked up at her. “Please!” he screamed.
Frankie moved her fingers thinking of what to bring forth, and Georgia’s most dangerous of the darkest and lowest creatures presented themselves, pushing through the black tide and encircling her daddy.
First came the snakes: the dusty-colored rattlesnakes; the green cottonmouths; the deadly copperheads. They surrounded her daddy. Then came the spiders and the scorpions: the glistening black widows, as big as a human hand; the small-bodied and almost translucent brown recluses; the chunky, brown devil scorpions. They crawled into the center of the circle made by the snakes and attached themselves to her daddy’s body, crawling up his pants and down his sleeves and clinging to his screaming, white face. As the pincers closed around his skin and the scorpion’s daggers penetrated his body, her daddy begged for his life in garbled, half-formed words as his bloodstream was overcome with poison that burned him from the inside out. When the snakes began to strike, they went for his face and genitals, popping his testicles and one of his eyeballs. Frankie raised her hands once more and the floorboards cracked and snapped upwards as she summoned the oldest of the low creatures. Three grinning alligators emerged from the darkness under the floorboards, pulling themselves through with small, powerful arms and propelling themselves with slashes of their long, thick tails. When her daddy saw the alligators, he emitted a single scream that lasted from the moment they arrived to the moment of his death. His scream was distorted and broken off by the jaws of the alligators around his head and body as they span and thrashed and broke every bone in his body, but it returned spasmodically as his body returned to something approaching its normal position for a split-second in between being twisted and pulverized by rows upon rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Frankie’s father and his attackers became a nightmarish biomass on the floor, a thrashing, writhing, screaming and roaring collective of nature and humanity.
Within moments, the beating heart of the biomass, Frankie’s horrified, tortured father, stopped moving. The creatures continued their feast and Frankie sat on the floor amidst them.
She was no longer afraid of any creature the earth could produce.
She tucked her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on her folded arms. She closed her eyes and wished for nothing further other than to disappear forever. She could feel it happening as
she rested. A silk blanket was engulfing her, growing around her as the spiders worked to produce for her a cocoon. She opened her eyes and the darkness was complete. She was wrapped from head-to-toe in spider-webs. Rolling onto her side, she began to cry.
No library books could stop it.
No trips to the playground could distract her from it.
No mix-tapes could shut out her thoughts.
She was no longer afraid of any creature the earth could produce, apart from one – men – and she no longer wanted to live in place with such creatures.
The crocodiles and the snakes and the spiders and the scorpions worked as one and Frankie felt herself being pulled away from the world in her cocoon. Out of the trailer and into the woods and off to the wild nothing beyond.
She didn’t know where they were dragging her. Frankie knew there was no place good to go to on this Earth.
Maybe they’ll take me below it, she thought, where my mom is.
Maybe down there is better.
The End.
