by Sam Millar
Dad sighed. ‘What your mother is trying to say, is that we know your hormones are driving you nuts at the minute, and experimenting probably helps to control them. Sex can be confusing at your age.’
I was cringing inside, my face rapidly going from white to deep scarlet. ‘Dad, this is embarrassing. I know all about the birds and bees, and all that crap.’
‘Watch your mouth, Mister,’ Mom said, speaking with the confidence of someone who never had to repeat herself. ‘And don’t interrupt your father when he’s talking. This is for your own good.’
‘What’s for my own good?’
Dad was starting to look flustered. ‘Tommy, what we’re saying is that sometimes growing up can be confusing and complex, and sex is all part of growing up. That’s all we’re saying.’ He looked over at Mom. It was her turn to carry the ball.
‘Before you try to lie your way out of this,’ Mom said, glaring at me. ‘I saw the way you were … behaving with that boy, this afternoon.’
‘Boy? What boy?’
‘What boy, he says!’ Mom rolled her eyes heavenwards. ‘The one you were pushing on the swing. That boy. What was that all about, giggling and laughing for all the neighbours to hear and see? I saw him hand you that drawing. I want the truth, and I want it now. What’s going on between the two of you?’
‘The truth, Tommy. We want the truth,’ Dad said, voice soft and controlled. ‘A lie is like a boomerang. It always comes back to you, hits you on the back of the neck. Your mother and I are not here to judge, just to help.’
‘First of all, I don’t need help about anything. Devlin’s not a boy. She’s a girl; a beautiful girl,’ I said angrily. My face was as red as Mom’s. ‘That’s how she likes to dress, in jeans. So what? Is that a crime?’
‘A girl …?’ Mom looked unconvinced. ‘Didn’t look like a girl to me. So stop trying to be smart, when you know you’re anything but.’
‘I’m not trying to be smart. I’m telling you the truth! Can’t you see?’
‘Whatever you’re selling, Mister, it sure ain’t the truth, and I ain’t buying. And that drawing? This Devlin, why on earth would she give you something so … something so vulgar?’
‘It’s not vulgar! It’s …’ I almost said ‘me’, but thankfully managed to grab my tongue in time.
‘It’s what?’ Mom said, folding her arms.
‘Well … she’s … she’s an artist … that’s her latest drawing.’
‘An artist? Ha! If that’s true, then what were you doing with it, hid under your bed?’
‘I … well …’ I didn’t want you to have a heart attack, seeing your son’s cock-a-doodle-doo, that’s what. ‘She let me borrow it. I … I was going to let Horseshoe see the drawing, compare it to the stuff he does.’
‘I don’t believe a single word you’ve just said.’
‘That’s nothing new. You never believe me, do you?’
‘Watch it with the mouth, Mister! One way or another, I’m going to find out what this is all about.’
‘Devlin?’ said Dad. ‘What’s the rest of her name?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Ha! What’d I tell you?’ Mom said triumphantly. ‘He’s lying through his teeth – as usual.’
‘Surely you know her second name, Son?’ asked Dad. It sounded like an accusation. ‘If we know her full name, it’ll make it easier and quicker to contact her parents.’
‘She only has her mom. They live over beside Stockman’s Field. A big farmhouse sort of place. I don’t know the actual address.’
‘He’s making it up as he goes along.’ Mom closed her eyes and sighed. ‘Get out of my sight. Now. Go to your room. Stay there and don’t come out. You’re grounded. And leave that disgusting drawing there. I’m going to burn it.’
That was when I saw blood.
‘You’re not burning it! It belongs to me. I won’t let you burn it.’ I stood and grabbed the drawing.
‘Put that thing down, now, while you’re still breathing, Mister.’
‘Dad?’ I looked directly at him.
He sighted. ‘We can’t burn someone else’s property, Helen. We could end up being sued. It’ll have to be given back to the young girl. I’ll put it in the trunk of my car. It’ll stay there until I find out exactly where she lives. Tommy? The drawing.’ He held out his hand.
Reluctantly, I handed it to him.
Mom glared at me with eyes that could have stripped paint from a wall. ‘You must have a twin, Mister, because I already told the other one to get to his room, four-and-a-half seconds ago. Now move it!’
Like a chastised dog, I quickly disappeared upstairs to my room, wondering why the hell bad things always happened to me.
Chapter Twelve
Hare-Raising Experience
Prying curiosity means death.
HP Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls
So far, Mom had refused to relent on the life sentence of solitary confinement she had imposed on me. A full week had gone by – seven days, 168 hours, 604,800 seconds – and counting. In all that time, I barely slept, as insomnia took over. The purplish bags under my eyes began turning into something sinister, like Vincent Price in a horror movie. I couldn’t get Devlin out of my head. What if she’d gone back to the lake, just to see me? What would she think, with me not being there?
On the eighth day of my imprisonment, at breakfast, Mom offered some kindly advice.
‘You better start behaving, quit all this nonsense of pretending not to sleep. You’re not a three-year-old kid – just acting like one. But, hey, you want me to treat you like one? No problem. I can start by reducing this week’s pocket money to what a three-year-old would get, and putting you to bed good and early.’
‘I think Tommy’s seen the error of his ways, Helen,’ Dad said, looking at me from across the table. ‘Right, Tommy?’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘You better have, because next time there won’t be a next time,’ Mom said.
‘A beautiful day like this, seems a waste to be stuck inside,’ Dad offered, glancing out the window at the cloudless sky. ‘I’m sure if you said you’re sorry to Mom for shouting at her, she would be generous and let you out.’
I hesitated for a few seconds before gritting my teeth. ‘I’m … I’m sorry, Mom,’ I mumbled, hating myself for giving in to her, even though I was in the right.
‘Get out of my sight, and keep away from trouble,’ she said, not even bothering to look at me.
Once outside, it took me less than an hour to do what Devlin had told me never to do.
The second I stepped out into the forest clearing, the isolated farmhouse came into view. I studied the eerie-looking place for a few minutes, debating with myself. I wasn’t yet fully committed to the mad plan in my head.
‘To hell with it. Stop being such a sissy,’ I finally told myself, agreeing to the madness.
I made my way cautiously in the direction of the barn, avoiding the carved path leading to it. The ground beneath my feet felt slightly sodden and spongy, from a thunderstorm the night before. It smelled of wet mushrooms and turned-up soil. Overhead, the afternoon sky was fading to the colour of dry clay, with tongues of darker grey clouds. Another storm seemed imminent, despite Dad’s earlier prediction.
Reaching the farm, I eased the barn door open and slithered in, like the snaky, obsessive bastard I had become. Pitch blackness greeted me. I waited a few seconds for my eyes to become accustomed to the gloom. All I could think about was how the hell I was going to find Devlin.
Suddenly, I heard something behind me. Unfortunately, I hadn’t heard it suddenly enough. The barn door snapped open and, before I could move, the place became filled with the day’s dull, oppressive light.
‘Private ground, boy. Trespassing gets you killed,’ said a voice directly behind me. Turning, I managed to say the word ‘shit’, before my mouth froze with fear.
A woman, her face shadowed from the dull light, stood in the doorway, sucking on a h
and-rolled cigarette. Its hot nipple glowed like a ghostly SOS message. A warning too late, it would seem, as I stared at what her arms harboured: a lean and mean pump-action shotgun, housed in the crank of her elbow. She cradled the gun affectionately, as if it were a sleeping child. An ugly-looking weapon, it was speckled with tiny freckles of rust that teased out the metal into an uneven surface. More worryingly than the gun, I could detect the stench of booze coming from the woman’s mouth.
Behind her stood a bear of a man, his massive face covered by a forest of unruly beard, his eyes flat as flint. What skin could be seen was jaundiced-yellow, and the colour was matched by his sporadic teeth. He smiled craftily – an unreal-looking smile, like something he’d just bought from a pawnbroker. He was wearing history clothes – someone else’s history – and a wine bottle protruded from his pants like a pickpocket’s fist.
‘That’s him, Miss Jessica,’ the man said, pointing gleefully at me. ‘Saw him snooping about the place. He thought I didn’t see him. Got to get up earlier if he wants to try and fool me.’
‘You can return to your work now, Mister McCoy,’ Miss Jessica said, her eyes never leaving mine.
McCoy nodded to Miss Jessica, before giving me a smug smirk. He looked like a fox with a chicken clamped firmly in its jaws as he exited the barn.
‘What’s your business snooping about my property, boy?’ Miss Jessica said, her face tightening into a spider’s web of suspicion.
Despite her slenderness, Miss Jessica’s arms looked muscularly chiselled, just right for giving headlocks. I would certainly have hated it to be my head in any wrestling match with her.
A million lies went racing through my head, competing for attention. I quickly selected the best one. ‘I was … searching for a friend of mine. I thought I saw him head this way, but I must’ve been mistaken, ma’am. I’m sorry if I –’
In an instant, she brought the shotgun to my face, barrel in line with my nose. I went cross-eyed. She cocked the weapon. I could feel my face screwing inward like a bathtub draining. I was no longer conscious of my own breathing. Distressingly, I smelled shit. My own. I’d just crapped my pants.
Miss Jessica’s nostrils flared. If the smell bothered her, she didn’t say. What she did eventually say bothered me.
‘Ma’am, is it? Very polite – for a thief and trespasser. What were you planning on stealing, boy? The answer better be good, or else it’ll be bad – for you.’
My balls, at that particular stage in my development, were about the size of small plums, but within seconds of having the evil-looking gun glued to my face, they had shrunk to pea-size. My stomach churned, making a disgusting farting noise. I knew I was about to shit myself again, any second now. I prayed I wouldn’t faint, lest any sudden movement would cause her to pull the trigger.
I forced my lips to move. ‘I … I wasn’t gonna steal anything. Honest, ma’am. I wasn’t.’
‘Your eyes do a strange twitch when you’re lying, even in bad light. Look like a captured rat’s. Did you know that, boy?
‘No, ma’am.’
‘Soiled your pants, too.’
‘I … I’m sorry …’ I wanted to cry with embarrassment.
‘You’re really something, ain’t you?’ she said, in such a way as to let me know I was anything but.
‘Yes, ma’am – I mean, no, ma’am.’
‘Move,’ she hissed, indicating with the shotgun. ‘Don’t try anything stupid. I’ll shoot if I have to. I’ve got the law on my side, when it comes to trespassers and thieves. You wouldn’t be the first one I’ve shot. Believe me.’
She didn’t need to try too hard to convince me. I believed her. I had a terrible vision of Dad rushing to the scene, only to discover his only son – Shit-The-Pants-Tommy – splattered everywhere like spaghetti and ketchup.
As we entered through the back of the house and into the kitchen, I felt like a condemned man, with a pocket of small expectations that would eventually come to nothing. The kitchen stank of stale paint, decaying potatoes and some other terrible smell, alien to my senses. Despite the afternoon’s heat, a glow from an old kerosene heater painted pale jaundice on the wooden walls. Unwashed pots formed a metallic pyramid in the sink. A block of butter, touched by afternoon heat, had turned to mush. The room was shelved with the battlefield of decapitated taxidermy: Hares. Foxes. Badgers. A deer’s head adorned one of the walls. It regarded me with sad, soulful eyes, as if to say, ‘You too?’ Below the deer, a bow – its quiver stuffed with arrows – was nailed to the door, alongside a collection of medieval-looking machetes and serrated hunting knives.
‘Sit. Over there,’ she said, pointing the shotgun at a corner of the room.
I quickly complied, and even though I was terrified to look directly at Miss Jessica’s face, I couldn’t resist its magnetic pull. Her blonde hair was pulled back tightly, revealing numerous bald patches speckled through the thin, greasy strands. I could see a scant line of discoloration, where some of the hair had recently been removed. Penetrating blue eyes had a life of their own. But it was her striking face that dominated. It was a carbon copy of Devlin’s – or at least what Devlin would look like in later years. There was no longer any doubt in my head: this was Devlin’s mother.
Miss Jessica slowly sat down opposite me. Not speaking, she chose instead to simply stare at my face, as if knowing the power of a perfect measure of silence. I felt like a bird being watched by a hungry cat.
Minutes ticked by, measured by an old wall clock directly above my head. Tick. Tick. Tick. Its wooden sound throbbed in my temples. Fear began playing tricks with my eyes; the raw fear only isolation can produce.
Almost imperceptibly, the silence in the room was slowly diluted. It was only now that I began to hear weird noises, coming from somewhere near. Soft squeals. Little soft squeals of fear.
What seemed an eternity of tense near-silence was broken by the woman’s movements. She placed the shotgun at her feet, before reaching into a large metal container, revealing the source of those horrible tiny sounds.
‘Hares,’ she said, dangling one of the squealing creatures in midair by the ears. ‘Don’t you just love when they make that sound, their complete hopelessness?’
The creature made the sound a hungry baby makes searching for a nipple; a haunting sound so ominous it reached to the ghetto of my soul, tattooing it forever.
Leaning closer, she held the struggling hare inches from my face, and with sleight-of-hand, produced a pearl-handled knife. In a horrible and bloody instant, she slit the unfortunate creature’s throat, releasing a river of blood that covered her fingernails like rose petals. The hare jerked violently. Instinctively, my hand moved to my throat. I felt myself grimacing. I tried to unknot the terrified look on my face, but she had seen it, and smiled slyly. The stench of newly hot blood made me retch. I desperately fought the urge to throw up.
‘You gonna soil your pants again?’
‘God, the smell …’ I mumbled.
Like lightning, she slapped me across the face with the bloody hare. The slap knocked me off the seat, and I landed squarely on my shitty ass. In an instant, I wanted to do two things: cry, and then rub the sting of humiliation off my face. Instead, I remained motionless. This woman was going to kill me. She would probably mince me up with rabbits’ meat, and sell me as pies.
She glared at me, then snapped off a line from a gangster movie: ‘I ought to pick that gun up and shoot a hole in your chest, teach you not to take the Lord’s name in vain, boy.’
‘I’m … I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to –’
‘Where’d you learn to blaspheme the Lord? Your filthy ma and pa teach you that?’
‘No, ma’am. They … they’d be very angry with me if they knew I spoke like that – especially ma.’
‘Are they good Christian people? Do they attend church and read their Bible?’
Neither of my parents attended church, but that didn’t make them bad people.
‘Both my parents are good.
Dad picks the Bible up every day.’ That much was true anyway, though he’d disembowelled his copy of the good book.
‘Then you should be ashamed of yourself shaming them, talking such.’
‘I am ashamed. Truly I am. If Mom heard me, she’d skin the hide off me with her whip,’ I said, hoping these were the kind of words she liked to hear. ‘I wouldn’t be able to sit down for a year, ma’am.’
‘“My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions.” That’s the Bible, boy. With scorpions. Think yourself lucky your ma does not use the everlasting sting. Don’t ever blaspheme the Lord’s holy name. His wrath is unmerciful, and His damnation everlasting. Do you want Him to come after you, with all His power of damnation?’
‘I … I’m truly sorry, ma’am. I … I promise never to do it again.’
‘Make sure you do keep that promise. Dark happenings have a strange and peculiar way of revealing themselves upon us, when least we expect them. Now stop lying there like a pathetic fool, and sit down.’
For the next two hours, I sat there uncomfortably in my own shit. It was hardening like cement, and I wondered if I would ever be able to stand again without walking like John Wayne?
In all that time of torturous waiting, my own torment paled in comparison to the hares’. Twenty of them met a similar fate to their first selected cousin. Their mercuric bluish entrails slipped through her fingers and were deposited into a bucket scabbed with blood and rust. After all the hares had been sent to Hare Heaven, kindly Miss Jessica skinned them, pulling each one inside-out with a single, deft movement, before festooning their pelts upon homemade, bloodstained hooks dangling from the ceiling. Ghoulishly, the pelts retained the hares’ tiny faces, each adorned gloriously with a grotesque, posthumous grin.
‘Don’t pay them no heed,’ Miss Jessica said, watching my eyes skim over the dead.
‘I … can’t help feeling sorry for them, ma’am.’
‘Sorry? You’re not in a position to feel sorry for anything, boy. Besides, they’re only animals; nothing but simple animals put on this earth for us to eat.’ She wiped sweat from her face, leaving a trail of skidded blood across her mouth. The blood glazed her lips, making them fat and obscene.
