‘But why, Euchrid? I am your own father. Why?’ said a voice.
Ah looked up and saw Pa sitting up in his water-tower.
‘Why?’ he asked again. And me with the goddamn saw in mah hand.
And the tower collapsed and Pa crashed to the ground.
Then, with a weird clonic spluttering, Pa threw up the ghost – a coiling heap of ectoplasm from which a wraith-like being arose. Free of the fetters of mortality, old Pa’s ghost flew about the room – we were inside the shack now, ah was seated at the table – and with arms waving all about, he dipped and swooped around me.
Then he floated over to the table and drew a chair right up close to me and for the first time in his life Pa didn’t reek of pitch or grease. He smelt instead of… nothing, the stuff of the revenant.
‘Ah want you to concentrate. Ah want you to try and unnerstand. Ah want you to listen with both your ears and try and unnerstand,’ he began. Ah could see right through him. Ah could.
‘Once there was a rottenness residing in our home. A malign evil that ah could feel spreading through our little house on the hill like a poison thing. It was not always there, y’unnerstand? There was a time when our home was a happy one and we were content, your Ma and me.
‘The first time ah noticed the stench of this rottenness was in your mother, years ago. You were not born yet, in fact Ma was big with you and your brother. Did you know you had a twin brother? Oh yes. God’s truth. Only lived one day. Just closed his eyes and passed over to the other side – this side.’
Pa’s ghost snapped his fingers in front of mah face and said,
‘Concentrate, boy, you’re drifting, you’re drifting.
‘The bigger your mother got with you two, the meaner, more bad-tempered and downright belligerent she became. She hit the bottle hard and the bottle hit back. She finally gave birth to you – you and your brother – and ah watched the years go by, the air poisoned with the sickness. But a man can’t just let something like that go on.
‘After ah had killed her, we were happy, you and me. And for a while, a week or two, ah experienced a kind of elation, ah did, happy to have finally purged our home of the mouldering evil. Doubly happy ah had broke down the barrier that stood ‘twixt thee and me. But all the time, boy, ah had the feeling something was not quite right. All the time ah felt there was something not quite right in all this – something to do with evilness and madness and murder. Something to do with you.’ Pa leaned forward and pointed one spectral finger at me. ‘Something to do with you.’ And the fabric of his being – or non-being – pinked as though his spectral blood was on the rise. His words became quicker, more agitated, and in his excitement Pa rose off the seat and hovered in the air.
‘One morning ah woke up and ah knew the evil had returned. Ah could hear the weird hissing and snipping and bumping around coming from your room, and suddenly ah realized that the evilness had never left our home at all.’ The ghost took mah hands by the wrists, and raising them he turned them this way and that. ‘Ah mean just look at your hands and wrists. Just what in God’s name have you been doing? More than a little sabotage. More than a little patricide.’ He put them down again, grimacing at the sight of them.
Prodding the table with his finger for emphasis, Pa hissed through his teeth. ‘Mule-pure hill blood,’ he said. ‘We’re one of a kind.’
Then ah think ah woke up for a moment. It was pitch black. All ah could hear was the creek and its slow-seeping waters. Ah remembered the bridge. Ah remembered the brambles. But only for a moment. Only for a moment. Then back. Back.
Ah was naked. Ah floated in an inky void like a deep-sea diver or a spaceman – slow, bumping things. Ah know there was another explorer with me, over there, in the liquid lightlessness.
Suddenly, ah was engaged in violent action – attacked – a tangle of limbs, slippery, naked, grappling, tugged at mah oxygen supply. Ah was thrown against a soft wall. A cell. The cell was padded. Ah felt a strap or a cord encircle me, pinning mah arms to mah sides but ah struggled free from mah slimy bonds. Ah looped the cord over mah attacker’s head and tightened it around his neck and in a few thrashing minutes ah had strangled the bastard. He floated dead on his oxygen hose.
Then a brilliant light erupted above us and we were drawn toward it, reeled in toward the screaming hole.
The sound of an automobile in low gear, a pick-up, all motor-hum and grinding gravel, accompanied our sudden ascent, cruising through the back alleyways, the crime slums of mah subconsciousness. Ah opened mah eyes. Mah body was wrapped in a binding caul of placental warmth and the pong of fresh cloaca and the sound of its trickling waters – the sensory devices of mah dreams – continued to dominate mah senses. Lying on mah side on the bank of the creek, ah gazed into the black night. The air was warm and thick and wet, and the creek shifted its load and pumped it into the fields somewhere. Fear came like the droning motors that crept closer. Only when they were nearly upon me – there were two now – and ah could see the sweeping beams of torchlight fanning the foisoned fields, did mah mind alert mah body to the impending danger.
Ah scrambled up the cool damp clay of the bank, sliding and slipping in the muddy earth, and mounting the steep upgrade ah clung to a wood beam support beneath the bridge and listened in silence to the funereal approach. Ah counted four beams of light, two on either side, which meant six men in all, including the two drivers. Their progress was thorough, painful, predatory. Ah crawled between two pylons where ah would be safe from the beams and listened carefully, mah eyes gazing absently at the waters, and for a moment ah thought the moon had fallen from its heavenly nest, along with a handful of stars, and landed in the creek.
‘It’s only the moon’s reflection,’ ah told mahself, as the wheels of the first pick-up hit the wooden planks of the bridge directly above me. The stars looked as big as gold coins.
‘Shit!’ ah thought, and ah slipped and skidded back down the bank to the creek – to the moon and the six gold stars. ‘That ain’t a reflection!’ ah thought, and ah scooped up mah admiral’s jacket and mah sickle that lay beside it. The vehicles had stopped on top of the bridge and ah heard the sound of cranky metal doors grating open and slamming shut.
Ah mounted the slope again, fearful for mah own bright nakedness, and as ah climbed between the pillars ah saw the plunging beams of light prod the briar, the bank, the creek, and ah squeezed into the niche where the unnerstructure of the bridge met the top of the bank. Ah could feel their booted footfall clopping on the boards inches above mah head. Ah tried to take command of mah whistling anhelations but the rising fist of pain tightened about mah throat and mah heart. O mah heart pounded up such a resounding alert in that shallow crawlspace that ah felt it necessary to roll mah jacket and trousers into a thick muff and press it against the left side of mah chest. The clay felt cold and clammy, like dead skin, and ah could hear all around me weird scratchings coming from the inky recesses of collected scum and rotten timber. Ah could see the light of the torches winking through the slatted beams. Fat slugs glistened and groped on the unnerbelly of the bridge, thrown into a state of confusion by mah sudden presence.
Two men stood almost directly over me, shining their torches down at the creek and the bank, one of them leaning out over the railing and trying to probe as much of the darkness unner the bridge as the angle of the beam would allow. But the crawlspace in which ah huddled, naked as a baby, lay well beyond the searching finger of light.
In the darkness ah listened to those above me talk, and with each footfall tiny deposits of sand would spill onto mah body from between the slatted beams.