A Penny Down the Well: A Short Story Collection of Horrifying Events (29 page)

Harriet nodded, pulling up
the ends of her dress to show it was stuffed safely into a tight
garter she kept around her thigh. Floyd smiled and took his wife’s
hand before heading over to the main cabin in the Fort.

***

“
We should bless the meal
before we eat it, don’t you all think?” It was less of a challenge
for Harriet to think about giving a moment for God despite all of
the recent trauma. In any case, she saw this small opportunity as a
blessing, a gift from God in the bleakest of moments in her
life.

Jasper and Chance didn’t
say anything in dispute of the consideration and lowered their
heads as they all stood around the small, wooden table. They
clasped their hands together and waited for the benediction of the
unlikely meal to begin. Floyd did the same and closed his eyes,
waiting for his wife to give the prayer.

“
Dear
God. We want to thank you for this meal and we want to thank you
for your continued protection of us that are still here. We know
that you have a divine plan, one that we aren’t meant to
understand, but we know that
always
you are doing your work by
grand design.” As Harriet continued with the vibrant prayer, Floyd
felt a subconscious buzz about his face. He opened his eyes in the
middle of the prayer to look across the table, to see that both
Jasper and Chance were staring directly at him, both with a twisted
smile on their face. Floyd swallowed hard and closed his eyes once
again, only more tightly this time, until the prayer was over. When
the prayer was completed, Floyd and Harriet both finished with a
conclusive “Amen,” while Jasper and Chance simply sat in front of
their plates.

Floyd thought to break up
the discomfort from the look a moment prior. “So, what sort of
animal was this? It smells delicious.”

Jasper didn’t waste any
time cutting into the meat on his plate, stabbing it with his fork
and shoving it into his mouth. “You’re ‘bout the most questioning
man I’ve ever met, Floyd Greyson. You ain’t eatin’ in what? Two
days? And you’re concerned now about what it is? It’s meat!” And he
laughed, nudging Chance at his left, who also laughed and chewed
away.

Floyd grinned a bit, still
very uncomfortable. “Right. I don’t think I could learn anything
that would make it any less appetizing.” And he cut into the meat
and took a bite. The meat had a sort of greyish tone about it,
similar to veal or lamb when cooked. It tasted very much of veal,
but Floyd wouldn’t be able to identify what animal it really was,
and suspected it was likely an animal he was less familiar with
from the foreign parts of the country. “It’s very good.”

Harriet took a bite
herself and smiled. She took in a breath, then allowed the warm,
steamy food to travel down her throat to her grumbling belly.
Harriet did her best to remain as ladylike as she could, despite
her will to eat ravenously after having gone without for so long.
After the initial silence necessary for getting a little food down
passed, Harriet asked, “Why haven’t the Shoshoni come into the
Fort? It seems like that would be something they would do,
especially if they attacked our camp.”

Chance shook his head,
cutting away the sinewy pieces of meat, one by one. “Nah. Those
savages are afraid of our weapons. I don’t think they know how many
we have, or don’t have, and decided the best thing they can do is
pick us off while we’re outside of our gates, as armed as men can
be away from a more permanent armament.”

Harriet nodded, not
thinking much about the answer, but supposing it made
sense.

Floyd chimed in, despite
being called out as someone who asks too many questions. “And there
were many people here at Fort Bleck before it became just the two
of you?”

Jasper nodded, swallowing
a hunk of meat. “Maybe fifteen, steady. Slowly dwindled down.
People would disappear in the night, either to run off or maybe
they were taken. Some never returned from hunts or any trip outside
of the walls. Eventually it was just us here. We had provisions,
you know, but eventually those things run out. Anyone coming
through that might have given us a hand, well, you see what’s
probably been happening to them. We’ve become isolated. We’ve
written letters to the government, asking for assistance and all,
but it doesn’t seem any of them get out. Or, maybe no one receivin’
them cares enough to do anything.”

Floyd thought about which
of the two it likely was. The Western frontier was a place that
existed in isolation. Those that dared it accepted its features. He
sighed and remained silent after the question, becoming thoughtful.
They all became quiet for a long time. Nothing else strange
happened there at the dinner table, and when they were done, fat
and happy for the first time in a long time, the Greyson’s returned
to their cabin.

“
They gave me the
strangest look, Hattie. You should have seen it. They may have
lowered their heads for God, but they weren’t praying with us. I
can promise you that.” Floyd confessed what he’d seen at the dinner
table as he rolled over in his bed, tired after not having slept
much the night before, or the night before that. He was exhausted,
made even more lethargic by finally having something to eat, and
something hearty and full like a slab of meat.

Harriet sighed. She
glanced to the gun on the small table beside the bed, right beneath
a simple, white candle flickering back and forth even with the
absence of wind. “These men are probably as lost as any, out here,
under the conditions they’re in. God will find a way into their
hearts when they’re ready to open them.” Always faithful and always
devout.

Floyd closed his eyes,
slowed his breathing and thought about her words as he began to
drift to sleep, and then was, heavily. Harriet smiled to her
husband and watched him for a few minutes before she leaned over to
blow out the candle. She, too, fell asleep promptly.

That’s when something
unexpected occurred.

What may have been
expected at this point was that a person’s sleep was never a
certain thing. It was a gift that came when the many worldly
disturbances abound managed to keep themselves away for a long
enough time for a person to rest. The past few nights were
unrelenting with their disturbances, but the one that roused
Harriet Greyson this night were different than the disturbances
before. This one, for one, wasn’t immediately threatening. There
wasn’t an armed native man seeking sacrifices for a ritual standing
over her and her husband, nor was there a frantic American
frontiersman shouting about a deviant guide; tonight it was the
sound of chopping.

Harriet sat up in bed,
listening as the sound echoed in the middle of the
night.

Chop. Chop. Chop.
Chop.

The successive pounding
reverberated through Harriet’s body and soul. She leaned over and
whispered toward Floyd.

“
Floyd.” She said with a
soft urgency in her voice. “Floyd, do you hear that?”

Floyd responded with a
sort of incoherent grunt and started snoring loudly. Her attempts
did nothing to wake him. Harriet looked down to her exhausted
husband and considered investigating the matter on her own,
something her husband clearly would have disapproved of, but
Harriet hadn’t given him the chance to do so.

Harriet carefully swung
her legs out of the bed and stepped onto the cool, wooden
floorboards. She dressed herself and picked up the gun that sat on
the corner of the table beside the bed. Harriet quietly moved
across the room and opened the door to hear the sound grow louder
now. Her eyes cast back to her sleeping husband, still completely
unaware of the strange circumstance, before Harriet slipped out of
the cabin to move toward the source of the sound.

Harriet remained near to
the walls of the cabin as she tried to identify the source of the
sound. In her hand, she held fast to the loaded weapon, prepared to
fire the thing (or was prepared in theory) if anything should have
gone awry. What Harriet expected was that the sound would be coming
from some sort of late night work on behalf of Jasper or Chance,
and not something worse, such as a raiding tribe trying to hack
away at walls with a hatchet. The sound seemed closer when she
rounded the main cabin, which housed Jasper and Chance, and which
was the same place Harriet and Floyd had shared dinner with the two
men earlier. Cautiously along the walls, she turned the corner to
reveal what was making the sound.

Chop. Chop. Chop.
Chop.

Each successive strike of
that cleaver came down to further sever a piece of meat from the
dismembered and disfigured human body, still in whatever clothes
the person had been wearing when likely murdered. Chance took his
time, even whistling as he worked, bringing that sharpened cleaver
down slightly below the carcass’s shoulder until the limb fell away
like a cut branch from a tree. Blood spattered and shot about
Chance’s face, which didn’t seem to make much of a difference from
the moment that Harriet had first seen the image. By the time she
arrived, he was already thoroughly painted in the crimson fluid, a
sort of imagery that made the war-paint of the raiding party from
the camp seem like children’s finger paint.

Harriet could not help but
feel an urgency to scream aloud, but she prevented herself be
covering her mouth firmly with her free hand, using the other to
clench her weapon as tightly as she could. This restraint on her
part gave a moment later when a particularly grotesque sound echoed
from behind the main cabin, before a silence and a sudden,
unexpected rolling of a man’s head happened to halt somewhere near
the corner of the building, near to where Harriet stood in hiding.
The face of the eternally terrified, decapitated head revealed the
identity of the carcass being cut asunder: it was Grant Vickers, a
family friend and the Greyson party’s cartographer. No longer could
Harriet stand by, nor could she compel herself to return to her
cabin to wake her husband. A rush of uncontrollable emotion surged
through her body as her face burned with fear, anger and confusion.
She turned the corner suddenly and pointed the gun out in front of
her, with her eyes targeting the blood-soaked frontiersman, Chance.
Chance looked up to notice the woman, a cleaver in one hand, a
severed arm in the other. Suddenly, he lifted the cleaver high into
the air in preparation to send it Harriet’s way but in a single,
perfect shot, a bullet went flailing from the end of the pistol,
through the thin epidermal and vascular tissue at the skull,
shattering bone, sending brain matter askew within his head, all
before breaking free and sailing into the wall behind Chance. As
the electrical signals in Chance’s head fizzled, his body collapsed
to the ground amid the violent turmoil of his previous action,
before ushering an unbearable silence.

Harriet’s hands became
limp and her lip began to quiver, involuntarily now whispering to
the one she claimed, “Oh God. Oh God. Oh no...” And as it would
with shock, everything came rushing in like a river from a broken
levee. The silence did not last long. A sound was heard from the
front of the main cabin, which likely signified Jasper was awake
and heard the noise. Another sound came from the cabin Harriet and
Floyd slept in before she woke. “Oh no!” Harriet
shouted.

“
Harriet? Harriet?! Are you out there? Jasper. Jasper, have
you seen my wife? I think I just heard a
—” but his voice was cut off with a second blast of a
weapon.

Harriet covered her mouth
once again, restraining a scream. Tears welled in her eyes and she
shook her head in disbelief, clutching the warm-barreled weapon to
her chest like a prized possession. Harriet couldn’t believe what
happened. A moment ago, she put a bullet through a man’s head, only
to hear the gunshot from the other side of the cabin that likely
ended her husband’s life. Then she heard footsteps.

Harriet ran behind the
chopping table, now covered with gore and blood. She ducked down
behind it, peering fearfully around the side, her entire body
shaking from head to toe, making it almost impossible to hold (or
aim) the weapon in her hand. Over and over, prayers were muttered
internally, asking for any semblance of grace from God, but she
hadn’t heard a reply in what now seemed like forever. The footsteps
stopped near the corner of the cabin, where Harriet first observed
Chance chopping Grant Vickers to pieces. She tried to hold her
breath, to calm herself in any way she could, so that he wouldn’t
know exactly where she was, but it was obvious that Jasper was
aware.

“
Now,
now, Ms. Greyson. Ain’t any reason to be shootin’ anybody. We’re
all friends here.” Jasper said in a cool, coaching
tone.

Harriet, a passionate
woman, couldn’t contain herself and shouted, though she remained
“safely” behind the chopping table. “What did you do to Floyd, you
monster!” It was now the second time Harriet called Jasper such,
only she didn’t realize the level of monstrosity about the two
gunmen of Fort Bleck when she said it the first time.

What sounded like the
cocking of a gun was heard around the corner. “Well, I’m afraid
Floyd had to die.” Which was telling of the sort of friendship
Jasper suggested. “Ain’t fair, I don’t think, two against one like
that. I mean, I’m guessing Chance is dead around this corner right
here, but I ain’t gonna peek around to see, because I think you
might just try to put a bullet between my eyes.” The words were
still calm. Unusually calm.