She drove deep through the trees until her truck’s tires spun loose in the mud and it was there she got out. Her flashlight made night’s theater of the june bugs and the buttonbush, errant shadows leaping from cottonwood like creatures undiscovered.
She spotted Jackson’s patrol car, muddied to hell within a stone’s throw of the Miller tobacco barn. The place was mostly how she remembered it. Gap-toothed planking, sunken and slanted like a last-call drunk. Left standing despite the time, prayers, and collective common sense that should’ve seen it razed from existence years ago. Maybe she ought’ve done it herself. Back then. Purging her name and the place with a single matchstick.
She didn’t know what to make of the tobacco barn’s persistence except that nature might hold the deed to what man builds, but even nature has the good sense of what to leave untouched, and could such a place even be said to be man-made if the devil himself was whispered to live here?
She raised her flashlight and waved it around through the dark. “Jackson?”
“Over here.” His flashlight edged around the barn, shivering in the dark.
She’d been getting ready for bed when she got the call and still wore her pajama pants, which she hitched up to her knees as she schlepped through the belching mud. Jackson stood with his flashlight wandering the fire-licked chinking, most of the exterior worn down to pale slats. Decades of sun and rainfall and occasional evil.
Her flashlight found Jackson’s bloodless face, as transparent as a dime bag. She might’ve expected as much. When he’d radioed her earlier, his voice was flatter than she’d ever heard it, none of his usual schoolyard bravado. She thought maybe he’d been drinking on the job again, but even if he had, drinking didn’t account for lips gone white. Sweat dripping down his neck and collecting in his collarbones.
“You were the first one I thought to call,” Jackson breathed like he’d run all this way. “Forgot you were off today.”
She waved off the apology like a mosquito. “Where is it?”
He shone his flashlight inside the barn, but she didn’t follow it.
“Who called it in?” she asked.
“Call came in half hour ago,” he said.
“Yeah, and I’m asking who.”
“Dispatch didn’t get a name.”
“A number then?”
“Just take a look. Goddamnit.”
The barn door was ajar against the breeze. Jackson’s cheeks puffed as he swallowed something down. He nodded once it’d passed.
The door swung on a single hinge, rusted beyond sound. A step forward and she heard a current sizzling through the air. She looked about for an electrical box or generator or simple telephone pole—impossible, this near the riverbank—until her flashlight finally traced the drone into the barn’s shallow belly where massed a plague of flies assembled into the shape of a body held upside down, outstretched and still. Feet to the rooftop and propped against the wall. Like it was standing on its head for her to see.
For a short second the dead nearly looked alive with the flies moving over the corpse.Then came the smell. Pushed like a fist down her throat, fingers tickling her stomach. She covered her mouth and nose with a handkerchief she’d brought only for this purpose.
For a short second the dead nearly looked alive with the flies moving over the corpse. She reached to shoo the flies off, and as they scattered her fingers nearly brushed the inside of the corpse’s belly, flayed open like curtains. A bone-bound book with nothing written inside but a rib cage and spine. Hung upside down like a rack of meat, pale wrists nailed to a two-by-four level with her ankles. And there before the inverted cross and its gutless crucifant lay a fly-ridden pile of shining insides scooped from the now- empty hollow of skin. Lungs draped over the top of the mess like two blankets keeping the rest of their organs warm.
She came out of the barn coughing, snot dripping from her nose and burning. Flies in her hair, she was convinced they’d be there forever, shampoo and combs be damned. She pointed back at where she’d come.
Jackson said, “Yeah.”
She wanted to feel the cool mud cover her but refused to drop to her knees. “Who called it in?”
“We didn’t get a name. I don’t know.”
“Put out a call then.”
“To who?”
“Everybody. Anybody. We’ll get to setting a perimeter.”
She scanned the dark and saw nothing but its many flashing eyes.
“Should I get State?” he asked.
“What’s Sheriff Parsons said?”
“I haven’t heard back.” Jackson’s cheeks puffed again with something vile. “He’s kissing babies in Frankfort last I knew.”
She shone her flashlight through the door. It was all still there how she remembered, how she’d dreamt of it since, waking only to the cold-sweat comfort of the here and now, but here it all was again. “God’s sakes.”
“I know it.” Jackson crouched down, his head hung between his knees. Breathing like he was birthing a child.
She’d never asked and didn’t know for certain, but he must’ve been not a day over thirty years old. Only reason the thought occurred to her now was that on this night he looked suddenly aged, hard-worn and similarly weathered. A man who’d lost a great deal and gained nothing in return.
“How long do you reckon he’s been there?” Jackson asked.
“Don’t know. Them bugs have done a number on it.”
“I haven’t ever seen anything like it.” Then he said, “Sorry.” And then, “Sorry for saying sorry. I don’t know. Goddamnit.”
She moved her flashlight through the trees, through the weeds, through the brush. She could hear Blood River warbling a stone’s throw away but could not see it. A knot on an oak tree looked to be laughing, cheeks of bark pulled back in joyful wrinkles.
“If Sheriff ain’t answering, we ought to call State ourselves,” Jackson said. “It’s gonna happen regardless.”
“We ought to wait on him.”
Jackson stood up and immediately doubled back over, releasing the yolky shine of his stomach over the mud.
“It ain’t the smell so much as the seeing,” he said, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his deputy’s jacket. “I ain’t ever seen anything like it.”
“You don’t need to be looking. Not right now anyways.”
“Crucified like Jesus. God Almighty.”
“Except the Romans didn’t disembowel Jesus and set him upside down.”
Jackson crouched back down into a three-point stance before settling into his haunches. He held his flashlight below his chin. Like a kid telling campfire stories, haunts that end before bedtime. He shook his head.
“This is where it was before, right? Same barn and”—he regarded the open door, as if expecting the corpse to come walking out—“everything?”
She didn’t answer. The night pressed its heel down on the back of her head. There was laughter in the trees, of that she was sure, but nothing in a human voice. She thought for the first time in a long time about the devils said to wash themselves in the river. How Greg Walpole had said they thirst and drink to their delight, but they hunger something terrible.
“Is it the same as before?” Jackson asked.
She didn’t answer.
“What about your dad?” Jackson asked. “You think we should call him down to have a look?”
She shook her head. “Go ahead and call State. No point waiting on Sheriff.”
“It’s not going anywhere. We can wait.”
“I said call them.”
Jackson walked back to his cruiser, flashlight wobbling. She waited until she heard him on the radio before going back to her truck for a pair of gloves. She returned to the barn and swatted the flies from the corpse’s head. Two empty eye sockets, blind but omniscient; yes, she could feel herself being seen from the dead. How must the living appear to them? Glowing and small, halfway familiar. And here the dead was asking for her to speak while flies crawled forth from the parted lips. Speak and be heard. Testify in my stead. The hair on the corpse’s head looked lovingly combed.
Through the roof slats, a yellow moon. That was the same as before too.
She took the dead hand in hers. Maybe she’d known already, maybe she hadn’t. Either way, she knew now. The tattoos on the fingers, one letter per knuckle except for the pinky that crammed the final two, spelling out her name: A-L-I-C-IA.
That was new.
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