A Corpse's Nightmare

by Phillip DePoy

  Without even thinking about it, I drew in a tremendously deep breath, held it for a second, and then blew it out as if I were blowing on a coal to make it flame up. I did, in fact, feel more relaxed.

  “Have a seat,” he whispered.

  I sat.

  “I told you it might sound funny,” he continued, “but here it goes. This is a part of my story. Now, you might not know this, but the very first elected official in the New World, before all this was even America, was a man named Edward Wingfield. He was born in Stonely, Huntingdonshire. That’s in England. He ran Jamestown because he was a big financial backer. He was the only shareholder in the group to sail from England, so it was no surprise that he was elected president of Jamestown. May of 1607 it was. But nobody liked him. From the beginning he was all wrong. He hated the native population, and made his men set up the colony on a miserable plot of land just because it was easy to defend from attack. It was no good for farming. Wingfield was also against having Catholics, non-Europeans, and women in the colony. How the hell he thought you could get by without women I have no idea. But it didn’t take long for everyone in the colony to send him back to London and take up with John Smith. From there on, you probably know the rest.”

  I squinted in his direction. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “My family,” he went on, as if I had not spoken, “as I mentioned, some of them came from France. And way back, one of my kin went by the name of Guichard d’Angle and he was the earl of Huntingdon in the fourteenth century. That’s the same place that Wingfield’s family was from. My kin was a Knight of the Garter and when he was older he was appointed the tutor of Richard the Second, who was just the Prince of Wales at that point, you understand. When Richard became king, he named my great-great kin, Guichard, Earl of Huntingdon. Since then, we’ve felt kind of responsible for anything that goes on with the folks from the old homeland.”

  “No, but seriously, what the hell are you talking about?” I growled.

  “Heritage. Responsibility. Self-knowledge.” He shook his head.

  “I mean how does any of this remotely affect me?”

  “I am the Earl of Huntingdon,” he said.

  I waited, but he said nothing further. He seemed to be watching me to see what I was going to do or say. It seemed to be some sort of test.

  “Andrews,” I finally said, “are you getting any of this?”

  “Hm?” Andrews mumbled. “What? Sorry. I wasn’t listening—this tea is really good.”

  “Leave him be,” the stranger snapped. “This is only for you.”

  “What is only for me?”

  “I am the Earl of Huntingdon,” he said again. “I wrote you a letter when you were a child. It used to be in a tin box on this mantel, behind a clock. Your mama showed it to you. Now it’s gone and you’re in trouble, bad.”

  I felt a tingling in my arms and heard a buzzing in my head. I began to realize that I might be in my half-dream state again. Or maybe, I thought, it was all hallucination, no reality. I could hear the words that the man was saying, and I could understand that they were perfectly good English words, but I couldn’t make them coalesce into anything remotely resembling meaning or sense.

  “You didn’t stay in Fit’s Mill long enough,” the man went on, his voice increasingly hypnotic. “You didn’t find what you should have found. You got to go back. You got to go to the meeting place, get up with those men, hear what they say.”

  “No.” I tried to move, but found I could not.

  “I tried to warn you about all this,” he told me. “And so did your mother. But it’s too late now. They found you out. They tried to kill you.”

  “Who tried to kill me?” I had to struggle for every breath.

  “But I won’t allow that.” His voice was fierce, but it was also the most soothing sound I had ever heard in my life. “Because we take care of our own.”

  An instant calm flooded my body, as if the tea were warming all my blood, and I felt more relaxed than I had since I’d come out of my coma. With that, I closed my eyes and fell dead asleep.

  * * *

  When I awoke, Andrews was gone and I was stretched out on the sofa. The sun was going down, the sky was red, and the storm clouds were gone. Crickets’ black tapestry hung in the eastern air and night birds sang out so loudly that I thought they all might be perched on my front porch.

  It was delightful to hear one sing out, but it was better when that call was answered, an echo a little way off in the distance. Singing alone is beautiful. Singing together is holy.

  Just as I was about to muster the strength to sit up, I heard Andrews clanking around in the kitchen.

  “I had a little nap,” I called out sleepily.

  “You had a hibernation,” he answered back. “Do you know it’s almost seven?”

  “Are you making dinner?”

  “God, no. I’m foraging. Somewhere in here is Girlinda’s fried chicken.”

  “All right, but we have to go back to Fit’s Mill.”

  “No!” He appeared in the wide archway between the kitchen and the living room. “I told you: you aren’t ever leaving this house. Not ever again. (a) I don’t want you to die but more importantly, (b) I don’t want Lucinda to kill me. And she would.”

  I sat up. “Oh, you really don’t have to worry about that. She’d be too busy killing me to bother with you. She’d kill me once, take me to the hospital, bring me back, just so she could kill me again.”

  “And you want to risk that because—?”

  “The man told me to go,” I said, easing up off the sofa. “You weren’t, by any chance, awake when he left?”

  “No, and I assume you weren’t either.”

  “Right,” I said, “but he was clear that I have to go back to Fit’s Mill.”

  Andrews leaned against the archway. His hair was at war with itself, and his face still betrayed a spot of barbecue sauce here and there. He’d changed back into a T-shirt and sweatpants and he was clearly settled in for the evening.

  “Now, who was that guy again?” Andrews asked, scratching his arm.

  “No idea.” I stood.

  I made my way past Andrews, into the kitchen, and opened up the fridge. It was packed to the gills with translucent Tupperware containers. I was familiar enough with Girlinda’s cooking to suss out most of the contents. I put my hand almost immediately on the large maroon-topped rectangular trove that held her famous fried chicken, renowned in story and song.

  She used a bird from her own yard, one that had wandered for all of its life anywhere it wanted to go, eating bugs off of her squash plants, pecking at seeds and berries on the ground. It had roosted in trees and laid, perhaps, a thousand eggs in its lifetime. It had stepped lightly through a dozen winters, leaving hieroglyphics in the snow as it went. It had slumbered peacefully under harvest moons, safe from red foxes and wild dogs inside a coop made from old barn wood. And when its time had come, it had given its life quickly, without anticipation. Then Girlinda lovingly bathed the pieces of the bird in buttermilk and salt for twenty-four hours, until it was silken and tender and soft. Each piece was dipped in flour, then in egg wash, then in cornmeal. The cornmeal had been cut with sage and tarragon and crushed black peppercorns. Then each piece was deep fried individually in duck fat. Nowhere else on earth was there a better piece of fried chicken than the one I was about to eat from Girlinda’s maroon-topped Tupperware.

  “Found it,” I called.

  “The chicken?” Andrews actually leapt toward me.

  Seconds later we were both eating, chicken in one hand, napkin in the other. Andrews tried to talk, but he was unwilling to keep the chicken out of his mouth long enough to finish a sentence, so nothing was coherent. I gathered that it had something to do with my staying indoors for the rest of my life.

  I chewed each bite of chicken very carefully, savoring as well as rending, and we both took our time finishing the meal.

  “I’m going to Fit’
s Mill.” I stood up.

  “Now?” he managed to say.

  “No. Now I’m looking for iced tea and potato salad.”

  “Oh.” He settled back into his chair. “Good idea.”

  A happy fifteen minutes later, we were sipping the last of the iced tea and staring at empty Tupperware containers.

  “Now,” I sighed, “if I don’t throw up, I might be ready to travel.”

  Andrews didn’t move. “Because the man told you to. The man with the accent.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you have no idea who the man is?”

  “Right.” I nodded. “No idea.”

  “Well, as you so clearly know what you’re doing, count me in.” He slumped in his chair.

  “The thing is—” I began.

  “The thing is,” Andrews interrupted, “that you thought the man tried to kill you in the hospital, then you thought he was the one who shot up your truck, then you told me to call Skidmore because he was the mysterious person who tried to kill you in December. And now you want to follow his advice.”

  “That reminds me,” I responded, “I have to get my back window fixed.”

  “I’m serious with you,” he shot back. “I think you might have suffered some kind of oxygen deprivation or something while you were in a coma. I think that it’s affected your cognition. Your mental acuity is very skewed—even for you. Which is saying something. You’re not going to Fit’s Mill tonight.”

  I stood. “With or without you.”

  “Wait.” He reached into his pocket and produced a nice shiny object. “I have your truck key.”

  I did likewise and showed him my key ring. “You have a copy of my truck key.”

  I headed for the door.

  Somewhere in my mind I knew that what I was doing was ridiculous, and dangerous beyond stupidity. But, as with any compulsion, I felt helpless to resist. The urge to find out who had tried to kill me, what my coma-dreams meant, why I had not felt completely awake and aware since I’d left the hospital—a dozen other impossible questions about my mother and my family—all overwhelmed me. And so I felt my body marching through my front door, onto my porch, headed toward my truck.

  “Damn it!” Andrews shouted.

  I heard his kitchen chair bang backward onto the floor; heard my front door slam and his feet stomping across the porch.

  “I’m driving,” he hissed. “At least that.”

  He passed me, loping toward the truck. Night was coming on. The last of the sunset was gone, and the wind had turned white-cold, a sure snow-sign. The stars, winking on one by one, looked like dots of snow frozen into the Parrish blue sky. Even the moon, low behind black tree silhouettes, was made of ice, late winter’s rage. The air had hardened, refusing to allow sweet showers that might pierce the drought of March to the root. Dark clouds were gathering behind the mountains, and snow was on the way.

  18.

  The drive back to Fit’s Mill happened in the kind of silence that is worse than any storm, an unspoken argument that festered and made matters worse. Andrews was livid and I was crazed. We went the longer way around, eschewing the shortcut through the woods. Andrews merely followed the signs on Highway 76. All the way, he had gripped the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles had drained of color, and the moonlight through the windshield made him a ghost.

  Cold air bullied us from behind, pouring in through the broken back window, and small sheets of crackled auto glass littered the floor, the dash; the seats with ice crystals that neither one of us was willing to acknowledge.

  All I could think of was that the men in the restaurant had warned us not to return to Fit’s Mill. Instead of making me feel sensibly frightened or at least intelligently cautious, the very thought of their threats made me red-faced with anger. For unknown reasons I possessed the confused, righteous indignation of a man unjustly accused.

  It was somehow my intention to teach these men a lesson, to show them who I was, what I was made of. Just by presenting myself before them I would teach them that they could never keep me from finding out something that I really wanted to know. I would make it clear to them that no one could come into my own house and try to kill me. I would demonstrate that I had absolutely no fear.

  I had no idea what Andrews was thinking. As he edged the truck into a parking space in front of the now-abandoned restaurant, he spoke for the first time since we’d left the house.

  “And where do you think you’ll find these men now? What do you think you’re looking for here?” He didn’t turn off the engine.

  “They might still be meeting,” I suggested, knowing how ridiculous it sounded.

  “How would you even know where this meeting is?” he fumed. “And, PS: it started hours ago. It won’t still be going on. Do you see that this town is rolled up? That everyone has gone to bed?”

  “Maybe they took a break and came back. I mean, what else is there to do in this town?” I cast my eye about the sad street. There were no lights except for the headlights of the truck, no sounds, nothing but the shabby bondage of leafless kudzu stems holding half the town in place. The air continued to chill, and the clouds had come over the mountain, silent and mythically gigantic.

  “I know it seems insane,” I began.

  “Seems?” He banged his forehead on the steering wheel. “Seems insane?”

  “But I have intuition,” I continued.

  As if on cue, we heard singing begin down the block, a large group in a minor key. The lyrics were as foreboding as the storm clouds: “I chanced to look and there I spied a curious book: of past days where sad Heaven did shed a mourning light upon the dead.”

  “What the hell?” Andrews whispered.

  “I’ve never heard that hymn before,” I admitted, opening my door as quietly as I could.

  “It’s not a hymn,” Andrews said, still sitting in the truck, his voice hushed.

  “What?” I turned back to face him. “What do you mean it’s not a hymn? Can’t you hear them singing?”

  “Those words,” he said, his voice still very soft. “Those are metaphysical lyrics by Henry Vaughan.”

  “Who?”

  “He was a Welsh physician and a poet in the seventeenth century. He had a weird twin brother who was a hermit and an alchemist. They were both nuts.”

  “How on earth would you know?” I began.

  “I had to teach some of their work once,” he interrupted me impatiently, “in a course that was mostly about Herbert and Donne.”

  “Well,” I sighed, “that makes me very uncomfortable, and I don’t know why.”

  Still, my legs swiveled out of the truck and began to carry my body toward the sound of the singing.

  “Wait,” Andrews urged. “How can we just barge in?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. But I didn’t stop.

  Andrews shut off the engine and the lights, and instantly the night grew darker. The snow clouds suddenly overtook the moon. Even its light was gone. My eyes weren’t adjusting to the pitch, and I had to stop, unable to see a thing.

  “Andrews?” I whispered.

  “I can’t see,” he answered back.

  There wasn’t any light coming from the direction of the singing. There didn’t appear to be any light on earth at that moment.

  “You have a flashlight in your truck, right?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I told him, “but I’m not positive we should alert everyone to our presence.”

  He snorted. “Yes, well, when we bust into the meeting hall, I think they’ll know we’re here.”

  With that we were flooded with blinding light: three or four high-voltage night torches.

  A recently familiar voice responded to Andrews. “Oh, they already know you’re here.”

  “Hello, Travis,” I said lightly.

  “It’s Devilin and that English boy,” another voice shouted toward the direction of the hall.

  * * *

  Oil lamps illuminated the inside of the small me
eting hall. It didn’t appear that the room had electricity; there was certainly no heat. The wooden floors were so worn that they looked like dirt. The smoke from hundreds of other nights’ lamp flames smudged the walls. The exposed rafters were delicately laced with spiderwebs and the ceiling was nearly black. There were wooden benches and folding chairs scattered without pattern. Andrews and I stood in the double doorway. At the other end of the room there was a battered podium that had been painted long ago with a large, plain letter W. There were no windows.

  “Go on in,” Travis said from behind.

  Andrews and I stepped into the room. There were, perhaps, fifteen men standing around, and one older man at the podium. The lamps made shadows, and some of the faces were completely obscured. There was a tall, thin man in a black suit near the back door. He looked familiar. I thought I might have seen him before, but it was hard to tell.

  “Come in, come in,” the man at the podium said warmly. “All are welcome here.”

  “This here is Fever Devilin,” Travis said, his hand on my shoulder. “And his friend is from England.”

  “England?” The older man sounded impressed. “Well, that is something.”

  “They were told to stay out of town,” another voice from behind said loudly.

  “Now, now,” the older man said, smiling, “I think it might be important to Dr. Devilin to hear something about our society.”

  Several men laughed. It was not a pleasant sound—more like the noise of crows on carrion.

  “Let’s all take our seats, then,” the older man said, “and I will start again from the beginning.”

  “Have you been meeting since we saw you this morning?” Andrews was apparently compelled to ask.

  More laughter.

  “We have a morning service and an evening prayer,” Travis explained, “on Wednesdays. Gets us through the week, you might say. We just got here when we heard your truck. They sang. We came to get you. Understand?”

  “I see.” Andrews took the nearest folding chair.

  I found an empty bench; Travis sat beside me. He had his shotgun in his hands. Everyone else sat, and the older man at the podium closed his eyes.