The Pines

Gurglings built up within the boy with mounting pressure, ready to emerge in screaming protest and pleading. His face lit in a flushing surge of color, and saliva gathered on his slack lower lip and slowly dropped in one long bead while he struggled to speak.

where?

The adults hovered about him, and he heard the dwindling hum of their voices as the kitchen contracted and receded.

Darkness entered him: the sound of distant howling echoed in his mind, lonely and pathetic, waiting for him, wanting. The heat rose up inside him, spurting rancid from his nose and mouth, heat and blackness and the cries of wild animals within him. And something tingled behind his ears, a frenzied, unreachable itch. Chabwok.

(“Look at his face. It’s like he’s in a trance.”)

Now, the dim-lit room all but faded, remained in the sickening murk only as an afterimage. The world wavered. He seemed to be in two places. He could still hear his mother and the gruff, gentle man, but distantly, their voices barely penetrating. Round and pale, their faces swam in his thickening vision, dissolving in the depths. Blackness, thick with the stench of bile, even here, crushed all possibility of light.

Pain burned in his loins. The fever, the suffocation crushed his chest, climbed, rushing through him, and the sound of the night, the searching yowl of demons, bellowed and shook the fibers of the dark.

don wanna be here no

At last, he could hear his own voice and knew his droning words had gone on forever.

“Daddy…Daddy, d-don’t, please, Daddy, no. N-Not again. I hear ’im? I can hear ’im! Yellin’ and hollerin’! Gonna hurt me. Daddy?” A current of pain washed out of him, and his words flowed, only half heard, like the music of the insects that filtered to that lighted kitchen drifting in his mind. Then the kitchen vanished altogether. Daddy? He’d never been in this room before. He lay on the floor and glints of light flitted up through cracks in the boards, making his heart pound even more. He tried to understand why he felt so scared, then his mind gave up the struggle. Might come up here. No, don’t hurt me. In the dark, the open window slit remained indistinguishable from the rest of the wall, yet he knew it was there, even before he felt the heavy air stir from that direction. He knew everything about this room. And from below the furious raging continued,

(“Matthew? Why don’t you answer me? Look at me! What’s wrong?”) quaking the building with its very loudness. Slumped in the darkness of my room, mine, only not, he listened to shouts and cringed as from the gin mill below, something splintered noisily. He

(“He can’t hear you, ’Thena. My God I think I understand this. Matty, where are you? Can you tell me what you see? Try, boy. Can you hear me?”) whimpered. And now the fever, the suffocation began to come heavily over him, claiming him, pulling his limbs. It raged up his legs, climbing through the blood to his stomach. Saliva flowed unnoticed from his lips to run across his bare chest, and he trembled and bent forward, choking again and afraid to make a sound. He couldn’t breathe anymore, and the burning pain in his groin made him weep.

Moaning softly, he pulled off the rest of his clothes. Marl leaned back against the bed and struggled for air. Ernie’s bed. His chest stiffened, and he clutched the tightened knot of his belly. Lonny’s bed. Hands clenched. His body hardened.

It was like drowning, the breath dammed deep within him, his lungs squeezed to bursting. Beyond his window, the night sighed softly.

His nostrils flared, vainly trying for oxygen, and the veins of his throat thickened and swelled, crushing his windpipe in anguished bulges. Burns exploded in his stomach, and he gritted back a scream. His teeth rattled as his head jerked spasmodically from side to side. He clutched at his swollen abdomen, fearing it would burst, and tears and spittle streaked his face.

Al Spencer rampaged and bellowed in the gin mill. He slammed a stool against the wall. He kicked a table over, and empty jars crashed to the dirt floor. The jars marked the last of his private stock; almost as an afterthought, the state troopers had smashed his still. But even before that, fewer and fewer of his customers had been venturing out. “Can’t even make a buck. Where da fuck’s Wes? Where’s Lonny? Assholes. Man works hard all ’is life.” At last he paused, panting heavily. Suddenly his face contorted with memory. He clawed away a loose board and extracted a jar half full of amber liquid. Leaning heavily on the wall, he gulped it down. “Gone.” By the glow of candles stuck in beer bottles, he surveyed the wreckage of his establishment. “All gone.” The slitted gleam returned to his eyes. “I know whose fault.”

One thought guttered in his brain. “Took ’im in outta kindness. Jus’ doin’ ’im a favor. So?”

So he hurled the jar against the wall.

“Lost everthin’! Says ’is name is Ernie. Doesn’t say the cops is after ’im! A favor! Up there—I knows what they was doin’ up in ’at room. Unner my own roof. You get down here, Marl. You hear me? I know you listenin’ up there! Thinks I don’t know.”

His eyes roamed to the calendar on the wall. December. Years ago. The woman’s breasts impossibly huge and blubbery in the brown and yellow light. Hanging below it, the blade of the meat cleaver glowed softly.

“Shoulda made your mother take you with ’er.” He paused, his breath labored. “When she went an lef’ me ’lone, lef’ me ’lone with a kid. You hear me? I shoulda took you inna woods and lef’ you wi’ half your head gone too. You think I done that?” Self-pity rang through the rage now as he stood at the base of the stairs and shrieked himself toward frenzy. “You think I done it? You don’t know what I done. Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t. You don’t know. She left me. With a kid. My boy. Won’t even come near his old man no more but up there wi’ that sumnabitch, that’s awright. I know!” He unscrewed the cap on a kerosene can and slopped some into a lantern. “Punish ’im good. What? Who said that? Somebody here?”

Something like a voice replied. Faintly. A tiny scraping noise. A wordless whisper that could exist only in a nightmare.

Al’s mouth opened, and no sound emerged. His eyes screwed up in denial while his body went rigid with fear. “What? Can’t be? Wha’s’at?” He took a step backward, then another. “Marl?” Something like resignation seeped into his fury. “Marl? Where you at, boy?”

The whisper scratched again, louder now, and nearer.

Al trembled…then took refuge in madness. Lantern in one hand, he hooked the cleaver down from the nail. “I know wha’ you was doin’ up there.” He started back toward the stairs. “Marl! You come here, boy! Fix you, you sumnabitch.” Climbing, he clutched the cleaver tightly, and the dull blade caught the light. “Won’t even come down ’ere to ’is daddy no more, ’is daddy who needs ’im, took care a him.” His voice filled up with tears. “Din’ I always take care a you?” Halfway up the stairs, he stopped. “Boy?”

Above him, something crouched…and cast a froglike shadow on the wall.

Al blinked, silent now. All rage evaporated. Peering, he leaned forward. With infinite slowness, he raised the lantern higher.

When he dropped it, flames engulfed the stairs.

Loud rustlings filled the dark pit of the shed.

Rats. Big ones, by the sound of them. Clutching the rifle, Steve crouched behind the door. He touched the flashlight at his side, still reluctant to switch it on. He needed a drink.

Across the grounds, the bright rectangle of the screen door glowed. He knew she sat waiting, revolver at her side, and he guessed she’d be holding Matthew’s small firm hand in hers. Yet the yard isolated them as surely as if they’d been on separate islands.

There was no moon, there were no stars. He shifted his position slightly and heard the slitherings around him cease for a moment. He could almost feel the vermin listening. Seconds ticked by, and the electric, reverberating whine of crickets filled the minutes.

He thought about her alone with the boy, faraway in the snarl of the night. And again he remembered the childhood game of “Werewolf,” the shame of being too afraid to come out of his hiding place when he’d been It, when they’d all been hunting him, remembered how he’d become the best one at the game when he grew older… because he’d been afraid still. He wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, convinced now this waiting was insanity, that they should have run when Athena wanted to.