Bad Juju: A Novel of Raw Terror (24 page)

But now he was a different man.
Since he’d been called to preach the Gospel, he did his best to keep his sins
small and his heart open. But there was danger in that, too. When a man opens
his heart to his fellow men, there is always the danger of something evil
slipping in and taking over. That’s where the Lord comes in. If a man sets his
heart and soul on God, he stands a better chance of being untainted by evil
when it comes.

He gazed through the rain-streaked
window at the railroad yard below the gravel parking lot behind Main Street.
Boxcars sat motionless on a sidetrack. A man was climbing into an old sedan
parked outside the squat office building. A black dog ducked beneath a trailer
set on cinderblocks, seeking shelter from the rain.

 Boots shuddered again, harder this
time. He was tired from his afternoon of sweeping, mopping, and cleaning sinks
and toilets, but he felt a bone-deep weariness that he couldn’t put off on his
janitorial labors.

“Lord,” he said as he gripped the
steering wheel, “give me strength to stand against the darkness and to do
Your
bidding. I ask this in the name of Jesus the Savior, amen.”

He cranked the engine, turned on
the windshield wipers and drove slowly homeward.

***

“You need to eat something, Cornelius,”
his aunt said from the door of his room.

“Ain’t hungry.”

“Your sure you’re all right?”

“Yes ma’am. Just ain’t hungry.”

“Well, then I reckon you won’t get
to meet our new boarder. And he’s such an interesting man.”

“Who’s that?”

“Mr. Goolsby. He’s the geological
engineer who’s to go down in that sinkhole and see how big it might get and
tell us what’s to be done about it. He’ll only be with us a day or two. The
town’s paying for his room and board for as long as he needs to be here. He
didn’t come right out and say so, but he let on that there could be a whole
network of caverns under the town. A scary thought, I tell you what’s the
truth.”

Corny sat up in the middle of his
bed. “He’s gone go down in that hole?”

“Sure is. Him and his crew. That’s
the only way to see what’s really down under there. You ought to come on down
and hear him talk. He’s scaring stew out of everybody and he don’t even know
it. I reckon it’s just an everyday thing to him. But goodness gracious, it’s
our
town
.”

“I might be down directly.”

She came into the room and stood
over his bed. “I’m so glad you weren’t hurt when you fell off that ladder
today. I never would’ve been able to forgive myself. Now, Corny, I don’t want
you cleaning the gutters no more. I’ll hire it done from now on. It’s just too
dangerous for you.”

“Aw, Aunt Mattie, it wouldn’ta
happened ’cept for that dadgum wasp stingin’ me. I wisht you wouldn’t treat me
like a retard.”

“You know better than that,” she
chided. “I just don’t want you up on ladders any more. Now there’s the end to
it. My final word. You hear?”

Corny sighed. “I hear.”

When she was gone, he rolled on his
side and rested his head on the worn-flat pillow and stared at the framed
photos of trains. His feeling of profound loss was still with him, and he
wondered if he was longing for his dead father. The bedroom window was
partially open to the rainy evening, and the rainfall drowned out the usual
house-filtered sounds of the TV down the hall in Kirby Cone’s room and the
buzzing conversation of the boarders gathered around the supper table
downstairs. Beneath the droning rain there was an unaccustomed silence deeper
than any silence he could remember. Then it came to him why he was feeling such
a sad emptiness. Whisperer was gone! It wasn’t just that Whisperer was being
quiet. His long-time secret companion was simply not there. He could
feel
the absence—just as sure as you can feel a hole in your gum after you lose a
tooth. Whisperer had abandoned him.

He sat up in bed and gasped for
breath. He was scared, nearly as scared as he’d been the time he got separated
from his mother in a department store when he was four years old. Lost, alone
and scared.

He stumbled out of bed and grabbed
his old engineer’s cap off his hat rack and jammed it on his head. The cap his
father had given him made him feel a little better, for engineers were fearless
men, and when he was wearing the cap he believed he could be almost as brave as
those manly train drivers. At least he could breathe a little easier.

“Musta been the fall,” he whispered
to himself. Sure, that had to be it. When he hit the ground, it knocked
Whisperer right out of his head. It made sense, didn’t it? Whisperer came to
him after that first fall that damaged his brain, and now this second fall had
knocked the whispering companion loose. He wasn’t sure how he should feel about
it. There had been plenty of times when Whisperer seemed like a curse, a
troublemaking voice in his head telling him to do bad things, but there were
those other times when he was glad to have Whisperer warning him of things he
wouldn’t have otherwise noticed. Blessing or curse, Whisperer was gone now, and
Corny was saddened by the loss.

He walked over to the window and
threw it all the way up and pressed his nose to the rusty screen. Though it was
too early in the evening to be dark outside, the stormy weather had turned the
day to deep dusk. Lightning flashed silently off to the east. The late-summer
rain smelled faintly of river water and bottom rot, and he wondered if the
Ohoopee River had flooded its banks.

“I reckon it’s just me now,” he
said. “Whisperer’s gone and I’m on my own. Huh. Can always talk to myself,
cain’t I? Dadgum right I can. Ain’t gotta whisper either.”

A sudden gust of wind blew rain
through the wire mesh of the screen, and he drew back from the window.

“Something’s out there,” he said,
warning himself in Whisperer’s stead. “Something bad.”

He felt it rushing toward him, but
before his brain had time to process his terror, it was upon him, smothering
him in darkness, flooding him with sensations so alien that he no longer knew
who he was. He tumbled backward to the hardwood floor, lost in molasses-thick
darkness.

Within the bone-chamber of his
skull, it whispered to him with a thousand slithery tongues. It whispered and
whispered, sharing its darkest secrets and not ceasing till he was filled with
feelings he couldn’t have named even if he’d he been able to speak.

***

Over his mother’s objection,
Skeeter Partain drove his truck to his father’s funeral home. She had strongly
advised him to stay home and rest up, but he’d argued that he’d had more rest
than he could stand during his hospital stay and that he was okay to drive
downtown to see his father. “He’ll be home in a little while,” she’d said, “why
not just wait? What’s so important that you have to go right this minute? And
in this weather?” But Skeeter had to get out of the house. The walls had
started closing in on him, and the storm seemed to be calling him out. He
hadn’t tried to explain to his mother that being cooped up was too much like
being strung up on that chain in the barn loft. He had to have freedom to move,
to
go
when he wanted to go. He’d told her that he wanted to talk to his
dad about Joe Rob’s legal situation, but that wasn’t really the reason. He just
had to be on the go and out and about in the night. He felt most free when he
was driving his truck, and that’s what he did. He stopped at the Quickie Mart
for a can of Skoal and a root beer, then he circumnavigated Vinewood just for
the joy of feeling the tires humming over the wet streets. He rolled down the
window and tossed out the empty root beer can, then put a pinch of his Skoal
between his cheek and gum. He drove around until he got a little buzz from the
smokeless tobacco, then he went on to the funeral home. He parked in the rear
and got out of the truck slowly so as not to aggravate his bandaged wounds. The
prescription codeine was numbing some of the soreness, but if he moved a
certain way the pain would flare up and he could almost feel the knife blade
going in again and see that Porch son of a bitch leering at him with those
beady eyes.

By the time he’d hobbled up the
back steps and ducked inside out of the rain, he was pretty well soaked with
chilling rainwater. He took off his cap and slapped it against his uninjured
thigh to knock some of the rain off. He shut the door softly and started down
the hall, trying to be
as quiet as a church mouse
, as his father used to
tell him when he was a child. Skeeter had never actually seen a mouse in
church, but he’d always understood the need for being quiet and reverent inside
a funeral home. Grieving relatives of the recently deceased didn’t care to have
their mourning disturbed by a bratty undertaker’s kid acting like he was in a
playhouse or raising Cain the way he would in a big rumpus room.

He heard the muffled voice of his
father from the office up front. Hearing no other voice, he figured his dad was
on the phone. Rather than stand and wait for the phone conversation to end,
Skeeter decided to have a seat behind his dad’s desk in the back office. As he
turned and started back down the hallway, he heard a thud behind the door of
the embalming room. He thought it must be Charlie Taylor, a.k.a., The Silver
Fox, who was his father’s senior mortician on staff. Skeeter liked Charlie
because he reminded him of that old comedian, Jonathan Winters, and Charlie was
just as funny—if not funnier. A good sense of humor in the funeral business was
a definite asset. Smiling in anticipation of Charlie’s first one-liner, Skeeter
opened the door and entered the embalming room.

Charlie wasn’t there. There was no
body laid out on the stainless-steel table. Wondering what had made the
thudding sound, Skeeter was about to turn off the goose-neck floor lamp and leave
the room when he saw the naked woman standing in the shadowy corner with her
back to him. Her flesh was shockingly pale, but a patch of skin just above the
cleft of her buttocks was discolored a bluish yellow. Her auburn hair hung in
wild tangles halfway down her back.

Skeeter knew who she was before she
turned around.
This can’t be real. She’s dead and buried in Vidalia.

Then she did turn to face him. Her
breasts youthfully firm, her abdomen only slightly rounded above her auburn
thatch of pubic hair, Jessica Lowell fixed her dead eyes on him and twisted up
her mouth in the same lunatic expression she had exhibited at the city dump and
said, “It wants you.” She raised her arm and pointed her finger at him, then
cackled with insane laughter.

Skeeter shook his head in profound
disbelief. “No,” he croaked. He’d last seen this same woman laid out on this
very table, dead of snakebite poisoning. She could not be standing here before
him now, pointing that accusatory finger at his heart. He reeled backward into
the wall, the jolt setting off pain in his wounds. He was suddenly dizzy, and
though he wanted more than anything to run out of the room, his vigor and
powers of movement had deserted him, and he slid down the wall and onto his
sparse haunches.

The dead woman walked toward him,
her bare feet softly slapping the tile floor.

Trembling involuntarily, he wanted
to call out to his father, but he couldn’t find his voice.

“It wants you,” she repeated, but
this time it wasn’t the voice of Jessica A. Lowell he heard. The sound issuing
from her mouth was a deep, cavernous croon. It was, Skeeter knew, the voice of
his doom.

***

James Partain hung up the phone,
locked the front door, and then started down the hallway to get his raincoat
from his office, which was across the hall from the prep room. Above the sound
of the steady rainfall, he heard another sound and immediately identified it.
Somehow the aspirator had come on. The motorized device used for suctioning the
contents of the abdominal and chest cavities of the deceased was whining like a
high-powered vacuum cleaner—which was exactly what the aspirator was. He
thought the lightning must’ve sent a surge of electricity through the wiring
strong enough to override the power switch and turn the thing on. But as he
drew nearer, he heard the wet, gurgling sound the aspirator makes when the
sharp point of the trocar is inserted in the body and is sucking out the
contents of the stomach, the intestines and the kidneys.

“What the hell?” he said as he
strode toward the closed door of the prep room. “Charlie? Is that you?”

But he knew it couldn’t be Charlie
Taylor. Charlie was on a fishing trip to Florida. And there was no one in
extremis, awaiting embalming. There were no bodies at all today.

He turned the doorknob, flung open
the door and froze when he saw his son stretched out on the table, his shirt
pulled up over his belly and the trocar inserted in his abdomen. He watched in
horror as Skeeter’s insides were sucked through the long, rubber tube that
emptied in the sink at the foot of the table. The familiar stench was all the
more overwhelming because he knew it was coming from his son’s innards.

“Skeeter!” he cried, rushing to the
table to grab the unattended aspirator and pull it out of Skeeter’s obscenely
shrunken abdomen. The stainless-steel trocar came out with a sickening, wet
whine. He shut off the motor and dropped the blood-streaked instrument to the
floor, its attached rubber hose giving one final snake-like twist, then falling
flaccid.  Though he already knew no living person could survive the grisly
aspiration, the terror-stricken expression frozen on his son’s face confirmed
that Skeeter was indeed dead. “My God,
why
?”

He closed his son’s eyes, then
draped himself over the supine body and sobbed.

A short time later, James Partain
picked up the phone and called the police. “This is James Partain,” he said,
trying to steady his voice. “My son is dead. We’re across the street at the
funeral home. I...I think he killed himself.”