The Backwoods

Trey’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he gulped. “It’s in my pants pocket. The postman delivered it today. No return address. But I know who it’s from, and I ain’t afraid.”

“Who’s it from, Trey? Is it from—”

“It’s from Everd Stanherd, that little shit. Just some a’ his backwoods superstitious bullshit, tryin’ to scare us. But I ain’t afraid.” He gulped again. “I don’t believe in black magic or whatever fucked-up mumbo-jumbo he thinks he’s pullin’.”

Now it was Patricia’s jaw that began to drop. “Everybody who got one of those letters died. They died because something was taken from them. Blood, organs, Dwayne’s head.”

“Ain’t nothin’ been taken from me.” But even then his words began to slur. . . .

“Trey,” Patricia implored. “I think you should turn on the light and look at yourself in the mirror. Something’s happening to you.”

“Ain’t nothin’ haplen-in’!”

But what was it? Patricia’s eyes were riveted.

“Ain’t blow-one play-ken bluthin’ flum me!” Trey shouted. He turned shakily, tried to stride out of the room, but as he did so, he wobbled in his gait. When he reached out for the doorknob, his fingers turned limp as cooked pasta; then his arm slowly bowed, then fell, tentacle-like.

Before he fell over altogether, Patricia saw his head . . . collapse, as though his skull had dissolved within the sack of his face.

A few seconds later the door creaked open, figures entering. Some held candles made from rendered fat, and in the flickering light Patricia recognized the face of Everd Stanherd.

“Wenden,” came the bizarre word from the even more bizarre Squatter accent. “It’s from our holy language, from a time even before that of the druids. . . .”

Patricia had been untied, dressed in a robe, and carried out. Then they’d driven her to someplace in the woods, for the woods truly were their home.

Everd Stanherd, his wife, and a few of the elders sat with Patricia in a circle, their candles guttering.

“We owe you no explanations, for they are all secrets. But remember this: long before Christ, God said ‘An eye for an eye.’ ”

Patricia was still regaining her senses. I’m alive. And it wasn’t a dream. . . .

“You’re a wizard or something,” she managed.

“No. I am the sawon—it means seer,” Everd intoned. His face was barely visible— all of them were.

The moonlight shimmered through the branches.

The cicadas thrummed.

“Sawon.” Patricia remembered the word. The Squatter on the pier had told them. “You’re, like, the clan wise man, some kind of ancestral leader?”

“It means . . . seer,” he repeated.

“What does wenden mean?” Patricia asked next.

One of the other elders’ voices fluttered like a death rattle. “It means gone.”

Gone. Patricia thought. Dwayne’s head. Junior’s innards. Ricky Caudill’s blood. And Trey’s bones . . . all . . . gone.

“You cursed them,” Patricia observed. “Any of them who harmed the Squatters. It was magic.”

“We can say no more,” Marthe Stanherd whispered.

Patricia couldn’t resist. “But . . . how?”

“We can say no—” Marthe began, but Everd leaned forward, overriding her. He held something in his crabbed hand. A jar? Patricia wondered. A clay pot of some sort, the size of a masonry jar. A cross adorned with the familiar squiggles and slashes of Squatter artwork had been etched into the pot.

“The burned blood,” Everd told her. “It’s our sacrament, from the sawon before me. And when I am dead, my blood will suffice for the next sacrament, for the sawon who is to follow. One of these men here tonight.”

Several of the faces in the circle looked startled when Everd removed the strange jar’s lid and passed it to Patricia.

She looked in and saw . . .

Dust?

Brownish dust. The dull chalklike substance with which the death letters had been written? There was very little left, just enough to form a rim around the bottom.

Burned blood, Patricia repeated in her mind.

“It’s consecrated,” someone said.

And someone else: “Through faith older than any religion . . .”

Patricia was confused, but she also knew that there were some things she was not meant to understand. No one was.

“I’m dying,” Everd said next, through a smile that seemed to float around them in the dark. “I will soon become the next sacrament. I will soon be wenden. I will soon be gone.”

They were all getting up now, blowing out their gullfat candles.

“You’re a good woman.” Everd was the first to walk away. “Continue to be good.”

“But where will you go?” Patricia blurted from where she sat

“From whence we came: nowhere. Everywhere. Anywhere.”

Like shifting ink spots, one by one they disappeared amongst the trees, blending into darkness.

But a final question assailed her. “Wait a minute! What about Gordon Felps?”

A hand patted her shoulder. The creviced face of the final elder whispered, “Don’t worry about Gordon Felps. We took care of him.”

When Patricia looked again, they were . . .

Gone.

It was an hour before daybreak when Patricia pulled through the gates of the compound. A sign on the fence read: FELPS CONSTRUCTION, INC. BUILDER OF FINE HOMES FOR LUXURY LIVING.

This seemed the most likely place to check first; she had no idea where Felps was staying in town. From the road she could see his truck parked in front of the office trailer.

Gravel crunched under her feet when she walked across the lot. She climbed the short wooden steps before the trailer, then paused. It occurred to her to knock but . . .

She tried the knob. The door clicked open.

He must not be here, she deduced. Darkness seemed clotted in the trailer. For some reason she wasn’t afraid of what she might find.

“Felps? Are you here?”

A voice rattled back. “Who is it?”

“Patricia White.”

A pause. “Thank God.”

“Trey’s dead. I know what happened, your plan, the people you paid to frame and murder Squatters, all of it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

He must’ve been at the very back of the trailer; she couldn’t see anything. And his voice now was beginning to scare her. Something about it sounded so hopeless.

She felt around the wall for a light switch but couldn’t find one. Damn, I can’t see!

“Please come over here,” Felps stoically begged her. “There’s a gun in the top drawer of the desk. I want you to take it out and kill me. For God’s sake—please. Kill me.”

She never found the light switch, but in the little bit of moonlight coming in through a tiny window, she saw a flashlight sitting atop a file cabinet.