Appalachian Galapagos (20 page)

According to Elias, Willy Pete had indeed fallen in the swollen river. Instead of drowning, he'd been pulled out about a quarter of a mile downstream unconscious by some of Elias's farmhands. A day later his friend had awoken. It was then that Elias had invited him to participate. At first Willy had been as
Dicky
had, incredulous that one would even ask. Then Elias had offered Willy a deal. He promised that he wouldn't seek out his best friend
Dicky
Sims. He promised that he'd allow his friend to live if only he'd join them. If he refused to join them, then he'd kill Willy outright and track
Dicky
down.

Dicky
limped to the center of The Pit. He rubbed the side of his head against the ground, pushing dirt into the space where his ear had been, using the earth as a coagulant. Blood trickled from the space beneath his arm. He'd been wounded, but he'd live. The
Rotty
had hurt him worse. If this was all The Low Man had, he had a chance.

Elias admitted that Willy hadn't exactly jumped at the chance to sacrifice himself. Even when he'd been informed that there was absolutely no chance of survival, Willy had hesitated. In the end however, with a painless death at hand, Willy Pete had chosen to sacrifice himself and it was at the hand of The Low Man that he'd died, crying and in agony like the hitchhiker had done so many months ago when
Dicky
had been offered the deal.

"Then what am I doing here?"
Dicky
had asked. "You made a deal with Willy. You promised him you wouldn't kill me."

"We did indeed," Elias had replied. "We promised we wouldn't seek you out. In fact, you may leave anytime, Mr. Sims. You may even leave right now." He'd held up a finger. "But realize that if you leave, any chance at retribution will be forever lost and your friend's sacrifice will go unrequited."

Dicky
remembered the intensity of the guilt he'd felt at that moment.

"I guess it all comes down to how much you loved him."

Dicky
feinted right then launched himself across the small space between them. He butted The Low Man in the shoulder, slid along his side and latched on to a calf. He snapped his jaw closed, gasping around the surge of blood and rank sweat as he bit deeply into the meat. He choked once, then reapplied his jaw.

The Low Man kicked out hard, trying to dislodge
Dicky
. It wasn't until the fourth try that
Dicky
was forced to let go. Still, The Low Man's back was to him.

Dicky
dodged the flailing heel, and spun. With a scream of victory he launched himself onto the back of The Low Man and began to use both of his arms to pound, bringing the stumps up and down upon the back of the other's head and neck. Within seconds, The Low Man sagged then fell.
Dicky
continued pounding, bringing his stumps down upon the back of the creature that had killed his best friend with all the diminishing force he had. Each impact brought a shiver from the body of The Low Man, until finally,
Dicky
sagged as well, hunching over the still form of The Low Man, exhausted.

Minutes passed before
Dicky
had enough energy to move. In that time, the crowd had quieted, waiting for some finality to the match.
Dicky
too, needed some finality. His victory seemed hollow. He felt no different. He'd beaten The Low Man, but the system that had created him was still around.

Sitting astride The Low Man,
Dicky
turned him over. The Low Man was still alive, but barely. His eyes swam in and out of focus. His breath wheezed from a collapsed lung. His mouth hung open, small bubbles dribbling from the sides.

Then The Low Man surged upwards.
Dicky
screamed into the mouth of The Low Man as teeth bit into both of his lips. He felt pain then numbness as his pain-crazed eyes stared into the two calm orbs an inch away from his own. Instead of sawing or biting deeper, The Low Man merely held
Dicky
there.

Like a kiss, they were locked together and forced to stare into the eyes of the other.
Dicky
calmed as he realized that The Low Man wasn't going to kill him. He wasn't certain how he knew, but the longer he stared into the two blue eyes before him, he knew that this was no crazed animal. Instead, he saw a certain tired humanity that had been beaten and subverted. He saw echoes of pain and loss. He recognized the tiredness of a life poorly lived.

Had The Low Man been like him once?

Dicky
felt the tongue of The Low Man caress his own. His eyes widened as The Low Man nodded. For a brief second he felt love and gave love in return. No one else on the earth would understand them. There was no one else like them.

Then tentatively at first,
Dicky
began to bite down. The Low Man nodded.
Dicky
applied more pressure and watched as The Low Man's eyes closed with the intensity of the pain. A tear escaped and The Low Man's jaw released
Dicky's
lips from the embrace. They hung, barely attached to
Dicky's
face. Then with a snap,
Dicky
came away with the other's tongue and watched as the blood seeped and pooled and The Low Man drowned.

Dicky
Sims sat back and spat the tongue to the earth. He had won.

Now what? Would he become The New Low Man? A thought streaked through him. He could end it all right now. All he had to do was place his face upon the ruined mess of the other's mouth and eat. Eat and inhale what was left of The Low Man and they would both die. He could smother in his own retribution, keeping Elias from using him ever again.

In a single grand gesture he could end hundreds of years of The Pit, for without the presence of a Low Man, what would The Pit be? It was The Low Men that made it special, of that he was certain.

Then the image of Elias standing proud and true interjected itself. Elias smiling. Elias drinking. Elias enjoying an upright life, undisturbed by the all the possibilities that retribution provided.

Dicky
found himself unable to kill himself. His retribution was incomplete. If there was even a microscopic chance to convert Elias into a Low Man, he had to remain alive. He had to wait and watch.

He would have smiled with the irony of it all, but one couldn't smile without lips. He reminded himself that it was the smile that separated people and animals.

So it was as an animal that he leered lipless up into the stands of The Pit. The crowd erupted in applause and Elias raised his arms in victory.

Dicky
nodded, one Low Man to another.

Melissa had already begun to melt. A pool of water ran from her tiny feet onto the wooden floor. Her five-year-old body stood rigid before the fireplace, hands held to her side like a statue, fingers blue and caked with crystals of ice. She wore the same white dress she'd worn in her coffin.

Michael's face looked haggard when he spoke, the face of a man hanging onto the edge of cliff by only his bloodied fingernails, eyes deadened with the resignation of his fate. "You aren't going to believe this, but I demanded that God give her to me. My faith was nearly gone."

I watched the water drop from Melissa onto the floor in soft
plunks
. A muffled ripping sound emitted from her body, a noise like her flesh was tearing apart under the ice. The firelight caused shadows to dance across her shiny face hypnotically.

"She came back to me, Richard," Michael said, his fingers running lovingly over her icy skin. "I can't believe it. God gave her back to me."

"You don't know that," I said, feeling repulsed by the dead girl. I noticed her eyes moved slightly. "We don't know what the hell this thing is. God doesn't give people back."

It was painful staring into the face of Michael O'Connor after he'd lost his little girl. When I looked into his eyes, I was always overwhelmed. They made me feel like I was staring into a window of a blazing house, watching someone burn to death—only the person was just standing there stoically letting the flames devour his blistering flesh.

"It's Melissa," he said. "She
is
from God, Richard. And don't call her a thing."

Looking at Michael by the flickering fire, his dead little girl standing before the flames, I could see the astonishing transformation. Gone were his pudgy chipmunk-like cheeks—replaced by sharp, severe cheekbones. The eyes which at one time had twinkled with a mischievous gleam were dark and gloomy, an edge of menace in the pupils as if he had just crawled from the battlefield of a particularly brutal war. His frame was wiry and emaciated, nothing like the rotund form of only two years before. His hair, once full and curly, was shaved down to his scalp. Michael held the look of someone on the verge of shrieking in anguish before folding to the floor in a quivering fetal position.

Melissa died in a drowning accident. Only a year before that, his wife, Lisa, had died from an agonizingly slow bout with cancer. Melissa had always been a very special child, so wise for her years that it was frightening. When I first heard she was dead, I broke down and cried right where I stood.

We had gone to the cabin to escape Michael's grief, to get him away from all that reminded him of his lost little girl. I don't think he had left the state of Arkansas in his whole life, so I felt the change of scenery in the Pennsylvania mountains would do him good. Though being here had not erased his grief, he seemed more relaxed than I'd seen him in a long while.

We found her in the snow outside the cabin, standing rigidly in the cold wind. The moonlight made her blue skin shimmer like the stars above. Snowflakes swirled around her. I couldn't even breathe. I was so stunned.

Michael wept instantly, starting with an odd, painful sob before exploding from his lips like a storm. He fell to his knees in the snow, shoulders shaking as he whispered his daughter's name like a mantra.

We carried her heavy body into the cabin, my mind too numb and unable to grasp the possibility of a dead girl coming back to see her Daddy.

"Don't you realize how strange this is? How impossible?"

As I asked the question, a large piece of ice fell from Melissa's open mouth to the floor, shattering into tiny slivers. She spoke, water dripping from her glossy teeth, though her lips never formed the words.

"Daddy, I'm sorry I went swimming without your permission," the child's voice said, all wet and soggy, almost bubbly, as it boomed from still lips.

My skin prickled. It was too surreal, like demonic possession.

Michael sobbed before he was able to speak. "I know, honey. I know."

Melissa began to cry. Her eyes slithered slowly to the left until they locked with mine, the sound of ice being dragged against stone as they moved. She had no pupils—just the dead blackness of space. I moved backwards as if struck, her dark gaze piercing into me with quiet violence.

"That's not Melissa," I whispered, my breath stopping as her eyes stabbed into me again with frightening rage.

Michael hissed—his fists curling up into tightly clenched balls. "She came back to me. God knew how much I needed her and He gave her back to me."

I ignored the sound of the ice breaking as she melted free. "Melissa is dead."

"Don't you think I know that!" He snapped, grabbed my shoulders and pulled me into him, spraying my face with spittle. "I've suffered every fucking day since she died, Richard! Not a day goes by that I don't hear the sound of her laughter! See her running by in the corner of my eye! I see her every night in my sleep! Not a day goes by that I don't feel the loss of her!"

"Listen to yourself, Michael. You just said it. Melissa
is
dead. You're talking about her in the past tense because you know this. Dead people don't come back."

He fell to his knees before the frozen corpse. I watched, repulsed, as Melissa's eyes crept sluggishly downward.