Midnight Grinding (7 page)

Jud felt as if he might pass out.
This can’t be for real,
he thought, although he knew it was. Then he heard a voice call out from behind him, from the top of the wooded rise. It was the voice of little Chigger…but, then again, it was also the rumbling voice of something that could not possibly possess the soul of an innocent, nine-year-old boy.

“Hey, mister!” it thundered, the tone hitting highs and lows virtually impossible for the human voice to manage. “Where do you think you’re going? Come back, will ya? Do you hear me? I said…COME BACK!”

Jud Simmons almost turned around and, if he had, would have surely been lost right then and there. He stood stone still for an endless moment, acutely aware of something coming down the rise toward him. Something very
big
, something very
evil
. A fetid heat prickled the nape of his neck and the sulfurous stench of brimstone and burnt flesh assaulted his nostrils. Jud knew that if he turned to face the thing, its appearance, perhaps even its very presence, would surely drive him insane. Resisting the overwhelming urge to commit mental suicide, Jud began to run as fast as possible up the cluttered avenue of Main Street for the town square and his car.

A hoarse roar shook the air around him, nearly shattering his eardrums. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING, MISTER? DON’T YOU WANNA GO BACK TO THE FAIR? EVERYONE’S WAITING FOR YOU…CAN’T YOU HEAR THEM?”

Yes, he could hear the sounds coming from over the rise, but it was no longer the toot of the calliope or the excited voices of the crowd. The awful screams of tormented souls drilled through the night air, enhanced by the crackling flames and explosive dishevel of wholesale Armageddon. It was the sound of an agonizing hell on earth.

As he ran past the battered shops and stores, a strange thing happened. The town began to
shift.
Brief flashes of normality replaced the devastation. Ben Flanders was giving Charlie Walsh a haircut in the big window of the barber shop, the elderly Stokes brothers were playing checkers outside the hardware store, and a teenager in a Future Farmers jacket was selling
Grit
papers in front of the post office. Then, just as swiftly as it had appeared, the deceptive camouflage returned to death and destruction. The clever and well-maintained illusion that had been conjured for the benefit of those outsiders who happened to visit Jackson Ridge from day to day abruptly bled back into grim reality.

Jud cut across the eastern side of the square for his car.
God, oh dear God in heaven, let me make it!
But what if he
did
make it to the Lexus? Would it make any difference?

He now saw the rusted wreck of Joe Bob’s 4x4 pickup truck where it hadn’t been before, hanging on the lip of the square, its front bumper stuck in the split stone of the cistern. It looked as though the windshield imploded from some terrible force. Jud suddenly knew that his car would be no protection whatsoever from the thing that pursued him.

“COME ON BACK, MISTER! YOU SAID YOU’D TREAT ME TO THE FAIR. YOU PROMISED YOU WOULD!” The horrid voice was strangely infantile, yet as old as time itself. And there was an underlying evil, a gleeful cruelty in every syllable it spoke. Whatever dark realm the demon had originated from, its very presence exuded a foul sense of utter depravity that made Satan’s threat seem pale in comparison.

The thing was gaining on him. He could hear its approach, like a thousand pounding feet in hot pursuit, growing ever nearer.
It’s going to catch me,
Jud thought wildly.
It’s going to grab hold of me and…what? What in heaven’s name will it do to me then?

He could sense the thing’s vast bulk as it shifted to his right. It was heading toward the car, trying to cut him off! Jud’s legs felt like rubber. He knew he couldn’t possibly beat it to the car. Abruptly, a crazy idea crossed his desperate mind and he acted on it. He veered sharply to the left, past the historical marker, and squeezed through the gaping crack in the lid of the cistern.

Cool darkness met him, as well as empty air. He fell for what seemed to be an eternity, before hitting the smooth hardness of the reservoir floor. The breath knocked from his lungs, Jud lay there for a long, silent moment. Even after regaining his senses, he stayed put, staring up at the fissure eight feet overhead. He awaited the inevitable, but it did not come. It appeared as though the demon was somewhat reluctant to enter the place that had entombed it for over two centuries.

Moments passed. Jud sat up, his eyes still glued to that jagged black slit with its sparkling backdrop of firework-filled sky. When the ogre finally appeared, Jud was not at all surprised to see the innocent, freckled-face of the boy staring down at him.

“Come on, mister,” begged little Chigger. “Don’t be an Indian-giver. You said we were gonna do the fair up right. We can still have loads of fun, you’ll see. We’ll eat buttered popcorn and those big salty pretzels and we’ll see the freak show and we’ll ride the Wild Mouse and the Tilt-a-Twirl and…”

Jud listened to the innocent voice for a long time, reeling off the simple pleasures of the county fair. He could even hear the music and the crowd again, could smell the rich fragrance of roasted peanuts and sawdust. He wanted to go back, he truly did, but he knew what awaited him if he dared succumb. The crackle of hellfire would mask the pops of the firing range, the pungency of cooked flesh would overshadow the sticky sweet smell of cotton candy, and his screams would join those of the damned.

PAPA’S EXILE

Alcoholism was rampant in my family at one time. The demon liquor turned kind, good-hearted folks into sadistic, mean-spirited ones. This brought about violence and heartache, even resulting in one uncle killing another in a fit of drunken rage. That is why I’ve never taken a drink in my life. Not trying to sound judgmental; it was just a personal choice I made to avoid that horrible disease from sinking its thorny claws in me.

This story is short, but certainly not sweet. It deals with an alcoholic and the physical and emotional havoc he wreaks, as well as the way he is “cast out” from the family that he victimizes.

Will Papa ever come home again?” asks Stephanie, her face staring hopefully from amid the snug safety of her pillows, blankets, and plush stuffed animals.

“No, baby,” says Mother. “Never again.”

Stephanie begins to ask why, but the dousing of the light curtails that simple question. “Sweet dreams,” Mother whispers and leaves her with a kiss.

Thunder rumbles, echoes of a distant storm, as Mother walks the darkened halls of the old house. Her daughter’s question brings a thin smile to her lips and she pauses by the parlor window. The persimmon grove crowds against the northern wall. Skeletal sentries stand tall and somber, as if ever watching.

No, never again. Not her dear, half-blind husband. Never again would his drunken voice resound within their peaceful household, eliciting fear and dread, nor would there be the fleshy blows of anger. And his mustachioed face would never glare hatefully across the dinner table, one eye livid, the other emotionless, unreal.

Never again will you rule us,
she had told him that night long ago, a night laced with pain and the raw stench of liquor.
Never again will you find comfort before the warmth of the hearth, nor in the folds of our marriage bed. Never again shall you savor the scent of my perfume or relish the softness of my skin.
She had declared all of these things and they had come to pass. After that night, Papa no longer filled the gabled structure with his troublesome presence, no longer darkened the cobbled walk with his weaving, drunken shadow.

The storm comes, forceful and born of vengeance. Dark clouds boil overhead, advancing, engulfing the land with their surly discontent. Beside the house, the grove dances, swaying to and fro, trees animated. Deep in the torrid darkness, something winks in whipcrack flashes of heavenly brilliance. Then, as a violent thunderclap shakes the earth’s very foundation, it falls like a lone hailstone, bounces, rolls across the sodden ebony carpet of night.

***

The following morning reigns supreme.

Young Stephanie skips cheerfully beneath the dripping branches, down the winding center path, through Mother’s flower garden and into the grove. She jumps an obstructive puddle, then is teased by an earthward sparkle. Stephanie spies a glistening orb lying at the foot of an ancient tree, hollow and dead from the ravages of time. Picking up the peculiar object, she polishes it against the cloth of her blouse, marveling, a treasure to behold. She stares at it and it stares back. Familiar, yet unreal.

Curiously, the girl regards the old tree, for the trunk’s gaping seam has been rent by the angry passing of the storm. As she draws nearer, something within the hollow shifts and falls forward.

Stephanie squeals, but not in delight.

Papa has come home.

THE HATCHLING

Back when I was a kid, dog-fighting was popular in the area where I lived. Before that, cock-fighting was the favorite illegal pastime of my Grandpa’s generation. I don’t hear much about either anymore, but they are still around. Men with money to wager and a hunger for violence never grow weary of such a sport.

I’m sure there are those who participated in such dealings—including the training and competition of pitting one of God’s creatures against another—who now regret those bloodthirsty days. The Lord forgives us of our sins, but the Devil isn’t so quick to forget.

“Not so fast, hoss,” he’ll say with a chuckle, then heap the misery of those past actions upon you a hundredfold.

I reckon a couple of things could have brought it about. Maybe it was that new corn feed I bought wholesale down at the co-op or maybe it was simply some unforeseen deformity. Such things happen on the farm occasionally…two-headed calves and the like. But, then again, I always figured there was some strange and sinister intelligence behind the whole ugly business. Something unspeakably evil. Sometimes I wonder if old Lucifer himself hadn’t seeded that hen and caused the sudden appearance of that godawful egg.

I’ve been a farmer here in Crimshaw County since I was fourteen and that was some sixty years ago. I’ve planted and harvested all types of produce: tobacco, corn, soybeans.

And I’ve dabbled in livestock, too, but most particularly chickens. Folks from all over the county drive for miles to buy my eggs and poultry. But when I was a younger man my association with chickens was not so innocent. There was a time when I had quite a reputation among the local sportsmen as a first-class breeder of champion fighting cocks. However, I sickened of that blood sport as I grew older and wiser and, much to the relief of my wife Margret, gave it up for honest work.

Anyway, it was a chilly morning in early spring when Margret hollered at me from the chicken coop. “Jake…come out here and take a look at this.”

I had been slopping the hogs, so I set my pail aside and crossed the barnyard to the henhouse.

Margret was standing there in the shadowy coop, a half-full basket of white and brown eggs in her hand and a puzzled look on her face. I glanced down at her feet and saw one of our best laying hens stretched out on the earthen floor. I stooped down and picked at it for a while. At first glance, I thought maybe a fox or a weasel had gotten into the coop and laid waste to the poor critter. But, upon further inspection, I saw that it hadn’t been eaten at all.

“This is mighty strange,” I told the wife. “Almost looks like this hen was split in two…
from the inside out
.”

“No doubt it was,” Margret agreed. “Take a look at what it laid here in its nest.”

I stood up and regarded the long, laying bins that went three levels high along the back wall. In the nest that the Rock Island red had always occupied there was the damnedest egg I’d ever laid eyes on.

The thing was big, the size of a coconut. And it was as black as sin. It didn’t have that flat, slightly granulated texture to it like a regular hen egg. Instead, it was slick as a black pearl. You could see your reflection in its surface, the shell was so shiny.

Well, now, I didn’t rightly know what to do. At first I figured I oughta take it to the county agent down at the farm bureau and see what they made of it. But then I got to thinking. They’d just turn it over to some dadblamed scientist who would likely crack it open and study its yolk and, hell, what would that tell them? Besides, I was kind of curious as to what sort of chicken would hatch out of such a strange egg. So I decided to just keep the thing my personal secret for a while.

I went to the tool shed and dug out one of the boys’ old incubators that they had used when they were in 4-H club in school. It was a homemade job; just a wooden box with chicken-wire windows and hay in the bottom. I screwed a sixty-watt bulb into the fixture at the top and, after setting that gigantic egg down deep amid the straw, put the whole kit and caboodle at the far corner of the henhouse.

Oh, another thing I oughta mention. None of those hens in that coop would go near that egg. Acted like they were scared of the thing. And I had me a couple of hearty roosters, too, who seemed even more leery of the egg than those hens.

For a week, I checked on the black egg, making sure it didn’t get too warm or cold. I fussed over it so, Margret joked that I was so all-fired concerned with the blasted thing, why didn’t I take to sitting on it myself. I had me a good laugh at that and said I surely would have but, with the size of the thing, it wouldn’t do my hemorrhoids a speck.

A couple of nights later, I was awakened by the most harrowing racket coming from that henhouse. Such a fluttering and squawking it was, that I grabbed my shotgun and a lantern and went out there to check it out. I found the door ajar and figured, well, this time it was a fox or an egg-sucking dog. Stepping inside, I shone that kerosene lamp around. There didn’t seem to be any damage done; no dead chickens or broken eggs.

Or so I thought. I walked over to the far corner and uttered a curse in spite of myself. That homemade incubator had been ripped apart. The wood frame was splintered in several places and the chicken-wire in the front had a hole the size of a good-sized cantaloupe torn in it. And, down in the hay within, was the shell of that black egg, cracked and lying in two halves.

I examined that hatched egg and was more confounded than I was to begin with. There was the most awful stench coming from the empty shell, like raw sulfur. And when I stuck my finger to the slimy residue that coated the inside, it burned my skin like battery acid. I had to run out and wash it off under the spigot of the long-handled pump, it blistered me so.

As I walked on back to the house, I had the strongest feeling that something was watching me from the dark woods beyond the barn. I checked the load in my Remington, but that didn’t make me feel any safer. With a shiver, I ducked into the house and locked the back door behind me.

I had never, in all my years of living on that farm, locked the doors of my own house. I did that night, however, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why I had done so.

The next morning, over breakfast, Margret asked me about that black egg. I told her that some animal had gotten into the coop the night before and smashed it. I wanted to leave it at that, wanted to forget that it had ever existed…but something out yonder in those woods wouldn’t let me.

I didn’t think any more about it, until a week later when my redbone hound, String, came up missing. I searched my property high and low and finally found him down by the creek. Poor String was dead. At first I figured he had died of old age, for he was going on fifteen years. But when I got to checking, I found a single wound on his stiffening body…a tiny hole in his right temple, just beneath one floppy ear.

I couldn’t rightly believe what I was seeing because, you see, I was familiar with that kind of wound, but not in a dog. If you don’t know anything about cock-fighting, let me explain. Just before fighting roosters are thrown into the pit together, the owners attach these tiny, handmade spurs to their feet. There ain’t much to them; just a curved length of steel like a bent nail with leather ties to secure them. The victor of the two cocks is the one who strikes first, driving that metal spur into the side of the other’s head. I told you before, it was a bloody sport and that was one of the reasons I took leave of it.

After burying String down in a honeysuckle hollow, I went to the tool shed out of pure curiosity. I went to my workbench where I knew a pair of those rooster spurs hung on the pegboard; sort of souvenirs for old times’ sake. Well, you guessed it. Those steel spurs were gone. A cold fear hit me then and I figured maybe it would be wise to keep old String’s death from Margret…and especially the disappearance of those spurs.

As it turned out, String wasn’t the only victim. Those two roosters I’d bought to look over the henhouse…I found them out back of the smokehouse. They had died the very same way. A single, clean hole through the side of the head. I took my shotgun that afternoon and hunted the woods over…exactly what for, I have no earthly idea. Nevertheless, I found nothing. Not a track, nor a sign of anything.

Spring passed into summer without incident and then things took a turn for the worse. Someone—or
something
—tore the back door off its hinges one night and rummaged through the kitchen drawers. Margret took inventory of the utensils the next morning and swore that the only things missing were a couple of old ice picks she used to chip away freezer ice when she was defrosting the Frigidaire. I didn’t grasp the significance of that late night theft until I discovered our finest Holstein milk cow lying in the south pasture a few days later. There was a deep hole in her temple, the wound reaching clean to the center of the brain.

Whatever had killed my cow didn’t stop there. Farmers all over this side of the county began to lose cows and hogs in the same gruesome manner. No animal was ever eaten, just smitten upon the head and left lying there. A lot of crazy theories began to circulate. Frank Masters, who owns the farm down the road a piece, claimed that devil worshippers were to blame. I began to figure that, indeed, maybe there
was
something of the devil involved, but I didn’t tell any of the fellas down at the grange hall that. I kept my mouth shut and hoped to God that things would die down.

But, of course, they didn’t.

***

I was cleaning out the hayloft a couple of weeks later, when I came across something that chilled me to the very bone.

It was my pitchfork, the one I had bought at the True Value earlier that year. But something had damaged it, something very strong. Two of the four tines had been snapped off. My mind immediately flashed back to the fighting spurs and the missing ice picks.

That night I took extra precautions before I retired for the night. I checked every door and window in the house, making sure they were securely locked. I even locked our bedroom door and Margret said I was being downright silly for doing so. I wasn’t so sure, though. I lay in bed for a long time before sleeping, turning my suspicions over and over in my mind.
If that thing, whatever the hell it was, had graduated from dogs to cows, then what did the missing tines off that pitchfork mean? Did it intend on pursuing larger game now…of the human variety perhaps?
The thought so unsettled me that I got up and swapped the birdshot in my scattergun for double-aught buck.

The following morning I awoke and, much to my surprise, found Margret still in bed. She usually rose an hour before I did, so as to fix breakfast before we did our daybreak chores.

I reached over and shook her gently. “Wake up, dear,” I said. “It’s five o’clock. We’re running a little behind schedule this morning.”

She did not answer me, did not even move. When I pulled my hand back it was covered with blood. With a cry of horror, I turned poor Margret over and…

The doctor said the wound in her temple had been made by a very long, very sharp object thrust downward with inhuman force. “It looks like someone drove a railroad spike through the side of her head with a sledge hammer,” he told me after I demanded his honest opinion.

I had been a law-abiding, church-going citizen of Crimshaw County for many years and so I wasn’t suspected. But I still blamed myself for dear Margret’s death, blamed myself for not doing something to prevent such a thing from happening. I grieved for many days after the funeral and, so, I wasn’t exactly prepared for that horrid night toward the end of August.

Exactly why I awoke at two o’clock in the morning was unclear to me. All I know is that I came awake suddenly, my heart pounding, my eyes straining against the darkness.

I felt a strong presence there in the bedroom with me and there was that unmistakable scent of sulfur.

“Who’s there?” I croaked, but I knew very well what had come visiting in the dead of night. The foot railing of the big, brass bed creaked as something of great weight perched there, waiting for the right moment to strike.

It was moonlight that saved me. Moonlight filtered through the lacy material of Margret’s hand-sewn curtains and it glinted upon that sixteen-inch spur as it stabbed for my head. I rolled aside, off the bed and onto the floor, as the steel tine ripped deep into the pillow my head had rested upon. I could see it against the light patch of the window then…pitch black and bristling with jagged feathers, its spurred feet clawing that bed to shreds like a grizzly mauling its prey.

I brought up my pump shotgun, jacked a shell into the breech, and squeezed off a shot. The force of the blast knocked that hellish thing off the bed and plumb out the upstairs window. By the time I reached the window, the moon had gone in behind a cloud and I could see nothing but darkness. Hurriedly, I struggled into my overalls and, shotgun and lantern in hand, went downstairs to check it out.