One Foot In [September Submission]
When Elizabeth Hurley saw Lester Owens coming down the crooked road by the pasture, she was sure he had been in the silage hooch, drunk as the last lord of creation. She stood half-hidden behind a beam on her porch and watched him in the early blood dawn. The sound of screech owls crying the last of their descending, ghostly whinnies of the night echoed from the deep woods as he stuttered along.
She was afraid of Lester.
Lester wasn’t walking so much as he was lurching down that dirt road.
He would stagger forward on one good leg, dragging the other behind, swinging his hip in a half-twist to carry that dead weight after him. He was slathered in mud from head to trailing foot. The filth ran brown to black hitting that gimp leg and left a foul trail behind him she could just make out in that apocalyptic new day. But the way Lester tried to grab at something in front of him, wanting purchase to carry himself forward, Mrs. Hurley didn’t like that one bit. That made him seem dangerous. She watched him shamble along the road - step, draaag, step … draaag, step… draaag, step - slow, but not quite ambling drunk-slow.
She watched him until he hit the curve that would have taken him into the town of Cedarville a couple miles going southwest from here, except he didn’t take the turn. A growing sense of dread rose up in her. Lester pitched into the underbrush beside the dirt road, going away from the curve. Then he was gone, leaving just the rip-haggard brush that seemed to shake in agony as it failed to close up. Something primal in Elizabeth told her not to look too closely at the road Lester walked; spatterings of blood trailed his muddied footsteps and the long, swishing smear that his anchoring deadweight foot left behind. She hadn’t seen it but she knew if she went to look she would find all that and more.
Somewhere, not as far off as Elizabeth would have liked, a barn owl screamed and it sounded like a banshee, or maybe a woman in distress. She stared off into that broken and dark wrangle of bushwork and trees. Her chest rose and fell at motor speeds and she clung to the porchbeam to keep from fainting. She knew what was over that way, straight as the crow flew, through the dogwood brush and the oak woods and the dark, spiraling animal trails that criss-crossed one another in secret places.
Lester Owens was walking to the Cedarville Cemetery, direct.
And, wildly, as if she were still in bed next to her husband, she had the waking-dreamlike belief that Lester Owens was dead. Had been dead, trudging along that country road and trying to imitate breathing, dead and weeping.
-
On the Friday before Elizabeth would see Lester boring through the pines and into the red twig dogwood, he was sitting at home, reading a letter. A warm buzz flushed up his face as he sipped out of a ceramic jug. The evenings were getting cool and the lightning bugs slalomed through the deepening autumn sky, will-o-wisps ferrying the dead. Firebobs, they called ‘em as kids. Lester was enjoying that build-up of tipsy every drinker craves, knowing it was building to something good. But this letter. Jesus mercy this letter just wasn’t gonna do.
He read by the dim electric light coming out of the window from his and Marcy’s squat, single-story home. The place had been rough when they bought it and was positively run to riot now. Creeping ivy had gone barmy on the north side of the house and the wood was so warped on the front that you could stick your knuckle in the bow between the boards. A number of disemboweled cars had been swallowed up in the weeds around their place. It wasn’t nothin’ to Lester, but Marcy was on him about finally taking care of the scrap in their garden now that baby Evelyn was turning one.
Lester took a belt off the jug, smacked his lips, and blew steam into the chilling night.
This letter.
He squinted at the fancy print for the third time since he yanked it out of Marcy’s hand this afternoon, getting in late from harvesting the O’Donnelly’s fields. He sat and thought. Late, but their tractor was a real hayburner jalopy that guzzled gas harder than Mr. O’Donnelly did his booze. They should have been grateful he got it done at all.
Lester swigged the bottle. The vinegary shit O’Donnelly’s boys brewed in about a hundred clay pots buried under silage made some of the foulest drink Lester ever had the pleasure of supping. Coughing, he thought about the contents of the letter.
The Letter, in no uncertain terms, was a notice to the residents of Cedarville and the surrounding communities within the district that the Cedarville Cemetery would be replotted to the far edge of town, to make way for a NEW road they were putting in to connect them to the NEW highway. That wasn’t the part that interested Lester, but it did do for a chuckle. The idea that this jerkwater town was going to be connected. Hoot and a holler, that.
No, the part that caught his eye was the bit about replotting the cemetery. Bad timing, with fall on the way, so they’d make a rush job of it, and probably not fuss up about any oddities. Afterall, gotta get Cedarville connected.
Lester laughed. The rank drunk odor clouded around him.
The front door opened behind him. Marcy was there, frigid - which he didn’t like - and scared of him - which he liked a helluva lot. She had on the whisper of a nightgown that draped off her shoulders, sheer enough to almost see through. Lester could feel himself getting a little hard just at the sight of her.
“Lester,” she breathed, clearly desperate but keeping her voice low, “Evvie is asleep, ya hear? You don’t be wakin’ her up. I just spent half the evening tryin’ to git her to sleep.”
He grunted, father enough to care about baby Evvie but not about to let Marcy tell him off. “Gonna laugh if I want to.” he said.
“Lester, please.”
Marcy held her ground, staring. The defiance caught him. She was still curvy and supple in ways that made Lester’s mind work like a dog’s, but she had gotten tough on him lately. Frownin’ on the drinking, frownin’ on the late nights, just always frownin’ he thought. Lester took another swill and then put the jug down into a little groove he had butted into the lawn that made for a good hold.
Lester stood.
He was a thin man made lean after years of hard living and hard working. Scrawny-strong. He faced Marcy head-on and his crooked-blade nose twitched, broken years ago by his old man over a dispute about money. There was a quiet, agile way he could move even with the drink so heavy set in him - she was scared of that. A smudge of grease like an Ash Wednesday cross was between his eyes where he had wiped sweat away. Foul hooch in his breath like poison on the wind. Hard, jade eyes. Lester didn’t like being told what to do in his own home.
“You wanna say that again, Marce?” he said, stepping close.
She swallowed, arms crossed defensively over her chest. “Lester, Evvie is sleeping. Please. Not tonight.”
His hand snapped up like a gator, strong fingers biting hard into her near-bare shoulder. “What the fuck do you think you’re saying to me, Marce, in my own Goddamn home?”
Marcy didn’t cry out because she knew he’d like that. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Lester could be like a wild animal, unpredictable and dangerous. She was attracted to that like a moth to the flame when she was younger, but not anymore. The danger and hurt were simply danger and hurt, now. She fought the pain but he could see her wince. He knew that he was hurting her, those sharp eyes of his. Sick satisfaction grazed his dark features. “Don’t you be cursing here, Lester Owens,” she said, fighting harder than she ever had before. “I said Evvie is sleeping and I won’t have you upsetting her. Not again.”
His eyes never left hers but she had caught him in a way he didn’t expect. Marcy knew that sometimes seeming brave was all you had to do to get a wild animal to hesitate. He loosened his grip and let go.
Marcy stepped back from him, not numb enough to keep from rubbing the hurt away where he gripped her. They stood for a moment, her hurting and him out on the darkening yard. He was becoming a silhouette of himself. She mustered and put sand in her craw, tightening up, muscles taut like she might jump. She didn’t think he’d hit her now, what with the evening being so early on, but he had been drinking the hard stuff. Was still drinking that vile witch’s brew.
“Evvie is sleeping, Lester, and I won’t have you causin’ a ruckus here. I don’t got it in me to be fightin’ you. Please.”
His eyes were sharp. Brilliant jade eyes. “You watch yourself, Marce. You goddamn watch your uppity mouth or I’m gonna shut it real good.”
But there was no turning back now. Either she would get her say in or forever be under his heel. Her own mother had been broken the same way. She promised herself something better. There was a galling certainty in her voice the next time she spoke that Lester wouldn’t forget. “Lester, I’m telling you, you stop now. Now. Cut the drinking tonight and sleep it off. Or go elsewhere.”
His hands moved in a blurred flash, unbuckling his belt as he took three large, quick steps toward his wife. She wanted to run but held her ground. If not for herself then for Evvie. God was he fast though. Faster than she realized. Lester held the folded leather in his right hand. His face was so close to her she would taste the liquor in his sweat if she just pushed out her tongue. He’d belt me and I’d bite it off, she thought, terrified. He breathed on her for a moment, then the rhythm changed - slowed. Deeper inhalations.
Lester ran the belt up her nightgown, along her shivering arm and to her breast. He kept his gaze on her as he let the belt fall to his other hand and began to idly play with her nipple through the sheer fabric. He could see her vision go distant and he smiled. He gave her a pinch and let his hand fall away, stepping back.
“Well, mayhaps I do that. Go elsewhere. Take a little run out to Cedarville and see if anything’s doin’ out there.” He gave a half-cocked smile, booze so thick in his spit it welled in his mouth. Vinegary hooch. “Might even be that I bump into Jeremiah Dudds. Could be we pal around, see if we can find anything with value, or somethin’.”
There was a twitch in her eye at Dudds’ name. He liked that.
That mean-drunk spirit was in him as he stepped back from her. “Ayup, I’mma gonna do that, Marce. But when I’m back, you’re gonna be awake. You got that? And if you ain’t, I’m gonna wake you up, Evvie be damned.”
He slipped his belt back on slowly, loop for loop, watching her. Even on the verge of being drunk he was nimble. He turned, twisting his booted heel into the floor before the door to leave a muddy print. She expected he would want her to clean that up too, before he got home. She’d be right.
Lester Owens climbed into his beat up Ford and turned it on, engine sputtering as if its guts were wracked with cancer, until finally the old bitch whirred alive. Marcy watched him drive off into the dark and pressing night until his lights were as distant, agonizing stars.
–
Jeremiah Dudds was enjoying the O’Donnelly hooch himself, and damn near drank half his jug by sundown. Dudds didn’t have a wife or kids. He was free to be as spiffed as he wanted to be any night he pleased. He stood up from his broken rocking chair, legs beat and wedged into the topsoil and through the thick mat of grassroot going half a foot down. He took three good, wobbling steps before he decided he had gone far enough to do his business. His gnarled fingers burned with rheumatism and ached as he worked the buttons to his overalls.
“Horse shittin’ spade!” he spat.
Like an incantation the button on his overalls let open and he schlucked them down past his knees and began to piss. He groaned and took in the cool evening breeze, ignoring the hot pain pinging from his prostate. The rank, acrid odor of his own urine blended with the pungent stink that came from the muck his clothes were covered in. If the hooch hadn’t been so vile he might have cared, but O’Donnelly’s boys made a batch that would make Satan himself hack.
Dudds swayed on his chicken stalk legs, piss dribbling into his pants and a humming tune coming to mind. He farted and it hurt. The hum turned into a Woodie Guthrie tune as he closed his eyes. Now came the real turn for the night; from here on the drinking would be hard.
It was in this trance-like state, pants covered in cow shit and his bloomers stained, that Lester’s dim trucklights fell onto him. They rolled over the hill and near-blinded the older, pot-bellied man. Dudds made a bad job of blocking the light with his arm and staggered, trying to find his chair. The Ford rolled to a stop in front of his house and for a stupored moment Dudds thought he had died in his front yard with his dick in his hands, reeking and reeling.
The motor died and the lights spasmed and died too, leaving a murky orange glow where the lamps were. Dudds blinked and rubbed his eyes with blunt, grime-covered fingers. Lester laughed at him.
“Lord ah mighty Jeremiah but do you look just all kinds of bent outta shape!” Lester cantered toward him, stumbling over a rock as he did so.
Dudds wasn’t amused. “Yeah, well go suck an egg why don’tcha? Your Ma knows a thing or two ‘bout that.”
Lester ignored him, still laughing loud. Dudds stumbled and finally pulled up his trousers. “The hell you doin’ here anyhow, Lester? Ain’t Marce still up?” Lester half-looked. Across the field, distant but just down the road, sat his squat little home, the dim-yellow lights giving its front a face full of mourning. Lester swiped at it, annoyed.
“Fergit et!” he snarled, losing the buzz he had been getting up while on the drive over. Dudds picked up his own jug and they knocked them together, taking a pull each. Hooch dribbled down the sides of Dudds’ mouth like a baby’s drool. Lester chaffed the rest of his and tossed it into the yard. Dudds’ place was worse than his own. The trash made for a junkyard maze of machine corpses and baubles. At night the place could kill a man if they stepped wrong.
Dudds belched and he could feel the bile rise up in him. “What’re ya doin’ here Lester?”
Lester side-eyed him, still checking on his house from over here. “You got yerself a letter today, from the county-man?”
Dudds nodded. “Ayup. Even read sum o’ et. Bad.”
Lester started to nod, slowly at first but more rapidly, excited about something. “Could be, Duddsy, but ah gots a plan. A good’n. But we gotta act quick. Tonight. Hotter’n a jackrabbit on a date quick tonight, yah git me?”
Dudds finished his drink. The hellwater slosh burned even his wretched guts. “I couldn’t read all of et, Lest. What’s the damage?”
Lester fished for the letter he brought with him, digging it out of his pocket along with a kleptomaniac’s haul of nails and bolts. He slapped it like a bill of goods onto Dudds’ chest. “This ‘ere says they’re moving the cemetery all the way ‘cross town. Bodies and kaboodle. All of et.”
“You don’t think they be findin what we did, do ya?”
Lester waved that off. “One horse town like Cedarville ain’t got nuthin’ but pikers and lollygaggers doin’ that kinda work. They won’t notice a few busted up coffins or nuthin’, ah tell ya.” he jabbed a finger into Dudds’ soft chest, making a point about this. “Hell, I spect they’ll be bustin them up themselves. Lazy bastards probably just bustin’ it all up and tossin’ it in a pile. Gonna move the whole lot over in a parade.”
Dudds laughed, soused and half-following Lester’s meaning. “Prop ‘em up and have ‘em toss worms to the kiddos, right Lest?” Dudds gave a wet wheeze of a laugh and Lester faked his own. Dudds was unsavory, but unsavory was the kind of man he needed. For the work they did so late in the deep and baleful black of night, when only barn owls watched and cried out at them, Dudds was the right man.
“So ya don’t think they’ll find nuthin? Nuthin’ about us stealin’ or taking whatever?”
Lester clapped his shoulder, already turning good ol’ Jeremiah Dudds to the truck. Dudds could be a lickspittle turd but he did what needed doing and that made him worth having around. Plus, he was always good for a drink. “Not a chance bucko. But look,” and he stopped him here, trying his drunk-damndest to make a point to the drunker Dudds, “they’re moving them soon. Don’t know when, could be those pencil-pushers got on ‘em to do it already. We gotta go tonight. Now.”
Dudds shook him off. “Tonight? Lord Lester, I’s been drinkin’ real good tonight. Tomorrow. Ayup, tomorrow.”
Lester squeezed his shoulder tight now. He wasn’t above beating Dudds black and blue in his own yard. Done it before, when Dudds had filched from Lester some of the jewelry they got off one of the bodies in Cedarville. Impossible to hide at the fence who ran a bunco game behind the apothecary in town, and Dudds wasn’t a sly man. Not like Lester. Not half as vicious either. Lester had larruped him good that night, so good ol’ Dudds was out of work for a week.
“Tonight Duddsy. Tonight or never. They’re going to start proper work on it one way or another, and once that happens it’s going to be hard to pull off. We need to pilfer what we can tonight so we can make a clean sneak of it. Maybe all of it.”
Lester scared Dudds sometimes. Scared him the way men shouldn’t be able to scare one another, as if Lester had tapped into a meanness beyond simple alley-working thuggery. Like he enjoyed it.
“Ya, a-all right, Lester boy, we’ll do that tonight. J-Just lemme get some more drinks, ya?”
Lester smiled, canines big and bright in the moonlight, rotgut on his breath like a poison wind, and jade eyes lean.
-
By the time Lester and Dudds rolled into the Cedarville Cemetery, they were blotto to the four winds - boiled as owls, Dudds called it. The Ford growled to a stop between hacked earthen loam and mounds of dirt that had been piled up fresh. Stacks of coffins went as high as Lester. The bodies were poorly tacked under tarp to protect from the wind or the rain or whatever, not that Lester could make sense of why anyone bothered. They were dead. All of them. They didn’t care if they got wet.
Even by their drunk standards Dudds was feeling swirly in the head, like he was shifting around on a boat in stormy waters. They staggered out of the car, running lights on. They would need a bit of light out here, at this witching hour.
The city folk had made a mess of their own work. Lester and Dudds, foul though the task was, were more careful. After all, they had to be - grave robbing was a crime, and neither of them wanted to be sent to the joint for something as low as robbing from the dead.
There had been a rumor, croaked out of rasping, elder throats - an old rumor that came from those who weren’t long for this world themselves. They said that Cedarville’s Cemetery was ancient. Older than the redskinned savages. Older than men warring with sticks and stones. Older. True to their whispers the place was arranged strangely, in a spiraling circle that felt druidic. You could trace the rim of that spiral from the entrance, walking - or driving, as they did - in and around, inward, along a singular row of graves folding in on themselves like a mathematical promise to infinity. Pagans in fervor marching to entomb their fellows into eternity; Pharaohs and Kings alike carried by the slaves who would be buried with them; Paleolithic man hunched and babbling as they descended like animals along paths established in the forging of time. The spiral, leading Lester and Dudds through eternal movement and interconnection; the triune nature of God and Death and Eternity.
No stars shone that night. Only the moon, fat and red, burned through the sky like an abyssal sun, as if it had pried open the heavens to peer on man, rictus grin on its deathmask face, watching them sin.
Owls cried out in the dark and Lester told Dudds that he shouldn’t be afraid. They were only owls. They’re all over these woods. They sound like a banshee, but they’re just owls.
Lester had been right in his assessment of Cedarville’s desecration. The crew had run ramshod through the place and torn it up to hell and high-water. Grave stones were stacked with paint associating them to the coffins stacked beside them, so they could be reinterned later on, elsewhere.
“Dudds, c’mon here.” Lester said, motioning to a stack of coffins set aside.
Dudds gave them a look over; they were each classier, finer wooden boxes. Fancy meant money, and dead rich folk liked to hold on to their money. Together the two slid the first coffin off the stack and began to work on it with prybars. Soon they had popped the lid, and the mouldering must of a woman dead for decades hit them. Even teetering drunk, the dead air made them reel. Her withered, open mouth scream did nothing for them as they pried her arms away from the crossed over, self-hugging rigor-mortis. Even the dead wish for an embrace.
The two men knew what they were after. They felt her up face to foot, looking for jewelry or piercings. They tore out the earrings she wore and pried open her mouth with dirtied fingers looking for gold. Dental rape. They violated and stole, tearing at the clothes her children so carefully picked for her. They stripped her to find what goods they could rob. A pearl necklace. A gold bracelet. Sapphire earrings. Three gold teeth. They threw this into a bag and put the lid back over her. Ravaged. She was done.
Onto the next.
For two hours they repeated this process, sometimes striking hot and others not. When they finished with what was dragged out of the earth for them Lester berated Dudds into more. By now the booze was wearing thin, replaced by exhaustion. But, like Lester had said, it was now or never. And it would never be easier.
“Look for what they left in the ground. We can skip digging tonight, I think. Walk the spiral and look into any of the graves for coffins they left.” Lester told Dudds.
Dudds walked that twisted passage which marked man’s closest bridge to the Great Unknown, trailing the empty graves on unsteady feet. The booze had enough of a hold on him where he felt like falling into a grave wouldn’t be all that bad. Little bit of sleep. Little bit of soft dirt if he was lucky. Empty. Empty. Empty. He turned and arched along the spiral’s orbit to the center, revolving closer and closer to its core.
Lester watched him, smoking a cigarette. The owls were screaming something fierce but the hooch almost did enough to keep them off his mind. Almost. “Like the Goddamn caterwallin’ dead, them sons of whores,” he whispered in a slur. The moon stared at him with greater intensity, manic and obsessed. He was starting to feel like they had hit as much pay dirt as they would ever and made to call for Dudds. Before he could get the words out he saw the older man twisting, dipping down and arms up in a drunken dervish, wide-eyes full of surprise. And then, silently, Dudds disappeared from the dying beams of the truck lights.
“Shit, DUDDS!” he cried out, fumbling ahead and vaulting awkwardly over a divot where a tombstone had been.
Dudds had fallen into an open grave near the center of the spiral and was moaning so piteously that Lester was sure it would be bad. Then Dudds began to wail. And then, Dudds began to scream. By the time Lester made it to the lip of the grave, Dudds was frantic, raving in the depths. The truck’s lights badly shone in. “DUDDS! DUDDS YOU OKAY?!” Lester shouted, slurring even now. But Dudds kept screaming and writhing, a struggling mass. Lester cursed and made a run back to the truck. He climbed into the cab and began to throw garbage out. Finally, under a seat, he found a lantern.
Dudds had not stopped screaming by the time Lester returned. When he put the light on him his addled brain didn’t comprehend what was going on below. Dudds was embraced by dessicated, black bejeweled arms. A skeletal face loomed out of the void behind him and there was a worm-writhing mass where the eyes should have been. Dudds was flailing but the dead man’s hands harrowed his face in gashes that bled into the beyond.
If Lester had been sober he would not have gone in.
Drunk as he was, he slid into the grave and landed heavy next to Dudds, half-falling on him and the crypt lord’s arms. He could feel it snap beneath the weight of his right leg, a dry break and pop that left something wet staining his leg. Lester tore at the hands on Dudds’ face, and with a savage cry stood himself up in a squat and booted the leering face of death back into its abyss. Dudds whimpered, shivering. Lester was breathing heavy, sweat raining onto the grime and blood that covered his friend.
He helped Dudds stand, and with an awkward, shaking crouch made Dudds climb out of the hole, using his knee and shoulder to ladder-climb out. Lester, adrenaline still pumping through him, giving him more clarity than he had the rest of the night, reached up and could just barely grab the lip of the grave pit.
From out of the blackness beneath him, from within the tomb that lay at the center of that spiral, a hand manacled onto his right ankle.
Pressure enough to crush life. The clawed fingerbones of the dead made a tatter of Lester’s pant leg, digging directly into flesh. He could feel bone chisel into his ankle and he screamed. There was a horrible moment of agony where Lester gripped the sides of the lawn above and could feel the hand glacially try to drag him into the beyond. A mad panic overtook him, and he felt the muscles in his arm almost snap as he pulled himself up, scrambling and kicking free to find his way to the top.
Dudds couldn’t help him. He was moaning and grabbing at his face, dark liquid pouring through his fingers.
Their own screams filled the graveyard air and the moon, mad and insatiable, bore down on them with its eyeless skull gaze. Hate and joy and only the inevitable death shone on them in that nauseating mix of moonlight and the dimming truck lights. The screeching of owls became a cacophony of poltergeists raving, banshees in the night. Dudds wept. Lester, through his pain, pushed himself up, wild.
Madness. Madness, all around, close, hunting them.
He threw the lantern into the grave, hoping to see whatever was down there. Just the mummified corpse lying in a pit with no headstone. It fell away into sanguine depths.
Lester took a step and cried out, the pain wracking his leg where the corpse had grabbed him was like a tiger’s bite. He fell. Dudds wept. Lester pushed himself up again, and this time began to carry Dudds to the truck. He pushed him into the cab and made his way to the driver’s seat. Sweat poured off of him as he bit his mouth to hold back the pain. Copper and iron on his tongue. He spat blood. Lester pushed away from the truck door and staggered, limping with his bad leg trailing behind, to the sack of loot they had taken from the residents here. He spat on them. “You all cain go to Hell! Ya hear!” he shouted, voice warbling.
The owls screeched on, if they had ever been owls.
Lester limped back to the truck, climbed in, and fought to get it going again. It did. He backed up and refused to look at their work; refused to see the spiral again; refused to acknowledge the dead man in his rearview mirror, a pillar of angles and bone and black hate.
-
By the time Lester swerved into Dudds’ front lawn, he was sure his leg had been bitten by a snake. In the last fifteen minutes it ballooned, a mess of tendon and muscles bulging out and dragging against the frayed fabric of his overalls. The pain was so excruciating it became transcendental. Dudds’ misery was a mystery to Lester, but the old man had fallen into the foot of the cab and was curled up there, shivering and moaning. Lester swore at him.
If Lester hadn’t been holding the driver-side door hard enough to scrape off the paint, he would have fallen a third time tonight. There was no doubt in his mind that if he fell again that would be it. One hand over the other, Lester pulled himself along the truck until he got to Dudds’ door. His leg was a nest of writhing pain radiating upward, through the meat and the bone. “Get out of the car, Dudds, come on.”
Dudds fell out. He would not take his hands away from his face. Lester could see in the bad light that Dudds was bleeding. He picked Dudds up by the crook of his arm and half-walked, half-carried him into the fly-horror, trashbag dump of a home Dudds lived in. Cans and bottles fell and rattled and exploded into shards as they pushed their way through the hall and into Dudds’ bedroom. Dudds staggered, pushing himself away from Lester to fall into his bed. He rolled onto his back, leaving a putrescene smear of dark green and blood on the pillow. His hands were stained with necrotic fluid.
Dudds, shaking, took his hands from his face. The skin had gone black and was riddled with angry, bleeding yellow boils, as if everything around where he had been gashed was burned and now rotting at electric speeds. Dudds’ eyelids were gone. He whimpered. “Lester, is it bad? Is it bad?”
Dudds smelled like dirt and death when he spoke. A rampaging rot bubbled across Dudds’ face. It ate him even as Lester looked on. Lester forgot his bad leg and screamed out as he stepped back, pain and terror in his voice. Shaking his head, Lester fled, and the clatter and bedlam of his own flight was masked only by the ghoulish, despairing wail that came from Dudds’ dark bedroom.
-
Dawn was an hour away, Lester could tell, when he stopped his truck into his front yard, engine dying on him. Marcy had shut the lights off but he didn’t have it in him to think of her. Didn’t have it in him for anything. His stomach did a slow and giddy rollover that rebounded into his brain as the pain welled up from his ankle to his hip and into his guts. Sweat spilled from his brow and somewhere in him he knew he was dying. This time Lester couldn’t keep himself upright getting out of the truck, slipping on the door as he slid out and fell to the ground.
Everything felt like snakes inside of him, tearing around and cannibalizing one another.
Lester army-crawled toward home, oblivious to the same necrotic waste he trailed behind his injured leg that Dudds was bleeding from his face. It was rank, killing the grass wherever it spread. Lester crawled to the porch, face straining and eyes bulging from the pain, until he pulled himself beside the doorframe.
Despite the hateful, enormous throbbing in his leg, Lester slept.
Marcy found him the next morning on their porch. He stank and she figured he had fallen into some sort of offal or cowshit to smell so foul. His leg especially. She could hardly look at it - truthfully didn’t want to even see him - and knew she had better let him sleep. Waking him would mean bruises. Evvie was crying in her crib and would fill enough of Marcy’s day. It might be better if Lester spent the day sleeping it off, like he sometimes did.
Lester stayed in that pitiable state well into the day, drifting in and out of sleep to vocalize the empty ache that panged from his swollen black foot. Marcy ignored it as she had his other hangovers, grateful he wasn’t caterwauling inside where he’d upset Evvie. At some point Lester dragged himself away from the front door and into the shade beneath the frame of a car that sat beside their home.
He lay in the dreck and gutterwash and dreamed of a spiraling descent into Hell.
Lester dreamt of the dead face in the grave, the one belonging to the hand that grabbed his foot. In that vast-dreamt void the skull and its writhing worm-eyes loomed from behind him, perched on his shoulder, and told him he was dying. Doomed. Its breath was full of grave dirt and stale must. It whispered in his ear as he fitfully slept. It told Lester that it was the god of filth in ditches and the wriggling masses that swam in sludge; that it was the god of insects; that it was the god of the Spiral. It was death and would take Lester.
Unless he could offer another.
A trade.
The jawbone of the skeleton clacked open and a mass of insects began to spill out, a waterfall of wriggling, biting beetles and centipedes and slithering worms, all making their way to his bloated and black leg. They spoke as one.
Can you do that, Lester buddy? Bring her to me? Why, then I’ll make that nasty old leg of yours right as rain. Do it tonight, Lester. You don’t got time to wait. Hell ain’t half-full, and the rot is spreading.
And it was.
-
Lester woke and the sun descended into the rim of the earth, a wavering mirage whose dissolution revealed an endless night of expansive and silent despair. He couldn’t move his right leg anymore. The pain was catastrophic. His fevered delirium had taken him to the darkest spot in the yard to try and escape the pain. Trembling, reaching down below that turtle-shell cast of rusting steel he lay under, Lester felt the pruned and rot-wet leg beneath his pants.
“Gawd Jesus,” he moaned. “Gawd Jesus what is happening?”
He had to see.
Gripping a tear in his pants made by the corpse in the grave, he tore a running gash up the length of his overalls from ankle to hip. Even in the crimson glow of the dying sun he could see how bad he was.
His skin had turned a pruny, mottled brown and black, like a leech shriveling up. The leg was withered, the whole thing gone necrotic and dead while he slept. The advance of death had gone to his hip, a widening of flesh where blotches of pink and red ached. He could feel witch-finger tendrils cold and probing inside, searching, devouring, killing. Yellow-green blisters the size of toads pulsed and spasmed along the dead flesh, as if a network of fungi were in his bones, trying to grow toadstools out of him. Those that burst left bleeding craters which stank like the waste bins of a slaughterhouse on a hot day. And everywhere within his clothes was a sopping sewage bile, soaking through. It looked like he had fouled himself.
Death ravaged him like cancer from the open and taut wounds the ghoul had left on his ankles; a curse from the Emperor of all Maladies. The once wiry leg of his, with muscles like tree roots, was an abstraction of diseased decay.
A trade.
In the haze of his fevered death throes he looked to the light inside. Home. Marcy’s silhouette against the window. Evvie at the table.
Marcy finished eating and was working up the nerve to wake up Lester - ought to put Evvie to bed first, in case Lester got rough - when she saw him standing in their yard. She was leaning over, talking to baby Evvie in her chair, when he seemed to bleed upward, out of the ground, a shape against the setting sun. Her stomach dropped, a dizzying vacuum of sense all the way to her feet. Something tiny and frantic in her told her to grab the baby and run; told her that the thing in the yard was worse than Lester.
She dropped her plate and it broke. Evvie started to cry and Marcy snapped out of her doe-like panic.
“Shhh, baby, shhh. D-Daddy’s home, yeah? Shhh,” and then in a whisper, “please.”
The looming, stalk figure of her husband began to move.
Step, draaag, step … draaag, step… draaag, step.
Marcy unfastened Evvie from her baby stool, her little girl still crying as she clung to the only comfort she really knew. Marcy clung back.
… draaag, step… draaag, step.
Lester lurched beyond sight, hidden by the wall past the window. Her eyes followed where she knew he was. There was a lull before a single, heavy KNOCK slammed into the door, followed by a low, guttural “Maaarcce… Lemme in. Ya gotta lemme in.”
She didn’t move.
Evvie’s sobbing was gentle in the crook of her arm, her soft tear-stained cheeks nestling into her mother’s neck. Don’t go.
SLAM
“MARCE! OPEN the FUCKING door or I’m gonna BREAK it!”
She had to. She pried Evvie off of her, not oblivious to the urgent refusal she had to let go of her mother, as if they would be separated forever.
Marcy rushed to the door and had it open before Lester could hit it again. She swung it wide, babbling an apology. “I’m sorry Lester, baby, Evvie was fussy and I-”
She froze at the sight of him, a watercolor silhouette of brown, black, and red, a mishmash of mud and gunk both dried and dripping smeared all over him as if he had been rolling with pigs. His breath was full of dirt and putrid bile. Lester’s jade eyes had dimmed to milky whites run rampant by scarlet veins. It was impossible not to see the mummified, leaking leg he kept his weight off of.
Lester grabbed her by the mouth, hand like a viper.
He lurched forward, moving her ahead of him like a ragdoll.
“Yyyou! Fffuuucking. Bitch!” he growled, his words a slur from somewhere distant - a voice within his throat. “Whhhy didn’t yyyou let me IN sshooner?”
A trade.
She couldn’t answer. Wild-eyed panic and desperate attempts to breathe through his foul smelling hand left her in terror. Even if she could speak it would have been incoherent.
But his strength was unreal. He threw her into the table and she went sprawling over, supper and ceramic splattering, shattering, and careening in an orchestra of loud, chaotic abuse. Marcy rolled and fell onto the floor, looking from Lester to Evvie - crying, screaming - as she felt hot blood flood from her lips. Marcy’s lip had been split from the front of her teeth to her nose, a ragged bleeding wound that would mend crooked.
“Evvie,” she sobbed.
Lester’s heavy footfalls, and that sliding scrape of his dead foot dragging behind him.
A trade.
Marcy could only watch him as her world spun in a drunk, wobbling revolution around her. All she could manage was a pleading hand toward Lester.
Lester stopped.
He stared with dead eyes out the window, down the road, beyond where the sun set.
There was a fire.
Jeremiah Dudds’ home was burning. It was a towering inferno defined by the mad junkyard and ramshackle squalor he lived in. Lester saw the strange shapes they cast in the light of the flames from here, distant though they were, and the way they danced and warped to the heat, topping into wreckage and horror. Lester saw an oblong figure emerge from the fires and waver, arms upraised, before it crumpled and was consumed. Dudds was gone.
It was enough. Lester turned his gaze onto his own hands, shaking, dirtied. What was he doing? This was too much. Who was he? He reached down for baby Evvie.
Marcy wailed, broken. Not her little girl.
But Lester did not. Lester held his crying infant and brought her to his shoulder, his own arms trembling. He swayed. Marcy wept. Soon baby Evvie’s crying stopped and she was quiet, pushing her soft, perfect face into the filth of her father’s neck, unbothered by the death that wafted from him. Because Lester was her papa.
Lester wept.
He cradled her and then gently kissed his daughter on the cheek.
“I love you, baby girl. I love you so much. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Gently, he set her back down next to Marcy. Her head was swimming but she pushed herself upright, clinging to Evvie. She was beginning to see straight again.
Lester stared at them, weeping. Then, abruptly, as if on instinct, he turned, dragging his wither-rotten leg along with him, the decay spreading upward into his guts and chest.
Step, draaag… step.
Marcy watched him lurch and fade into the dead of night, disappearing beyond the doorframe.
-
There would be no trade tonight. Lester refused. He would give himself instead. He shambled along the road dying, dead, somewhere in-between. He wept and he remembered that Jesus did too and he wondered what awaited him in the vast beyond. Can the dead change? Be forgiven? Owls screeched into the night and he followed a road that seemed to spiral into infinity, walking all night until by dawn he had passed Elizabeth Hurley’s home.
She knew, long after he had disappeared into the dogwood brush, never to be seen again, that Lester Owen’s had one foot in the grave.