August's Eyes

by Glenn Rolfe

  Pat’s mouth went dry. “What?”

  “She asked me to put sunblock on her back,” Danny said. “Top off.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I swear to God, man,” Danny said. “Swear to God.”

  Pat leaned back and bit his lip. “Man, as if.”

  “Yeah, I’m just fucking with you,” Danny said. “I saw her in the bikini for like two seconds and then she disappeared into the house. I mean she looked great and it gave me plenty of fuel to keep my motor runnin’ while cutting her grass, but I didn’t rub her in any way.”

  By the end of the day, sunburnt and exhausted, he and Danny decided next summer would call for another helper or two. After Pat paid Danny his take of today’s earnings, they parted ways. Danny had offered Pat a ride, but he declined. He liked the way the wind felt against his sweat-covered skin after a hard day’s work as he rode his bike home.

  The last job had been out near Crescent Cemetery, one of the twelve graveyards in Spears Corner. A thought occurred to Pat as he cruised by and smelled the freshly cut grass.

  Twelve graveyards.

  One small town.

  A lot of graveyards.

  A lot of jobs.

  Unless each cemetery had its own caretaker, he might have stumbled upon a jackpot. He made a mental note to check with the town office tomorrow. Danny was heading out of town with his brother and their cousins, so there would be no chance for crosstown jobs, not without Danny’s truck. Pat would make the most of it and look into the graveyard business.

  A soft voice caused him to brake.

  “Hello?” he said.

  Gazing into Crescent Cemetery, he could have sworn the place had been smaller. Looking at it now, he saw a path he’d never noticed before leading to another one beyond the last grave. He scanned the other pathways and the graves between them for a car or signs of anyone at all.

  After setting his bike in the little gulley between the graveyard and the road, Pat walked to the first of the three pathways. Something about the trail at the back center of the place called to him much louder than any imagined voice.

  At the start of the little path at the back of the cemetery, there was a slight dip, surrounded on either side by foot-high rusted fences. He walked from the front cemetery and entered the shaded trail. The trees held hands above him, creating cover like some sort of amusement park tunnel. As it opened to a larger, and judging by the poor condition of the gravestones, much older section of the cemetery, Pat felt uneasy.

  Dead center stood a huge tree, two of its branches broken and bent, hanging over a number of graves and covering more from view. As weird as it was that he’d never noticed any of this before, Pat’s growing sense of commerce and opportunity began to sound in his head. Surely someone was in charge of cleaning up such a mess, and whoever it was wasn’t doing a very good job. A smile barely had time to trace his lips before a strange boy stepped out from behind the tall stone monument off to Pat’s right.

  Something looked off about the guy’s dark eyes peering at him, almost as if he had on some small black goggles or weird European sunglasses.

  A vision of Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka came to mind.

  “Hey, hello?” Pat called.

  Whoever it was stayed mostly out of sight. Only the top of his face peeked out over the monument.

  The boy did not respond.

  “I’m just….” What was he doing? Wandering?

  The temperature dropped.

  “I’ll leave you alone. Sorry.”

  Pat hurried back the way toward the trail, suddenly nervous that whoever was out here might follow.

  “Tell him…” a voice whispered.

  Pat stopped dead in his tracks halfway back to the front cemetery.

  He felt the hairs prickle on the back of his neck and the oddly cooler air grip his insides and threaten to never let him go.

  “I’m sorry?” he asked, not daring to glance back.

  “Tell him that August says hello.”

  The voice sounded like it was nearly on top of him. He spun on his heels and saw – no one.

  Movement on the ground just behind him caused him to jump.

  Tons of black spiders the size of fifty-cent pieces scurried from the path and toward the woods surrounding the place.

  Pat hated the little eight-legged freaks. Ever since Seth Rowe told him they made babies in your hair or climbed into your mouth when you slept, Pat had never been anything but a complete and utter fraidy cat around spiders.

  He nearly fell as he stumbled away from them.

  He ran to his bike.

  All the way home, he swatted at his neck, back and shoulders. It was only the wind, but his mind refused to allow him to commit to that truth.

  Tell him August says hello.

  Chapter Thirteen

  December 1991

  Llewellyn Caswell waited for his moments. Patience was one of his strong suits and why not? He would do anything to nab his boys. Even if it meant not being back home for his elderly mother. He would make it back to Maine someday. He remembered a Creedence song about someday and how it never comes.

  Right now, Henry Bixby was saying his goodbyes to his group of trouble-making friends. Llewellyn had watched them throw chunks of ice at numerous vehicles passing by. He’d worried that they’d spotted him across the road once, but it was just the big ugly kid in the red, white and blue jacket pretending to talk tough to someone.

  Llewellyn had walked these streets near this time of night for weeks watching the boys gather down the road and around the corner from Chinook Park. Every time they broke up to head home for curfew, Henry walked alone down Belmont Street, while the others made their way back through the park together. Oh, how many times he’d wanted to overtake Henry on his way home. But Llewellyn was patient. He hadn’t been caught in the fifteen years he’d been taking them. That takes discipline and wherewithal.

  “See ya guys tomorrow,” Henry said, placing his hands in his jacket pockets. The puffy brown coat looked too big for the boy. It practically swallowed him whole. Between the huge jacket and the eye patch that covered one of the lenses of Henry’s thick glasses, Llewellyn wanted to scoop him up and carry him away.

  The group barked farewells in return; the big ugly one mentioned something about his pecker and Henry’s mother. Llewellyn was half tempted to cross the street now and smash the large loser’s teeth in and shove his own cock in the kid’s bleeding mouth. No one fucked with one of his boys. Not after he’d imprinted upon them.

  He liked that term. Imprinted. It’s what animals did. He’d seen a lion cub imprint on a human on one of those programs on the Discovery Channel. It was astounding. They recognized the human as their mother. An instant bond.

  While it wasn’t quite the same for Llewellyn and his boys, it assured him that no matter the circumstances, they would all be together in some spiritual capacity forever.

  He pressed down the stiffness in the front of his pants, licking his lips before pursuing his golden goose.

  Zooming ahead, Llewellyn rounded the corner of Lucy Lane and Belmont Street. He pulled to the curb, threw on his hazards and stepped from the car.

  When the boy walked around the corner, Llewellyn’s heart quickened. Snowflakes descended from the clouds above, coming down like a thousand arachnids in a ballet of cold, hypnotic dust, littering the earth in a gathering threat.

  Henry stopped in his tracks.

  “Oh, hey,” Llewellyn said. “Can you help me?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the boy approached with a hopeful look upon his face.

  A feeling akin to one you got in your stomach when you hit the big drop on a roller coaster trundled through Llewellyn’s body.

  “What’s wrong?” Henry asked. He stopped in the middle of the empty street, not an inch closer.


  “I’m not from around here and I seem to be having some engine troubles. Would you happen to know where I could find the closest pay phone?”

  Henry scanned the road left and right, his teeth suddenly gnawing at his lips.

  Llewellyn saw the nervousness rising in the boy. Like animals, human beings could sense danger.

  “Well, uh…” he said. He glanced over his shoulder from the direction he’d just come from. “I think I just passed one…back there—”

  Llewellyn made his move.

  “Walk over to the car and get in the passenger seat or I’ll blow your fucking head off right here and be gone before the cops can show up to tell your parents you’re dead.”

  Henry stared at the gun in Llewellyn’s hand.

  His chin quivered.

  “I’m going to count to one and then pull the fucking trigger.”

  Henry hurried around the car as Llewellyn guided him to the passenger side and opened the door for him. The kid took one last glance around, hoping to spot a witness, someone to save him, but there was no one.

  Llewellyn got behind the wheel, set the gun in his lap and flicked off the hazards.

  “We’re going to go back to my place for a little while and hang out. When we’re finished, I’ll drop you off at home. Understood?”

  “Please…” Henry whined.

  “Understood?” Llewellyn repeated, menace seething into his voice.

  “Please, I don’t want to go with you….”

  “Don’t make me kill you, Henry.”

  “How…how do you know my name?”

  Llewellyn gazed at him, lust pounding through his veins.

  “I know the names of all my special boys.”

  He started the car and pulled away into the snowy night.

  * * *

  The papers reported that the missing child, Henry Wilfred Bixby, was last seen by his friends leaving Chinook Park Sunday evening. His parents pleaded to the nation on the Today Show for the person who took their Henry to bring him home. It was his thirteenth birthday, and Christmas was only three weeks away.

  Henry Bixby never came home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  1993

  “Shut that fuckin’ shit off,” Llewellyn heard the ghost of Steve Norton shout from the other side of the door.

  Steve Norton wasn’t even here; he was just a phantom walking the hallways. No one could tell Llewellyn Caswell what to do anymore. Norton, his mother’s demon fiancé, was dead two months after he first hit Llewellyn with the wrench. His mom thought Steve had just walked out on them and never come back. Llewellyn knew better.

  He was drunk and mean, Llewellyn remembered….

  Norton had swept Llewellyn’s mother, Loretta, off her feet and the two were engaged within a matter of weeks. She had no idea what kind of monster she’d let into their lives. Steve Norton was a mechanic and an active member in the Ku Klux Klan. He was only in Llewellyn’s world for a moment in time, but he’d certainly left an impression. Within weeks of moving in with them, Norton began dishing out the hurt, both physical and mental. The belt one night, a wrench the next, a “you fat little fucker” here and a “you a faggot, boy” there, the son of a bitch revealed his true depravity soon after. One night, while his mother slept, Norton, drunk and horny, burst into Llewellyn’s bedroom and raped him.

  Two nights later, with his mom helping out at the church’s bean supper, Llewellyn found an inebriated Norton passed out in front of Three’s Company and smashed the claw end of a hammer into the top of the man’s head.

  Llewellyn tossed a blanket from the recliner to the floor and shoved the dead man on top of it to keep as much blood away from the sofa as he could. After wrapping a garbage bag around the man’s ruined head, he rolled the body onto his plastic sled and hauled him out the back door. It took every ounce of strength he possessed, but Llewellyn managed to pull the sled into the woods and back to Litchfield Pond at the edge of their property. He loaded the man’s clothes with rocks and rolled him into the murky water.

  The mysterious disappearance of Steve Norton hung over him and his mother for years, but with no body and no evidence, the police eventually cleared Loretta and her overweight son of any wrongdoing.

  The results were a mixed bag as Loretta, her reputation sullied by the local sewing circle, squirreled herself away in the farmhouse and never dated again. Her heartache was enough of a burden for Llewellyn to witness. He didn’t want to tell her how wrong she was to miss the man.

  The memory of caving in the back of that monster’s head carried with it an excitement that Llewellyn sought out time and time again.

  His boys brought him to that place. And when they were finished, despite what he told them about going home, he made them vanish from the earth just like Steve Norton.

  * * *

  Now at his home in Wisconsin, stewing in a drunken haze, he ignored the phantoms of his past and turned his attention to the fly in his web.

  “Please, I won’t tell anyone.”

  The boy sat in total darkness of Llewellyn’s living room closet, bound at the wrists and ankles, naked and scared.

  “Please, mister, just don’t kill me.”

  Llewellyn groaned in agitation. Begging was not something he rewarded. It only fed his rage.

  He stood, walked to the stereo and turned the AC/DC album up until the walls threatened to crumble. He poured a tumbler of Knob Creek and drank down its fiery promise.

  Opening the closet door, he smirked down into the glistening eyes of the youth. The devil he kept within whispered suggestions and Llewellyn took up each one.

  The boy’s screams – a choir of sadistic glee and carnal wonderments – went on well after midnight. At some point, he gave up and died. Into the dirt crawlspace the broken body would go, coated in boiling lye and wrapped in a plastic sheet until Llewellyn could find a good time to bury whatever remained with the others.

  In the morning, he stood in the window gazing out at his front yard and thought of all the others buried out there in his Graveyard Land.

  A thought skittered from the darkness. Someday, it would all be over. He’d be caught or he’d be dead. Either way, it didn’t seem fair. If only there were a way he could make his Graveyard Land last forever. He’d do anything to stay with his boys.

  That was the day Llewellyn decided to challenge the impossible.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Welcome back, John,” Dr. Soctomah said as he stepped aside and directed him into the cozy room.

  John took his time looking over the native artifacts. “What tribe do you belong to?” he asked, staring at a map on the wall tracking the tribes of Maine.

  “Excuse me?” Dr. Soctomah asked.

  “Oh, sorry, I assumed you were—”

  The man laughed, his smile matching the warmth of his brown eyes. “I’m just messing with you. I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t as your therapist. Passamaquoddy. My sisters and mother live on the Pleasant Point Reservation up there, just a little north of Lubec.” He pointed to the eastern part of Maine. “It’s beautiful coastal country. Have you ever been up that way?”

  “No,” John said. “I think Bangor is as far north as I’ve ever been. Do you get to see them often?”

  “A few times a year,” he replied. “But come, have a seat.”

  John took the same sofa as the other day.

  “Thanks for fitting me in again so soon,” John said.

  “I’m glad you wanted to be here. Some people I see once and never again. Glad to see that’s not the case with you. Plus, I had a cancellation and voila!”

  “Yeah, well, thanks. I appreciate it. And I’m still dreaming about strange kids, so….”

  “Is that the dream journal?” Dr. Soctomah nodded at the notebook in John’s hands.

  “Ah, yeah. Did you want to
see it?”

  “That’s not necessary. It’s more for you to keep track of things as you remember them. Anything of interest over the last couple days?”

  “Well, to tell you the truth, Sarah and I are having a different issue at the moment. It sort of makes this,” he said, holding up the journal, “seem small.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “She wants to try for a baby again.”

  “I see. And you?”

  “I….” John hesitated. “I don’t want to see her go through that again.”

  “When did this come up?”

  “Just the other day.”

  Dr. Soctomah made some notes.

  “What about you, John? Do you want to try again? Without worrying about Sarah’s feelings. Is having children still a want for you?”

  “I mean, I…I don’t know. Part of me is finally comfortable. You know? But another part wouldn’t mind, but….”

  “Then, maybe you just need some time to think it over.”

  “I got mad when she brought it up. I mean, not right off, but I said some things I can’t take back. And so did she.” John hung his head and gazed at the cover of the notebook.

  “Well,” Dr. Soctomah said. “You guys have been down this road before. She’s let you know what she wants, it’s okay to react, but now, I want you to sit with it. Give it time. I’m sure she’ll wait for you to weigh it out.”

  John nodded.

  “How about running? Have you been out yet?”

  John grinned. “I picked up some new shoes this morning. I was planning on going out this afternoon.”

  “Good. I really think you’ll find it therapeutic. Now, I’d like to go over your history. Is that okay?”

  “Sure,” John said.

  “Let’s start from your earliest memory.”

  * * *

  They covered his relatively happy childhood, up to his parents’ divorce, and his decision to fend for himself. Dr. Soctomah checked his phone and stopped them momentarily. His next appointment had canceled. He offered John the chance to double up their session today. John agreed, thinking it best to plow through this while his walls were down. They talked about his year and a half of couch surfing, before he took over his brother’s apartment. That led to deciding to work instead of finishing school, and then to his father’s death.