CHAPTER EIGHT

Beard’s Grocery sat perched atop a small peninsula, accessible from Hollow Creek Road only by a rickety wood and steel bridge just wide enough for a single car to traverse at any one time. The back of the store opened onto acreage that had, once upon a time, been a dairy farm owned by Jerry Beard’s father Jessie. An overturned tractor had taken the elder Beard’s life when Jerry was still a tot. Over the years, his mother Kathy had sold off all the cattle and leased the farm’s unsaturated acres to local tenant farmers to put food on the table and keep the store Jessie and Kathy had opened as a second business in 1936 operational.

Hollow Creek bordered the three remaining sides of the tiny piece of land on which the store sat. A white-washed board fence ran the length of the creek borders, except for the spot where the bridge connected the store’s property to the road. The Beards had considered the geography and its fencing as a beneficial property feature in earlier times. It provided some natural defenses against intruders and a source of distillable fresh water if they needed it. As farm life became too much work for too little profit and the merchant life showed more promise, the creek and the fence with the single-car access bridge seemed more like barriers. For Kathy, anyway.

Jessie had long ago mounted a small five-inch rain gauge on top of the fence post nearest the eastern wall of the store. It was one of several he’d configured around the farm’s perimeter to determine which areas were receiving the most benefit from nature’s watering can.

On the afternoon of March 21, 1955, just as Eli Wynn and Nazarene preacher Mark MacDonald were arriving at Beard’s on their errands, the first drops of what the National Weather Service in Hollow River would later call a hundred-year flood collected in the gauge’s basin. A bit more than an hour later, that gauge overflowed, and Hollow Creek swelled to dramatic effect, well on its way to flood stage. The bubbling crystal clear creek water over which Eli had trod became a bed of sickly beige, opaque rapids topped with hundreds of tiny cresting waves. The flow bottlenecked under the bridge. The water, too fast and furious to remain contained, began to stretch its fingers in spidery rivulets over its banks. The sun descended rapidly on the horizon as if trying to ignore the impending disaster below.

***

Donna Gilliam’s bleeding had not stopped. The bandages in which she had wrapped her hand soaked through in the amount of time it had taken her to clean herself up, feed and gather tiny Theo, secure him in the floorboard of her late husband’s Ford F1, and haul ass from the house where his cooling corpse remained propped against the wall in the main bedroom. The two palm gashes she’d sustained while stabbing Ted with her makeshift knife of glass burned when she folded her hand around the steering wheel. Mercifully, Theo was fast asleep. He remained so when the Ford’s engine roared to life.

The nearest hospital stood in Hollow River, a significant trip for her and her infant son on a dark afternoon like this one. It was her only choice for getting herself stitched up.

She had also decided to ask a doctor to examine Theo’s head and neck. Donna remained unconvinced that Ted hadn’t injured the boy when he’d suspended him by the collar in their nursery. He hadn’t fussed very much since then. Whether because of injury by his father or the simple death of same remained to be seen. The baby was half-Ted. If Theo’s mental connection to his dad was more robust than the one she had unwittingly established, the sudden silencing of rage within his mind must have been welcome.

Large raindrops splattered against the Ford’s windshield as mother and son spun out of the driveway. Donna, who drove only occasionally, struggled to find the wiper control. Her fingers stumbled over it and switched it on just as the patter transitioned into a pummel and the gray asphalt of the path in front of her became splotchy and stained black with water. The rain pooled in unmaintained areas of the right-of-way, streaming down man-carved hillsides in long waterfalls and collecting at the shoulders until it formed nearly invisible ponds in places where the asphalt wasn’t poured at an angle that allowed runoff.

How long since Ted had bought tires for this bucket? She didn’t know. Hopefully enough tread remained to keep the truck from skidding into the verge if she ended up unable to avoid hydroplaning or some road hazard. After passing the Lost Hollow sign, there would be at least another forty-five miles or more of heavy rain and wet road between her and Hollow River. Assuming she made it that far, of course.

The rain flowed in sheets over her windshield as she made the left turn onto Hollow Creek Road, less than a mile from the border of the Blalock farm and Beard’s General, but not even close to the center of town. She slowed the F1 to a crawl, searching through the downpour for signs that she was keeping between the lines. She had to fight overcorrecting more than once after bounding over a pothole. With every bump, her fearful brain screamed that she’d accidentally ventured over the centerline, that she was on the precipice of driving off the embankment and into Hollow Creek.

To make matters worse, the windshield’s interior kept fogging over because of the sudden difference in temperature and humidity inside versus out. Donna swiped at the moisture with the palm of her bandaged hand. That further hindered her visibility because it left a long wet red streak over the glass in its wake.

She raised her uninjured hand to try again when the taillights of another car swam into view. They were blurry and distorted through the F1’s windshield, but the light from them combined with her headlights was strong enough to allow her to see that she was approaching the bridge that marked the entrance to Beard’s General. The other car (she couldn’t determine the make) was parked on the shoulder of the road just beyond that entrance. Possibly someone had decided that the downpour made driving too risky and had pulled to the side of the road to wait it out.

“Why didn’t you just park in Beard’s lot?” Donna wondered aloud. Her voice inside her head echoed: Why don’t you just pull into Beard’s lot, Donna?

She glanced at her hand, then at her infant son sleeping soundly in his carrier in the passenger-side floorboard of the F1. Although her wounds still wept, she was not bleeding out. Theo didn’t seem to be in pain. The danger to their lives was greater if she continued the drive to the hospital through flooding roadways than by stopping at Kathy’s place to wait out the storm.

There would be questions, of course. How did you hurt your hand, Donna? How did you get that cut on your head, Donna? Why isn’t Ted with you, Donna? She’d need to answer them, buy herself some time to think through everything that had happened back at the house. It was self-defense. It was son-defense, really. But facts never stopped the law from arresting you and labeling your baby a ward of the state while they “investigated.”

She’d heard the awful stories about that Georgia Tann woman’s orphanage in Memphis. Would Theo end up somewhere like that? There had to be a way out that allowed her to live her life with her son in peace. But until the rain stopped and she could move on to Hollow River, Beard’s was as good a place as any to think for a while, to figure out her next move.

Donna turned right onto the bridge, crossing a rapidly rising Hollow Creek already lapping at the top of the barrel. As she rounded the turn, her headlights passed over the car’s rear window . Donna caught a glimpse of two figures, silhouettes of a man and a woman, through the stopped care. She wouldn’t swear to it, but they appeared to be necking.

***

Peter Mayberry had regrets.

He had intended to use the hammer’s claw end to remove the nail from the shaft of his penis after he drove it through. He had wanted the chiseled point of the nail to extrude from the neck of the glans the way his mother’s nail had completely penetrated his tongue and embedded itself in the kitchen table. He was circumcised. He didn’t know for sure why his parents had made that choice for him, although he thought it was probably his mother hedging her bets God-wise. He’d thought not having a foreskin would make the removal of the nail the easy part. Alas, the pain, blood, and mere sight of the foreign object protruding from the organ overwhelmed Peter just as he’d set about reversing the operation.

Sudden dizziness and nausea caused him to release the hammer. It fell headlong to the kitchen floor, landing with a dull thud. It balanced there, the handle in the air like a diver pointing his toes skyward after a successful jack-knife. Peter registered the novelty of the image—he scored the hammer ten points—before consciousness abandoned him and he collapsed to the floor. The nail remained enrooted in him. As the lights and the room wavered in his vision, he was glad it had not become stuck in the kitchen table as well.

***

Hours later, Peter’s eyelids shot wide when he heard a knock at his door. His piano student, no doubt.

He lay quietly, half under his kitchen table, blinking at the hammer beside him, not bothering to call out to his visitor. Shock must not have taken him entirely. Good.

After a minute more of light staccatos on the door, Peter heard the boy’s mother tell him that Mr. Mayberry must have gone out. She added that it was just as well because he wasn’t any better at tickling the ivories than their pet turtle. The lessons were a waste of good money. She was tired of paying for them. Peter drifted back toward unconsciousness as their footsteps faded from his doorstep.

Much later, he awoke again. The tip of his penis was on fire. With both hands, he pressed on his gut, moving it so he could get a better view of the damage he’d done. The nail was still there. The blood pooled around its head had run down the shaft and congealed in the thatch of pubic hair that surrounded it. Blood clots. He wondered what would happen if blood clotted inside the nail wound. Had he damaged his urethra? What if he had to pee?

These anxieties overwhelmed his shock. Peter scrambled—as well as he could scramble given the circumstances—to his feet and ran for the bathroom. There, he found a small roll of gauze. He wound it around the shaft of his dick, nail and all. He had no medical tape, patience, or steady hand to thread a safety pin through the gauze without pricking himself. Instead, he tucked the loose end of the roll into a previous fold. He hoped it would hold there while he drove himself to the new emergency room at the hospital in Hollow River.

He dressed carefully, sliding first into a pair of loose-fitting boxers. They felt foreign against his skin, as if he’d never dressed before. No surprise, he thought, given he’d spent the previous night and every hour of the day so far wholly naked.

He pulled a pair of beige slacks over the boxers. After a couple of scream-inducing attempts to button them and raise the zipper, he chose to allow the slacks to remain undone in front. The alternative was too painful. Instead, he covered his indecency with a tails-out button-down shirt.

Dressed for his errand, Peter snatched up the keys to his Dodge Custom, a nearly ten-year-old unmaintained rust bucket he’d bought from a junk dealer. He’d only bought it after deciding he might need to venture out of Lost Hollow occasionally to indulge his need for company. Sometimes he wished the thing would break down completely, preventing him from leaving the house.

My luck, he thought, that’ll happen now. But he was wrong. The Dodge turned over immediately.

By the time he reached the entrance to Beard’s General on his way out of town, Peter could barely see the road in front of him. The downpour that the skies threatened when he left his driveway had finally presented itself, and it was a doozy. Unable to clear his windshield faster than the rain could obscure it, Peter edged the Dodge to the shoulder of the road and parked it there. His dick throbbed urgently, frustrated by the foreign object lodged in its neck and requiring attention. Ending up with his car in a flooded ditch or, God forbid, upside down in a rampaging Hollow Creek in no way aided that pursuit. So, he pulled over to wait it out. No blood had seeped from his bandaged member, as far as he could tell. There were no dark stains on his pants or his boxers.

His stomach churned. Despite his best efforts to keep it down, last night’s dinner scaled his esophagus and lodged itself at the back of his throat. He gagged and tried to swallow. No use. He threw open the driver’s door of The Dodge and lost the previous night’s meal onto Hollow Creek Road.

Rain pelted his bare head, gluing what remained of his hair to his scalp. The deluge was cool against his skin, a relief after his convulsions subsided. He cupped his hands and captured some of it in his palms, then pursed his lips and slurped the water from the cup he’d made. The liquid sloshed pleasantly over his teeth and tongue. He spat it out on top of the vomit, most of which the rain had already washed away.

He had grabbed the door to slam it shut again when he caught a glimpse of something, or someone, watching him from the side of the road. He squinted, trying to see through the sheeting rain. Sure enough, there appeared to be a large animal of some kind—a dog perhaps—seated on the opposite shoulder. It had thick, black fur and pointed wolf-like ears, more prominent and longer than any pet he’d ever seen. The creature’s jaws hung in a wicked canine grin teeming with jagged yellow shards of teeth. Most prominent of those were its four fangs. The lowers were bent daggers, the uppers extended and poisonous. They dripped with saliva and drops of rain the way a viper leaks venom.

Most hypnotic were its eyes. Peter became aware of them as the thing stalked across Hollow Creek Road, closing the distance between itself and Peter’s Dodge. Narrowed above its muzzle, a throbbing red light showed through the slits of its eyelids. The light flowed and pulsed behind the shining lenses, like lava bubbling against panes of glass that were somehow impervious to its tremendous heat.

As the creature drew near, its height inched upward. Its stride evolved from four legs to two. The thick black fur that had dominated the surface of its skin shed in drifts along its path. Long trails of smoke, or perhaps steam, rose from the exposed areas of skin as fat drops of rain landed there. They left behind angry sores in the thing’s flesh. Its keen, slitted eyes rounded and became more expressive, sentient, and human.

Lost in those eyes as the creature closed in, Peter next felt warm and loving fingers gently caress his cheeks. He closed his eyes when they slid down his neck. From there, they glided to his shoulders and pressed gently against them, urging him back inside the Dodge. They guided him past the driver’s seat to the passenger’s, mashing his back against the interior of the opposite door so that his legs and hips—slacks undone at the waist—lay supine on the bench seat. The creature crawled inside the Dodge with him, nuzzling its recently human face into the crook of his neck. Its warm tongue lapped at his jaw chin and lips.

“Sam?” Peter murmured. The pain and discomfort in his pants had been forgotten, replaced with an overpowering sense of relief, nurture, and nourishment. The underlying shame and guilt that had caused him to injure himself was a distant memory. He was in a car with his lover, in public. At that moment, it was only right and good. “Sam? Oh, God, Sam, is that you?”

“No,” the creature whispered. Its voice was feminine, tender, and lyrical, a summer breeze blowing softly along the crests of a babbling brook. “My name is Marilyn. I am here to help you, Peter Mayberry. That is, if you are willing to help me.”

Her fingers danced down his chest. In an instant, his shirttails had been brushed aside. His bandaged penis protruded from the opening in his boxer shorts. Peter’s heart fluttered as the roll of gauze entwined around it came loose and laid in a strip across his thighs. Bursts of electric pinpricks tingled the head of his dick. The sensation ran down the shaft, into his pelvis, and then throughout the rest of his body.

The woman above him pried the finish nail from his flesh and dropped it to the floorboard without resistance. “You will help me?” she prompted. She cradled Peter’s exit wound in the palm of her left hand. Bizarrely, he thought he was going to come.

“Yes,” he moaned. “Yes. I will do anything.”

Marilyn pressed the palm of her right hand over the top of Peter’s penis so that her fingertips met the wrist of her left hand, obscuring the injury between her palms. Peter opened his eyes. The headlights of another car briefly filled his rear window. Then they were gone. Soon after that, the interior of the Dodge filled with an unearthly crimson glow. It was accompanied by a fog that obscured everything around him. It billowed gray, tinged with red. The ungodly smell of sulfur found his nostrils.

Peter began to scream.