by Curran, Tim
“Calm down, will ya? Just take it easy. Tell me about it.”
Weams could imagine him over there, clutching the phone in a sweaty hand, alone in that house now that his wife had left and just white with terror…but terror of what?
Lyon’s voice went down to a whisper, a gritty rough sort of whisper like he was afraid somebody was listening. “It…it started about midnight, no eleven-thirty…I’m not sure, but that’s when I first heard it.”
“Heard what?”
“Something scratching at my door.”
Weams’ belly felt loose. “Scratching? Like what? A dog? A cat?”
“No, nothing like that…just a scratching like…like maybe nails being drawn over the outside of the door.” He paused there, as if he was listening again. “It kept on and on and, God help me, I was scared for some reason…I didn’t dare look out there…”
“But you did?”
Lyon swallowed. “Yes.” Swallow. “Yes, I did. I…I crept up to the bathroom window and looked out on the porch—”
“And?”
All he could hear was Lyon breathing, licking his lips. “Out there…I wasn’t sure…something fat and white like a body, Weams…something that didn’t have a head and didn’t have legs…it was scratching the door with its fingernails…”
Weams just stood there, sweat running down his spine. He wanted desperately to fall over like a post. He was dizzy and nauseous and his throat had constricted down to a pinhole. His breath came in short, wheezing gasps. “Lyon…you’re losing it…do you know what you’re saying to me?”
But then the phone was dropped and there were sounds over there. The sound of shattering glass. The sound of something thumping and crashing around, something wet and heavy.
And, of course, there was also the sound of Lyon screaming.
*
An hour later the police were all over Lyon’s house, snapping pictures and taking measurements, asking questions and getting few answers. But mostly just pulling their peaked caps off and rubbing their eyes, trying to get the sight of what they’d seen out of their heads.
Specks pushed past the big cop at the door and Weams followed right behind him, right into the slaughterhouse. It was bad. It was more than bad. Besides the shattered glass on the floor and the ragged curtains billowing in, there was a lot of blood. Looked like someone had butchered a steer in there. But what both Specks and Weams saw was the form on the couch with the bloody sheet thrown over it. The sheet had slipped off Lyon’s face and it was marble-white, eyes staring up at something nobody else could see.
The bad thing was the sheet ended right where Lyon’s legs should have been.
“Where…where are they?” Specks said in an empty voice.
“Can’t find ‘em,” one of the detectives admitted.
Specks looked around—through the debris and drying pools of blood, the clods of black earth on the floor—like maybe he might catch a glimpse of them. Shoved under the couch or tucked behind a chair.
The cops started hammering them with questions and Specks said he was just a friend, didn’t know anything more about it. Weams told them about the phone call. About Lyon saying something was scratching outside the door. But that’s all he said. He wasn’t about to go farther. Not then. Not yet.
The cops seemed to believe them, but they studied the two men, gave them some funny looks. Maybe they saw how pale they were, how they shook, the way they fumbled their words and started at the slightest sound like they were expecting something. But Specks and Weams had just lost a friend and that’s all it was, that’s all it could be.
Outside, Weams had to fight not to get sick. That metallic, sour stench of blood was all over him, he couldn’t seem to get it out of his head.
“You know, you know what this means—”
“Shut up,” Specks warned him. “Just shut the hell up.”
The coroner’s people were examining the broken window in depth by flashlight. With forceps, they were pulling strands of something from the shards of glass still in the frame. Looked like strands of tissue.
An old lady was standing under a tree with a cop. She was a slight thing with a wrinkle for every year. Looked like a good wind would send her sailing over rooftops and trees like a sheet blown from a line.
“I saw something,” she was saying. “I don’t know how you’d exactly describe it.”
“Do your best,” the cop said.
“A big white monkey,” she said.
The cop just looked at her. “Ma’am?”
“Yes, sir. That’s what I thought. It was hopping down the walk like a monkey, like one of those apes in a circus, you see? Using its hands to push it along, swinging its body and slapping along with its hands…but it was white…funny…”
“How so?” the cop said and you could see he thought it was all a waste of time. Christ, pink elephants next.
She hugged herself against the night breeze. “Well, sir, it didn’t seem to have a head nor legs, just those long arms and a big, fat body.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, I believe it had a tattoo on its chest.”
*
On the way out to the shack in Specks’ Buick, Weams spilled it, said those words, hated the taste of them on his tongue: “We didn’t do it, Lyon and me. We didn’t cut Zaber’s arms off, we just threw him in the pit. That’s what we did. That’s exactly what we did.”
“Should’ve known better than to trust you idiots.”
“Yes,” Weams agreed, “you should’ve.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Weams chose his words carefully…carefully as he could. “Me and Lyon were amateurs, Specks. You knew that. You damn well knew that. Not like you.”
“Oh, you think I do that shit all the time?”
“No, but we saw you. You were experienced. You knew exactly what to do.”
Specks sighed, lit a cigarette. “Maybe I did. Maybe I spent too much of my youth with the wrong people. What of it? I’m not a fucking psychopath. What I did, I did for us all. You boys agreed. You’re as deep in this shit as I am, Weams. Don’t you dare forget that.”
Weams didn’t think he ever would.
Specks pulled the Buick off the highway, onto a gravel road that turned into a rutted dirt track a few miles down the line. Weams didn’t say a thing, he just remembered it all, watched the headlights limning those big twisted trees that hung out over the road. He didn’t say a word, but he thought plenty.
“All right,” Specks said when they reached the field. “This is it.”
Weams stuck tight to him as they followed that meandering trail through the dark, brooding forest. There was terror in him, hot and white and knotted, but not for what they might find, but for what mind find them.
The shack was still there, still waiting.
Then the lantern was lit and Specks and he began yanking up the boards. They didn’t bother being careful this time, they went at it all-out, splitting the boards and tossing them aside until there was a circular, rough-hewn hole through the plank floor. Weams held the lantern down there, his blood gone to a cool, gray sludge. The dirt of the grave was undisturbed. Or so it seemed.
“Keep that lantern steady,” Specks said, taking a shovel and giving his 9mm to Weams.
He began pawing through that moist, rank soil, flinging shovelfuls aside wildly, not caring if he sank the blade into Zaber’s corpse, not caring much about anything but proving to Weams how very wrong he was.
Four feet down there was nothing.
“We didn’t go any deeper than that,” Weams told him.
“You must have,” Specks said, sweat streaking down his dirty face. Weams felt something happening, something that made him instinctively cringe away from that hole as if a snake was going to show itself or a tiger was going to come vaulting out with gnashing teeth. “Specks, dear Christ, get out of there, get—”
Too late.
Specks looked down into the pit w
here his feet were, saw they were slowly sinking into the bottom of the grave. He couldn’t seem to work them loose. He let out a shriek, thrashing and fighting and finally falling over. And by then he had sunk to his knees in that rippling, bubbling soil. And he was still going down, like a man drawn into quicksand.
“Help me!” he cried. “Help me, Weams!”
Weams took hold of one of his hands, then let go.
“What’re you doing, Weams?” Specks whined, tears running down his face, drool flying from his contorted mouth. “Help me, for godsake! Help me! Help me! Get me outta here! Something’s got me, something’s pulling me down—”
Weams’ eyes were huge and wet. “Tell me, Specks. Tell me about you and Lila. Tell me about what you have with my wife.”
But Specks was beyond simple conversation. He had sunk to the waist now, screaming and moaning and gibbering and all that did was sink him farther. Sink him until two bloated white arms rose from the muddy earth, pudgy fingers taking hold of him and dragging him down and down. But before his mouth was filled with soil, Weams heard what he said.
Heard it very well.
Zaber, he’d said. It was Zaber, not me.
*
Lila came slinking home an hour before dawn.
Sneaking, stealing lightly, her high-heels in hand, she slipped through the front door and Weams was waiting for her. He had Specks’ 9mm and he pointed it straight at her.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.
She just stood there, looking a little worn around the edges from a rough night of play, a cat creeping home, its belly full and satisfied. She started to smile, saw the gun, thought better of it. Then she didn’t do anything but watch Weams slam the door shut behind her. And Weams could hear the loom of her brain whirring and clicking, trying to spin believable webs of lies, but unable to find any fresh silk.
“How long,” Weams put to her, “how long were you and Zaber sneaking around behind my back?”
“Zaber? I—”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Lila was figuring that probably wouldn’t be a real good idea either. Because she was seeing Weams, her husband of six years, seeing that twitch in the corner of his mouth, that mottled face, those eyes like windows staring into a madhouse.
“Not long,” she said, then started to cry.
And, hey, she was good. You had to give her that. Right to the last drop. Those tears looked real and they made something soften in Weams. But not for long. “You wanna tell me why?” he said to her.
Oh, she was whimpering and chewing her lip, making with those big brown doe eyes. The sweet, precocious little girl who had done something bad, but would never do it again.
Weams laughed. Maybe it wasn’t a laugh exactly…too hollow, too sharp, too agonized. “No, let me tell you why. Money. Plain and simple. It’s always that way with people like you, Lila. Cash means so much to you, you’d lay with a pig and…ha, ha…I guess you did at that.”
“Please…please,” she pouted.
“Get moving,” Weams said.
He marched her right to the cellar door, the gun on her the whole while. “Open it,” he said.
She did. Her hands were trembling. All you could see down there were the steps leading into a mouth of blackness. Like the depths of a cave, there could have been just about anything down there.
“Go ahead,” he said, far too calmly.
“Oh please, baby, you don’t—”
“Go down…or I’ll fucking shoot you,” Weams told her, drooling now, a funny sobbing sound coming up from his throat.
Weeping, Lila moved down two steps, then three. Stopped. She turned and looked back up at Weams like he might change his mind. And as she did so, there was a sound down there…a fleshy, heavy sound. Something moving, something big.
“Enjoy yourself,” Weams said, slamming the door shut behind her, locking it carefully.
He heard her scream.
Heard the sound of motion, somebody scrambling up the stairs. Lila’s voice crying out, begging hysterically for help. A thrashing, a slapping of flesh, a rending. A manic scream dampened by something wet and slobbering and attentive.
Then, his mind just gone, Weams put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
It was easier that way.
*
A week later, the police busted into the house.
They were led by two detectives named Green and Dickson, both big brutes with topcoats and thick necks, identical oily gray eyes. When Zaber went missing and they found out that he was hooked up with Specks, it wasn’t too hard to put it all together. They found Weams’ corpse and Lila’s down in the basement. It was a real ugly scene, but they were used to ugly scenes. They couldn’t figure out who chopped off Lyon’s legs or the whereabouts of Specks, but they had an angle on Zaber…or part of him.
“They finish the post on the woman?” Green asked a few days after the coroner’s people bagged the bodies and took them away to the morgue where things were more intimate.
Dickson nodded. “They did. Doc says she was ruptured pretty bad, raped repeatedly by the looks of it. Vaginally, anally. Probably went on for days.”
“Jesus. Bled to death?”
“No, not exactly,” Dickson said. “There was a foreign object wedged down in her throat. She choked on it, asphyxiated.”
“What was it?”
Dickson told him. “Doc said it looked like she bit it off and tried to swallow it. She must have been some kind of freak, because it was putrefied. Whoever it came from was dead for days before she put it in her mouth.”
PIRAYA
As they pushed deeper into the Amazon Basin, following a winding series of tributaries, their guide told them one randy tale after another of what he called the piraya. He was a kind old Yagua Indian from the Javary named Rico Uara Valqui and had come highly recommended. He told them wild stories about the old Conquistadors who’d made the unpleasant mistake of wearing blood-red trousers in piranha-infested waters. About swimmers getting their nipples bitten off and skinny-dippers who’d gotten more than their nipples bitten off.
At that last one Jack chuckled, wiped sweat from his face, and gave Elise a jab with his elbow so she’d see it was a joke too. But Elise did not think it was funny. The others in the low-bottomed boat—Cutler and Basille—just smiled thinly.
“And all true, I swear,” Rico said, crossing himself after telling a particularly lurid tale of a madman named Crazy Lupo who’d caught his limit of piranha by using his murdered wife’s corpse as bait. Rico grinned, ran fingers through his stubbly white hair. “But it not all bad, eh? You wait, we catch our limit, conk-conk-conk, we knock the fight out them sumbitch pirayas, then we clean ‘em out, slit-slit-slit, some the garlic, the salt, the spice root, then cook ‘em up over the fire. Taste real good. You see, eh?”
“That’s what I’m looking forward to,” Jack said. “I heard they taste like catfish.”
“Sure, like you say.” Rico looked at him and grinned. “Hey, maybe Rico show you how to make piraya-head soup, eh? It make a man more a man. You eat the soup, Jack, your wife she not enough for you! You need ten wives!”
Elise sighed, waving flies away from her face. She hated fish in general. It was Jack’s idea that she come. He told her that she’d never know Peru, the real Peru by hanging around the hotel in Pucallpa. And her answer to that was she did not want to know the real Peru. Pucallpa was bad enough with the bugs and the stench coming in from the docks, she didn’t need to get devoured by man-eating fish to boot. But Jack had explained that there was nothing to fear. There were twenty-five species of piranha in the Amazon and most fed on other fish, on insects, on fruit that had fallen into the water. Only six species were true flesh-eaters and of those six, only the Red-Bellied Piranha and the larger Black Piranha were dangerous to man.
So here she was, deep in the backwaters of the Amazon with a guide who kept telling one raunchy tale after another, showing off the stump of the finger he�
��d lost taking a hook from a piranha’s mouth. There was absolutely no breeze. The air was damp, the river stank like something dead. They had rubbed Vick’s Vapo-Rub over their faces and arms so the clouds of mosquitoes wouldn’t drain them dry. As it was, she was drenched with sweat, her eyes were burning, and Cutler kept staring at her.
From the moment they stepped into the boat—a flat-bottomed motorized skiff—Elise was aware of his eyes on her. His gaze was perverse. Something about it made her stomach roll. Not that she hadn’t dealt with men like him before, but the way he looked at her, sizing her up like a tasty slab of beef, was just too much.
“Why don’t you take a picture, it’ll last longer,” she told him.
Cutler grinned. His teeth were yellow, tobacco-stained, there was a sheen of sweat on his face. “Was I staring?”
“Yes, you goddamn well know you were.”
Cutler shrugged, licked his lips, and stared out over the shimmering expanse of the upper Amazon. What he saw was pale green flora growing in and out of the dirty brown water, clouds of gnats rising and falling, broken stumps and dead trees rising up like monuments. A steam condensed above the water, rolling over its surface like a sluggish fog. Tanagers and barbets cried out in the treetops, insects buzzed and flies nipped. None of which was as remotely interesting to him as Elise and her fine cleavage which made him feel weak in the pit of his belly.
“Simmer down,” Jack said under his breath and not for the first time.
Elise scowled at him. “If he keeps staring at me, he’s going overboard.”
“Quit staring at her, Cutler,” Jack said, smiling. “I won’t have it.”
Cutler was one of his drinking buddies from Pucallpa. He was a small, wiry man with the eyes of a rodent. He made Elise’s flesh crawl. Basille, the other occupant of the boat, was a round, portly businessman from Lima. The only thing that excited him was money.
Elise tried to ignore the both of them.
