AFTER (20 page)

He listened to the quiet sounds of the darkness. Cassie slept, exhausted, beside him. Across the room, Seth's breathing came in a shallow whistling sound.

What's to become of him, Lord?
wondered Jubal.
What's happening to my son?

An instant later, he found out.

Seth's breathing hitched violently, then stopped.

Jubal sat up in bed. "Seth?"

There was a long stretch of silence at first, then a noise that terrified Jubal to the depths of his soul. A horrible rending of flesh and crackling of brittle bones.
Is something in here?
he thought.
Has something gotten in and torn into the boy?

But he knew that wasn't what was taking place.

The awful sounds echoed through the night for several minutes, then stopped.

"Seth?"

In the pitch darkness, the boy giggled.

"I can see you, Papa."

Cassie was suddenly awake. "What was that?"

Again, Seth giggled. It was a chilling sound, full of playful evil.

Hope sounded in Carrie's voice. "Seth? Baby… are you awake?"

"It ain't Seth," said Jubal. He reached across the nightstand for the kerosene lamp, fumbling to light it. It rested too close to the edge, however, and went crashing to the floor. The lamp shattered upon impact. Coal oil and shards of glass scattered across the floorboards.

Seth laughed at the sound. "Only darkness now. You can't see me… but I can see
you
."

Jubal leapt out of bed, cutting his feet on the glass of the lamp. He cursed as he groped through the darkness. He found the shotgun a moment later, leaning against the wall where he had left it.

A peculiar sound came then. Sort of like the whirl of a fishing reel when a catfish takes the bait and takes off into deep water. Jubal heard Cassie gasp and Seth began to giggle gleefully.

"Something's got a hold of me, Jubal!" his wife cried out.

Jubal reached across the bed. Sticky strands clung to Cassie like knitting yarn soaked in glue. Screaming, she grasped at the bedcovers as she was pulled toward the end.

"Come to me, Mama," Seth said in the darkness. "Come see your baby boy."

Jubal thumbed back the hammers of the shotgun.

"No!" shrieked Cassie. "Don't shoot him!"

"I ain't gonna let him have you!" Jubal hollered back.

Jubal's eyes had grown accustomed to the gloom, but still it was difficult to see. He could make out a dark form huddled on Seth's bed, but nothing like that of a ten-year-old boy. A slash of pale moonlight filtered through a crack between two shutters, reflecting off two glittering red eyes.

Cassie reached the end of the big brass bed. She clutched the railing tightly as the gummy cords pulled at her. Her knuckles grew white. Soon she would lose hold and be dragged across the floorboards… toward the thing on Seth's bed.

Jubal raised the shotgun to his shoulder and prepared to fire. The creature saw his intentions and, without warning, rose to the rafters, pulling itself upward with the same sticky substance that had snagged Cassie.
What manner of creature has he become?
wondered Jubal.

He peered into the darkness of the rafters, but could see nothing. Above his head, Seth snickered, scuttling across the rafters, clinging there like a…

Like a
what
?

Cassie wailed. She was no longer being pulled at, but was still entwined in the sticky mess that originated from the thing that had occupied Seth's bed. "Get it off me! Get it off!"

Jubal remembered Lenora's candle. He rushed to the kitchen table, found a sulfur match, and lit the wick. Pale light cast shadows throughout the room. He lifted it overhead, toward the ceiling. There was a shrill wrenching as one of the tin panels was torn from its moorings and cast aside. Jubal caught a fleeting glimpse of a gray-furred monstrosity pulling itself through into the night. Those mirrored eyes gleamed down at him in the candlelight. Then there was a child-like giggle and the thing was gone.

Shaken, Jubal ran to see about Cassie. He helped her shed the gummy strands, which were difficult to remove. Leaving her, Jubal approached Seth's bed.

The linens were soaked with blood. Several objects had been discarded and abandoned on the bed sheets. Things that had once been a part of their youngest son –
 
the shriveled remains of his arms and legs, as well as his other eye, now rejected in favor of the one that had grown, unseen, in the cavity of his right eye socket.

"My children!" moaned Cassie. She curled up on the foot of the brass bed, her knees pulled tightly to her chest. "My poor babies!"

Outside, the thing laughed and skipped playfully around the front yard. And from the sound of it, with more feet than Jubal would have believed possible.

They sat at the kitchen table, drinking strong black coffee that Cassie had brewed earlier.

"You know I've gotta do it," he said.

Cassie said nothing. She simply stared into the dark depths of her china cup.

"I can't allow him to exist the way he is," he told her. "It… it ain't natural."

Cassie laughed. It was an ugly sound. "Natural? What
is
natural these days, Jubal?" She stared out the front door into the sunlight of early morning. "Maybe the Creator has started over. A new Genesis. Maybe in the scheme of things, we are the unnatural ones."

He didn't know what to say to her. Maybe she was right.

Jubal took his last swallow of coffee and got up. "I'm sorry… but it's got to be done." He picked up his shotgun and started for the door.

"You've killed our daughter," Cassie told him. "If you kill our son, then you've slain the love between us. I'll not cook your meals nor share your bed ever again."

The thought of Cassie's ultimatum disturbed him, but the thought of that thing outside – the thing that was partly Seth – disturbed him even more.

"I'm sorry," he said, then left the cabin.

He paused in the yard long enough to study the earth. The prints from the creature's joyful romp lay scattered in the dust. They were not the footprints of a young boy. In fact, he couldn't identify them at all.

From the direction of the barn and its outbuildings, echoed the sound of laughter.

Jubal clutched his gun and started forward, eyes keen, heart pounding. He passed the outhouse and the chicken coop, which had been empty since their laying hens had shed their feathers and grown shiny, blue scales and teeth like
tenpenny
nails. Jubal had killed the lot, then crushed the charcoal-gray eggs they had left in their nests. He still remembered the horrid smell of those inky black yolks as they leaked upon the hay-strewn ground, sizzling like a caustic acid.

He was nearing the smokehouse, when the giggling came again. So that was where it had made its lair. Cautiously, Jubal unlatched the door and swung it open.

Squinting against the darkness, he stepped inside, the muzzles of the shotgun entering ahead of him. He stood on the threshold for a moment.

Slashes of sunlight came from the uneven cracks between the boards of the walls and, within them, dust motes drifted lazily. With the exception of the salt troughs and the curing poles overhead, the structure was normally empty. But now its hollow was occupied by interlacing strands of that peculiar substance that had ensnared Cassie the night before.

It was a massive nest spun of silky fiber. A cobweb that stretched from walls to ceiling to earthen floor. And inside its spiral hung various victims. A tree squirrel, a jackrabbit, a couple of barn swallows. All stared at him with dead eyes. They appeared stiff and dried out, as though their life's fluids had been sucked out.

"Howdy, Papa," came a voice from a far corner of the structure.

"Seth," said Jubal. His hands tightened around the walnut stock and
foregrip
of the shotgun.

"Yes… and no," said the thing on the web.

Jubal watched as the thing slowly crept along the silky strands and into the hub of the nest. The only way he could describe it was as a hellish hybrid of boy and spider. The body and head seemed to belong to Seth; the torso and face were gray-skinned but still included the familiar freckles and moles he had once possessed. But that was where the resemblance ended. Its skull and back were covered with a coat of soft gray fur, as well as the eight gangly legs that had replaced his human limbs. As it swayed to and fro in the cradle of its massive web, the thing leered at Jubal. Insectile eyes revolved beneath contorted brows and curved incisors jutted sharply where Seth's youthful overbite had once been.

"I've been hunting, Papa," said the spider-thing. A gelatinous fluid, thick and yellow, dripped from its fangs, settling in poisonous beads on the heavy strands of the cobweb. "Look at all I've caught, just this morning. And I could catch more… much more."

Jubal wanted nothing more than to run from the smokehouse and leave the creature to its sordid doings. But he knew he couldn't. Not for his or Cassie's sake. And, especially, for the sake of poor Seth.

"I hunger, Papa," the thing said, slowly working its way down the web toward him. "Come, feed me."

Jubal centered the twin muzzles on the hideous face, wanting to see only the monster and not the child underneath. "I love you, boy," he whispered, then let loose with both loads.

As the husk of the dying creature sighed amid its web, Jubal stepped outside and secured the door. He went to the barn, took the five-gallon can of kerosene, and splashed some upon the
graywood
walls. Then he set the smokehouse on fire.

He was walking back to the cabin, his footsteps heavy and his heart broken, when Cassie met him midway in the yard. He opened his mouth to say something, when his wife slapped him savagely across the face. "We're finished, Jubal Hayes," she said with a finality that sounded like the thunderous clang of a burial vault sealed into place.

Behind them, amid the crackling of flames, came a pitiful voice. "Mama! Mama, help me… I'm burning!"

"Oh, God!" wailed Cassie. "He's still alive!"

Jubal grabbed her as she tried to run past him. "No… let it go."

"Mama! I'm hurting, Mama." The voice began to grow shrill and subhuman in nature; like a mixture of a cicada's reedy call and the high pitched chirring of a cricket. "Come to me, Mama. Please!"

But no matter how she struggled, Jubal would not release her.

"Damn you, Jubal!" screamed Cassie. She clawed at him, battered his face with her fists, bringing blood and bruises.

Inside the flaming smokehouse, the thing that was Seth screamed and, eventually, grew silent.

And still, despite her struggling, Jubal refused to let go.

After the deaths of the children, Jubal and Cassie existed apart.

They no longer lived as husband and wife, but as separate entities, treating one another with neither love nor hatred… only indifference. They occupied the mountain cabin like two ghosts haunting the same house, scarcely aware of each other's presence.

The summer passed and autumn arrived. The mountains rang with muted cries and a sad moaning as the leaves of the mutated trees turned color, then died. The changing of the season was no longer a natural thing for the vegetation on Hayes Ridge, but a mournful time of loss.

Jubal and Cassie no longer seemed to fret about their altered surroundings as they once had. The tragedies of Seth and Lenora had forced a grim acceptance upon them and they lived among the beasts of the forest, no longer fearing what the Burn had done to them, but merely taking it as fact. Even the monstrosities that their offspring had changed into no longer held the terror that it once had.

They spent their days in their own separate worlds. Cassie passed her time praying and fasting, huddled on the porch swing, reading her Bible. She took to wearing a heavy woolen coat and a knit cap over her head, not only to ward away the coolness of the season, but to conceal her own changing state as well. Her skin lost its leathery texture and its sun-baked bronze hue. In its place, the flesh smoothed and grew as pale as snow, and the pupils of her eyes changed from brown to a brilliant pink, like those of an albino.

Jubal spent his time outdoors, away from the farmstead. He roamed the Ridge, walking the deer paths and climbing the rocky cliffs unafraid, toting nary a gun or knife when he went. He had grown dark and sullen, neglecting to shave until he was bushy and bearded. His skin had grown coarse. The epidermis of his face and hands began to wrinkle and peel, the way flesh did following a severe sunburn. His eyes yellowed and the pupils seemed to narrow in a sinister, almost reptilian way. When he walked the mountains, the animals scurried away and avoided him.

Sometimes Jubal would come home toting something he had stalked and hunted down… a grossly-mutated possum or ground hog. He'd sit at the eating table, peeling its
hide away
and devouring it raw, without a thought of cooking it. He offered Cassie none of the game that he bagged. She would have refused, even if he had made the offer. She required little sustenance during those days.

She ate like a bird.