The Backwoods

(I)

Ricky felt high on drugs when he got back home, the tantalizing garbage thoughts filling his brain as effectively as any opiate. The girl had really gotten him tuned up. I love it when the bitches twitch like that, he thought, replaying the atrocity in his mind. And right there on the floor next to her dead daddy! Yeah, it was a great night, all right. He’d torched the place perfectly, too, afterward, and was all the way back in the woods before the fire started to really catch.

Ricky was a consummate sociopath.

Can’t wait to tell Junior, he thought. He was cutting through the woods all the way back home, so as not to be seen. This was something they needed to have a few beers over. And he couldn’t wait to tell him about the girl. . . .

Yeah, my little brother’ll be a mite jealous ‘bout that!

He could hear the sirens in the distance, which simply brought more satisfaction to his heart. It filled him up very happily, like a big, rich meal.

Night sounds pulsed around him. Eventually, the trees broke and he was suddenly standing in his backyard. He didn’t see any lights on in the house, though. Guess Junior went beddy-bye, he thought. Usually they both stayed up late, drinking and watching porn. It seemed a brotherly thing to do.

But Ricky was too keyed-up to go to bed himself. Couple beers and another chew, first, and maybe he’d also pop in his favorite porno, Natal Attraction. He crossed the backyard, stepping over moonlit junk, and went in through the back screen door.

At once, the inside of the house felt . . .

Weird, he thought.

Darkness hemmed him in, and when he closed the door behind him the silence felt cloying, like the faintest unpleasant smell in the air. He snapped on the kitchen light, yet felt no better. He couldn’t shake the feeling, and he didn’t even know what the feeling was. When he opened the refrigerator for a beer, he stalled, hand poised.

Ain’t that the fuckin’ shits.

The full case of brew he’d put in there this afternoon was untouched. Junior must be sick as a dog to not’ve knocked out ten or twelve bottles by now.

He grabbed one and closed the door, then walked slowly, brow furrowed, into the front room, switched on the light—

The bottle of beer shattered on the floor.

Ricky stared, gut churning.

Junior Caudill lay in the middle of the floor, eyes and mouth wide open, not breathing. His face could’ve been a pallid mask, gravity pushing the blood to the lowest surfaces of the body, leaving the flesh white as a turnip.

Ricky’s mourning escaped in a shrill gasp from his throat. He couldn’t say or even think anything about what he was looking at. Junior had obviously been dead for several hours, but that wasn’t why Ricky stared.

Junior’s pants looked several sizes too large; in fact, they hung so loosely they surely would’ve fallen down were he standing up.

When the shock snapped, Ricky yelled, “Junior!” and rushed to him, dropping to his knees. His hands floated in the air; he didn’t know what to do.

“Junior! What happened?”

In his mind he knew his brother was dead; it was obvious from the pallor. He felt the neck for a pulse, found nothing but cool fat. Then he straddled his brother to administer some inept CPR, like on TV, but he may as well have been straddling a bag of fertilizer.

“Junior . . .”

He climbed off then, numb, remaining on his knees.

Musta had a heart attack or somethin’ . . .

What else could it be?

He just looks so fuckin’ weird, he thought.

Indeed, the arms and legs still held their usual girth—Junior, like his brother, was a big man. Fat, in other words. The big, fat arms and legs looked normal, and so did the fat-covered chest and chubby face. So . . .

Why did Junior look so strange?

Ricky pushed his brother’s spotty T-shirt up over the blubbery, hairy chest and belly.

He shook his head in the utmost dismay.

There was no intricate way to put it. Junior’s once-proud and very prominent beer gut . . . was gone.

Had he been dieting? Fuck, no, Ricky knew. His brother had never been on a diet in his life. Diets were for sissies!

He remained there awhile, sorting his thoughts. He supposed he should call an ambulance, but that might not be the smartest thing to do right now. The local ambulances were at the Point, no doubt recovering the burned bodies of David Something-or-other and his little fox of a daughter. It would seem an odd coincidence. And an ambulance call might bring some police questioning with it. Guess I’ll have to wait, he reasoned, but there was still no reasoning this situation.

In time, Ricky straggled up. Damn it, Junior. Why’d ya have to die? Never even got the chance to tell you ’bout the hot job I did on them two crackers . . .

He went to the kitchen, grabbed another beer, then wandered open-eyed around the house. He didn’t turn the lights on; he needed it calm and dark, to help him think on what to do.

Musta been a heart attack. Couldn’t be nothin’ else. Hash ‘n’ eggs every morning of his life? Shit, I guess the one who needs ta go on a diet is me. . . .

He wandered around some more in the dark, then found himself in the living room. He didn’t know where he was going, what he was even doing. This was redneck mourning: shuffling around in your dark house with a beer in your hand and a thousand-yard stare. . . .

With his next step, something crinkled under his foot.

A glance down showed him a sheet of paper. The hell’s this? he wondered, and picked it up. He was about to turn the light on to look at it when—

Movement snagged the corner of his eye. He spun around, and—

His second beer of the night shattered, full, on the floor.

A thin figure stood staring at him from the hall that led to the bedrooms. It was so dark Ricky couldn’t see. Just a figure there, something barely more substantial than a shadow . . .

A burglar? It must be. But, boy, did he pick the wrong house to burgle! There was nothing to steal in this dump. This dumb-ass burglar’s about to get his ass killed, Ricky thought with some confidence.

Unless . . .

“Who the fuck’re you, scumbag?” Ricky challenged.

The figure looked grainy standing there in the dark. It said nothing.

“I’m gonna . . .” But Ricky stalled through a thought. It finally occurred to his not-so-spectacular brain that maybe this figure was the guy who killed Junior somehow.

The figure said this, in a low, grating voice like some slow, black liquid oozing up his throat:

“Your brother is in hell. . . .”

And the figure, in a split second, withdrew into the hall.

“I am gonna kill you so motherfuckin’ dead, you motherfucker!” Ricky bellowed out in his loudest sociopathic rage. His bulk tore down the hall, boots thudding. In the dim darkness he spotted an edge of the figure disappearing into Junior’s bedroom. A second later Ricky was there, eyes sweeping back and forth in the dark.

There was no one else in the room.

But the window stood open, framing moonlit darkness.

Then that utterly bizarre voice seemed to gush around his head in a mad circle:

“Your useless brother is now a fat whore for the devil’s minions, as you too will be, very soon. . . .”

Ricky stared in the dark. This time the voice had seemed to have no source. It came from everywhere, or nowhere.

He thrust his head out the window and saw the figure standing between some trees at the very end of the yard.

That is one fast motherfucker! How’d he get all the way out there so fast?

A cloud moved off; then a bar of moonlight fell ever so briefly across the figure’s face, and Ricky’s teeth ground, because he knew who it was. . . .

And then the figure’s voice returned one last time, not from the figure itself but again a mushlike gurgle churning around Ricky’s head as it bade its final promise before the figure disappeared.

The voice said this: “Curse thee.”

Running after him would be pointless. Ricky pulled back into the room, confused, sick, and enraged. But something tempered that rage—even sociopaths felt fear.

He took deep breaths in the dark bedroom. Now instead of the evil voice it was the sound of cicadas that flowed into the room, and it was then that Ricky realized he was still holding the piece of paper he’d found in the living room.

He turned on the light and looked at it.

A single word was scrawled on a sheet of white paper, in something like brown chalk: wenden.