The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World (7 page)

Truth is, Tyler knew why he kept hanging around Old Burt: Tyler felt sorry for him.

Well, Tyler felt sorry for Burt, and he liked the old man too. He wasn’t all bad. Sometimes, when it was just them, Tyler kinda thought Burt treated him like family. Shit, of all the people in the tree house, only Tyler knew.

Once, as they sat on Burt’s porch drinking soda, Tyler asked him, “Why’d you quit?”

“Quit what?”

“Drinking?”

“Ah,” Old Burt had told him, and Old Burt wiped beads of sweat from his glass bottle. He looked Tyler in the eye. “Used to,” he said, “I had a daughter. Michelle,” he said. “That was her name. Died a cancer. About eleven years back.”

“Oh,” said Tyler. “You quit when she died?”

“No, no,” said Burt. “Before.” He chuckled. “It was a promise to God.” Burt looked at his shoes. “When Michelle was diagnosed, I was drinking. She and her mom had moved out the house, you see? I was always showing up messed up. Wrecking cars. Interrupting soccer practice.” Old Burt shook his head. “The two girls were done with me, and they should’a been.”

It was silent. Both Tyler and Burt sipped at their drinks.

“Michelle’s mother called me up, Brandi,” he said, “that’s her name,” he shook his head, “but I gotta say, I don’t like saying it. But she called me up and told me she and Michelle needed to talk, and they had me drive up to Houston where they were living, took me to a Whataburger and told me the sad news over bad coffee, and I asked how I could help.

‘“Burt,’ Brandi told me, ‘You’ve never been much a help at all, but we thought you should know,’ and then Michelle kinda told her mother off for me, told her, ‘you said you wouldn’t do this,’ and then her mother apologized to me, and I said that I understood.

“And, well, on the way home, it just kinda hit me. I pulled off 59 in Victoria and went down to the Riverside Park and wandered the trails there, and I came across a family picking pecans off the ground, speaking Spanish as they tucked the things into plastic bags, and then, later, I saw a herd of deer standing still off in the woods, and a hurt washed over me, but a stillness too. And I was there in the woods and a sun ray dropped down like a Jacob’s Ladder, and it felt like it landed right on me, and I whispered to it, like a kid might whisper into a tin can telephone, that if God kept my daughter safe, I’d never drink again.

“I lived up to my end of the bargain, but I guess God had his fingers crossed, because I watched Michelle go skinny as a skeleton, watched all the treatments just bounce off her, maybe even make her worse, and the day she died I was holding her hand, and she said, ‘don’t start when I’m gone,’ and I told her I wouldn’t, and she said, ‘and get back with Mom,’ and I told her I would, and she smiled at me, and her big blue eyes dropped two tears, one from each, and she laid her head back on a pillow and the tears ran toward her ears.”

Silence sat strong on the porch. No movement.

“Did ya?” asked Tyler.

“What?”

“Stay sober?”

“I did.”

“And the mother.”

Burt smiled. “We were together a while,” he said. “Then one day I went on a fishing trip and she got mad at me. I came back, went to bed, and the next morning, when I woke up, she’d packed her things and was gone,” Old Burt frowned. “She left me an e-mail address, but I’ve never used it. Some things are too fragile to try to put back together.”

ROB

“Scrape’s fucking broken.”

MANNY & TESSA

“You awake?”

“Kinda.”

“Think anyone else is?”

“Probably.”

“I’m too tired to sleep.”

“Me too,” Tessa says, “isn’t that funny? I’ve never been too hungry to eat, but when I’m beat like this, I just fidget and toss.”

“I used to always have to pretend I’d been hurt.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Manny says. “Like wounded or, like, sick.”

Both Manny and Tessa giggle.

“Like, I’ll pretend I’m an old-time soldier, been shot and in a military hospital with all kinds of dying men around me, and the smell of medicine, and people fighting to save their legs from amputation, and that I’m just there and bandaged and listening to the nurse wheel carts around from bed to bed.”

“You’re fucking crazy,” Tessa says.

“Maybe,” says Manny. “But sometimes it works.”

Both Manny and Tessa lie there, their minds packed with the noise imagined from military hospitals.

Manny falls asleep.

TESSA

She thinks about nurses, soldiers gut shot and bleeding.

She thinks smells—antiseptic, urine.

The noise of pain, low grunts emitting from the wounded. Whispers to gods and mothers and girlfriends.

One soldier’s hand drapes from the side of his bed. From the tip of his index finger, dark blood drips into a pool on the tile floor. His hand is reflected in the pool, and each time a bead of blood increases the perimeter of the puddle, ripples distort the reflection, the blood shimmies iridescent.

There is a cart. Rusty wheels. A white clad nurse pushes it, and a sort of song emits. Her black shoes against the white tile in time, the sing song whine of rusty wheels spinning. Fluorescents flicker. A lullaby to Tessa.

And then she’s asleep.

TIM

Tim’s phone is near dead, but he lays beneath the covers looking at the nude pictures he’s accumulated.

Some of the girls, he can’t even remember their names. Girls he met at rodeos and girls he knew from high school and some women that he’d known from church and some of his mother’s friends and friends’ mothers and sisters of people he’d worked with.

He liked his picture collection, but it also made him feel sick.

What was wrong with him? Why was he so foul-minded?

In high school he’d had a girlfriend who’d told him he was a “good one.” That’s what she had said. She’d called him kind. She’d called him sweet.

She went away to school. She didn’t call like she said she would.

A few Christmases later, Tim was at Rudy’s, a bar that’s now closed.

She was there. The girl. She had a guy with her, and the two came up to Tim, and the girl introduced Tim to the new guy by saying, “This is my friend Tim.”

Friend Tim.

Friend Tim.

Tim scrolls through his pictures.

Chubby girls and black girls and white girls and girls with soft, full breasts, and girls with small tits, nipples the color of almonds.

Tim’s phone says: 10% Battery.

Tim looks at a few more pictures.

Tim turns off his phone.

BLUE

Blue is drunk.

Blue is snoring.

Blue’s too drunk to dream.

Or too drunk to remember.

His dreams in the morning.

MORNING

Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Hear that?” asks Old Burt.

“A branch?” says Blue. “The wind?”

Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Too constant,” says Mindy.

They all sit up. Panic upon them.

“Someone look out the window,” says Tessa.

“You look,” says Blue.

“Ain’t you just a fucking man,” says Mindy.

“Never claimed to be,” says Blue. “Ain’t we in my fucking tree house?”

“I’ll look,” says Tyler. “Probably nothing,” he says.

“After last night,” says Old Burt, “it’s doubtful.”

Tyler goes to the window, parts the drapes, places his face to the glass.

Hands. Thousands, millions, scurrying on fingers like spiders or crabs. Only hands. Black, coarse hair covering them. Fingernails sharp and long. They move flicker quick over parked cars, across rooftops. They break glass, smash mailboxes, toss broken bits of Scrape to and fro, willy nilly. Pouncing on the pads of their fingers, acrobatically, unfazed, seemingly, by gravity, they cross walls un-slowed, sweeping perpendicular to the ground the way roaches or squirrels may, the tapping sound of their progression like typing or Morse code, the clickety clack of their multitudes like a million tiny locomotives chugging along miniature tracks. A static kind of hiss from their legions, a sort of white noise birthed by their oddity, and Tyler contemplates them, unaware of what to call them, but the others in the tree house sense his fear raging, sense him growing disturbed.

Some stories are so old, they split just like rivers. Headwaters birth channels that spit tributaries in all directions. The fuzzy hand, the Devil’s hand, the black hand, the hand of Horta.

Some say this: it is the Spanish Inquisition and a Muslim man will not convert. Of course, this isn’t exact history. He could have been a Jew, a pagan, a witch. If it is a witch it is a woman. If it is a woman, it may have been a child. Whatever it was, it stood trial for its sins against the church, was found guilty and put to death, dumped in a mass grave, and there, the magic starts. How? It is unclear. For others, it is the New World. Perhaps in modern day America. Missions are erected to convert the natives, but some refuse. Those who do are similarly sentenced to death. They are buried in indigenous graveyards where the local magic does its trick. Later still, it could be a woman who feverishly masturbates to death, the hand so intent on masturbating, that it leaves its owner who can no longer maneuver it. Or, perhaps, there is a merchant so intent on counting his jewels and coins, that his hand carries on the counting even after the merchant has passed away. In all of these myths, the result is the same: An evil hand wanders the world freely. It steals, kills and torments. It maims, interferes, harasses. In some myths, the hand can grow many times the size of a man. It carries evil children away to Satan. It kills adulterers, rapes women, steals gold.