by Gene Baker
“Where are the buzzards? They should be marking the spot by now!”
“I toll ya, boss! Dis is some crazy ass shit heuh!”
“So, what’s the story?”
“Like I toll yo depty, I wuz out walkin’ my fence lookin’ foe poachuz. Saw dis hawg tearin’ up sumpin. He hud me an look up at me. I ain't fraid to tell ya, boss, de shit went ice cold in me when I saw dat!”
“How so?”
“He had da man’s ahm in his mouf! Rite den, he come at me so I drew up Miss Daisy heuh an put a fifty slug in his face! Shouda dropt him der an den but he kep on comin’! I shinnied up dat tree and sat der till duh Debil took im! Dat wen I look to whut he wuz grubbin’ and saw whut wuz left of de face an’ I recunized it frum de teevee.”
“I appreciate you calling it in L.D., we’ll take it from here.”
“Shuah, boss, but der sumpin else befoe yuh go trompin out der!”
“What’s that?”
“Ain’t no foots been out der cept mine an dat hawgs’. It like dat man dun drop outta da sky!”
5
May 2, 1953
Bobby tried to run off Howard today and called him white trash. I got mad and told Bobby that mister Howard was helping me with my math homework and he could stay all day if I wanted him too! Howard stood up like he was going to hit Bobby but Mother came out and told Bobby to go inside. She apologized to mister Grant and thanked him for helping me. Bobby is just Father’s house man but sometimes he acts like he is the boss.
Anezka watched as Howard, with gentle voice and demeanor, pointed out the corrections in Edwin’s mathematics. Why can’t Edgel be like that? she asked herself. The big, rough-cut man was the complete opposite of her husband. She briefly allows herself the fantasy of what her life would have been like if she had met a man like Howard Grant as a young girl instead. She didn’t, however, and she had been completely taken in by the charming, moneyed, and influential Edgel Hale. Over and over again, she had tried to figure out the where and when and why of the dark changes in her husband. Was it all somehow her fault? Should she feel guilty about having these thoughts? Was it too late to exchange the security and stability of wealth and power for tender caring and genuine love?
Grant glanced at his watch.
“Hey, it’s getting late and I still got to burn that pile of bushes before nightfall,” he said to Edwin.
“Are those my rosebushes you are burning?” Annie asked with the pretense of pique.
“Yes, ma’am. They were eaten up with fungus, so I’ve got to burn them before it spreads to other plants. I may also remove the soil they were in and pour boiling water to sanitize the area completely.”
“That sounds pretty drastic! Will I ever have roses in the garden again?”
Howard smiled and lifted his shoulders.
“Drastic circumstances call for drastic measures, Mrs. Hale. It will just have to be a wait and see. Meanwhile, I’m going to contact the agricultural service office in town to see if there are disease resistant varieties we can try.”
“I would definitely appreciate that, sir!”
As the gardener tipped his hat in Anezka’s direction and turned to walk away, she felt a chill touch her soul. Looking up, she saw Edgel in the tower window angrily glaring at her.
***
The thumpa-thumpa sound of the washing machine awoke Harley with its mechanical heartbeat. Disoriented at first, she rolled over onto her side and the pain of sore muscles and tiny wounds hit her.
“A little sore this morning?” Nikki asked upon hearing the sound of her daughter’s groaning.
“Like I’ve been in a knife fight and lost!”
“I imagine so.”
“I think I remember hearing Cody say something to me. Is he here?”
“He was. Now he’s up at the house taking a shower while I wash and mend his clothes.”
A sly smile creased Harley’s face.
“You kinda like him all of a sudden, huh?”
“Well . . . he has allayed some of the suspicions I had about him at first. And he did save your ass! I’m just really torn.”
“Torn about what?”
“Stay and see this whole thing through to the end with the Hale House contract, or take my daughter and run like Hell itself was nipping at my heels!”
As Harley grabbed an energy shake from the refrigerator to wash down some Ibuprofen, she asked between grunts of pain, “I suppose . . . you want my . . . opinion?”
“We are partners, remember?”
After a pause to let the last of the thick, chocolate flavored drink slide down her throat, Harley turned her head and through drapes of red hair she choked out, “I gotta stay!”
“No, you don’t!”
“I know that I—we—were brought here for a reason and that leaving would be worse for both of us than staying.”
“And you came to this insightful conclusion last night?”
“Sort of. I felt it before but last night I had a dream that gave me a clue.”
“Are you gonna tell me about it?”
Harley sat down on her bunk and rubbed her temples.
“I recalled a documentary film from school about how they smelt ore to make metal.”
“So, you think you are being ‘smelted’ here?”
“I think that both of us are!”
Sheriff Donnelly finished wrapping yellow crime scene tape around the grove of trees as Deputy Harrison planted the last of the small evidence flags next to a dismembered finger.
“Well, Angela, what does your homicide investigation training say to you about this situation?”
Harrison swept a strand of sweat-soaked blonde hair behind her ear as she stood up.
“Just the obvious,” she mumbled.
“What may be obvious to you, may not be so to the rest of us. So what is it?”
“He was dead before the animal could get to him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Little to no blood. He was bled out elsewhere before being deposited here for the hogs to dispose of.”
Donnelly watched Harrison quiver as a silent shudder went through her body and she nervously clenched and unclenched her fists.
“Kind of recalls an incident from the Mister Starlight murders, if I read those reports right.”
Mister Starlight. She didn’t need to hear that name the newspapers had titled the vicious murderer with. The painful burn scars that she hid from view with gloves and long sleeves were a constant reminder of the scars he had left on her soul. Angela had grappled with the monster to hold him to the sunlight fanned flames until his carbonized flesh fell from her grip. She had even made sure that he would never return to prey on the innocent by casting his still smoldering skull into the thick, muddy waters of Buffalo Bayou.
“You did,” Angela said flatly. “Difference is, feral hogs weren’t available in Houston and the only other large animals that could do the job were the alligators down in the sewers. Starlight used them and the big rats down there to great effect to get rid of his victim’s bodies. He, therefore, remained an unknown problem for quite a while. We never did get a complete tally of all the deaths he caused.”
As the Sheriff glanced over Harrison’s shoulder at the dead hog, he verbalized what he was thinking.
“Wild hogs eat carrion only as a last resort. With the abundance of acorns and other stuff they prefer around here, it is just not their usual behavior.” Returning his gaze to his Deputy, Donnelly watched her shake her head as if she was trying to wake herself from a nightmare. “If this was back in the day when I worked in New Orleans with your dad, he would be telling me that it was some kind of voodoo thing.” When the only reaction that his words elicited from Harrison was a mean sideways glance, the Sheriff decided to be less covert. “Come on Angela! It’s just you, me, and the dead out here. Me and your father came across a lot of off-the-wall shit back then that never made it into the official report. So be straight up with me and tell me what we a
re really dealing with out here!”
“The last time I answered that question, the HPD dropped me like a hot potato.”
“You don’t have to worry about that with me.”
Still no response.
“Okay let me start the conversation with this. I’ll bet that when we dig the dead man’s throat out of that hog’s gullet, we’ll find bite wounds in the vicinity of the artery.”
“And that it is easier to influence a hog than it is an alligator to dispose of evidence.”
“And that the reason it appears this guy dropped down here out of nowhere, is because we are dealing with another Mister Starlight.”
Deputy Harrison’s head and shoulders dropped in abject surrender. Lifting up her arm she saw the twisted scars between her cuff and glove.
“Damn it! I sometimes wish I had died right along with that bastard! I don’t think I can go through this again.”
“Angela, you are not going through it alone this time. I promise.”
6
July 20, 1953
Penny is acting strange lately. She says that she sees lights in the woods at night. I tell her that they are lightning bugs. She says that they are bigger than lightning bugs and that she is afraid of them. Mother tells us to stay out of the woods. Penny is also afraid of Howard. She stays in the house when he is around. She can’t tell me why. She gets nervous when he is close to us.
Penny pointed at a faint, pulsating ball of light glowing with a sky blue iridescence.
“There’s one!” she shouted just before it expanded and faded into the surrounding blackness of the nighttime forest.
“You’re right, those ain’t lightning bugs!” an astonished Edwin exclaimed as he quickly pulled his head back through his sister’s open bedroom window.
“Are not!”
“What?”
“There is no such word as ‘ain’t’. The proper phrase is, ‘are not lightning bugs.’”
Edwin sat back and smiled at his precocious little sister.
“You are right, I ain’t gonna make an argument about it.”
Penny just shook her head and tried to hide her smile by letting her waist-length hair fall over her face. A pair of dim white beams quickly glided across the ceiling and pulled the brother and sister back to the open window. The clutch and gears of the truck made a clanking noise as the driver roughly downshifted at the top of a distant hill. A cloud of dust mingled with diesel exhaust briefly silhouetted the heavy cargo carrier in its reflected headlights.
It is awfully late for people to be visiting Mister Howard,” Penny observed as the vehicle disappeared behind the trees that surrounded the sexton’s house.
Edwin didn’t respond as a childlike sobbing came to his ears from the direction of the darkened gazebo. His mother was crying there, alone in the night.
***
All that was left of the sexton’s house was the cement and brick foundation and the crumbled remains of a chimney. Weeds had attempted to overgrow the site, but here and there vagrants had scratched out sleeping places. Nikki looked up at the mansion on the hill and saw workmen applying new roof tiles to the tower that Edgel Hale had used to watch over his kingdom. I wonder if Edgel ever looked down here and thought he would be buried among the outcasts of his little world she thought.
Nikki turned as Cody admonished, “Ya’ll be careful! There’s a reason right there why I told ya to wear heavy, high topped work boots.” She looked down at the glint coming off the object Cody was pushing with a stick into an empty soda can. “The hypes leave their needles laying out here, and somebody else gets stuck if they’re careless.”
“Why there? Why were they buried in that particular spot?” Nikki asked, hoping to distract Cody from possibly seeing the soft green light being emitted by the crystal pendant between Harley’s fingers.
“Story goes that back when this was Mexican territory, some witches were executed and buried there.”
As Cody walked over to Nikki, he pulled a military-style compass from his pocket. While he showed her the wildly bouncing needle, he continued.
“Whether they knew about this effect or not, no one knows. But, it is said that it keeps the ghosts of the people buried here from going out and getting revenge on those who put them here. It’s a kind of magnetic prison.”
As Nikki glanced over Cody’s head, she saw Harley return the pendant to the inside of the front of her blouse.
Under other circumstances, since she is the only one that sees them as they really are, the dead concentrated their attention on Harley. Their loss and sadness permeated every cell of her body and every emotion her mind could conjure. This time, however, the spirits’ essence followed their eyes towards a massive water oak that marked the eastern boundary of the cemetery. The roots of the arboreal guardian wrapped around the bricks of a wall like the tentacles of a giant octopus, which it would eventually crumble into powdered clay. From what Cody had told her, this was the visible remains of the root cellar that he would escape to when things got rough at home.
Among the dozen or more ghosts that Harley could see, many different eras of dress were evidence of two hundred years of pain and suffering. Nearly every imaginable manner of death was also represented. The most poignant was a woman in colonial Spanish dress. Her head lay dangling, barely attached to her broken neck which also anchored the Hangman’s noose draped down her back. Then there was Edgel Hale. Unlike the others, he had briefly turned to look at Harley, who could see the terrible, ragged gash splitting his cranium. A slimy, sadistic grin had crawled creepily across his face as he acknowledged her presence before slowly turning his gaze in the direction of the tree.
“Harley Elise! Where do you think you’re going?” Nikki shouted with a pitch she hoped would break through the trance her daughter was apparently in. “You need to wait up for the rest of us!”
“Good advice, little lady!” Sheriff Donnelly gruffly added as he emerged from behind a dilapidated outbuilding. “There are bad critters out here and some of them walk on two legs!”
Harley stopped and turned to look at Donnelly but not before turning off her aura vision. Getting to be Sheriff didn’t come from being unobservant. She wanted to appear as nothing more than an average 12-year-old girl.
“Thank you for the warning sir.” It felt like she was tying her tongue in a knot to speak so sickeningly sweet. As Nikki trotted up next to Harley, Donnelly tipped his hat in her direction.
“Miss Baldwin? We haven’t met before now, but I am Hank Donnelly. I hope I didn’t frighten you folks.”
“No problem, Sheriff. What can I do for you?”
As he looked over at Cody Taylor standing frozen in mid-stride, he smiled and responded to Nikki’s question.
“Following up with you folks on that escaped convict my deputy came out here to warn you about. He isn’t a threat to anybody no more since we found him dead yesterday morning.”
Trying to hide her confusion, Nikki steadied her voice before she spoke.
“We appreciate you letting us know about this, Sheriff. You didn’t have to come all the way out here to do that though.”
“It is just part of the job description, ma’am. I go wherever and do whatever I need to in order to keep the people of this county safe.” After a short pause, Donnelly looked down to the green-eyed, red-haired girl standing with her arms crossed over her chest. “As such, I have to reiterate that this is definitely not the safest place to be in the daytime or at night!”
***
The boilerplate Howard lifted from atop the entrance to the old root cellar weighed nearly 600 pounds. As night had fallen, a thick fog smelling of death had descended with the darkness. It made the metal cover slick and his fingers slipped off and the lid fell back into place with a whump.
“Yeah, grunt if that will make you feel like you are really doing this yourself.”
“Shut the hell up, asshole!”
“Are you saying something to me?” came a girl child’s voi
ce from the back of the truck with “Titus Funerary Supplies” painted onto its canvas cover.
“No, mistress.”
“That’s good. I would hate to start off my visit by kicking your ass.”
“Thank you for your understanding, madam.” Then, nodding his head in the direction of the sexton’s house, Howard added, “If you’re hungry, it’s in there waiting for you.”
Within a few seconds of Grant’s words, the front door of the vine-covered cottage swung violently open. The sounds of the old man in ragged clothes straining against his rope bindings were quickly followed by a hushed scream slipping past the cloth that gagged him. His fate descended upon him like a nightmarish cloud and silenced his fear.
7
July 22, 1953
Mother and me took a cake we made to Howard today. He made coffee and we sat on his porch and ate together. While I was there I saw a leather bag like a doctor has on the floor. There was also fresh washed and ironed clothes like a girl wears on the table. I asked about them and he told me that the bag belonged to his dead brother and that he kept it in memory of him. The clothes were from his niece. She comes to visit him sometimes. She is about the same age as me and her name is spelled M-E-R-R-I-L-E-E. I asked if I could meet her sometime. Howard said that she has a condition where she can only come out at night. Since it is bad for me to go this far away from home at night I might not be able to meet her. I asked Mother if it would be okay for me to meet Merrilee if mister Howard would bring her over. Mother said they would have to think about it. Mister Howard gave me an old medical book so I could read about what his niece has. He marked the part about it and it is called Porphyria.
