The New Chapel

Hell, I don’t know how to talk about it. Never did amount to nothing anyway, but I didn’t want to go like this; cowering in a corner.  Never even left the county, and I always did mean to see cousin Bobby in Houston.

I killed a momma snake once.  She was layin’ eggs.  Struck at me, but missed and  I coulda just kept goin’ but I didn’t.  Don’t know why.  Shot her with my little .22.  It was a clean shot, but I don’t think he cares about stuff like that.

I guess what begun it was that new church.  Pastor Oackland was a fiery sort of man when it came to what he always called a “proper” House a’ God.  Unless I missed my guess, he’s burnin’ in hell now.   Heh, he was a right S.O.B..  Picked the top of the only hill in town for the site of the new Church, and wouldn’t nothing stop him from building there. We moved power lines, water mains,  tilled the shit out of it, till it was flat enough to build on.  Whole town pitched in.

Oackland was good at gettin’ people to do like he said, and to be fair, did a lot of the work himself.  Don’t mean I miss him though. Well, it was like any other build at first; till’ we found that den.  This whole area’s full of caves, but most ain’t big enough for a grown man to crawl in, though critters fit just fine.  Oackland was digging one day, tryin to remove this big stone from where he said “the pulpit would sit.” He’d removed a lot o’ earth around there and exposed some shallow tunnels.  Well I don’t expect he was payin’ too fine of attention, he could git in a fury when he had a goal in mind.  He got bit by what he later called “a little yellow, devilish snake.”  Course he called everything that he didn’t like devilish. But even I must admit, he had a point.  We got him some anti-venom real quick from the county hospital, but he wasted away just the same.  They even called in this specialist from Dallas to treat the bite, but he died before the big doc even arrived.  Before he went, he started saying some real crazy stuff.  Like, in another language. The specialist, Dr. Hall, gave an “inconclusive” diagnosis.  He said that while he was pretty sure it was a snakebite, he’d never seen such a quick death from a local one before.

There was a real hysteria for a few months after that, folks killing every snake they found and what not… this would be about the first of August. Anyway, after that there didn’t seem to be no point in finishin’ the church, and only some of the older folk still wanted to get up early for Sunday anyway.  Rest of us, truth be told, was just as happy to stay home.

The trouble started when  Mr. Radcliffe went back up to the hill to pray for Oackland’s soul.  We heard him screamin’ and yellin’ and all run up there to help. The stone Oackland had dug around had fallen into one of those tunnels. They was jest packed full o’ snakes.  It was real weird.  They boiled out of the ground like oil.  Pretty much everyone ran.  I sure did.  You can call me a coward but you wasn’t there.  It was bad.  We saw em crawlin’ all over the hill till sunset.  When we went back up the next day there wasn’t a one in sight.  We figured they’d crawled back into the earth. Found the body then.  Torn to shreds.  No one in this town would have called me weak, but I got a turn at that sight. Mr. Radcliffe wasn’t somewhere, he was all over. We had a hell of a time cleanin’ it up.  Before we could even arrange the funeral, Poor old Mrs. Radcliffe was taken.  She died different though.  Tap water contamination, that’s what the coroner said.  Coulda’ sworn I seen some bite marks on her arm.  The older folks started dropping left and right after that.  Mr Fenning was a near on a hundred, but I swear he was strong as an ox the day before he went. Looked like he’d fallen in a ditch and broken his neck – what he was doing out on Junior Fenning’s property was anyone’s guess, they never did act like kinfolk even when Mother Fenning was alive.  They hadn’t spoken since her funeral to my knowledge.

There was a federal investigation, but they never did find nothin’. Twenty five deaths in one week a town with less’n two hundred souls is fairly suspicious.  But none of the folk that died had any money, and Agent Denton, F-B-I, never did find anything concrete.  He left the second week of September.  Before it got really bad.

I read once, about Mongolian tactics. Chinese built that wall ’cause of them.  Callin’ them ruthless would be an insult to all the ruthless folk in the world.  They did all kinds of things like fling diseased corpses at barricaded towns, and kill the defenseless, children and elderly, but leave the healthy citizens alive to watch.  I used to think the worst thing in the world was to see something wrong and not being able to do anything about it. But now, well… the worst ain’t in the world.

Well, about the third week of September is when the children started passing.  you know how in the movies, they never show the death of a child?  That’s a good thing.  Almost makes me want to lay down and die.  The causes were just as varied as they had been with the older folk. Some wasted away, some died of accidents, couple cases of food poisoning .  Couple in even worse ways… I mean, they was just kids you know?  Never done nothin’.  Think I see why; can’t fix it now. That goddamn chapel is still there, half-built.  Damn you Oackland.  There were better sites.  Well, about 15 kids was killed in all, the rest of the families moved away real quick.  That leaves us with a town of about thirty.  Younger, capable folk, with no children.  But he was just playin’ with us.

You know it’s funny, Agent Denton asked me if I had any suspicions before he left, and I told him that if he had never known a man that could do all this, kill all these people, they I surely had not either.

I caught Emma Lockstaen stabbing Johnathan Wentworth right in the throat, but it wasn’t her.  I believe that now.  John died, couldn’t even talk; but we had Emma.  Funny thing, she passed out right as we walked in the room, and that’s probably what killed John.  She’d just caught him on the side of the neck, but missed the big veins.  When she fell, the knife went with her, and cut crosswise into him. After the children, it didn’t seem so bad, and to be perfectly honest I never did like John.  Didn’t want him dead though.  Whole thing was wrong.  Miss Lockstaen didn’t know John that well, so motive was hard to come by. She just sat in that cell, rocking and moanin’ to herself.  She died about week later.  We didn’t have no coroner then, so what killed her is anyone’s guess.

I knew somethin’ big was happenin’ or about to happen, but it was hard to get around the murders themselves. I don’t believe any of them were accidents. Not anymore. You’ll probably laugh at this, but this whole situation gets me to thinkin’about life.  It has a funny way of balancing things out.  Just nature I reckon.  When I was a kid I used to say my prayers and go to church real regular.  Even more than my ol’ man.  I’ll allow there’s powers out there much bigger than men, but they don’t come from nothin’ good.

Well, there was just four of us left By the first of October, after about ten or fifteen deaths everyone else left.  I called up charlie Wentworth about a week after he moved, but he talked to me like you’d talk to a crazy man.  Said he’d never lived here and didn’t know me.  We was best friends in high school. There was talk of gettin’ the government down here, but a kind of wilfulness set in.  It’s a small town thing, I expect.  We never knew nothin’ else, don’t have nowhere else to go or whatever.  People talk about not wantin’ to leave the place where they grew up, but that ain’t it.  Bub Deckland left, and his great grandaddy helped build the original town hall.  No, we stayed because we had to.  We wanted to leave, but like… anytime we’d think of it, the thoughts would just get in a jumble and we’d forget before too long.  Like there was some reason we had to stay, but could never quite remember.  Well we all ended up staying in Ella Pritchard’s old ranch house, being the biggest around.  I guess we thought we’d be safer together.  We had a long talk by the fire one night.  I don’t expect i’ll ever forget that. It was Jordan Pritchard – Ella’s grandson, Nadine Simmons, Big Doug Cooper and me. For a spell we just told our stories, not bein too much interestin’, since none of us except Nadine had ever been anywhere but here.

Nadine had gone to county college in Fort Worth. Said she had kind of a funny incident there.  She was walkin’ a park trail when she come across a scared kid, looking for his mom.  He said a bad man had tried to take him.  Just about then she looked up and thought she saw someone comin’ down the path-way out on the horizon. The kid got hysterical, so she took him back down the path to find his mom.  She said she told us because she thought she’d seen that someone again, not two weeks ago.  She said she knew it was him. He walked wrong, not like a limp or anything, more like he was always falling forward.  Said it makes you queasy and weak in the knees to see it.  Well we all had a bit of a laugh at that, eased the mood, but then Jordan stopped real sudden.

The look on his face turned ours like to stone.  He told us how back in Febuary he was choppin’ wood for Mrs. Radcliffe when he came across a big rattler under the wood pile, curled up and nearly dead from the cold.  He didn’t think twice, but chopped it up. Most people ’round here woulda done that, I expect.  You know sometimes a rattler head can still bite, even after you cut it off?  Jordan swore up and down that head made a little leap for him.  It missed, and he smashed it with the head of his axe.  He buried it in the Radcliffe’s backyard, close to the well. Tap water poisoning. I don’t know about that.

Cooper was a pretty wild kid, but he’d settled down these last few years – after a spell he told us about him and his old buddy Dawson Langers.  Dawson had died when they was both about fifteen, and I looked into it myself.  We never found any body, but there was some bloodstains and torn clothes.  We only had Cooper’s word for what happened, but since no one had anything positive against him we let it drop. Cooper’s story was that they were hiking out by the river and Dawson had slipped, hit his head, fallen in, and was carried off by the current.  It was possible, seein’ as the river was flooding that time of year, but I’d heard from Lesley Garrot, the Cooper’s neighbor, that Doug had come home all nervous, covered in blood and dirt and went straight in the house to talk to his old man.  They showed up here about an hour later, which is funny cause the station ain’t more than a minute’s walk from that house.  Lesley said she was out mindin’ her azaleas and she heard a real different story.  She said Doug had told his folks that he and Dawson had been attacked by some animal.  He said it wasn’t no cougar.

Me? I killed a momma snake once.

Well that was last week, and I ain’t seen any of them since.  Probably dead.  Just like the town.  Just like us.  I’m gonna let you out ok? No citation or nothin’.  Drunk drivin ain’t anything compared to this anyway. But I think you should let me go out there first.  Maybe all he wants is me.  I don’t know nothin’ about this stuff, and I’ve lived it.  I’m sorry you got mixed up in all this.  Heh, fallin’ forward. Wish I coulda left.  I didn’t want to go like this. Do yourself a favor. Get as far away from this damn town as you can.