As Feeble As Frail: Part 4

This is part 4 of my serialized short story. Read the earlier parts if you would like:

part 1
part 2.
part 3.

December 1918

Years before Arthur became a father, before Bonnie came into his life and destroyed it in the passing of an hour, he was awoken by the sound of his older sister’s body hitting the floor. They shared a bedroom and their mother slept across the hall. Arthur crawled along the cold boards and found Dorothy face up. Her eyes were open and she wasn’t breathing.

“Dotty?” said the boy, shaking her. “Dotty!”

She drew a long breath and sat without using her arms to lift herself. Her eyes looked like the lifeless glass in a doll’s face. She jerked an arm and held it there for a moment before swinging it over Arthur’s shoulder. He thought she resembled a mannequin trapped in one of those mechanical fortune telling machines, like Zoltar or Esmeralda. When she spoke, her scratchy voice sounded as though it were coming from a gramophone record.

“Papa.” she said. “I can’t understand what you’re saying.” Then Dorothy slumped and her voice returned to normal. “Arthur?”

“You were over there again.” He touched the place on her hand where the amateur tattoo was still healing. “I wish you would stop going off like that.”

She hit him on the back of the head. It was playful, but hard enough to register her frustration.

“Are we going to be under Momma’s boots forever?” she said as she stood. “The spirits won’t speak to me in plain words. I need your help. Don’t let me down, Arty. Don’t you dare leave me to this all alone. Follow me.”

Without a word, he followed her down the hall and through the back door. Their little yard narrowed as it stretched away from the house and ended abruptly in a bank of rocks that tumbled into a frozen stream. Just in front of those rocks stood a shed. The ground was snowless but still frozen and Arthur’s bare feet ached. Once they were standing in front of the shed, Dorothy produced a key.

“You stole it?” said Arthur. “Momma will kill you.”

“Arty, she’s got all we need to hold a seance.”

The girl opened the shed and revealed a jumble of props. There was a spirit trumpet and a tambourine. A small spirit cabinet sat in the corner. Arthur saw a book on a bench entitled “Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen” by an Emanuel Swedenborg. He lifted the book and found a poster with their mother’s name printed over a drawing of a young woman with objects floating about her. He had to assume the woman was Momma. The poster advertised several dates in 1905.

“You see?” said Dorothy. “She was a medium.”

There was a curtain drawn half way across the front of the spirit cabinet. Faint light from the waning moon pierced the shed’s interior through gaps between the roof slats. It formed scattered shadows within the box. Then it seemed as though the shadows became one, became the shape of a person sitting on the bench inside the cabinet. Its head turned. It stood. The shadow’s foot, thin as paper and dark as a well hole, stepped onto the shed’s dirt floor. When an arm pushed the curtain all the way to the side, Arthur knew he wasn’t imagining things.

“Stupid feeble minded child!”

Behind them stood Momma, tall and broad as a mountain. In her hand she held a kerosene hurricane lantern with a bright red metal frame. She swung it in the direction of the shadow and when the light fell upon that thing, the figure burst into a mass of insects. The bugs swarmed down the side of the spirit cabinet.

Arthur and Dorothy were already running back to the house when their mother started following them. Despite her size, she caught up to them just as they reached the door to their room. The woman forced herself between the two children and shoved Dorothy into the room and locked the door. Arthur ran across the hall.

In his mother’s room there stood a massive armoire, one of the double door models with an oval mirror on one side. He climbed into the space behind the mirrored door and held fast to the interior latch.

Momma didn’t come right away. There was some shuffling down the hall and the sound of a bath filling. Then footsteps creaked in his direction. They entered the room and stopped. All was silent. Arthur would’ve rather faced the shadow man in the shed. The sound of his own breaths was deafening in his ears.

breathe…

one, two, three…

breathe....

one, two…

breathe…

His mother spoke. “There may be ghosts, but there is no life after death. It’s nothing like the church people say.” The woman always talked of church people, which meant anyone with any religion besides her own. “I dressed it all up like their conjuring tricks; just for money. But the Drifter ate them and left the shadow men behind for the rest of us. If the shadows get in your body then the Drifter will eat you too.”

She grabbed the handle on the dresser door, but Arthur was strong enough to keep her from opening it more than a crack. Then he watched a wooden broom handle slip through the gap. Momma pried open the door. She shoved the pole hard into his chest. She dragged him out and beat him on his head. Curled in pain on the floor, Arthur saw what he had feared: a bottle of bleach and electric cords stripped to their bare copper. Down the hall, the bath was still running.

He turned his head away from his mother’s implements. On a nightstand stood a rust colored bottle. It was emptier now than it had been earlier in the day. The label read “Betz Co. Tincture of Opium”.

The bottle rested on a yellowing newspaper hanging halfway off the nightstand. The top of its front page was limping over the edge and upside down letters spelled out the largest headline he’d ever seen: “Armistice Signed!” His mother had refused to toss the paper out and so it remained, like an undesirable relative who’d overstayed his welcome, but which she couldn’t evict.

At first the paper had filled the children with hope, not only of their father’s return, but of an end to the cycle of torture. It did nothing to their mother but make her even more morose. It was as if she already knew what the future held. She always had.

Momma pulled out a pair of scissors and, with the precision of a surgeon, slipped them beneath her son’s clothes and cut them off his body. She whipped the boy with the wire. The length of copper, with all its little burrs, caught Arthur’s skin and tore bloody lines down his back. She pulled him across the floor and into the bathroom. The cold tiles were more welcome to Arthur’s ruined skin than the splintered floorboards. The woman knelt. Her big face, made of reddened hillocks and creases, filled his vision. Her look was almost one of sorrow and regret.

“You did nothing wrong, Arthur. Not aside from being born and having a stupid sister, but I guess that’s my fault.” She ran her fingers through his hair and plucked out an insect. “I would be a terrible mother if I didn’t at least try to take the demons out.”

“Demons?” muttered Arthur.

“I know, it’s the word of those idiot church people. With all their smells and bells and all their petulant pleading for favors from a god they will never leave, no matter how much he abused them. But what better word is there? The shadow men are as close to demons as anything. I’m going to use my own two hands to drive them away because there ain’t no magician who’s gonna do it for me.”

She shut off the water and lifted the boy. It was startling that she was still able to do so, even if with considerable effort. A normal sized fifth grader should’ve been too heavy, let alone one of Arthur’s unusual heft. But Momma was bigger than average herself and always seemed capable of doing whatever impossible thing she’d set out to do.

If Arthur had thought the whipping was painful, it could never compare to the shock the bleach water sent through his body when his mother dropped him in it. He was thrashing and flailing and drowning. In summers he swam in the stream behind the house and he was always stronger than the current, but now he was going to die in a few feet of bathwater, all the while in terrible pain from the stripes on his back.

February 1927

Ethel slept sideways on the sofa, the only way she could now that her belly had grown too round to let her rest any other way. Arthur placed his hand over it and felt Beverly’s little mass inside. The three of them were in the front room of his mother’s house. They had arrived five days ago, after the doctor said there was nothing more he could do. Momma would be gone soon. After all the stories Arthur had told her, Ethel had said he should just let the monster go. Yet the bonds people put on each other’s minds were hard to break, and so here they were.

A moan came from the back of the house. Arthur fetched a glass from the cupboard. The faucet rattled and groaned as it spat water into the dirty vessel. He passed the bathroom with its claw-foot tub. The hall ended in a door that lead to the yard and the shed and the frozen stream. On one side was the room where he and Dorothy had once slept. On the other was his mother’s room. He went into its darkness. The woman enveloped within the bed sheets took the glass from Arthur without a word. After sipping from it, she set it on the nightstand, on top of an ancient newspaper so curled and smeared it was illegible. She turned her back to him. He walked to the armoire and opened the door with the mirror. It was empty. There was no cowering child and no shadow man.

Arthur returned to the front room. Through the windows he saw a group of strange children he had observed the past few nights. There were five of them scrambling down the steps of their sagging home. Each seemed about the same age, maybe six years old. They were all shoeless and dressed in short clothes, in defiance of the cold and the sugarcoat of snow over the knobby patch of dirt on which they played. Each night they had appeared after sunset, never to be seen in daylight.

Despite his inclination to mind his own business, Arthur had grown frustrated with the abandonment of these poor children to the night and the winter air. He walked across the street and a little girl came up to him. Her face was pale, the color of wet clay. She tipped her head to look Arthur in the eyes. The full light of the moon illuminated an indentation below her hairline. It appeared as though there was a thumbprint pressed into her skin there. She smiled at him with uneven rows of jagged teeth that looked to Arthur like shards of porcelain.

“I’m Arthur.” he said. “Where’s your mother?”

“No mother.” said the girl in a cheery voice. “Only our father.”

“Why are you out late? And in the cold, with nothing on?”

The little girl shook her head at him as if he were a child himself and needed simple things explained in tedious detail.

“We are not worth your worry.” she said. “We are only frail children of dust, and feeble as frail.”

She took Arthur’s hand and brought it to her forehead. It was soft, as though he could push his own hands in and leave an indent. It was also warm.

“You’re running a fever.” he said.

“No, we’re little demons.” she said, with that same wistful smile and singing voice. “Our father says we cannot go out in the sunlight or our skin will dry and crack. It’s good to stay in the dark and the cold.”

A boy ran into a shed, which looked as though it might collapse with him inside. Arthur went to the entrance and stopped. On one side of the building, he saw shelves full of dusty jars, each in the shape of an hour glass. The boy grasped a jar, unscrewed the cap on one end of it, and drank in the liquid.

“What’s that?” said Arthur.

“Those are canopic jars, of course.” said the girl.

A moment later, her expression changed to fear. With sudden urgency, she pulled the boy out of the shed. She turned to the other three children and hollered at them.

“We must go!” she said. “The Drifter is near.”

Arthur’s mother had spoken of the Drifter. This was the creature she claimed had somehow consumed the attendees to her seances, leaving shadow men behind. She had never said more than that, however.

“The Drifter?” he said.

“She is the fisher of souls.” said the girl, tipping her head to one side in another sign she thought Arthur quite dense. “She keeps the black caster in her house of wheels.”

With those words, the children ran back up the steps from which they had come. Arthur stood there for a moment. Then he turned to cross the street again. As he passed the edge of the property, he noticed the mail box, which stood on a pole leaning to one side. It read “Jonas”. It was a name that meant nothing to him then, but would mean very much in six month’s time.

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If you want more, then you are in luck. I hear from good sources that the next part is imminent. In the meantime, don’t let me stop your little fingers from upvoting, commenting, or resteeming. If you’ve lost interest, I would appreciate any time you could spare telling me why. Thank you!