CREATURES Read online

  CREATURES

  by

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  CREATURES copyright@Billie Sue Mosiman 2012, All Rights Reserved

  Three Short stories about Creatures including THE SCREAM, THE LONELY WALK, and ANGELIQUE.

  A werewolf, a zombie, and a fallen angel--Creatures.

  THE SCREAM

  by

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  Copyright @ Billie Sue Mosiman, 2012

  The wound would not heal.

  Joey leaned the hoe against the barn wall to adjust the bandage covering his right forearm. He frowned, worried at how dirty the strips of torn sheet had become from this day's work in the field. If the wound got infected any worse, what would happen to him?

  Shadows indicating the approach of evening slouched in the corners and rafters of the big open hay-strewn building. It was October, a month when the light failed early. Joey had been attacked in June, during a late hour of darkness as he came from across the field after finishing a long day's tilling.

  They wouldn't believe it had been an animal. They thought he had snagged himself again on the barbed wire fence during crossing from the back field to the front. They called him clumsy and a fool, and no, they would not put in a gate they could ill afford for his convenience. They called him worse names than that, but he tried to forget them because the words hurt too much if he kept them in his mind.

  If Joey had told them it was not the fence, it was not an animal he had ever seen, something less wolf than macabre beast, more human than gorilla, they would have ridiculed him mercilessly. They might even have sent him away. They threatened him often enough for him to believe them.

  Yet no scoring of the flesh from barbed wire had lingered. Instead a throbbing pain and a sulfurous stink came slowly creeping into him that lasted six months now. He tried everything to cure himself. They didn't believe in doctors and would not take him to one. Here at the end of the twentieth century they lived as if they were firmly entrenched in the nineteenth. He had to make do with a poultice of black greasy salve used as medication for the cows and mules. For pain he sneaked an occasional aspirin from his mother's purse. Not that the aspirin helped. The pain kept growing, a tiny incremental bit day by day, until he realized nothing his parents had in the house was going to stop it.

  Still the wound festered, turning blue around the bite marks, now threading red streaks up the inside of his biceps toward his shoulder. It ached all the time. He expected it would kill him--a thought that skittered fretfully in and out of his thoughts a dozen times a day as he tried to get through his work.

  "Did you chop the weeds between your mama's winter greens or have you been daydreaming in the barn for hours?"

  Joey started. In the open doorway stood the menacing silhouette of his father. In his father's hand Joey could make out the leather horse whip, his father's constant companion used for whipping his son, flinging snakes from beneath the house, frightening cows, swatting flies, and any other action meant to control his world.

  "I hoed the garden," he said. And he milked the cows, fed them their hay, saw after the mean-spirited hogs that he hated with a passion, and watered the fall sweet potato crop.

  His father went through the list nevertheless, questioning him closely about the chores. He was not allowed into the house until everything was done.

  Why didn't Evie ever have to help out, Joey wondered sullenly. She was big as he was now, and despite all her weight, just as strong. But, no, Evie was their darling. His sister put on a good show in their presence, while behind their backs she tortured him every chance she got. Called him dowder-head and pinched his earlobes and poured sand in his food. Now there was a monster no one could have imagined.

  "All right, clean up at the pump. Come inside, supper's getting cold."

  His father pivoted and left him alone in the barn with the dark coming on and the fears of his wound nagging for attention. Joey could hear the sound of the whip striking at a pants leg fading as his father moved across the yard.

  He shivered with fear and with self-pity.

  #

  The attack had occurred June sixth. Must have been nine o'clock with the days so long Joey fell into bed from fatigue as soon as he entered the house those days. He had not an inkling of premonition something watched, waiting for a strategic time to ambush him. His tired mind could take in little more than the lonely call of a whippoorwill he heard from the woods and the thankful evening breeze that was beginning to dry his sweat.

  He shut off the engine of the old Massey-Ferguson tractor and climbed wearily down at the end of the last row, moonlight full shimmering across the flat symmetrically-tilled land. In the morning he'd have to climb aboard old Massey again and finish the field, or his father would, of course, be angry. It was acres and acres of land and he had so much more work to go.

  Then without warning from out of the thick trees came the sounds of a disastrous whirlwind that broke limbs and crashed through bushes as it came. Joey halted, his head snapping up, his heart lurching in his chest. He opened his mouth to scream, the first ever scream he had made in his adult life, a scream that began high and was drowned by the rush of wind and the pouncing of a thing upon his right side that sent him sprawling with a hard thunderclap of pain against the perfect rows of freshly turned soil.

  The Thing, not a wolf, larger than a wolf, stronger, more lethal, but with a head bearing some awful resemblance to that animal, reared above him like a giant in the moon-splashed sky. It howled from deep in a long throat, scaring Joey beyond terror, dripping silver streams of saliva upon his wildly beating chest, and then it swooped down with a last terrifying growl, its teeth bared and ivory, sinking fangs to the bone, and tearing away a chunk of meat before bounding away again to the protection of the forest.

  Joey shuddered, remembering. He struggled for release from the nightmare, shambled through the door of the barn into the deepening twilight, and went to the pump to wash the farm dirt off his hands and face. He thought he felt eyes on his back at once and turned lightening quick, but nothing was there. Yet it was there, that Thing was out there somewhere, always waiting.

  #

  During the dinner meal he felt ill. He tried to explain, but his words were garbled. First a mental confusion came over him and he could not make out the sense of words--what were they all saying to him? Then he thirsted like a man dying, yet after grabbing a glass of water he couldn't bring himself to drink. Finally he fainted and thrashed about on the floor, suffering convulsions.

  He didn't hear what his family said about him while so sick and he didn't know when they took him up the stairs to bed, throwing him across the mattress fully clothed.

  He woke after midnight leaking sweat and blood into the sheets. The train passing in the distance rattled clackety-clack over the rails and the high, shrill, screaming whistle from the engine called to Joey to get up, move now, it's time.

  He stumbled from bed, his head filled by a mass riot of white noise. He took the stairs from the attic two at a time to the ground floor of the old farmhouse. He heard an animal growl and turned his head, cocking it to listen. Where was the animal? Where was it?

  "Who's there?" called his father, floundering through the shadowy dark to where Joey stood fearlessly in the moon-streaked room.

  Joey didn't know him, only knew he was an enemy, that the object in the man's hand would cut into him if he didn't take it away and tear it to shreds.

  "Joey?" Querulous and wondering, his father stood with the leather whip hanging loose from his hand. Then knowing and expectant: "Oh my God, Joey?"

  Joey hunched then vaulted, using his back legs to propel him across the room, leaping now into the air like an archaic bird with wide wings, falling through filtered gloom, landing
on top of the enemy full force. The man screamed once, the scream like a song of blood, a song about the dying of the world, a song to put the end to all things. The object fell from the man's hands with a clatter to the floor. And then the man's throat, pulsing hot as a bonfire in Joey's great, clawed hands, opened to him, gushing that heat and the wet of red to stain the floor black.

  Joey turned and looked down the hallway where instinct drove him in leaps. In the bed, sitting upright with a hand to her mouth, was another being, a female one, waiting for him to drag her from the covers and devour her in bloody snatches. She never made a sound beyond the bright bubble-gurgle of dying.

  He turned from her, knowing another one was in the house and coming. Now down the stairs came a large one, another female, a block of darkness squalling like a burning feline, and he left the broken female on the bedroom floor, hurrying to silence the caterwauling, thrilled to know the power could carry him in mere seconds bounding across the threshold, through the littered living room, and to the foot of the stairs. He reached with a long arm and drew her quick into an embrace, smothering her echoing screams in his hairy chest, and bending down, took the top of her head into his great jaws, cracking it with just small pressure from his pointed teeth.

  Suddenly he dropped his prize and fell to all fours, listening again.

  It was the train whistle, calling of far-off places, and the wash of cool wind and of freedom from the killing land.

  Joey turned, a phantom of fur of a deeper shade than midnight, and leaped toward the door, blasting it outward and down. He moved like smoke across the seared grass. He rattled the Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod in his swift passage at the edge of the yard.

  Across the next field waited a dell of trees and on the other side, through a ditch, he knew lay the tracks, coal black and glistening. Beckoning. Wind and blood mingled on his tongue that lolled from his mouth like a flag. Rocks rolled aside from the pads of his feet.

  A cow lowed, sensing danger, and Joey stopped. Not an enemy, he knew. He padded forward to the cattle tank, a man-made pond rank with algae and mosquito larvae. He paused, testing the water with one impossibly long finer, watching the ripples circle out. In the reflection from the water he knew himself and lifting his head high, he howled in celebration.

  He was no more a poor man whipped by a sadistic father, ignored by a silent and ignorant mother, taunted and tortured by a fat, heartless sister. He was Other. He was a Thing.

  The land, bright as day in clear moonlight, was cluttered with stacked tires, rusting hulks of farm trucks and forty-year-old cars, butane tanks that had outlived their usefulness, and fallen trees left to rot.

  He carefully circled the pond, passed the hog pen, disregarding their rooting grunts through the swill, and finally made it into the stand of trees. Mesquite armed the perimeter, their weapons the sharp thorns. Joey brushed through them, hardly feeling the pin-pricks or the leakage of blood that trailed out to the tips of his long fur before dropping to the ground. He heard the rattle of pale khaki mesquite bean pods shiver at his passing, tiny skeletons of October.

  The green shawls of muscadine vines draped and hung in ropes from water oak and maple and sweetgum. Dwarf cedars bristled with hard green seed clusters and smelled of a holiday in some dim past.

  Joey waited in the wood, instinct instructing that another change was to take place, that silence and vigilance was called for. New-found vigor, the like of which he had never experienced, coursed through his veins, welling first from his abdomen. Strength flowed from shoulder to paw, from hip to foot. He perceived a darkness that came slithering from inside, deep in his bowels, and it spread, along with the strength, permeating his entire being like ink spilled on a sponge. It blotted out summers working endless hours in the burning sun--back-breaking, soul-killing summers. It blotted out winters sunk in bottomless despair before the fireplace while the wild wind scurried around the eaves. It took his past and nullified it forever, saving him from a young melancholy that would have clung to him through all his days.

  He roared with life, rising to his full height, towering over the stunted cedars, reaching up toward the sky with raised arms for heaven's approval. That it was not forthcoming meant nothing to him, nor ever would.

  And now through the remaining wood and to the ditch, tangling himself, sweeping aside brambles and waist high cattails nodding brown heads at his crossing making for the railway, and a journey away from all that was dead, from all that had tried so diligently to bring him to his knees.

  #

  The passenger cars shined with a silver gleam as they slowed to pass over a wooden trellis bridge skirting Joey's farm outside of Arville, Texas, that October night.

  Joey lay low in the ditch, his yellow eyes fastened on the conveyance that would take him into the starry distance. As the train cars rumbled past with a noise that stormed his sensitive ears, he shifted his gaze to the last car coming toward him, rose from the grasses lining the track, and readied his haunches to send him airborne.

  He sprang from cover, air singing past his flattened ears, and latched with all fours onto the stainless steel handles of the last passenger car.

  He was finally free, moving now with a dizzying speed beneath the trellis bridge timbers, shadows and light flickering in and out of the crossbars. He rocked back and forth in the cradle of the transport he had spent years dreaming about taking him from the poison of the farm life, the hatred of his family, delivering him like a chariot drawn by a thousand steeds to the heart of a new beginning.

  He squatted, his back against the wall, relishing the wind nipping at his muzzle and ruffling the fur of his appendages. He had much to contemplate if the hunger spared him the time.

  #

  The first of his victims opened the sliding train car door not an hour after he had boarded. Joey little understood the compulsion that gripped him as involuntarily his claws extended from their sheaths. He stood, swinging around in a blur, and took the man up and over the safety rail, flipping him headfirst to the metal floor. Reaching back with one paw, Joey clanged the door shut again so the other passengers would not hear the death throes.

  "Don't...!" the man cried. "I'm not...!" They were his first, last, and only words before Joey ripped into the tender area just below his chin with jaws so strong they snapped his neck upon closing. Joey fed, the blood as warm and comforting as water from a hose left lying in the sun all day. The flesh was as good as sunshine spilling down his throat.

  He threw the carcass overboard and watched while it bounced and tumbled like a huge rag doll down an incline and into a grassy grave.

  Squatting again, Joey licked his lips with a rough tongue, felt the howl of triumph sliding up his windpipe and over his great pointed teeth. He opened his mouth, arched his neck, and bayed just as the train blew its whistle at the scudding clouds overhead that limned the edge of the moon.

  No one else came to the door at the train's end for hours. Joey sat quietly, fierce joy flooding all through him as the landscape changed from farmland to town. He was beyond Arville and on his way west. In the neon bloom of the passing town he caught the scent of mankind in a flock. He could smell the car exhaust, the disgusting scent of smoked meat from the vent of a barbeque restaurant, and the stench of a chemical plant belching acidic smoke. Why did they live this way? How did they live this way? What had happened to take them from the dense jungles and open plains to gather in hovels, to ride in closed coffins, to eat their fresh meat burned to a tasteless crisp? Because he knew them intimately. He had been one himself--a man mired in a prison of walls, feeding on old, dead animal carcasses.

  As the moon rode the sky, reached its ultimate zenith, and began to slip toward the horizon, Joey felt his power, jubilation, and certitude of the rightness of his deeds waning. Dawn held the sky hostage, tinting it on the eastern edge a dry and aged parchment yellow.

  Falling rapidly into despondency, Joey was not as quick to respond when next the sliding door opened and a human appe
ared at the safety rail.

  When he did manage to move, he was not nearly as swift grabbing the victim as he had been before. He had her, a female, over the rail, reached to close the door, and when he turned again to attack her most vulnerable flesh near the neck, she threw herself from the clutch of his arms, and commanded in a loud voice, "BE STILL, YOU LOATHSOME BEAST!"

  Startled into inaction, Joey hesitated, watching her. Her words had reached through his dark mind clouded as it was with animal instinct, and he knew a command when he heard one. He sniffed and found her scent different from the enemies he had killed on the farm. She smelled nothing like them.

  "So this is what happened to Bernando? He came for a smoke and you did away with him. Haven't you any control? Are you mad with the change? Bernando was my friend."

  He turned his head to the side to show his confusion. What did she mean? Why was she not afraid?

  She glanced at the sky and saw the moon lying low over the land. "It's almost dawn," she said. "You'll change back soon. Do you understand me?"

  He nodded, slowly, and it felt odd, as if he was not supposed to communicate in this manner anymore.

  "I am Marta and I know what you are; that's why I'm not frightened. I come from Austria. Before that I was in the cold emptiness of Siberia caring for my sister. She's what you are now. That's why I know when the moon dies, so does your craving for the feast. Just wait. Fight it and wait."

  He stared at her and his gaze softened. She knew him as real, as wolf-thing, as beast. How many like him were there in the world? There must be many for her to happen upon him this way. Was she, too, a beast, a Thing? She didn't look changed.

  "My sister is a wolf," she said. "Bitten when she was a child, bitten and not devoured. I took her with me away to the north country where she wouldn't stalk whole villages while under the curse of the moon. She lived well on wild things and, with my help, her secret was preserved. How long do you think your secret will keep if you murder this way? Poor Bernardo, I told him there were many wolves loose in this land, but he was not careful enough, was he?"