Held (27 page)

I nodded. “One. A girl.”

Burt nodded. “So you can imagine how upset you’d be if you caught a man peepin’ in at her. Especially if it was a man you were payin’ to work for you; a man you’d put up in your barn and trusted to be around your family.”

I nodded again. He was right. I would be beyond infuriated. I wasn’t even sure there was a word for what I would be. I drank the last of my beer, wondering if I could invent a new word that would cover such an emotion, and then I ordered the second of my three beers.

“He was angry, that’s for sure,” Burt continued. “He ran up to Lucius and didn’t even ask any questions, just started beatin’ him to a bloody pulp. His wife Sarah was inside the house. She was plagued with bad headaches that kept her up most nights, see. She was up with a bad one that night, knittin’ a blanket for the upcomin’ winter. She heard the commotion and came a runnin’ outside, still holding the knittin’ needles. She saw the two men fightin’ and ran over to them, demandin’ to know what was goin’ on.”

I could easily picture Molly doing this. I could see the oversized t-shirt she always slept in swishing around her thighs as she ran. I imagined her curly, brown hair flapping behind her as she rushed up to me and demanded to know what was happening. Though it was totally inappropriate to do so in the midst of Burt’s story, I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of my wife nearly naked. I was snapped out of my lustful thoughts when Burt went on with his tale.

“James told her what he’d caught Lucius doin’ while he had the boy down on the ground. James was on top of him, throwin’ punch after punch, and landin’ every one of ‘em on the boy’s face. Sarah stood there, rollin’ this over in her mind, I’m sure. Of course, I have no way of knowin’ for sure what she was thinkin’, see. But I can imagine.”

Burt paused for a drink and a cheek-inflating belch before continuing.

“When James grew tired of beatin’ Lucius, he stood, but Sarah was just getting’ started, see. I guess it had finally settled in on her that this man had been peepin’ on her daughter because that’s when she bent down and stabbed a knittin’ needle through each of his eyes.”

I cringed. “Jesus.”

“Lucius, he just lay there on the ground with those needles stickin’ out of his eyes, bleedin’ from the nose and mouth, and rollin’ around in agony. James took a step back and looked at Sarah in disbelief. While he stood there, shocked that his dainty little wife could do somethin’ so awful, Lucius got up and started swingin’. Before James could register what was happenin’, Lucius - blind now because of the needles, ya know- had managed to make one of those punches land square against Sarah’s face.” Burt made a fist and brought it up to his jaw to mime the event, just in case I had no idea what a thrown punch looked like.

“When James realized what had happened and he saw Sarah fall backwards, he lurched forward and grabbed Lucius. He took to beatin’ him again, worse now than the first time because not only had Lucius peeped in on the man’s daughter, but he had also hit his wife. That’ll make a feller real mad, see. Well, James threw a punch that drove one of those knittin’ needles farther into Lucius’s eye. James threw a few more punches before he realized that Lucius was just layin’ there twitchin’, not even fightin’ back. When the twitchin’ stopped and Lucius got still, they thought he was dead.”

“Jesus,” I muttered again.

“He got up off Lucius and looked down at him. When he caught his breath and calmed down, he noticed Sarah standin’ at his side. She told him he’d killed Lucius, but he didn’t believe her. He didn’t
want
to believe her. He didn’t want to kill the bastard, just beat the shit out of him and send him down the road. But it was too late, see. They’d already done it.”

Burt stopped to finish that beer and order another.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” John asked.

“Hell no, I ain’t had enough,” Burt replied. “If I’m still sittin’ here an’ makin’ sense, I ain’t had enough.”

John shook his head and gave Burt another beer.

“Where was I? Oh yeah, yeah. So there they were, Sarah and James, standing over Lucius’s body. They wondered what they were gonna do with him. They didn’t want anyone to know what they’d done. After all, they were upstanding people, see. They didn’t want to tarnish their reputations. Back then, ya see, your reputation was a big deal.”

“So what’d they do with his body?”

“Well, they thought about it for a while. They thought about throwin’ it in the river. They thought about buryin’ it. They thought about a lot of things. But they finally decided that the quickest and easiest thing to do was drag him out into the corn field and put him up on the scarecrow post. Let the buzzards take care of the rest. And that’s what they did.” Burt shrugged and took a long drink of beer.

“My god, Burt. That’s a horrible story.”

“Told you it was.”

“True. You warned me.” I took a drink of my beer and rolled the story around in my mind. I wondered how people knew about this if the only people that knew were James and Sarah. How had word seeped out for the story to be passed around? I considered asking Burt, but decided against it. What I really thought was that he’d made it all up, probably to scare me. I was the new, out-of-town city boy who’d just leased that farm. Burt was probably just a bored local who got a kick out of scaring newcomers.

“Now this is where the story gets weird,” Burt said.

I looked at him, obviously confused. In my peripheral vision, I noticed John shaking his head while pouring someone a glass of something stiffer than a beer.

“You mean there’s more?”

“Oh there’s plenty more to this story. But if that first part rattled your cage, the rest of the story’s gonna knock your feathers off.”

I stood on the cool grass, looking through the railing of the porch at my rocking chair, the very chair in which I had been sitting only a minute earlier, which was now broken into a dozen pieces and scattered across the porch.

Quickly, I scanned the porch and yard around it, but saw no one. It had only taken me a few seconds to walk back across the yard, yet there was no one around. Whoever had broken the chair had left in a hurry, and I was certain that it was some
one
and not some
thing.
The only logical suspect was the man from the corn field.

That was unacceptable. He wasn’t going to get away with this. I loved that chair. And even if I didn’t, I wasn’t going to let him escape unpunished.

Angry now that this asshole had the nerve to come on
my
property and destroy
my
rocking chair, I walked around the house in search of him. Sure, I realized it was stupid. I should’ve gone in the house and grabbed a gun. I should’ve put on some pants and shoes. And I should’ve stopped pursing my lips like my mother, but I did none of those things. With pursed lips, naked legs, and bare feet, I walked around the house prepared for a confrontation.

I walked past the front porch and turned the corner. The clouds had covered the moon again, and in the darkness, I saw no one. I walked down the north side of the house, the side that was hidden in shadows even when the moon was bright, determined to find this guy. I was hell-bent on getting an answer as to why he was here and why he’d smashed my beloved rocking chair.

When I turned the corner at the back of the house and looked across the yard, the clouds slid off the moon and the world brightened once again. I saw no one, so I walked across the back yard, keeping close to the screened-in porch that ran the width of the house. When I got to the other corner of the house, my search finally ended. I found him. The bright light of the full moon cast his shadow on the ground and told me he was there, standing perfectly still just around the corner. He was waiting, knife in hand.

I froze mid-step. My breath caught at the sight of his large shadow stretched across the grass, but my heart hammered away in my chest. Common sense was starting to settle in now, and I realized that this was quite possibly the dumbest thing I’d ever done. Scenes from horror movies started popping into my mind again, and I decided that it was best for me to take my stubborn ass inside and wait for Tim. I was only a few feet from the chair-smashing asshole, but suddenly I didn’t want to be.

Quietly, I retreated a few steps, then turned and quickly crept back around the house and up onto the front porch. I hoped he’d just go back to wherever he’d came from, though it seemed very unlikely that he had walked all the way through the field just to destroy my rocking chair. There had to be another reason for him to be here, but I couldn’t imagine what it could be.

I crossed the porch, carefully avoiding broken pieces of my chair, opened the creaky screen door, and went inside. I loved the old screen doors on this house, even the creaky springs that screamed in protest each time the door was used. It was very country. After living my life in the city among the honking horns and blaring alarms and screaming sirens, a creaky spring was music to my ears. However, there were times when I longed for a stealthier door, one that wouldn’t give me away if, say, a crazy knife-wielding man ever showed up in the middle of the night to stalk around the house when I was home alone.

Once inside, I shut and locked the door behind me, even thumbing the deadbolt into place. I made it about five steps away from the door when he knocked. Okay, knock wasn’t what he did. He
pounded
on the door as if he were angry; as if
he
was the one who’d just lost a beloved rocking chair.

After nearly jumping out of my skin, I spun around, heart pounding furiously in my chest. I walked to the door, determined to throw it open and confront him. But when I got there, I had a feeling that if I did that, it would be the last thing I’d ever do. I don’t know where the feeling came from, but I didn’t want to ignore it.

I hesitated with my hand on the door, unsure of what to do. Slowly, I leaned forward and put my ear against the wood. I heard nothing on the other side.

The door was large, and there were four small panes of glass in a row across the top quarter of it. I inched my way up on to my tip toes and peeked out one of the little windows. What I saw made my pounding heart stand still and my breath catch in my lungs.

It was a very large man. Only it wasn’t a man at all. His clothes were torn and dirty. Through a hole in the left sleeve of his black jacket, I thought I saw bone, but that was impossible. He wore a black, brimmed hat, also torn and dirty. His head was tilted down and cocked to the side, as if too were listening for sounds on the other side of the door, the only thing that stood between us.

I stared at him, still not breathing. It was creepy, there was no doubt about it, but when he raised his head and looked at me, it was absolutely terrifying.

In the second before the clouds covered the moon and submerged us into total darkness, I saw his face, a mangled mass of hanging flesh and protruding bones. And his eyes…He had no eyes. His eye sockets were dark, completely black. But he still seemed to be looking right at me. I must’ve seen him wrong. After all, I only saw his face for a second before the moon was hidden, and his back was to the moon, which cloaked his face in shadows. My imagination, paired with the wine and with psyching myself up into a horror movie frame of mind, must’ve made me see things that weren’t real.

With thoughts of zombies on my mind, I turned and ran to the stairs, each step creaking underfoot. Mentally, I congratulated myself for not screaming. Take that, horror movies. Not all women were big bags of vocal chords, just looking for reasons to scream.

I was three steps up when the moon brightened the world and he began pounding at the door again. I stopped and turned, unable to believe the nerve of this man. As I stared at the door, I could see the chain rattling with each pound of his fists. From my position on the stairs, I could see his hat through the windows at the top of the door. That is, until the clouds covered the moon again and everything grew dark.

I’d be safe if I could get upstairs and hide. There, I could wait for Tim to come home. I could call the cops with the phone in the bedroom if it came to that. I hoped it wouldn’t, but it was starting to look like it just might. So I continued on up the stairs, thinking of where I could hide and what I should do to keep both myself and my sleeping daughter safe. As this plan formulated in my mind, I turned to continue up the stairs.

When I heard the door explode open behind me, all thoughts of safety were gone. Also gone was the thought that I could hide and wait for Tim to come home. And gone was the pride of not screaming.

I told myself I wasn’t going to look back. In every horror movie ever made, the fleeing potential victim risked a glance behind them which caused them to fall and inevitably be murdered. That wasn’t going to me. I was
not
going to look behind me.

I looked behind me as I stepped off the stairs and onto the second floor. I just couldn’t help myself.

The man burst through the open door, crunching the splinters of wood from the busted jamb beneath his feet. I ran into the first room on the left, a spare bedroom. I took a second to decide whether or not I should shut the door. I left it open. It would’ve been the only closed door in the hallway, which was as good as hanging a sign on the door that said I’M IN HERE, COME ON IN. Plus, every door in the house squeaked and was sure to give away my location. And if those reasons weren’t enough, I wanted to be able to keep track of this guy. I couldn’t do that as well through a closed door.