A Host of Shadows

by Harry Shannon

  Clyde Harrow got to his feet and stumbled clumsily down the wooden steps. Julie and I could see him again in the streetlight. He turned in the road like a terrified animal.

  “You know what’s really got me going?”

  Mr. Peterson stared at him, prudish mouth slightly agape. Clyde Harrow looked sheepish. He smiled in a minor key. “I lay awake nights wondering what that creature looks like…up close. Now I got to go and fill the beware-man up before it’s too late. That’s the ticket.”

  Peterson sighed. “Now, don’t you get yourself spooked. There’s a natural explanation for this, there surely is.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Maybe. But in the meantime I’ll leave the beware-man out front just in case. A man has got to have something to believe in.”

  “You get some sleep, Clyde.”

  “Night, Peterson.”

  A couple of minutes later Clyde fired up that beat-to-hell cherry red 1940 Ford he kept together with spit and baling wire. The engine coughed low as a sleepy lion, then roared to life and farted away down the asphalt.

  Down below the porch, one gorgeous teenaged girl was twisting her frustrated lover’s shirt in her hands and gasping for breath because she was so excited. But it was the wrong kind of excited. Julie was a naughty girl by nature. I could see her eyes twirling like cherries in a slot machine. My stomach sank, because whenever Julie got this way there was bound to be trouble. If wanted a shot at some pussy tonight I’d have to do her some dumb-ass favor or another.

  See, Clyde Harrow wasn’t too popular with the high school kids. He had fired buckshot at a few of us he caught skinny-dipping in his duck pond. I’d been one of those kids. So had Julie Dawson, whose already feeble reputation had seen further damage due to Clyde’s big mouth. Her father had grounded her for a month after slapping her silly. Now the grudge-prone girl saw her chance to get even.

  “Honey?”

  Woody softening, mood darkening. “What?”

  Soft breath, taut breasts and pouting red lips. “Do you want me?”

  “Julie, I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Let’s pick up Little Stinky and go to Harrow’s farm,” she said, excitedly. “It’s trick or treat time, baby. Clyde’s half out of it already, and he’s got himself scared of the dark. Well, we’re going to pay him a visit and seriously fuck with his mind.”

  Little Stinky Ragland was a pimple-skinned midget in blue jeans and a torn t-shirt. He ate moldy pizza from the trash and sniffed spray painted rags for kicks. Stinky, who was not only tiny but maybe two notches below stupid, also had a body odor that could peel wallpaper. I tolerated Stinky because Julie liked him. Julie liked him because he would do anything she wanted, whenever she wanted. Not that she had much trouble manipulating the boys. When Julie got an idea like this in her head there was no use arguing.

  Little Stinky lived with his drunken father, who beat him regular and then passed out on the couch. We threw pebbles at his window until Stinky stuck his head out. And started singing a Buddy Holly song in his wimpy tenor, so his old man must have been out cold. Julie wiggled and whispered and in a big city minute Stinky had slithered down the tree to join us. Julie explained what the evening’s festivities were all about.

  “Oh, cool,” Stinky said. His stoned pupils were little fecal pinpricks. “I’m in.”

  I knew when to throw in the towel. “Okay, okay. I’ll drive.”

  “He’ll hear us coming that way. We’ll walk it.”

  “All three of us? It’s nigh on five miles, round trip!”

  Stinky had already started walking. He looked like the kid in the Chaplin movies. I decided to dig in my heels.

  “Screw it. I’m out.”

  Julie took measure of my annoyance, saw that I was serious. She stroked my fly. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Young fool that I was, I went for it. I pounced like a duck on a June bug. We got a six-pack of beer from the back of my truck and started walking. Stinky, he never even turned around—but he moved so slow we had no trouble catching up.

  It had been raining on and off for a week. This was one of those odd fall evenings when the moon is a pocked piece of marble and gossamer clouds hang below it like a burial shroud. The air was thick with the smell of night blooming jasmine, enough to cover even Little Stinky’s BO, although all I really smelled was Julie’s perfume and my own frustrated sexuality.

  We went through the thicket called Briar’s Wood, where the brush grew thick as fingers on a clenched fist, and then beyond it and into a patch of dead farmland. Now and again we would let Stinky wander ahead and stop to neck a bit. The rare, errant gust of wind stroked our hormone-addled flesh. Lightning spider-webbed the far horizon and a low rumble followed seconds later. The air felt electrically charged. Stinky started in singing the Buddy Holly song again, something about rocking and rolling around the clock. His thin voice echoed eerily through the empty field.

  The three of us went across Parker’s meadow, cut around behind his horse barn and then followed the damp creek bed until we were at the cusp of Clyde Harrow’s property. Stinky seemed focused; I was less enthusiastic. But whenever my courage or energy would falter, Julie would undo my zipper and yank my crank a bit to get my head back into the game.

  “Aw shit!”

  Stinky tripped stepping over a raised up tree root and almost spilled one of the last cans of warm Natty Bo. In his haste to protect the brew he over-corrected himself and took a knee. His huge left calf went straight down into a cow paddy that was crusty like a Frisbee on the outside, juicy as pus in the center. Julie giggled herself foolish. By now, we were all already more than a little drunk. After a few seconds Stinky laughed too, a wheezing cough that didn’t carry far.

  Another trident of lightning split the sky to the West. The horizon growled. We sat down to rest. Stinky found a thick twig by the sullen white moonlight and scraped the crap off his skinny leg. “Let’s take a breather,” I said, dropping where I stood. “And you tell us just what the hell it is you got in mind.”

  “This old man has been a pain in the ass for too long, right? And hell, he’s already got himself spooked. He’s put up some dumb-ass scarecrow for Chrissakes, and now he’s going to fill it with God knows what.”

  “The beware-man.”

  “Right. So we’re going to play with him some. I figure maybe we crunch around his yard making noises to start with.”

  “OooOOOOOooooohhhhh…” Stinky moaned, rehearsing an eerie Halloween voice. Actually, it wasn’t half bad. “I got to piss,” he announced. He bounced to his feet, turned his back and let fly a steaming yellow stream. Julie shook her head, grinned at me and held her pretty nose.

  “That’s it?” I asked in a low voice. “Assuming the crazy old bastard doesn’t up and fill Little Stinky’s ass full of buckshot, what do we do after that?”

  Julie looked down. I thought I’d never seen anything half as beautiful as her face in the moonlight. “I don’t know,” she said, weakly. “I thought maybe we’d make it up as we go. Maybe we stuff some cow shit in that thing.”

  And then I got the idea that was to prove our undoing. I saw a chance to be her hero, and let my mind go racing. “We could tip things over in his barn,” I offered. “That would scare the crap out of him. One of us could keep an eye on the house, and if he comes outside toss a bucket into the hog pen to warn the others.”

  Julie sat in my lap. She squirmed with delight. “I like it, I like it.” I nearly went crazy from the sensation. “Maybe Clyde will have himself a heart attack and die!” Right about then, I felt a slight twinge of guilt for upping the ante, but told myself I was only trying to get laid. Surely, God would understand.

  Little Stinky zipped his fly and turned around. The moon sat behind his head like a pale halo and it was impossible to read his features. Getting into the spirit, he reached down the leg of his jeans and produced a wickedly gleaming, saw-toothed skinning knife. “How about I do one of his chickens and spread blood around the yard? T
hen when he comes out he’ll see the guts and feathers everywhere?”

  “Oh, I like that!”

  Julie bounced up and down again. I almost reached the heights. But she hopped to her feet too quickly and spun around like a ballerina. “He runs outside and sees blood and guts everywhere? I don’t just like it, I love it. Then we just sneak away.”

  “Works for me,” Stinky said.

  Her face went solemn. “And I want this to be our little secret, you hear? We never tell anyone we done it. None of us, never. You swear?”

  Delirious with lust, I nodded swiftly. “Sure. I swear.”

  Stinky surprised the both of us by slicing open his palm. A thin tendril of blood trickled down his flesh.

  “Let’s make it a blood oath.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” I replied, and laughed out loud. “Don’t tell me you believe in this kind of crap.”

  “Everybody got to believe in something,” Stinky said, solemnly.

  Julie was already nodding. “A blood oath.” She took the knife from Stinky and, to her credit, cut herself with very little flinching. I swallowed my natural response and stood up; reluctantly touched the blade to my palm. It cut through my flesh like it was warm butter; the wound was surprisingly painless.

  The three of us clasped hands. Julie, her eyes wide with excitement and melodrama, pronounced the oath. “We’re going to bust our butts to drive old Clyde Harrow nuts, fuck with his beware-man thing, and then we’re gonna keep this a secret forever. I swear on my mother’s life. Agreed?”

  “I swear,” Stinky said.

  “I swear.” I pulled my hand away as rapidly as possible; wiped Stinky’s blood off on my pants. I could see the smear, black in the moonlight.

  Julie looked at her two soldiers and smiled. “Let’s do it.” She marched ahead, swinging her arms, with me and Stinky following. Our feet made sucking noises in the thick, brown mud.

  It started to rain again. As we crossed the field by moonlight, a thin cloud began to mist over us like the cool spray from a lawn sprinkler. I watched Julie’s butt cheeks rolling in her tight jeans and cursed myself for being such a horn dog. Truth be told, that blood oath business made me feel like I’d done something evil. I clutched my St. Christopher medal and asked for protection.

  Julie had a way of getting a guy into truly deep shit.

  When we got to the edge of Clyde Harrow’s property Stinky raised his fist for us to stop. He sank to one knee and motioned me forward. I flashed on a billion bad war films and giggled. The beer was getting to me. Stinky pointed with one trembling arm. Squinting, I followed a direct line of sight and gasped.

  A huge man with a pitchfork was standing right in the middle of the barnyard. He was grinning with long, sharp teeth.

  “Jeez!’ I hissed. “Lay down or he’ll see us!”

  We dropped flat as pancakes on the spot. Julie was caught up in the moment and didn’t seem to mind the mud and cow shit covering her pretty white blouse.

  “How’d he know we was coming?” Little Stinky whined. “It’s like he’s standing there waiting for us.”

  I squinted. The rain was coming down a bit harder now, making it more difficult to see. I felt in the muck, grabbed a fair sized rock and heaved it at the figure in our way. The rock bounced into a nearby puddle, but the man didn’t move an inch. I chuckled. “That’s not Clyde. It’s that damned beware-man. The thing he put up and chanted over.”

  “Huh? It’s a freakin’ scarecrow?” Stinky hadn’t been under the porch. He was lost. “This time of year?”

  “It’s something he did to warn away these monsters he thinks drink human blood,” Julie said. She seemed to find the whole thing beyond funny. “Clyde told old Peterson his grandma told him how to make one and what to put inside of it. He said she called it a beware-man. They’re to scare off the monsters that send bugs or something… I don’t remember the word he used. It was something foreign.”

  “Monsters?” Little Stinky grinned like a satisfied fox. “You mean like us?”

  “Exactly like us,” Julie said. “That’s what we’re going to be tonight, too. Three scary monsters.”

  The rain slapped our skin. We began to inch closer, foot by foot, on elbows and knees. The mud made obscene noises, almost as if it was lapping at our bloody hands. Awash with rain, the world turned opaque and distorted like a funhouse mirror. Still, we went on; slowly closed the gap, our excitement causing us to vacillate between trembling and giggling.

  Soon the beware-man was towering over us; giant arms spread wide, tattered clothes flapping in the icy wind.

  The horizon growled and lightning flared.

  Looking up, I had a second moment of clarity that turned my bones to marshmallow. This huge beware-man’s eyes were made of tiny china saucers, with candles burned to blackened nubs bulging from their centers. In the flickering lightning those eyes burned bright and seemed to focus. Worse still, his long nose was a rotting sweet potato that angled down and away like an engorged penis. The hole below it—that hungry mouth—was a gaping maw made of two slatted, splintered boards pounded and packed full of roofing nails; the twin rows would have done a shark proud. The center of the beware-man was a large, completely hollow space, a pitch-black cavity the size of a small man. The clothing hung open; dank, filthy rags that slithered in the breeze and reeked of mildew and mold. Clyde Harrow had dressed the unfinished totem in a decaying business suit that might well have come directly from a fresh grave.

  A moaning gust of wind hit the humanoid figure, causing the clothes to ripple around the hollow body and snap flat again. The empty crucified form tilted and the frame veered a few inches to the left, causing the macabre face to leer down; head cocked in curiosity.

  “Oh,” Little Stinky mumbled. “Oh, my.”

  “I think,” I said quietly, “that we should maybe just go home.”

  But Julie had already slid to the side of the creature, her black eyes fixed on Clyde Harrow and his battered wooden shack. She hadn’t bothered to look up, hadn’t seen what Stinky and I had seen. She was going on, moving forward. As I contemplated cowardice, I watched her slither along through the muddy field like a guerilla warrior. Then I imagined myself trying to explain to the other guys on the football team why I chickened out. With a large sigh that sent a billow of mist forward, I flattened and followed.

  The downpour pelted us now; liquid BBs thudding against our clothing and splattering into puddles cratered in grass, mud and animal droppings. I suddenly had an overpowering urge to urinate, but I kept my eyes on the soles of Julie’s tennis shoes; turned my mind off and counted each shift of left elbow/right elbow as one movement. Two, three, four. Twenty-three, four, five. Covering ground and trying not to think about where I was, where we were headed or what we were about to do. I lowered my eyes to the muck and moved relentlessly forward.

  And ran into her leg.

  “Shhh,” Julie hissed. “I thought I heard him moving around in there.”

  The two of us were at the sagging front porch, only a few feet away from Clyde Harrow’s house. The building stank of rotting garbage cans and human excrement, likely from an overflowing septic tank.

  “Damn, he’s a real pig.” Right then, something slithered along the edge of my arm. I looked down and saw a bunch of squirming insects. They were black and brown and one bit me. “Aw, shit!” I whispered.

  Those bugs Harrow was complaining about? His filthy place was infested with them. The man had to have existed in total squalor for years to have a plague like this on his hands. How could anyone choose to live this way? And then a flash-forward movie suddenly ran through my head: Clyde Harrow bursting out of the house with a pump shotgun, screaming and yelling and firing the weapon; BOOM! watching part of Julie’s pretty head sail up and away like a soup of grey brains and white bone. I’m embarrassed to admit I wet myself, there in the filth and the stink and the relentless rain.

  “This is a bad idea,” I whined, stating the obvious. “We could get
shot.”

  Julie saw a long pitchfork resting tines-down against the slatted wall. She tugged the prongs with her fingers and it fell down next to her. She clutched the weapon and grunted in satisfaction.

  “Julie?”

  She turned her pretty head, curled her lip and gave me a withering look of scorn. “Are you with me, or not?”

  I started to say yes against my own better judgment but looked behind me and discovered that Stinky had vanished into the storm. A jolt of adrenaline ran through my body.

  “Little Stinky is gone!”

  Julie chose that moment to sneer: “You wimp.”

  Right there and then, I realized that my dreams of getting laid were just that—dreams. I didn’t believe her anymore. The sense of having been ruthlessly manipulated by a prick tease made my face burn. There was only one dignified way out of a disaster like this. I nodded my filth-streaked head like a parrot and forced a smile. “Have a nice night.” I began to inch backwards, away from Harrow’s home.

  Julie was beyond furious. Her upper body spun rapidly back and forth like a cobra as she realized she could not call out to stop me; and that Stinky really was no longer behind us. If she chose to go through with it, she would be alone from this point on.

  Just then booted feet walked across the living room and out onto the porch as someone came outside to have a look around.

  Julie squeezed down into the hungry mud, hugged the pitchfork tight and tried to be invisible. I was several yards away by now and did the same. I managed to turn my face and gasped. The man on the porch—Clyde?—had a trusty shotgun cradled under one arm. He walked in circles like he was really pissed off. I tried to make out the face, but couldn’t. The man froze and leaned forward like a stalking cat. He squinted and peered out into the sheet of rain that drenched the front porch steps. He raised the gun eagerly and sighted down the barrel.

  Oh, Jesus

  , I thought. He sees Little Stinky!

  I trembled for a long moment. There was Julie with the pitchfork, safe beside the house. I was in the middle of the yard. It was only a matter of time before I was discovered. The man with the shotgun was probably about to blow away somebody who’d already had a pretty shitty life. I couldn’t think of a single acceptable alternative, so I chose the bravest.