Digging a biscuit from my pocket, I took a bite. It was hard as a stone, which was odd because Janet always cooked the lightest soda biscuits around Blue Peak. She’d learned how from her Mama. This one hurt my jaw and scraped the insides of my cheeks.
Janet, what happened to the biscuits? How old are they?
Forcing down the biscuit bits, I adjusted the satchel and shotgun on my shoulders, and headed off toward the tunnel.
It appeared like a dragon’s lair in a dream, not there and suddenly there, around a slight curve and flanked by two steep, granite slopes. It was as I remembered it to be though seeming even a bit larger. A stone-lined arch twenty-five feet wide and thirty feet tall, sewn in place with a tapestry of browned Virginia creeper and poison ivy. Long, pointed icicles hung from the apex like glistening fangs. The tunnel emitted a cold mist that obscured anything that might be inside.
Slowly, I limped to the tunnel’s misty maw. Fungus-scented air licked my face. The icicles high above dripped down into my hair, tickling it like spider legs. I slapped the water away and stepped inside.
My hand instinctively reached around to the satchel with the Mauser pistol. I could feel its outline through the canvas, remembering the way it looked in the German’s hand and then in mine. The way it sounded when I fired it. Loud. Certain.
I didn’t know why I’d brought it with me. I would never use it for hunting. I unbuckled the satchel, drew out the Mauser, cocked it, and engaged the safety.
I moved into the mist of the tunnel, listening.
For what? There were no animals here, save a few bats, snakes, and millipedes. Nothing worthy of a Christmas dinner, even for the poorest of the poor.
In several more yards now, holding the pistol before me. I should leave. I should go out and find food. There was no reason to be here.
Except that I wanted to be. The dank air felt right. In spite of its chill and its smells of decay, it seemed as though the place welcomed me, expected me. I closed my eyes for a moment, taking it in. I knew this feeling, these smells. They were intimately familiar. But from where? From when?
Then I remembered.
The trenches at St Mihiel. September 13th, 1918. The stench of a foreign rain, tank engines overheating as they negotiated the knee-deep mud, blood leeching into the earth, infected feet, mildewed uniforms.
Jesse, my buddy, dead in front of me. Andrew, my buddy, dead behind me. Me, bleeding from my arm and my leg. But not dead. I should have been dead. Like them, I should not have come home. It would have been my duty to stay away. To never come back.
But why? I drove the heel of my free hand into my forehead, hard. Why should I have died there?
Something cracked to my right and I whipped about, my leg flaring hot with the motion. The mist had filled in the space where I had been, thickening to where I could no longer see the entrance, only a faint gray glow beyond. Day was trying to break.
My heart thundered. I stood, waiting.
“Who is there?” My own voice startled me. My scalp tightened.
“Hello, Stowe.”
I gasped.
“I know why you’re here.” The voice was in the mist, deep in the thick purple-gray tapestry, a whisper so soft I could hardly hear it. Young. Very young.
“Stead? Is that you?”
Silence.
“Stead, son, are you here?”
Silence.
It was my imagination. Stead couldn’t be here. It was impossible. I squeezed my eyes shut. But why? Why couldn’t he have followed me here?
Because he was asleep. He, Janet, and the others were still sleeping.
Aren’t they?
I gripped the pistol tightly.
“Stowe.” The voice was a little louder now. A bit older than Stead.
“Who is that?”
Something moved in the mist, just beyond me.
“Tell me who you are or I’ll kill you!” I demanded.
I saw his face then, appearing through the gray, an angular face, with a reddish beard and large dark eyes. He looked to be about seventeen. His brow was furrowed in that almost delicate way of worried young men who are years away from wrinkles.
“They need you,” he said. “Go home, Stowe.”
I licked mist and salt from my lips. I didn’t know him. He could be an insane man, hiding here in the tunnel. I knew about crazy people. My grandfather was crazy as a bedbug. He used to sit on the porch of our cabin and scream that the Yankees were watching him from the trees, aiming at him, determined to bring him down since he had survived the War Between the States.
“Get away,” I said.
“Don’t do it. They need you.”
“Don’t do what? What are you talking about?”
He nodded toward my right hand, and I felt it then. The muzzle of the pistol was against my temple. I had put it there without knowing.
“Don’t do it, Stowe, please.”
But oh, did it feel right. Pressed there, cool, kind, ready to kiss my torment away. Take it all away. To do my final duty. To pay for what I’d done.
But what did I do…?
The man stepped closer. The mist parted and I could see his clothing. It was fashioned as if he were living a good fifty years ago. Loose linen trousers with a checked pattern. A long, brown frock coat. When he shifted he flickered, as though I was watching him through a slightly warped pane of glass.
“My family needed me but I was a coward,” he said. “I was afraid to stay at home. We’d heard tell of the vicious battle over in Charleston on September 13th and I was sure the Yankees were going to come our way next, across our mountain and burn us all down, take me away to join with them or shoot me if I refused. I can’t fight, Stowe. I just can’t do it. Not everybody can be a soldier.”
“No,” I said.
“My mama and daddy, they were both ailing, ailing bad. But I told them I couldn’t stay. I had to get away and hide.”
My index caressed the trigger on the pistol and then I flicked off the safety with my thumb. The young man looked at it and then at me.
“I was a pathetic, yellow dog.”
“You were scared.”
“I hid here. I didn’t care what happened outside the tunnel as long as I was safe. But the second morning there was a rumble and the tunnel came down on top of me. My parents never knew what happened to me.” He paused, and held up his hand, waved it back and forth. It trailed an odd light, like that of a falling star. “So you see, not only did I harm myself, but left my parents to die alone. Not from Yankee torches or sabers, they never came close, but from illness. From loneliness.”
I blinked. My heart caught. “Do you mean you’re…?”
He nodded. “Yes. But you don’t need to be. Don’t do what you came here to do, Stowe. They need you back there. Back at Blue Peak.”
Anger flared up in me from deep inside, hot and huge. “What do you mean, what I came to do?” I cried.
“That.” The young man nodded again at my pistol. “You want it to be gone, you want to forget…”
“I haven’t forgotten anything! I remember it all, the mud and the screams and the bullets and the tanks!”
“Your mind remembers some,” he said simply, “but your soul remembers it all.”
“Damn it, what…?” But then my soul opened and it all came back to me, slamming into my mind, crashing down upon me, driving me to my knees in the wet and the stink.
“I brought it with me! Oh, my God! I brought it home with me!”
I’d returned home in early November. My family had welcomed me with cheers and kisses. Within two days of my homecoming, Janet and Sid were sick. Sally and Stead followed the next morning. Four days later, they all were dead of the flu. I had brought it home to them.
I buried them behind the house.
They were gone. The biscuits in my pocket, from the last batch Janet made while she was still alive. Four weeks ago.
“I killed my family!” I screamed to the mist above me. Bile burned my
throat and tears cut the corners of my eyes. “Janet, Stead, Sally, Sid. Forgive me for what I did!”
“No” said the young man. “You didn’t kill them. The disease did.”
I squeezed the pistol grip and shoved the muzzle so hard against my skull that I saw stars. “I have to do my duty! I have to join them!”
“You have a new duty,” said the young man. “Mattie and her children. Your neighbors.”
I stared at him, my body shuddering.
“Mattie won’t make it another winter without help, Stowe. You can help her. She is your family, too, and her children. We are all one family, don’t you know that? Regardless of time, regardless of birth. Regardless of state or nation. Brothers. Sisters. All of us. Your duty’s changed. It’s not to take yourself out of the world but to stay and help them.”
“I can’t! The disease will get them! I holed myself up to keep away from other people! I chased Mattie off my porch several times. I didn’t want her harmed! I only came out of the cabin because we needed some meat. I…I needed some meat…”
The young man shook his head, light trailing with the movement. He smiled for the first time, and it was startlingly beautiful. “The disease is gone now. It’s safe. You’re safe.”
I knelt there, panting, sobbing. Then, when the crying had eased to a faint hitching, I forced myself to my feet. With sweat-slick hands, I re-engaged the safety, gently let the hammer down, and placed the pistol into the satchel. “All right. I’ll do it.” I would go to Mattie and help care for her and her children. It was my duty. As a man.
“Good.”
I began to turn away, but then looked back. He still stood there in the mist. “But how did you know about me?” I asked. “How could you?”
The young man shrugged. “As I am now, I know everything that goes on around our mountains. I can’t leave here, but see things in my mind and in my soul.”
“But why can’t you leave, too?”
He blinked, glanced away, and then looked at me again. “Because of what I did. I was wrong. I must stay here until…” his voice faded.
“Until what?”
He just considered me with his large, dark eyes. And then I knew.
“Your story needed to be told,” I said. “Someone had to hear it. Someone needs to tell it beyond this tunnel, so they’ll know.”
“Yes.”
“But no one would ever come in here because they believed it to be haunted.”
He nodded. There were tears in his eyes now, bright as crystals.
“What’s your name?”
“Gregory,” he said.
“I’ll tell your story, Gregory. I’ll let them know what happened to you.”
“Thank you.”
“And though your parents can’t do it, I forgive you, Gregory. As your brother, I can at least do that for you. For what you did for me.”
Gregory lowering his head. “May God bless you and send you a happy New Year.”
Then he was gone. Vanished. Mist to mist. Spirit to spirit.
“And God send you a happy New Year,” I whispered.
I went out into the world. Fat, white flakes drifted down from the early morning sky, coating the tree branches, the dead grasses, the stretch of rail bed ahead of me. Crows pecked at the earth, then turned their anxious faces toward me to beg for crumbs. I threw the biscuits from my coat pocket. They would soften in the snow.
All would soften with the new day. All would heal.
I broke a branch of holly from the craggy stone beside the rail bed. It would look nice on Mattie’s front door.
From Hamlin to Harperville
by Kealan Patrick Burke
They’re hammering on the door again. But how can I really be that afraid when I saw it coming?
They’ll find a way in, eventually. Despite my precautions and lunatic attempts at carpentry (my father would be proud), they are growing in number. Eventually the sheer weight of them crowding against the house will cause those boarded windows to snap, allowing them to spill and tumble and crawl and clamber their way into my crumbling sanctuary.
Before it’s over, I must record this for the benefit of whoever remains out there.
This is a warning.
My death will be the true beginning of the end.
* * * * *
He walked into the town square at midday on Monday morning. (I find it hard to believe that was only two days ago.)
Although strangers have a pretty good chance of being noticed in a town as small as Harperville, it was Max’s sudden frenzied whimpering and barking that drew my attention to him.
I was standing outside Strickler’s store, loading sacks of groceries into the back of my truck and thumping a fist against the glass of the cab to chasten Max into silence when I saw him.
He was standing in the center of the square, right next to the statue of Harlan Masterson—the town founder—who now presided over a scum-filled pond with an understandably depressed expression on his marble face.
The stranger wore a dark suit that only served to highlight his stark white features, his hair wild and fizzing around his narrow skull like black electricity.
He would have looked odd to anyone else, standing there with his hands behind his back, head cocked slightly while all around him people were going about their business warmed by the pleasant August sunshine. But to me he didn’t look out of place at all.
The dog bared his teeth and growled. I finished putting away my groceries and sat into the truck. Massaging the animal’s shaggy coat as I gunned the ignition, I found it hard to look away from the man by the statue.
After a moment of staring in a manner that would have been considered impolite in any society, I started home.
A quick glance in the rearview mirror revealed that the stranger wasn’t moving from his place by the statue and before I took my eyes off his dwindling form, I thought I saw him bring something long and thin out from behind his back, something that gleamed in the sunlight. Something he put to his lips.
* * * * *
I live alone. There are many reasons why that has to be the case but none of them are pertinent to this account. Although I don’t consider myself an unfriendly fellow, I think perhaps the sight of the many demons cavorting in my eyes is enough to deter any potential relationships I might have developed with my neighbors.
My house is small, quite literally a ‘cracker box’ but it is comfortable and clean. At least it used to be before it became necessary to smash up the furniture to use for barricades.
When I got home, I put away the groceries, still troubled by the sight of the pale-faced stranger. He might not have bothered me had he just been going about his business, or acting like a tourist but he had seemed distinctly out of place in the square and I don’t mean in the sense that any stranger might seem out of place in a town where there are no secrets and everyone knows everyone else. If anything, he looked as if he had been imitating the statue next to him. And the thing he’d been holding…
I grabbed myself a beer from the six-pack I had purchased at the store and sat down at the kitchen table, wishing I had something else to preoccupy myself with when the doorbell rang.
I hesitated, debating whether or not to answer.
There is a half-mile stretch between my home and the Sandersons next door. It had been almost six months since they paid me a visit and that had been an awkward affair, all uncomfortable silences and plastic smiles. Apparently, they had decided it was time to get to know their reclusive neighbor but I doubted I’d ever see them again after that brief encounter. If it wasn’t the Sandersons, then it would more than likely be someone selling something and I was in no mood to face fresh-faced salesman on that particular morning. But I decided to see who it was if for no other reason than to distract myself from the inexplicable dread that had wrapped itself around me like a wet blanket.
I opened the door and sighed.
Geoff Sanderson.
He looked excited, double chin
flapping and face wrenched into an enthusiastic smile as he did a little two-step on my stoop, as if he needed to go to the bathroom.
“Geoff.”
“Hi Ed, listen! You’re not going to believe what’s happening in town!”
He was waiting for me to ask him what was going on but I didn’t. I’m not sure I could have even if I’d wanted to. My skin had grown cold and slivers of ice began to slide down between my shoulder blades. Whatever was happening, I had felt it coming and now Sanderson was doing a jig on my porch confirming it.
“Rats!” he yelped and studied my face for a reaction.
I stared blankly at him, wondering what he was talking about. Had that been an exclamation?
He sighed deeply, looking at me as if I were slow. “Rats, buddy! The whole town has been overrun by rats!”
“What?” I had a sick feeling in my stomach.
“Yeah! I just got off the phone with Carl Brandner at the bank. He’s a good buddy of mine,” he said in a confidential tone as if this was something he was proud of. “He said that about fifty million of the little fuckers just came flooding into the square. Isn’t that wild?”
I frowned at him, wondering how he could find such excitement in something that was making me physically ill.
“Christ. Is anyone doing anything about it?”
He waved away my question and I felt like punching him in the face. “Wait, wait! That’s not the best part.” He licked his lips. “Right in the middle of this shitpile of rats there’s…wait for it…there’s a guy!”
I felt the blood drain from my face before he said it.
“Playing a fucking flute! Can you believe it?”
I couldn’t and the look on my face must have said as much because the smile vanished off Sanderson’s face as if he’d been slapped.
“Hey Ed, you okay?”
I stepped away from him and slammed the door. He continued to mumble through it for a few seconds more and then I heard a car door slam. He drove away, no doubt regretting having taken the time to share such prized information with the weirdo down the road.
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