by Adam Howe
Below the tree the dog tracked her movements, stalking along beneath the branch. It seemed to realize what she was up to and gave a guttural growl. Hanging from the middle of the branch was the tire-swing. Snatching the tire in its jaws, the dog dug its paws in the dirt and pulled on it. The branch bent back like an archer’s bow. The wood creaked under the strain. Tilly let out a cry as the dog released the tire and the branch whipped back and forth and nearly catapulted her from her perch. She gripped the branch tightly between her thighs, looped her arms around the limb, a literal tree-hugger holding on for dear life. The tree shuddered violently. Leaves showered down over the yard. The tire-swing yo-yoed beneath the branch. But she managed to hold on.
The dog whined, snatched the tire, started pulling it again.
The branch began to splinter. Feeling it giving way beneath her, Tilly scrambled the last few feet to the end of the limb, and threw herself onto the porch roof, seconds before the branch snapped away from the tree like a twig.
The branch thudded to the ground, the impact rocking the porch beneath her.
“What in the luvva fuck was that?” she heard Dwight exclaim from the cellar.
Peering over the porch roof, Tilly prayed she’d see the dog crushed beneath the branch … But, no. The fucker was right as rain and still barking at her.
She teetered to her feet and turned towards the window that wasn’t boarded over. There was nowhere else to run. She cleared a porthole in the filthy glass and peered inside. A black blizzard of flies needled the window, pinging off the glass, obscuring her view—yet what she saw was enough to make her lurch back in horror.
Tilly would have said that nothing on this earth could have compelled her to enter the house. But then she heard Dwight’s heavy footsteps ascending the cellar stairs, and in a flash of panic, she hauled up the window, gagging at the charnel stench as she crawled inside.
24.
Dwight emerged from the cellar.
“Damn it Roscoe, I don’t have time for your shit!”
He saw the broken branch lying down in the yard.
“Now why the hell can’t you do that when I put you in the fighting pit?”
He followed the barking dog’s gaze. Peered up at the porch roof. “What is it, boy? A squirrel?”
Dwight thought Roscoe had lost his appetite for squirrel once he’d had him a taste of long pig.
Then he saw Momma’s window was wide open, haloed by buzzing flies.
Dwight patted the dog’s blood-matted head. “Good boy, Roscoe …” he murmured, gazing thoughtfully at the open window.
He returned to the cellar.
No two ways about it, the townie was a fucking mess. Bloody tatters of flesh flapped from his face like open doors on a Christmas advent calendar. He upchucked another rat head and croaked, “Please … No more—”
Dwight shushed him, said: “Who you got with you, mister?”
25.
Away—
Look away—
But she couldn’t.
And oh, there was so much to see.
A naked young woman was chained to the bed in front of her. She wore a bodysuit of bruises, her wrists and ankles rubbed raw and scabbed where the manacles had abraded her flesh. She looked more dead than alive. One of her eyes was swollen shut, the other glazed, gazing up at the cracked plaster ceiling. Blood-matted blonde hair spiked stiffly from the woman’s scalp. She wheezed for breath through cracked bleeding lips, her chest hitching raggedly. Clamped to her breasts was a set of alligator clips, their steel teeth biting sharply into her nipples. The jumper cables were attached to an oil-smeared car battery on the nightstand. Reaching out from between the woman’s thighs was a disembodied human arm. Near mummified with decay, the withered brown limb was wedged inside the woman shoulder-first, where the rotten flesh had receded around a sallow stump of bone. The hand was clawed— fingers grasping—begging Tilly for release. The knuckles of the hand were hairy; one of the man’s fingers wore a high school football ring; on his wrist was a cheap Timex watch with a splintered face.
On the wall above the bed was a framed photo portrait of an unsmiling woman with shark-black eyes, stern as a Victorian governess. Plastered to the wall around the portrait were pages torn from pornographic magazines.
As Tilly’s eyes absorbed the full horror of the room—the woman shackled to the bed, the obscene shrine on the wall—Hingle’s cries echoed shrilly from the cellar; coupled with the woman’s shallow moans, the buzzing flies, the dog barking, and oh Christ, the smell, all Tilly could do was clamp her hands to her ears and clench her teeth for fear of screaming and being unable to stop.
Retching, she lurched towards the open bathroom door to her left—and then stopped in her tracks. Roped above the bathtub was a one-armed man. The body had been bled white, hanging upside down like a butchered hog. The man’s ribs were twisted back like broken cage bars, revealing the gaping red hollow of his chest. Below him the bathtub was full to the brim with a rancid soup of blood and entrails, the surface jeweled with glistening maggots.
Tilly backed slowly from the bathroom. Shaking her head to deny what she saw. Unable to look away. She thumped against the bed frame and the woman cried out as the bed was jolted and a black cloud of flies billowed up around her.
The woman rasped “ … please …” her lips barely moving.
The eye that wasn’t swollen shut welled with tears.
Tilly crouched beside the bed, fanning flies from the air. She examined the chains shackling the woman to the posters. Padlocked. Searched around the bed for the keys. Not on the nightstand. She yanked open the nightstand drawer and then let out a cry and slammed it shut. Told herself what she’d seen was just a bony white spider clutching a bible.
Wanting to comfort the woman, but not knowing where to start, Tilly softly stroked her forehead. The dried blood in her hair crackled and flaked onto her pillow like red dandruff. As delicately as she could, Tilly removed the alligator clips from the woman’s breasts, wincing in sympathy as the steel teeth relaxed their grip on her nipples and the woman mewled in pain. Her breasts were tattooed with bruises and burns, indented with bite marks from the alligator clips, and human teeth. The woman nodded at Tilly with pitiful gratitude. Tilly threw the alligator clips to the floor and wiped away her own tears with the back of her arm. The woman’s eye rolled slowly down her ruined body. She saw the withered brown limb jutting from between her thighs, and hacked out a wretched sob. The arm swayed about inside her like an obscene flyswatter. She looked up at Tilly. “Please …” she croaked. “Get it out.”
Tilly shuddered. “I … I don’t think I can.” In fact, she was sure she couldn’t.
“Please!” The woman tried to raise herself up on the bed. Too weak, and her chains allowed little movement. She hissed in pain and flopped back down. A coughing fit wracked her body. Bloody spittle sprayed from lips and spackled her upturned face. She stared at Tilly pleadingly. “Get it out.”
Tilly felt herself nod. She approached the foot of the bed like a squeamish midwife, fighting the urge to heave as she gazed down at the arm. The woman’s inner thighs were cobwebbed with bruises. Her sex was swollen hideously around the limb, where it had been forced inside her. It looked like the woman was birthing a fully-grown man. Tilly glanced at the woman, who nodded and gripped a hank of her hair between her teeth like a bit. Tilly took a deep breath. The foul stench did little to steel her for the task at hand. No pun intended, she thought. She turned her head and reached out blindly. Groping the air until she grasped the man’s arm at the wrist. Her fingers sank into soft rotten flesh. Papery skin sloughed away to the bone. With a cry of disgust, Tilly yanked the arm like a Christmas cracker. It slid free from the woman with a soft sigh of air. The woman bucked and hissed and bit down on her hair like she’d passed a kidney stone. Tilly dropped the arm to the floor and kicked it away from her and then wiped her hand on her waitress uniform.
The woman coughed out her hair-bit, gasping for breath
.
Then she jangled the chains on her arms. “Help me …”
“I can’t find the keys—”
“Help me!”
Tilly choked back a sob, unable to look the woman in the eye.
“I will,” she said. “I’ll come back for you, I promise.”
She moved around the bed, took a step towards the window.
The woman’s eye widened in horror. “Wait, no … Don’t leave me!” She started screaming, flailing on the bed like she was possessed. Her chains rattled and banged against the headboard. “Don’t you dare leave me, you fucking bitch!”
Tilly hesitated at the foot of the bed, pleading with the woman to be quiet.
“I’ll get help,” she promised.
But the woman was too far-gone to hear her, much less heed her.
“Bitch! Fucking bitch! You fucking bitch!”
Leave her, Tilly told herself. Just leave her! But she couldn’t. Even as she glanced at the window and told herself to run. Now! While she still could.
Then she heard something else …
Sly footsteps in the house below them—
Stalking slowly upstairs—
The woman continued to curse her: “You fucking bitch!”
Tilly kneeled at her bedside, pleading: “Quiet, be quiet!”
A creak on the upstairs landing—
“Someone’s coming,” Tilly gasped.
“Bitch!”
Tilly put her hand to the woman’s lips. The woman sank her teeth into Tilly’s fingers, biting her thumb to the bone. Tilly hissed in pain and clamped her hand over the woman’s mouth, muffling her cries. The woman snorted against Tilly’s palm. Her eye rolled in her skull like a panicked horse. Her breath whistled through her blood-clogged nostrils. “Please,” Tilly said, “please be quiet—”
The footsteps were approaching slowly down the hall. They paused outside the bedroom. A shadow moved underneath the door.
Tilly glanced at the window. No other choice. If she was to survive, she’d have to leave the woman here. “I’ll get help,” Tilly promised.
But the woman was beyond help.
Tilly snatched her hand from the dead woman’s face.
She staggered to her feet and stumbled back from the bed, horrified at the realization of what she had done. She wiped the hand that had smothered the woman on her apron, as if she could absolve herself of the sin.
She thudded back in shock against the bedroom door—
And heard the jangle of keys on the other side.
26.
Strictly speaking, there was no need for Dwight to keep the bedroom door locked. The Jarvis gal wasn’t going no place. But Dwight liked the way she’d start hollering when his key hit the lock, like she knew the fun and games were about to start. It was like that Mexican fella Dwayne once told him about, whose dogs would start drooling at the sound of a bell ringing—Pablo’s dogs—a bit like Roscoe when he heard the chainsaw and knew there’d be scraps coming his way.
But the Jarvis gal was unusually quiet as Dwight put his ear to the door.
He couldn’t hear the other gal, neither. The one the kin-killing sonofabitch in the cellar said was with him. It hadn’t been the easiest interrogation, what with the fella having a rat-bit tongue and no lips, but Dwight gleaned the general idea.
Dwight guessed the gal must’ve heard him coming and fixed to hide herself someplace. Good luck with that, sweetie pie … He didn’t think she’d slipped out the bedroom window or else Roscoe would be raising holy hell.
Dwight dug two shotgun shells from the bib of his coveralls, fed them into his sawed-off, and then snapped the barrels closed with a flick of his wrist. Bracing the shotgun before him, he toed the door open with his boot and then stalked inside, clearing the room with a sweep of the barrels.
Then he saw what’d happened to the Jarvis gal and gave a sickened moan. All the weeks of hard work just to keep her alive … only for some other split-tail to come along and snuff her. Worse than that, the body had been looted; the salesman’s arm was missing from the Jarvis gal’s cooter.
If there was one thing Dwight couldn’t abide it was a thief. Slamming the bedroom door shut behind him, he locked it from his hoop of keys and then slipped the keys back in the bib of his coveralls. The bitch wasn’t getting past him now. And there weren’t many places for her to hide.
He started searching.
She wasn’t in the closet—no room among the literal skeletons.
Nor under the bed—just a rubble of bones and mulch-like rotten flesh that had once been a travelling preacher.
Dwight peered out the window and saw Roscoe standing silent watch in the dooryard, not barking to wake the dead like he would’ve been if the bitch had snuck outside. He glanced to the bathroom to his right. The door was part closed. Dwight always kept it wide open so the Jarvis gal could see the salesman and not get too lonesome when he or Dwayne weren’t keeping her company.
He prodded the door open with his shotgun. The shower curtain was pulled across the tub. The salesman’s carcass hung in silhouette behind the translucent screen. Or so the split-tail wanted him to believe, Dwight thought, grinning.
Inching inside the bathroom, he reached a slow hand towards the shower curtain … and then ripped it down fast from the rail—
The salesman’s butchered body was hanging right where he’d left it.
“Well, goddamn it,” Dwight muttered.
The bitch had to be here someplace.
Where the fuck could she have got to?
Glancing down into the gore-filled bathtub, he saw his shimmering red reflection in the blood and guts. A bubble popped on the surface.
Dwight frowned—
And then she torpedoed up from the stinking sludge, clutching the salesman’s arm by the wrist, swinging the limb like a Louisville Slugger and socking Dwight hard in the jaw. His legs buckled. He staggered back, firing off a barrel from the shotgun. The blast was deafening in the enclosed space. Buckshot shredded the salesman’s carcass, splattering the bath tiles with maggoty gray meat. The body jangled wildly on its hook. Tore loose. Splashed down into the tub.
Before Dwight could fire off a second shot, Tilly swung the arm again and knocked the shotgun from his hands. It dropped into the tub and sank beneath the viscera. She swung the arm again and landed another crunching blow to his face. Dwight staggered back, skidding on the slop that had overflowed the bathtub. He lost his balance and crashed to the floor, grunting as the back of his head splintered the tiles.
Dripping with gore, Tilly hauled herself from the tub. She loomed over Dwight and raised the arm high above her head. With a hellcat scream, she brought the arm crashing down on his skull, again and again, pulping his face like a pumpkin.
Dwight finally lay still, apart from one twitching foot.
Tilly dropped the arm breathlessly. It thudded to the floor. She crumpled to her knees, gasping for breath and retching as she caught a whiff of herself. She considered stripping off her slime-sodden uniform, then remembered Hingle had used her panties to gag her when he locked her in Betsy’s trunk. She didn’t relish the idea of wandering about this slaughterhouse wearing only her bra.
She’d change later … after bathing for a year.
As she fished in the bib of Dwight’s coveralls for his keys, Tilly realized he was still clinging to life. Barely. She could feel his heart thudding weakly as she snatched the keys from his coveralls. Staggering to her feet, she stumbled for balance against the toilet. Prizing the heavy lid off the cistern, she raised the slab and was about to bring it crashing down upon Dwight’s skull … when from the corner of her eye she glimpsed a hellish apparition in the mirror above the sink.
With a ragged moan, she let the cistern slab slip loosely from her hands. It broke in two on the floor next to Dwight’s head. She limped towards the mirror and clutched the sink to support herself. The mirror glass was splintered. A jagged crack bisected her reflection. The whites of a stranger’s eyes
peered back at her through a scarlet mask. She ran the faucet and began scrubbing the blood from her face, her hands, her bare legs and arms with scalding water; snatched a filth-stiffened towel from a rack and scourged her flesh with it. But when she looked once again in the mirror she could still barely recognize herself.
Recoiling from her reflection, Tilly stepped over Dwight—who was splayed across the floor like a bearskin rug—and limped into the bedroom. Her ears were ringing from the shotgun blast. She felt numb and cold all over. Her bloody uniform clung to her body like a wetsuit. She paused in the bedroom and looked at the woman she had killed. The dead woman’s eye glared at her accusingly. Tilly searched the room for something to shroud the woman with. She found an old moth-eaten blanket in the closet, draped it over the woman, and then turned her back on her, knowing it would not be so easy to turn her back on what she had done.
27.
Tilly unlocked the bedroom door with Dwight’s keys, and then limped down the hall to the staircase. She staggered downstairs, clutching the banister for balance, her blood-sticky feet smacking like toffee on the bare wooden steps.
She limped across the hall towards the screen door. The first light of dawn was spilling inside. What a night it had been. One to tell the grandkids.
Outside in the yard she could see Dwight’s tow truck. She glanced at the hoop of keys she was holding and was surprised to see that her hand wasn’t shaking.
Reaching to open the door, she’d barely grasped the handle when the dog appeared suddenly at the foot of the porch, snarling and barking.
