little left of Franklin’s body. His left side had been torn apart, his innards half eaten and hanging loose like uncooked dough. Everything beyond his left elbow was gone, the remaining bone nearly stripped of flesh, what remained hung in ribbons. His legs looked blue from the frost, but both had been shortened at the knees. At the sight of the gaping hole where his manhood should be, the contents of my stomach made their reappearance. Heaving until all I could spew was bile, I wiped away the traces of vomit with my sleeve, my body shaking more from fear than the chill.
The younger Carrington silently helped me back up the stairs to the store. He brought me over to the elder Carrington’s narrow office and placed me down in a creaking wooden chair. Younger Carrington placed his hands on my shoulders and told me to stay put while he ran to find the sheriff, and with that, he disappeared.
Minutes passed before I heard the slow sound of lips smacking. I glanced over to find the elder Carrington chewing on tobacco, his glassy eyes trained on me as he stuffed more chew into his mouth. Black-brown liquid leaking through his yellow teeth, he asked me if the nigger was dead. I cannot recall whether I replied or not.
An hour or more passed before the younger Carrington returned with the sheriff and undertaker. They left me in the office while they inspected the body in the basement. A short time later the sheriff shuffled up the stairs, his naturally pale face whiter than paper. His jowls shook when he asked me to relate how I found the body. I answered him in short sentences; never lifting my gaze off my feet for fear that I would break out into tears. They removed Franklin’s remains while I was speaking to the sheriff, and thank God they did; I could not handle to see it again.
The younger Carrington closed down the shop that afternoon, despite the elder’s protests to the contrary, and took me home. He explained to my father the horrible circumstances for my early return and I swear I could see my father’s thin lips quiver and his eyes threaten to tear for the first time. The younger Carrington patted me on the back, calling me a brave young man. My father nodded and thanked the younger Carrington for bringing me home. He wrapped his arm around me, his rough, callused, dirty hand gripping my shoulder, and brought me inside.
Days went by before the younger Carrington decided to reopen the store, an event met without pomp and circumstance. The rumors and murmurs around town were deafening, and grew worse with each subsequent telling. There were claims that it had been a bear that had killed Franklin, or perhaps a mountain lion, starved for food in the hills had made its way down into town. These theories did not explain how the beast had ended up in the storeroom nor how Franklin could have remained undiscovered for so long. There were those, mostly the older women who had loved to smile at me, who made monstrous claims, saying it was the Carringtons who had murdered poor old Franklin, stuffed his body into the snow and sold his flesh as meat to their patrons. It was not without much hesitation that I chose to return to work, but feeling a debt of gratitude to the younger Carrington for telling my father I had been brave, and knowing that with a death so foul, it would be difficult for him to find other help, drove me toward my return.
The store sat devoid of patrons most days, only the most loyal of customers defying scandal and rumors to purvey our wares. With the warmer weather leeching in around us, the perishables in the shop began to spoil quickly, forcing us to make frequent trips to the basement to replace the rotten food. The younger Carrington made most of the trips down into storage, knowing how it affected me, but I eventually had to make my way down during the rare, busy periods of the day. My skin would always prickle as I inched down the stairs, my teeth chattering in spite of the warmth. I would rush through the stores, my eyes locked on my goal, never once risking a glance at the shadowed spot under the window where Franklin’s body had once sat. Finding my charge, I would race back up the stairs, sweat kissing the edge of my scalp, my heart racing, my breath ragged.
It was in the third week after we discovered Franklin’s body that I first heard the chittering echoing up from the earthen walls. The sound put my nerves on edge, finding little comfort in how the sound reminded me of mice whispering as they chewed through wood. But it wasn’t that, not exactly. There was something insect-like to the sound, cicadas in early morning, a mosquito in your ear. I whipped my head around, searching for the source of the noise, but never found any evidence of an animal, mammal or insect; just darkness, cold, wet and crushing. I naturally assumed it was my imagination—so worked up from Franklin’s death—it would search for terror in the dark. My heart raced, my skin crawled, but I pushed through the fear and raced back up the stairs, believing it was the last I would hear of the phantom sound.
However, this nightmare quickly proved to be recurring.
At the outset, I would hear the sound infrequently, once a month, at most. Always from the shadows, never running away like an animal would, but stationary, as if it was watching from a hidden space, deciding whether it should fully make its presence known. I did my best to ignore it, trying to convince myself it was all my imagination, but as the spring turned into summer, I began to hear sound more and more frequently. Sometimes I felt it inching closer, while other times it seemed to circle me, padded feet pawing against the compacted soil. I debated endless hours whether I should tell the Carringtons, but what would I say? A shapeless, invisible creature stalked the storage? They would think me mad, indeed, I often thought myself mad. I decided to keep the sounds a secret, perhaps out of some strange sense of vanity or pride. I cannot say which or the other, but it was a mistake I was soon to pay for.
It had been nearly two months since we had discovered Franklin’s body, the store now a mere shadow of its former prestige. The lack of business seemed to have a direct effect on the elder Carrington’s health. Already a frail man—in body, if not in spirit—the elder Carrington had grown thinner as time progressed, his thin, paper like skin hanging precariously off his brittle bones. Most days, he would sit slumped at his desk, his yellow eyes glazing over as drool tumbled out of his mouth. The younger Carrington would try hourly to bring his father out of his stupor, only to fail time and time again. He would walk out of the office, shake his head, and walk back to the main store, often near tears. It wasn’t until the elder Carrington began soiling himself, the rancid smell suffocating the entirety of the store, that the younger Carrington decided it was time his father stayed home. It was the only time the old man showed any sort of life; silently spitting a large wad of green phlegm onto the younger Carrington’s shirt when he had made the decision known. As the elder Carrington began to hurl violent insults, the younger looked to me and asked if I could give him and his father a moment alone.
With the younger and elder Carringtons arguing in the office, none of the end of day work had been completed, so the tasks fell to me. I swept up the floor, rearranged items on the shelves, and secured what little cash there was left in the register back into the lockbox. It was tedious work but it was all done in an effort to avoid the chore of restocking the basement. It was a simple task, just the matter of storing a crate of empty bottles and canisters on a shelf in the back of the basement, but even that small matter stopped my blood cold. Working the basement during the daylight hours, when I knew where the shadows came from, was difficult enough; but as the sun set, when the shadows and the darkness intermingled creating horrible visions in the corner of my eyes, was often too much to bear, so the work was taken on by the younger Carrington. But with him and his father still in the midst of their row, I was left with no other option than to complete the work myself.
Standing outside the basement door, I tried to stop my hands from shaking. With my sanctuary removed for the time being, I drew on every ounce of my pride and courage to unlock the door and inch down the stairs, one step at a time. My heel eventually pressed down on the basement floor, sinking down several inches into the muddy floor with a slow, wet slosh. I lifted up my foot, but the muddy ground clung on to my shoe and pulled it off. I swore under my breath and tried to ignor
e the gooseflesh that had crawled up my arms and neck. I carefully put my bare foot back on the lowest step, placed the crate on the ground, and sat down on the stairs. I leaned forward to retrieve my muddy shoe when I heard the chittering sound from the earthen wall across from me.
Not a breath escaped my lungs nor did a muscle move. My eyes remained on my half-buried shoe, for I didn’t dare look up. For a moment, my body had turned to stone as I silently prayed that the sound was only in my mind. And I waited and listened.
There was the delicate sound of a large paw pressing down against the soft earth, then another. The chittering came again, closer than before.
I slowly lifted my gaze up toward the source of the sound, my body trembling as I at last lay eyes on the fiend. Its hind legs like that of a dog or a cat, with three-clawed toes at the end shifting earnestly in the mud. A long rat’s tail swung from its back. Its flesh was the Devil’s hide, hairless, crimson, and glistening. Its body was slender and upright, with long, skeletal arms. Its head was a long and cylindrical, its jaw split down the center,