I’ll
know the time is right when the howling begins. It will be after
sundown of course, the Mothers and Fathers of Jebsen only scream after
sundown, and only on the clearest of nights.
There is no town of
Jebsen listed on any map, even in its heyday of the 1940’s it was too
small to be worthy of notice. It’s nothing more than a collection of
buildings at the end of a dead end road. On one side it is bordered by
long untended corn fields, on the other the swampy remains of Lake
Campbell. The most noticeable of the town’s buildings is a red brick
edifice with a wide domed roof of fractured glass. The rest is just
barns and single story homes. Along the border of the swamp is row after
row of barbed wire and bear traps.
I’ll let them scream for an
hour or so, let them become tired. Even now it amazes me how I had
learned to pick out the individual voices in the cacophony. The Widow
Toth tires easily but the Garrets will be at it until dawn.
And
what will I be doing while every able-bodied adult is on the rooftops?
I’ll be slipping these pages into this mason jar and sealing it lid in
place with the wax from a melted crayon. The Children of Jebsen won’t
miss just one, especially not purple.
Twenty-five years ago a
calamity befell the town of Jebsen. The authorities blamed it all on the
after effects of an experimental insecticide but the Old Book the town
elders read from every Sunday said otherwise. It told the citizens of
Jebsen that a curse was carried by those twinkling dots in the sky. A
malevolence traveling at 186,000 miles per second that would twist their
Children into nightmares should a glint of it ever touch their skin.
That is why they scream at the starlight; hating it, cursing it, raging at it.
You
can’t see what their Children have become and not feel the same way.
The changes are heartbreaking and horrifying all at once but after you
spend time with them you feel differently. There is mockery in the
mis-set eyes that peer from those mollified skulls.
They know
secrets. On quiet, cloudy nights I would put my ear to one families’
basement door or another and hear them murmuring and giggling as they
writhe in their basement styes.
I think of their weeping mouths
and soft teeth and remember that day half a decade ago the ill-advised
shortcut and along the neglected county route 99. I remember approaching
the train bridge and seriously considering turning around, it looked
decades out of repair and I half suspected it would collapse as I passed
under it.
But I didn’t turn back, my ego wouldn’t let me. I was
right and the road was wrong so I drove under the train bridge,
momentarily marveling at the strange and elaborate graffiti that covered
it.
I was just past the structure when a small, bent figure ran out from the long grass.
The
sounds are what I really remember; the squeal of the brakes, the thud
of the body on the hood of my car, the thick crack of laminated glass.
I
would later learn the name of the child I had hit was Julius McCarty
but all I knew then was that there was an emaciated, bloodied shape
lying halfway through my windshield.
Human instinct made me reach
out, to see if the little boy was alive. When my fingers brushed his
skin he twisted around to face me. His mouth lashed out proboscis-like
and nuzzled into the flesh of my arm.
Pain bristled out from
where the boy had latched on to me. I screamed, thrashed. I shoved the
car door open and tumbled out onto the asphalt. The boy coughed once and
died.
At first the wound held all my attention. How could it
not? I had expected to see torn flesh and blood but instead the boy’s
distended mouth had left behind a cluster of thick, festering
ulcerations.
But then I became aware of the men making their way
out of the tall grass. These were the Fathers of Jebsen understood
immediately what had happened.
They had brought everything they
might need to bring one of their Children back home to its basement;
rope, bandages and cudgels. It was also everything they needed to make a
captive of me.
They, dragged me away from the accident site,
through the tall grass and over the collapsed remains of a chain link
fence to leave me in the care of the Mothers of Jebsen. Those gaunt
women had cudgels of their own and I was a mass of bruises and welts by
the time the hole in the Earth had been made to their standards.
The
menfolk returned carrying the child wrapped in a linen shroud. They
dropped it roughly into the ground. There were no ceremonies, tears or
headstone. It was well after dark by the time I had filled the grave
back in.
Now here it is years later and I’ve had to dig a dozen
more graves, one by one the Mothers and Fathers are dying out, it’s
always a surprise when it happens. Every mother and father of Jensen is
withered and white haired but every year a few more die in their sleep,
or at work in the fields or at prayer in their red brick observatory.
The
Children are dying too, not a one has ever lived past seventeen. One by
one they waste away, except of course for the occasional accident like
the one that trapped me here.
Despite these curse that has
befallen them the people of Jebsen continue to reproduce, each mother
convinced that this time she will give birth to the Great Redeemer as
was foretold in the Old Book. Each time they fail and each time the
result is locked away in it’s family’s basement.
You can’t
imagine those basements, the smell of rotten meat, the ankle deep fecal
matter and the perfectly clean toys. They draw equations on the walls,
gold and silver crayons are their preferred color. Every Tuesday I have
to visit each of those cellars and scrub the theorems and postulations
away.
The youngest of the Children is a newborn, still angry from
the womb, the oldest is seventeen and nearly rotted away. No matter the
age they all taunt me as I work, sometimes with bites, sometimes with
maledictions. Both have left unimaginable scars.
So many scars
now, I’m marked, I could never walk among the people I’d known before.
They’d refuse to recognize me and insist I was a stranger
The
Widow Thoth says this is my penance for the death of Julius McCarty, she
even went so far as to cite chapter and verse on the subject from Old
Book itself. The Mothers and Fathers of Jebsen, base every aspect of
their lives on that thick volume of prophecies and homilies.
I
wonder if anyone will notice me as leaving. I doubt it, even when
they’re not screaming their heads off a long dead suns they barely
notice my comings and goings.
As I said before, the Mothers and
Father’s of Jebsen have become so sure of me. Some families think I’ve
become a true believer, the rest think the cinder block chained to my
ankle is enough to keep me in my place.
I don’t know who you are
or when you’ll find this message. My only hope is that you will believe
me. If you do, please bring this document to the proper authorities.
Don’t let my death be for nothing.
I go to the bottom of the
swamp with two regrets. One is that I won’t be there when the town of
Jebsen is discovered and burned to the ground.
The other is that
six months ago I accepted Father Garett’s invitation to join in their
celebrations. I went willingly with them to the old brick observatory. I
prayed with them. I danced with them. I partook in all of their
debasements.
And for a little while, perhaps an hour, I was happy.
They
even asked me to give reading from the Old Book. I eagerly stopped up
to the podium and began flipping through the thick volume.
Everyone
waited for me to choose a passage and speak but all I did was shake and
weep at what I beheld. My knees buckled. My mind shut down. I had to be
carried out and put to bed.
You see, the Old Book was blank from cover to cover. You’re even holding some of those pages in your hands now.
I used them to write my story.
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