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JED WAS CERTAIN his old hands would seize up, carrying both the shovel and the neighbour boy’s bike into the woods to bury. But the little shit made his blood boil, snotty fingers dribbling that basketball all summer, prepubescent whine caterwauling over the fence and rattling around in his ears like a bad song. A pair of cramped up mitts would be small price to pay and nothing that a slop of Bengay and a bottle of whisky wouldn’t cure. He angled the little Schwinn between thick tree trunks and pushed deeper into the twilight-bathed forest, licking his lips and impatient for the deed to be done. If he timed the burial right, he would be in his slippers with a napkin tucked into his undershirt, hunched over a slab of Winnie’s ham casserole before full dark.
When he came to a spot that seemed fit for a grave, he thought, boy sure loves this bike. Shame to miss the expression on his face when he can’t find it. Jed let the bike drop in a clearing past a copse of beeches that fell off into a narrow river. He glanced at a whisper of moon in the darkening sky and broke ground with his Gardenmaster, a nasty smile haunting his face.
Just as he had begun to make headway shovelling a depression in the dirt (and working up the sweat of the sedentary), he was startled by the sound of approaching footfalls in the leaf cover. Jed spun and growled at the forest, ‘Who’s there?’ He whipped his head around, aggravating the crick in his neck. Nothing but a strange, warm wind answered him. And on it, the suggestion of something decomposing, as though the breeze had passed over a mouldering elk or swept through the skeletal canoe of a coyote’s ribcage on its way to him. Jed was scratching his white stubble, resenting the interference, when an old man’s tremulous voice said in his left ear, ‘Nice night to bury a bicycle.’
Before him was an odd old man indeed. He was dressed in the rags of a different century, as if he had wandered out of a revival of The Pirates of Penzance. Yes, to Jed, the geezer looked like an old pirate, wrapped in faded fabrics and missing only a scabbard and an eyepatch. His pruned face and rheumy blue eyes told of a man well into his eighties, and the sallowness of his cheeks, of hardship and hunger. He leaned heavily on a gnarled walking stick, every overgrown fingernail crowned in dirt. Jed tried to blink the surprise out of his eyes and spat, ‘Who are you? What do you want? Leave me to my business!’ The pirate gave a hoarse chuckle and said, ‘Take it easy, fella! The name is Hobart. But friends call me Hoby. You can call me Hoby, too, Jed.’
Jed’s eyes bulged. ‘How the hell’d you know my name? You followin’ me, mister, you sent by someone?’ Jed had made plenty enemies in this place, living here as long as he had and being the sort of man he was, and his first thought was that some sonofabitch from town was behind this and looking to make trouble again.
‘No, no, young man! I mean no harm! It’s just that you sure look like a “Jed” to me. I didn’t mean to unnerve you, been a while since I’ve seen anyone in this forest.’ Hoby adjusted his soiled rags and presented a filthy hand to be shaken, corn-kernel teeth showing in a wet smile. Jed scowled and looked at the man before him suspiciously. His face was kind, but there was something in the eyes. Jed tilted his head like a dog who perceives an inaudible cue and held out his hand reluctantly. They shook.
‘What the hell you doin’ out here?’ Jed scanned the clearing for any other strange characters and laid the shovel down, wringing his aching hands.
‘Oh, I live out here, my little shack is just down the river a tick. Shabby spot, nothing to look at, but room enough to brew the world’s best homemade wine and that’s the truth!’ Hoby chuckled hoarsely to himself, then said, suddenly excited, ‘you know what, Jed? I know a better place to get rid of things you don’t want found, and it’s just a bit further down by those trees.’ Jed shot him a distrustful look.
‘What if I told you that you could lose that bicycle down a very deep hole in the hillside? Hole that leads to an old cave system, takes half a minute ’til you can hear anything you’ve dropped hit bottom. Means no digging a grave when you’re hungry and ready for your supper. Means no sore hands, eh, Jed?’
Jed felt a wave of unease, like this old bastard was reading his mind but Hoby added placatingly, ‘Neither one of us being young, and you rubbing your hands like you are.’ Jed shifted his weight and looked to where Hoby had pointed. ‘Tell you what, Jed, we drop this kid’s bike down the hole, no questions asked about whose or why, and you can be the first to taste my latest batch. Raise the dead, this batch! And the bike will be our secret.’ Jed considered how insane it was to entertain following this vagrant further into the woods, let alone to whatever foul dwellings he had raised out there. But Jed was a drunk who liked a shortcut, and the wino’s boast was enticement enough. And his hands did ache.
There was something about this old coot, an itch under his skin that demanded scratching. Who the hell is this guy living out here in the forest? Why? Since when? The questions abounded like mosquitoes, and he nearly fanned the air around him to clear his mind. These questions itched. And so, even though the sky had become a dark, purple bruise and he could almost hear Winnie’s contemptuous snort as the hour pressed on and he hadn’t returned, Jed followed Hoby deeper into the forest.
After a few moments of trailing Hoby, who hummed a phlegmy tune and lumbered with his staff and knobby, bowed legs, Jed saw the hole. It opened like a grassy maw, four feet around, and yawned into criss-crossing roots and then darkness. As Jed craned to see into the cave, he felt two things at once, a sudden, vertiginous swoon like he was already drunk, and an ineluctable urge (which shocked him) to let himself fall into it. It was an alien thought because Jed had never been suicidal; he considered murder often enough, but the malice in his heart was reserved for others. He was hovering over the opening in the ground when Hoby’s jolly voice ripped him from his reverie.
‘Go ahead, Jed. Toss it down! There are spirits to be drunk!’
Jed blinked, cleared his throat, and let the bike go, just as he had envisioned letting himself drop a moment ago. At first, he heard nothing. For what seemed like an entire minute, nothing. And then, as he was turning to Hoby with accusations, a far-away, metallic crunch. Jed howled with surprise at the blast of pleasure he felt when the bike hit the ground. It was a warm, golden euphoria in his gut and loins that reminded him of being a young man and lying in rumpled bedsheets after a good screw.
‘Good riddance! And well done, Jed! Did you feel it?’
Jed was breathing hard, his face locked in a stupid grin. ‘Feel what?’ But Jed had felt it.
‘No use being shy with ol’ Hoby, I saw it in your eyes, Jed. Throwing things down there feels good, and the more weight a thing has to someone, the better it feels to drop it down that hole.’ Jed stared into the abyss, his mouth moving with silent words, and he might have stared for longer if Hoby hadn’t laid a dirty paw on his forearm. ‘Don’t look too long, Jed! Best we make it to mine and we’ll have you on your way home in no time, belly full of my secret recipe!’ Jed shook himself and followed.
It wasn’t a shed. It was more like four walls made of stacked cardboard boxes, rows of branches leaning against them, and a dusty, drop cloth slung over the whole mess. Hoby lifted the cloth for Jed to duck under and followed him in. Inside was deceptively spacious and filled to the brim with odd things—rusted coffee pots, soiled stuffed animals and dolls, beaded necklaces, trinkets, and small, carved figures. Everywhere Jed looked were stacks of mouldy books, their covers threadbare, and old music boxes like the one Winnie had for jewellery with a spinning ballerina inside. It was as if Jed had stumbled into a degenerate pawn shop in the middle of the woods.
In one corner of the space was a hulking steel drum that several flies were lazily exploring. ‘There she is,’ Hoby cooed and reached for two metal cups hanging off the end of one of the support branches. He made a show of dipping each cup into the drum, using them to stir his batch, and with a grand flourish, offered Jed the deep red liquid. Without breaking eye contact, Hoby drained his own cup in one swallow.
The concoction was pungent and made Jed’s eyes tear; a deep sniff of the stuff made him cough. He took a sip. Jesus, it was strong. He rolled a heavy, sweet mouthful of the wine over his tongue and swallowed. Once the liquid had passed from his throat into his belly, he felt another wave of vertigo and with great effort, sat himself down on the dirt floor to catch his breath.
‘Told you it was strong, didn’t I, Jed? There you are, old boy, have a seat and drink it slow, no rush.’ Hoby gathered his rags together and with even greater effort, sat himself down on the ground next to Jed, his empty cup making a tinny sound as he tossed it to the side. Jed’s head was spinning after the third sip. ‘This shit’s stronger than whisky,’ he slurred, and slumped back against a pile of oily blankets. He took a final sip and through bleary eyes, momentarily mistook a pile of good-sized rocks for human skulls. He blinked the disturbing vision away and swaying, asked, ‘Where’d you come from?’ Hoby leaned in close; Jed could smell the sickly sweet wine on his breath, and beneath that, something sour like the air in a cellar. ‘Time to go now, Jeddy, time to get back to your plump wife and ham casserole, to dream of wicked deeds,’ but Jed could hardly hear him. As if he were being operated by remote control, he picked himself up, rubbed his hands over his face, and hung his head. He left the strange dwelling in the forest without a word to stumble home in the darkness, never once lifting his eyes to look where he was going, thoughts thick and slow as honey. As he left, he heard faintly what Hoby called to him. ‘Come back and see me, Jed! Your old friend Hoby! Come back soon and bring us something to feed the hole. Don’t stay away too long, Jed. I’ll be waiting for you!’
Interlude
‘Wake up, you miserable asshole.’
Jed stirred to consciousness. He blinked sleep from his gummy eyes and willed them to focus on the hulking form of his wife. He found that he was sprawled on the living room couch, fully clothed, only his dusty boots removed and leaning against each other on the floor like two drunks.
‘Where’d you go last night, Jeddy? Ain’t you too old for whores?’ Jed cleared his scratchy throat and glared up at her, one hand shielding his eyes from morning light. Her doughy moon face was screwed into a snarl and she had her flabby arms crossed over her bosom like she always did when she berated him.
He felt like he had just been roused after surgery. He was sore, nauseated, and couldn’t think a clear thought for the life of him. What the hell happened last night? What he wanted to do was tell Winnie that she should fuck right off, but the thought of inspiring her to nastier spirits made his head throb even harder. So he covered his face with his hands and said, ‘Drank too much, Winnie, just drank too much and fell asleep outside. Brought myself home when I finally woke up.’ She rolled her eyes and snorted derisively. ‘I’m goin’ out, I have errands to do, and I can’t stand to look at you.’ Jed rolled over to face the couch cushions. She added as she stormed out, ‘And put yourself in the goddamn bath. You smell like a graveyard.’
But Jed didn’t put himself in the bath. He drifted in and out of fitful sleep and strange dreams there on the couch for the next three hours. In one dream, he found himself in the forest, at the foot of an enormous beech tree. He was filled with a powerful sense of foreboding, a certainty that something dangerous was up in the tree, looking down at him through shadowy branches. He strained and stretched but couldn’t quite see anything in the darkness from where he stood. A pair of yellow eyes blinked into being in the branches above him. Jed took a deep, shuddering breath as he steeled himself for some kind of impact. He could hear something moving around in the black recesses of the beech tree and knew that he was about to die. He yelled into the night, ‘COME, ALREADY!’ Branches stirred, something fearful was gathering itself to leap at him. And then he woke.
Winnie shouldered open the screen door and pushed her way into the house carrying several bags of groceries and a pernicious mood. She hadn’t stopped cursing Jed in the hours since she left him curled on the couch. Revelling in the indignation, she sucked down cigarettes and blasted Connie Francis, whipping around corners and failing to give the right of way in their rusty Datsun.
At the country store, she had glared openly at the pretty cashier swiping her groceries and cursed herself for ending up with Jed. She knew he was a mean sonofabitch even in their twenties and had no illusions that he might soften over time. People don’t change. But she was a mean sonofabitch herself, and he was the only man she had found willing to stomach her crassness and pendulating moods. In their seventies now, all pretence of civility had vanished. They were both angry wardens in a prison they had built together. And the thin layer of mutual tolerance had attenuated to disgust over decades of conflict and bad blood. The reason she didn’t leave him was equal measures complacency and certainty (which she would never admit to) that as inharmonious as their union was, she could do no better.
Winnie dropped the grocery bags on the kitchen counter and peered into the living room where she was surprised to find Jed snoring in the same position she had left him. She made a revolted sound and went to wake him. As she approached the couch, Jed began talking in his sleep. She leaned down and noticed his face was striped with sweat. He tossed and turned like he was fighting a fever and uttered a few strange words before she lost her patience and flicked his ruddy nose with her pointer finger and thumb.
‘Who’s Hoby?’ she asked, as though she had smelled something foul. Jed spasmed awake and felt a flash of déjà vu as he squinted up at her. ‘What?’
‘You were talkin’ in your sleep. Someone named Hoby. What the hell’s wrong with you, you got the flu?’
Jed’s stomach lurched as the night rushed back to him all at once. Hoby. The hole. The shack in the woods. ‘Back off me, woman, I’m sick. He’s no one. Met him last night while I was takin’ a walk. Lives out in the back woods.’
‘Well, now, don’t like just attract like. Don’t go bringin’ some forest bum back here. “Lives out in the back woods.” Shit’s sake!’
Jed forced himself to sit up, felt a stabbing pain in his belly and lay back down.
Winnie switched to taunting. ‘Probably out there all alone talkin’ to yourself, imagined the whole thing. Nobody named Hobo out there, just YOU bein’ a drunk shit and wastin’ my casserole.’
‘Hoby,’ he muttered in correction, and attempted to sit up again. ‘Winnie, for ever-loving shit, will you leave me the hell alone for a minute? I ain’t feelin’ right!’
Jed made it to a sitting position and Winnie gave up and waved her hand at him dismissively. She waddled off to the kitchen to put away the food, mumbling curses. Jed swung his legs around to find the floor, pulled his boots to him with a groan, and put a foot down into each. One sock was immediately soaked with warm liquid and he winced and kicked it away, spilling cat piss all over the carpet. ‘Goddamn it, Winnie! That piece of shit cat! That motherfucker has pissed in my boots for the last time!’ He instantly regretted shouting and put his fingers to his temples. Jed looked around the room for Sparkles but the cat was long gone to some smug perch.
It was not unusual for Jed to drink too much booze and pass out, or to wrestle with a nasty hangover the day after; but he was wrecked, sick like he ate something—the wine! He thought of the greasy steel-drum wine and the dizzy spell. Old bastard made a tub of poison out there in the woods and I drank it!
Jed stumbled to the shower. Battered by clean water in a cloud of steam, he began to return to himself. The sickness and delirium sloughed off with the dirt and dead skin and he leaned against the shower wall, taking deep breaths. But there was more. As he dried himself off and began to dress, he found that he felt good. He felt energised. He searched for the familiar ache in his hands but could not find it. His back felt less like it had a twisted ladder running through it to his neck. His knees felt strong. Jed decided to give himself a clean shave and wiped a spot in the bathroom mirror, leaning over the sink and exhilarated by the new comfort in his bones. I feel younger!
As he dragged a straight blade over his lathered whiskers, his thoughts turned to the forest. And to Hoby. The longer he thought about his experience in the woods and the strange man who appeared out of nowhere and knew his name, the more curious he became. He tried on the idea that maybe he had taken too many pulls off the bottle in the garage before he left to bury the boy’s bike, that maybe by the time he got to the woods, he was already sauced and half-dreamed the whole encounter. But he couldn’t convince himself. He found that his memories of the evening began to blur around the edges after he peered into the mouth of the hole. That impulse to jump in and the elation after he dropped the bike down sat in his gut like undigested food. What was that?
Unsure as he was exactly what had happened to him last night, he felt a deep-seated, increasingly insistent need to know more. To go again to the woods and see if Hoby came to him, to visit the hole and drop something else into the cave. Lost in a flip book of thoughts, he didn’t feel the half dozen cuts he had opened on his cheeks and chin, each weeping a drop of blood.
By the time he was eating breakfast, he wondered if Winnie was right and the whole thing hadn’t happened after all. As he shovelled cold ham casserole into his mouth, he remembered his boot filled with piss and his thoughts turned dark. Fucking Sparkles! With this newfound vitality, Jed found that he was capable of even more rage than usual. His mind flooded with permutations of harm he could do to Winnie’s old, incontinent cat. And as he continued to ride a wave of violent fantasy, his face fell slack, one corner of his mouth turning up in a grin, a string of cheese dangling there like drool. And within the trance, he heard Hoby’s last words echoing to him,
Come back and see me, Jed! Your old friend Hoby! Come back soon and bring us something to feed the hole. Don’t stay away too long, Jed. I’ll be waiting for you!’
2
Jed wasn’t thinking about his old hands seizing up this time. He was only thinking about one thing. He swung the canvas sack holding Winnie’s dead cat at his side like a picnic lunch and whistled as he retraced his steps to the clearing in the forest where Hoby first appeared. Today, he was able to bound up rocky inclines and jump over roots as he reassured himself, He’ll come, he’ll be there. Jed wanted that euphoria back, whatever had stricken him standing over the hole that day, and he wanted answers about the wine and his sickness, and why memories of that night swam in his mind like a dream. Most of all, he wanted to ask Hoby why he felt stronger in the week since their meeting. And he had been dispassionately observing the upswell in wicked thoughts. Always present, this part of him seemed to have been electrified, passed through an amplifier. Jed thought about hurting the mailman, the neighbours, the waitress at his favourite bar. He raged at traffic lights and screamed at the television when the game was rained out. And he followed Winnie around the room with his eyes like she was a big, fat fly he was preparing to swat. He thought increasingly angry, murderous thoughts all week. Of course, they were more than thoughts now; he looked down at the sack, stained crimson on one side, and smiled. Something was unfolding leathery wings inside of him and Jed didn’t mind.
He sat comfortably against the trunk of a beech tree at the edge of the clearing, dead cat-sack at his side. He was basking in a shaft of autumn sun when he caught sight of the ditch in the ground that he had been digging when Hoby came to him. This filled him with joy like he had found an artifact of something achingly precious and only half-believed. He laid his head back against the tree trunk and called Hoby’s name out loud with closed eyes. Silence. He sat still as a stone for close to an hour, listening to every bird call and gust of wind for a sign of Hoby. He tried to will the old fool into existence, and failing at that, took a long pull from the flask in his flannel jacket. Twilight was coming, and Jed began to doze there against the tree.
He woke to someone singing a strange song. It seemed at a fair distance, but he could make out the clear baritone and lilting vibrato and began to look around for the source. Surely it couldn’t be Hoby, but he got to his feet quickly and followed the song to where the ground sloped down into riverbank. A man with his back to Jed stood ankle-deep in the river wearing Hoby’s rags. Jed’s breath caught in his throat and he called out to the stranger, who he could see was holding Hoby’s walking stick. Jed closed the distance between them, sliding on his heels down the embankment and out of breath, looking like a poisoned man chasing the antidote. When he got to the edge of the river, he stopped, ten feet from the stranger who turned to face Jed with outstretched arms, ‘Jed, my old friend, you came back! I knew you would find your way!’
Jed grimaced, squinting, and shook his head, ‘What the hell is goin’ here, this some kind of joke?’ He stared at the man in Hoby’s filthy clothing; he had thick, silver hair, the rugged face of a handsome fellow in his fifties, and sharp blue eyes.
‘Come on, now, Jed! It’s your old pal, Hoby!’
Jed took two steps back. ‘Old…’
The man calling himself Hoby showed a slow, knowing grin.
‘Whoever the hell you are, you ain’t Hoby. What’d you do to him? Where’s the old man?’ Jed searched the tree line as if the real Hoby would emerge from hiding and give up the jig, corn-kernel teeth and ancient eyes alight with the ruse.
The man took two steps toward Jed. ‘Easy now, Jed. Let’s head back up there and visit the hole, I know you didn’t come empty-handed. After, we can go to my place and I’ll explain everything. Promise.’ He held his hands up innocently, but there was a danger to his tone. It was more than his robust physicality; there was a new feeling of menace to him. Who is this Hoby?
Jed looked off toward the clearing and the beech tree where he had left the bloody sack. He turned back to the man, scratching his head as though he had lost a thought and was ransacking rooms in his mind to find it. Being in the stranger’s presence seemed to make his brain grow fuzz. He couldn’t be Hoby. He was easily thirty-five years younger than the old codger he had met before; and yet there was something about him, an air, a way of holding his head, the look in his eyes. Jed reeled. How? He had come here with a head full of questions for the old man. But standing before this mystery, he could not remember a single one.
‘Come! Let’s get moving, young man! We’ve got holes to feed and words to have and a brand new batch to sample!’
Jed beamed at the thought of the hole, the wine, and the chance to make sense of it all. He let himself be led around the embankment and up a small path in the hillside. Soon, they were standing together in the clearing. ‘Well? Go get your offering.’ Jed blinked and stared. The man’s face hardened, ‘Get the fucking cat, Jed.’
Jed felt funny as they stood together over the hole. He turned to the new Hoby, ‘How’d you know I had the cat?’ For a fleeting moment, he had that same urge to fall in; he even lifted one foot off the ground and dipped it into the air inside the hole like he was testing the temperature of a swimming pool. He swallowed as a wave of nausea overtook him.
‘The same way I knew your name was Jed and that you were hungry and sore the night we met. Now drop it in. You’ve been waiting for this moment.’ Jed returned his foot to the ground and braced himself. He tossed the sack down into the hole. And was flooded. It was like a shot of morphine, stronger by orders of magnitude than when he had let go of the bike. A current of pleasure swelled inside him and burst and his knees buckled in its wake.
Jed stumbled backwards, panting, a dumb grin softening his face. ‘There you have it, Jed. Just like I said, better the more weight a thing has.’ Through the lovely haze, Jed thought, It is him. It’s Hoby.
The shack was exactly as he remembered it. He sat cross-legged on the dirt floor and tried to take in all the details so that he could freeze them in his mind, pore over them later, keep them as his own. Oddities surrounded him; the glass eyes of a dozen dolls followed him, a cuckoo clock spilled its guts out in a heap of gears and springs, the tyres of a familiar bicycle poked out from behind a large antique mirror leaning on its side. That bike…
Jed was about to speak, but Hoby’s booming voice stole the question from his mouth. ‘It’s the wine, Jed. It will make you young again! I’ve been drinking it and look! See my strong jawline? My broad back? I know you’ve felt it, too, old friend, even from a single cup! Am I wrong?’
Jed nodded and held up his hands, ‘They don’t hurt no more.’
Hoby clapped him on the shoulder and nodded toward the tub of wine in the corner. ‘This one’s stronger, Jed. Melt the years off like wax.’ His face opened into a beatific smile, but the thought struck Jed that Hoby’s eyes held secrets.
‘Last batch made me sick ’fore it made me better. Just about the worst hangover I can remember.’ Hoby glided to the vat of wine. He reached for the cups and dipped them in, just as he had before, although then he had done so with liver-spotted hands.
‘Drink this, Jed. The sickness just means it’s working. Small potatoes for the gift of youth, wouldn’t you say?’ He presented the cup, brimming with liquid so red it was nearly black. Jed thought about how sweet it would be to be young again. He had a brief, vivid fantasy in which, looking like Steve McQueen, he leaves Winnie for a red-headed stripper with big, fake tits and—
‘Drink up, Jed! And we can get to the good part.’ Jed drank up, forgetting the way his stomach turned and ached last time, how terrifying dreams visited him in restless, sweating sleep. He drank and forgot the questions he meant to ask.
He let his head loll against an old, dusty trunk, and as Hoby began talking, Jed felt as though he was listening to a sermon from down a long hallway. The wine was warm in his belly and seeped into his brain, where everything echoed and vibrated. Hoby was on his knees, building up momentum as he spoke, boring into Jed with wild eyes. ‘I know what you want to ask me, Jed. I know you want to understand. But let me ask you a few things. You’ve always known, haven’t you, that something was missing inside of you? That deep within you, the wiring was different? Remember the first time you set out to hurt someone? You punched Georgie Fitzgerald in the gut so hard he puked right there on the playground. Do you remember that feeling, Jed? That’s what makes you special. And forever after that day on the playground, haven’t you always found ways, sometimes devastating and sometimes forgettable, to bring pain to people around you? Have you ever sensed that each one of those deeds fed something out there, something very old, Jed, and very powerful? Haven’t you wondered why that strange seed is inside you and what put it there? And oh, haven’t you asked yourself what would happen if you gave into that part of you, gave in completely and nourished that seed, what great works you might do?’
Although Jed found it difficult to keep his eyes open, and the wine was pulling clouds down around his mind, he strained to take in every word as if it might be a missing puzzle piece. Hoby’s eyes flashed as he whipped himself to a rapturous crescendo; he was peeling back layers of Jed, staring straight into his soul. Jed could see flecks of spittle collecting in the corners of Hoby’s mouth which seemed to have grown wider, taking up more of his reddening face. As Hoby opened his mouth to continue, Jed saw something there that made him afraid for the first time. Hoby’s teeth were no longer the grey nubs he had flashed at Jed on the hillside as they met and shook hands. Nor were they the clean, white set on the version of him that stood in the river earlier today. They were long and yellow and each one came to a point. Jed tried to blink away what he was seeing, remembering how he had confused a pile of rocks for human skulls last time.
‘The very thing that has made people turn from you your whole life, that is what I want you to celebrate! We can only ever be who we are, Jed. No matter how hard you to try to dress that part of you up or push it down into the shadows, it will always be the truest part of you. Our disguises are flimsy, Jed. Give yours up. ‘
Jed’s eyes fluttered closed and he sank into a place of semi-consciousness where dark shapes floated over him. He heard Hoby in the distance saying, ‘Come back soon, Jed. And show me what beautiful things you’re capable of. Bring us something worthy to feed the hole. Don’t disappoint me.’
Interlude
Winnie wasn’t stupid. She was cruel and ignorant, but she could see that something truly awful was happening to Jed. Something different than all the times he got shit-canned from a new job or when he and his brother fell out and he retreated to the garage to drink and sulk for a few days. Something that made her want to take a knife to bed with her for the past two weeks. Just in case. It was the way he looked at her lately. His passive distaste for her had fermented into something more aggressive, and when he wasn’t baiting her into an argument, he was staring off into space with raging eyes.
She knew he killed Sparkles. Her scorn for him had undergone a transformation of its own into something unfamiliar in her adult life—fear. As contentious as their marriage had been, Jed had only ever raised a hand to her once. They were young and had both been drinking; she couldn’t remember the details of their disagreement. But she recalled how Jed puffed up his chest, backed her up against the wall, and popped her in the right eye. She was certain he didn’t expect what happened next because his eyes went wide and his mouth made the shape of an ‘o’ on his way to the floor. Winnie rose from the crouch she had fallen into after he hit her and kicked him in the balls with her heavy boot so hard that he couldn’t sit or piss right for a month and his whole business turned an angry blue. Jed never hit Winnie again.
Winnie had been making herself scarce the past few weeks, finding reasons to take the car into town, doing a more diligent job of keeping household supplies stocked than she had in their forty-three years together. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to be around him, because that was nothing new. Winnie had to come to believe that Jed was going to kill her, and on the day he asked her where the wheelbarrow was, she made a quiet decision to be ready.
Jed waited for the sick feelings to stop and the youthful feelings to come like they had last time. Instead, he lost weight and his eyes sank deeper into his head. He developed rashes on his chest, and bruises he couldn’t explain appeared on his arms and legs. He tossed and turned every night for a week, but the only sleep he could manage was poisoned with nightmares. He dreamed he was huddled in the branches of a beech tree, high above the forest floor, gathering his strength to leap at someone. He saw his mark gawking up at him, ran his tongue over predator’s teeth, and readied himself for the kill. A voice shouted, ‘COME, ALREADY!’ And just as his muscles tensed, he woke up, and the dream scattered.
He moved through the days, zombie-like, oscillating between states of agitation and semi-consciousness. In lucid moments, he began working out how to kill Winnie. He could think of little else than delivering her to the hole and to Hoby’s approval. But the thorny question of why the wine hadn’t made him feel younger this time plagued him. Maybe a stronger batch meant it took longer to produce effect. Every morning, Jed stood in front of the bathroom mirror and took inventory of how he felt and looked. And every morning, he found his reflection alarming and his body besieged with more aches and pains. He began to feel a growing desperation that wound itself around the anger in him like strangling ivy. Maybe Hoby was testing him; maybe he was supposed to offer something else to the hole to prove himself. His mouth slid into a frown. Where the hell had he left that old wheelbarrow?
On a Tuesday, Jed prepared to cook a batch of chili, the only recipe he knew. He lined the ingredients up on the counter: beans, ground beef, onions, garlic, jalapenos, tomatoes, spices, and rat poison. He hadn’t offered to cook dinner in forty-three years and wondered briefly if Winnie would be suspicious but forgot his concern as he chopped vegetables and daydreamed about the red-headed stripper. He resolved that if Winnie wouldn’t eat the poisoned chili, he would find another way to get the job done. It was time to return to the woods and find Hoby. And Jed would not disappoint him.
The game of pretend was easier for Jed than he thought it would be. As he poured Winnie a glass of cola, he offered, ‘I know I ain’t been nice lately, even for me. Ain’t been myself. But I’m better now, Winnie, and I think it’s time things changed with us, don’t you? Ain’t you tired of all the meanness?’ Winnie smiled, leaving the cola untouched. The kitchen air was thick with the smell of cooking meat and spices, and Jed buzzed around the stove, stirring and salting the bubbling pot and humming to himself. He had added the most important ingredient before Winnie came down and sat at the kitchen table, hiding an unpoisoned portion for himself behind some empty cans of beans.
‘Know what, Jeddy? Why don’t you get my good serving bowl from the rack in the garage? You made this nice supper, let’s do it right.’ Jed thought with relish, This is the last chore I’ll ever do for you. But he winked at her, wiped his hands on his pants, and said, ‘Good idea’ as he headed to the garage for the bowl.
Holding the china with both hands, Jed went over the plan, playing out the scene of Winnie choking, gasping, then bleeding from the mouth. He would load her up and off to the woods they would go. Hoby would clap him on the back and say, ‘Nicely done, old boy,’ and feed him the right wine to make him young and strong. And he would be free to do whatever he wanted, to be whatever he wanted.
He rounded the corner to the kitchen and in one instant, his world became fire and pain and unalloyed panic. Winnie stood before him, the upside-down pot of boiling chili held over her head triumphantly. As his eyes melted and the flesh blistered across his face, he heard her scurrying, breathing hard, slamming the front door shut, then peeling off in the Datsun with a horrible screech that blended with the sound of his screams.
And then he was alone with his agony. Every nerve shrieked. He could see nothing. Burning hot beans and blinding jalapeños slid down his pustulating face and pooled in his shirt, singeing his chest. He fell to his knees and made gurgling, bubbling sounds from his nose and mouth, tried to scream Winnie’s name, and writhed on the kitchen floor with the spilled chili. Then he remembered the rat poison. It was in his mouth, his eyes, his nose, his wounds; he had no doubt ingested enough of what was meant to kill Winnie to fear for his life. Jed knew suddenly in his bones that only Hoby could save him.
3
On his third trip into the woods, Jed crawled on his hands and knees, dripping globs of flesh from his face. He banged into trees, felt the seeping wounds of his eye sockets further assaulted with branches and pine needles, and only paused in his journey to vomit blood. And all the while he was dragging himself further into the forest, he yelled Hoby’s name and begged him for mercy. After a time, his knees gave out and he fell over on his back, hair plastered to his skull with blood and pus. As he lay there shivering, a shape bent over him. His ravaged eyes only registered a blur, but a place activated in his lizard brain that had evolved to know terror when faced with it, and he pissed himself there on the ground.
‘What’s become of you, Jed?’ It was a new voice, not entirely human and it hissed, ‘You fail me twice. You come with nothing, and you come to me ruined.’
Jed gurgled, blood in his mouth, ‘Helllllp me!’ In response, he felt the claws of an animal closing on his wrists. Hoby moved so close that Jed could feel hot breath on his raw skin. Even with his suppurating eyes, he could now make out the face inches above him. It was a devil’s face, both reptilian and simian, fanged, grinning, yellow eyes with slitted pupils, heartless, hungry. Then, he was swept up into the air, hanging from Hoby’s clutches by the armpits, and lost consciousness.
His eyes opened, and he found himself on the ground beside the hole. His stomach contracted, and he turned to his side to dribble red spit. Hoby’s new voice said, ‘You have only one thing left to offer.’
Jed’s dying mind raced. He began to weep because he knew that what Hoby said was true. With his last breath, he pulled himself on his elbows to the mouth of the hole. He felt Hoby’s eyes on him and heard a monstrous chuckling that seemed to come from the sky and fill the whole forest. And in the elastic moment before he landed on the cave floor in a heap of broken bones and bloodied, melted flesh, Jed felt pure ecstasy.
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