He picked up his pace, eager to flee the damp and dense forest, toward a small clearing which he knew was nearby. With each breath, he tasted moisture in the air that on this night nearly gagged him. He spat, trying to rid his tongue of the vile flavor.
Upon reaching the open space, he shivered, wiped his brow of sweat. He paused to get his bearings and catch his breath. There was a sudden break in the sound of the crickets and cicadas, which resumed unevenly, overlapping, and Chris had the sensation of the ground shifting.
He continued forward, with only a vague memory of the rich firelight awaiting him beyond.
He moved through a patch of younger growth, weaving his way through the forest with the innate agility of a young deer. Just as his momentum reached its peak he was stopped short, caught in cobwebs. Fighting them, he became twisted up and panic nearly suffocated him before he realized the cobwebs were no such thing but merely cloth draped over a branch.
He unwound himself and looked about. Clothing—shirts, trousers, and frocks—similarly hung over the surrounding branches. The fleeting sense of peculiarity was instantly overcome by the drive to continue on.
The trees were no longer familiar to him. They stood black against the midnight sky, like false trees on a stage setting. And although still tall and slender, they had flattened out, no longer organic, appearing as if their branches were covered with burlap.
A gold fleck shone from one of them and then another. He approached cautiously, afraid of another trap. As he neared these strange trees, they regained their depth and structure and he realized the branches were strewn with black hats. He touched one to be sure and ran his hand along the wide brim, fingers feeling the brass buckle that adorned it.
There were bonnets, too. No mistaking it. His stomach clenched. But as quickly as the feeling had come over him it passed, and though he slowed his steps even more, he could not stop.
Once again the atmosphere changed ever so subtly. The cicadas and crickets re-synchronized, but now the sound was louder, the vibration in his head almost deafening.
He had no idea where he was. But surely this was his forest. He knew it well.
And following this unseen force, he walked on and immediately kicked something, nearly tripping over it. It did not roll but slid ahead carving a path in the dirt. He crouched down and carefully felt before his feet, recovering the object.
It was a boot. A man’s boot, flat and sturdy, with metal rods extending out the top, and as the moon slid from the clouds, he saw a graveyard of similar footwear, discarded carelessly, crude leg braces glinting in the gentle light.
“There you are,” came a whisper from behind him, and Chris whirled around to face it.
Maria had crept up and now giggled at the start she had given him.
“Shhhh,” Chris quieted her. She wore a white cotton shift, one foot still bound, though now covered with earth, the other bare. “Maria, what . . . ?”
Then the moon passed behind the clouds again and she put her hand in his and let him lead her. And through the cacophony of the cicadas and crickets, he was certain she was urging him, hissing:
“Faster, faster!”
And though she was limping, he could not stop, for now he saw a flicker of light, golden orange sparks, and shadows of living things.
Chris ducked behind some bushes and Maria ducked with him. They edged closer, together, until he saw a dark body laying on a spread of leaves and grass. It was a large animal. As he got closer, he recognized hooves and horns. Chris followed its gaze and his attention was drawn to a group of figures moving about a ring of fire. Some might say they were dancing, but it was an awful, awkward dance.
The world went quiet. Maria took his lead. A flute picked up where the insects left off. It was a familiar tune, and as they got closer, he saw there were no goats, for the figures had the arms of humans that swung as they frolicked in the dangerous light. And they had horns and wicked faces and passed a leather sack around and sucked from it eagerly. Maria tugged at his hand and led him into the circle of fire, pushing him into the fray.
Chris landed on his side and bumped his head. The music stopped. Maria’s bound foot held him down and the soft blond hair of the young girl’s leg glistened in the firelight.
Everything around them was silent and still now except for the crackling flames. Chris struggled to lift his head. There stood Mr. and Mrs. W. in the center of the blazing ring. They looked on with expectant pride.
Maria bent down, hands on her hips, and thrust her gleaming, grinning face into Chris’s, forcing his head back to the ground. She pressed her boot more firmly into his chest, as if using him for balance. She then began tearing away at the cast with a blade, discarding the plaster piece by piece into the fire.
Tiny beads of sweat sparkled across her brow as she worked at it and when only one piece remained, she threw up her arms victoriously, one hand still wielding the blade, the other the final square of plaster from the sole of her cast—the one that bore Chris’s inscription.
Maria looked to her father. His strong chest gleamed as the firelight flickered across it, his large powerful arms raised to the sky.
“Look, Daddy. He came,” Maria said, beaming up at him.
“You did good, child.”
Maria pitched the final piece of plaster into the flames. The crowd that had been watching silently in anticipation cheered. The flutes started up again and so did the merriment, and the living things danced, slowly closing in on Chris.
Chris looked up at Maria, confused, betrayed, and then down at his chest where her foot was digging into him. Where the cast had been there now was a cloven hoof. He looked back up at her and she smiled at him.
It was the smile of her mother.
Founding Fathers
By K. H. Vaughan
The clearing in the woods was set well back from the park entrance and was littered with the detritus of years of parties. A couple dozen kids sat on logs or the remnants of a couch that had been dragged out there years ago, its upholstery stained and reeking. Others stood around the keg.
Jess wouldn’t normally have come to this sort of thing, but it was Costa’s party, and Denny was Costa’s friend. Costa was already on probation for an alcohol violation. The R.A. in his dorm was a real hard-ass, so Costa had dragged this keg out into the woods at Founder’s Park down the hill from campus. Stale beer in the dark surrounded by empties, trash, and used condoms. This shit was for high schoolers.
Some girl shrieked as a frat boy waved her sports bra around in the air, hooting. He threw it up into the tree branches. Everyone laughed while she slapped at his shoulder.
“This is so stupid,” Jess said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Aw, it’s not that bad,” Denny replied.
“Really?”
Denny looked around. A freshman girl was puking in the bushes while her friend held her hair out of her face. But she’d gotten there too late. The friend now held the vomit-soaked strands gingerly as she muttered support and encouragement, trying to keep from getting puke splatter on her sneakers and jeans.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “This is pretty bad. Lemme top off our cups and we’ll go.”
They cut through the woods on the far side of the park, leaving the noise of the partygoers behind them. Deeper in it grew quieter, despite the expanse of the city around them.
“Whoa, what is that?” Denny said.
“What is what? Come on, I need to pee.”
Denny let go of her hand and picked his way through the brush toward a dark obelisk situated beneath some branches. Getting closer, Jess could see it was a statue tucked away in the trees. A leering creature formed in marble—half man, half goat—crouching on a pedestal. It was ancient and stained. Green moss hung from its weathered horns.
“Denny, I want to go home,” she said.
“Yeah, yeah. Just hold on a second.” He hunched down by the base of the pedestal and began brushing at the filth and grime. “Can’
t see,” he grunted.
She sighed loudly at him, then found her keys and shined a small pen light on the area he had unearthed.
“Sixteen seventy-four.” He whistled, touching the engraving on the base. “Weird. It’s classical style but they didn’t do much of that in the Colonial period, especially with this kind of subject matter.”
“That’s my history major,” she said.
“Yeah. Something strange . . .”
He looked around as if confused and then suddenly reached for her, kissing her urgently. Within moments he was peeling away her Albemarle University sweatshirt and bra, exposing her full breasts to the moonlight. She was flushed and breathing heavily.
“We don’t have any condoms,” she said.
“I know. But I want you now.”
Her mind raced. Had she missed a pill? She decided she didn’t care. She gasped as he entered her, and somewhere deep in the recesses of her mind she imagined the sound of drums and flutes.
They stayed in bed at his place all weekend, ordering pizza and leaving only to get wine. Monday morning she realized that she had missed her nine-thirty class and hadn’t written two papers that were due. Denny pulled her back to bed, and she surrendered willingly.
***
Jess pulled herself away for a couple of days to get caught up on school. She liked Denny, but this was insane. Constant fucking. Inventive positions that seemed dreamlike and strange in the sober light of day.
She’d never been prudish but now found herself spontaneously blushing and horny while sitting in lecture. She almost came once just daydreaming about their experiment with the reverse cowgirl. She excused herself from seminar to run to the bathroom, finishing herself before racing across campus to Denny’s room.
Denny hadn’t changed or bathed. His room held the deep musky smell of sweat and sex. His computer screen was plastered with windows open to porn sites, the monitor framed with empty liquor bottles and tissues like an X-rated shrine to penetration.
He grunted and pulled her inside. After the first hour, she realized his hands were stained with dirt and moss.
“Denny, have you been out at the park again?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just got me curious. That monument is out of place period-wise. It’s something the Founding Fathers would have to have built, but they were strict Presbyterians. They didn’t embrace statuary anyhow, and that thing is practically pagan idolatry.”
His honors thesis was on the influence of religion in politics during the late seventeenth century, so he would know. She really didn’t care much at the moment though, not when he was so close in the room. She stroked his face—which was well into five days’ worth of beard—and kissed his salty flesh.
“Why don’t you explore something more current?” she breathed into his ear.
***
She couldn’t get a hold of Denny later that evening. He wasn’t answering his phone. She considered trying to find him, but where to look?
She took a long shower in the common bathroom at her dorm, enjoying the spray of steaming water on her flesh. Her nipples tingled as she massaged and soaped herself, and before she realized it she was masturbating with the hand shower, shuddering and moaning. Two girls from her floor giggled as she left the stall, and she blushed, fleeing to her room.
No sign of Denny yet. Thinking about the moss stains on his hands, she threw on some clothes and drove down to the park. He wasn’t there, but someone—certainly Denny—had been cleaning the statue.
She’d not gotten a good look at it before, and with the filth and growth removed, she could see its bestial goatlike features and squat muscular body more clearly. Those eyes with their horizontal slits had gazed at her when they had made love that night at the party. She felt lightheaded and reached out to steady herself, her hand coming to rest on the muscular marble haunch.
Art and history were not her subjects, but she could tell that the style of the sculpture was wrong for the period, as Denny had insisted. It was grotesquely real and primitive in its lines and detail. Denny had dug out the accumulated dirt and leaves around the base of the pedestal beneath the cloven hooves. The base was wider than she had imagined.
She drove back up the hill, planning to go back to Denny’s room, but something made her turn off and go back another block. She passed Club Passion a second time. Neon lights and nude women in silhouette. The sign said it was amateur night with a cash prize. Ridiculous. She had never considered stripping before.
She drove around the block three more times before parking. Up on stage she writhed and moaned: excited, horny. The crowd of men watched her with undisguised atavism. The music was throbbing, urging her on, some DJ mix of trance with a primitive flute echoing through the background.
In the changing room, the other girls glared at her and whispered, “Bitch has done this before.”
She won five hundred dollars and the owner offered her a gig weekend nights.
***
“I’ve just been in a weird place,” she told Samantha afterward, as they drank wine in her friend’s room. “I mean it’s been a little over a week now and it’s like I can’t think about anything but sex. And Denny has turned into some kind of animal. If he’s not on me, he’s surfing the Internet for porn.”
She didn’t mention the strip club, gyrating and bending over in front of complete strangers. She wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about that yet.
“You should relax as long as you’re enjoying yourself. I can’t get attention from anything that doesn’t run on batteries right now. Sometimes couples just get like that. When my dad started dating his new girlfriend last summer they were at it constantly.”
“Eww!”
“You’re telling me? I caught them on the couch. Oh God, he was behind her and his big white gut was rippling around and all I could think about was video I had seen of elephant seals going at it.”
“God, that’s gross. Thanks for that image. Really.”
“I know,” Samantha said. “No one wants to hear about their parents having sex.”
“Well—I don’t mean that I feel bad about it. It’s just . . . different. I almost feel weird that I don’t feel weird about it. Because it isn’t like either of us.”
“As long as you aren’t doing anything dangerous.”
They talked for several hours, drinking merlot and smoking a couple of joints. Samantha was taking a course on human sexuality and they went through the chapter on hypersexual behavior and laughed. She was pretty sure they didn’t have any kind of neurodegenerative disease, and they weren’t doing drugs—or at least nothing that would send them on a sexual bender.
She flipped through the textbook, checking off positions they had tried in her mind. She realized she was feeling drunk and woozy. It was hot in Samantha’s room. She could hear drums and flutes.
“What is that music?” she murmured.
“Oh God, Sasha down the hall has been on a Depeche Mode kick lately.”
Samantha was braless beneath her T-shirt, and Jess could trace her nipples along the light cotton fabric. Samantha caught her eyes and Jess shifted on the bed. They kissed, giggling. They had kissed once before playing spin the bottle at a party, but it hadn’t done anything for either of them then.
This time she grew hot and wet immediately and they locked tongues, stripping off their clothes and burying themselves in the exotic sameness of each other.
***
She found Denny in his room the next afternoon. He smelled of sweat and perfume and other women, and without a word he peeled away her panties and bent her over the couch, his thrusting like a pounding drumbeat. His sweat dripped on her neck and back. The last thing she remembered clearly was the sound of drums as she began going in and out of lucidity.
In fact there were drums all around, and naked slaves holding burning brands, their dark skin glistening with sweat and oil in the torchlight. The flames glittered on the polished wood and marble of the hall. Or was it a churc
h? She could remember walking in the cold echoing space once when she was a girl on a grade-school field trip. The beautiful lacquered millwork and brocade tapestries along the walls. She squinted at small, engraved plates that labeled each artifact of colonial history in the dry and sterile space, while their docent, prim and proper, cautioned them not to touch anything.
Now in the past, what looked to be a future governor’s mansion, filled with heat. August men dressed like English lords in embroidered silk and tight wigs encircled women in various states of dress: fine velvet gowns and simple linen shifts. Their wives and servants. Their slaves. Soon they were taking them aside in twos and threes, imported finery and homespun dropped carelessly on the parquet floors as they began their ecstasies.
Singularly and in groups, again and again, in permutation after permutation of entanglement and animal frenzy, they grew more crazed. Here two men pummeled one another with bloody fists. There, the wife of a minister knelt before a wealthy plantation owner, punching him repeatedly in the scrotum as he came, his semen spurting out as if driven forth by her blows.
***
Jess regained consciousness some time after midnight in the stillness of Denny’s room. She was naked and alone, salty crust on her face, hair, and back. She staggered to the bathroom and rinsed her mouth. How many times had they done it? Seemed impossible. Foggily, she tried to remember what was real and what was a dream.
A dream. The thought instantly sobered her. Visions she had seen, strange alien memories from history: manic sexual abandon and increasing violence that had ended with hacked and bloody corpses lying among the discarded petticoats and torn stays. Somehow she knew in her core that it had been real.
She shuddered violently, then began looking around for her clothes. She found her underwear hanging from Denny’s computer monitor. She reached for them and the screen caught her eye. It was a painting of one of the city’s early luminaries. He had a visible scar on his face which she’d been taught had happened in a battle with the French. She had seen him that night, choking a maidservant in the throes of his lust until someone smashed a bottle against his head. Afterward, his teeth had flashed white and feral beneath the running blood as he beat her to death.
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