A DARK CATECHISM

  Jenelle struggled but the ropes were too tight. Her wrists burned and each twist and turn of her arms dug the rope deeper, fresh blood dripping over old blood. The Dogwood tree she was bound to cast a rge shadow in front of her–like an arachnid monster–and she wondered how such a beautiful tree made such an ugly shadow.

  She assumed there was a lightsource behind the tree, maybe a rge spotlight like the one her Dad used when he worked overnight on Interstate 10 construction. How this would be powered in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere, she did not know. She did not care and it did not matter. She would be dead soon.

  She wondered if her Dad–or anyone else that knew her for that matter–would be surprised when she turned up missing. Would they think she finally took her addiction to its obvious conclusion? That she finally copped crystal with some of that Chinese fynt and ended up in a ditch? That she maybe got busted turning tricks with the hoodrats at the Thorne City Inn(LOW DAILY RENT-FREE WF-FI) and was locked up?

  Maybe at first. Thorn County, Florida has a lot of ditches and northwest florida has a lot of jails, but they would quickly find out she wasn’t there. Her Dad has friends in the nearby jails and they always let him know she was there before she got her free phone call. With how quickly these rednecks compined about their dirt roads, a dead junkie in a ditch wouldn’t go unnoticed for too long.

  “Ion give a FUUH!”

  The voice was distant, impossible to tell how far or near in the middle of the woods. In the Northwest Florida dark, sound carried. Natives knew unless you sat on an acre or more to whisper outside, unless you wanted your neighbor to hear.

  “I done tol’em I’ma quit if dey don’t get me some ass too!”

  “You silly as fuuh boy, man and them will kill yo white ass, talm ‘bout you finna quit. Ain’t seen none dem boys who quit”

  The voices were unknown to her, but the accent was familiar. Two white trash country boys who have spent a lot of time in juvenile detention centers and county jail.

  Jenelle felt tears stinging her eyes. They’re going to rape me. They’re going to kill me.

  This seemed obvious but to hear it confirmed made it more real. She knew these types of men. She knew the kinds of things they’d make her do before killing her. What she didn’t know was how many of them there were or how many girls had been taken before her.

  She had heard the stories of girls going missing for years, from Thorn County all the way up to southern Abama–none of them found. Her granny told her it was a monster in Holmes Creek. Her Uncle Larry said it was the Catholics. Her Dad said it was just crackheads being crackheads.

  Janelle made a feral jerking motion with her body, thrusting her hips forward in an attempt to stand. She felt her mushy wrists shred deeper by the rope. Her bare butt smmed back onto the piss-soaked dirt. The trunk of the tree cut into her shoulder bdes. She wanted to scream but knew it would only bring the men to her sooner.

  Janelle struggled but the ropes were too tight.

  More voices. Closer. Arguing.

  Janelle heard movement now—boots and something being dragged through the dirt and leaves.

  She looked down at the cross tattoo on her right knee. She had done that herself on her 18th birthday, higher than fuck on biker meth. She wondered if God would truly keep her like Granny said he would. She wished she had a hit right now. If she could take a hit of Mexican ice, she was confident she could break free and fight off these men or at least survive whatever they wanted to do to her. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad with some meth. She was an animal when narcotics hit her bloodstream and that is what paid her bills at the Thorn City Inn. Maybe she should ask them for some. It couldn’t make it worse, right?

  The arguing was right behind her now and she realized it was the two thugs she’d heard before, but they weren’t arguing, they were yelling through closed mouths.

  Gagged mouths, their mouths were gagged with something, and they were being dragged toward her.

  Janelle felt her bowls tumble as the boot steps stopped behind the Dogwood Tree. Five gigantic shadows were now cast in front of her. Two of them appeared to be shoulder to shoulder with a third next to them. A fourth stood apart and next to the fifth, who was much smaller than the others.

  The third shadow made a gesture with its arm, and she heard the thugs cry out through their gags, their feet kicking at the dirt. Close enough now that she heard the grains of dirt spilling near her.

  The fourth shadow silently joined the third and began struggling with the thugs, who now sounded like trapped raccoons. Janelle noticed the fifth shadow, now standing alone, was hunched and held a cane or stick.

  “Hold them still Kenny, please”

  The 4th shadow's voice sounded bored, like they were going through a routine they’d done a million times before. They had the Florida Panhandle accent, but Janelle thought they sounded more like the tricks from the country club than the backwoods crackers that made up a majority of Thorn County.

  “These fuggin idjats kicked my bad fuggin’ leg!” The voice that must be Kenny said.

  Kenny grunted and Janelle saw the two thugs' shadows drop to their knees, nearly limp. Their heads scked forward and she knew Kenny must be suspending them with a rope around their necks.

  “Are you done?” the 4th shadow said, still bored.

  “Yes Mist—”

  CRACK.

  The .44 casing nded next to Janelle’s left thigh—

  CRACK.

  Another casing joined the fist. Her hearing was gone; it was like she had no ears at all.

  She felt a slight vibration under her bottom as the two thugs dropped to the ground. The 4th shadow returned to the 5th, hunched over one, as Kenny’s shadow appeared to throw a bnket or tarp over the bodies.

  She closed her eyes as a ringing appeared in her ears. She opened her eyes and saw specks of blood on her toes. The ringing lowered in volume, and she heard screaming. The ringing lowered more, and she realized the screaming was her own.

  Janelle thought she was going to vomit but defecated instead.

  “Ohh he ain’t gonna like that, is he? Not one fuggin bit”

  A man stood in front of her now, legs spread aggressively apart, hands on hips. He was 5’7 and wide shouldered. The spotlight lit him up among the dark woods like an actor's solo in a py.

  Kenneth Rose. Kenny is Kenneth Rose. The motherfucking mayor.

  Kenny’s wide jaws stretched open, like a bck hole swallowing a star, as he barked out ughter over his cheap, too-white veneers. His small eyes peered out at her over his giant sunburnt cheeks.

  The nameless 4th man joined him. Janelle had seen this man but didn’t know his name. He was rich, she knew that, too rich to ever speak to her or hers. He was tall and slender with a 90’s Tom Cruise haircut and short beard. He wore a suit jacket and dress pants. He could have been 25 or 45.

  “I think he’ll be fine considering how the st one went. Maybe this was the missing ingredient afterall,” he said, and she thought there was genuine optimism. As if maybe, they had found a solution to a long-standing problem.

  “Let me. Fucking. OUT OF HERE!” Janelle said.

  More ughter from Kenny.

  The 4th man looked perplexed and slightly tilted his head, as if he were surprised, she was able to speak at all. He took two steps back as Kenny stepped forward, still barking ughter.

  “These dumb junkies, FUCKING.JUNKIES!”

  Kenny raised his cowboy boot, and Janelle watched the heel bellow toward her like a wrecking ball, filling her vision until all went dark.

  She opened her eyes and the scene around her was spinning. It stopped and she realized she was ying on her cheek. Something wet was on her face, blood or dirt. She heard muffled voices but couldn’t understand them.

  She tried to move but couldn’t, someone was holding her down by her neck. Fat hands. She knew it was Kenneth Rose.

  Two bare feet appeared before her. Old feet, old as shit. Old as time. A purple robe of some expensive, soft material stopped right above the ankles. Varicose veins, spider veins—all KINDS of veins—bulge from the feet and up to the knees, as far as her fixed position allowed her to see.

  “Allow me to take your cane”

  She heard the 4th man say, and suddenly she was staring up at the sky. She didn’t know anything about consteltions or astronomy, but she knew she’d never seen so many stars so clearly. Branches of the dogwood tree curled over her, high above. She could smell something now, incense maybe. Something thick and special, not the kind of incense you buy at the gas station.

  Kenny’s fat hands cranked her neck forward and she finally saw the 5th shadow who owned the old, veiny feet.

  The man, if he was actually a man, stood hunched around 5’5. She was right, he was old as shit. Ancient.

  Under the purple robe, his skin was pale and thin, draped over a gnarled, muscled physique, which should not be possible to exist on the same body. His face was like a skeleton, hairless with bone structure she had never seen on another face. No color variance existed between his skin and lips, which were clenched up over a toothless mouth. His eyes, gray almost colorless, looked dead but mechanical, like an animatronic from those horrible kids gimmick restaurants.

  Terror, that is what she felt, maybe for the first time in her life. Pure terror. Janelle thought this must be equal to seeing an alien from outer space.

  This is something nobody should see. This should not exist. This is an abomination.

  She felt tears pouring down her cheeks in streams and her breathing was becoming uncontrolled, quickly growing to hyperventition as this man–this creature–stared soullessly at her naked and excrement-covered body.

  God help me, God help me, the phrase rapidly replicated itself in her mind and became the only thought. It felt as if the thought stopped, reality itself might unravel, that the phrase was the only thing holding everything in pce.

  Suddenly she heard–and felt–a foreign sound. A frequency. It was coming from the man, from the creature. It was an alien, unnatural, sustained note.

  She felt Kennth Rose release her neck and she was now paralyzed. He appeared with the unnamed man, a few feet behind the ancient man-creature. The unnamed man no longer seemed bored, he seemed very interested. He put on rge over- the-ear headphones, or maybe they were hearing protectors like her Dad used to shoot his shitty Taurus 9mm in the backyard, and handed Kenneth Rose a pair.

  “This is always so fuggin’ BADASS” Kenny said, the spotlight beaming off his veneers.

  Then the frequency increased in velocity, filling Janelle’s ears, and then increased in octaves until she could no longer hear anything, but she could FEEL it. She felt every muscle in her body melt of tension and rex. She felt organs rexing under her navel. She felt like she had a morphine drip. She felt like butter.

  Her eyes were able to focus enough to see there was a red light coming from the man-creature’s chest. Between the slightly parted robe she could see he wore a neckce with a stone around it, and this stone was emitting both the red light and the alien sound. It felt like she might explode if she stared at that stone too long, though she could not see it entirely.

  She was losing control of her eyes now; they were rolling but she fought to keep focus.

  The man-creature was standing straight up now, with his hands clenched at his sides as if he were about to do the old Kane ring entrance from WWE. His skin was flushing; he was pink and turning red quickly.

  She noticed the lower part of his robe had jutted outward and was expanding forward as his skin grew in color. Dread filled her mind and she realized what was expanding under that robe.

  The frequency changed octaves abruptly, this time to a low, oscilting growl, and she could hear again but she could not move or scream.

  The man-creature stepped toward her. She felt his long, bony fingers clench her kneecaps. Those hands which were pale blue before and undoubtedly cold, were now scarlet and thick with sweat.

  God, NO! God, NO! GOD, NOO!

  The phrase replicated in her mind, ricocheting until it she was lost in it. Until she felt like her brain would disintegrate.

  The mechanical, grey eyes slowly moved down to hers.

  This is an abomination! God, No, God, Nooo!

  Keeping his hands on her legs, the man-creature turned to the spectators behind him.

  Janelle heard him take a deep breath, heard the ancient chest rattle before he said,

  “Robe”