by Ron Shiflet
Terrified, Talbot backed into the kitchen. Raph followed him, whipcord legs bending at tight knot knees. Talbot backed against a wall. Raph stood before him, arms and legs a flurry of boneless flexing. Talbot’s eyes, adjusting to darkness, scanned the room—new sink, old battered ice-box, storage cabinets. The cabinets would have knives, but blades wouldn’t help where bullets failed. Was there anything he could use as a weapon?
Raph lunged. Talbot dodged. He smashed into the icebox. The aged contraption’s legs, none too stable to start with, collapsed. Ice spilled out.
Raph jumped back at the ice’s touch. His rope mouth trembled in what looked like a pained cry. Raph lunged at Talbot again. Again, when he hit the ice, he stopped. Raph turned and ran.
Talbot, hearing returning, heard a wooden crash. Raph smashing through the door to get out? He guessed so. Talbot paused. The ice had saved him. But why?
Josephat’s African witchery had to be responsible for this. Josephat had said something about ‘warm, dark’. The grub-slime had been morning coffee hot. Maybe Raph—or whatever Raph had become—couldn’t stand cold. The blocks of ice packed between tarpaulins with insulating layers of sawdust made sure that no place nearby was colder than the icehouse out back. That was where Talbot needed to be. He picked up a block of ice, the best weapon he had, and ran for the back door. He studied the moonlit darkness. He saw no sign of Raph. A nervous voice in his head whispered, “What if he’s hiding behind that stack of old tarpaulins, thrown over the sawhorses outside the icehouse?” Talbot ignored the feeling and dashed for the icehouse.
Once inside, he uncovered as much ice as he could. Sure, he was cold. But a few shivers were a bargain for keeping Raph away.
Talbot’s hearing returned. The sawhorses crashed as something knocked them over. Talbot clenched his teeth. What was Raph doing out there?
Talbot’s answer came in minutes. The icehouse door swung open. A bulky, round figure filled the doorway. Talbot couldn’t tell who or what it was until he saw its boneless stance. It was Raph, wrapped in multiple layers of tarpaulins. If the heavy cloths kept ice into the summer, they would shield Raph from cold. Talbot silently swore. Changing hadn’t made Raph stupid. If anything, he planned better now than when he had been himself.
Raph’s ropey legs propelled his leap, his inhuman lips spurting an insane, dry-husk laugh. Talbot dodged. Raph bounced off the icehouse wall and came down in front of Talbot. “One left,” Raph rattled. He took a step forward. “Not for long.”
Talbot retreated. Raph reached for him, the dangling tarpaulin flapping as he moved. Talbot’s mind raced. What could he do? What? Then he knew.
Talbot whipped the matches from his pocket. He lit one and applied it to the dangling tarpaulin. The dry cloth caught. Raph gave a screech owl shriek and burst into flame. Raph collapsed, thrashing his burnt-rope arms and legs. The scent of burning rope filled the icehouse. Then Raph shivered and lay motionless, except for the lingering orange flames that danced about his fallen form.
“It’s over,” Talbot whispered in relief.
“Ain’t,” came the voice from the doorway.
Talbot turned. Something blocked the door. It was the thing that had attacked them in the forest, sword still protruding from its back. Earlier, Talbot had identified the thing as a giant grub-worm. Now he got a better look at it, he realized that he had been wrong. Glistening and soft-fleshed, the multi-limbed, multi-jawed monstrosity would have made a giant grub-worm seem welcome in comparison.
“You ain’t the one that did it,” the thing in the doorway continued. Although all its mouths moved, only the one directly above its eyes spoke. “That’s why I let you save yourself.” The monstrous creature nodded toward Raph’s charred body. “That and me not minding one bit seeing that one burn.” Its stubby legs, far too short for its bulk, carried it into the icehouse. The orange light outlined its hideous face, not man, not grub, not bloated leech. Its eyes of honeycomb and tar studied Talbot. “You know who I be, boy?”
Talbot swallowed hard. “Reckon I do.” Despite the changes, the voice was still recognizable. Talbot’s eyes searched the icehouse for a weapon. “Josephat,” Talbot whispered, heart racing.
“That’s what I was called.” Josephat laughed. At least laughter is what Talbot thought the noise was. “What I’s called now, you couldn’t hope to pronounce.”
“Try me.” If he could just distract Josephat, maybe he could lunge, drive the sword in deeper. That might do the trick.
“Children of Shup-Niko’rat, like I be now, got no time for such truck.” The monstrous thing edged closer. “Just study what happened to that buddy of yours that yanked my life away.”
“That was him, not me.” Talbot prepared to charge. He would probably never get a better chance.
“Maybe, but you didn’t move none to stop what he did.” The creature’s eyes glittered with a black flame. “Now study on how what you did took me from my woman’s touch, forever. How pain delivered brings payment in kind.” Then it was gone as though it had never been. Only the battered Confederate sword, dripping with brown slime, remained.
Talbot licked his lips. Could it really be over? Picking up the sword, the only weapon he could find, he cautiously left the icehouse. Nerves on edge, he darted back to the main house.
He waited a few minutes, expecting something more to happen. When nothing did, he lit the kerosene lantern. The open eyes of Billy’s mangled body stared at him in accusation. Talbot shivered. He would have to think of something to tell the sheriff come dawn. Dawn. Talbot froze at the thought. Dawn marked the start of the day he was supposed to marry Gretta. What would he tell her?
At that thought, his arm began to itch. Talbot instinctively scratched. The itchy spot felt a little bit rough, like a knotted rope.
Talbot shook his head in denial. Just a few drops of the grub’s brown ichor had landed on him. The itch grew worse. It covered a larger area now. And an unpleasant, sour, fear-sweat smell hung about him, worse now than it had been when he faced Raph.
Talbot rolled up his sleeve. He stared in horror at the patch of rope on his arm, growing broader and broader.
An image of Gretta, neck like a goose with its head across the chopping block, floated through his mind. And, what was worse, some part of him liked that image.
“No!” Talbot screamed, driving the thought from his mind. African magic tried to take his soul. Talbot Carver wasn’t going to surrender without a fight. Something would beat it. Maybe prayer, maybe his own will. Something.
“Ain’t nothing beating me,” a voice like a memory of a voice whispered in Talbot’s head. It was Josephat. “Nothing except something bigger and meaner. That ain’t you, boy.”
A grim smile covered Talbot’s face. He would not become a monster like Raph. Of that he was certain. Talbot picked up the old sword. Despite the years, it still held an edge. If all else failed, it gave him one sure way of beating Josephat.
A LITTLE NEST EGG
KEN GOLDMAN
The old farmhouse lay hidden behind a fortress of neglected shrubbery, and had it not been for the freckled brown and white cat, Willy McCorkle would have sped right past it. The animal had darted out into the road from nowhere and Willy never even saw it. He heard only the sharp crunch of bones and the thick squoosh of innards as the animal thumped beneath the front tire of the Ford pickup and burst open. The cat rolled a few yards like a small furry sack, then lay soaking in its own thick gravy, leaking its guts into the cracked asphalt fifty yards behind him.
Willy noticed the weather-beaten old house peeking through the thatch of bushes that separated it from the road and wondered if perhaps inside some withered prune of a woman would be expecting her tabby to be lapping up a dish of milk in her kitchen right about now. The thought curled his lips into a toothy smile. This was almost too easy.
Just weeks earlier Willy would have had little use for a jerkwater town like Loomis Falls, excepting those times he had pulled his truck off the Intersta
te to guzzle down a few cold ones or to take a dump behind a tree. But six months of dipping into the cash receipts at Al Kelly’s Service Depot in Piedmont had convinced him that he was not cut out for time-clock employment. Al had been one of those grizzled old duffers who was easy to fool, but still Willy had to waste his days on oil changes and wheel alignments. This seemed unnecessarily time consuming when there were so many other old folks living just off the southern exit ramps of Interstate 95 who could more quickly improve his circumstances the moment he shoved his .22 into their mouth. Old women especially scared easily, and they were usually more than happy to empty their jewelry boxes for a young man holding a gun. That flattened cat baking on the asphalt might just as well have been an engraved invitation to come pay one of them a visit.
The buzz among the Piedmont cowboys was that these old farmhouses were deceptive because many of these hovels hid gold mines behind their doors. Every second story man this side of Georgia knew that inside the decaying shacks lived the sort of frumps who placed Uncle Sam’s Federal Reserve System in the same category with the greaseball who might slit your throat for a cold beer. To them the bank vault had not been built that was as trustworthy as the tattered mattress upon which they slept.
In helping Willy McCorkle to locate the human fossils who shared this logic, so far Lady Luck had been with him, and he had acquired some decent pocket change. Inside one of these old farmhouses he knew some real pay dirt awaited, and Lady Luck would be throwing in her own blow job. Somewhere in an old house like this one those riches were his for the taking.
“Like eatin’ corn outa the can,” Willy whispered to the empty cab, and pulled the dusty pickup into reverse. He parked alongside the soft shoulder to inspect the dead animal for any source of identification. It was a chubby calico, and although a mangy creature it did not seem very old. He knew that in places like Loomis Falls where you might wind up porking your own sister it was unlikely any resident would think to place an ID on a dumb cat. The tubby fur ball he had smeared into the road might not even have been a house cat judging from the look of its coat.
But then again two tons of truck had just passed over it. Cats and old women just seemed to go together, and Willy figured it might be worth a shot to see who was home and to humbly offer the lady of the house some restitution for the pet he had unfortunately killed.
If I might come in for just a moment, Ma’am, why I’d be much obliged if you’d allow me to pay you for your beloved pet lyin’ out there on the road. Thank you kindly, and I am so sorry for what I done, Ma’am, I truly am . So if you’d be kind enough to just open the door ...
The name on the rusty mail box read Hammond. Excepting his pickup, Willy saw no other vehicles parked nearby, although there might be one inside the shed behind the house. Whether there was a Mr. Hammond around Willy could not tell. It was Sunday and farmers usually did no work on the Lord’s Day.
But Willy McCorkle did . He followed the crooked path through the weeds to the house and stepped onto the rickety front porch. A floorboard was missing near the screen door, and the half-rotted door behind it had been left ajar. Judging from what Willy could see through the dirty windows and the torn screen, the grey furniture inside looked like early American garage sale. No one very young lived here, that much was damned sure.
He rang the bell. Nothing. He rang again. Still no answer. This was going to be easier than he thought. He pulled the screen door open.
Old people’s homes always had that same musty smell. No matter where they lived, you walked into a house that had elderly residents and you were assaulted by that rancid liver-and-onions stench of rotting flesh. It was embedded in the walls and saturated itself into every fiber of fabric. But the smell made Willy smile. It meant that he had come to the right place.
Daylight had a hard time finding its way through the grimy windows and filthy drapes, and most of the parlor was shrouded in dusty shadows. This too was good. Willy quickly headed for the staircase.
... and just as quickly he stopped himself cold.
“Jesus—!”
An old woman sat half hidden, silhouetted in the shadows, motionless upon a wooden rocker in the far corner of the room. Wrapped in a colorless shawl, she must have been staring directly at Willy all along. Her shriveled hands rested in her lap upon a thick patchquilt blanket, and the dark rodent eyes that followed him were set deep inside a head that did not move. The woman’s creased gray-crowned face expressed nothing except its age. Only her eyes differentiated her from someone who was dead, but not very much. Standing before her was a complete stranger who had come uninvited into her home, yet the old woman simply sat in her rocker and stared at him as if she were watching a housefly that had somehow got inside her parlor.
Willy had to gulp air just to catch his breath. “Sorry, Ma’am,” he said trying to swallow his gasps as he approached her rocking chair. “I didn’t mean to startle you, but I guess you sure have returned the favor. See, I think that I just run over what might be your cat out there on the road, and so I figured—”
Nothing. No reaction at all. If not for her eyes Willy would have sworn a corpse sat in the old rocker. He reached into his jeans jacket and whipped out his revolver, pointing the small pistol directly at her forehead. The woman did not even flinch.
“Look, lady, let’s fuck the formalities. I don’t want to hurt you, okay? Just show me where you keep the money and I’ll be out of here in no time flat, and no one gets hurt. You understand what I’m sayin‘?”
The woman stared at him yet did not seem to know he was there.
“Hun‘reds and hun’reds. Prob’ly over a hun’red thousand of ‘em ev’ry goddamned day,” she said through pale lips that hardly moved as she spoke. Her voice croaked at Willy from somewhere deep inside her throat.
“What?”
For the first time the woman stirred. Although she had been watching him the entire time, her head finally came into alignment with her eyes.
“... a hun‘red thousand of ’em ev‘ry day since my Jake passed on, that’s how many I’m losin’. Even while ol’ Nettie Hammond is just settin’ here doin’ nothin’, doin’ nothin’ but just settin’ here countin’ ‘em as they go, she’s losin’ hun‘reds of ’em. Maybe thousands of ’em.”
Willy smiled and slowly let the .22 drop to his side. He wouldn’t be needing it. Ol’ Nettie was clearly a few eggs short of a dozen.
“Okay, lady, I hear what you’re sayin’. You’re losin’ hun‘reds and hun’reds of ‘em, yes sir, that’s just what’s happenin’. So while you’re busy countin’ up all those figures of whatever the fuck it is you’re losin’, I’m just goin’ to step upstairs for a moment and rob your crinkled old ass blind, if that’s okay with you. You just stay down here sittin’ in that ol’ rocker doin’ your figurin’ loud enough for me to hear you, and I won’t have to come back down to blow your goddamned lunatic brains out through your ears. That’s a good ol’ girl, Nettie, yes indeed ...”
“Just hun‘reds and hun’reds of ‘em, and me just settin’ here countin’ ’em ...” the old woman continued as Willy headed up the stairs. She was still babbling when he reached the top, and this suited him just fine. The crazy bitch would have probably done the same if he had dropped a grenade into her lap.
Although there were two bedrooms, only one of them contained a bed. The other was littered with junk piled clear to the ceiling, and Willy figured there was not much point in rummaging for more than a few seconds through the cheap lamps, broken pieces of furniture, and the countless boxes of dusty magazines.
Ol’ Nettie must have been quite fond of medical journals. There were hundreds of them in piles wrapped in tight cord and packed to brimming inside dozens of dirty cardboard cartons. Willy picked up a handful of loose copies from a stack of The Journal of the American Medical Association and blew the dust from them, rifling through articles on health and diseases, human anatomy and surgical procedures, features on the brain and the whole shebang.
> “Hun‘reds, just hun’reds of ’em ...” he could still hear the woman repeating downstairs.
“Crazy old buzzard,” he mumbled.
The woman had kept a regular medical library in the small bedroom, but Willy did not find much of interest in any publication that did not come with a centerfold. Maybe this was exciting stuff for a prune-faced hag who probably had not seen daylight since the Nixon Administration, but otherwise the old magazines were completely worthless.
He tossed the dusty journals to the floor and headed for the main bedroom. There was this unwritten law that every person this side of Georgia over the age of eighty understood, a law with dubious logic that stated one’s nest egg became automatically untouchable if someone were sleeping near it. Willy McCorkle intended to dispute that logic.
He swung open the bedroom door and stopped dead where he stood.
“Whoa!”
The room reeked with a foul odor that was worse than any other part of the house and Willy had to force himself to enter. He opened a window, hoping the stench would not cause him to woof his breakfast. It stank as if some animal had crawled into the room to die, but first decided to spend some time inside a toaster oven. The room probably had not been aired out in months, and the open window did not help very much. It was the kind of smell that clung to your clothes and forced itself through your nostrils to imprint its fetid memory into every fiber of your consciousness, a stink so powerful that Willy had to shove his head out the window to fill his lungs with fresh air.
Waiting for his breathing to return to normal, he yanked out the drawer of the rickety nightstand alongside the woman’s bed. When he flipped it over, two pairs of eyeglasses, a dozen pencils, and a set of yellowed dentures spilled to the floor. No gold mine here.
