Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (23 page)

Stiff-legged, lead-footed, I moved into the house. I knew where I was going and what to do when I arrived. My life had a purpose.

I jacked back the slide to reload, retrieved the reeking mess of shed skin with my free hand, and clumped forward. I was going to nestle the barrel right on the bridge of Dunwoody’s thin hickory nose. He just sat there, watching my approach. There were no hidey-holes, and Ormly was probably out cruising at this time of night.

“You look foolish with that pumpgun, city boy.”

“Foolish enough to spread your reedy old ass all over the wallpaper.” My voice was dry and coarse, a rusted thing.

“You want all kind of answers.” He spoke like the keeper of knowledge and wisdom, shifting in his easy chair with a snort of contempt. “Big-city know-it-all finds out he
don’t
know it all. Don’t know shit.” He gulped schnapps from a fingerprint glass.

I couldn’t buy his casual disdain for the gun. Perhaps he thought I wouldn’t use it. To dash that little misconception from his mind, I stepped into the room and brought the shotgun to bear.

It tore violently out of my grasp like a runaway rocket, skinning my index finger on the trigger guard. Momentum yanked me the rest of tile way into the room, and I got my crippled foot down to keep from falling. It wasn’t worth it.

Ormly had been stationed in ambush behind the doorway and had acted with a speed startling for his bulk and presumed intellect. He stood there with the shotgun locked in his bulldozer grip, upside down, while Dunwoody watched drops of blood from my hand speckle the floor like small change.

“Get Mister Taske a cloth for his hand, Ormly.” Each order was slow, metered, portioned out at rural speed. “Take care of his pumpgun; I’m sure he paid a lot of money for it. And bring me my bottle. You might as well have a seat, Mister Taske. And we’ll talk.”

The tar-colored pelt had slithered from my grasp and piled up in an oily heap on the floor. It slid around itself, never settling, as if it refused to give up the life it once contained. Dunwoody looked at it.

“It’s stronger now, quicker. At its best, since it dropped a hide. Don’t gawp at me like
I’m
nuts. You saw it the first day you was here, and you didn’t pay it no mind.”

“I thought it was . . . some kind of cat,” I stammered lamely. “Mountain lion, or . . . ”

“Yeah, well, you know so goddamn much about mountain cats, now don’t you?” he said with derision. “You said you didn’t have no pets, no guns. See what happens? It ain’t no cat.”

Jesus. Anybody with two dendrites of intelligence could see that it
weren’t no cat
. Arguing that now would only keep the old man off the track. I decided to shut up, and he seemed satisfied that I was going to let him talk without any know-it all city-boy interruptions. Ormly lumbered back with the schnapps, which Dunwoody offered to me perfunctorily.
Let’s retch!
my stomach announced, and I waved the bottle away.

Ormly backed into his corner like the world’s largest Saint Bernard sentry, keeping his eyes on me.

“Ormly was whip-smart,” Dunwoody began. “He was my Primmy’s favorite. Then she had Sarah. Little Sarah. You’da seen that baby girl, Mister Taske, she woulda busted your heart left and right, she was so perfect. Like your little girl.”

“Jilly’s dead.” It was shockingly easy to say it so soon. “It—that thing, it—”

“I know. And I know you think me and Ormly is up to something, squirreled away up here, that we’re somehow responsible. We ain’t. I’d never hurt a little girl, and Ormly’s never harmed no person nor animal. It’s just . . . there’s a certain order of things, here.”

I had begun watching the ugly shed skin, still yielding, relaxing. It might reinflate and attack.

“Primmy and I kept a henhouse. We loved fryers and fresh eggs. One day I went out and all our chickens had been killed.” The drama replayed behind his eyes. “You know how chickens run around after you cut off their heads, too dumb to know they’re dead? Christ almighty. Twenty chickens, and half of them still strutting around when I got there. Without heads. It came down that night to eat the heads. And left the chickens. We’d been living in Point Pitt about two months.”

My brain dipped sickeningly toward blackout. It was an almost pleasing sensation. Ebb tide of the mind; time to go to sleep. I sat down hard in the chair next to Dunwoody’s and swallowed some schnapps without even tasting it.

“I had two hounds, Homer and Jethro, and an old Savage and Fox double-barrel, not as fancy as that pumpgun you got, but mean enough to stop a runaway truck dead. I laid up in the chicken coop the next night. ’Long about two in the morning, it stuck its head in and I let it have both barrels in the face. It was as close as you are to me. It yowled and ran off into the woods, and I set Homer and Jethro on it. Next morning, I found them. That thing took two loads of double-ought buckshot in the face and still gutted both my dogs. Ormly loved them old mutts.”

I remembered the sound it made, the ground-glass screech. I didn’t have to ask whether Dunwoody’s dogs had been found with their heads intact.

Dunwoody cleared his throat phlegmatically and hefted himself out of the chair, to pry open a stuck bureau drawer behind the TV set. “Next night, it came back again. Walked into my home bold as you please and took my baby Sarah. It was slow getting out the window. Sluggish, with its belly full. I shot it again like a fool. Didn’t do no good. Let me show you something.”

He handed across a brown-edged, fuzzy piece of sketchbook paper. “Careful with it. It’s real old.”

It was a pencil rendering of the Dunwoody house, done in a stark and very sophisticated woodcut style. The trim and moldings stood out in relief. The building was done in calm earth tones, complimented by trees in full bloom. The forest shaded up the hillside in diminishing perspective. The strokes and chiaroscuro were assured. The drawing deserved a good matte and frame. I tilted it toward the light of the television and made out a faded signature in the lower right, done with a modest but not egocentric flourish.

O. Dunwoody.

He handed me a photograph, also slightly foxed, in black-and-white with waffled snapshot borders. A furry diagonal crease bisected a robustly pregnant woman packed into a paisley maternity dress. She had the bun hairdo and slight bulb nose that had always evoked the 1940s for me—World War II wives, the Andrews Sisters, all of that. Hugging her ferociously was a slim, dark-haired boy of nine or so, smiling wide and unselfconsciously. He had his father’s eyes, and they blazed with what Dunwoody would call the smarts.

I tried to equate the boy in the photo with Ormly’s overgrown, cartoonish body, or to the imbecilic expression on his face as he stood placidly in his corner. No match.

“Night after it took baby Sarah, it came back. We were laying to bushwhack it outside. It flanked us. Ormly came in for a drink of water, and there it was, all black and bristly and eating away on his mamma. He couldn’t do nothing but stand there and scream; all the starch had run right out of him. He looked kinda like you do right now. I ran back in. That was the first time it bit me.”

I extended my wrist for him to see, and his eyes lowered with guilt.

“Then you know that part already,” he said.

Ormly stood parked like a wax dummy while his father went to him and looked over the wasteland of his son, hoping, perhaps to read a glimmer of the past in the dull eyes. There was no light there, only the reflected snow of the TV set, now tuned to nothingness.

“Ormly was crazy with fear and wanted to run. He loved his mamma and his little sister and the dogs, but he knew the sense in running. I was full up with ideas of what a man should do. A man didn’t go beggin’ to the police. The police don’t understand nothing; they don’t care and don’t want to. A man should settle with his own grief, I thought, and Ormly wanted to be a man, so he hung with me.”

Brave kid
, I thought.
Braver than me.

“Ormly came up with the idea of setting it on fire. He’d seen some monster movie where’d they’d doused the monster with kerosene and touched it off with a flare gun. We set up for it. We knew it was coming back, because it knew we didn’t like it and would try to kill it. It
knew
how we felt. We were the ones that had intruded on its territory, and when you do that, you either make peace or you make a stand. Or you run. And that’s what we shoulda done, because we were prideful and we didn’t know what we were up against. We shoulda run like hell.”

Dunwoody was stoking his own coals now, like a stump revival preacher getting ready to rip Satan a new asshole.

“Sure enough, the son of a bitch came down after us that night. You couldn’t have convinced me there was another human soul in Point Pitt. All the houses were dark. They all knew, that is, everyone but me. When I spotted it crossing the backyard, in the moonlight, it was different than before. It’d dropped its hide, just like a bullsnake.” He indicated the rancid leftover on the floor with a weak wave of his hand, not wanting to see it.

He did not look at Ormly, either, even as he spoke of him.

“The boy was perfect, by god. He stepped out from his hiding place, exposed himself to danger just so he could dump his pail of gasoline right smack into that thing’s open mouth. I set my propane torch to it and it tagged me on the back of the hand—just a scratch, no venom. Or maybe the gas all over my hand neutralized it. We watched it shag ass into the hills, shrieking and dropping embers, setting little fires in the bushes as it ran. We hooted and jumped and clapped each other on the back like we were big heroes or something, and the next morning we tried to find it. All we turned up was a shed skin, like that one. And when the sun went down again, it came back. For Ormly. I swear to you, Mister Taske, it knew who had thought of burning it. But it didn’t kill Ormly.” The memory shined in Dunwoody’s swelling eyes. He had witnessed what had happened. “Didn’t kill him. It took a big, red mouthful out of the back of his head, and . . . and . . . ”

He extended his scarred arms toward me, Christ-like, seeking some absolution I could not give. Bite marks peppered them everywhere, holes scabbing atop older holes.

“You get so you can’t go without,” he said dully. “You won’t want to. You’ll see.”

I was aware of speaking in an almost sub-aural whisper. “Why didn’t you leave?”

He shook his head sadly, ignoring me. “One day it just showed up. That’s all anybody knows. Whether it came down out of the hills or crawled out of the ocean don’t really matter. What matters is it came here and decided to stay. Maybe somebody fed it.”

The speed maxed out in my bloodstream, hitting its spike point. The murky room resolved to sharp-edged clarity around me in a single headlong second. I’d broken through, and rage sprang me from my chair, to brace Dunwoody so he could no longer retreat into obfuscations or babble.

“
Why the hell didn’t you leave?
” I screamed in his face.

He flinched, then considered his ruined arms again, and avoided the easy answer. “We don’t like the city.”

I remembered Suzanne, browsing the house. All her remarks about getting back to nature, slowing down, escaping the killer smog, hightailing it from the city as though it was some monster that had corrupted us internally and conspired to consume us. The big, bad neon nightmare. What penetrated now was the truth—that the state of nature is the last thing any thinking being would want. The true state of nature is not romantic. It is savage, primal, unforgivingly hostile. Mercy is a quality of civilization. Out here, stuck halfway between the wilds and the cities, a man had to settle his own grief. And if he could not . . .

My father, the guy who’d taught me to keep all guns loaded, had another adage I’d never had to take seriously yet:
If you can’t kill it with a gun, son
—
run.

“You’ve squared off with it,” Dunwoody said. “That choice was yours. Believe me when I say it knows you don’t like it.” The provincial superiority was seeping back into his tone. “Have you figured it out yet, or has all that toe-food crap turned your brain to marl?”

Near the nub of his right elbow, the old man had sustained a fresh bite. It was all I could see. The thing had bitten Dunwoody recently—and Dunwoody had let it.

He sighed at my thickness. “It’s coming back. Might even come back tonight. You’re new here, after all.”

I bolted then, with a strangled little cry. It was a high sound, childish, womanish. A coward’s bleat, I thought.

Ormly had left my shotgun on the kitchen table, and I snatched it up as I ran, hurdling the demolished door, heedless of the stabbing pains in my hand, or the blood I could feel welling from the ruptured wound on my foot. My shoe had turned crimson. I ran so fast I did not see Dunwoody nodding to himself, like a man who has made the desired impression, and I missed his final words to his huge, dullwitted son.

“Ormly, you go on with Mister Taske, now. You know what you have to do.”

Three feet more.

Three feet more, and the world would be set right. Three feet more to reach the hole in the fence, where Brix had died. Then came three more feet to reach the back door, to the stairs, to our bedroom. Three seconds more and I could shake Suzanne awake, pack her into the BMW, and bust posted limits red-lining it out of this nightmare. If the city wanted us back, no problem. We could scoot by on our plastic for months. My life was not a spaghetti western; I did not bash through my degree and get ulcers so I could do symbol-laden combat with monsters.

And Jilly . . .

The south window had been shoved neatly up. The drapes fluttered and there was no hint of broken glass, of the horrorshow trespass my brain had pictured for me. The creature was snuggled between Suzanne’s legs on the bed. Eating. It looked very different without its skin.

Thick braids of exposed sinew coiled up each of its legs, filament cable that bunched and flexed. The knobs of its spine were strapped down by double wrapping of inflated, powerful muscle tissue as smoothly grooved and perfect as plastic. It no longer required an envelope of skin. An absurd little triangular flap covered its anus like a pointed tail.