“Oh, sure!” Ben grinned. “I’ll bet ol’ Bruno’s still in these woods right
now, eatin’ people’s brains for supper, huh?”
“Nope,” I said, formulating the conclusion of my tale. “The police and
the soldiers found him, and they shot him so many times he looked like Swiss
cheese. But every so often, if you happen to be out in the woods on a real
dark night, you can see Bruno’s lantern movin’ through the trees.” I spoke
this in an icy whisper, and neither Davy Ray nor Ben did any more laughing.
“Yeah, you can see his lantern movin’ as he wanders in search of somebody’s
brains to eat. He casts that light all around, and if you get close to it, you
can see the shine of his knife, but don’t look at his face!” I held up a
warning finger. “No, don’t you look at his face, ’cause it’ll drive you crazy
and it might just make you want to eat some brains!” I yelled the last word
and jumped as I yelled it, and Ben hollered with fright but Davy Ray just
laughed again.
“Hey, that’s not funny!” Ben protested.
“You don’t have to worry about ol’ Bruno,” Davy Ray told him. “You don’t
have any brains, so that lets you off the—”
Davy Ray stopped speaking, and he just sat there staring into the dark.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“Ahhhh, he’s tryin’ to scare us!” Ben scoffed. “Well, it ain’t workin’!”
Davy Ray’s face had gone white. I swear I saw his scalp ripple, and the
hair stand up. He said, “Guh… guh… guh…” and he lifted his arm and pointed.
I turned around to look in the direction he indicated. I heard Ben make a
choked gasp. My own hair jittered on my head, and my heart kaboomed.
A light was coming toward us, through the trees.
“Guh… guh… God a’mighty!” Davy Ray croaked.
We all three were struck with the kind of horror that makes you want to
dig a hole, jump in, and pull the hole in after you. The light was moving
slowly, but coming closer. And as it came closer it broke into two, and all of
us got down on our quaking bellies in the pine straw. In another moment I
could tell what it was: a car’s headlights. The car looked like it was going
to roll right over our hiding-place, and then it veered away and we watched
its red taillights flare as the driver applied the brakes. The car kept going,
following a winding trail that was only fifty yards or so from our campsite,
and in a couple of minutes it had disappeared amid the trees.
“Did you guys see that?” Davy Ray whispered.
“’Course we saw it!” Ben whispered back. “We’re right here, aren’t we?”
“Wonder who was in that car, and why they’re way out here?” Davy Ray
looked at me. “You want to find out, Cory?”
“Probably moonshiners,” I answered. My voice trembled. “I think we’d
better leave ’em alone.”
Davy Ray picked up his flashlight. His face was still pallid, but his
eyes shone with excitement. “I’m gonna find out what’s goin’ on! You guys can
stay here if you want to!” He stood up, flicked on the flashlight, and began
to stealthily follow the car. He stopped when he realized we weren’t with him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I won’t think you guys are scared or anythin’.”
“Good,” Ben answered, “’cause I’m stickin’ right here.”
I stood up. If Davy Ray had enough courage to go, then so did I. Besides,
I wanted to know who was driving a car way out here in the woods myself. “Come
on!” he said. “But watch where you step!”
“I’m not stayin’ here alone!” Ben hoisted himself to his feet. “You two
are damn crazy, you know that?”
“Yeah.” Davy Ray sounded proud about it. “Everybody stay low and no
talkin’!”
We crept from tree to tree, following the trail that we hadn’t even seen
when we’d set up camp at nightfall. Davy Ray kept the flashlight’s beam aimed
at the ground, so it couldn’t be spotted by anyone up ahead. The trail wound
back and forth between the trees. The owl was hooting again, and lightning
bugs blinked around us. We’d gone a couple of hundred yards more along the
trail when Davy Ray suddenly stopped and whispered, “There it is!”
We could see the car ahead of us. It was sitting still, but its lights
were on and the engine was rumbling. We crouched down in the pine straw, and I
don’t know about the others, but my heart was going a mile a minute. The car
didn’t move. Whoever was sitting behind the wheel didn’t get out. “I’ve gotta
pee!” Ben whispered urgently. Davy Ray told him to squeeze it.
After five or six minutes, we saw more lights coming through the woods
from the opposite direction. It was another car, this one a black Cadillac,
and it stopped, facing the first car. Davy Ray looked at me, his expression
saying we’d really stumbled into something this time. I didn’t particularly
care what was going on; I just wanted to get away from what I figured was a
meeting of moonshiners. Then the doors of the first car opened, and two people
got out.
“Oh, man!” Davy Ray breathed.
Standing in the crossing of headlights were two men wearing ordinary
clothes except until you got to their heads, which were covered by white
masks. One of the men was medium-sized, the other was big and fat, with a
belly that flopped over the waist of his jeans. The medium-sized man was
smoking either a cigarette or cigar, it was hard to tell which, and he angled
his masked head and blew smoke from the corner of his mouth. Then the
Cadillac’s doors opened, and I almost swallowed my heart when Bodean Blaylock
slid out from behind the wheel. It was him, all right; I remembered his face
from when he’d looked across the poker table at me, same to say he had my
granddaddy and wasn’t about to let him go. A slim man with slicked-back dark
hair and a jutting slab of a chin got out of the passenger side; he was
wearing tight black pants and a red shirt with cowboy spangles on the
shoulders, and at first I thought it was Donny Blaylock but Donny didn’t have
a chin like that. This man opened the Cadillac’s right rear door, and the
whole car trembled as whoever was still inside started to climb out.
It was a mountain on two legs.
His gut was tremendous, straining the front of the red-checked shirt and
overalls he wore. When he rose up to his full height, he was maybe six and a
half feet tall. He was baldheaded except for a wisp of gray hair circling his
acorn-shaped skull, and he had a trimmed gray beard that angled to a point
below his chin. He breathed like a bellows, his face a ruddy mass of wrinkled
flesh. “You boys goin’ to a masquerade party?” he growled in a voice like a
cement mixer, and he laughed hut-hut-hut like a big old engine starting to
fire its plugs. Bodean laughed, and the other man laughed, too. The men
wearing the masks shifted uneasily. “You fellas look like sacks of shit,” the
mountainous bulk said as he shambled forward. I swear his hands were the size
of country hams, and his feet in their scuffed-up boots looked like they could
stomp down small trees.
The masked man with the bulbous belly said, “We’re incog… incog… We don’t
wanna be recognized.”
“Shit, Dick!” the bearded monster said, and he guffawed again. “Have to
be a blind fuckin’ fool not to recognize your fat gut and ass!” Talk about the
pot calling the kettle black, I thought.
“Awwww, you’re not supposed to recognize us, Mr. Blaylock!” the man who’d
been called Dick answered with a whine of petulance, and I realized with a
double start that this man was Mr. Dick Moultry and the other was Biggun
Blaylock, the fearsome head of the Blaylock clan himself.
Ben realized it, too. “Let’s get outta here!” he whispered, but Davy Ray
hissed, “Shut up!”
“Well,” Biggun said, his hands on his massive hips, “I don’t give a shit
if you wear sackcloth and ashes. You bring the money?”
“Yes sir.” Mr. Moultry reached into his pocket and brought out a wad of
bills.
“Count it,” Biggun ordered.
“Yes sir. Fifty… one hundred… hundred and fifty… two hundred…” He kept
counting, up to four hundred dollars. “Take the money, Wade,” Biggun said, and
the man in the spangled shirt walked forward to get it.
“Just a minute,” the second masked man said. “Where’s the merchandise?”
He was talking in a low, gruff voice that sounded false, yet I knew that voice
from somewhere.
“Bodean, get what the fella wants,” Biggun told him, and Bodean took the
Cadillac’s keys from the ignition and walked back to the trunk. Biggun’s gaze
stayed fixed on the man with the false voice. I was glad it wasn’t directed at
me, because it looked so intense it could puddle iron. “It’s fine, quality
work,” Biggun said. “Just what you boys asked for.”
“It oughta be. We’re payin’ enough for it.”
“You want a demonstration?” Biggun grinned, his mouth full of gleaming
teeth. “If I were you, friend, I’d get rid of that cheroot.”
The masked man took a final pull on it, then he turned and flicked it
right where we were hiding. It fell into the pine straw about four feet in
front of me, and I saw its chewed plastic tip. I knew who smoked cheroots with
a tip like that. It was Mr. Hargison, our mailman.
Bodean had opened the trunk. Now he closed it again, and he approached
the two masked men carrying a small wooden box in his arms. He carried it
gently, as if it might hold a sleeping baby.
“I want to see it,” Mr. Hargison said in a voice I’d never heard Mr.
Hargison use.
“Show him what he’s buyin’,” Biggun told his son, and Bodean carefully
released a latch and opened the box’s top to reveal what lay within. None of
us guys could see inside the box, but Mr. Moultry walked over to peer in and
he gave a low whistle behind his mask.
“That suit you?” Biggun asked.
“It’ll do just fine,” Mr. Hargison said. “They won’t know what hit ’em
until they’re tap-dancin’ in hell.”
“I threw in an extra.” Biggun grinned again, and I thought he looked like
Satan himself. “For good luck,” he said. “Close it up, Bodean. Wade, take our
money.”
“Davy Ray!” Ben whispered. “Somethin’s crawlin’ on me!”
“Shut up, goofus!”
“I mean it! Somethin’s on me!”
“You hear anythin’?” Mr. Moultry asked, and that question froze the
marrow in my bones.
The men were silent. Mr. Hargison gripped the box with both hands, and
Wade Blaylock had the fistful of money. Biggun’s head slowly turned from side
to side, his blastfurnace eyes searching the woods. Hoot-hoot, went the
distant owl. Ben made a soft, terrified whining noise. I hugged the earth, my
chin buried in pine straw, and near my face Mr. Hargison’s cheroot smoldered.
“I don’t hear nothin’,” Wade Blaylock said, and he took the money to his
father. Biggun counted it again, his tongue flicking back and forth across his
lower lip, and then he shoved the cash into a pocket. “Okey-dokey,” he said to
the two masked men. “I reckon that concludes our bidness, gents. Next time you
want a special order, you know how to find me.” He started trudging back to
get into the Cadillac again, and Bodean moved fast to open the door for him.
“Thank you kindly, Mr. Blaylock.” Something about Mr. Moultry’s voice
made me think of a ratty dog trying to lick up to a mean master. “We sure do
appreciate the—”
“SPIIIIIDERS!”
The world ceased its turning. The owl went dumb. The Milky Way flickered
on the verge of extinction.
Ben hollered it again: “Spiders!” He started thrashing wildly amid the
pine needles. “They’re all over me!”
I couldn’t draw a breath. Just couldn’t do it. Davy Ray stared at Ben,
his mouth hanging open as Ben writhed and yelled. The five men were frozen
where they stood, all of them looking in our direction. My heart thundered.
Three seconds passed like a lifetime, and then Biggun Blaylock’s shout parted
the night: “Get ’em!”
“Run!” Davy Ray hollered, scrambling to his feet. “Run for it!”
Wade and Bodean were coming after us, their shadows thrown large by the
crossing of headlights. Davy Ray was already running back in the direction
we’d come, and I said, “Run, Ben!” as I got up and fled. Ben squawked and
struggled up, his hands madly plucking at his clothes. I looked over my
shoulder and saw Wade about to reach Ben, but then Ben put on a burst of
frantic speed and left Wade snatching at empty air. “Come back here, you
little bastards!” Bodean yelled as he chased after Davy Ray and me. “Get ’em,
damn it!” Biggun bellowed. “Don’t let ’em get away!”
Davy Ray was fast, I’ll say that for him. He left me behind pretty quick.
The only trouble was, he had the flashlight. I couldn’t see where I was going,
and I could hear Bodean’s breath rasping behind me. I dared to glance back
again, but Ben had headed off in another direction with Wade at his heels.
Whether Mr. Hargison and Mr. Moultry were coming after us, too, I didn’t know.
Bodean Blaylock was reaching for me, about to snag my collar. I ducked my head
and changed directions on him, and he skidded in the pine straw. I kept going,
through the dark wilderness. “Davy Ray!” I shouted, because I no longer could
see his light. “Where are you?”
“Over here, Cory!” he called, but I couldn’t tell where he was. Behind
me, I heard Bodean crashing through the underbrush. I had to keep running, the
sweat leaking from my face. “Cory! Davy Ray!” Ben shouted from somewhere off
to the right. “Goddammit, bring ’em back here!” Biggun raged. I dreaded
finding out what that monstrous mountain and his brood would do to us, because
whatever had been going on back there was definitely something he’d wanted to
keep a secret. I started to call for Ben, but as I opened my mouth my left
foot slid on pine needles and suddenly I was rolling down an embankment like a
sack of grain. I rolled into bushes and vines, and when I stopped I was so
scared and dizzy I almost upchucked my toasted marshmallows. I lay there on my
belly, my chin scraped raw by something I’d collided with, while I waited for
a hand to winnow from the darkness and grab the back of my neck. I heard
branches cracking; Bodean was nearby. I held my breath, fearing he could hear
my heartbeat. To me it sounded like a drum corps all slamming an anvil with
