The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  As far as she was concerned, she was a widow now. Russell Cavanaugh was dead.

  “Just standing here don’t make no sense,” Charles said sternly, snapping her back to attention.

  Theodora nodded rapidly, her chest rising and falling as if in anticipation of the hard run ahead of her. “Right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Margie led the way, wasting no time. She took off in a hard sprint, her shoes smacking the pavement, and both Charles and Theodora followed close behind. Russ bellowed angrily, flailed his arms and took off after them. The remaining members of his frightful entourage followed suit, leaving Jake behind in a pool of his own blood.

  Theodora hadn’t run far before her chest started to burn and feel much too tight, and she did not have to look back to know their pursuers were gaining ground. The pain in her ankle seemed to have spread out across the foot and up along her calf like poison moving slowly through her bloodstream. She bit her bottom lip and did her level best to ignore it. What air she managed to suck in with her short, desperate breaths was ice cold and stung her lungs like tiny needles. The chilled air burned her eyes and numbed her cheeks. Behind her, Russ moaned and screamed as he rapidly closed the distance between them. She knew she did not have long now, but she aimed to make what seconds were left to her count. Pumping her arms like pistons, she drove herself forward with her last ounces of energy, her final reserves. She never even heard the squealing tires or the roaring engine over the pulsing of her own blood in her ears.

  Charles, conversely, twisted at the waist as he sped down the street and caught sight of the wildly swerving headlamps. He cried, “Look!”

  The automobile careened toward them and when it was close enough for Charles to notice the bulbous roof light on top, he spread his arms and hooked Margie and Theodora around their waists to sweep them out of the speeding car’s path. The police car jerked to the right as the three of them fell into a tumble on the grass beside the road and plowed purposefully into the scrambling horde. Bodies smashed against the grill, rolled up over the hood and windscreen, flew into the air with limp arms and legs. Blood washed over the headlamps so that they burned an angry red.

  Half of the horde was sprawled out on the street, broken and twisted out of shape, when the police car growled down the street and abruptly spun around for a second pass. Theodora lifted herself up from the grass and watched Russ shake his arms like an enraged ape at the speeding automobile. He grunted and screeched, stamped his feet and screamed, “You can’t stop it! You can’t stop HIM!”

  Less than a second later, the broad expanse of the police car’s impenetrable Detroit steel pulverized Russ, collapsing his chest and driving him down and under the crushing tires. The car screeched to a halt, leaving a wide trail of slick black blood in its wake.

  Margie broke into a fit of heaving sobs and Theodora squeezed her as though she was the girl’s mother. The car idled where it stopped and the driver’s side door opened. A few of the horde still loomed near, the fat man from the drugstore and Phyllis Gates among them. The first thing to come out of the police car was the barrel of a 10-gauge shotgun. Sheriff Ernie Rich followed, grasping the gun like a man on a mission with a snarling face to match. He turned the weapon on the fat man, who waddled rapidly toward him.

  “Stop right there, Finn,” Rich yelled. “If there’s any part of you left in there, listen to me, man. I don’t want to put you down but I’ll do what I have to, you hear?”

  Finn kept coming. He still wore the long white apron he usually wore at the drugstore, which was now spattered with the blood of his dead compatriots. He threw his head back and let loose an ear-splitting wail as he pin-wheeled his arms and came on twice as fast.

  Ernie Rich proved himself to be a man of his word. With a shake of his head and a deeply furrowed brow, he drew a bead on Finn and blew a hole in the fat man’s chest big enough to push a glazed ham through. No sooner than Finn slammed against the street, Phyllis was up and scrabbling madly toward the sheriff, shrieking and spitting, clawing furiously at the air. The next thunderous blast took off the left side of her head in a gruesome red-black burst. Rich did not bother to wait for the remaining two to come after him; with grim determination he ejected the spent shells and reloaded as he marched over the dead and dying and took aim at a reedy little man with wispy blonde hair and the complexion of a corpse. Hershal, he thought as he squeezed the trigger and sent the little man spinning. His name was Hershal—sold me my shoes.

  The last of the horde was an older coloured man with stark white hair and stooped shoulders. He stood in Russ Cavanaugh’s blood and viscera, staring sorrowfully at the approaching sheriff. Rich recognized this man, too: he had been a tenant farmer back in the day, before Sims Dailey sold off his land and hung himself in the attic. Briefly, the lawman wondered what became of the sharecropper and his kin when they lost the lease, but the reverie was short-lived. The old man raised his trembling hands and seized two handfuls of his own hair, which he tore out at the roots.

  “You cain’t stop ’im,” the man said, grinning a toothless grin. “We seen things. We changin’.”

  Rich kept the 10-gauge trained on the old man and wished he could remember his name. He figured he’d have a better shot at keeping the old guy calm if he used his name, but it just wouldn’t come to him—far too many years had passed since last they crossed paths.

  “You fixing to run up on me, too?” he asked instead.

  “It don’t have to be like that,” the old man said, still holding on to his handfuls of hair. “You can change too, if’n you want to. You just got to see. You want to see, Mr. Sheriff?”

  “You ain’t got nothing I want to see, fella. Whyn’t you just show me the palms of your hands and keep real still, all right?”

  “But he wants to show you, Sheriff. He wants you to see.”

  Rich’s hands were slick with sweat despite the incredible cold snap, but he maintained a firm grasp on the shotgun. “Just do like I say, fella. Palms up.”

  The old man opened his mouth, stretching his lips to their utmost limit, and opened his hands. White tufts sprinkled down and floated away.

  “Okay,” Rich said, “Here’s what we’re gonna do—”

  But he did not get to tell the old man what they were going to do. Instead, he was interrupted by the keening screech that erupted from the man’s gaping mouth, an impossible, wholly inhuman siren. Startled, Rich jerked as the old man curled his hands into talon-like claws and fell into a stumbling run.

  “Stop!” Rich yelled.

  The old man did not stop. Rich gritted his teeth and fired. At six feet away, the old man’s head came apart like an overripe melon. Rich turned away and squeezed his eyes shut. A shiver worked its way through his body that didn’t come from the cold. When he opened his eyes again, a pair of figures stood up in the grass beside the road. Rich spun around and pointed the shotgun at them, suddenly nervous that there was only one shell and no time to reload if they both came screaming at him. Instead, both figures threw up their hands and a male voice cried, “Don’t shoot!”

  “Who’s there?” the sheriff shouted. “Speak up!”

  “Ch—Charles Day, sir! My name is Charles Day! And this here’s Theodora Cavanaugh, Russell Cavanaugh’s wife!”

  Rich balked. “I just ran Russ Cavanaugh down,” he called back. “Killed him. You aim to do something foolish, Mrs. Cavanaugh?”

  “No, I don’t,” Theodora said. “I aim to thank you, Sheriff. Those . . . people . . . were like to have murdered us.”

  Gradually, Ernie Rich let the barrel of his shotgun down until it was even with his leg. He squinted into the dark and said, “Who all you got there with you?”

  “Me, Charles, and Margie Shannon,” Theodora said.

  “The preacher’s kid?”

  “That’s right,” Margie said, standing up.

  “I think I need to have
a word with your daddy, Ms. Shannon,” Rich told her.

  Margie expelled a heavy sigh. “I think we all do,” she said.

  Jojo handed the shaken man a mug of coffee from his own cupboard. It was instant, but it was all Shannon had. The reverend accepted the steaming mug with a nod of thanks.

  “Please excuse me,” he said solemnly as Jojo sat down across the table from him. “It was not my intention to insult or offend you. I was already in a—well, a troubled state of mind.”

  Jojo sipped at his own cup and made a face of displeasure that he hoped, for once, was masked by the coat of hair covering his features. “It’s all right,” he said. “I guess it can be pretty startling. Normally I shave two or three times a day. It’s been a strange day, though.”

  “You said it,” Shannon agreed. He gulped at the sour coffee and didn’t make a face.

  Jojo asked, “Mind if I smoke?” even as he lit a cigarette. He raised his bushy brow and sucked deeply at the filter. “I guess we should start from the beginning,” he said.

  Jim Shannon killed his coffee and exhaled loudly. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop and after a while muttered, “It’s all my fault.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I lost my faith. I think I’m being punished. I think we’re all being punished for my sin.”

  “That doesn’t . . . I mean, I don’t buy that, rev. I’m not a believer myself, not really. If that’s all it takes, it could just as well be my fault.”

  “No, you don’t understand.”

  “Okay: make me understand.”

  Shannon smiled sourly and reached for the packet of Old Golds in front of Jojo.

  “Do you mind?” he asked.

  “Go right ahead.”

  The reverend stabbed one in his mouth and ignited it. He inhaled and turned a light shade of green and coughed like a man dying of tuberculosis.

  “I don’t really smoke,” he apologized when his breath returned.

  “Could’ve fooled me,” Jojo said.

  “Hell, I’ve fooled everybody. I’ve been doing it for years—spewing all this garbage from the pulpit and laughing at the absurdity of it down inside. I’m a liar, Mr. Walker. A fraud.”

  “Did you ever believe any of it?”

  “Absolutely,” Shannon said, taking another drag. He was starting to get used to it. “When I was a boy, I thought I saw the Devil once. Or I saw something, had a sort of experience, I suppose you could say, and later when I talked to my granddad about it he laid it all out for me. I had met Satan himself, and the mean old bastard drew a fork in the road for me. He said I could take the easy way or the hard way. I always thought I opted for the hard way, the Lord’s way. These last couple of years, though . . .”

  “Forgive me, rev, but you’re sort of talking in circles.”

  “I know I am. I don’t know how else to talk. Empty platitudes and reassurances, that’s all that’s come out of this mouth in twenty years or more. I’ll tell you, if the good people of this town honestly need me to tell them not to kill each other and rape their neighbours, then there’s no hope, Mr. Walker. There’s no hope at all.”

  Jojo expelled twin streams of smoke through his nostrils and gazed at the oily surface of the coffee in his mug. A shimmering reflection of a hairy face he had not seen since a different lifetime stared back at him. A lifetime he had somehow managed to forget altogether until Barker Davis took it upon himself to make him remember. Jojo swallowed and rolled his shoulders, working out the cricks from laying so long on the cellar floor.

  “Tell me about Barker Davis,” he said at length.

  “I’m not sure what to say about him. We haven’t met, but I think he came here because of me. Because of what I’ve done, and what I haven’t done.”

  “Circles, rev.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll try to be more clear.”

  “Just give me the facts; tell me a story in chronological order.”

  Shannon laughed. “That’s right—you used to work for Ernie Rich, didn’t you? I’d forgotten.”

  “I didn’t look like a monster movie reject then.”

  Shannon shook his head.

  “Let me think,” he said. “I expect it started around the same time you and Rich had your falling out, really. That’s been about a year now, hasn’t it?”

  Jojo quietly agreed that it had.

  “Yes,” Shannon said, “a bad time all around. You got it the worst, I suppose, but a great deal of people had rough going around then.”

  Jojo narrowed his eyes. “How do you mean?”

  “Hmm—you probably wouldn’t have noticed other people’s problems, not with so much tragedy raining down on your own head. But I’ll give you the scorecard version:

  “Russell Cavanaugh, the fellow who runs the Palace Theater? I gather he started drinking around then. That, and wailing on his poor wife. They both stopped coming to church, but a pastor hears a lot.

  “And there was Tuck Arnold, whose wife ran out. Tuck was allegedly having relations with his register girl. . . .”

  “Georgia May,” Jojo said, frowning. He hadn’t known that.

  “Yes, that’s her. Mrs. Arnold found out about it and simply up and left one day. I don’t believe they ever positively identified the body they found out in the northern woods as her, but Tuck knew. Everybody knew. That poor woman went out there to die.

  “Of course, there’s Eddie Manning, who went off to fight in the war, and nobody’s heard hide nor hair of him since. His mama doesn’t speak anymore, I’ve heard. And Bradley Finn.”

  “Drugstore Finn? I just saw him the other day. Seemed as jolly as ever.”

  “He’s a generally optimistic type, Finn. And he’s had a year to get used to sleeping at the drugstore since his house burned to the ground.”

  “God.”

  “God’s another thing,” Shannon added. “Sometimes I think God left Litchfield a year ago. That’s when my faith dried up and died, practically overnight, and a whole mess of other people, too. I have a core group of faithful congregants, old ladies mostly, but nothing like it was before. Maybe they only lost faith in me, but I’m sure it’s more than that. With everything else in this sad, pathetic place, it has to be more. A dark cloud settled over Litchfield and it never went away. If you were to ask me, I’d tell you it never will.”

  Jojo tamped his smoke out and immediately lit another. “Bleak perspective.”

  “Just the way I see it, my friend. Life goes on—it always goes on—but that oily, black sludge keeps on bubbling up in the flower beds, if you’ll forgive the metaphor.”

  “So what has any of that got to do with you?”

  The reverend made a taut line of his mouth and scrunched his brow.

  “Before any of those catastrophes happened, I found something. Something unusual, to say the least. I had been trimming the hedges around the church that morning and brought the tools back here, to the house. I keep them down in the cellar.”

  “I saw.”

  “I had quite the armload, and I must have stumbled at the bottom of the steps. The whole load of tools I was carrying went sailing, and the shears stabbed the dirt right in the centre of the floor. They couldn’t have been more than a couple of inches in, hardly enough to support the weight of the rest of them, but sure enough those shears were standing straight up like a dousing rod. I worked around them, picking up every other tool and depositing them on their places on the shelves, and then I just sat down on the ground and waited.”

  “Waited? For what?”

  “I’m really not sure. For something to happen, maybe. Perhaps I just wanted to see if the shears would fall, something to prove that it was just a freak thing. But they remained quite firm. A few minutes later I even discovered that it wasn’t easy to dislodge them. It reminded me of Excalibur, the way I had to jerk my back and sh
oulders to free the damn things.”

  “But you did.”

  “Yes, and I took up a fair amount of the floor in the process.”

  “That hole down there?”

  “I dug it out some more, after I saw the gleam of the metal.”

  “Something buried there.”

  “Something buried there,” Shannon agreed.

  “What?”

  The reverend cleared his throat and rose from his chair. “It’s probably better that I show you. I won’t be a moment.”

  Shannon vanished down a dark hallway, leaving Jojo alone in the cold, quiet kitchen. The cold came as something of a surprise to him; he did not expect a reverend to have the wherewithal to pump expensive cold air into his house. A cursory glance at the curtained kitchen windows surprised him even more: the curtains danced and floated from the frigid air passing through the open windows. He screwed up his face and started to get up for a closer look when Shannon returned from the hall, a shiny metal sculpture in his hands.

  Returning to his chair opposite Jojo, Shannon held onto the object a moment longer before gently setting it down on the table between them. Jojo gripped the edge of the tabletop and leaned over for a better look. An inverted triangle with a pair of slashes cutting through it, its point splitting into curving loops with an ornate V resting between them. The burnished metal shone almost gold in the kitchen light.

  “Okay,” Jojo said. “What is it?”

  “It took me months to find out for myself,” the reverend said, keeping his eyes on the mysterious cipher. “I’d never seen anything like it. Eventually I mustered the courage to write a letter to a fellow I know in Little Rock, another pastor with a peculiar interest in arcane matters like this.” Running the tip of his index finger over the intersecting lines of the symbol, Shannon continued: “I drew the symbol in pencil as best as I could and asked my friend if he could tell me anything about it. I couldn’t believe how quickly his response came.”