His mind wandered and he thought of eggs, sunny side up. A mug of hot black coffee, no sugar. In the distance, a pair of eggs rose over the horizon—no, not eggs; they were headlights, blinding him as they closed in.
Beside him, Marianne fell to the ground, whacking her head against the open door on the way down.
"Marianne!" Henry rushed to her. As he bent over her, he nearly hit his head against the same door. He swore under his breath as he lifted her head and felt dampness. He pulled one hand away—it was dark but there was no mistaking what it was.
"Is everything okay here?"
He hadn’t realized the vehicle was already upon them, and he hadn’t heard the driver get out. But the headlights were blinding, and with one wet hand still holding Marianne’s head, he shielded his eyes as a figure emerged from the glare.
“Oh, shit,” the driver said.
He wore a mesh ballcap and a red hunting vest over a plaid shirt. His face was indistinct, but Henry could make out the shaggy black beard that covered a good half of it. Behind the man, a late model Chevy pickup idled, something shrill warbling from the radio inside the cab.
“She fell,” Henry said.
“I got a CB,” the driver said. “I’ll radio for help.” He moved to return to the truck.
Henry barked, “No!”
The driver stopped, slowly turned back to Henry, who rose to his feet and fidgeted with the hem of his shirt.
“I mean, I think she’s exhausted, maybe. It’s been a long day. A long drive.”
“Is that—is that blood on you?”
Henry shot a glance down at himself, at his hands and shirt, where indeed there was something dark, wet, sticky.
“No,” he said, his voice starting to crack. “No, no. Look, maybe just help me get her back into the car, huh? I don’t want to trouble anyone. She’s just tired, really. We’re both just so goddamned tired.”
He wished to hell he could see the driver’s face, read his expression and maybe his thoughts. All he really wanted was for the nosy bastard to go away, but he needed to feel sure he went away comfortable enough with the situation that he didn’t get anyone else involved. Though part of him considered the wisdom of making her—it—somebody else’s problem, it wasn’t going to be easy explaining any of this, especially when she was doing such a bang-up job playing dead for their guest.
No, this was Henry’s problem.
“Yeah,” the driver said at some length. “Yeah, okay. Sure.”
He approached somewhat warily, and when he reached Marianne, he knelt down beside her. Henry crouched, too, and he didn’t like what he saw in the man’s face now that he was close up. The man touched her arm and squashed his eyebrows into a tight knit.
“Mister,” the driver said, swallowing hard. “She doesn’t look…”
Quickly, he retracted his hand and shot up, eyes wide and wild.
“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ. That lady’s dead.”
He edged around Marianne and cleared the Buick’s open back door, and he began moving backward toward the idling truck.
“No, no,” Henry pleaded. “Listen, she’s a little sick, maybe, not feeling all that great, but we’re just so tired, man. Come on, now. Hey, would you stop a minute, now?”
“Stay back,” the man said. “Stay right there.”
“Not dead,” Henry said, shaking his head back and forth and advancing slowly toward the man. “You got it wrong. She’s not dead. I can prove it. I can prove it to you.”
As soon as he said it, he decided it wasn’t true. He couldn’t prove it, because she was dead. She’d died there on their bed, back in Jersey, and he knew it. One only had to look at her, to smell her, to feel the rubbery give of her cool skin, to see that. And she wasn’t budging—not as long as she kept up this charade.
Yet looking at her now, still and white on the gravel and lifeless grass, her eyes sunken into her skull and dry lips receding from her teeth, all Henry could see was the same thing the frightened stranger saw.
A corpse.
His dead wife.
He said, “Oh my God.”
Henry grabbed handfuls of his own hair and fought back the scream rising inside of him. Dead, his mind screamed back at him. Dead dead dead dead.
Grief welled in his chest, bleeding from his heart and spreading throughout the rest of him like the cancer that took Marianne. A grief he could not face, a grief that preferred madness to being left alone in this life.
“What have I done?” he asked, but there was no one to answer him. Marianne was dead, and the stranger was already back in the cab of his truck, holding the CB receiver to his face.
Henry fell into a stumbling gait, pinwheeling his arms as he rushed the Chevy. He was desperate to explain, to make the man see what this really was, that it was bad, but not nearly as bad as it looked. Please please please no no no.
“…a big problem here on the westbound side of 57, over,” he heard the driver say.
You don’t understand, please no, don’t, Henry’s mind babbled, but the words got stuck in his throat. It was just a mistake, not a murder. It was too much to take, but he had a grip on himself now. Why couldn’t this goddamned son of a bitch just settle down and listen?
He reached the truck and grasped the door by the open window, and just as the startled driver dropped the receiver and recoiled from Henry in fear, the passenger side door flew open and Marianne flew into the cab like a wraith.
“Marianne!”
The driver squealed like a hog being slaughtered when her teeth sank into his neck, her jagged, gray fingernails into his face and one eye. The man’s hands slapped blindly at her as he thrashed behind the wheel, but the earthly remains of Marianne didn’t loosen their grasp on him. She shook and snarled, whipped her head with her teeth still clamped down on him. Blood, black as the night, burbled out of him and sprayed the windshield. Another massive 18-wheeler rumbled past on the interstate and blew its deafening horn as it swerved to avoid taking the passenger side door off the truck, but it didn’t slow down.
And by the time the semi had vanished into the pitch, the driver was dead, his red throat opened and right eye ruined, his body blanketed with his own blood.
The CB crackled, then fell silent.
For the first time, Henry noticed the insects singing somewhere in the grass and brush behind him. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and listened to them.
“Henry…”
When again he opened his eyes, he found Marianne sitting calmly in the pickup’s passenger seat, knees together and hands folded in her lap. She slowly turned her head to face him, and in the shadows the blood on her face looked like a dark beard had sprouted.
In spite of himself, Henry laughed at that.
“Now we have a truck,” Marianne said. Her voice was wet and syrupy.
The task of dragging the driver out of the pickup and over to the Buick was considerably more difficult than Henry anticipated. It was the second body he’d ever moved, but substantially heavier than Marianne’s. When at last he got the man into the backseat and covered him with the blanket, he was awash with sweat and his breath was ragged.
The gas gauge on the dash was close to E when he finally climbed in behind the wheel and pulled the door shut. Henry heaved a sigh, then cranked the gearshift into D. He drove below the speed limit and headed for the next exit, where there was a Shell station they’d passed several miles back. Once he was gassed up, he’d get back on the westbound side as they had been, before spinning out.
When they passed the Effingham cross again, bright in the night sky, Marianne snickered. Henry could smell the decay in her breath, the coagulating blood on her blouse.
The ocean, he thought, pushing the unpleasant odors from his mind. I’ll take her all the way to the ocean. With this in mind, he could almost smell the salt spray, feel the sun on his neck.
“We’ll go in together,” Marianne said. “The water. Both of us.”
“Yes,” Hen
ry agreed, slowing the truck at sight of the Shell sign ahead.
“My beloved,” she rasped.
Henry smiled, knowing he was not mad, after all.
<<====>>
Author’s Story Note
“Crossroads of Opportunity” is the first collaboration between Ed Kurtz and doungjai gam, though hopefully not the last. The process of co-writing it was fairly simple and orderly; Ed wrote the first paragraph, not really knowing where it was heading, and sent it to doungjai, who wrote the next paragraph and put more meat on the bones. In between, we discussed avenues to explore while doungjai carefully studied maps of the area the characters explore in the story—she’s a stickler for authenticity! The end product showcases the strengths and creative tics of both authors, effectively forming something new and different for each of them.
DAD’S FAMOUS PRESERVES
Seras Nikita
From Hinnom Magazine #004
Editor: C.P Dunphey
Gehenna & Hinnom Books
When I was eleven and my brother Rourke was sixteen Dad moved us to the jungle to deliver the Lord’s Good Word to the people who lived there.
He must have thought it would change us. Make us into men, lift us above the everyday sins of the other boys littering the stoops of Boston.
That’s what he called them—everyday sins.
Dad said that everyday sins were small things.
Small things, like not telling the Irish girl who lives in the building across the way that maybe the cat’s been sitting in her window, because the way her curtains fall lately they bunch up around the pullstring and if a person were bending down in just the right way, for example on his knees whispering prayers before bed, he might see right through the gap to whomever might be standing there blow-drying her hair in clean white panties.
“Everyday sins can sneak up on you, son. Like bees. One or two aren’t so bad, but when you get a swarm of them together you’re in big trouble.”
Dad had black hair and a mouth that could smile all the way to the corners of his eyes. He was not a religious fanatic or a child abuser, if that’s what you’re thinking. Dad never beat us with Bibles or locked us in closets or forced us to grasp crucifixes heated over burners. He was just an electrician turned preacher who, in addition to being fond of analogies, believed that God would want men and boys to wear heeled shoes and pressed shirts while they were delivering the Good News.
He’d been flipping a batch of Dad’s Famous Hotcakes while he delivered the analogy about the bees. Dad cooked us hot meals all the time, and everything he made was “Famous.”
“They’ll sting you swollen, son, if you give them a chance. You have to be on the lookout.”
He put the plate of hotcakes on the table and we ate them together in the warm kitchen with syrup and butter and cold milk.
* * *
There were no bees in the jungle.
The native women were not like the Irish girl or the lady with the tiny waist on the detergent box. Their breasts fell to their navels like cupsful of cold molasses sinking slowly down their chests. They were the first breasts I’d ever seen up close. Instead of using a toilet the villagers squatted over holes, and their nails were thick and yellow. They were all missing a toenail or a fingernail, and sometimes more than one. The girls poked pieces of wood and bone through holes in their noses and ears, and sometimes lumps of scar tissue bloomed up around the holes like chunks of white lime built up around our drain at home. They squatted next to coal beds while they cooked. Some nights the firelight showed me their down-therehair and dark parts beneath that hung like flaps. Some had brown and black tattoos on their faces. Some of their heads were as bald as eggs.
The men were strong and glossy and hard. They hunted monkeys and butchered them with their hands. Then they cooked up the meat, and the guts too. They even broke open the bones and dug inside with their thumbs, and then ate the stuff that came out. Sometimes they pulled out the guts before the monkey even stopped breathing.
The children turned over logs and found white grubs the size of pecans that they roasted on sticks before chewing them up. They watched the moon and some nights they smeared things on themselves and danced in front of bonfires. One night, I saw a baby born.
Inside our chapel was very, very hot. The walls and roof were made of heavy pine planks.
“The planks were the first thing we brought in once the road was cleared,” said Father Claussen, showing us how to fan out mosquito nets over our beds and weight them at the bottom. He pointed to the four glass windows, looking very proud.
“From a pair of very charitable Christians in Long Island. Real glass. They let the light of Christ shine right in.” He beamed. “I doubt there’s another set of glass windows for three hundred miles in any direction.”
The windows didn’t open. The air in the chapel was as hot and heavy as the steam that used to hiss from Dad’s iron. Beads of sap oozed from the pine lumber, scenting the smother like Christmastime. Everything was sticky. The few villagers curious enough to attend services brought banana leaves to sit on, so they wouldn’t get sap on their bottoms from sitting in the pews. They fanned themselves with fronds and then stopped coming altogether.
Dad said sometimes the Good Word was like the sound of the ocean.
“Waves just keep crashing on in the background, and finally a day comes when people see that the waters are cool and clear. People wade in and try to swim. Some of those people will take to the water like fish, and others might not get the hang of it right away. Some people might only dip in a toe.” He’d always drop his voice for the next part. “And some people need us more than anyone else, because by the time they get to the water they’ve already been on fire for a long, long time.”
Dad was from Chicago first, then Minneapolis, and then Boston. He’d signed a year contract for us, and when the review board asked if he had any experience living in the tropical wild, he said,
“I’ve studied up.”
To us, he said,
“If the Swiss Family Robinson can do it, so can we. The Lord will watch over us.” But not many days had passed before it became clear that neither thing was true. We were dangerously ignorant about the jungle.
We’d packed useless things. A swimsuit. A gold pocket watch. A red plastic radio that never picked up a station and ran out of batteries after the first week. Dad brought three jars of Brylcream, because he was afraid he’d run out. Nonetheless, he assured us, everything would be okay. We were on the Lord’s mission and He was looking out for us.
Those first months were a dark time. Our water filter was a heavy contraption that took both hands and all my weight to pump it. In the heat of the day, I’d avoid pumping water until I was so thirsty my head throbbed, and then make it worse by exerting myself in the heat. For food, we had a kind of dried porridge with vitamins ground up in it, and you added water to make a sweet, gritty sludge. The best way to get it down was to drink it fast, like cod liver oil.
Suffering in button-up shirts and heeled shoes with socks, we doled out litanies to the strange natives who looked at us skeptically, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads. The village children ran naked in the open air, and waded into the brown running stream to splash their dark bodies with water. I tried not to feel bitter thoughts toward them.
On Sundays Dad offered Sacrament, pressing wafers of host into rough brown hands and making the sign of the cross in the air. “On the night in which he was betrayed, Christ broke bread and said, Take and Eat. This is my Body, given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.” The villagers inspected the paperish discs, taking wary nibbles as if tasting an unfamiliar fruit for the first time without knowing if the flesh would send them into fits or cause chaos in their bowels. Nobody understood a word either side was saying.
At night Roarke and I lay beneath the mosquito nets and felt things crawling on us, scratching furrows in our legs with our grimy fingernails. We’d been itchy and paranoid since the night Roa
rke had found a millipede as long as his forearm coiled inside his pillowcase. Sometimes we lay in bed and remembered things together, like the icebox back in Boston and the cool fountain in the square. Rory reminded me of Dad’s Famous Potato-and-Fried-Egg-Hash with Catsup, and I reminded him of Dad’s Famous Chocolate Egg Cream, always with an extra sprinkle of Ovaltine on top.
One very dark night I dreamed of the Irish girl. She was blow-drying her hair. She turned around, and I saw that her breasts were deformed and made of scar tissue, lumps stacked upon lumps like bunches of half-dried grapes. Beneath her white panties something bulged and squirmed. The hard horny head of a giant millipede emerged from one leg of her panties and wound down the inside of her thigh, circling once before disappearing behind her knee. She held up her thumb, and there was black stuff on it. She sucked it off and smiled, looking right at me, still holding the blow dryer.
I’d wet the bed that night for the first time in years, but Rory didn’t notice. The sheets were always damp anyway, and we’d trained our noses not to smell things.
Four months passed, and Dad was sick. He would stand in the palmettos behind the chapel and make himself vomit before morning service, so he wouldn’t have to stop the sermon when he felt it coming. Long, flat worms like ribbons came up in the vomit. Yellow stains bloomed in the armpits of his white shirts, and he had to go to the bathroom a lot. He grew thin and grim.
Still, he didn’t want to leave. He said that nothing was more transient than flesh, and he felt proud that God believed he was strong enough to be tested.
Rory and I wondered about this. We also wondered whether or not God considered all meat to be flesh. Were the worms made of flesh? Were the grubs, the millipede? The monkey guts? Were the villagers? What was the difference between flesh, and just regular old meat? We couldn’t decide.
The infection began with a black dot the size of a pea on the top of Dad’s foot. It looked like the time I’d stepped on a sharpened pencil, and a smooth pellet of lead had lodged itself in the web of my big toe.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 4 Page 17
