A Natural History of Hell: Stories (25 page)

So intense was his focus on the mark that he didn’t notice at first the figure in a black hat and handkerchief mask enter the room. Jimmy obviously did, though. He grabbed Emmett by the wrist and pulled him back. “How?” Emmett wondered, feeling the hard bony grip on his arm. In the next moment, the pastor was at the window, peering out through the dark scrim and glass into the dark. He lifted off his hat to see better, and that’s when the boy and skeleton again turned to salt and were whisked upward into the sky.

When they coalesced this time, they were standing in front of an ancient structure that Emmett, even at night, was able to identify. It was the old Threadwell icehouse, the one that had been on the farmland that the town was eventually built on. It happened to sit behind the Williams place, a hundred or so yards behind the carpentry shop. His father had brought him back to see it one time when they’d been to visit Mrs. Williams about building a dresser for Emmett’s mother. Mr. Wallace had explained that there was an outer and an inner wall, separated by about a foot all around, and that space was filled with sawdust for insulation. As old as the icehouse was—built in 1887—and as hard worn, it was still intact. The big door was on its hinges, the walls stood save for splintering and wormholes, and there were no windows, so no glass to be broken.

Jimmy Tooth pointed to the door and motioned for Emmett to open it and go inside. The boy looked at him, and, thinking about how the specter had physically seized him before, he was skeptical. Tooth put his palms together in the sign of prayer and then pointed to the door again, as if begging. After seeing the mark he’d left on Mrs. Holst’s cheek, Emmett wanted nothing but to be home, a roll-up in the corner of his lips, paging through Jules Verne. He’d thought he wanted to know what it all meant, but that was forgotten. Jimmy clasped his hands with a click in front of him again, and a voice came out of the night from up by the back of the carpentry shop.

“Who is that over there?” it called.

Emmett knew it was Mrs. Williams.

“Get away from there.” It sounded as if she was getting closer.

The skull gazed directly at the boy, and in its empty sockets, something strange was happening. Emmett saw the colors of sunset deep inside Jimmy’s head. Then he felt a cold wind, the one everyone had wished for in July, rushing around him. Mrs. Williams bellowed, “Emmett Wallace, is that you?”

“Run now,” whispered Jimmy.

The boy moved his legs, up and down, up and down, and looked across the fields to the sunset. Jimmy’s diminishing whisper was still on the wind. A moment later, Emmett came to the realization that he was riding his bike on the dirt path homeward from town and the sun was still an hour from setting. He’d not missed dinner. In fact, he would hardly be later than usual. The entire episode seemed a dream, and yet he was certain it had all really happened.

His conviction was borne out at Sunday mass when Mrs. Holst appeared, bearing the mark on her face. He was certain that no one else was seeing it as no one else seemed disturbed and it was perfectly disturbing—a black center with thin black cracks radiating away from it. He was sure it had grown larger. Still, he wondered why it was that he had to be there to witness Jimmy Tooth kiss the pastor’s wife. And how did it involve the old icehouse? His mind wandered for a moment and he remembered that the day he’d discovered Jimmy, he was heading for the icehouse on the Addison property. His vision of eternal ice came back to him, but none of it led anywhere, and it turned to salt on the wind.

After mass let out, the parishioners stood on the church lawn in small clusters, catching up on news and gossip. Emmett stood off by himself near the buckboard while his parents passed the time with the widow Alston. Studying the scene from afar, he closely followed the actions of Mrs. Holst. She had knelt on the cold ground to put her arms around the youngest Fenwick girl. “She’s going to die,” he said to himself. “That’s what the mark is.” He watched as she rose, her beaming smile nearly a distraction from the horror on her cheek. “No,” he whispered. “Someone’s going to kill her.”

Emmett thought frantically about how he could warn her, but his concentration was broken by a voice close by. He looked up and saw Mrs. Williams standing a few yards off. She was dressed in a blue, man’s roll-collar coat, beneath the hem of which showed the striped design of her dress. Her long frizzy hair undulated in the wind. She was wide in the shoulders and slim at the waist, and her eyes crinkled down to mere slits when she spoke.

“You know something, don’t you, Thyme Fiend?”

Emmett was caught off guard. He stared at the ground and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“I know you know something,” she said and then walked off to join the others.

He spent the ride home in the buckboard and the better part of the afternoon trying to figure out what she thought he knew.

On Wednesday, he left for school prepared for the afternoon, with a thyme roll-up and a box of wooden matches in his pocket. The smoke he’d had after breakfast took him through the school day and after, when he met Gretel Lawler by the bike rack. They made for town, pedaling through the golden last light of the afternoon, heads down against a fierce wind. There was a light dusting of snow on the frozen dirt road, and their bikes skidded here and there, which they pretended was hilarious. He led her to the bench in the woods at the edge of town, next to the creek, and proceeded to tell her everything.

Every few minutes out of the forty-five it took him to tell her pretty much the whole strange saga of his doings with Jimmy Tooth, he asked her a question. “You following this?” “You scared?” “You think I’m crazy?” To all of these, she answered by shaking her head. He could tell she was getting it, and better yet, could picture it, by the gleam in her eyes. The relief of being able to share all of his fear and confusion nearly brought tears. She didn’t laugh or act stupid about it. She listened so intently, at one point he wondered if she was crazy.

When he finished speaking, relating to her his flight above the town with Jimmy Tooth and the peeping tom visits to the pastor’s wife and Mrs. Williams, there was a brief silence before she said, “So you must be wanting to go see what’s in that old icehouse.”

“That’s what I want to do,” he said.

“Okay.”

In his plans for Gretel Lawler, he never imagined it would be so easy.

They left the bikes and headed across the creek into the woods. The carpentry shop wasn’t far at all from that end of town. They could circle around behind it through the trees, cross the creek again, and come out in ten minutes a few feet from the icehouse. He led the way, bent slightly and whispering because they were on a secret mission. “That pastor is mighty strange, eh?” she said. “My pa says they’ll be sending him off to the loony bin before long.”

“You think he could have killed Jimmy Tooth and thrown his body in the Addisons’ well?”

“I can’t see it,” she said. “He seems kind of useless, like it would be too much for him. Best he can do is put on that handkerchief hat.”

“I know what you mean,” said Emmett.

“Mrs. Williams, though,” said Gretel, “why’s she so worried about what you know?”

“She always seemed nice to me, but when she said what she said to me out on the church lawn, it gave me a shiver. I got the feeling she could be as mean as she wanted.”

“What about the spider kiss the skeleton gave Mrs. Holst?” asked Gretel.

“I have a feeling somebody is gonna kill her.”

“Like Jimmy Tooth knows the future? Or like Jimmy Tooth put a curse on her?” she asked.

Emmett had no answer and shook his head. They got down on their hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the treeline. From where they squatted, behind the bole of a long-ago fallen oak, they could see the icehouse, clear as day, no more than twenty-five yards into the open field behind the carpentry shop. From up in the shop they heard the sound of a hammer pounding cut nails. Emmett turned to Gretel and looked at her. He couldn’t believe he had a friend after not having one since July. She smiled at him, and he said, “Let’s go.”

They crouched as they made their way to the structure, using it to block any view of them from the carpentry shop. When they stood against its western wall, Emmett inched forward and looked around the corner to see if Mrs. Williams was in sight. Eventually he waved over his shoulder for Gretel to follow him. He got his hand on the door and pulled back, expecting it to be locked. Instead it swept open with little more than a grumble from the hinges. They slipped inside, and he said for her to hold it open just a sliver so he could see. There was an old oil lantern hanging from a hook just inside the door. He reached into his pocket and took out the box of wooden matches. There was still oil in the rusted old lamp and the wick was damp with it. He removed its glass globe, thumbnail lit a match, and brought light to the shadows. The sight of the flame reminded him he hadn’t smoked his afternoon roll-up yet.

The inside of the place, lined with cedar wood, was much smaller that the outside. The walls were in the shape of an octagon. They were standing on a huge trapdoor, and Gretel said, “They must keep the ice down there.” With the exception of a couple of wooden shelves lining each wall, and the remainder of the floor not covered by the hatch being poured concrete, there was nothing much to see.

“Looks like Jimmy Tooth sent you on a wild-goose chase,” said Gretel.

“Maybe he meant we have to go down there,” he said, pointing to the trapdoor. He leaned over and tried the handle. It didn’t budge and he tried it with two hands. Gretel walked over when he was done and gave it a tug.

“Well,” he said, and they stood there close together in silence for a long while.

“Hey, what’s that in the corner?”

He lifted the lantern off the hook and followed her. She knelt next to the wall opposite the door they’d come in. Emmett tried to see what she was looking at over her shoulder. She slowly turned toward him, her palm up and her brow furrowed.

“Is that chips of ice?” he asked and brought the lantern closer to her hand.

“No, teeth.”

A moment passed and then Emmett said, “You gotta know what I’m thinking.”

Gretel nodded. “Jimmy Tooth’s teeth.”

“The rest must have got cleaned up, but they missed these.”

“I’ll bet.”

She handed him the three teeth, each cracked off at the root, and he stowed them deep in his pocket.

“Let’s get out,” he said, and with that, the icehouse door slammed shut and they heard a key turning in its lock.

“Wait!” he yelled. “We’re in here.”

“Hey,” called Gretel, whose voice was higher and louder than his.

In the silence that followed, as if from a great distance, they heard a woman’s voice. At first they couldn’t make out what she was saying, but slowly her words came clear. “You’ve gobbled your last thyme patch, Emmett Wallace.”

“Please,” he yelled back. “We won’t tell anyone.”

“Is she going to bash our teeth out with a hammer?” asked Gretel.

The friends stood perfectly still, taking shallow breaths in order to better hear their captor. Emmett was sure it was Mrs. Williams. Even in her muffled voice he could detect that chilling thread of nastiness. The time passed, but they were afraid to move. When after a long while, they heard nothing, they went to work on the door by which they’d entered, kicking it and ramming their shoulders into it. It didn’t move an inch.

“If she comes in with her hammer, we’ll both rush her at the same time,” said Gretel.

Emmett swallowed hard and agreed, unsure if he’d be able to.

They wore themselves out pounding and screaming and eventually slumped down together onto the trapdoor at the center of the eight-sided room. She put her arm around him, put her head on his shoulder, and neither of them spoke. The oil lamp flickered now and then, and Emmett wondered how much longer it would be before they were swamped by total darkness.

An hour later, they heard knocking noises from outside. Emmett crawled forward to the door and put his ear to the thin slit between its bottom and the floor. He barely heard Mrs. Williams’s voice. “We’ll be done with this little peckerwood,” she said. Then another voice answered her. “A blight of a child,” said a man.

“What about Miss Angel Cake?”

“I fixed the brakes, and I’m sending her on an errand to Mount Victory,” he said.

“More kerosene around the base,” she commanded. “That dry old sawdust’ll go up in a blink.”

Emmett felt a hand on his shoulder. “What’s she doing?” whispered Gretel.

“The pastor is with her,” said Emmett, moving back away from the door as the smell of kerosene sifted in beneath it. He didn’t have the heart to tell her the rest.

A few minutes later, the cedar room grew hotter, smoke issuing in from beneath the door and between the wall slats.

“I want to go home,” cried Gretel. She screamed for help and lunged at the door, pounding and kicking. Emmett was paralyzed with fear, unable to move off the concrete. That’s when the lamp went out and they heard the crackling of the fire all around them. She found him in the dark, and they put their arms around each other. They were gasping. Their hearts were pounding.

Just as the flames began poking through the inner wall, bringing back the light and casting jittery shadows, there was a loud bang. The trapdoor flew open and slammed back on the concrete only inches from them. Jimmy Tooth slowly ascended from the ice hold below. His skull and ribs glowed in the firelight, and the tattered shirt smoldered where embers had landed. Emmett saw him emerge through the smoke, that near-toothless open mouth either screaming or laughing. There were tiny fires burning in the hollows of his eyes. With sharp, cold hands, the phantasm grabbed both the boy and girl by the wrists, and they were off.

Emmett felt himself dropping, felt the heat increasing. He finally mustered the courage to open one eye. They were drifting down through the darkness, into a vast cavern. Everywhere, stretching out to the horizon of the cave as big as Ohio, there were fields of fire, the flames growing individually in rows like corn. Their orange stalks, their sharp white tips bowed and rippled in a strong sweltering breeze. Directly below there was a clearing of black rock where the boy spotted Jimmy Tooth’s farmhouse as he’d seen it in his daydream.