How could her mother not see his disease? Filth and sickness covered every inch of him. He was woven from perversity. Carved from shit. How could her mother let him anywhere near her?
How could Sally let him anywhere near her daughter?
In the basement, she crossed the cold cement floor to the door to the fruit cellar and pulled it back, allowing a wedge of light to drape along the plank stairs and puddle on the mud-caked feet below.
The simple answer was: she couldn’t.
As she descended the stairs, Uncle Henry was slowly revealed to her. He lay motionless. Naked. Damaged.
The dark dirt beneath him coiled and swirled and turned darker still, and together they road the surface of the gloomy bog. Nail heads jutted from his eye sockets; they had punctured the orbs and released a greasy pale fluid along with blood to dribble down her uncle’s stubbled cheeks—the juice dried to a crust, now. His upper lip had receded in rigor, adding prominence to his bucked teeth. His jaw lay open, propped against his second chin. Blood clotted the frayed gray hairs and made dark veins in the creped skin of his chest and belly. Before the drill, she’d used the clamps, and she’d used the hammer and she’d used the pliers. She’d used the blowtorch. Between his legs was nothing but a blackened terrain that looked no more threatening than a scoop of scorched casserole. The holes in his torso—ragged, clotted, and numerous—had been bored over the course of thirty minutes. The third aperture, the one through the hairy flesh above the old man’s heart, had been the last wound her uncle had protested—though he’d done so with little more than a hiss of breath. After that one, he’d lay still. There were twelve holes totaclass="underline" an even dozen.
“I know what to do with an egg,” she said.
Sally knelt down and placed the decorated egg against her uncle’s prominent front teeth. She forced the shell and the tumescent content through his parted lips, and worked it back and forth, trying to insert it whole. It cracked further and broke apart. When a piece fell to his chest, Sally retrieved the yellow scrap and worked it between his cold cheek and gums. Additional bits of yellow and white began to rain from his lips.
Unsatisfied, Sally retrieved them and worked them into his gums as she’d done with the first piece. Then she took the hammer from the floor beside her. She swung it with all of her strength. The steel head smashed her uncle’s lips and shattered his buckteeth, sending them and the bulk of the egg deep into his mouth and to the rim of his throat.
“Swallow it,” she whispered.
Then she pulled back the hammer and swung again.
JOYEUX PÂQUES
by Emma Ennis
Christine Lake inched her way over to the window. She planted herself in the corner, her hand shaking as she stretched it out to the curtain that was only ever closed on that particular night of the year. As her fingers probed a tiny gap between the material and the window, her body leaned away on instinct, as though she had no control over its various attachments.
Her fearful eyes scanned the garden in the gloom of early morning. Her heart hammered against her chest as she took in the eerie mist hanging low over the lawns and wrapping around the boles of the miserable trees that cried dewy tears. It was to the end of the garden, down by the fence that her eyes feared to travel the most. But she willed them, and her heart was stilled, her blood slowing to a more civilized trickle in her veins. There was nothing down there.
Suddenly the horizon pinked, a great slash of rosy dawn cut the gray sky and she watched it spread. The glow warmed her and one by one her knotted muscles began to unwind. After all those years of fear and hiding, of wondering, it turned out that the rumors were just that—rumors.
Light began to spread and now the dew glistened on the leaves. In the corner of the garden the hedge moved. Christine stiffened and almost jumped away from the window in fright before a gray-brown rabbit hopped into the clearing. She breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at the sight.
The little fella was in no hurry; its whiskers twitched as it glanced around, absorbing its new surroundings.
And then time seemed to slow down.
As Christine watched, her eyes wide, she saw a clawed hand creep from the hedge. With a swift swipe it captured the rabbit. Its snowy legs thrashed against the hold, but the gnarled fingers tightened around it, the filthy, pointed nails puncturing the little body.
From inside the house Christine could hear the creature’s agonized squeal as its captor squeezed ever tighter.
A bloody, coiled thing fell from the rabbits anus, still attached somewhere inside. Its eyes bulged like cooking egg-whites and were seconds from popping with the pressure as its head lolled around on its neck in a desperate struggle for air. With one final jerk its spine snapped and the writhing ceased. It hung like a used dishrag over the grotesque fingers.
And then she stepped into the garden.
Christine clamped her hands over her mouth. Air hissed from between her fingers as she screamed her throat raw, the sound muffled against her palm. She dropped to her knees when the thing on the lawn turned towards the window.
Fear and shock invaded her body, turning it ice cold. Her stomach convulsed and she braced herself against the wall as she vomited pools of bile and terror.
AH, EASTER. A TIME of yellow and green; of fluffy bunnies and downy chicks. Kids with chocolate-ringed lips grip colorful baskets in smeared hands, their teeth watering and fingers itching for the egg hunt. For a few hours there is an excitement in the air that is almost akin to Christmas.
But not in the town of Murrins. There the doors were locked and bolted, blinds firmly closed. And they remained so until the sun was high in the sky and the latter half of the day had begun. Nothing happened before then; there were no morning egg hunts, no early sermons in the church to celebrate the Ascension.
Families huddled inside in darkness and fear until the clock in the village struck twelve. Then cautious cracks appeared in curtains. Doors eased open and father figures emerged to inspect the lawns. The lucky ones got to walk back inside with such obvious relief that the difference in his posture from the man who had walked out moments before was as stark as if it were two separate people.
Small bonfires were lit around the backs of the houses of the less fortunate. Fathers, husbands, eldest sons could be seen toting shovels, grimacing and staying as far back as possible from the pulsating, oozing thing carried on the other end; big green globs that dripped mucus and trailed after-birth. They were tossed into the flames with a hiss and crackle. And then, as the heat set in, an unearthly wail like a cat being skinned alive would fill the air.
When the sound faded and died, and the town fell quiet, only then could the Easter festivities begin.
Murrins was not a pretty town. There was nothing in particular wrong with it. It had all the right ingredients; pretty flowers sprang from their perfectly groomed beds, litter was kept off the streets. The buildings all had uniform, old-world façades of wood and stone; no tumbledown shacks or ugly, unpainted edifices to break the charm. Livestock grazed contentedly in the lush meadows that surrounded the town and wild critters could often be seen darting from the woods.
It was like a dream, a postcard, but one had only to set foot in the town to sense the tainted air of the place. Especially on that day: Easter Sunday. No amount of town planning or aesthetics could mask it.
The town had a history, and not one that it was proud to tell. This was not something one would find in local tourist information pamphlets; it was known only to the inhabitants, passed around by word of mouth in whispered conversations designed to shock and frighten. Inevitably leaks occurred, rumors got out, and that history became a stigma that lay like a cloud over the town and stained gray the countenances of the inhabitants.