Authors: Kealan Patrick Burke
Instantly, the voices fell quiet.
"What I should have done a long time ago," I told him, and plunged the knife into his stomach. Or rather, tried to. I had underestimated the amount of force necessary to drive the blade into him and managed only to penetrate a half inch or so of his flesh before he screamed and rolled off the couch, hit the floor, then quickly scrabbled to his feet. His eyes were glassy with terror.
"Gillian!" he cried
, wincing and doubled over slightly in pain. "What the fuck are you
doing?
" Hands covering the small hole I'd made in him, he backed away from me. "What's the
matter
with you?"
Confused and shocked, he did not move fast enough as I quickly stepped close and slashed the knife across his face, narrowly missing his eyes. He cried out again, a
deep vertical red line opening just beneath his eyelids and across the bridge of his nose. Stunned, he staggered backward, one hand now raised to probe the extent of the damage to his face. Blood ran freely down his cheeks, welled on the tip of his nose.
"You won't touch her ever again," I told him, and my voice sounded alien to my ears. Younger, perhaps, and angrier.
The old me, the wounded me. The victim.
He raised his ha
nds in surrender. "Gillian, honey...let me call someone. Let me get you some help. You're sick, but we can fix it."
I lunged forward, dodging his attempt to block me with a skill and agility of which I had not known myself capable, and thrust the knife into the meat of his right thigh
with such force that the blade bent a little. Chris howled in agony, stumbled, and fell gracelessly to the floor.
"Gillian, my God, look at what you're
doing
!
Please
, baby..."
The hardwood
was spattered with his blood. The right leg of his jeans had turned dark. The last wound had been a deep one, and with time, he might have bled out. But I was not willing to wait. Here before me, looking pathetic, afraid, and helpless, was a monster, crippled by defeat and the vengeance of an innocent. Felled by his own prey. No, I would not wait for him to die slowly, no matter how satisfying the thought.
"
Gillian...
" His face had become a monochrome portrait of horror and disbelief. I recognized that look. Had seen it in the mirror for most of my childhood. "Baby,
listen
to me...you have to stop. You don’t know what you’re doing."
“I know exactly what I’m doing.”
He dragged himself backward with his hands. Patiently, ever-so-slowly, I followed, here and there answering his pleas for mercy, for clarity, with the blade, and by the time I was done, he had made it into the kitchen before the strength to go any further abandoned him.
"Why...?" he managed to ask. Blood continued to spread around him in an ever-widening pool from the dozen or so puncture wounds on his chest, face, arms and legs. With his resistance minimized, I'd managed
—admittedly with great difficulty—to sever the tendon on the back of each foot, disabling him just in case the other wounds didn't. "Why did you do this to me? It was a mistake, that's all...that's
all
it was. A stupid mistake. Please, Gillian,
please
get help. I'm going to die." He began to sob.
"Yes you are," I told him, and knelt between his legs, felt his blood soak through my jeans.
It was warm and unpleasant, but I did not intend to have to endure it long. My hands were shaking violently, my head raging with myriad voices, as I undid the button on his jeans and unzipped him.
"Honey...no...
Jesus..." he whined, every word punctuated by a sob. Feebly he tried to resist me, but he was in too much pain, had lost too much blood. He looked like the ghost I intended to make of him.
“Hush now,” I whispered. “Someone will hear.”
He tried to pull away from me as I grabbed his cock and put the edge of the blade beneath his testicles.
I imagine
d it impossible that no one heard the resulting scream. But such things were beyond my concern. Only the presence of my children at the door would have prevented me from finishing. At such a young age, they, or Sam at least, should be spared seeing such brutality, no matter how justified and necessary. It might warp them.
When it was done
, I left Chris unconscious, fetched some string from the utility drawer and one of the deluxe freezer bags I kept for storing meat from the cabinet over the refrigerator.
It's over now
, I thought, with something akin to relief and excitement, as I went to the monster's stricken body, got to my knees, and raised his head just enough to slip the freezer bag over it. Then I looped the string around his neck, cinching tight the edges of the plastic.
Then I stood and studied him.
His breath, slow and uneven, clouded the interior of the bag.
But only for a little while.
TWENTY-ONE
I dream
, but I am not asleep.
Instead, life has become the dream.
I am there again, on the hill overlooking Mayberry. At my back are the crosses, driven like stakes through mounds of earth, three of which cover people I have known and lost. Perhaps Chris should be here, but he is in his own place, feeding the walnut tree at the end of our yard from which Sam's tire swing hangs forgotten. Sooner or later I suspect his absence will be noted—already some woman named Clare from the bank has been calling the house—but for now at least, we are safe.
The children do not yet know Chris is gone, only that he is away. In time, it won't matter. They will deal with it with the same resiliency all children employ when they are forced to accept an unkind reality.
I have not yet seen the expected relief on Jenny's face, and to date (four days since I killed her tormentor), she insists that there was never anything awry in the relationship between her and her father. But this, I suspect, is the natural fear of reprisal should he ever return and discover that she has shared their dark secret. Eventually, she will confess, and I will be there to listen.
After I told Sam what my little brother and I used to do here, he immediately wanted to try the game for himself, and so I watch as he tumbles down the hill on a wave of laughter. It warms my heart to see it.
My little Jack.
Jenny, of course, considers herself too mature for such things. She stands up there at the top of the hill watching Sam, just as on that last day, I watched John, my thoughts occupied with ways to help him escape the nightmare. I wonder what it is my daughter's thinking now.
Is she pondering the benefits of her father's absence, or replaying the horrors he forced her to endure? The sun is sinking in the sky behind her, throwing the shadow of a lopsided cross down the hill toward where Sam is only now coming to rest, spreadeagled on the grass.
"That was awesome!" he cries.
I wish only the best for him, a good life free of the kind of terrors that infected Jenny's, and mine. And nightly I pray that he will never become the monster, for the corrupt elements are extant in all young men. I'll watch, and I will guide him, and I will protect them both. And should the day ever come in which it becomes necessary to save either one or both of them, then I will do that too.
It is my duty as a mother.
As for me, I sit at the foot of the hill on the low wall across from the school with its dark windows, reading the
Mayberry Times
newspaper. It is filled with accounts of the mundane: break-ins, altercations, traffic violations, political treachery, but nothing that bears further study. And this is good. Because I know, as every mother should, that there are still monsters here, as there are everywhere, but for now at least, they are quiet.
* * *
WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT FROM
THE WITCH
, A NEW NOVELLA FROM KEALAN PATRICK BURKE, NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON.COM
On the night he came upon the witch, Bryce Carrigan was patrolling alone, and drinking a bottle of Buckwheat Prime Beer, a local brew that tasted like someone had wrung their dirty socks into a dish full of rainwater, but sure got your head spinning. It was also cheap, and with the ever-present threat of unemployment looming like a goddamn thundercloud over his head (already their "police force" had been reduced from five men to two—three, if you included the dispatcher, Sheila Graham, who might as well have been a man—in the past year), not to mention a baby on the way, that made it the beer of choice. Besides, after you'd had the first one, the taste got a little better, but then he assumed that was true of most vile things.
It was a pleasant night, cooler than it had been in some time, and Bryce drove the back roads with the radio low and the window down, allowing the breeze to flow into the car. His stomach was a little shaky, a feeling he blamed squarely on the greasy burritos he'd wolfed down at Iris's place. The woman could fuck like a champion but damned if the food hadn't tasted like two sheets of rolled up newspaper painted with an egg yolk. Still, he hadn't complained. Being with child, his wife wasn't all that eager to let him have a poke, was downright against it to tell the truth, so he didn't see the harm in going elsewhere to get his lay as long as it didn't become a habit. And like the beer, the whore was cheap too. He liked that. Liked it even more that she wasn't judgmental.
Eyes half-closed, he was reflecting on Iris's pale, willowy body looming over him as he ran his hands down her over her small breasts, the slight, soft intake of breath when she came (or pretended to, for all he knew), when it registered that there was something in the road ahead. He frowned, eased his foot off the gas and squinted for a moment, knowing what he was looking for out there in the night and hoping like hell he wouldn't find it.
"Fuck."
It was, at is so often was in this goddamn town, a wrecked car.
Quickly tossing the beer bottle out the window and into the tall grass at the side of the road, he brought the patrol car to a halt. The unoiled brakes squealed in protest. For a moment he just sat there trying to talk himself out of the buzz, then he popped the glove box and rummaged around until he found a pack of gum with a stick still left inside the crumpled package. He sighed through his nose and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he chewed. He was in no hurry. He could see how damaged the car was and it looked bad enough that he doubted he was going to find anything other than a mangled corpse inside the steaming wreck.
Eight
, he thought, with a slow shake of his head.
This one makes eight so far this year, and it's not even winter
. That was when the snow and ice came, the nights got longer, and the number of accidents doubled, though it was hard to call them accidents when nothing appeared to have caused them.
Deer, mostly
, was Sheriff Dale Underwood's opinion.
They like that patch of road
. And though Bryce never contradicted his boss, he had also never seen a deer that could cause the kind of damage that was done to these cars. But Dale's theory was better than his own, because it didn't involve the supernatural, so it made him feel better to go along with it. Otherwise, he'd have to start thinking about invisible barriers around the town that chose who got in and who got out, and that made no sense at all. So if the front of those wrecks made it seem as if they'd run right into a brick wall at sixty miles an hour, well, then it was probably just one hell of a big deer, like Dale said.
He snatched up the radio. "Dispatch, this is Bryce. Sheila, you there?"
"Where else would I be?" she droned back.
I don't know. Getting hormone injections
? "We have a wreck out here on the north side of town."
"Well, fuck me and good for you! The usual place?"
"Right on the border, yeah."
"Bodies?"
"Haven't checked yet, but it's bad enough. I'll get back to you once I've had a look. Might as well call Dan Haldeman and get the tow truck out here. Damn wreck's right in the middle of the road."
"Anything else?"
"Not for the minute." He hung the radio back on the cradle.
Grabbing a flashlight from beneath the passenger seat, he paused to make sure his gun was in his holster. Frequently he forgot the damn thing at the station, despite Dale chastising him about it more times than he could count. On those occasions, Bryce had to resist the urge to remind his boss than in the four years he'd been a deputy, he'd only had cause to discharge the weapon three times outside of the shooting range, and not once had the gun been pointed at anything bigger than a coyote. Guns made him uncomfortable, which was why he'd sought out the job of a deputy in a town so quiet it seemed unlikely he'd ever need to use one.