Amid the Recesses: A Short Story Collection of Fear (15 page)

“So it ripped his fingers off? Oh, I
bet the dog did it, didn’t it? That’s bad.”

Desirae shook his head. “I bet he
thought that was it too.”

“But it wasn’t? How do you get away
from a dog like that?”

Desirae tapped her spoon against the
edge of her bowl. “With a little help…”

“No! No! Stop it! Let go!
Let go!” Porter screamed. He felt the flesh slip from his bone as
the dog twisted and tugged relentlessly. With his free hand Porter
slammed his thumb into the dog’s eye and pushed as hard as he
could. The dog’s jaw locked harder before it let go and whined. It
whined and walked in a ritualistic circle around Porter. Most of
Porter’s index finger hung from the dog’s mouth, fingernail and
all, and one eye of the dog was recessed into its skull and looked
like a shirt button surrounded by blood. The dog chewed the finger
into mince. Its tongue whipped about its mouth and it focused its
melted eye and its bulging twin on Porter again and
snarled.

“You won’t fucking give up, huh? I’ll
rip out your other eye! I’ll kill you you mother fucker!” He
beserked.

The dog charged and as if
swept up by an alien craft it disappeared in a mist of blood and
Porter laid there prone and dumbfounded and alive. He hadn’t heard
the crack of thunder that preceded the dog’s disappearance. But the
source of the thunder pushed against Porter’s head and he could
miss it no more. Porter, bloodied and covered in bile, turned his
head and he stared into the two barrels of a shotgun in front of a
dirty leather boot. His guts tightened and he shit himself. The gun
barrels disappeared and the butt end of the weapon came down on his
head like a battering ram. Darkness.

The four of them huddled back and
forth around the fire. Jacob picked up the fire pit’s cover with a
small metal rod with a hooked end and sacrificed another log to it.
The fire roared.

“Did he get shot?” Willow
asked.

“He’d probably bleed out anyway.”
Harry said.

“From what?”

“His finger. There’s some
pretty serious veins in there.”

Jacob smirked. “There are not. He
wouldn’t die from that.”

Willow looked at her hand in the
firelight. She examined the front and back of it.

“People lose their entire
hands and they don’t die. Or their legs. You think a finger is
going to kill him?” Jacob asked.

Harry shrugged. “Maybe.”

Desirae watched the exchange. She put
her bowl to the side. “He wasn’t shot.”

Willow looked up. Her eyes
glistened.

“He was taken away…”

When he woke he felt heat.
His body was drenched and he stunk of the most abysmal concoction
of both life and death. He seemed to stare through glass. Figures
moved back and forth. A fire was burning. Something moved next to
him. Sounds were low drones, like a swarm of bees huddled around
his head. Words came in and out, out of context with everything. He
reached a mutilated hand out in front of him in attempt to
understand space. One of the moving shadows in his vision turned
and stomped toward him. In a second his vision became clear and
pain shot through his body. A grizzly man with a thick beard and
thick brows, rotten teeth and squinty eyes grabbed a hold of his
exposed finger bone and clamped it inside of his foul leather
glove. Porter screamed and looked around as the man held him, and
he looked for anything he could use to free himself. A woman stood
behind the man with ratnest hair and white pockmarked
skin.

“You shut him up. You make him shut
up, Earl.” She chanted.

Porter realized he was
inside of a wooden cage. A young boy next to Porter in the cage
cowered like a beaten animal. The man jammed Porter’s finger bone
between his thumb and his index finger and snapped it off, tearing
sinew and dangling flesh away with it. Porter’s heart blasted in
his chest and he felt faint. The man slapped him once and Porter
was clear again, but Porter moved back until he was flush against
the wall behind him.

The man put the bone in his mouth and
pulled it. The bone dragged between his bottom and top teeth and
the meaty slabs ripped away. He tossed the bare, white bone into
the fire.

“Oh, you got it. You got
it, alright. I knew it, Betsy, I knew he had. I could smell it in
him. He sat in his own stank and I smelt, I did.”

“We shoulda known they’d send’m, Earl.
We shoulda. But we got’m, don’t we?”

“We do.” The man smiled his broken
smile. He reached out and grabbed the wooden cage and shook it like
a madman and hooted and howled into the night. “We got’m! We
got’m!”

The boy that was in the
cage with Porter shook both from the rattling cage and from intense
fear. Porter gnashed his teeth to prevent himself from screaming
and cradled his broken hand in his other.

“What are you going to do to us?”
Porter asked.

“Do to you?” The man looked back to
the woman.

“He wantsa know what we’re gonna do,
Earl.”

“Well, be besa not keep em
waitin.”

Willow covered her eyes as if the
scene were right there in front of her. Jacob looked at her with a
frown.

“I don’t think we should keep on with
the story, Desi.” He said.

Harry, with his long face and wide
eyes stayed quiet, too scared to get in between it.

“But the story’s just getting good.
You want me to stop now? I haven’t even gotten to the part about
the zombie yet.” Desirae said.

“I’m wondering when you will.” Jacob
said.

“Well, if she’s going to be a crybaby
about it, I’ll just stop.”

Willow brought her hands down to her
cheeks. “No. I’m not a crybaby.”

“She’s not a crybaby.”

“Well, she seems like one, not wanting
to hear the rest of the story.”

Willow looked up to Jacob. Jacob
sighed.

“Where was I?”

Earl spit into a pot. Leftover chunks
of Porter’s severed finger mixed with rank saliva fired into the
pot. The woman clapped in glee and bounced on the other side of
large wooden table that sat in the center of the room.

“Get the boy, Earl.”

Earl did. He went to the
cage and opened one side of it after fiddling with a rudimentary
mechanism at its edge. He snagged the boy out of the cage by his
collar and slammed him down on the table and the boy curled up in a
defensive fetal position and screamed and shouted to no avail. He
locked the cage back up.

“Here’s the straw, Earl. Put in the
straw.”

The woman shoved long
blades of hay to Earl in chunks. Earl unplugged a giant Bowie knife
from the bottom of the table and slammed it down into the boy’s
thigh. The boy arched upwards as if the devil himself were expelled
from his soul and he passed out in an instant, muttering cries that
were cast more from the body than the mind—a verbal manifestation
of shock. With the boy unconscious, the man stuffed the hay into
the sleeves of both of his arms and his pant legs. The boy wore
clothes that were akin to a potato bag, burlap and undecorated.
Straw stuck from each of his appendages.

Porter watched the scene
with such a horror that he’d forgotten about his missing finger.
His hand was clutched like a newborn against his breast and he
pinched and pinched his chest in an attempt to wake himself from
the living nightmare. He stayed. He watched.

A straw hat was pulled from the top of
the severed head of a bear that was hung on the wall. The man
slammed the hat down on the boy’s head and it rolled and rattled
back and forth like an overgreased joint.

“Oh, he’s lookin’ good,
ain’t he, Betsy? He looks regular like one of em, doesn’t
he?”

“Oh, he do, Earl. He do. We
got’m.”

Porter pushed from the wall of the
cage and clutched the wooden bars. “I’m not the one you want. I
came here and I was attacked. I’m not the one you want, I’m telling
you.”

Their heads rolled and their black
stares fell on Porter. “Whatchu mean?”

“I’m just passing through. I’m no
one.”

“Who’s then attacked you?” The man
asked.

“Mortimer and Judith Orson. Listen, I
didn’t mean anything by any of it.”

“We know where you came from, boy. We
smell it in you.”

Porter’s mouth hung. “What
do you mean?”

“We smell her stank you in, boy. We
smell it in you. You feel that heat inside of you? Like the fires
of hell are swelling in your body? Yous tryin’ to send it out, but
not nothing can get it outta you, boy.”

Porter shook his head. “W-Wha? No.”
Sweat poured down his head. His hands clammed and slipped on the
bars.

“You ate it.” The man said.

“You did.” The woman said.

“The soup?” Porter’s brows
knit.

There was a gasp across the
group.

“It was the soup!” Willow
said.

Desirae grinned.

Harry felt a grumble in his stomach
and he gripped it with both hands. The rest of the group heard it
and looked his way.

“It isn’t anything.” Harry said but
didn’t seem sure.

Their heads swiveled back to
Desirae.

“What happened to the boy?
Does something happen to him too?” Willow asked.

“Oh. Something happens to him
too…”

The man pulled the Bowie knife from
the boy’s leg and black arterial blood spewed from it like a
hellish geyser. The man ran the edge of the blade against the lip
of the same pot he’d spit into and the blood dripped down into the
mix. A hiss came from the bottom of the pan and a black smoke
rose.

“It’s happenin’, Betsy, you
see?”

“I see it. I see it, Earl.”

“You gonna tell me what happened to
thems Orson’s, boy.” He pointed the smoldering pot toward Porter
and Porter sat on his knees.

“What do you mean?”

“I knows they dead. All of
ems is dead. You think I’m stupid? I thinks he thinks I’m stupid.”
He turned back to the woman.

“He ain’t.”

“I ain’t.” The man said.

Porter swallowed hard. He looked
around for a way out. His attention was drawn back to the boy on
the table.

The man put the tip of the Bowie knife
to the boy’s forehead and he twisted it around until a small hole
was carved into the boy’s head. The man lifted the smoking pot and
held it over the boy’s head.

“We’s gonna show you what we’s can do,
boy.” He said to Porter.

The man stared at him as he
tilted the pot and the crude black oil, burnt-smelling and riddled
with chunks, rallied in the fresh wound on the boy’s head. Smoke
rose like a huge fire had been set and the room became a thick
invisible nightmare. Porter coughed and fell low to the ground. He
saw the boots of the man and the corned bare feet of the woman
stamping around the room and then they disappeared in the smoke. A
door opened on the other side of the room and like some unfilled
black hole on the edge of space it took everything away and the
room was there again, quiet, with the man and the woman, but the
child was gone.

Porter searched the room and coughed.
He stood as tall as he could in the cage and looked at the table
and all he saw was a small plush scarecrow sitting in the middle of
it. The man snatched the ragged thing from the table and waved it
in front of Porter’s face.

“Say hello to Sam here.”

The plush figure waved back and forth.
Its beady black button eyes stared lifelessly at Porter.

“What the fuck?” Porter
spit.

“Ain’t like him? Aw,
com’on, boy, I know you like him. Here. Here ya go. Don’t say we’s
never done nothin’ nice for you.” He cackled and threw the doll
into the cage.

Porter picked it up. Drops
of sweat fell onto the plush scarecrow and then drops of blood.
Porter swept his broken hand across his forehead and a smear of red
came with it.

“What is this?” Porter asked no
one.

The man stepped back. So did the
woman.

“It’s happenin’, Earl. It’s
happenin’ now. Make sure that cage there’s locked up good.” The
woman said.

The man rushed to the cage and Porter
reached out for him. He grasped at the ends of his old coat but the
man slipped away after checking the lock.

“Ain’t so, boy. Ain’t gonna be
so.”

Porter slammed into the
sides of the cage like he was one fire. He crashed into the bars
and blood shot out and onto the ground and in each direction he
sprayed like a dog shaking out water.

“Help me! Help me! Something’s
happening. I’m burning up. I can’t breathe.”

The woman shook her head.
“Ain’t nothin’ to be done, I reckon.”

“Not nothin’.” The man
said.

Porter reached up for the
lock and fiddled with it blindly and his arm fell off of his body
and in a wet smack it hit the ground and floundered with a separate
life like a fish.