Shivers 7

by Clive Barker

  Space divided equally on each side of the bed, they heard an odd sound.

  Maybe David was making an omelette?

  But if he was making an omelette shouldn’t he be downstairs in the kitchen?

  And how many eggs was he going to crack?

  * * *

  When Mr. and Mrs. Bradshaw opened David’s bedroom door, they barely recognized the battered young man whose bloody forehead was caving in under the force of self-inflicted blows. David’s bloodshot left eye bulged out unnaturally and threated to pop out of the socket.

  “Work will set you free.”

  THWAPP!

  “DAVID!! STOP IT!!”

  But David couldn’t stop. He had more work to do.

  His grip on the half brick tightened.

  “Work will set you free,” David declared in a slurry tone, determined to bash himself even harder and hopefully silence the screams.

  Bovine

  Joel Arnold

  See, the ice shapes this land, and the land shapes us. Simple as that. You got that?

  “Yes, sir.”

  And you know what we shape?

  “What, sir?”

  We shape everything else. The buildings, the livestock, our women. You got that?

  “Yes, sir.”

  See, the livestock ain’t nothing but dumb beasts. Women ain’t much different. You got to make sure they know that, make sure they know where they stand and what they mean to you, ’cause otherwise…

  “Sir?”

  Otherwise they’ll kill you. You got that, boy?

  “Yes.”

  Yes?

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  Herb Collins saw her from the window, saw her collapse in the cow pen in a heap. He stared for a moment, sucking in breaths of brandy scented air, then realized he ought to move.

  He walked out of the farmhouse slamming the door and muttering, “What the hell you doing there, Cam? Get up off the ground.” He opened the gate to the pen. Her eyes were open, but they seemed fixed. Unblinking.

  He stepped closer. One of the twenty-six head of cows, heifers and yearlings ambled in front of him. He swatted its flank. “Get out of the way.”

  It stepped aside, but another one, a thick, leggy heifer, wandered in front of him, its square head staring at him with dumb, rheumy eyes, its bristly ears twitching.

  “Goddamn it, move!”

  It stood its ground, chewing a mouthful of cud and blinking sleepily.

  Herb walked around to its rear, but more cows came, four of them, stepping mutely between him and Camille. More shuffled in, slow and steady, forming a lazy circle around the prone body of his wife.

  Herb grinned hotly. So this is how it’s gonna be. Gonna protect the missus.

  “Camille!” he shouted. “Get up.” He circled the cows, looking for gaps between their huge lumbering bodies. “Camille? C’mon. Tell your cows to get the hell out of my way. Camille? Come on, now. Camille?” The words began to crack in his throat like brittle sticks.

  * * *

  He was an old man now, but he still did all the farm work.

  Most of the work, anyway. Camille had taken over the cows after his second heart attack. (His son, Jack, did the work a short while after the first.) Once Herb got up and around after his attack, he went out to feed them, same as he used to, as if the heart attack had been a rude daydream. But Camille stood there with a bucket of corn straight from the hammermill. She pulled away when he tried to take the feed from her, and said, “Cows are mine from now on. You never treated them right.”

  He stared at her. “Never treated ’em right? The hell you mean?”

  Camille swallowed, her voice scratchy with defiance. “You never treated them with respect. You never treat anything with respect.”

  Herb laughed. He hocked up a mouthful of phlegm and spit it at Camille. “You want to treat ’em with respect, you go right on ahead. You’re more cow than woman anyhow.”

  He figured she’d tire of it soon enough, or kill them off with stupidity, but the big dumb beasts were still alive.

  But Camille…

  He punched the brown and white flank of a doe-eyed cow, then shoved hard at its rear. It didn’t budge.

  “Cammy?” he called.

  More cows came, gently but forcibly nudging him aside.

  “Move!” The frustration was like wires coiling around his lungs, tightening. He sucked in a breath. His mouth watered for a cigarette. A drink. Goddamn it, Cam, what did you get yourself into?

  He reached into his coveralls, undid his belt buckle and slid the belt from his pants. He snapped it over his head and brought the teeth of the buckle down hard against the rangy neck of a heifer.

  It turned its head. Mooed like a loosely strung cello. Herb swung the belt again, and again. The cow merely turned and kept its position within the tightening perimeter.

  “Goddamn it…” Herb’s arm tired. He dropped the belt to his side, catching his breath, rubbing a hand absently back and forth across his chest. He looked at his dirt-caked boots. “Fuck it,” he muttered. She’s dead. He trudged out of the pen and secured the fence behind him. He walked back to the house and shut the door without looking back at the lowing cattle that surrounded his dead wife.

  She’ll keep, he thought.

  He had chores to do.

  * * *

  He dialed his son’s number. The rotary phone had been there since Jack’s birth.

  “Herb.” Jack stopped calling him “sir” a long time ago.

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “Caller ID. What do you want?”

  What did he want? Why the hell did he—

  He remembered. “Your—” He cleared his throat. Almost said Your mother, but then why should he say anything to Jack? What kind of a son was he, anyway? No kind of son. A good-for-nothing kind of—

  “Is it Mom? Something happened to her?”

  “No,” Herb said quietly.

  “You sure?”

  “Course I’m sure. Everything’s fine. Got that? Everything’s fine.” Herb slammed the phone into its cradle and dropped to the white linoleum of the kitchen floor. He put his face in his hands and tried hard to swallow it all down, swallow everything down, but he couldn’t hold back, and it came out in violent hiccups. Tears and snot ran down his hard, raw hands. He felt a hard lump like a shotgun cartridge lodge deep in the back of his throat. He grabbed the door of the fridge and slowly pulled himself up, his legs boneless. He opened the fridge, moved aside a bottle of fresh milk, and pulled out a bottle of apricot brandy. He unscrewed the cap. Didn’t bother with a glass. Sat down at the kitchen table and took a good long drink, trying to dislodge the growing lump he felt deep in the back of his throat.

  * * *

  Once he made her castrate pigs with him. Thought he’d give her a taste of what a man had to do to keep her in food and clothes and the roof over her head. Jack used to help, but he stopped coming a few years ago; Herb couldn’t remember exactly when. He didn’t want to ask Walt or Berry to help, so why not show Camille what it was like, the rough business of being a man, a farmer. Maybe she’d appreciate him then, get it through her thick skull that he didn’t just wave a magic stick to get shit done. So he grabbed the castrating knife and grabbed hold of her hand and pulled her to the pigpen and told her what to do.

  Herb grabbed a week-old pig and hugged it tight against his chest. He dropped to his butt, legs splayed out, the critter squirming in his lap.

  “Don’t stand there with your mouth hanging open,” Herb said. “I can’t hold on forever.”

  Camille’s hand flexed on the knife’s handle, and as Herb struggled to hold the pig still, he saw something in her eyes, something he didn’t like, and for a moment he felt helpless as she stood there, hand tight on the knife, that look in her eyes. A thoughtful look. A “what if” look.

  “Come on,” he grunted. “Do it.”

  She hesitated, then tightened her grip and performed th
e castration through squinted, disgusted eyes. Her hands moved quickly.

  The piglet screeched hellfire. Herb almost lost hold. Camille dropped the knife and scooped up a double handful of diesel fuel and splashed it on the animal’s fresh wound to sterilize it.

  A drop of fuel hit the corner of Herb’s eye. He dropped the pig as if it bit him, and it raced away screaming.

  “You trying to blind me?”

  He got to his feet, tears dripping from his eye.

  Camille said, “I didn’t—”

  He grabbed her hands, both of them in one of his, then slapped her across the face.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Shut up.” He let go of her and wiped again at his eye, the surrounding skin an angry red.

  * * *

  Herb coughed hard. Damn! He pounded on his chest. Something shifted inside of him and came up from the back of his throat. He spit it out. It landed at his feet on the kitchen floor. He looked at it, wondering if it was a piece of lung.

  “Geez-um,” he said. It looked fleshy. Big as a quarter. Can’t be a good thing, he thought. He wondered if he should put it in a plastic sandwich bag and take it to the doctor. But what could they do about it? He scooped it off the linoleum with a spoon and flung it into the garbage disposal. He looked out the window as the disposal gargled and spat.

  The herd stood in a silent circle around his wife’s prone body.

  That’s all right. Let ’em starve for a few days.

  Then he’d fill the troughs and watch them come running.

  * * *

  Once upon a time, Herb had slapped Camille hard across the back of her neck. The reason was—well, he couldn’t recall the reason, but what he did remember was ten-year-old Jack pleading to Camille, “Why don’t we leave, Mom? We don’t need this son of a bitch.”

  And Herb slapped Jack for calling him a son of a bitch. But then he asked, “Why don’t you leave, Camille? You think I’m gonna stop you?”

  She held Jack against her red and white checked apron splattered with bacon grease and flour. She ran her fingers through his red crew-cut hair.

  Herb’s rage turned to bemusement. “Why the hell don’t you just up and leave? Get the fuck out of here?”

  Camille said quietly, “There’s not enough left of me any more. You took it all, like I was a Sunday dinner. You ate all the good parts of me and all I got left are the gnawed-on bones.”

  Herb furrowed his brow, then chortled. “You’re dumber than I thought. Go ahead and stay, then.”

  Jack started to protest, tugging at his mother’s apron, but she shushed him and said, “We ain’t going nowhere, son.”

  * * *

  “Cam? I’m hungry. Where you at?”

  He waited for an answer, waited for her reedy voice to shout, “Coming!” Waited for her footsteps over the hardwood floor of the living room, or the flush of the toilet. But there was nothing. Not a peep.

  “Damn it, where are you?” He looked out the window. Saw the circle of cows.

  Oh geez-um. He remembered. There you are.

  * * *

  The next day, he shoveled field corn into the hammermill, where it exploded against the swirling hammers and shot out of the mill’s strainer-like holes. He filled two buckets and lugged them over to the cow pen. He emptied the buckets into the feed troughs, grinning and watching the tightly grouped beasts.

  “Hungry?” He set down the buckets and lit a cigarette. He put a foot up on the trough and leaned forward, elbow on knee, smoked and waited.

  The cows turned to face him. They mooed and bellowed and shuffled on the frozen ground.

  “Come on,” Herb said, blowing out smoke in a ragged halo. “What are you waiting for?”

  The cows turned their backs to him, their breath billowing out in wavering sheets.

  Herb flicked his cigarette at the small herd, and it bounced off a yearling’s muzzle in a small shower of sparks. “Goddamn bunch of scrubs. You don’t think I know patience?”

  The cows merely lowed and farted.

  “Pieces of shit.” Herb headed back to the house. Halfway there, he turned to look. The herd had turned to stare at him. Matter leaked from their eyes, leaving dark trails on their cheeks. A thin frost circled their nostrils. Herb shook his head. He saw one of Camille’s legs through a small crack in the bovine wall. Her shoe had come off her heel but held on to her toe, forming a tent of foot and shoe.

  Tiny cold flakes of snow began to fall. “She ain’t worth it,” Herb muttered. He shouted at the cows, “She ain’t goddamn worth it!”

  Eventually they’d move. They couldn’t stand there forever.

  Herb went inside.

  * * *

  There were chores to do. Tractor’s fan-belt busted as he was harvesting the last of the corn over a month ago, so Herb figured it was as good a day as any to get around to fixing it. He pretended to ignore the cows, watching them out the corners of his eyes. Their udders leaked on the ground beneath them. Their backs were dusted with snow.

  He fell asleep that night to a stillness that comes only with fresh snow; a kind of stillness where the slightest sound seems big and clear and lonely. He listened to the stillness, the loneliness, and fell asleep.

  He woke up an hour later and couldn’t breathe.

  Something was caught in his throat. Something big. Like he’d forgotten to swallow a piece of steak before settling in. He fell out of bed, trying to cough the object out, but he couldn’t get any air around it.

  He got up off the floor and stumbled to the mirror. Tried to breathe.

  A bit of air whistled into his lungs. His face grew the color of beets. He sucked in, then coughed and pounded hard on his chest. The object in his throat moved. He breathed in some more air through his nose. Opened his mouth wide and looked frantically in the mirror at the inside of his mouth. Couldn’t see anything, so he coughed once more. His lungs burned, and his heart galloped. The object moved forward. He reached into his mouth with a rough old finger and grabbed hold of the thing. He yanked it out and flicked it into the sink.

  He sank to his knees, sucking in air, filling his lungs, fighting back the grayness that threatened to wash over him. He pounded the counter around the sink, then slowly pulled himself up. He steadied himself. Looked down at what he’d coughed up. Something pink and shiny. As he watched, it unfolded and flattened out. His hand shook as he reached down to touch it.

  “Oh, God.”

  It was an ear. A human ear.

  “Oh, geez-um.”

  A thin, jagged white line ran from the center of its lobe to the lobe’s outside edge. A scar.

  He recognized the scar.

  He’d given Camille the scar. Grabbed hold of an earring she wore one night and ripped it right off.

  “Oh God, oh God.” He grabbed hold of the ear, pinched it between thumb and forefinger, walked it over to the bedroom window and tossed it out into the darkness.

  In the morning. He’d bury it in the morning. Maybe throw it in the hammermill. Destroy the goddamn thing.

  How did it get in my throat?

  He’d wait until morning. Deal with it then.

  * * *

  Of course, morning came early. Good thing, ’cause after he’d coughed up Camille’s ear, he couldn’t get back to sleep. Each time he drifted off, he felt like he couldn’t breathe, like something new had lodged in his throat, but each time he sat up in bed and took a breath, there was nothing there.

  He got up as the first hint of light threatened a new day. He scraped a thin layer of frost off the inside of his bedroom window, and saw that the cows lay down around Camille, asleep or resting, huddled together for warmth.

  Herb cursed himself. He’d left the feed out. A trail of teardrop hoof-prints had been pounded out of the snow to the trough.

  He found Camille’s binoculars, the ones she used for bird watching, and looked out the window at his wife.

  She’d been there almost three days now
, and a skin of snow covered her. He focused on her head. Tried to look at where her ear should be, but her gardening hat, a straw, wide-brimmed contraption with daisies circling the hat above the brim had been knocked askew just enough to block his view of her ears.

  Cam, you idiot, why’d you wear your gardening hat in the middle of winter? And her gardening gloves. What the hell?

  A stroke, Herb thought. Got disoriented. Thought it was spring, time to plant her garden. She went outside and wound up in the cow pen. Passed out. Froze to death.

  Stupid. She never had no sense.

  Not gonna feed ’em. No more. As long as they won’t let me at her, they’re gonna starve.

  * * *

  He put on a shirt, jeans, coveralls, socks and boots. Sat down at the kitchen table to a breakfast of steak and eggs. Burnt steak and eggs. I’ll get the hang of it. Camille had the cooking down, he’d give her that. Cooked everything just right. And when she didn’t, he let her know. Sure did. He chuckled over a forkful of solid egg yolk.

  Dropped the fork and grabbed his throat.

  Shoved himself away from the table gagging, staggering across the kitchen floor.

  God no. Not again.

  He doubled over. Tripped on the garbage can and fell forward onto his stomach. The force from the fall dislodged the object in his throat. He spit it out. Pushed himself up. Felt something else in his mouth. Something hard and round. He hooked it out with his thumb. Dropped it as if it bit him, and scooted back across the floor.

  The thing he’d spit out was a finger. The hard round thing—Camille’s wedding ring. It glistened with Herb’s spit.

  He coughed up two more fingers before he made it to the living room. These came up easier, and one of the fingertips was misshapen, flattened from the time she’d dropped a match she’d used to light Herb’s cigarette. When she squatted and reached out to pick it up, he stomped her finger with the heel of his boot. Just one of those things you do when you can’t even stand to look at your wife.

  * * *

  He grabbed a rifle off the gun rack, chambered a round and tossed the gun over his shoulder. He tramped out of the house onto the front porch.