(I)
Ricky felt high on
drugs when he got back home, the tantalizing garbage thoughts
filling his brain as effectively as any opiate. The girl had really
gotten him tuned up. I love it when the
bitches twitch like that, he thought, replaying the atrocity
in his mind. And right there on the floor next
to her dead daddy! Yeah, it was a great night, all right.
He’d torched the place perfectly, too, afterward, and was all the
way back in the woods before the fire started to really
catch.
Ricky was a
consummate sociopath.
Can’t wait to tell Junior, he thought. He was
cutting through the woods all the way back home, so as not to be
seen. This was something they needed to have a few beers over. And
he couldn’t wait to tell him about the girl. . . .
Yeah, my little brother’ll be a mite jealous ‘bout
that!
He could hear the
sirens in the distance, which simply brought more satisfaction to
his heart. It filled him up very happily, like a big, rich
meal.
Night sounds pulsed
around him. Eventually, the trees broke and he was suddenly
standing in his backyard. He didn’t see any lights on in the house,
though. Guess Junior went beddy-bye, he
thought. Usually they both stayed up late, drinking and watching
porn. It seemed a brotherly thing to do.
But Ricky was too
keyed-up to go to bed himself. Couple beers and another chew,
first, and maybe he’d also pop in his favorite porno, Natal Attraction. He crossed the backyard, stepping
over moonlit junk, and went in through the back screen
door.
At once, the inside
of the house felt . . .
Weird, he thought.
Darkness hemmed him
in, and when he closed the door behind him the silence felt
cloying, like the faintest unpleasant smell in the air. He snapped
on the kitchen light, yet felt no better. He couldn’t shake the
feeling, and he didn’t even know what the feeling was. When he opened the refrigerator for a beer, he
stalled, hand poised.
Ain’t that the fuckin’ shits.
The full case of brew
he’d put in there this afternoon was untouched. Junior must be sick as a dog to not’ve knocked out ten or
twelve bottles by now.
He grabbed one and
closed the door, then walked slowly, brow furrowed, into the front
room, switched on the light—
The bottle of beer
shattered on the floor.
Ricky stared, gut
churning.
Junior Caudill lay in
the middle of the floor, eyes and mouth wide open, not breathing.
His face could’ve been a pallid mask, gravity pushing the blood to
the lowest surfaces of the body, leaving the flesh white as a
turnip.
Ricky’s mourning
escaped in a shrill gasp from his throat. He couldn’t say or even
think anything about what he was looking at. Junior had obviously
been dead for several hours, but that wasn’t why Ricky
stared.
Junior’s pants looked
several sizes too large; in fact, they hung so loosely they surely
would’ve fallen down were he standing up.
When the shock
snapped, Ricky yelled, “Junior!” and rushed to him, dropping to his
knees. His hands floated in the air; he didn’t know what to
do.
“Junior! What
happened?”
In his mind he knew
his brother was dead; it was obvious from the pallor. He felt the
neck for a pulse, found nothing but cool fat. Then he straddled his
brother to administer some inept CPR, like on TV, but he may as
well have been straddling a bag of fertilizer.
“Junior . .
.”
He climbed off then,
numb, remaining on his knees.
Musta had a heart attack or somethin’ . .
.
What else could it
be?
He just looks so fuckin’ weird, he
thought.
Indeed, the arms and
legs still held their usual girth—Junior, like his brother, was a
big man. Fat, in other words. The big,
fat arms and legs looked normal, and so did the fat-covered chest
and chubby face. So . . .
Why did Junior look
so strange?
Ricky pushed his
brother’s spotty T-shirt up over the blubbery, hairy chest and
belly.
He shook his head in
the utmost dismay.
There was no
intricate way to put it. Junior’s once-proud and very prominent
beer gut . . . was gone.
Had he been dieting?
Fuck, no, Ricky knew. His brother had
never been on a diet in his life. Diets were for
sissies!
He remained there
awhile, sorting his thoughts. He supposed he should call an
ambulance, but that might not be the smartest thing to do right
now. The local ambulances were at the Point, no doubt recovering
the burned bodies of David Something-or-other and his little fox of
a daughter. It would seem an odd coincidence. And an ambulance call
might bring some police questioning with it. Guess I’ll have to wait, he reasoned, but there was
still no reasoning this
situation.
In time, Ricky
straggled up. Damn it, Junior. Why’d ya have
to die? Never even got the chance to tell you ’bout the hot job I
did on them two crackers . . .
He went to the
kitchen, grabbed another beer, then wandered open-eyed around the
house. He didn’t turn the lights on; he needed it calm and dark, to
help him think on what to do.
Musta been a heart attack. Couldn’t be nothin’ else. Hash
‘n’ eggs every morning of his life? Shit, I guess the one who needs
ta go on a diet is me. . . .
He wandered around
some more in the dark, then found himself in the living room. He
didn’t know where he was going, what he was even doing. This was
redneck mourning: shuffling around in your dark house with a beer
in your hand and a thousand-yard stare. . . .
With his next step,
something crinkled under his foot.
A glance down showed
him a sheet of paper. The hell’s this?
he wondered, and picked it up. He was about to turn the light on to
look at it when—
Movement snagged the
corner of his eye. He spun around, and—
His second beer of
the night shattered, full, on the floor.
A thin figure stood
staring at him from the hall that led to the bedrooms. It was so
dark Ricky couldn’t see. Just a figure there, something barely more
substantial than a shadow . . .
A burglar? It must
be. But, boy, did he pick the wrong house to burgle! There was
nothing to steal in this dump.
This dumb-ass burglar’s about to get his
ass killed, Ricky thought with some confidence.
Unless . .
.
“Who the fuck’re you,
scumbag?” Ricky challenged.
The figure looked
grainy standing there in the dark. It said nothing.
“I’m gonna . . .” But
Ricky stalled through a thought. It finally occurred to his
not-so-spectacular brain that maybe this figure was the guy who
killed Junior somehow.
The figure said this,
in a low, grating voice like some slow, black liquid oozing up his
throat:
“Your brother is in
hell. . . .”
And the figure, in a
split second, withdrew into the hall.
“I am gonna kill you
so motherfuckin’ dead, you motherfucker!” Ricky bellowed out in his
loudest sociopathic rage. His bulk tore down the hall, boots
thudding. In the dim darkness he spotted an edge of the figure
disappearing into Junior’s bedroom. A second later Ricky was there,
eyes sweeping back and forth in the dark.
There was no one else
in the room.
But the window stood
open, framing moonlit darkness.
Then that utterly
bizarre voice seemed to gush around his head in a mad
circle:
“Your useless brother
is now a fat whore for the devil’s minions, as you too will be,
very soon. . . .”
Ricky stared in the
dark. This time the voice had seemed to have no source. It came
from everywhere, or nowhere.
He thrust his head
out the window and saw the figure standing between some trees at
the very end of the yard.
That is one fast motherfucker! How’d he get all the way
out there so fast?
A cloud moved off;
then a bar of moonlight fell ever so briefly across the figure’s
face, and Ricky’s teeth ground, because he knew who it was. . .
.
And then the figure’s
voice returned one last time, not from the figure itself but again
a mushlike gurgle churning around Ricky’s head as it bade its final
promise before the figure disappeared.
The voice said this:
“Curse thee.”
Running after him
would be pointless. Ricky pulled back into the room, confused,
sick, and enraged. But something tempered that rage—even sociopaths
felt fear.
He took deep breaths
in the dark bedroom. Now instead of the evil voice it was the sound
of cicadas that flowed into the room, and it was then that Ricky
realized he was still holding the piece of paper he’d found in the
living room.
He turned on the
light and looked at it.
A single word was
scrawled on a sheet of white paper, in something like brown chalk:
wenden.