by Ronald Kelly
Mickey lowered his eyes in embarrassment. “I don’t know, Frank… you just seem so pale and peeked lately. And you get plumb tuckered out after just a couple hours walking. How are you feeling these days? Are you sick?”
“Don’t you go worrying your head over me, young fella. I’m doing just fine.” I lied convincingly, but the boy was observant. The truth was, I had been feeling rather poorly the last few weeks, tiring out at the least physical exertion and possessing half the appetite I normally had. I kept telling myself I was just getting old, but secretly knew it must be something more.
Our conversation died down and we were gradually lulled to sleep by the sound of crickets and toads in the forest beyond.
~ * ~
That night I had the strangest chain of dreams I’d ever had in my life.
I dreamt that I awoke the following day to find Mickey and myself trapped inside the old boxcar. It was morning; we could tell by the warmth of the sun against the walls and the singing of birds outside.
We started in the general direction of the sliding door, but it was pitch dark inside, sunlight finding nary a crack or crevice in the car’s sturdy boarding. We stumbled once or twice upon obstructions that hadn’t been there the night before and finally reached the door. I struggled with it, but it simply wouldn’t budge. It seemed to be fused shut. I called to Mickey to lend me a hand, but for some reason he merely laughed at me. Eventually I tired myself out and gave up.
We returned to our bindles, again having to step and climb over things littering the floor. I lit a candle. The flickering wick revealed what we had been traipsing over in the darkness. There had to be twelve bodies lying around the earthen floor of that boxcar. The pale and bloodless bodies of a dozen corpses.
I grew frightened and near panic, but Mickey calmed me down. “They’re only sleeping,” he assured me with a toothy grin that seemed almost predatory in nature.
Somehow, his simple words comforted me. Utterly exhausted, I laid back down and fell asleep.
~ * ~
The next dream began with another awakening. It was night this time and the boxcar door was wide open. The cool October breeze blew in to rouse me. I found myself surrounded by those who had lain dead only hours before. They were all derelicts and hobos, mostly men, but some were women and children. They stared at me wildly, their eyes burning feverishly as if they were in the heated throes of some diseased delirium. There seemed to be an expression akin to wanton hunger in those hollow-eyed stares, but also something else. Restraint. That kept them in check, like pale statues clad in second-hand rags.
I noticed that my young pal, Mickey, stood among them. The boy looked strangely similar to the others now. His once robust complexion had been replaced with a waxy pallor like melted tallow. “You must help us, Frank,” he said. “You must do something that is not in our power… something only you can perform.”
I wanted to protest and demand to know exactly what the hell was going on, but I could only stand there and listen to what they had to say. After my instructions had been made clear, I simply nodded my head in agreement, no questions asked.
~ * ~
The dream shifted again.
It was still night and I was standing in the thicket on the edge of that hobo camp in the hollow. Carefully, and without noise, I crept among the makeshift shanties, performing the task that had been commanded of me. I removed the crude crosses, the cloves of garlic that hung draped above the doorways, and toted away the buckets of creek water that had been blessed by a traveling preacher man.
I spirited away all those things, clearing the camp, leaving only sleeping men. They continued their snoring and their unsuspecting slumber, totally oblivious to the danger that now descended from the tracks above.
I stood there in the thicket and listened as the horrified screams reached their gruesome climax, then dwindled. They were replaced by awful slurping and sucking sounds. The pungent scent of raw garlic had moved southward on the breeze. In its place hung another… a nasty odor like that of hot copper.
“Much obliged for the help,” called Mickey from the door of a shanty, his eyes as bright as a cat’s, lips glistening crimson. Then, with a wink, he disappeared back into the shack. The hellish sounds continued as I curled up in the midst of that dense thicket and, once again, fell asleep.
~ * ~
That marked the end to that disturbing chain of nightmares, for a swift kick in the ribs heralded my true awakening. It was broad daylight when I opened my eyes and stared up at an overweight county sheriff.
“Wake up, buddy,” he said gruffly. “Time to get up and move on.”
I stretched and yawned. Much to my amazement, I found myself not in the old boxcar, but in the camp-side thicket. My bindle lay on the ground beside me. Confused, I rose to my feet and stared at the ramshackle huts and their ragged canvas overhangs. They looked to be completely deserted, as if no one had ever lived there at all.
“There were others…” I said as I tucked my pack beneath my arm.
The lawman nodded. “Someone reported a bunch of tramps down here, but it looks like they’ve all headed down the tracks. I suggest you do the same, if you don’t want to spend the next ninety days in the county workhouse.”
I took that sheriff’s advice and, bewildered, started on my way.
After a quarter mile hike down the railroad tracks, I came to the boxcar.
“Mickey!” I called several times, but received no answer. Had the boy moved on, leaving me behind? It was hard to figure, since we’d been traveling the country together for so very long.
I tugged at the door of that abandoned boxcar, but was unable to open it. I placed my ear to the wall and heard nothing.
~ * ~
Since that night, much has taken place.
I’ve moved on down to Louisiana and back again, hopping freights when they’re going my way and when the yard bulls aren’t around to catch me in the act. Still, Mickey’s puzzling departure continues to bug me. That grisly string of dreams preys on my mind also. Sometimes it’s mighty hard to convince myself that they actually were dreams.
Oh, and I found out why I’ve been so pale and listless lately. A few weeks ago, I visited my brother in Birmingham. Unlike me, he is a family man who made it through hard times rather well. He suggested I go see a doctor friend of his, which I did. The sawbones’ verdict was halfway what I expected it to be.
For, you see, I’m dying. Seems that I have some sort of blood disease, something called leukemia. Now ain’t that a bitch?
My dear brother insisted that I check into a hospital, but I declined. I’ve decided to spend my last days riding the rails. Who knows where I’ll end up… perhaps lying face down in a dusty ditch somewhere or in a busy train yard, trying to jump my last freight.
However it turns out, I don’t really mind. When my end does come, at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that mine will be a real death, deep and everlasting… and not one that is measured by the rising and the setting of the sun.
CONSUMPTION
Pap Wilson was returning home from a tedious day of digging ginseng down yonder in a backwoods hollow. His spirits were high and his sack held a good eighty dollars worth of the medicinal root. He was only a hoot and a holler away from the old log cabin his grandfather had built shortly after the Civil War, when his foot sank through the dense carpeting of wild kudzu and into what he first thought to be a sinkhole hidden from sight.
“Confound it all!” said the old man as a sudden jolt of pain shot up the length of his right leg. When he attempted to pull his boot from the opening in the ground, a sensation of prickly discomfort gripped him, as if his foot had fallen asleep. However, his injury proved to be much more serious than that. Red-hot needles of agony stitched his flesh in a dozen places, causing him to moan aloud.
Pap, you damned fool! he told himself. You’ve done gone and put your foot into a nest of copperheads!
But snakes were far from being the source
of his discomfort.
With a curse and mighty heave, Pap extracted his leg from the knee-deep kudzu and landed hard on his backside in the thicket. For a moment, all he could do was sit there and stare dumbly at his foot. Something had a hold of Pap Wilson. Something he had never seen the likes of during his seventy-odd years in the hills and hollows of Tennessee.
Tiny black eyes glared up at him, burning with an emotion that could only be described as intense hunger. What it appeared to be was a very large and stubby caterpillar, the wooly kind that built great transparent nests in the boughs of blooming dogwoods in the heart of springtime. But several disturbing differences separated that creature from any insect that Pap had ever encountered. A thick coat of bristles covered the cylindrical body of the ugly thing. The old man poked at its back with the end of his walking stick. The cane emerged covered with long quills, five to seven inches in length, each as sharp and barbed at the end as a fish hook.
As the pain grew increasingly worse, Pap’s attention was reluctantly drawn to the bloody, black maw that encircled his lower leg. It worked ravenously, awful sounds of sucking and tearing rising from deep within its gullet. The teeth were triangular ivory razors. The moved along flesh and bone in an odd circular motion, performing irreparable damage, funneling the chewed tissue and gristle into the dark tunnel of its throat. In sudden horror, Pap realized that the mouth had traveled upward a few inches, totally engulfing the swell of his ankle.
The thing was eating him!
Pap Wilson had always been a proud man. He forever balked at help offered by neighbors or kin, and staunchly refused any consideration lest acceptance be interpreted as a weakness on his part. But that evening, deep in that wooded hollow, he screamed long and loud for his life and prayed to the good Lord that someone would hear his frantic cries.
Someone did. Nate and Johnny, the old man’s strapping sons, were in the barn unharnessing a pair of swaybacked mules. Their upper bodies were tanned and slick with sweat, for they had spent all day plowing the hillside acreage that bore their meager crop each year. The two brothers looked at one another. “That sounded like Pap,” said Nate.
They ran out of the barn and down the slope of the hollow. They found their father lying in a tangle of briers and bramble, trembling in a palsy of torment, his life’s blood flowing freely now.
“Good God Almighty!” gasped Johnny, the younger of the two.
The boys stared in disbelief at the thing that pulsated along Pap’s right shin. Nate crouched and curiously extended his hand toward it.
“Don’t touch it, son!” warned Pap through clenched teeth. “The critter’s got barbs as sharp as a porcupine’s.”
“What the hell is it?”
“Don’t rightly know. Put my foot in a sinkhole under the kudzu and the thing latched onto me with a vengeance.” Pap shuddered with another spasm, each more painful than the last. “Well, don’t just stand there a-gawking like a couple of idiots… get me on up to the house!”
Fashioning their brawny arms into a makeshift chair, they carried their papa up the steep embankment to the ancient log house. “Ma!” they yelled as they approached the back porch. “Come on out here quick! Pap’s been bad hurt!”
Mable Wilson rushed out of the kitchen door, drying her hands on her apron. “Lord have mercy!” she cried. “What’s happened to him?” At first, all she could see was her husband’s britches leg saturated with fresh blood.
Then she saw the parasite and nearly screamed.
Pap reached out and took her hand firmly. “Now, don’t you go getting hysterical on me, old woman,” he said evenly, trying to inject an element of calm into his faltering voice. “Ya’ll just get me inside and we’ll see about getting this ugly cuss off’n me.”
By the time they carried Pap to his chair at the head of the kitchen table, the creature had crept to the bulge of the old man’s knee. They tried two things, neither of which showed any positive results. First they tried pouring hot water on the thing. Mable had a kettle of water boiling on the woodstove, knowing that her husband enjoyed a mug of tar black coffee after his forays in the forest. Carefully, she tipped the kettle over the writhing body of jagged bristles. All in the room were silent, watching in nervous anticipation. Mable and the boys prepared themselves for the shrieking and thrashing of the scalded critter as it dropped away and the grisly sight of Pap’s leg, flesh and bone whittled away to a point like a lead pencil. But the boiling water had no effect. If anything, it only riled the creature. It continued its gnashing and gnawing with renewed vigor.
Next, Nate took a carving knife from the kitchen pantry. Careful not to ensnare his hand in the quills, he jabbed at the thing’s body, intending to skewer it. But, still, their good intentions proved futile. The knife’s edge continuously struck a network of hard, interlinked scales, comparable to the chainmail of a knight’s armor.
“Try its head,” suggested Johnny.
He did. After chiseling for a few moments, the point of the blade broke off with a snap. “No good,” sighed Nate. “The blamed thing is as hard as a tortoise shell.”
“What’re we gonna do now?” asked Johnny. He noticed the thing was halfway up his father’s thigh and, amazingly enough, its toothy maw was expanding in width, accommodating the circumference of the morsel it was devouring.
Pap had no more answers. He merely sat there trembling, tears of rage and agony rolling down his leathery cheeks. Mable saw her responsibility and took control. “Carry your papa into the bedroom and make him comfortable.” She followed them to the front room that she and her spouse had shared for over fifty years. After Pap had been laid gently on the big feather bed, Mable led her sons out into the hallway. “Nate… you’ve got the keys to your papa’s truck, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now, listen to me, both of you,” she said, trying to calm herself. “I want you to drive to town and fetch Doc Hampton. Bring him back here as fast as you can.”
“But that thing on Pap…” Nate began to protest, “as fast as it’s going… won’t be nothing left of him by the time we get back.”
“Don’t talk such nonsense!” balked Mable, although her skepticism was half-hearted with dread. “Now get going. And put on a shirt, the both of you. I don’t want you roaring into town looking like a couple of naked savages on a rampage, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” They dressed hurriedly and, soon, the old pickup was heading down the dirt road for town.
“Mable?”
After a moment’s hesitation, she went in to see what Pap wanted.
“Mable?” Pap muttered weakly. His face, once ruddy with good health, now stared up at her as pale as baking flour. “Mable… I want you to do me a favor.”
“Of course,” she said, but there was wariness in her tone.
“I want you to fetch that old shotgun of mine from outta the hall closet and load it for me.”
“Whatever for?” Mable exclaimed. Her mind raced, revealing reasons and quickly discarding them. She had a cold fear that she knew exactly why Pap wanted the gun.
The elderly man avoided looking her in the eyes. “The pain, Mable… oh, dear Lord in heaven, it hurts!” His white-knuckled hands clutched at the mattress, the nails digging deeper into the bedcovers. “Mable, darling… I don’t know how much more of this I can stand.”
Mable Wilson removed her apron and tenderly wiped the sweat from his pasty brow. She was a God-fearing, church-going woman and, at that moment, knew she must draw on her faith to get them both through this terrible ordeal. “I’ll not let you die, Pap Wilson,” she declared, her own tears spilling freely. “Not by your hand or by this… this monster that’s got hold of you!”
“So you refuse to help me?” Once again he was the rawboned mountain man, fearful of nothing and full of piss and vinegar; the man she had wed the summer of her eighteenth year. “Well, if that be the case, then just get the hell outta here! Get out and lock the door behind you! And no matter how bad
ly I scream, woman, don’t come in… do you understand what I’m saying?”
He stared down reluctantly at the quilled parasite. The thing was at the joint of his crotch and thigh now, blood pouring in torrents, more blood than he had seen in an entire lifetime of hardship. The appetite was what mortified him. Could the thing eat and eat and never gorge itself to capacity? Was its devilish hunger eternal? And who would it start on next, once it had its fill of him?
Mable obeyed her husband’s demands. Swiftly, she closed the door behind her, locked it shut with the skeleton key. She stood at the front door screen and watched the evening bleed into twilight. She prayed softly, trying hard to ignore the awful noises of feeding that sounded from the next room.
~ * ~
In the course of a lifetime one rarely endures the kind of living nightmare that befell the Wilson clan that dreadful day in the wooded hills of East Tennessee. A nightmare so horrendous that it crumbles the very foundation of day-lit reality, then pursues the tortured mind relentlessly into the realm of troubled sleep afterwards.
When Nate and Johnny returned with Louis Hampton M.D. in tow, darkness had fallen. They found their mother sitting in her rocker on the front porch, her face buried mournfully in wrinkled hands, her frail body racked with the force of her sobbing. “It was horrible!” she told them. “The screaming… I’ve never, in all my born days, heard such awful sounds as those that came from that room. Oh, your poor papa… how he must have suffered. And, Lord forgive me, I did nothing. I sat right here until the screaming finally stopped.”
Nate left Johnny to look after Ma. Then, accompanied by Doc Hampton, he entered the house. Living so far back in the sticks, the Wilson household, like most of their backwoods neighbors, existed without benefit of telephone or electricity. In pitch darkness, Nate fished in the hall closet, found the old Parker twelve-gauge, and loaded it. Then, flashlight in hand, they unlocked the door and burst in.
