The Rascal
WILDE CITY PRESS
The Rascal © 2015 Eric Arvin
Published in the US and Australia by Wilde City Press 2015
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Published by Wilde City Press
ISBN
:
978-1-925313-49-9
Cover Art © 2015 Wilde City Press
THE RASCAL
Eric Arvin
People would believe almost anything if told to them by the right storyteller. But would anyone believe what he had been through in the past few months? Would they believe his life story? One can believe in angels. Those, the world has said, are acceptable spiritual flourishes. But tell someone of ghosts, of demons—and vengeful ones at that—and you’re a crazy man.
The fall should have killed him. That was the whole point. But he lay there, his cheek against the moist earth at the bottom of the well while something sharp and jagged jabbed angrily at his stomach from beneath him. At least it didn’t hurt. He was beyond that kind of pain.
He’d never known darkness as black as this. Yet there was moonlight somewhere above him. He just couldn’t bend his neck to see it. He was so far down the well the moon had given up its search for him. Any other person would have tried to scream. To cry and shout for help, even if in vain.
He heard dripping, water seeping through the stones of the well and soaking into the garbage around him. Into this, his eventual final resting place. He wondered how long he would have to wait for death. The horrible hours waiting. How long had he waited already?
A strange whistling could be heard faintly overhead. Night breezes on the coast were the loneliest in all the world. They bit at the ears. There were certain things—certain voices and laughter—he would have loved to hear one last time before he died, but those winds… he wanted no part of them. Those winds brought trouble on their currents. He’d felt that harsh tinge to them, that pinch, not long after he had bought the place. Or rather, not long after his
wife
had bought the place.
If she had only known the truth, everything could have been avoided.
His mind was clouding now. He felt a trickle of water on his face. No. Not water. Blood. Most likely his own from the fall. He imagined himself a twisted mess on the stinking well floor with all the other tossed debris from decades past. Just the latest addition to a pile of refuse, out of sight and out of mind. Don’t think about it and it doesn’t exist.
He imagined he was smiling, though he couldn’t be certain. There was no way the rascal could get him now. He had felt it trying for weeks, every hour more intrusive since the dreams began.
He hadn’t known what it was in the beginning. At first it had been but an itch. But as things went on, the power of possession grew stronger. It slid beneath his skin like he was an old shirt and it was a familiar fit. The rascal was taking control of things. What it wanted was blood and flesh. And it knew his flesh very well. Oh yes. Very well, indeed.
He, a modern man with his family, had come, shrugging off anything he was told about the old place, casting all warnings aside as superstitious hokum. He only wanted to do his penance. But then it began.
He had never tried to understand the reasons why this dark thing wanted him. All he knew was that it desired the body he walked around in, the four limbs and aging flesh. And it would have had it if he had not done something drastic to stop it.
But now where was the rascal? Did it not want this broken man on the well floor? Could it not reanimate his limbs and climb up out of the well as he had seen the damned thing reanimate his precious little—?
He could wish he had never come here to this place, but that was useless now. He could cry. He most likely already was. Again, however, what good was crying over a fate he brought on himself?
The lines were blurring. Things were spreading apart at molecular levels. He heard a low moan and he felt his dying heart jump. He thought it was the rascal at first, climbing down the well to take him over after all. But that could not be true. The dark hate had released him as he threw himself down the well. No. The moan was something more familiar. And then he realized what was happening. This was his own soul crying. Leaving for good.
“Don’t go! Don’t leave me here in this cold place all alone.” How like a child every man is at the end. How greedily he clings to some sort of comfort.
But it was a slippery thing to catch, his soul. Like a fish wriggling in wet hands. The soul climbs up regardless of cage or coercion.
He did not suffer much longer in loneliness and pain. His eyes shut. The last visual image he would have of the world was the glimmer of a little glass pony his daughter had thrown away months ago.
On Bad Luck Hill
The town of Wicker sat like an awestruck supplicant below the hill. The quaint little structures—the churches and banks, the Italianate stores, and restaurants of Main Street—even seemed to lean slightly away in veneration. The height of each successive building shrunk as they neared the hill. Both sides of the street were like lines of perspective in a painting, leading the eyes straight off to what would seem Wicker’s raison d’être.
Chloe Singh-Cane felt the town’s sense of reverence and expectation as she walked from the old, beaten Jeep into the small grocery store with her husband, Jeff. The few people on the sidewalks abruptly stopped what they were doing and looked at the strangers as if in rapt gratitude. Their expressions verged on hunger. Chloe walked as close to Jeff as he would allow her. His personal space was still precious to him where she was involved.
The store clerk, a razor-thin woman with willows for fingers, watched them from beneath the rims of her glasses. A pleasant, if knowing smile never shifted or fell. There was no one else in the store.
It was a small cubicle of a shop that had been there since the town’s founding. Like all of the structures on the main street, it seemed stoic and stuck
,
as if the shelves and walls were still adjusting to fluorescent lighting and the computer age was but science fiction. Arts and crafts were sold alongside loaves of bread and bags of candy. Individual colas could still be purchased out of an icebox. There was a smell of nostalgic comfort: wood stoves and wax candles.
Jeff went to the pharmacy aisle and picked up a bottle of aspirin. It had been a long drive and his back was hurting him. Chloe had volunteered to take over, but he shrugged her off as if her suggestion was an annoyance.
Chloe wandered around the store, happy to stretch her legs. She was still surrounded by silence, but at least this was a new silence. In the Jeep, Jeff’s silence had been covered by rock music. In the store, it was disguised by pop-flavored piano music and scented candles. She picked up a bag of candy corn and a bag of sour gummies.
Jeff was waiting at the cash register. He had a cold bottle of root beer to wash down the aspirin. The clerk put down the tabloid magazine she was thumbing through and continued to smile at them as she rang the items up. The lighting behind her caused her long fingers to cast thin shadows.
“Just passing through?” she asked, her voice a scratchy, nicotine-lined thing.
“No,” Chloe offered. “We bought a cottage up on the hill.”
The clerk’s bagging of the items slowed to a crawl. Her eyes swallowed them. “The little place up on Bad Luck Hill?”
“Is that what it’s called? Why in heaven’s name is it called Bad Luck Hill?”
The clerk’s item bagging picked up. “Silly reasons. Or none at all. Who can remember how things get their names?”
Jeff and Chloe exchanged quick glances. It was the first eye contact with Jeff Chloe could remember having for miles.
“I’m Odette,” the wiry woman said. “Me and my sister, Alma, run this place. You let us know if you need anything else, you hear? We can get you anything you need.”
Jeff picked up the small brown paper bag, rolling it at the top. “How close is the next town?” he asked. “Is there a hospital near?”
“Do you need one?”
“Just inquiring. This is the first town we’ve seen for an hour and a half.”
“There’s your answer, sweet pea. We’re it as far as Bad Luck Hill is concerned. As for a hospital, that’s an hour farther still. But we got a doctor, Doc Holland. He’s good. Self-trained.”
“Self-trained,” Jeff repeated in a whisper.
“We should be going,” Chloe said. “We have a lot to unpack. We don’t want to keep you.”
Odette snorted. “Keep me from what, sweet pea? Look around. We’re not exactly Walmart. You’re the first customers we’ve had all day.”
Chloe gave a pleasant, if uncomfortable, smile and touched Jeff’s shoulder to suggest they should leave. They had made it to the door when Odette turned their heads again.
“But things will pick up. Our business here at the store, I mean. Business is gonna pick up right quick very soon. I can sense these things.”
Winter was coming. The winds were pushing it over the sea to the coast. From the passenger seat, Chloe dissected the sky and the sea as they drove the twisting incline road to their new home, a place they had purchased sight unseen. Chloe tried to peer past the dulling grays. She tried to find the point where sea touched sky, both born of the same line yet separating in opposite directions. The gray would not let her, though. It was
too
gray, too uncertain it was even a color.
Jeff drove. He hadn’t said anything for a good twenty minutes, not since they left Wicker. Jeff had always been the quiet sort. It was a selfish quiet, as if his time and words were gold and he would not spend either hastily. But that could no longer be the go-to reasoning for all of his reserve. For the past year, things had changed between them, fallen away, and that was all Chloe’s doing. She realized her error and owned it the best she could. That was one of the reasons she had mentioned moving somewhere else in the first place. New beginnings could only take root in new ground. Maybe Chloe’s apologies would be heard better on stranger earth. And, too, it would be good for them—for their relationship—to get out of the reaches of her family. They were born meddlers. Her father was an Indian businessman; her mother, an American entrepreneur who owned the adventure tourism business that employed both her and Jeff.
“Why would you need that much time off?” her mother had asked when Chloe told her they were moving. “You can work just as well there as you can here, can’t you? And where is
there
, anyway? Maybe it could be a new business opportunity for us.”
“No, Mother. No business. Just me and Jeff. And I’m not telling you where we’re moving.”
“I can find you easily enough, darling.”
“Mother, no. And I have a new cell phone. So does Jeff. The old number is useless. Just let us be for a while.”