by Hank Early
“Where are your clothes?”
Her voice came, and it almost sounded disembodied. “Daddy says I’ll hang myself with them.” She looked up, nodding toward the window. “It’s why they put the bars up too.”
“Jesus. Are you planning on hurting yourself again?”
That was when she rose and stepped into the patch of moonlight.
I turned away, shielding my eyes from her nakedness.
“You don’t understand anything, do you? I don’t want to hurt myself. I want to stop the hurting. I want the pain to end. I want the world to go away.”
“I’m going to get you some of your sister’s clothes, and then we’re going to get you out of here. Okay?”
“No. I need you to see me.”
“What?”
“I heard you say you were going to stop them. I heard you tell Amanda that. You have to see what they can do first.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look at me.”
“What? I’m not going to do that, Baylee. It’s not right.”
“Look at me. They marked me. He marked me. You have to look.”
Despite myself, I looked. She was right—I had to. I’d come all this way, taken all these chances. If she meant to show me something, I meant to see it.
She’d turned her body sideways to show me her profile. Moonlight filtered around her, sharpening the lines of her silhouette. She pointed to her left hip, but it was too dark for me to see from where I stood, and I didn’t dare get any closer. I pulled out the penlight I kept on my keychain and flicked it on. I shone it on her side, careful to keep it away from her breasts.
I found what she wanted me to see and dropped the penlight. It hit the floor, but somehow the light remained on her side—or maybe I didn’t need the light anymore, maybe the image was burned into my brain, maybe she turned just enough for the moonlight to catch it.
A dark tattoo-like pattern had been grafted against her skin. It ran from the bottom of her left breast all the way down her leg. It shimmered an electric red, like the inside of the skin turned out, slick and soft and gleaming, an intricately crafted welt, a scrape beneath the flesh, branching and flowing toward her hips in fernlike striations.
I thought of Allison DeWalt, the mark that her brother said he’d seen on her.
“What is it?”
“It’s the mark of God,” she said. “Where he touched me with his finger.”
I picked up the penlight and stepped closer, determined to get a better look, but just before I could, I saw her eyes go wide with fear. Someone spoke from behind me.
“I told you to leave our family alone.”
I turned, but not fast enough to dodge the hammer as the small girl brought it crashing down into my forehead.
45
I woke to the smell of death—deep and overwhelming. It was well past my nostrils and had seeped into my lungs. There was no escaping it. That was my first realization.
My second was the darkness. Darkness so deep, there was a moment in which I couldn’t determine if my eyes were opened or closed. I lay on my stomach, my right cheek pressed against the ground.
I blinked a dozen or more times, trying to orient myself, trying to make something out, but if there was anything else near me, it was hidden from my sight so thoroughly, it might as well have not been there at all. No shape or form came clear in the viscous blackness.
I remembered my penlight. I slid my hand down to my pocket, lifting one hip slightly so I could dig out my keys. I was surprised to find they were still there.
Just before flicking the light on, I felt something soft brush past my right pants leg. I reached for it with my free hand and touched the skin of something alive. Repelled, I rolled away only to land on what felt like knotted rope or maybe thick roots.
Then I felt that move too.
I screamed and scrambled to my feet, flicking the penlight on. My hand was wild—it shook with fear and exhilaration—and I couldn’t see anything but quick flashes at first, the staccato lightning of my deepest fears.
The tiny light reflected off their shiny backs as they heaved in a unified mass. I glimpsed an open mouth—needle fangs framing an endless corridor of clean white throat. The light touched a living wall of the creatures, so entwined they pulsed as one great heart, an organ whose arteries had wrapped it in a blood-black knot. There were eyes too—the tiny soulless couplets that knew me, that recognized me as a fellow traveler through the underworld, knew we were just pawns, really, held before a God who’d long stopped paying attention to the evil that men do in his name.
I steadied my hand and held it close as I cut a wide swath with the penlight.
There must have been twenty or more cottonmouths. On one side of me, the majority of them were engaged in a mating orgy so intense that even in my fear, I was stunned into wonder.
And that was the moment everything came back to me—the ride with Ronnie out to my cousin’s; the encounter with Amanda; the lock on Baylee’s door; my forced entry; the deep, resinous abrasions that flowed beneath her skin and fanned out across her hips like the wet tendrils of a creeping vine.
The tiny girl lifting the hammer.
And now I was here. With the cottonmouths. Waiting to die.
I shone the light up. There was a trapdoor at least ten feet over my head.
I was fucked.
I stumbled away from them and into the side of the pit—because that was exactly where I was, a snake pit. I pressed my body against it and shone the light out like a torch.
* * *
My dreams—or rather, my nightmares—over the years had been largely devoid of snakes. There was always the seed of one in every fear, every quivering moment of unexplained anxiety. I tried to pluck them free like splinters, but—also like splinters—they were nearly impossible to grasp and extract. Snakes didn’t so much make an appearance in the films of my subconscious but rather slithered among the shadows, always just out of sight, ghosts sure enough of their power, their hold over the haunted, they need not do any more than move languorously across the scaffolded fabric of my stupor.
And even in this way, they were able to grip me with panic, to control me with hidden strings. My encounter with them in Daddy’s sanctuary on Long Finger had been bad but bearable enough because there was space to separate myself from the vile things. Even picking up the cottonmouth and swinging it toward Choirboy was less an act of confrontation with my inner fears than simply an act of pragmatic survival.
Now—seeing the ground not only move but squirm beneath me—I realized I’d become immersed in my deepest fear. Worse, I realized this was how I would die.
I tried not to breathe. I tried to consider my options, but I didn’t have any.
One of the snakes not engaged in the orgy was making its way over to me. I shone the penlight at its eyes, and it stopped, transfixed.
I could buy some time. Maybe. But that was all.
I tried to make my mind work. I worked my way back to Burt’s house. The hammer. How long had I been out before Amanda got in touch with her father? And who did he get in touch with to bring me here?
And where was here?
The snake retreated, and I took the opportunity to move the light around the pit again, this time not so much looking for snakes but checking its dimension, hoping to see something I’d missed before, something that would help me escape.
The walls were poorly delineated in the dark, but eventually I gained a sense of my surroundings. The pit was big, as snake pits go, probably about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. The snakes covered nearly half of the pit. I kept to the other half, pressed against the earthen wall.
I swung the light back to my right. Something gleamed white in the beam. I leaned in—too afraid to risk movement—hoping for a better view.
Something caught the light and threw it back into my eyes. A metallic object lay several feet away.
I did another sweep with the penlight. The orgy had grown, and
I realized when that ended, my chances of survival would go way down.
I decided to risk the move and slipped quickly to my right, the penlight tracing my path.
I knelt, shining the penlight on the reflective object. I did a double take when I realized what I was looking at.
A badge.
I picked the star up and read the inscription.
Deputy Sheriff Coulee County
The light caught something else. The gleaming I’d seen earlier. I pocketed the badge and moved the penlight slowly across what appeared to be a skeleton covered loosely in tattered clothes.
And that was when I understood why the snakes weren’t particularly interested in me. They’d been fed well. Most of the flesh had been picked clean, but a little still remained on one leg.
I didn’t need anything else to understand who this was. Mary had told me on the very first day I met her that she’d taken over for a missing deputy. Well, at least I’d managed to find him. I wondered what he’d done to end up here and remembered how the DeWalts had said there was one deputy who’d actually tried to help them, and it all made sense.
What didn’t make sense was who exactly was pulling the strings. If it wasn’t Shaw—and according to Roger the night I’d dragged him out behind Jessamine’s, it wasn’t—then that left my father. But . . . shit. Always back to the same problem. He was dead. He had to be.
Or maybe I was just fooling myself. Maybe it was time to face the truth. He lived. Somehow, he had survived. The body had been identified wrong, or it was an elaborate ruse.
I swallowed hard. Maybe it was all true. Maybe he had ascended and now his spirit resided at this mythical well, and it was from here that he had been manipulating everything, including my own return to the mountains.
It was a scary thought. It was a thought that made me question everything.
It was a thought I could not—would not—allow myself to entertain.
So were there any other possibilities?
Only one. What if he’d faked everything? He certainly had the resources at his disposal. Hank Shaw would help. Billy Thrash and Lester would help. But how? How would something like that even be possible? And just assuming it was possible, there was still another pressing question that needed to be answered:
Why? Why would he do such a thing?
I was extrapolating quite a bit now, but it seemed to me that if I were my father, if I had his unique mind-set, there could be a couple of reasons I might do something like that.
One, he’d do it because it would prove God’s power. I once saw my father try to pick a lame child up and force her to walk after he laid hands on her. When she fell over, he picked her up again and this time held her by the belt loop of her blue jeans and tried to make it appear as if she were walking on her own. The message was unmistakable: when my father believed God was going to do something, he truly expected it to happen, and if it didn’t, he wasn’t going to hesitate about making it happen himself. No, he had no compunction whatsoever about fooling the church if he believed it would make their faith stronger.
Two—and I wasn’t completely sure this wasn’t just an extension of the first reason—he’d do it as some twisted way to gain more control over the congregation. The folks in these mountains craved religion and God, but even more than that, they craved the inexplicable, the articulation of power through supernatural means. Look at the way they ate up the whole snake-handling shtick.
And maybe there was a third option too. Maybe Daddy had always wanted to be more than a man. I saw that in him as far back as I could remember. The way he soaked up the adulation, the way he welcomed the praise and the hyperbole about his legacy. He wanted to become a legend, to linger in these mountains in a way that gave him the ultimate power. The power of an unseen, all-knowing God.
And if it was true, if he really was alive, he’d succeeded.
Something moved nearby. I jerked the light and saw a cottonmouth exiting the hollow of the deputy’s skeletal eye socket. It launched itself at me, and I flailed wildly to meet its attack. I got my keys and penlight up in time to knock it down before it struck, but unfortunately, I dropped the keys and penlight in the process.
Scrambling back, I was forced to leave the light where I’d dropped it.
I pressed myself to the wall again, creeping backward to the far left side of the pit. That was when I stepped on something that cracked beneath my boot.
I turned around, no penlight now to show me what I’d stepped on. There was something large below me. I knelt, feeling with both hands. I touched fabric and then cold skin. I moved up to a face and then to thinning hair.
Something made me find the right arm and trace my way down past the crook of the elbow to the wrist and to . . .
Nothing. The hand was missing.
I backed away, returning to the one spot I’d found that seemed safe. A cruel song lyric drifted across the dark of my consciousness—Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Except now it was a dead deputy to my right, Bryant McCauley’s corpse to my left. And everywhere else? Snakes.
Fucking cottonmouths.
At least I’d found McCauley. Finally.
So whoever had brought me here had also moved his body here. More food for the snakes? Probably. Not to mention a safer place to hide his corpse.
I thought of the deputy again, and suddenly I realized Mary might endure the same fate if I didn’t manage to get out and warn her.
But how?
I didn’t even have a light anymore. If the snakes came for me now, there was truly nothing I could do but die.
46
“When you die,” Daddy said, “there’s an immediate rush of light. For some it’s a brief, fleeting glimpse of what they might have had if they’d just listened to the Gospel. After the fleeting glimpse of all the wonder they’ll be missing, the universe goes dark.”
“There ain’t no fire?” I asked. I was six or seven, and we were alone out in the woods, looking for a pig that had escaped from the pen.
“Oh, there’s fire aplenty,” he said. “If that’s what you fear. If it’s drowning you fear, there’s water. Satan is downright mean. He’ll hit you where it hurts.”
I nodded in serious contemplation of Daddy’s words.
“But the Lord has told me he has a special plan for me.”
“Special?” I asked.
“Special. Upon my death, I’ll ascend to these mountains and lead the church from a special place. It’ll be a holy place, and I’ll speak with God daily.”
At that age, I listened to Daddy with awe, unsuspicious of any hidden agenda in his words. It was in this spirit I asked my next question: “How can you know that will happen?”
He grabbed me by the shirt collar and twisted me around.
“How can I know? Hell, boy, I know because God told me.”
I remembered being afraid of him then. Not just because he’d grabbed me so roughly. At that age, I’d already become so accustomed to such behavior as to barely notice. No, it was his eyes. They were so demented, so otherworldly. I didn’t have the words to express what I saw in them then, but they came to me later.
He believed what he said. Not just in the religious sense too, which I’d learn so many times meant people wanted to believe something so badly, they fooled themselves into it. This was different. He believed he talked to God the same way an ordinary person believed in the permeable world that existed before our very eyes. He believed when he died, he’d ascend.
But what if he got impatient? What if he decided to speed things up?
It sounded like a stretch. How did one go about faking one’s own death?
“He talks to you?” my seven-year-old self persisted, trying to wrap my head around the possibility.
He put me down. “He does. It started when I was a boy not much older than you. He told me it’ll happen with you or Lester too.”
I swallowed hard. I did not want God to talk to me. As bad as I feared hell, I’d come to fear
God and heaven more.
The moment ended with him asking me to kneel and pray with him. When we rose, he was smiling again.
“What?” I asked.
“God told me where that pig was.”
And he was right too. We found the pig a few minutes later, and I watched—memorizing the look of smug accomplishment on his face—as he picked it up by its legs, ignoring its pitiful squeals for mercy, as only a true man of God could do.
* * *
Everyone in the Holy Flame believed my father was special. It was undisputed. If someone expressed doubt in his ability to discern God’s word or to even hear it, Daddy had been known to excoriate them in front of the entire congregation. Most left and never came back. A few were changed by the experience and, more often than you’d expect, went on to become some of Daddy’s most ardent supporters.
Around the time he called for Hank Shaw to bring his daughter before him, Daddy was at the height of both his powers and his popularity. His word was iron, and it didn’t matter how crazy the things he said were, people treated them as law.
I heard about it secondhand, piecing it together from rumors and innuendo to draw a picture of what went on that night.
I knew the meeting was brief. I knew Maggie was forced to stand in front of the church the next Sunday and apologize. Afterward, she was made to stand in the churchyard while elders from the church walked past her offering blessings. I watched this from the top of a large maple tree a couple hundred yards away. Based on the expression on her face, I wondered if the men weren’t really offering curses.
She kept her mouth shut tight, her lips trembling while tears streamed down the sides of her face. At one point, she said something back to one of the elders, and Daddy—standing off to the side and observing the proceedings—stepped in and slapped her face. She fell to the ground crying. He stood over her, shouting words down with such anger, I could almost see them striking her. I cringed as I watched it all take place, and as bad as I’d feel later when everyone turned on me, it never got worse than what I felt at that very moment.
