“What time is it?”
“Nearly eight. We thought we’d take an evening stroll over to the cottage. Our cottage, I mean. Not Pepe’s. God, I can’t get used to the idea. Annie and Mark’s cottage… how does it sound?”
“You mean Elsa’s cottage,” she said dully. “It belongs to Elsa.”
But he was drifting towards the door, telling her to stay there and rest. He was drifting away from her, from England, into Elsa’s burning stratosphere, into Spain. She called out after him: “Watch out for the centipede.” But he was gone.
The centipede burrows below ground to hatch its grubs. It prefers undisturbed land, the thatch of dead grasses, skeleton leaves, powdered seed heads; it lurks in cracks and craters, in the dust beneath the bony roots of olive trees. You might never see one in your whole life, except in a book. You might go hunting it out deliberately, turning every stone, peeping into crevices, and yet find only ants and spiders. Or — and no one can rule out this possibility — you might just be one of the very few who come upon it suddenly, its deadly amber stripe flashing its warning… too late. You might be an unlucky statistic, a few lines in the newspaper, the wrong place, the wrong time. Statistically it’s rare. But not impossible. Nothing is impossible.
The sun was low as Annie started towards Pepe’s cottage. She was wearing the pale blue sundress, and Elsa’s straw hat, and sandals. To the west, the sun brushed the mountaintops, turning the land the colour of Miel de Canna, porridge honey.
Things were biting her shins, mean little pinpricks of pain which she ignored. She had grown tired of it, this fear she had of wild dogs and sickness and insects; of this bright burning landscape, of skulking in Elsa’s shadow. Somehow she must steal back the initiative, show Elsa that she was no frail sappy Englishwoman to be dried out and crushed.
A slight breeze ruffled the grass as she descended to the cottage. The purple and yellow wild flowers undulated like a quilt.
“Elsa!” she sang out bravely, “Elsa… are you down there?” Then, as Elsa appeared, “This hat you gave me is too big!”
They were looking up at her, Elsa and Mark, as she flung the hat into the grass. There! That would show Elsa what she could do with her gifts. Big generous Elsa, now so silent. Both of them. As if they didn’t want her there.
Something twitched, just beneath the brim of the hat, tilting it up slightly… shifting. Annie looked down, noticing her own toes, vulnerable in the sandals. There was a moment almost of relief that she had come face to face with it at last.
It was the hat, of course, that had disturbed its nesting place. She recalled quite coolly what the book had said, how fast they moved, the centipedes, full of a mad voracious energy, poison flowing like ink from tiny steel-trap jaws.
“Once they get a grip,” Elsa had said, “you can’t shake them off.”
Elsa and Mark were clambering towards her. They seemed to be moving in slow motion. The sun going down lit Elsa’s hair in a curious two-tone of dark honey with an amber stripe. Funny how she had never noticed before, that stripe in Elsa’s hair.
As they drew closer to her, the sun vanished altogether; the eucalyptus trees shivered in the breeze. The pain was really no worse than she’d expected.
Jay Lake
The Goat Cutter
Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, with his family and their books. In 2004 his short stories appeared in dozens of markets, including Asimov’s, Chiaroscuro, Postscripts and Realms of Fantasy. His collection Greetings from Lake Wu was a Locus Recommended book for 2003 and his follow-up collection, Dogs in the Moonlight, is available from Prime Books.
About “The Goat Cutter”, Lake explains: “Everything in this story is true in one form or another, except that the Bible bus sits a bit up the road from my mother’s old farm instead of on the middle of her property.
“While I never personally met the Devil in the Texas woods, I’m pretty sure I heard him shouting on moonless nights. Life in Caldwell County can be, if anything, stranger than fiction.”
The devil lives in Houston by the ship channel in a high-rise apartment fifty-seven stories up. They say he’s got cowhide sofas and a pinball machine and a telescope in there that can see past the oil refineries and across Pasadena all the way to the Pope in Rome and on to where them Arabs pray to that big black stone.
He can see anyone anywhere from his place in the Houston sky, and he can see inside their hearts.
But I know it’s all a lie. Except about the hearts, of course. ‘Cause I know the Devil lives in an old school bus in the woods outside of Dale, Texas. He don’t need no telescope to see inside your heart, on account of he’s already there. This I know.
Central Texas gets mighty hot come summer. The air rolls in heavy off the Gulf, carries itself over two hundred miles of cow shit and sorghum fields and settles heavy on all our heads. The katydids buzz in the woods like electric fans with bad bearings, and even the skeeters get too tired to bite most days. You can smell the dry coming off the Johnson grass and out of the bar ditches.
Me and my best friend Pootie, we liked to run through the woods, climbing bob wire and following pipelines. Trees is smaller there, easier to slip between. You gotta watch out in deer season, though. Idiots come out from Austin or San Antone to their leases, get blind drunk and shoot every blessed thing that moves. Rest of the time, there’s nothing but you and them turkey vultures. Course, you can’t steal beer coolers from turkey vultures.
The Devil, he gets on pretty good with them turkey vultures.
So me and Pootie was running the woods one afternoon somewhere in the middle of summer. We was out of school, waiting to be sophomores in the fall, fixing to amount to something. Pootie was bigger than me, but I already got tongue off Martha Dempsey. Just a week or so ago back of the church hall, I even scored a little titty squeeze inside her shirt. It was over her bra, but that counts for something. I knew I was coming up good.
Pootie swears he saw Rachel MacIntire’s nipples, but she’s his cousin. I reckoned he just peeked through the bathroom window of his aunt’s trailer house, which ain’t no different from me watching Momma get out of the shower. It don’t count. If there was anything to it, he’d a sucked on ‘em, and I’d of never heard the end of that. Course I wouldn’t say no to my cousin Linda if she offered to show me a little something in the shower.
Yeah, that year we was big boys, the summer was hot, and we was always hungry and horny.
Then we met the Devil.
Me and Pootie crossed the bob wire fence near the old bus wallow on county road 61, where they finally built that little bridge over the draw. Doug Bob Aaronson had that place along the south side of 61, spent his time roasting goats, drinking tequila and shooting people’s dogs.
Doug Bob was okay, if you didn’t bring a dog. Three years back, once we turned ten, he let me and Pootie drink his beer with him. He liked to liquor up, strip down to his underwear and get his ass real warm from the fire in his smoker. We was just a guy and two kids in their shorts drinking in the woods. I’m pretty sure Momma and Uncle Reuben would of had hard words, so I never told.