The Creeping

Her silhouette moves past us, seemingly gliding. It travels up the porch and converges with the shadows. Deep inside the shack there’s the scrape of something heavy dragged across the floor, and then a warm glow seeps out the doorway.

“C’mon, this is the only way,” Sam whispers, limping forward and guiding me rather than me helping him. The porch protests loudly under our weight as we lunge over the busted steps. We pause at the mouth of the door. The faint light wafts down a long hallway—longer than I would have expected, given how little and squatty the shack looks from outside—and smoke makes the air shimmery and thick.

“Sam.” I catch his chin and make him look at me. His eyes have the look of pink-rimmed black marbles. And it’s my fault. “I swear I’d get you to the hospital.”

He swallows the pain and smiles feebly. “I know you would.”

Without another word he lifts his injured leg over the threshold and tugs me inside. As we struggle through the last door in the hall, we see Griever hunched over a stone fireplace. Suspended over the flames is a giant cast-iron pot; she stokes the blaze, and the flames lick its sides. She sinks into a crouch and holds long metal tweezers into the heat until their tips glow molten. Sam hobbles to an empty chair.

“I tan leather at night.” She clinks the tweezers on the cauldron. I can just make out a brown solid bubbling up from the water on the surface. It has the look of an empty sack of skin. “Boilin’ rather than jus’ soakin’ keeps the hide from crackin,’” she adds. It’s the stench of cooking leather pervading my mouth, lungs, and nostrils.

She rises nimbly from the fire and hurries to Sam’s side, where she squats at his feet. She doesn’t move like someone who’s ancient, about to break down. “Have you done this before?” I ask, eyeing the bottle of rubbing alcohol and strips of gauze.

“When I was younger, I nursed sick folk back to health,” she says, wielding a pair of scissors. She cuts Sam’s pant leg off at the thigh. I creep closer and gasp at what I see. Griever gives me a fierce stare, and I get ahold of myself. There are maybe ten or twelve wounds, seething and bubbling where large shards of salt like glass are embedded in the minced skin.

“Why shoot me if you thought I was Daniel?” Sam asks, averting his eyes from his leg.

“That boy’s been stickin’ his nose round here since he was a scrawny li’l thing just off the breast. Empty stare. Stumbled on him in the woods that same summer your li’l friend went missin’, saw his game diggin’ the eyes from a squirrel he snared. I got a name for rotten ones like that.” She wags her tweezers in Sam’s face. “Boys.”

I prop my clammy hands on my hips. Griever’s words are a line cast into my sea of formless memories. It snatches a few out with it, giving them shape. I remember Daniel sticking potato bugs in a glass jar and shaking once. I remember that he used to collect these spiders that had bloated bellies and wiry crimped legs. He trapped them in an old container with breathing holes drilled through the lid in order to keep them indefinitely. I even remember him going out of his way to step on crickets. Horrible, yeah, but boys are always messing around with bugs and mud. Torturing squirrels is another thing. A sick, demented thing. Not the kind of thing a boy who loves his sister as much as Daniel loved Jeanie has in him. A surge of anger rushes through me, and if it wasn’t for Sam grinding his teeth to bear the pain as Griever sticks tweezers into the first festering cut, I’d lose it with her.

“Daniel’s only after answers. He’s lost his whole family,” I say sharply.

“Is that so?” she clucks. I can’t tell if she doesn’t know or if she’s being sarcastic. “Girl, get to askin’ me your questions before I run outta patience with ya.”

I look to Sam for help, but his eyes are scrunched closed, sweat shines on his forehead, and he’s rounded forward like he’s trying not to be sick. It’s painful to watch him, so I pace. “What’s buried in your yard?” I ask, failing miserably at delicacy.

Griever doesn’t miss a beat. “Animals, but you already know that. I heard you diggin’ ’em up and findin’ a dog.”

My stride falters. I try to tie my hair back from my face, but my hands are shaking so badly I can’t make a knot. Instead I just wring them like some kind of OD’ing schizo. “So there’s someone—or a group of someones—who are sacrificing animals in Savage, right?”

Half her face shadowed, she watches me, her good eye trained on mine, the tweezers lingering at the mouth of Sam’s open wound. “Same families have been doin’ it for generations. Only one of their bloodlines left, though. Don’t know how it started, but we’ve been tryin’ to stave off the evil for years.”