SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

Forty

303 Forty I was back at the Homeplace. The rat wasn’t there. Maybe he had gone on to other rat business under another house. The dog wasn’t there, either. There were no dogs anywhere. It was almost as though they knew the deputy was there, a hulking mound of menace that shouldn’t be messed with. I had dived under the house seconds before his car, the Ford, had rolled into the clearing between the houses, boiling dust up into the late evening air. I was under the house next to the church again, only this time there was no rat and no dog and no singing. I huddled at the far back where the ground rose slightly to meet the house, my back pushing up against some rotting planks, my face in the fine talcum-like dust, my body jammed and caught, my own personal pool of mud growing under me from the water that ran from my naked body. I had fallen in a creek that I didn’t know was there, just at the edge of the village. I shivered from the dank air, and from fear. And every time I moved the dust roiled up and settled on my wet body, an instant layer of thin, fine mud that seeped into every cut and tear on every part of my body. There was a smell under the house that I hadn’t noticed before, an ancient scent of dead and fading things, desiccated things, hurtful lives and pain. I rolled over and braced my bare feet against the floor above and tried to pull inside myself, to control my breathing. Tried not to scream. Every breath seemed to rip down my throat in a gasp that I knew could be heard out in the yard. I pulled my arm up over my mouth and nose and tried to muffle the noise, but it only rasped louder in my ears. My head spun and I knew I was probably going to pass out. 304 There was a knot of ice behind my stomach, a hard, cold fist that was always there in those times of my life when fear began to overpower my mind. My body always reacted to it, seemed to sweep up the fear and gather it into a cold ball and store it behind my stomach where it froze my bile and rose into the back of my throat, choking me. When those times came, I would be afraid. But it was more than just being afraid. It was feeling the pure essence of fear, a tangible, cold and sour thing that existed beyond any context of being afraid. And I felt it now. I thought if he found me, he would kill me. This time, he would surely kill me. There was still enough thin light filtering down through the heavy pines and dripping on the ground for me to see legs walking across the dirt yard in front of the house. Two sets of the legs faced each other and I could hear angry voices, one of them John Three’s, one of them Polk’s. Other feet came across the yard and the noise went up a notch. I was glad there was noise out there to cover the noise I thought I was making, still shivering hard, my feet bumping the floor above me, a soft bass drumbeat in hollow blackness. When I felt the arms come around me my head snapped upward and I bumped the floor even harder, making a soft booming noise that rolled in my ears like a tired wave against a pier. I twisted to the side, trying to roll away, but the arms held me. It wasn’t hard to do. I couldn’t even have fought off the rat. The arms relaxed and fingers began to feel along my body, probing , testing for damage, running gently over the mud and the crusted scrapes. I mumbled something and a hand came up and covered my mouth, softly, not a gag but a signal for silence. The hands kept probing and then rubbing, and in another minute my body was being covered by a soft blanket and a warm sweet-smelling body 305 was on mine, under the blanket, holding me, pressing me into the dirt. The rubbing had spread the mud all over me but the mud felt warm now...