THEY PASSED THROUGH several villages unseen and unheard, skirting settlements like coyotes on the lope. The Long Walker carted Petty Shughrue swiftly over great distances. She wondered what had become of the preacher back at the carnival. How badly did the townspeople hurt him? The Long Walker hadn’t even seemed all that delighted when those men started to beat the preacher down. It had actually looked bored.
The Long Walker carried them up a hillside and across the narrow spine of a ridge. Petty could not help but notice how the plants wilted wherever the thing passed. A trail of death.
The ridge fed down to a grassy valley. A faint prickling of light between the trees. They came upon an isolated shack. Smoke spindled from a flue in its roof. Firelight cut between the chinking of its logs. Skins were tacked to hide stretchers near the door.
The Long Walker’s posture was loosey-goosey, shoulders rounded forward and head hanging between its shoulders. Its fingers twitched at the ends of its hands as if in search of some more spirited pursuit.
“Is someone out there?” came a man’s voice from inside the shack. “I can hear you.”
From inside, there came the popping of knots in the fire. After that, the unmistakable cocking back of a shotgun’s hammers.
“I will ask once more. Then I must assume you mean to cause harm. Who the hell is out there?”
Finally, the Long Walker opened its mouth—its terrible, skull-spanning mouth. In the moonlight, Petty could see its insides: the soft, pulpy flesh of a toothless infant.
“It is your mother, Cedric Finnegan Yancy!” the Long Walker cried in a voice that could not be its own—this was the shrill tone of a woman. “Will you not come out to greet me?”
Silence. Then a trembling voice: “That ain’t you, Ma. You’re dead, God rest your soul. You been dead eight years now.”
“And whose fault is that?” the Long Walker said, its lips spreading in a corrosive grin. “Who left his mother when she was just getting sick? Whose departure quickened his mother’s path to the grave?”
When the man finally replied, it was in a tone of disbelief. “What devil lurks past my door?”
“Devil?” The Long Walker laughed. “Devil! Ha! My own son, flesh of my flesh. Come outside, boy. Apologize to your mother. For your sins are plentiful, as we both know. The whoring we may set aside, for what man has not fallen afoul of the pleasures of the flesh? But to leave your own mother, who cradled you and kissed your scraped knees—to leave her alone to die? This, my son, is a sin most unforgivable.”
“They sent me to ’Nam!” the man shrieked. “I was given no choice in the matter!”
“I died in pain greater than you could imagine.” The Long Walker spoke in a crooning singsong. “My body rotted from the inside. The sawbones cut my tits off—the same tits you latched to as an infant to suckle and bite—yes, bite, for you were a cruel nurser. Where did the doctor toss my diseased old tits? To the dogs, for all I know. Nobody was there to speak for me. My husband dead, my ungrateful son gone and run off. I screeched and bled night after night. Nobody cared. Nobody came to help me.”
“Please.” The man’s voice was choked, pleading. “Ma, please.”
“My cunty rotted out, Cedric,” the Long Walker said matter-of-factly. “Everything that had gone off inside of me came right out, slicker than snot on a doorknob. But it was sloooooow. It took months. I lay there for hours in my own shit and ruin. I died alone, all alone.”
A thundering BOOM!—
A ragged hole punched through the shack door, splinters spitting in every direction. Lead shot whizzed past mere inches from Petty’s ear, so close that it sent her hair fluttering.
The Long Walker advanced. The door opened without it even touching the handle, as if blown open by a mammoth gust of wind. The Long Walker’s body expanded, the flaps of its duster billowing, then shrank again to fit through the doorway. It dragged Petty inside with it.
The shack was lit by a kerosene lantern. A fire guttered in a potbellied stove. Animal skins cured on the walls. The man was big and self-sufficient by the looks of it, with a graying beard. He was jacking shells into his double-barreled shotgun as the Long Walker came in.
“Oh God,” the man said, dropping the gun. “Oh no . . .”
He curled up in the corner and covered his face with his hands and shook. He had lived in these inhospitable woods with the howling of wind and wolves, yet he had been reduced to a child at the mere sight of this thing.
“Go away,” he pleaded. “Please just go away.”
The creature seemed even bigger within these confines, its milky skull brushing the roof. A coldness wept off its body, particular to creatures that live at the bottom of the ocean. It crossed the shack, passing the man where he sat mewling, to a tool rack on the wall. Knives and other sharp implements for the flensing, puncturing, and skinning of animal carcasses.
The Long Walker selected one seemingly at random—but Petty could tell that this thing never acted randomly. Its every gesture served some terrible purpose. The knife was fingerling thin. The blade was pitted and rusty, but its edge was sharp—and it became keener, more glittery, when the thing took possession of it, as though the Long Walker’s touch conferred a deeper refinement of its purpose. The Long Walker ran the edge along its fingers. The blade slit its tissue cleanly, but no blood welled: its flesh was flawless porcelain clean through to whatever bone might have lurked at its core.
“Vivisection,” it said. “Is this word familiar to you, my Pet?”
Petty shook her head. The Long Walker flirted the blade over its fingers.
“Oh yes,” it said. “Sometimes it is the only way.”
The Long Walker hunched before her with its arms hugged round its knees, the knife’s tip touching the oiled dirt floor. Its posture did almost nothing to change the sweeping size of its body. Its eyes were very strange indeed. To Petty they resembled Christmas tree ornaments but darker, more secretive—and she could see things moving behind them, their shadows held by the lamp.
“To know something—to truly know that thing—you must open that thing up.”
The man continued to moan. More than anything in the world, Petty wanted to run away, to run and keep running even if that meant she would be alone in the woods. She had an overwhelming sense that the Long Walker was going to show her things soon. Open her eyes to wonderments she could go several lifetimes without ever knowing.
“The only way to understand anything is to see what makes it tick.” The Long Walker exposed its toothless gums. “Tick. Tick. Tick.” It held the knife by its handle and let the blade swing side to side like the pendulum on a clock. “To see how those things fit together, yes? To expose the soft and delicate parts.”
“You already know how they fit together,” said Petty.
The Long Walker shook its head. “Each is subtly different, my Pet. And it is these subtleties that intrigue.”
She could see that it was excited for what was to come. Its skin jumped with anticipation. Yet mixed in with that excitement was a strain of deep tiredness, as if it had done this exact thing so often that the act had long ago surrendered any enjoyment. Seeing this, Petty felt a weird pity for the thing.
Wretchedly, the man asked: “Am I in hell?”
The Long Walker hung its head between its shoulders. The knife moved from one of its hands to the other, never stopping, as if the blade was white-hot to the touch.
“Hell is a box,” it said to the man. “Yes, it is. Hell is a box not much bigger than your own body. It is dark inside the box, and cold, but the encasement is thin—so thin that you can almost convince yourself that you can break out if you only tried. You cannot feel anything inside this box. But you can hear and . . . sense, to a certain extent. Outside of that box is everyone you ever loved. All the people you have cared for and who care for you. And they are in agony. You cannot touch them. They are screaming, calling for you—your name is always upon their lips. And you cannot go to them or comfort them in any way. And that is your hell, friend. Hell is a box.”
The knife’s handle danced along its knuckles, a neat trick. The shadows thickened and the lamp’s light bled low.
“What I have for you is not hell,” the Long Walker told the man. “But for a brief while, it may feel something like it.”