I'm about to publish a horror novel called
In the Depths of the Valley on Kindle. Written almost two years ago, it tells the tale of a love-struck teacher named William Jameson, who makes a covenant with a graveyard creature that doesn't turn out too well (spoilers). This book is sort of a reliving of high school; Mr. Jameson teaches in a small town, and his students have similar adventures to my own at that age. In preparation for its publication, I'm sharing a short chapter. The main character in this chapter is Doug Hepburn, a good ol' boy cop, who is engaged to Loretta Mendez, the object of Will's affection.
Chapter Ten
Doug Hepburn sits in his patrol
car, listening to the sounds of the night while sipping from a thermos
half-full of beer. He’s parked on the side of the highway, lights off, radar
gun sitting unused in the seat next to him. Every couple minutes the silence is
disturbed by the roar of a passing car, headlights glowing around the wooded
hillside like will-o’-the wisps, and Patrolman Hepburn stirs from his drinking
and fumbles for the radar gun. They are always speeding—late night gamblers,
truck drivers, hillbillies—but Hepburn rarely chooses to chase them, not when
he’s drinking. The humidity is nearly unbearable, and the night brings no
breeze. Hepburn takes a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and lights it with a
match. His head aches a little, and the air is draining all the moisture out of
his body, but he likes sitting by the roadside alone. Sometimes he talks to
himself, a habit he’s kept secret for years. Loretta doesn’t know that he
drinks and smokes and talks to invisible people, which is fine with Patrolman
Hepburn, because there are things that shouldn’t be shared with anyone, he
believes, even your fiancée. There is a front, a professional face, as well as
a home face, the face of tenderness, and then there is the true self, the
private self, the self that is inward and raw and unintelligible, the part that
speaks with screams and ground teeth, with kicks and punches thrown at
shimmering whispers, things that float and smile out of the gloom, horrors with
no form and malevolent purpose, seeking souls that are lost, hungry, and sad.
The radio kicks on, mumbling police
jargon, ruining the stillness. Hepburn chucks his beer can out the window and
hears it clatter down the bank and into the river. Smells drift up from it,
stagnant odors of mud and rotting fish. "Cesspool," says Hepburn to
something off in the corner of his vision. "Slough,
skeleton, fall into a heap." It vanishes as soon as he speaks, but it
isn’t really gone. Neither is the smell.
Patrolman Hepburn opens the door
and gets out of his car. It is a rural wasteland out here, the river to the
south, a road traveling up a steep hill to the north, woods going east and west
along the highway back to town. He takes his pistol out of its holster and
twirls the gun around his index finger. I
could shoot at the next car, he thinks, walking across the highway. Broken
glass and fast food wrappers crunch beneath his boots, the trash of pigs, of
fat, useless gluttons content to feed out of troughs. It’s hard for him to talk
to them, the porcine beasts, whenever he has to pull them over, hard to look at
them, to take their licenses out of their greasy hands. He puts his gun back in
its holster and starts to climb up the hill.
The hill’s elevation increases
quickly, and soon Hepburn is panting. He remembers running this hill during
football practice in high school as part of a hellish conditioning routine
designed to weed out the weak. Though still young, he’s not quite in the same
shape he was, and this fact enters his mind as he wheezes up the incline. What am I doing? Where am I going? Patrolman Hepburn isn’t really sure. He seems to
be seized by strange impulses more and more these days, impulses that come out
of the fuzzy nether regions of his brain and steer him with unknown purpose. There has to be a purpose, he thinks,
Doug Hepburn not being a man who believes in random occurrences. In his lucid
moments, he thinks back to his one-way conversations and impulsive behavior and
wonders if he suffers from schizophrenia or some other brain disorder. Can you tell if you’re crazy? he thinks,
stopping near the summit to rest and breathe. The night answers him with the
throb of locusts, pulsating like a wild beating heart. Up here at the top
Hepburn can see acres of forest and the blinking lights of a barge crawling up
the winding Ohio. Is this what I came for? A nice view? A
mosquito lands on his forehead, but he doesn’t attempt to kill it. A deer
carcass rots a few feet away, filling the night’s air with rank, sweet fumes.
Hepburn considers investigating it, maybe to push it off the shoulder, but he
pinches his nostrils and doesn’t move. I
should be doing something better, he thinks, without pondering what. Coach used to make us run till we puked,
then we’d go and do drills, which you never could remember, you stupid bastard.
Never got the patterns down. He spits
to his right, aiming at the deer. Headlights climb up the hill, moving
in-between lanes like a drunken snake. Drunk
sonsabitches, Hepburn concludes as a beater truck rushes by. Loretta can make sense of it all; she’s
smarter than me. She can take care of the mumbling and the shapes. I don’t even
need to tell her because she knows when something’s wrong.
One of the shapes is by the deer
carcass, sniffing and pawing at the dead meat. This one has a long head and a
snout with heavy jaws full of triangular teeth, white and glowing even in the
murk. Hepburn is scared of this one; it has a bad vibe to it, the whisper of
decay allowed to fester and bloom. "Fungal, reptile, diseased,"
babbles Hepburn suddenly, before clamping a hand over his mouth. The creature
snickers—its laugh is raw and dirty, infected somehow—and Hepburn gets the
sense that this one is worse than his other hallucinations, this one knows, it knows and thinks and walks and talks without words, and then it’s
moving toward him on hairy paws (they never
move toward me, they always linger just out of sight) and Hepburn stumbles
further up the hill, trying to remember something about bears (do you run up the hill or down the hill?)
as his heart races and legs climb. What
can I do what can I do what can I do he thinks, never looking behind him,
he can’t look at it, that would be the worst thing to do, he has to put some
distance between this thing and him,
so he sprints across the road, pausing suddenly to stare as great moonshapes
appear out of the darkness, climbing as he climbs. Let them see me let them see me, he thinks, frozen wide-eyed as the
twin satellites grow closer and closer. He wants to look away, but he cannot
move, some wire has been clipped and he’s as dead as a stone, dead as that deer
the thing was eating, and when the
moonshapes greet him he’ll be on the shoulder like the carcass, life ebbing
away and leaving only bloat, stink, and carrion. It’s what I want, he realizes, listening to that inner self that
waits and speaks to shadows. Rubber squeals and the moonshapes veer away from
him, and Hepburn sees for just a split second it, the nameless carrion eater, black and vague and eyeless as it
hits the front of the truck and slides beneath it. The truck stops and a man
gets out, yelling and cursing, coming at Hepburn, who is staring at the
darkness lying motionless beneath the
front tires, and all of a sudden the wire connects and he’s Patrolman Hepburn
and a gun is in his hand and the man is silent and holding his hands up.
"I was running," he says,
pointing beneath the truck with his gun. "You hit it."
"Hit what?" says the man.
He’s wearing a trucker hat and a flannel shirt with cigarettes in the pocket.
"Tell me what you see under
there," says Hepburn.
"Am I under arrest?" asks
the man. "I was just driving, I wasn’t crossing the road in the middle of
the—"
"Look under the goddamn truck
and tell me what you see," interrupts Hepburn. The man is more or less a
kid, a thin trace of a mustache visible on his upper lip.
"Was it a dog?"
"Tell me what you see."
The man complies, moving awkwardly
to his knees to peer beneath the vehicle. Hepburn waits, his pulse rising,
positive that it will lash out with
those triangular teeth and seize upon the man’s throat, he’s almost hoping for
it, for validation for years of formless shapes and disembodied voices and
words that come bubbling up out of some hard, dark place. His gun is trained,
his finger on the trigger. If a truck
couldn’t kill it, how could a bullet?
"There’s nothing under here,"
says the man. "I don’t see nothing."
"You sure?" says Hepburn,
nausea spreading from his stomach.
"Positive," says the man,
turning to look at him. His eyes have disappeared, leaving only sunken skin,
and as he smiles Hepburn sees that his teeth are jagged little triangles,
stained red and covered with bits of flesh and bone. Thank Jesus, thinks Hepburn as he pulls the trigger.
