A DISCUSSION OF LIFE AND WHAT COMES AFTER. THE UNIVERSAL QUESTION IS; WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE BODY? LET'S EXPLORE THE RAMIFICATION OF LETTING YOUR NEIGHBOR'S DOG RUN LOOSE IN YOUR FLOWER BED.
Gerhard stood beside the grassy cliff with his last cigarette pinched between fingers that would not quite hold still. Exhaustion had hollowed his face beneath the stubble. His eyes burned. Every time he blinked, the lids wanted to stay shut.
He drew the smoke deep, held it until his chest hurt, then let it escape from the corner of his mouth. When the ember reached the paper near his fingers, he crushed it against a stone and tucked the butt into his jacket pocket. No cigarette ends on the post. No evidence for some clean-shaven bastard with a notebook to find.
The morning sun warmed the back of his neck without doing a damned thing for the cold inside his coat. He had been staring into the darkness over the water since one o’clock. Now, with eight approaching, the sea lay exposed beneath a pale sky, blue-gray and restless. Waves broke against the beach below, fell back through the shingle, and came again. Salt filled his nostrils. Somewhere behind him, a loose piece of sheet metal knocked against concrete whenever the wind shifted.
He scanned the sector the way they had drilled it into him until it became automatic. Left flank first—the dark smear of the next bunker, the wire that ran down to the high-water mark, the open ground that any landing party would have to cross under fire. Then the beach itself. Then the waterline. Then the empty horizon. He did it again. And again. The rifle stayed light on his shoulder only because he no longer felt the weight of anything except the ache behind his eyes.
Two men worked along the beach, fifty yards apart. Their heads were down, their eyes searching the wet sand for disturbed ground, washed-up debris, anything that had not been there on the previous round. One stopped beside a dark object near the tide line. Gerhard lifted his rifle from the parapet and watched.
The man prodded it with his boot. A length of seaweed rolled over. He moved on.
Gerhard lowered the Mauser. His shoulder ached where the sling had rubbed through the skin. He shifted the weapon, felt the raw stripe pull, and settled it again. The pain was useful. It kept him awake.
A flock of gulls passed north over the water, wings scarcely moving. He followed them until they dwindled against the sky. He envied their freedom. Nothing stopped them at a railway platform. Nobody demanded papers or asked why they were leaving.
He thought of his wife and children. Were they up yet? Had the boys eaten? Was there anything left for breakfast besides bread shaved thin enough to see through? His older son used to complain about the crust. Gerhard wondered whether he still did.
It had been more than two weeks since the last letter. He had read it until the creases softened and one corner tore away. His wife had written that the baby was healthy. A daughter. Dark hair, a loud cry, and two brothers who argued over who would hold her first.
He had never laid eyes on her.
He pressed his fingers against the breast pocket beneath his coat. The letter was there, inside an envelope he had wrapped in a scrap of waxed paper. He could picture his wife at the kitchen table, bending over the page after the children were asleep. The single lamp. The cold floor. The way her handwriting grew smaller when she was tired. He could not picture the baby’s face. That was the part that worked at him when the guns were quiet.
Given leave, working trains, and a little luck, he might reach home in thirty-six hours. He had counted the connections so often that the station names came to him more readily than the words of the prayers his mother had taught him.
But there was no leave.
There was work, guard duty, and another order to make the defenses stronger. More wire. More concrete. More holes in the ground. He was tired of carrying things until his arms shook, tired of food that tasted of scorched cabbage and old grease, tired of thirty men breathing and coughing in quarters where the roaches came out as soon as the light went off. He had forgotten what it felt like to sleep without somebody’s boots inches from his face.
Sunday had taken eighteen hours out of him. Four and a half hours of broken sleep followed, then a hand on his shoulder and a voice telling him to get up. Back on watch at one. Still here at nearly eight. The hours had stopped meaning anything except the next order and the next stretch of concrete under his boots.
He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. For a moment, the beach tilted.
He caught the parapet and stood very still until it settled. The rifle stayed locked against his side. He forced his breathing slow and even, the way they taught men to do when the body started to fail the mind.
Tomorrow night, he told himself. Finish the watch. Wait until the men coming off duty had gone below. Slip through the rear service entrance before dawn on Wednesday and start east.
The plan had come to him in pieces over several sleepless nights. Now it occupied every spare corner of his mind. He knew how easily it could fall apart. A sentry might ask one question too many. A patrol might stop him before he reached the first village. His papers would tell them where he belonged. The wrong answer at the wrong checkpoint and the whole thing would end against a wall with a cigarette still unlit in his pocket.
If they caught him, they could put him against a wall. He had seen the notices. He had seen men reading them in silence, pretending the names meant nothing. He had watched one of those men later, standing very straight while the officer read the sentence, and then the man was gone and the wall was just a wall again.
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His stomach tightened. He swallowed and looked toward the inland road. The road was empty. It always was at this hour. That emptiness was the only thing that made the plan feel possible.
He had to see his family.
Boots sounded behind him, striking the concrete walkway in a tired, uneven rhythm. Gerhard straightened and brought his rifle against his side. Twelve men came around the bend, their equipment knocking against buckles and belt hooks. The corporal at their head looked him over without breaking stride.
“Anything?”
“Nothing to report.”
The corporal glanced toward the beach, then motioned the detail onward. One man stepped out beside Gerhard. The other eleven continued downhill toward the lower positions, their footsteps fading beneath the surf.
“Good morning, Gerhard.”
Gerhard nodded. “Günter.”
His friend set his rifle against the concrete long enough to tighten the strap on his helmet. He studied Gerhard’s face, then rested a hand on his shoulder.
“You seem exhausted.”
“I am.”
“You look worse than yesterday.”
“Then stop looking.”
Günter gave a short laugh, but his hand stayed on Gerhard’s shoulder. “Have you eaten?”
Gerhard shook his head.
“Go get something to eat. Then rest. I’ve got this.”
Gerhard pushed away from the parapet. His knees resisted the movement. For a second, he had to lean on the rifle.
“Easy,” Günter said.
“I’m standing.”
“That’s a generous description.”
Gerhard managed a weak smile. “Okay. By the way, do you have a cigarette?”
Günter searched one pocket, then another, and produced a crushed packet. He eased out a bent cigarette and tried to straighten it between his fingers.
“Best I can do, my friend.”
“It’ll burn.”
Gerhard took it carefully. He dared not tell Günter what he intended. His friend might try to stop him. Worse, he might understand. Then, when the questions started, Günter would have something to hide. Friendship was a liability once the field police started asking names.
“Thank you, Günter. You have been a good friend.”
Günter’s smile faded a little. “‘Have been’?” He tipped his head. “Are you going somewhere, Gerhard?”
Gerhard felt the blood rise beneath his collar.
“No. No. Just saying.”
Günter watched him for another moment. Down on the beach, one of the patrolmen called to the other. Both men turned toward the sound.
“Get some sleep,” Günter said at last. “You’re talking like a man who needs it.”
Gerhard nodded. His match snapped on the first strike. The second caught. He cupped the small flame against the wind and drew until the cigarette glowed.
Günter hoisted his Mauser onto his shoulder and faced the water. Gerhard started along the walkway, boots scraping where he could no longer lift his feet cleanly. At the bend, he looked back. His friend stood where he had stood all night, coat pulling against his legs, watching the empty sea.
“Gerhard?”
He stopped.
Günter turned sideways, squinting into the morning light. “What’s today’s date?”
Gerhard had to think. The shifts had run together. So had the days. He counted backward through the long Sunday, the short sleep, the hand shaking him awake.
“June fifth,” he said. “June 5, 1944.”
Günter grunted, as if the answer confirmed something he already knew, and turned back to the water. Gerhard waited a beat longer, then continued down the walkway. The concrete was cracked in places where frost and shell concussion had worked at it over the months. He placed his boots carefully, counting the steps the way a man counts ammunition when the belt is nearly empty. Each step took him farther from the cliff and closer to the only decision that still belonged to him.
At the rear service entrance he paused. Two sentries stood under the overhang, sharing a cigarette between them, their rifles leaned against the sandbags. One of them looked up, eyes narrowing against the sudden light from outside.
“You’re early off the cliff,” the man said.
“Günter relieved me.”
The sentry nodded and waved him through. The second man did not look up from the cigarette. Gerhard stepped into the relative dark of the corridor. The air changed at once—damp concrete, unwashed bodies, the faint metallic tang of gun oil and the sour smell of men who had not washed in days. He moved past the first set of bunks without looking at the faces. Most of the men were still sleeping or pretending to. Someone snored with a wet, broken rhythm. Someone else muttered a name in a dream. Boots and packs lay in the narrow aisle where men had dropped them without the energy to stack them properly.
He found his own narrow space, sat on the edge of the straw-filled mattress, and unfastened the rifle sling. The leather had left a raw stripe across his shoulder. He set the Mauser carefully against the wall, barrel up, the way they had been taught, then leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. The cigarette was already half gone. He smoked the rest of it in silence, staring at the concrete floor between his boots.
The letter pressed against his chest. He did not take it out. He knew every word. He could recite the station sequence in his sleep: the local train to the junction, the long wait on the platform with the smell of coal and wet wool, the express that would carry him east if the tracks were still open. Thirty-six hours if nothing went wrong. A lifetime if something did. He had mapped the checkpoints in his head, the places where papers were checked hard and the places where a tired corporal might wave a man through if the man looked like he belonged.
He closed his eyes. The beach tilted again behind the lids. Waves, shingle, the gulls disappearing north. The baby’s face he could not invent. The wall they would stand him against if the plan failed. He opened his eyes again and forced the images back into the dark.
A voice from the next bunk: “You look like death, Gerhard.”
He turned his head. The man was sitting up, rubbing sleep from his face with both hands. Keller. Young, still believing the war might end in something other than dirt.
“I’ve been on the cliff,” Gerhard said.
“Anything out there?”
“Water. Gulls. Two men walking the tide line.”
Keller nodded as if that were useful intelligence. “They say the weather’s turning. Storm coming in from the west. ”
Gerhard said nothing. He had heard the same talk before. Weather was always coming. Storms always threatened. The sea remained empty.
Keller swung his legs over the side of the bunk and reached for his boots. “You should eat something. There’s still some of that cabbage left if you can stand it.”
“Later.”
Keller shrugged and began lacing his boots. Gerhard lay back carefully, boots still on, and folded his hands across his chest. The letter crackled once under the pressure of his palm. He kept his eyes open a little longer, listening to the sounds of the billet, the low coughs, the scrape of metal on concrete, the distant knock of the sheet metal outside whenever the wind shifted.
Tomorrow night, he thought. The rear entrance. East. He would leave the rifle. He would take the letter. He would walk until the first train and look like a soldier who belonged wherever the train was going.
Outside, the sheet metal continued its irregular knocking against the concrete. The sea kept working the shingle. Somewhere far inland, trains still ran on tracks that might or might not be open by Wednesday. He did not pray. He simply held the date in his mind the way a man holds a last match in a high wind.
June 5, 1944.
He closed his eyes again and waited for the few hours of sleep that might still be left to him before the next hand shook his shoulder and the next voice told him to get up. The cold inside his coat did not leave. It never did.
Gerhard slept, if it could be called sleep, with one hand resting on the letter and the other curled loosely around the imaginary shape of a ticket he did not yet have.
He dreamed of his wife, and his children, as his mind faded towards sleep, and dreams of tomorrow.
THE END
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This is a work of fiction. Names, character, places, and incidents or products of the author’s, imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual person, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Please repost with full attribution to the author and copyright holder.”
I wanted out, and the Organization had offered me a way. Free and clear, without waking up some night to a hand over my mouth and a 22-caliber bullet drilled into my skull.
One more job. That was the deal. Do it, collect forty thousand dollars, and disappear. "You've earned it," my handler had told me.
I should have paid more attention to that. In all the years I had known him, he had never once said anybody had earned a goddamn thing.
But I had come up through the ranks. I had settled debts, removed problems, and kept my mouth shut. Somewhere along the way, I had started believing that counted for something. Maybe this one would be easy. South America sounded good. So did Malaysia. Vietnam had possibilities. Somewhere warm, where nobody knew my face and a few well-placed Benjamins might make an inconvenient question go away. I had money already. What I needed was permission to spend it without looking over my shoulder.
I was waiting on Paros, in a rented room above a private garage, for word about the Delivery Boy. That was what they called him in the trade. He worked as a freelance contractor, moving anything valuable enough to need an armed escort and dirty enough to stay off a manifest.
Sometimes the cargo was money. Sometimes it was a person. The distinction never seemed to bother him. He was my target, and he was a professional. I had mulled that over before taking the assignment. The Delivery Boy was good. I had a hunch I was better.
In a couple more hours, I intended to be free. I sat on the balcony with a glass of fizzy water and a twist of lime. Below me, the coastline bent away into a haze of pale stone and dark water. From my chair, I could watch the two-lane road wind in from the east. That was where he would appear.
The phone vibrated against the glass patio table and began a rattling walk toward the edge. 1 caught it with two fingers. The number was familiar. With the tip of my tongue, I shifted the slim cigarette to the corner of my mouth.
"Εμπρός?"
"Black Jaguar. Convertible. He's on the coast road."
I stood, leaving the drink untouched. "Alone?"
"You'll have everything you need."
"That wasn't what I asked."
A brief silence. Wind scraped across the microphone at his end. "Finish the job." "Okay." The connection died before I lowered the phone.
A slight smile almost cracked my lips. Almost! They were nervous. I liked that. Let them worry about something for a change.
I dropped the cigarette and crushed it beneath the heel of a twenty-three-hundred-dollar alligator loafer. Back in the apartment, I took my black leather jacket off the bed and went downstairs. The BMW M3 waited in the garage, clean enough to eat off. I fitted myself behind the wheel, pulled on my Bottega Veneta driving gloves, and pressed the starter. The engine filled the concrete room with a low, impatient growl.
Another touch opened the garage door. I drove into the last of the sunlight.
Beyond the village, the road tightened against the cliffs. Low limestone walls flashed past the windows, their cracks stuffed with weeds and trailing flowers. Wind off the water carried salt and the dry, resinous smell of scrub. I let the tires warm before pushing harder into the bends.
It was beautiful country. I had worked in worse places. A few kilometers out, I backed into a shallow turnout screened by stunted cedars. The BMW's nose faced the road. Through a break in the branches, I could see the upper curve and the descending stretch beyond it.
I switched off the engine. For a moment, all I heard was the ticking exhaust and water breaking against the rocks below. Then a goat bell sounded somewhere inland, thin and irregular in the gathering dark.
I took out my silver cigarette case, opened it with one hand, and selected a Treasurer Aluminum Gold. Expensive habits were supposed to be a weakness. I considered them compensation. "Come on," I murmured, tapping the cigarette against the case.
My gold lighter caught on the second stroke. The first drag was always the best. I settled into the leather seat and watched the empty road through the smoke.
The Delivery Boy had a reputation for being careful. He also had a weakness for old cars and fast driving. That was in the briefing. So was the instruction that nothing in his possession was to reach its destination.
I had asked whether they wanted anything brought back. "Just confirmation," my handler had said.
I remembered that now, sitting under the cedars. Nothing to retrieve. Nothing to negotiate.
An engine note rose above the surf. I lowered the cigarette.
Headlights swept the upper wall. The Jaguar came through the curve with its top down, black paint catching a last dull reflection of the sky. An old XKE. Long hood, low windshield, one man behind the wheel. I watched it pass the turnout. Then I dropped the cigarette, started the BMW, and pulled out behind him. Gravel struck the underside of the car. The rear tires found pavement, and the M3 surged forward.
The Jaguar's driver noticed me before I had closed half the distance. His head shifted toward the mirror. A moment later, his brake lights flashed and he turned sharply onto the lower coast road. I followed.
He accelerated out of the turn. I could hear the Jaguar working now, the exhaust snapping against the rock face. He crossed the centerline to straighten the next bend. I stayed with him. "That's right," I said. "Keep it moving."
My headlights climbed into his mirrors. He ducked his head, one hand leaving the wheel and reaching behind his seat. I brought the machine pistol up from beside my thigh.
The road opened briefly. I drew alongside his rear quarter, felt the BMW lean as its outside tires approached the ragged shoulder, and fired through my open window. The noise inside the car struck like a hammer. Brass bounced against the console. The Jaguar's side glass burst, and its driver folded away from me. I let off the trigger and hauled the BMW back from the shoulder.
The Jaguar swerved across the road. Its front wheel struck a stone at the verge with a crack I heard over both engines. The car lurched, slewed sideways, and spun through a cloud of pale dust.
I stamped on the brake. The BMW shuddered under me. The seat belt cut into my chest. Ahead, the Jaguar came to rest facing back toward me, its rear end close to the low wall above the water. The Delivery Boy was still moving.
He dragged a compact weapon across his chest. I saw the muzzle rise above the broken door glass. A flash. Something punched through my windshield. Another strike tore the passenger headrest open. I ducked, felt the wheel pull against my left hand, and fired again.
The Jaguar's windshield whitened and broke. The man behind it jerked backward. His gun disappeared below the door. I released the trigger. For a second, I could hear nothing but a high whine inside my skull.
The BMW stopped a few feet short of his front bumper. Dust rolled through the headlights. A loose strip of windshield trim tapped against my dashboard.
I sat still, breathing through my mouth, waiting for the shape in the Jaguar to move. It didn't. "Forty thousand," I said. My voice sounded far away. "And you almost cost me a head."
I got out with the machine pistol held low. Broken glass crunched beneath my loafers. The Jaguar's engine had stalled. Steam escaped under the hood, and the front tire sat crooked against the fender. It would move, maybe. How far was another question.
The driver lay against the seat, chin down, his shirt black across the chest. His gun rested in the footwell. I moved it beyond his reach and glanced at the empty road behind us. No headlights.
No voices. Somewhere below, a wave struck the cliff with a deep, hollow report.
A leather courier's satchel had slid against the passenger door. A narrow envelope protruded from its outer pocket. I could see the edge of a photograph inside.
"Nice Jag," I said.
"Expensive to work on."
I reached across him. His hand clamped around my wrist.
It was mine.
I jerked back and brought the muzzle up under his jaw. His eyes opened. Blood glistened on his lower lip.
"Easy," he said.
"Let go."
His fingers loosened, but his eyes stayed on mine. He wasn't looking at the gun. That bothered me more than the grip.
"How much are they paying you?"
I said nothing.
He swallowed, winced, and tried again. "How much?"
"Enough."
He coughed into his chest. Blood ran down his chin and dripped onto my glove.
"Did they say one more job?"
I stopped pulling away. His mouth twisted. It might have been a smile. "One more, and you get to go live a regular life?"
I pressed the muzzle a little harder beneath his jaw. "Who told you that?"
"Same bastard who told you."
The wind lifted the corner of the envelope. My face stared up from it, taken somewhere I had thought I was alone.
"Your last job," he whispered. "Freedom from the rackets. No more killings."
"That's right."
"Twenty thousand? Thirty?" He dragged in a shallow breath. "Forty?"
"Forty."
His eyelids fluttered. "Cheap sons of bitches."
I glanced at the satchel. "What's in the bag?"
"My retirement."
"Try again."
He moved his hand toward his chest. I caught it before it reached his jacket. He looked down at my grip, then back at me. "I was supposed to make this run," he said, "and kill you before I left the island. Your picture. Your car. The place you're staying. All in that envelope."
I pulled the envelope free. Beneath the photograph was the address of my rented room. For a few seconds, I stood there reading it while his blood dried on my glove.
"They told me you'd been sent to stop the delivery," he said. "Said you'd gone into business for yourself." "And you believed them?"
He looked at the gun in my hand. "You came, didn't you?
I had nothing to say to that. He coughed again, a deep, wet convulsion that brought his shoulders off the seat. When he fell back, his breathing had changed. Shorter now. Each breath took work.
"Nobody leaves the Organization," he said. "No one."
I looked toward the road. The darkness beyond our headlights seemed crowded all of a sudden. "Who else is coming?"
"Don't know."
"Don't know that, either."
"How long?"
I caught his collar. "Then give me something I can use."
Pain tightened his face. He looked at my hand until I let go.
"There are twenty-five million dollars in bearer bonds in that satchel."
I looked down at the leather bag. Scuffed corners. Brass buckles. It could have belonged to a traveling salesman. "Bullshit."
"Open it."
I shifted toward the passenger side. His fingers caught my sleeve. "Or stand here counting while somebody comes around that bend."
I looked back up the road. "How do I get out?" I asked.
His gaze moved past me to the BMW. The torn windshield. The open door. My jacket hanging against the seat. "Give them what they expect to find."
"Me?"
"Enough of you to buy a little time."
He tried to lift his head. I leaned closer to hear him over the water. He talked in broken pieces, stopping to breathe. A dead man in my car. My belongings beside him. Confusion before certainty. A few hours, if I was lucky.
"You'll need to leave tonight," he said. "Before they start asking better questions."
"Why help me?"
He turned his face toward me. For the first time, something harder than pain showed in his eyes. "Wouldn't you like to cost them twenty-five million?"
That made sense to me. It made enough sense that I stopped looking for anything underneath
His hand slipped off my sleeve. He coughed once more and folded forward against the wheel. I waited. Then I touched his neck.
Nothing.
Getting him into the BMW was ugly work. He was heavier than he looked, and blood made everything slippery. By the time I had him slumped in the rear footwell, my shirt clung to my back and one of those expensive loafers had split along the seam.
I left my black leather jacket beside him. My Organization credentials went into his wallet. I knew none of it would survive serious examination. But serious examination took time, and I had begun to think in hours instead of years.
By the time I left the bend, the BMW was burning. I carried the satchel to the Jaguar, brushed glass from the seat, and wiped the worst of the blood off the steering wheel. The engine resisted, caught, and settled into a rough idle.
"One more trip," I told it.
The damaged front wheel pulled to the left. I kept the speed down and headed uphill. In the mirror, flames climbed through the BMW's broken windows.
At the crest, I looked back once.
An orange glow pulsed below the road. Smoke drifted across the cedars and disappeared into the dark. I was dead, and I had got away with the money. Two for two. I smiled and reached for a cigarette. My hand shook badly enough that I put it back on the wheel.
The room was a risk. I knew that. The address was in his envelope, and the man who had sent him knew it too. But my passport and travel cash were upstairs. So were clean clothes. I needed ten minutes and I convinced myself I had them.
The Jaguar limped into the garage with something grinding inside the left front wheel. I killed the engine and sat listening.
No footsteps overhead. No car outside. Only the hot metal ticking and my own breathing. I took the satchel upstairs. The room looked exactly as I had left it. Fizzy water on the balcony table. Lime floating against the glass. A crushed cigarette beneath the balcony chair.
I locked the door, put my passport and cash on the bed, and stripped off the bloody clothes. The shower should have been quick. It wasn't. Once the hot water hit my shoulders, I stood under it, watching pink water circle the drain. My neck loosened. The shaking stopped. I had money. I had a passport. By morning, this island could belong to somebody else.
I dried off and slipped into the full-length terrycloth robe hanging behind the door. The satchel lay across the satin bedspread where I had left it.
Twenty-five million dollars. I sat on the edge of the bed and finally lit that cigarette. The first drag was almost enough to make me laugh. The Delivery Boy had been wrong about one thing. Somebody did leave the Organization.
I drew the satchel toward me. The outer pocket still held the envelope. I took out my photograph, looked at it, and laid it facedown beside the passport. "Forty grand," I said. "Cheap sons of bitches."
I unfastened the buckles and opened the bag. Inside was a thick bundle wrapped in heavy paper. There was no bank name on it. No printed value. Just a rubber band and a crease worn smooth across the top.
I closed my fingers around the bundle and pulled. Something resisted. Then a small metallic click came from inside the satchel. I stopped breathing.
For one clear instant, I saw the Delivery Boy looking at the gun beneath his jaw. I heard him telling me to open the bag on the road. Heard myself asking why he would help me. His answer came back whole. Wouldn't you like to cost them twenty-five million?
I let go.
The windows blew outward before the cigarette reached the floor. The blast tore the bed apart and punched burning debris across the room. Part of the balcony collapsed into the street below. Glass rained over the parked cars, and a rolling cloud of black smoke spread above the waterfront.
Down in the garage, the Jaguar stood cooling in the dark. The Delivery Boy's blood was still wet on the seat.
THE END
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Newt Livesay, Writer and Author in English & Spanish. Language, Stories, and Quotes from the Feral Mind of Newt Livesay, Author & Writer.
METH ~ CRANK and Rotten Teeth
“Piggin and Wiggin’ Out” Combination Convenience Store, Rib Joint, and Asian Fingernail Parlor.
A SHORT STORY FROM NEWT LIVESAY
"SHE’S A FLOATER"
Okay, you stop in the “Piggin and Wiggin’ Out” Combination Convenience Store, Rib Joint, and Asian Fingernail Parlor to pick up a thirty-six-can suitcase of Lite Beer. While there, you strike up a conversation with this smoking-hot, dishwater-bleached blonde and former truck-stop lot-lizard queen who works behind the counter. Your libido jumps when you notice that she doesn’t have any grease burns on her forearms from cooking all that gas-station sushi, corn dogs, and chicken tenders.
She smiles, and you catch the acidic aroma of acetone-induced “crack fumes” that still linger around your dog-pecker-gnat-infested beard. Instantly, your stud-muffin syndrome kicks in, precipitated by the two bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 and the three small crack rocks you inhaled before leaving the house. During her fifteen-minute personal break, you make plans to meet her out behind the convenience store later in the day and fire off a bong.
Heading for your 1983 Toyota Hilux pickup, you flop down in the front seat, squirming slightly to remove the pointed end of a chopstick that had impaled itself in your right butt cheek. The chopstick came with the carryout teriyaki chicken you had for supper two nights ago. You kick it and all the other trash that has collected in the floorboard before gently moving a squashed Little Debbie’s Creme Cake off the center console into the passenger-side seat of the car.
Then you see it. Something lying on the sticky, beer-stained center console catches your eye. It’s half of a small white pill, and a big smile comes across your face when you realize it is one-third of a 10 mg hydrocodone. After pulling a couple of unknown hairs off the surface of the pill, you lay it on the chromed lid of the ashtray. Using the metal edge of your Skoal tobacco can, you pulverize the pill into a fairly fine consistency and bend close as your nose makes a snorting sound like a Hoover vacuum cleaner plugged with a giant hairball. Moistening your finger, you wipe the residue off the lid and rub it under your tongue. The rush blurs your eyes, and everything looks like you’re seeing it through a soda straw, so you suck down a can of warm beer to clear your vision and to get the bitter taste out of your mouth. Most of the beer makes it down your throat.
With your head nearly clear, the only sound you hear is something like a fruit jar with cicadas buzzing inside. You can see all ten of your fingers, so you decide to head out on the two-lane blacktop toward the house.
Ya suck down three or four more warm beers while driving and begin fighting the bar ditches as you drive back to your double-wide house trailer. Your mind is running a hundred miles an hour, and all you think about is taking some hits with the blonde at the store later in the day. You sink lower into the seat, one eyelid shut, and begin to drool. That is when it hits you, and damn, you come fully awake. You realize your old lady is living at the double-wide, and she doesn’t take kindly to you hanging out with other old hides. You need to get her out of your hair since she is cramping your style. Suddenly, a voice whispers inside your pea-vine head.
Now, how do you hide a five-foot-two-inch fat girl who tips the scales at two hundred and sixty pounds? Your mind is racing while it bounces off the sides of your cranium. All the time, in the background, a film is running of the skinny blonde with a pocket full of rocks and the keys to the Brown Derby depository.
So the question is, “How do you get rid of the little fat girl at home?” You know if you shoot her, there will be “stuff” everywhere, and after watching one hundred and eleven hours of CSI Miami and over three hundred hours of COPS, you know all about good “stuff.” You just need her to disappear and not come back, and that is when it comes to you: you’ll take her fishing. She likes to fish, and she won’t think anything of you coming home with a bucket of stink bait and wanting to go a-fishin’. You tell everyone that she left a note saying she was going to see her sister down in Little Rock, and no one will know the difference. All you need to “figure out” is how to sink her and keep her down until nature does its work.
Keeping a body down depends upon several factors, beginning with, but not limited to, water temperature. Is the water moving, such as in a river or a stream? Is the water still, such as would be found in a pond or lake? Is it shallow, like in a slough or the slow-moving backwaters off a naturally meandering stream? Is the water warm or cold? Is the water fresh, such as in a river, or saline or brackish, such as in ocean inlets, etc.? Water that is sufficiently warm will cause a body to decompose and float much quicker than cold water, which may prevent decomposition in a corpse and keep the body from floating.
How do you get her in the water? You hit her on the head and dump her overboard. No! If you do that, there will be a big bump on her head. Remember episode number … ah … something or other where the CSI determined that the guy was killed and thrown in the lake?
Hell, she can’t swim, so why not just throw her out of the boat into the water? You row off, and she thrashes around like a wounded whale and then sinks once she takes in a good lungful of water. She will begin to rot away at the moment of death. The correct term is “decompose.” The decay of the flesh will generate gases that will be trapped in her body, causing it to float. Seeing how a body is normally heavier than the water, she should get a good lungful of swamp water and sink like a rock. Even if she does sink, after a few days in the warm water, the decomposition will generate enough gas to float her to the top. You’ll have to come back down to the swamp and find her floating corpse and shoot her with your twenty-two rifle a few times, and she might just up and explode like a bloated cow when stuck with a sharp stick and sink.
Then again, maybe when she comes to the surface, the birds, some bugs, snapping turtles, alligators, or some other scavengers will be a-eatin’ on her. Once the critters chew a hole in her, it will cause the bloating body to lose the gases (hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and methane) that are building up, and she will fall apart and sink to the bottom. The only other way to keep her from floatin’ like a dead carp is to wrap her real tight with chicken-house wire and wait for her to grow. In only about three days in the swamp, she’ll start swelling from the gases, and the wire will cut her up into dozens of six-sided plugs, and she will sink like a rock.
You can see her now, floating in the lagoon like a grazing manatee, head, arms, and legs all hanging down beneath her. Then it is off to the “Piggin and Wiggin’ Out” Combination Convenience Store, Rib Joint, and Asian Fingernail Parlor, where that hot, dishwater-bleached blonde and former truck-stop lot-lizard queen works.
You dream of the moments you can share with her and the half dozen crack rocks she has in her pocket.
Disclaimer: This blog does not suggest that anyone should do anything that would be considered illegal. I do not even know why I should have to write this, but my lawyer said the world is made up of malcontents looking for a way to sue someone. Anyway, this is a blog for people who want to know and enjoy a funny horror story. It pokes fun at a very serious problem. If you do not understand this fully or, for any reason, you think this gives you the right to commit an illegal act or hurt someone, then you’re one sick bastard, and you should seek competent mental counseling immediately.
English & Spanish Language Stories and Quotes from the feral mind of Newt Livesay, Author & Writer
General Chang Xiaojian
An excerpt from my novel in final edit-process
“The civilians will continue their work. They will see what they are supposed to see. They will ask questions. You will answer those questions without answering them.”
-General Chang Xiaojian, Commanding General of the People’s Liberation Army
This content may not be copied, republished, or distributed without my written permission. You’re welcome to quote short excerpts with a clear credit and a link back to the original post.
No part of this story or quote may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, stored in a retrieval system, translated, adapted, or reproduced in any form or by any means, including printing, photocopying, recording, scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews, and other non-commercial uses permitted by applicable copyright law. If you reproduce, print or use please give me credit. I need the ego boost. -Newt
The crossbow was invented in China in the 7th century BCE (or earlier) In medieval Europe it later provoked real moral panic, so much so that the Lateran Council of 1139 even banned its use against Christians as “too deadly,” and that it could destroy all of mankind.
Creo que cada uno de nosotros es un espíritu: un ángel vivo, por así decirlo. Comenzamos como una chispa: un ser diminuto e infinito, un alma, un ángel al que Dios otorga una nueva vida.
♡
Algunos ángeles eligen permanecer libres de las pruebas del mundo —el sufrimiento, la enfermedad, la alegría, el amor, el hambre, el frío y toda forma de dolor—. Simplemente desean velar por nosotros. Sin embargo, incluso estas chispas celestiales anhelan, en algún momento, volverse mortales una vez más: amar y ser amadas de nuevo. Piden a Dios el preciado regalo de la vida, deseando experimentar todas las maravillas que ofrece, aunque sea una vez más.
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Nuestras vidas se entrelazan como un tapiz de seda infinito, mecido suavemente por la brisa, sin un principio ni un fin verdaderos. Fluyen como un tejido vivo y eterno de la existencia.
♡
Aunque son diminutos, frágiles y dependen totalmente de nosotros, los recién nacidos comprenden mucho más en esos primeros instantes de lo que los adultos solemos admitir —o incluso de lo que queremos reconocer—.
♡
En los breves segundos posteriores al nacimiento, sus ojos escudriñan nuestros rostros con intensidad, como si tras ellos parpadearan recuerdos difusos de una vida anterior. Buscan seguridad: saber que los amamos, que los deseamos y que les damos la bienvenida de nuevo a este mundo.
♡
¿Qué mayor regalo podemos ofrecer que corresponder a esa mirada con el corazón abierto y decir, sin palabras: «Sí, pequeño… estás en casa»?
-Newt Livesay
Publicado originalmente el 21 de abril de 2011 (c)
Republicado el 22 de marzo de 2026 (c)
♡
Gracias por pasarte por aquí; ¡los «me gusta» y los comentarios son siempre bienvenidos! Al fin y al cabo, necesito ese empujón para el ego.
“Don’t think to hard – cause this ain’t gonna turn out well”
I awoke being carried by a half dozen men on a rough-sawn pine board about twelve inches wide and seven feet long. I noticed that I was dressed in my street clothes as they jostled me clumsily to the ground. On each side of me, I watched as they picked up lengths of rope, and the pine board swayed slightly. I felt the sensation of being lowered, then I bumped against something, and a shower of loose dirt and rock gave way.
When the board came to rest, the ropes fell loosely over my body. I blinked. My throat was parched, and I tried to speak. A shovelful of dirt crashed down on my chest. Dust formed a cloud, making it hard to breathe. Another shovelful pelted my legs, and another landed on my stomach.
I tried to speak, but couldn’t form the words. More dirt was being emptied into the hole. It fell on my stomach, my legs, and then one large scoop crashed down hard on my chest with such force that I coughed.
The shoveling stopped.
I heard a voice from above say, “He ain’t dead!”
That is when I saw a smiling face looking down from above.
“Yeah, I know,” he whispered.
-Newt Livesay
(c) 1999 revised 2026 by Newt Livesay Writer, Author
English & Spanish Language Stories and Quotes from the feral mind of Newt Livesay, Author & Writer
Thanks for stopping by — likes and comments are always welcome! After all I need the ego boost.
The Ozarks gripped the night like a drunk clutching his last bottle of Mad Dog grape-flavored wine, mean and unyielding. Out here, the hills didn’t just resist progress… they chewed it up, spat it out, and buried it under roots older than God.
We didn’t have 911 out here. Hell, we barely had working plumbing. No GPS, no fancy radios, just an old rotary phone, a party-line switchboard that rang like a funeral bell, and a country sheriff’s office reeking of stale Folgers, cigarette ash, and the faint tang of despair. Two deputies with secondhand revolvers patrolling a county where the moonshine still flowed thicker than the law. I was twenty-two, a dishonorably discharged Army grunt. I still smelled of gun oil… my head still screaming with the ghosts of jungle mud, burning villages, and buddies who never made it back. Kicked out for slugging an officer who deserved it, I came home to nothing… no prospects, no family willing to claim me, just a debt to my mother’s older brother for keeping me out of jail. He called in a favor with the sheriff, and now I was chained to a desk, five nights a week, as the night-shift dispatcher and jailer, a job that paid in coffee and contempt. I was on my third night of county duty. I was limping along with another dispatcher and two deputies on weekend patrol, their radios spitting static and small-town gripes until the bars vomited their drunks at midnight.
But tonight, the air was wrong… thick, heavy, like the second before a bayonet finds your gut. The phone hadn’t rung, but the silence was a liar, and out of Old Johnson Lake Road, something was crawling toward us, hungry and mean.
I slumped in a creaky chair, nursing a lukewarm mug of country-issued sludge, out of the communal pot—black as tar, bitter as my discharge papers—looking at nothing when the phone shattered the quiet. Second ring, I snatched it up, expecting a bar fight or a coon in someone’s henhouse.
“Sheriff’s Department, what’s your problem?” My voice was flat, already bored.
A scream ripped through the line. A woman’s, raw and jagged, not begging for help but clawing for survival, like she knew help was a fairy tale. “Help me!” she shrieked, the words breaking into sobs. “It’s gonna kill me!”
I bolted upright, coffee sloshing over my hand. “Ma’am, slow down. Tell me what’s happening.”
Her breath came in gasps, punctuated by crashes… wood splintering, glass shattering… and a groan, deep and wet, not human. “It’s in the house!” she screamed. “Please, God, help me!”
“Ma’am, you need to slow down…” I sat up, my gut tightening. “Tell me what’s—”
“It’s going to kill me!” she cried. Panic cracked through the line like lightning on dry timber. “Please! Please! Help me!”
I sat up in my chair a little straighter and leaned forward slightly, like it would help me hear her a little clearer. “Ma’am, listen to me,” I said, forcing calm into my voice, though my pulse hammered like mortar fire. “Where are you? What’s going on?”
Her breath now came in ragged bursts. I could hear more chaos over the phone… crashing sounds, groaning, screaming. Something primal. Agonized.
Her voice filled with fear. “It’s in the house!” she screamed. “It’s going to kill us!”
“Ma’am, you need to tell me where you are and what is going on. What’s your location?” I asked once again, trying to stay calm.
She pushed forward, her words tumbling out, more frantic, tripping over each other. “Me and my boyfriend… we were at the lake swimming. We walked back up to the cabin. He build a small fire just off the porch, near the well. We were cooking hot dogs when it… it came up on us.”
“It came up on you?” With my free hand, I pressed the earbud tighter into my ear. “From where?”
A pause, then a whisper, like she was afraid it could hear her. “It came out of the well.”
My gut twisted. “What came out of the well?”
She didn’t answer, just continued talking. “We both ran inside,” she added, ignoring me. “The lights were on and my boyfriend slammed and bolted the door. He told me to get in the bedroom and hide. Just as I turned to run in the bedroom, it began breaking down the front door. My boyfriend, he told me to run. I ran for the bedroom as it broke through the front door. I hid myself in the closet.”
“Which bedroom? Can you describe it?” I asked, scribbling notes on a legal pad, my handwriting shaky.
There was a moment of clarity in her voice. “There is only one bedroom,” she said, her voice sharpening for a moment, grounded by terror. “Please, it’s gonna find me.”
“All right. Stay on the line,” I said, my mouth dry. “I’m getting your help. What is your address?”
“I am… please… it’s going to kill me.”
Silence.
“Ma’am? Can you hear me? I need an address.”
A faint whisper: “It is in the bedroom.”
I froze. “It’s in there with you?”
Sobbing. Then, breathless: “Please help me. Please help me. It’s in the bedroom.”
“Where are you calling from?” I pressed. “Give me an address,” I asked once more.
“We’re in a fishing cabin… Old Johnson Lake Road…” Her voice cracked, fading.
I slapped the emergency alert button on the switchboard. A piercing tone blared through the emergency radios. “Any unit near the fishing cabins on Old Johnson Lake Road, be advised: female caller is hiding in a bedroom closet. Caller claims an unknown assailant is inside. Possible violent situation. No cabin number. Stand by for further information.”
More crashing noises came through the phone. Wood splitting. A scream… male, maybe her boyfriend, raw and final. Dying. Then that groan again, low and guttural, like something dragging itself up from hell… deep, wet, inhuman.
“It came from the well!” she whimpered, her voice barely audible.
I hit the mic again, my voice sharp, slicing through the static. “All units: possible 10-56, homicide in progress. Female caller in immediate danger. Unknown intruder. All available units respond code three.”
Unit 16 crackled back, voice tight. “Three miles from the old gate, en route.”
Unit 23: “Southbound on Mount Ida, ten minutes out.”
“10-4.” I snapped, turning back to the phone. “Ma’am? Are you still there?”
Nothing. Just the hum of a dead line.
Reba Jean, the other dispatcher, looked up from her panel, her face pale under her helmet of permed hair, frozen in a 1958 beehive. She was a tough old broad, chain-smoking Marlboros and spitting curses that’d make a sailor blush, but now her hands trembled. “Did she say Old Johnson Lake Road?”
“Yeah,” I said, my throat tight.
She frowned, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray overflowing with butts. “Hell, that road ain’t seen a county crew since Eisenhower. It’s closed off. Big-ass sign just off the highway, warning folks to stay out. Ain’t no cabins out there anybody’s lived in for years.”
She hollered down the hallway, her chair groaning as she leaned back. “Leon!”
Leon shuffled in, mop in one hand, his face blank, but his eyes sharp. Leon was the courthouse janitor. Black, old as dirt, with a rap sheet longer than the Mississippi. He’d run moonshine ’til the judge caught him, then got hired to mop floors and take care of the courthouse instead of doing time. That way he could be home nights and on most weekends. Everyone knew he still brewed shine up on the mountain. The judge looked the other way. It was common knowledge that Leon had been mean once. Snake-bite mean, but age and a bad hip had dulled him. Mostly.
“Yes’sum?” he drawled, leaning on the doorframe.
“Leon, you know any fishing cabins out on Old Johnson Lake Road?” Reba asked.
He squinted, scratching his stubbled chin. “Yes’m,” he drawled. “Used to be a few shacks out there, back when the lake was stocked. Folks fished, drank, fought, swam. But the county let the road go to seed. Nobody goes out much anymore. You can swim, boat, fish or get in the water. Place is cursed, folks say.” Leon’s eyes met mine, steady and unblinking. “Folks say peoples, up and gone missin’ out there, son. Some said it was the lake. Others said it was the well. It’s an old one, hand-dug deep, before the county had records. Said somethin’ lived in ’em. Somethin’ that don’t like company.”
Reba snorted, but it was forced. “Old wives’ tales, Leon. Don’t scare the kid.”
I wasn’t scared. Not yet. But my skin prickled, like the jungle when you knew Charlie was watching. My chair squeaked as I turned and looked over at Reba. “The woman on the phone. She said it came out of the well,” I muttered.
Leon didn’t change expression, but his grip tightened on the mop. “Then you best pray them deputies get there quick.”
I pressed the emergency alert button on the switchboard. “Stay on the phone with me.”
“Leon, are there any of those old fishing cabins or hunting lodges out on Old Johnson Lake Road anymore?”
“Yes’um,” Leon’s voice grated. “Maybe one or two.”
“Tell us about it,” Reba Jean asked.
“Most of them have rotted and fallen down. We’s used’ta fish up there on that lake some twenty or thirty years ago. That was before they found that chemical stuff in it.”
“Are there any cabins out there anymore?”
Leon looked down, then raised his head. “Yes’sum, they may be one or two, but most have fallen down or been burnt by homeless and kids.” He smiled, thinking about the lake. “We used to fish there, ‘fore the state found them chemicals in the lake.”
“What kind of chemicals?” I asked.
“PCB,” Reba said automatically. “Transformer fluid. Off them high-line wires. Cancer in a bottle, they say.”
Leon glanced at me. “Yes’sir, that’s what it was, PCB. It was all in that lake, it was in them fish. The state made it illegal to swim in the lake. Ya’alls couldn’t even fish or eat any of them fishes. The owner of the lodge, he went bankrupt and he got sued by the folks that had bought land and was gonna build houses there. His wife was much younger than him and she got to messing around with this’har preacher fellow here in town. Seems old man Johnson caught his young wife and the preacher man one night up there swimming. They was plumb naked. Didn’t have no clothes on at all.” He paused and smiled. “Old Mister Johnson, well, he went home to get a shotgun. Folks said he went crazy. When he got back, they was cookin’ wieners out by the front porch. He up and shot ’em both in the head, with that ther’ double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun, and throwed ’em down that well… out front of his cabin.”
STALE AIR AND BAD DECISIONS
The sheriff’s office was a damn pressure cooker, the kind of place where the walls sweat regret and the air tasted like stale coffee and bad decisions. I sat at the dispatcher’s desk, staring at the radio, my guts twisting like a bayonet in a pig. The call had come in about thirty-eight minutes ago. A woman, her voice shredded with panic, screaming about it coming from the well. Her boyfriend’s howl cut through the static, raw and wet, then a crash like the cabin was caving in. I’d smelled smoke through the line. It was acrid, biting. I heard the floorboards groan like they were begging for mercy. Then nothing. Dead air. A gut-punch that left me choking on the silence.
Reba Jean stood by the coffee pot, her arms crossed, her face a road map of hard years. She wasn’t just a co-dispatcher, she was the damn spine of this outfit, a widow who’d buried her logger husband after a snapped cable took his head clean off. Then her son after a bar stool cracked his skull in ’68. The Ozarks had chewed her up and spat her out, but she’d learned to bite back.
Her eyes caught mine. “What the fuck was that, Caleb?” she rasped, looking at me. Her voice was a gravel pit from chain-smoking. “You hearin’ ghosts now?”
“Ghosts don’t scream like that,” I shot back, my tone sharp enough to cut glass. “That was real. Too fuckin’ real.”
Leon lingered by the door, mop in hand, but he wasn’t just the janitor. He was a relic. An old bootlegger, the kind who’d run shine with killers and lived to tell it. His eyes, cloudy with yellow cataracts, held secrets the hills wouldn’t cough up. “Old Johnson Lake Road, huh?” he grated, voice like rusted wire. “Ain’t been right since they poisoned that lake.”
I leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “That is the second time you’ve mentioned poisoning the lake. Spill it, Leon. Fishing cabin, hunting lodge… what is out there?”
He scratched his stubble, smirking like he was tasting a memory. “Like I said, we’s used to fish that lake, ’bout thirty years back. Bass big as your arm. Like Miss Reba said, the state found that transformer oil in the water. They said it causes cancer. Shut it all down. Couldn’t swim, couldn’t eat no fish. Old Man Johnson had a lodge out there, went bust when the lawsuits hit. His wife… hell, she was half his age. She started screwin’ some slick preacher. One of them strange churches that dance, played music, kissed snakes. Crazy damn white folks, I always thought. Well, like I said, the old man caught ’em one night. They was wrapped up like a couple of water snakes, buck-naked in the lake. He up and grabbed his 12-gauge, come back, and painted the porch with their brains. The sheriff back then said the old man dumped them bodies down in that old well out front. That’s what folks said.”
Reba snorted, but it was hollow. “Romantic old bastard. That it?”
Leon’s grin faded. “Folks say he went nuts after that. The well swallowed ’em both, but it didn’t stay quiet. Dynamited it shut a year later, but them old wells… they all over these here hills. Folks used to call ’em artesian wells. But them old wells… sometimes they tap somethin’ deep. Underground rivers, and them caves twistin’ for miles. You don’t bury that kinda hate.”
Reba swore under her breath. “You and your hillbilly ghost stories. I ain’t buyin’ it.”
“Then explain the call,” I snapped, rage starting to simmer under my brow. “She said it came from the well. Boyfriend’s screamin’, and now they’re gone. You wanna sit here and knit while that shit festers?”
Before she could answer, the radio crackled.
Leon’s story was interrupted by a police call over the radio. “Base, this is Sixteen. I am at the cabin. The front door has been torn off. There seems to be some kinda bones scattered in the front room. Human lookin’. They look old as hell. You might want to contact the sheriff and see what he thinks about getting some of the Arkansas State Crime Lab people to take a look-see. And while we wait on them, get ahold of Doc Newton. They need Doc to come take a look.”
I snatched the mic, my knuckles white. “Sixteen, what about the woman in the closet?” I asked.
“Well, there is some remains in the closet, and they may be female.”
“Remains? You’re saying she is dead?” I asked.
“Well, she’s dead, all right. I am just guessing it is a woman.” A pause, then: “Got remains in there. Skeleton, small frame. A thin cotton print dress, half-rotted. Long blond hair on the skull. No flesh, just bones.”
My stomach dropped. “She’s dead? She just called.”
“She’s been dead, Base. Years, maybe decades. Ain’t nobody fresh here ‘cept the stink.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nope! Base, there ain’t nobody here besides bones in the closet and bones in the front room.”
Reba’s eyes met mine, wide with a flicker of doubt. She cocked her head. “What the hell, Caleb?”
“We’ve secured the area, Base. Any orders?”
I looked over at Reba and keyed the microphone. “Sixteen,” I said, voice steady as I could fake it, “check the well.”
“Already did,” came the reply. “It’s covered with a slab of concrete. It cracked, but it’s solid.”
Leon answered quickly. “Theys’ ain’t no well,” Leon was quick to say. “Theys’ dynamited it years ago. I told’ja, theys’ filled that old well in back after that old man killed them folks and threw their bodies in it. He got out on bail, poured a concrete slab over that old well. He then blowed his head plum off with another shotgun he had hid somewhere.” Leon said, shaking his head slowly. A thin grin came over his face. “Told ya. What’s down there don’t need no door.”
I clicked on the mic. “Stand by, Sixteen,” I said, dropping the mic. I looked at Reba, then Leon.
“Bodies still in the well?”
“No’sar,” Leon said. “Seems that when they dug that old water well back in them real early days, they hit some underground river. Some kind of a big cave underground. Once time, some gover’mint people came down here from the University up at Fayetteville and said that river flows underground for hundreds of miles. Them gover’mint people said the river took ’em. My old grandmammy said some of them wells were here over a hundred miles long. She said they be deep and dark, runnin’ under them hills like veins. You never get out if you go in.”
“Base, this is Sixteen?”
“Go ahead, Sixteen,” I answered.
“Base, we found the phone. It was under the woman’s bones and her dress. It was still in her hand. Just bones holding it. This thing is old. The battery has corroded and split open on the back from the leaking acid.”
“An old telephone?” I asked.
“Yes, it looks like an old-time Motorola. It has to be the size of a couple of bricks with an antenna.”
Reba’s face hardened. “Then who the fuck called us?”
The room went quiet, the kind of quiet that presses on your chest. I stood, grabbing my coat and the keys to the spare cruiser. “I’m goin’ out there.”
Reba lunged, blocking the door. “Like hell you are, Caleb! You’re a dispatcher, not a fuckin’ deputy. You’ll get your ass canned. Or killed.”
“Move,” I growled, my hand twitching for the shotgun on the rack. “She called me. I ain’t sittin’ here jerkin’ off while somethin’… whatever it is… laughs in our faces.”
She glared, maternal worry flashing behind her stare. Her widowhood and loss grounded her skepticism and worry for Caleb. “You’re a dumbass, you know that. I ain’t buryin’ another one.”
“Then don’t,” I said, shoving past. “Leon, watch her.”
The cruiser chewed up the road, tires spitting gravel as the Ozarks swallowed me whole. Trees loomed like gallows, their branches clawing the sky, mist curling thick as smoke. My headlights stabbed the dark, but it fought back, a living thing that hated being seen. Every mile was a step deeper into the pit, and my mind, fuck, it wouldn’t stay put.
Vietnam hit me like a mortar round. Jungle nights, black as pitch, the air heavy with death. I’d lain in mud, rifle slick with sweat, listening to Charlie creep closer. The snap of a twig, the glint of a knife, the scream of a kid who’d never see Da Nang again. I’d clawed out of that hell, but it stuck to me, a second skin I couldn’t shed. Now the hills were pulling the same trick, watching me, waiting.
A coyote bolted across the road, eyes like hellfire. I swerved, the wheel jerking in my hands. Reba grabbed the dash and stomped the floorboard on her side of the car.
“Son of a bitch!” I snarled, pulse hammering. “Keep it together.” But the past was a leech, sucking me dry.
The cabin squatted at the end of the road, a rotting corpse of wood and memory. The deputies’ cruisers flashed blue and red, painting the night bloody. I parked, grabbed the shotgun, and stepped out, boots crunching on dirt. The air reeked… wet rot, old death. Something sour stung my nose.
Deputy Mike Harlan met me, his face tight. “Caleb, you’re outta line comin’ here.”
“Save it,” I said, racking the shotgun. “Show me the bones.”
He cursed but waved me and Reba into the cabin. “Where is Lester?” I asked, looking for the officer in Unit 16.
“He was outside looking around with a flashlight, just a minute ago.”
We stepped inside the front room. It was a butcher’s dream, bones strewn like trash. Yellowed and brittle. A rib cage lay open, a femur snapped clean, a skull with a hole in the middle of its face, big enough to throw a baseball through. “Old,” Mike said, kicking a tibia. “Johnson’s leftovers, maybe.”
I crouched by the skull, bile rising. “He was a busy bastard.”
Mike nodded toward the bedroom. “Closet’s worse.”
The door hung crooked, splinters jagged as teeth. Inside, the skeleton lay crumpled on its back. Small, most likely a female, dress clinging to bleached bones like a shroud. Blond hair draped the skull, tangled and dull. An old dial, push-button-type phone lay next to her, its plastic case cracked like an egg.
It looked to have been stomped and burst open. “She didn’t call from this,” I said, voice low. I looked around. “There’s no phone jack in this room,” I said, standing and scanning the room. The air was wrong. Thick. Dead. “She said it came from the well.”
I walked into the front room. There was a single antique phone jack screwed onto the wall. A length of phone cord that looked to have been severed with a knife lay next to it. “Well, that was the landline.”
“Yeah,” Mike said, pointing toward the front door. “Come on, look at this over here.”
We headed out the door, our flashlights searching the dark. Mike pointed to the ground off the porch. The dirt was torn up. Something had been dragged through here.
“Show me where it goes,” I said, gripping the shotgun.
We followed the drag marks to the well. It was a scar. Stone rim crumbling, concrete slab split open like a busted lip. The ground around it was clawed, dirt churned, and there on the concrete… blood, flesh, crimson and black, smeared toward the woods. I bent down and touched it, finger sticky. “Still wet,” I said in a low voice.
I stood and looked toward the woods.
A branch snapped, loud as a gunshot. We spun, weapons up.
“Coons,” Mike muttered, but his hands shook.
Another snap, closer. Then a groan. Low, wet, dragging sound from the trees. The stink drifted over the ground like grave rot, rancid meat, death on the move.
“Mike,” I whispered, safety off, “that ain’t no coon.”
The groan rose, guttural and hungry, and the dark came alive.
The night was a living thing, oppressive and damp, wrapping around us like a fever dream gone sour. Mike’s voice cracked the silence, low and shaky. “Lester? You out there?”
Nothing answered but the wind, a thin, mocking whistle through the pines and blackjack trees.
“Com’on,” I said, slapping at Mike’s arm. “We need to fall back… now!” I added as I started walking backward toward the cabin. Mike ran past me.
Then the groan hit again, a deep, twisting, guttural groan, closer, ripping through the trees like a dying animal’s last gasp. My breath caught, shotgun slippery in my sweaty palms. The mist was choking now, so damn thick I could taste the rot. Wet earth, decay, and something sour, like death itself had crawled up from the grave. I moved closer, bumping up against the front fender of Lester’s police unit. I glanced over. Mike stood by the grille, the muzzle of his revolver shaking like a cornered mutt.
I started to move closer to him. “Mike, it’s me. Comin’ in,” I whispered, bumping around the front fender.
“What the hell was that?” he whispered, his voice cracking like dry twigs.
I didn’t answer. I made a shushing sound with my mouth and moved closer to the front grille where Mike stood. My eyes were glued to the treeline, heart hammering. Shadows twisted in the mist, every rustling leaf a jab to the nerves. The dark pressed in, heavy and alive, and I felt it. Vietnam all over again. The jungle’s stink, the snap of branches, the glint of steel before it tore into flesh. I shook it off, but my hands trembled anyway.
A crash boomed from the well, loud as a mortar round. We whipped around, weapons up, pulses racing. “Stay here,” I growled, forcing my voice steady. “I’ll check it.”
Mike nodded, his face white as a skull. I crept toward the well, boots crunching gravel, the mist peeling back just enough to show the cracked concrete slab. The slab was twice as wide open now as it was a few minutes ago.
Reba came out onto the front porch of the cabin. “What’s going on?” she shouted, spotting my flashlight beam over the slab.
“Get back in the cabin, Reba,” I shouted.
I thought I saw something in the beam of Reba’s flashlight. I shined my light on the slab. And there, sprawled next to it, was a body. Fresh, not like the old bones inside. A man, throat shredded, blood pooling black in the dirt. It wasn’t there three minutes ago. I recognized what was left of Lester from his deputy’s sheriff’s uniform.
“Jesus Christ,” I muttered, stomach lurching. His eyes stared up, locked in horror, mouth gaping mid-scream. I glanced back at Mike, still clueless, now standing by the porch of the cabin. Before I could yell, another groan directly behind me. I spun, shotgun raised, but the mist mocked me, empty. Then movement. Fast, too fast, darting between trees. My blood ran cold, finger twitching on the trigger.
“Mike!” I roared. “Get to the cruiser! Now!”
Too late. The thing burst from the mist. A hulking shadow with eyes black. Dead like the darkness. It roared, a sound that seemed to split my skull, and charged Mike like a fucking mad bull.
Mike screamed, firing wild. Bullets flew uselessly, and the creature hit him. Claws flashed, a wet crunch as it ripped his chest open. Mike’s flashlight dropped to the ground. Blood sprayed, hot and red, splattering across the cabin’s front porch.
I didn’t think. Pumped the shotgun and fired, the blast ringing in my ears. The thing staggered, black ooze leaking from its side, but it didn’t drop. It turned, its black eyes now seeming to burn into me. Pure hate.
I fired again.
Again.
Each shot pushed it back, but it kept coming. Relentless. Like the VC in the dark, shrugging off bullets like drops of rain. My mind screamed. Charlie ain’t stopping. Charlie wants to die. It was as if I were back there. Mud on my boots. Blood in my mouth. Rage took over. I charged, slamming the shotgun’s butt into its face. It howled, reeling, and I thought, It feels pain. Maybe I’ve hurt it.
Then it grabbed me. Claws dug into my shoulders, lifting me off the ground. Pain exploded, white-hot, and its breath hit me. Grave-rot stench, bloody, ancient and evil. I thrashed, but it was like fighting a tank.
A flash. Blinding white. An ear-splitting explosion. The creature screeched, dropping me. I hit the dirt hard. My vision blurry, but I could see Reba, flare gun smoking in her hand.
“Get up, dumbass!” she yelled, her voice cutting through the haze. “We’re gone!”
I scrambled up, snagging the shotgun, and we bolted for the cruiser. The creature’s roar faded behind us, wounded but alive. Reba floored it, tires spitting gravel. I looked back. The mist swallowed the cabin, hiding whatever was left.
“What the fuck was that?” Reba panted, gripping the wheel.
I didn’t answer. My head was a mess. Mike’s blood, those eyes, the jungle bleeding into the hills. One thing I knew: this wasn’t done.
SHERIFF’S OFFICE
We stumbled into the dispatch office, Reba cursing, while sitting me in my chair, half-dead at my desk. Leon was still there. He began mopping my blood up that was dripping on the floor. His face was like carved stone. “You see’d it,” he said, flat.
“Somethun’,” I grunted, collapsing into a chair. “Mike and Lester are both dead. Torn to pieces.”
“What the fuck was that?” Reba asked, slamming the flare gun down on her desk. “We need the National Guard, not campfire tales.” She pulled a 1911 out of her desk drawer and began slamming .45 rounds into a clip.
Leon’s eyes didn’t flinch. “Ain’t no guard stoppin’ what’s in that well.” He shook his head slowly and made a tsking sound with his tongue. “It be older than these hills, meaner than hell,” he mumbled. He stopped mopping. “It may be hell for all wee’uns know,” he uttered before going back to mopping.
“Bullshit,” Reba snapped, but her voice wavered. “If it breathes, eats, and shits… then it can be killed. I don’t buy this boogeyman talk.”
My eyes snapped on her. “Then what killed Mike?” I said, staring her down. “What grabbed me? You saw it.”
She looked away, jaw clenched. “Somethin’. Not supernatural. Maybe a bear.”
“I see’d ‘um once. Bear’s don’t move like that,” Leon cut in. “Bear’s don’t hate like that.”
I touched my shoulder, claw marks throbbing. “It’s the well. Johnson’s mess. Somethin’ woke up.”
The door opened and Doc Newton, our resident veterinarian, walked through the door. His eyes widened seeing my shirt soaked, bloody. “We need to get you to a hospital,” he said, drawing back.
“Well, that’s an hour or so away, any direction we go. Springfield, Little Rock or Fayetteville,” Reba spat.
“Just fix me up, Doc,” I ordered. “I got shit to do.”
Doc snapped his head in a curt nod. “Okay,” he said, pulling out a syringe that had to be five inches long with a huge needle.
“Damn, Doc,” Reba said. Her face pale. “That looks like a horse needle.”
“It is, but it’s all I got.”
I actually felt faint seeing the size of it.
“Don’t worry, I sterilized it,” he said, poking the needle into the rubber top on a vial of clear liquid. “This’ll keep down any infection. It’s an antibiotic called oxytetracycline. It’s similar to penicillin.”
He pushed the needle into my arm. It hurt so bad that I wanted to scream.
“Holy cow, Doc!”
Leon broke the tension. “Mistar Caleb. Ya won’t have to worry ’bout no strangles, rain rot, or colic now,” he said, chuckling aloud.
Reba shot Leon a look.
Again, I toughed it out as the veterinarian, Doc Newton, wrapped my shoulders in clean bandages.
I looked over at Leon. “It’s the well. Johnson’s mess. Somethin’ woke up.”
“Yes’sum!” Leon nodded slow. “Old Man Johnson didn’t just kill his wife and her lover. He fed them folks to it. Made a deal. Power for blood. Deals like that don’t die quiet.”
Reba paled. “You’re saying he summoned it?”
“I’es saying that old man was mean. He opened a door,” Leon replied. “And just because he’s dead don’t mean it not still open.”
I stood, wincing… “Then we close it. Figure out what Johnson did, and how to end it.”
Reba reached for me. “You’re bleedin’. Sit,” she said, pushing me back into the seat.
“I’m fine,” I lied, shaking her off.
I tried to stand again. Doc Newton pushed me down. “Just sit there for a moment more while I fix that other shoulder.” He removed a bottle of purple powder from his bag.
“What is that, Doc?” I asked suspiciously.
“This ain’t gonna hurt. It’s blood stop. I use it stop bleed’en on cattle when we’re dehorning cattle, cuttin’ calves or pigs… castrating ’em, you know.”
I winced at the thought.
Leon laughed, all the time leaning on the mop handle still. “They be an old journal… Johnson’s notes he writ’ in it. Town library, locked up. Cursed, they say, but it might tell you’en somethin’.”
I looked at the Doc. “You through, Doc?”
He nodded and was putting his horse tools in his bag.
“Then we get it,” I said, standing. A slight shadow came over my mind. I felt weak. I snagged the keys. “Now.”
Reba swore. “You’ll get us killed, Caleb.”
I glanced over at Leon, then back at her. “Maybe,” I said. “But I ain’t waitin’ for it to come knockin’.”
THE LIBRARY
The county library was old, smelled of homeless sweat, unwashed pits, dirty butts, and mildew. Reba said we needed to go to the basement for the older historical records. We walked down the stairs. The freight elevator wasn’t working. At the bottom of the stairs was a locked room. I used the key kept in the sheriff’s office to open the door. I figured that was better than kicking it down, splintering the door frame, or worse.
I smiled at Reba, turned, and opened the door. She walked in first. Found the light switch and flipped on a single 60-watt bulb hanging from a frayed electrical cable from the ceiling. The damn county commissioners are some tight asses, it seems.
The basement area was a tomb, dark and musty, the kind of place where secrets fester, and black mold had sex orgies.
“You’re a real asshole,” she said.
I grinned. “Yeah!” I began scanning the shelves. “We need to find the history section?”
“Hey, asshole,” Reba said, pointing to a dusty set of shelves on the back wall, dust thick enough you could write your name on the covers.
I shoved past her and began looking at items on the shelves. I found a glass case, full of old books, papers, and there on the bottom shelf, an old leather journal, yellowed, old, brittle, tied shut with what looked to be hay-bale string. “That’s it,” Reba said.
I used my boot. Smashed the glass and grabbed it.
Reba flinched. “Careful, damn it. You’re going to get us arrested.”
I laid it on a librarian’s table. Cut the string with a piece of broken glass. I flipped it open, pages crumbling. Johnson’s scrawl was manic:
September 12, 1951: She betrayed me. Him too. I’ll make ’em pay. The well… it speaks. It offered me power, and immortality. It wants blood.
September 15: Done. They’re gone. It’s hungry still. More.
October 3: Well’s alive. Groans at night. I’m next.
Last entry, October 10: It’s coming. God help me.
Reba read over me, her face grim. “How do we stop it?”
I didn’t answer right off. I sat thinking. “Seal the well,” I said.
Reba parroted my words. It was more of a question. “Seal the well?”
I glanced over at her. “Yeah! We seal the well,” I answered.
“It was sealed. Someone concreted over the top and it still got out.”
I smiled. It was almost a smirk, maybe just a snarl, as only part of my upper lip curled. “Fire!” I said, Leon’s words echoed: “Doors don’t shut easy. So, we seal it with fire… We burn that motherfucker.”
I turned to see Reba looking at me. “Will that work?”
I let out my breath. “Well, I faced worse. ‘Nam taught me that, and like you said, if it bleeds, ya’ can kill it. An’ we know it bleeds.”
BACK TO THE CABIN
We loaded up a county pickup parked out back of the jail. Shotguns, flares, gasoline. Reba drove, silent, a Marlboro hung from her lip, ash never falling even when she spoke. I sat, silent, clutching the journal, pain pulsing. The cabin loomed, shrouded in claws of mist. Reba stopped on the road next to the cabin. I stepped out of the pickup, grabbed two five-gallon cans of gasoline, sloshing toward the well, shotgun slung over my shoulder. Each step dug the sling into my wound. Yeah… it hurt.
“We burn the well. We seal it,” I said.
Reba nodded, flare gun up. She caught me looking at her. “Just in case it come back?”
“Damn tootin’, Sparky,” I smiled. It never reached my eyes. I pumped the 12-gauge’s slide and handed it to Reba.
Standing at the well, I could see dirt stained by Mike and Lester’s blood. The creature’s roar was faint, deep down, waiting. I poured three five-gallon cans of gasoline into the well, followed by three more unopened. Reba tossed me the shotgun and lit a couple of flares. She hissed a smirky comment. “Last chance to run.”
“Nope,” I said.
“Fire in the hole!” she shouted as she tossed the two flares into the well. We both ran. A massive clap, a whooshing blast shook the ground. The air around the well erupted in a concussion, a sucking explosion as flames roared upward.
Then a scream. It was hollow, wrong, and came from deep within the well. The ground shook twice more as the five-gallon containers of gasoline exploded. The concrete slab split even more. Something tried clawing its way out of the darkness. Its eyes black and dead.
I fired, shotgun kicking. I fired over and over, until it only clicked. It shrieked, charging through the flames. Reba pulled the trigger on her flare gun. The round hit, bright and brutal. The darkness slashed at me. I flipped the empty shotgun up, catching the barrel. I dodged, swung the 12-gauge like a Louisville Slugger, cracking its skull with the stock of the shotgun. It stumbled. I threw another full can of gasoline into the well. It exploded deep inside. Flames, and a flare of heat shot into the sky. The blast was hellfire, swallowing the creature standing at the edge of the crack in a fireball. I dove, ash and dirt raining down. When I looked, the well was a smoking pit. The thing was gone. Reba pulled me up. I was sooty, and slightly singed.
“Done?” she asked.
I was silent for a long minute. “Maybe,” I croaked in a dry whisper, staring at the ruins.
“Hills don’t forget.”
Reba looked at me. “What?” she asked.
I turned and faced her. “Leon,” I said.
“What about Leon?”
“Leon said the hills don’t forget.”
We both turned and gazed at the smoldering hole in the ground.
“Yeah,” she said.
THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE
Making it back to the sheriff’s office, Reba was able to get a message to the sheriff and the Arkansas Highway Patrol. Both seemed to descend on the little office in the courthouse at the same time. Outside, it looked to be a beautiful morning. Birds chirped, people were greeting each other, exchanging smiles. Inside the sheriff’s office, the sheriff screamed, threatened, and threw shit at the walls. Two state troopers stood watching, adding the occasional remark, wanting to know if we had been drinking or smokin’ weed.
This fiasco, as he called it, could cost him the upcoming election. I was beginning to wonder if the elections were more important to him than the deaths of two officers and the near death of two more officers. Getting reelected seemed to be of more concern to the sheriff. But again, he was a damn politician.
The sheriff’s office overall smelled like despair, burnt coffee, and singed hair, but it was a damn sanctuary compared to the hell we’d just crawled away from. I slumped against the desk, the sheriff department’s shotgun lying on the desk, the stock busted plum off. My shoulder throbbed where that thing had clawed me, blood once more beginning to soak through my shirt, sticky and warm. Reba sat across from me. Her eyes were glassy, staring at nothing, like she was still seeing those burning coals in the dark.
Between the ass-eatin’ from the sheriff and the state troopers that had now weighed in… Reba Jean was on a slow burn. Finally, she’d taken all she was going to take. She slammed her open hand down on top of the desk, and, standing, put her hands on her hips. Her beehive trembling with barely contained fury.
“You dumb sons of bitches,” she snapped. Her voice like a whip crack. “What the hell do you think we were doing out there, runnin’ around like some cowboy movie? Lester’s gone, Mike’s gone, and Caleb near dead.” She said, slapping me on the shoulder. I almost vomited as the pain shot through me. “Sorry,” she whispered. “Hell, this boy’s bleedin’ all over the floor! So, save the sermon,” she growled. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see it.”
“See what?” the sheriff shot back, his tone wavering slightly. “A bear? A drunk with a knife? What, Reba? Caleb?”
I met his eyes, my jaw tight. “It wasn’t a bear. It wasn’t human. It came from the well… same as the woman said on the phone. It wasn’t an animal. Too fast. Eyes black like a shark’s. It smelled like death… like somethin’ crawled out of a grave.”
Reba’s face hardened, but she didn’t interrupt. Leon, leaning on his mop, stood in the corner. He hadn’t said a word since we’d stumbled in. His silence was heavier than the room’s.
I turned. “Leon,” I said, voice low. “You talked about that well. Johnson’s murders. What the hell came up from under the ground?”
He straightened, slow, like the weight of years was pressing him down. “Ain’t just Johnson’s doin’, boy. That well’s old. Maybe older than the hills. It was dug deep, too deep, back when folks didn’t ask what they were tappin’ into. Underground rivers, caves that twist for miles, and maybe somethin’ else. Somethin’ that don’t belong.”
The sheriff snorted, but it was forced. “You’re talkin’ fairy tales, old man. Wells don’t spit out monsters.”
Leon’s gaze didn’t waver. “Then what took Mister Lester and Mister Mike? What left their jackets in pieces, blood all over them slabs like Mister Caleb and Ms. Reba Jean saw’d? I appreciate all you’ve done for me, Sheriff, but there are things out there that I’d seed… things out there that ain’t got names. You’s wrong this time, Sheriff.”
I rubbed my face, the jungle creeping back. Vietnam. The dark. The screams. “Johnson fed it. Maybe unknowingly. Maybe he woke it up. Maybe he asked for it with the blood of his wife and the preacher. Maybe it promised him power, like he said. The question is, what is it? A demon? Some hillbilly curse?”
“What kind of bullshit is this?” the sheriff asked, standing up and moving around.
“Sheriff,” I said. “It wasn’t just evil. It was hungry. Like it wanted more than our blood. It wanted us.”
Leon’s lips twitched, not quite a smile. “Call it what you want. Demon, spirit, somethin’ older. The hills got memories, Mister Caleb. Blood soaks deep, and that well… it’s a mouth. Old man Johnson didn’t make it, but he done just woke it up. He gave it a taste.”
The sheriff paced, his boots scuffing the linoleum. “Bullshit. I don’t buy no damn boogeymen. Maybe it’s some freak… maybe some meth head livin’ out there. Maybe someone messed up on shine or drugs. Maybe someone drank that lake water. It is full of chemicals. Maybe it got in his blood. Maybe them chemicals made him a lunatic. It doesn’t have to be supernatural for him to be fucked up.”
“Then explain the phone call,” I said, my voice sharp. “Woman screamin’, dead for years, usin’ a live phone line that has been dead for years as well. It wasn’t even hooked up. The receiver itself was crushed, destroyed. Explain Lester and Mike’s jackets, the blood… you’ve seen the wounds on Caleb’s arms and shoulder. You tell me a man did that?”
Caleb’s voice broke the tension, barely a whisper. “It spoke. Not words, not really. But when it had me down, I felt it. In my head. Like… it was promisin’ somethin’. Power… maybe. Like it promised Johnson.”
One of the state troopers spoke. “Promising what, Deputy?”
I shook my head, my eyes distant. Seeing nothing. “Don’t know. Didn’t wanna know. Just wanted me to give in.”
Leon nodded, slow and grim. “That’s how it works. Feeds on blood, but it’s yo’ soul him wants. Always has.” Leon’s voice cut through the tension, soft but heavy. “Mind yourself, boy. That thing’s still out there. It’s watching.”
The sheriff now softened to reason, looked up, his face haunted. “What if it’s not just the well? What if it’s everywhere? In the hills, the rivers… what if we can’t stop it?”
“Then we die trying’,” I said. “Better than livin’ scared.”
An Original Short Story from the Feral Mind of Newt Livesay
(c) 2022
Thank you for taking the time to read my story. I truly appreciate it.
So, what was the evil from the well? I deliberately undefined the ‘evil’ to maintain some suspense throughout the story. Was it a primal, ancient force… neither fully demon nor beast, but something that exists in the liminal space between? It’s tied to the land, the superstitions, the Ozarks’ deep caves and rivers, like Bigfoot. The evil or fear feeds on blood and despair, amplified by Johnson’s murders. It’s not just “evil” in a moral sense; it’s a predatory hunger, possibly a forgotten entity or a manifestation of the hills’ buried wrath, awakened by human violence. Its promises of power suggest a sentient malice, but its physicality… claws, speed, maybe the ichor seeping from a wound inflicted on the earth. Ground in visceral reality. I think it’s a blend of folklore and cosmic horror, like a Native American spirit twisted by industrial poison (PCB) and human sin, or a Lovecraftian remnant bound to the earth’s veins. It is less a “thing” than a force… a hunger given form, using the well as a conduit. Leon sees it as an old, nameless power; Reba Jean clings to a rational explanation, while Caleb feels its seductive pull. He fights it like a soldier, not caring what it is.
