Horace spoke in a friendly tone but had murder in his eyes. “Come on, boy, don’t stop there! If we’re gonna get dirty, let’s get filthy.”
A small shadow appeared in the light of the doorway. “Papa, Papa, don’t kill Danny!”
Horace slowed his menacing orbit to turn and offer a moment of drunken parental guidance. “Becca, I’m not about to kill him. Danny needs a spanky. Go to bed.”
Rebecca immediately forgot about her brother’s life. “Aaaw… but it’s my biiirthdaaay... You said I don’t have tooo…”
Horace threw his hands up into the air at her whining, spilling whiskey on himself and roaring all of his words into one. “DannyneedsaspankyBeccagotobedAAAAAAH!”
She vanished.
When Horace turned back, his son was sprinting away. Daniel disappeared into the woods at the end of the warm strip of firelight the kitchen cast across the yard. Horace stood there for a long time, watching that spot in the trees and drinking from his jug.
Daniel’s pace slowed after a hard minute. The cool air burned in his thumping chest. Glaring back through the moonlit trees, he realized his father wasn’t following. He touched his throbbing mouth, tasted a split lip and clenched his fists. “Fwah!” Then he kicked the ground and shouted, “Fwaaah!” Before long he’d worked himself into a screaming, hopping and stomping fit.
Two, rugged miles into the woods from the farm was a very large, old oak. On one side of its gargantuan trunk, a rotten platform rested in the thick, chaotic branches. A rope wound around a bough above a hole in the platform’s center and descended in a straight line to the forest floor. There the tree’s huge, knuckled roots made seats for a dormant campfire’s circle of stones.
Daniel moped through the gloom to the tree, inched up the rope and then climbed through the hole. The rope slithered up behind him. He lay down and frowned up at a starless blanket of leaves. “Fwah.”
His fishing knife’s handle was an annoying lump under his back. He snatched at it, nicking his fingers on the blade, cursed and jerked his hand away, smacking his fishing pole. He looked up with a bug-eyed scowl just in time for the toppling rod to thwack him in the face.
Daniel exploded. The poor pole bounced around in his flailing rage until it clattered from the platform. He sprang to his feet, quivering and screaming. Then he started punching the oak, slamming his fists bloody against the jagged bark.
***
Horace stepped into Daniel’s room the next morning, sober, a huge man in a boy’s empty space. Rebecca came up behind him, dragging her blanket and peeking around. She was no bigger than one of her father’s arms.
“Papa, did you killed Danny?”
Horace had mixed regrets. “No. He’s run off to the tree house again, I guess.”
“Cause you give him a spanky?”
“Becca, stay inside today.”
“Aw…”
“I don’t want you outside without brother.”
“Aaaw...”
“Keep it up. You’ll get a spanky.”
She vanished.
For two days Horace made Rebecca stay inside while he worked the farm. It was the longest Daniel had ever held out but Horace refused to go after him, feeling the boy should pay for his pride with hunger and loneliness. On the third morning, after much of her moaning, Horace let Rebecca out on her own, making her promise to stay close enough to hear him when he called.
Wind whipped through the tops of the plants but not where she sat in the dew at the base of the stalks. Rebecca loved playing in the field. She was frightened of the woods and never went there, but the field was safe. She had two animal-shaped carvings Daniel made for her. Trotting one through the air, she sang, “Cow, cow, cow, cow.” Then the other reared back. “Hooorse! Hooorse!” It was a repetitive little song and she really belted it out on the horse’s turn.
The barn shuddered and groaned in the wind. Horace led the pig into it on a rope. The garden spade rested on his meaty shoulder. At the back end of the building’s eerie shelter, he looped the pig’s noose over the slaughter post. He and the animal considered each other for a moment from where they stood.
Horace said, “I’ve a pigheaded boy, you know.” It was a conversational observation.
The pig oinked.
Horace scratched it between the ears. “Can’t put any more chores on hold waiting for him. I guess I just need a body to hold the funnel. Becca’s old enough for a little blood.”
Horace left the barn, his clothes fluttering in the wind outside. He frowned at the sun’s position in the sky. He’d lost track of time. Dropping the spade next to the hay cart, he tied back his long, black hair. Then he put his fingers to his lips and let out a shrieking whistle. “Becca!” He released another piercing blast. “Becca! Come help Papa!”
The crops jostled across the way and he smiled, but a lanky man tore into view, not his daughter. The man was familiar, last summer’s farmhand. “Oaky? What are you doing here?” Oaky didn’t answer or slow his charge. It puzzled Horace. After the harvest, Oaky had gone home to Meroe on good terms and they’d made plans for his return, but not so soon.
Horace repeated himself. Then he reared up with an angry frown. As a younger man, he’d been an elk rider in Clan Breahg. Oaky was asking for a beating, charging at him like that. Horace stomped on the tip of his garden spade. It jumped into his hand.
Horace leapt aside at the last moment and rammed the spade’s handle into Oaky’s middle, folding him over the force of the blow. In the same deft motion, he swung one leg behind Oaky’s knees, slammed him to the ground and stepped on his chest. The former farmhand heaved smoke into the wind like a wicked bellows. That, the unnatural strength, the eyes; Horace gawked at what he’d pinned. “What’s happened to you?”
The ghoul pitched and kicked beneath the big man’s weight like a beetle on its back, its skeleton lancing out of its flesh like talons. Horace drew back in a panic and flashed a look around, trying to decide between keeping Oaky down or just running away. Then he saw the spade. He’d forgotten it was in his hand.
Horace thrust the shovel into the monster’s mouth, splitting its face from ear to ear. Then he stepped on the tread and drove it into the earth with a wet crunch. The head above the jaw fell away. Ink spilled out of the split. Horace shuddered and then regained his composure with an angry kick that sent Oaky’s skull spiraling into the barn. The pig went berserk. As it squealed and tried to escape the slaughter post, Horace’s face opened with horror.
“Becca… Oh my God, Becca! Becca!” He crashed through the plants around the house, shouting his daughter’s name. “Please be in the house, oh please God be in the house!” He ran through the rooms, around the barn, down the road and back again with the pig shrieking its terror through every moment of the search. Horace looked everywhere. He called everywhere. He even shouted her name into the well with dread and hope.
Heartbroken and exhausted, Horace stumbled into his dark kitchen. He slumped into a chair at the table and prayed that Rebecca had disobeyed him, that she’d somehow gone to see Daniel at the tree house, though she didn’t know the way. Horace prayed for his children’s safety, turning to God out of despair.
He didn’t know if he should go out there to find out. If she was somewhere on the farm, she might come back. He decided to wait just a little longer. Then he would go to the tree house.
The doorway was a brilliant rectangle of sunlight behind him. From the barn, the pig’s voice was breaking. Horace cried, “Shut up,” weeping into his hands. “You stupid animal, shut up.” It did. Tears leaked from between his fingers and slid down his wrists for long minutes. Then a small shadow lurched into the light.
His head lifted with his heart. “Becca?” She came to him, silent, black-eyed and bathed in the pig’s blood. Though a silhouette from where he sat, Horace knew by the way she moved that something was wrong. Something had happened to his little girl. He held out his arms, frightened again for her safety, and brought her in close. Her tee
th sank into him like chisels.
He was slow to struggle, but the bite was a branding iron and he could not pull her off. Her smoke burned in the wound and then in his eyes and lungs. He thrashed around the kitchen, smashing his daughter into the wood and stone.
The infection sped on his desperate pulse. Paralysis crept behind it. Horace faltered and then fell, helpless and losing his senses, losing control until he couldn’t even close his eyes or focus their stare. His daughter was somewhere out of sight, doing something to him. He didn’t know what. What he could see shook, like the world in a looking glass, each time she pulled a piece away.
Rebecca stopped when Horace died. Her head lifted and swung from side to side. She was a bloody puppet, searching for something that had vanished. After struggling to her feet, she limped away with a peculiar, wagging step. Her father had snapped her leg in the thigh. She didn’t feel any pain from the injury, or from anything else. The only thing left of her mind was a vague, instinctual memory of something important in the field.
Clouds of flour and soot settled on shattered glass. Hours passed. The sun turned slow shadows across the room. Black capillaries surfaced and burst in his deserted eyes. Gray smoke pushed itself out of his mouth and nostrils. Horace’s huge corpse stirred and then staggered to its feet like a drunk. It stumbled outside with a vague, instinctual memory that something important was in the woods behind the house.
4 Lost Son
Daniel’s feet dangled over the side of the tree house. An aging afternoon lengthened the shade. He whittled a figure with his fishing knife, pausing at times to blow the shavings away. When the figure took on a rough shape, he trotted it through the air and sang, “Puh-puh-puh piiig. Pih pih piiig.”
His hands were swollen with infections from punching the tree three days before. His lip had a fat and nasty scab as well. Noticing the evening coming, he put the pig carving down and kicked the rope through the hole. He wanted a fire started before dark.
As he descended, he felt fluid trailing down his arms and thought his bloated fingers had cracked open like sausages. He dropped to the ground, relieved to find only the scabs had broken. Bloody pus flowed from his knuckles and cuts. He wiped them on his dirty shirt.
Gathering kindling was easy. It hadn’t rained in days. A pile of sticks and pine cones soon waited in the stone circle for Daniel’s tinderbox, a rusty canister, four inches long and a little slimmer than his wrist. It held a shard of chipped flint, a ring of firesteel and a hairy tuft of straw from their field. His father had given it to him and taught him how to use it.
He struck the steel with the flint, sending tiny sparks of molten metal to smolder in the straw. The glow passed from there to dry pine needles and then licked to twigs which lit the sticks within minutes. Daniel snuffed the tuft out and reloaded the box.
A warm, orange fire flickered in the pit. Pockets of sap snapped and hissed. Daniel propped a useless roasting spit against the oak. He hadn’t managed to catch any fish. Sitting on one of those huge roots, thinking about food and his family, hands hurting so badly he hated the rope, Daniel quit. He’d just go home, apologize and eat. By then he’d forgotten why he’d run away in the first place.
That was when he heard footfalls in the forest. He searched and called out, “Pa? Is that you?” There was no answer except for an added urgency in the approach. Horace was coming to the oak. Daniel recognized him through the lowering gloom by the size of his shadow. “Pa!”
His father had never come to get him before. Horace always waited for Daniel to break. The boy smiled and thought, not anymore. Now you’re too old! You’re too old and need help with the chores. Ha ha, Pa! Daniel’s smug grin narrowed into suspicion as he studied his father’s stride, a staggering charge.
His eyes went wide. “Drunk on some!” He shimmied up the rope, regardless of his hands. “Oh no you don’t, Pa!”
Horace grabbed the rope below, but it was too late; Daniel had reached the tree house and pulled himself through the opening. The boy tried to bring the rope up too but it stuck in his father’s grip. Daniel scowled down at him. “Fwah! You can’t get up it anyway. Even if you did you couldn’t fit through the hole! You can go on home. I’m never coming back!”
Daniel plopped down, folded his arms and frowned at the rope. Horace’s drunken slant showed in its tension and waver. Over a few silent minutes, the boy started to imagine fishing from a raft, an oak tree for a pole and a sea monster on the line. He narrowed his eyes and decided to wait him out, refusing to speak.
After half an hour, he started to think his father had fallen asleep. Daniel tugged on the rope. Horace still held it tight. The boy went back to frowning.
That night the campfire’s glow came up from the hole and around the edges. The platform was like a lily pad on a pool of light, and Daniel was the toad. His wide, big-eyed frown watched the rope stay tight and wavering. He thought it was very strange. What’s he doing? Is he angry? Is he sorry? He tugged the line again. “Pa?” His father had come and was down there waiting for him. It had to mean something.
Despite the things said in anger, Daniel always planned on going home. Every time he’d run off before, he’d been welcomed back. So, he spent much of his time away thinking about how to word his grievances upon return. Though the circumstances were odd, with his father having come to him rather than Daniel crawling home in defeat, it seemed like the right time. He gave Horace the prepared speech.
“Pa, if you’ve got to give me a wallop, you shouldn’t call it a spanky. That’s disrespectful to me. I’m grown up, or near there, and you shouldn’t shame me like that in front of Becca. You always say to say sir and be respectful, but you should too. I don’t mean calling me sir, but being respectful.”
As Daniel waited for a response, guilt began to replace his draining frustration. He said things before he’d been knocked out of the kitchen that night. Part of him felt he deserved a wallop. “Pa, I’m sorry about what I said the other day, about Ma. I didn’t mean it.” He wanted to see his father’s face. He needed something other than silence. But, descending the rope still felt like a bad idea. He lay down and waited for Horace to speak.
Daniel woke up in the morning, in the forest’s dappled light. The rope was the same, tight and wavering. It wasn’t just strange anymore. It was frightening. “Pa?” He crawled over to the hole and looked down at his father’s blank, smoking stare. A cold weight settled in his stomach.
“What’s wrong with you, Pa? Are you sick?” He bent lower to get a better look. His father pawed at him from yards below with the ignorant motion of an animal in a trap. Daniel was terrified. Over and over he cried, “What’s wrong, Pa? What’s going on?” That day passed and the sun set without an answer.
That night was a black lake around the oak. Sounds came out of everywhere to send Daniel scrambling. He was afraid any one of them might be the tell of his father climbing in the dark. His fear turned the autumn breeze into a freezing blast; it closed the platform in so that he always felt an inch from the edge, and that his every breath threatened his fall.
By sunrise Daniel was exhausted, dehydrated and shivering with fever. He crept over and peeked under the boards. His father was still there, holding the rope. The boy’s face peeled into a silent, trembling scream that tore his lip open again. He backed up, buried his head in his knees and sobbed, “Please go away. Please, please go away…”
***
John had little trouble following Horace’s trail. Trampled saplings and snapped branches made a hallway through the brush. He had an idea of where it was headed anyway. As the forest grew darker from the approaching storm, John kept calling out, “Horace!”
A strained voice answered him suddenly from up ahead. “Run! Run! He’s coming! Run!” John stopped and searched. Lightning flashed across the sky, thunder rumbled in behind it and rain began to dot the path. The enormous zombie-Horace crashed forward with leaves and twigs in its hair.
“Horace...” John’s face fell. He w
as too late. Drawing his sword, he stepped into a swing that clove a deep diagonal through his son’s heart. That would have been enough to stop a man. Smoke and gore erupted from the gash but the spine remained intact.
The charging giant slammed into John and they hit the ground with a splatter, John’s right arm and sword pinned across him. Horace drove forward. John locked his left hand against the nearly-severed shoulder. The wound yawned from their combined effort, tilting Horace’s head and one thrashing arm away.
John’s eyes glowed in the belching smoke and viscera. Riin coursed into him. He yanked his other hand free and pushed harder. Bones and tissue popped and ripped at the base of the cut. Then, with a loud, deep crack, like splintering lumber, Horace’s spine broke. Ink puked out of the fissure. The monster went slack. John had folded its upper half onto its back.
He squirmed out from beneath the body, drenched blood, bile and black. John stood up, letting the rain wash it all away - water poured into the forest - and with a look of loss and sadness stared at what had once been Horace.
***
Daniel squeezed the platform’s edge as he ducked and wove, trying to dodge trees with his gaze, swollen hands pale from his grip. Seconds before each thunderclap, lightning exploded for a stuttering, black and white heartbeat that let him see twice as far. He saw the golden circle first. Then John jogged into view.
Daniel recognized the dumpy, old man for what he was, a knight of the church from Antioch. He’d seen one once before, in Meroe, a big one named Gabriel. He was also related to one he’d never met, one he knew only as his father’s uncle, John.
John called up to him, “Are you hurt, boy?” Daniel couldn’t answer. Fever, deprivation and astonishment allowed him only to stare and tremble. John ran under the platform, dashed hand over hand up the rope and dropped to his boots on the boards. Removing his gauntlet quickly, he asked again, “Are you hurt?” He placed his gnarled old hand on the speechless boy’s forehead.