by J. D. Wilkes
“Grin-deddy sed ‘git.’”
“Excuse me?”
“He tole me t’kep these here hwoods clur. This is Burkeholder land.”
Reader, there can be few depths lower than spending your last moments on Earth with a gun-totin’, wall-eyed inbreed. But perhaps this one can be reasoned with. I take a deep breath and give’r a go. “Look. Dooney, right? Please. Help me down. Cut me down and I promise I, we, will never come back. I am so, so sorry. Please tell your grandfather we’re sorry and we’ll never ever ever come back.”
“Grin-deddy is wipf Jeeziff now, but he’s all het up ’n done tole you git.”
“Dooney, look, I need a doctor. I’ve got bit by a snake and I, I need to get down from here, okay? I’m having a hard time. I’m losing it and I think the poison is, uh, making me crazy. Affecting me in a bad way. Can you run go get a doctor? Somebody needs to come cut me down from here, okay?”
“Nuh-uh. Ah ain’t.” Dooney cocks his rifle and aims it between my eyes.
“No no no no no! Don’t shoot! You don’t want that. You don’t need that kind of trouble. What if all your church friends find out? They wouldn’t be nice to you anymore, right?”
“Ah hain’t a-gerna shoot ye, but ah orta.” He pauses for a second.
“Yep. Ah orta. No. Ah’ll let them vines thar do th’ trick, in stid. That’s Grin-deddy’s hway o’ doin’ hit. Them’s is his hands!”
With those words I feel the hands, no, the very vice grip of Burkeholder’s Deadening strengthen around my ribcage, squeezing my eyeballs nearly out of their sockets. His capillaries surge with sap, swelling the foliage to damn near crush my windpipe. And pop! I just felt a rib give.
Through tears of agony I finally see Dooney for the cursed progeny he is inside. He’s not just some homeless, glue-huffing man-child. He’s the Sin Eater from the corner of my mind. He is a monstrous, skeletal wretch with fish gills and webbing. An effigy brought to life by woodland hoodoo, hammered together by a pitiless tinker and left to fester in his sores and sin. He is part Judas, part Cain, part walkingstick insect, with crooked crucifix and gravebeam bones that bend backward on rusty hinges… and he is no friend of mine.
SEARCHLIGHTS
At this moment a crop-duster buzzes overhead. It’s a search plane, panning its spotlight on us. Its refreshing light sweeps over me in the cool of the evening. I can’t believe it. I’ve been spared! Slow descending flares streak down the firmament like golden tears. Hallelujah! Maybe they’ve already found Carver too. Oh, praise the LORD, I am saved!
“Oh thank God. I can’t wait to tell Delilah the news. I made it and lived to tell the tale!”
I sigh with relief while trying to signal the plane with my tautly wound limbs. Thank goodness. Maybe they picked up the signal I’ve been trying to transmit from my molars.
“Nuh-uh. Y’aint saved. Cain’t nobody cross Grin-deddy. What we do wipf trestpasters is none’ve ther nevermind. Looka-hure now.”
Dooney takes up his rifle and aims it at the small craft’s engine. The gun barrel moves in a figure eight, finding its mark until CRACK! The shot jerks a knot into the night. And it’s a dead hit. The plane sputters and chokes as Dooney bleats a giddy “Squeeeeee!” All at once the craft is sent whirly-birding into a field like a tinkertoy, search-beam and taillights spinning in plaits of sad brilliance.
“Dammit, Dooney. Why’d you have to go and do that?”
“Nighty-night,” he says. And with that, my destruction comes at once.
Constricted by a calligraphy of vines, I scream in silence as ten thousand creepers take their course. Prodding and probing, tangling and strangling, looping and interlacing. They worm themselves into every orifice, sinus, and sinew, filling my throat and lungs with bitter unfurling leaves and popping bones with dull thuds. Now they’re pushing out my eyeballs, probing their feelers between the creases of my brains and braiding themselves into a masterpiece of arabesque. My soul looks down from its kite string, singing out to anyone so inclined to listen: “Remember me! Know my story!” Let my dental work fire a message to the outside world. A faint signal into the void.
Dooney shimmies down the tree into nothingness. And with that, I soon pass away into a dreamless sleep on a moonless night. The way I’d always imagined death to feel like. Kind of tingly…
EDGAR CAYCE, the “Sleeping Prophet,” was born downriver in Beverly, Kentucky, circa 1877. Edgar began experiencing paranormal phenomena as a child, complete with his own “imaginary” spirit friends. As a young adult, he was invited to become an Ascended Master by St. Germain, who, I may or may not misremember, motioned to him from inside a painting that hung in Cayce’s den. He joined the spirit by the hand, stepped into the frame, like Alice through the looking glass, and walked into a secret garden to discuss the mysteries of life.
Cloistered in the lush brushstroke foliage, Edgar was shown the future: the rise of Hitler, the atom bomb, the Kennedy assassination, the World Trade Center attack, and other global events. Later, as his powers grew, he would relay this information from his dream state to a bedside associate who would then publish his prophecies. As a result, Edgar Cayce became our own “Southern Nostradamus.” And, although he communed with spirits, he was still accepted as a devout God-fearing member of his local church.
Occultists like these believe true wisdom can be gained by exiting the body to enter an astral plane. They say there is a “golden rope” that kite-strings your body to your soul, to your solar plexus. (It seems I can attest to this. I am here now, dangling by such a thread. And it’s good to know that we still hang on for a while after death.) But we must beware; the cord could be cut! Perpendicular “soul traffic” could disconnect us from our power source: those faint electrical pulses that remain in our brain, and we will die all the way.
Of course, you may disregard if you think this is just a load of crap. That this whole episode is a mere figment of my imagination in the deep throes of REM. Hey, I hope you’re right! I hope I am at rest somewhere right now, having one hell of a nightmare. Perhaps it’s all just the result of that snakebite. If not, then maybe it’s just a bad case of indigestion, the result of a rare bit of meat or expired milk. Come to think of it, if the skeptical reader is correct, perhaps all Edgar Cayce needed was a big ol’ swig of Pepto-Bismol.
Chapter Twenty-Three
WHITTLE STICK
A stream-of-consciousness litany of regrets.
For all my bellyaching about being babied by my mother and bullied by my schoolmates, all my whining about Daddy, all my carrying on about my rivals in love and waxing poetic about death, I am now left alone to reconsider. In all honesty, I would have preferred to live long enough to become an old man. A classic elderly gentleman with stories to tell. I always thought that growing old and dying was one of the coolest things I’d ever get to do. And not to become a legend necessarily, either. I’d be content as just another forgotten story in the dusty annals kept in a musty, dark room. Let me blur in with all the other worried faces of a crumbling photo album. Or set me alongside those Melungeons I saw peering out through the cataracts of their cameos. I, too, want to be a part of that ever-fading eternal mystery. To be forgotten means your story is too rich to occupy the minds of the madding crowd. Had I lived though, I would have manned up over time, matured, married Delilah, had a family, maybe even some grandkids. But before settling down, perhaps I had done a little living… maybe some traveling. Or better yet, as long as we’re making stuff up, maybe I was forced to leave, driven out of Kentucky. Maybe I had gotten into trouble. Was it because I’d fallen in with the wrong crowd? Some shady cast of characters? Maybe we had a secret club. Perhaps you’ve heard of a certain group called the Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels, that charitable organization of Southern gents in string ties. Well, maybe we called ourselves the “Dishonorable Order of Kentucky Colonels,” a secret society of my own design. We would’ve been far more interesting than those normal Kentucky Colonels. We would’ve been mystic oddfel
low Kentuckians; we would have held underground meetings just like the Freemasons do. Perhaps we would’ve even been their rivals! We would’ve donned drape jackets and string ties in the opposite color scheme of Colonel Sanders. Black suits and white ties! And instead of chicken, we ate CATFISH! Blasphemy! Maybe we would have risen up and loudly made our presence known to the city at large. Maybe we would’ve crashed the local Christmas parade, joined in the march and beat our drums to recruit other dark souls. Uh-oh! Well now. Having said that, it suddenly looks like it’s time to split, as the city leaders are grumbling and the townspeople are revolting. And they are truly revolting. So next I would’ve run off to, um, join the Merchant Marines! Or maybe I just signed up with the Tuna Fleet. Upon gaining my sea legs and mastering the art of knot-tying, deck-swabbing, and sailing, I would’ve become a grizzled old tar. A salty dog. Aye, a veritable Poopdeck Pappy! Lean, mean, scrappy, and packin’ many a tall tale to regale my future grandchildren. They would hear my harrowing yarns of circumnavigation around Tierra del Fuego and the Horn of Africa, all aboard my mighty ship, the S.S. Krakatoa. Well, the Krakatoa would be more of a dinghy than a schooner, but boy, if that boat could talk! She would sing of having delivered me deep into far-flung, exotic locales whereupon I did such things as, oh I don’t know… lounge with pygmies beneath the flame trees of the Dark Continent, or entertain the crowned heads of Europe with my trusty French harp, or maybe I just laid about, shooting the breeze with the Red Chinese. When the coast was clear, I would’ve returned from my exploits to a restored Kentucky citizenship. Now they would call me “Colonel,” not “Crap Knife.” I am a man to be respected! And there, as an old adorable saw, I would one day entertain those many grandchildren of mine, as they sat on the old porch planks of home, gathered about the boots of their elder silver-haired badass. I would hold them spellbound, creaking in my hand-hewn rocking chair, embellishing each tale with colorful asides and lie-after-lie! And whittling all the while. Yes, whittling! Whittling the ivory of a narwhal tusk down to a long slender stick, gliding my Case knife while shavings fall into their smiling eyelashes. Then they would watch as I’d etch a scrimshaw timeline. Little vignettes of each scene I just described, carefully carved in detail. But whoops… upsy daisy! Out to the fencerow I must hobble, old man that I am, after all. I don’t move as quick as I used to. I’m all stove up and plum give out. But off I go nonetheless, over to the dewberry bushes to gather berries for ink. I’d squeeze their juices into a rusty Folgers coffee can, carefully daub the ink into each carving, and wipe away the excess. “This will make a fine keepsake for my landlubber grandchildren,” I’d say aloud. Ha-wharf! There’s that pesky blood-wet rattle in my lungs again, the result of my ever-present corncob pipe. But if it’s one thing the sea has taught me, it’s that a man must live or die on his own terms. Not just wither away! A captain goes down with the ship! So into the S.S. Krakatoa I’d climb. She would be moored on Kentucky’s Clarks River, a short walk from the old porch planks of home. I’d be careful to sneak the 12-guage in with my bundle of oars and tackle. And, of course, my whittle stick of ivory. Notched at the base, she would be conveniently just long enough to trip the trigger. Barrel in mouth, the deed would be done, and the whittle stick would fall safely into the hull. It’s an excellent heirloom, after all, engraved even with this final scene of suicide, and summing up a triumphant life well spent. The last thoughts of a soul held taut at the end of a kite string.
Chapter Twenty-Four
MOTH MAN
Salvation.
A supernatural stranger.
The “White Thing” appears.
I am snapped-to by a gauntlet of slapping branches. A body-flop into the floodwaters brings me straight awake, and I’m gulping down the green gunk and dredged filth of the creek, coughing it up and having to dog-paddle with one arm. My other arm is still dead, blackened and tight in its tourniquet. And here I am again, chest-deep a-bobbin’ in the swollen swampland. I must have shrugged off and coughed up the limp cables that’d held me.
Alert and panicked, at least I can now be free to focus… focus on my next vision, as the bumblebee-swarm of TV static assembles a new picture into place:
COLD
Red veins beat across a charcoal moon. Black as a habit, He appears through a mist of foxfire with ruby eyes. They are as red, round, and wide as bicycle reflectors, and they are positioned where the areolas of man’s trunk would be. His head is his torso. His torso is his head.
Despite confounding anatomy, his countenance is immaculate. Lord High Potentate of the Great White Brotherhood! Grand Imperator of the Golden Dawn! With outstretched sable wings, he stands ten feet tall and bulletproof, hovering above the surface of the water and mounds of rained-down meat. He is lean and chiseled, like the body pried off a crucifix. His aura sparkles with a thousand blessings and there is a Shekinah glow that could convert any atheist. Yes, that could whiten the very hairs of Hitchens!
He hums to me with velvet thoughts:
“Rise, ditchling. RISE.”
Somehow I know Him by many names. He is Mahatma, Melchizedek, Indrid Cold… three figures found in my father’s old leather-bound bestiary of demi-gods. The Ascended Masters. Just as much a myth as the Bell Witch, he is also every bit the matter of official public record:
And this man stood there, and he first asked me what I was called, and I knew he meant my name. […] And then he asked me, he said ‘Why are you frightened?’ He said ‘Don’t be frightened, we wish you no harm.’ He said […] ‘We wish you only happiness.’ And I told him my name, and when I told him my name, he said He was called ‘Cold.’ That was the name that he was called by.
—Woodrow Wilson Derenberger interview,
WTAP-TV, November 2, 1966.
He appeared as both a “Grinning Man” and a “Mothman” to the good people of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the 1960s, foretelling of a bridge collapse. Perhaps, like the other spirits, He has traveled here through water, from the confluence of the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers. Or maybe he just flew. He is the Mothman, after all.
They say Hell hath its demons and Heaven hath its angels, but whatever weird Purgatory I’m trapped in now hosts its own cast of characters. Mr. Cold’s friend, the White Thing, is just as Carver had described it: a four-foot-tall panther standing on its back legs and always out of reach some fifty feet away. And again, just as Carver described, it sings past its fangs with the voice of a crying child.
Though in the presence of the highest of Masonic gods, obeisance is an afterthought. Relief to be alive comes first! I recall my escape. A loosening from my leafy death-grip, followed by a 100-foot plummet into the swamp.
“You are safe and I am ‘COLD,’” came his voice like a sonic boom. I beg for pardon and any explanation as to what was happening. Am I really alive? Where is the witch and all her gap-toothed cave-goblins?
And what about the Night Riders, the Sultana soldiers, and all the old, dead prisoners? What is it that they want from me? Why was I set free? Am I safe now?
“What do you remember?” Mr. Cold asks, his thundering voice rippling the sludge.
“I-I remember gasping for air… sir. I was choked by the ivy and I fell asleep. A sleep sounder than death. Then, well… I felt like I was flying! There was the sensation of flight.”
“Go on.”
“I could feel a cold wind in my face and the sense of weightlessness. I opened my eyes and, yes, I was flying… way on up, way up in the stratosphere! But my mind was always scanning the woods, much lower to the ground, like a hawk hunting mice. I was in search of someone.”
“You are the one who is lost,” Cold sternly states.
“Yes, sir. But there were two of us. I was looking for my friend… Carver. He was my guide out here. But he had to turn around.”
“You should have both turned around miles ago.” The odd god’s eyes throb with a pulse of fire. The White Thing intones his infamous dark idylls, singing quietly in the background.
I cont
inue talking nervously to avoid further scorn. “Um, well. He went back to wash off in the creek. But I found him much, much farther back. I could see him scrambling up onto that old man’s property. Old Man Demp. Do you know the man? Gray flattop, navy blue coveralls, gold spray-painted boots. He hates trespassers.”
I struggle to recall more details.
“Carver went back to help someone. No, it was to save something.
Yes! I remember. His uncle’s old broke-down racehorse! It had wandered onto private property and this Demp fellow took a notion to kill it. And not just to shoot it but to string it up… you know, like to hang it… with a noose… like they used to do to people. Carver must have seen him from the creek, trying to lynch that horse, so he ran up the bluff to stop him. All I know is that they got into a scuffle and it didn’t end well. Next thing I saw was Uncle Earl’s racehorse dangling by a rope off the cliff, kicking its hind legs. Then Carver… while he was trying to pull it in and cut it loose he… he got shot in the gut! Oh Jesus.”
It dawns on me. Carver is lying up there on a bluff beneath a carpet of Kudzu, completely hidden from view. My voice swells with grief.
“Ah, Carver Canute,” Cold muses, “a mighty oak has fallen.”
“Oh yeah. And how could I forget!? Above it all, I remember, was this giant character gazing down… like some great spirit in the sky. He looked like some Native American chief or a shaman of sorts? Who was that?! He must have taken up the entire sky!”
