The Apparition

Petey Paul Puckett the triple P pugilist slouched along, hands in front pockets, whistling and kicking at stones as he went.

“That sure was easy money,” he thought with a jolt of glee moving through him. The night air made him buoyant, creating the sensation that gravity had been turned down but not off.

Lean as a lowercase L, Petey Paul Puckett was a construction of tight fibrous muscles connected by interlacing sinews. He was limber, long, and lanky, plus a lot of other L words besides.

Like lucky and loose-limbed.

"That poor fellow," he thought. They ought never have brung him to brawl. He was too green, too ornery, too much backtalk and not enough swing. Petey hadn’t wanted to polish his lights like that, but there was money riding on it, and the man was just too stubborn.

Despite the brevity of the scrap, Petey Paul had taken his full cut. Now it lay enfolded in his shirt pocket, where no man could get at it without considerable effort.

The evening felt silent and serene, until something at Jibby Wilson’s window brought him out of his reveries. Glancing over, he saw a window raised, the curtains swelling in and out as mild breezes tickled against the fabric.

“Ain’t that the baby’s window?” he thought.

Why, yes it was the baby’s room. Jibby and Maggie were lucky to have just the one, though more would probably be on the way.

With both hands he pulled the pane downward, until he heard wood collide against wood. It wouldn’t do to have gnats and mosquitos dining on an infant the whole evening through.

Then Petey Paul walked home in a stoic silence. The lights had been doused and a plate of supper stood cold on the counter. All was as quiet as the fallen dead. Only Shep trotted over to sniff at him before curling up before the door once more.

After finishing the cold biscuit and a drying corn on the cob, he washed his face and crawled in with Em beneath the covers. He hadn’t been that hungry, but it seemed an insult to turn away from her labors.

Emma Lee was every bit asleep as little Jibby across the way. He supposed the infant growing inside her lay dormant too, but of course he had no way of knowing. Sometimes it moved about at odd hours, rousing her when she most needed rest.

But tonight she lay still and silent as a statue, and Petey soon joined her. Sleep came instantly and without a dollop of mercy. He dropped into a series of fragmented dreams almost as quickly as he had shut his eyes.

Then the dreams took an even more ominous turn when he heard the squealing of his own window as the pane began to rise. Horror piled upon horror as a pair of gray and bony arms reached inside, clasping the walls for leverage, and pulling the rest of a body through, first a head draped in hoodery and then a thin torso followed by a pair of quaking legs. The thing was vague and shadowy, hard to distinguish, seeming to blur when he looked at it. It came and stood at the end of the bed, watching him with one pale and unblinking eye. Petey wanted to rise but couldn’t.

“Don’t tell me I’ve turned coward,” he thought. “I can be anything but coward.”

Without explanation, as if by instinct, Petey Paul knew the budding life in Emma Lee’s womb was now under mortal threat, for the vile entity meant to devour its tender soul, leaving his wife to deliver a stillborn.

The trespasser seemed to laugh without laughing, taunting Petey in his slumbers. It made its slithery way along the floorboards, crawling beastlike as its forked tongue found the scent it sought.

Without pause, Petey was up and kicking mightily at the thing, his bare feet colliding painfully with its understructure.

“Such weakness!” The thing’s voice sounded in his head before it rose up, squatting on thickened haunches, bending its neck to accommodate the ceiling. Then it clutched his hands in its own skeletal digits, in the manner of a novice dancing partner, engulfing his fists entire. They tottered like that, locked in a grapple that neither could break. Strain as he might, Petey Paul could not throw his guest off balance. The figment merely chuckled and made eye contact through a tattered veil of mossy cloth.

Petey Paul felt himself staggering backwards, momentum threatening to topple him, but then braced his foot against the base of the bed and found his strength once more.

Lifting his other foot so that neither touched the floor, Petey Paul let the law of gravity do what it does best, bringing the beast downward with him.

There was a thumping crack as its head crashed against a jutting bedboard. His Emma Lee stirred but did not wake.

The figure hissed and writhed in the effort to break the grasp Petey Paul now had around his desiccated wrists. Petey Paul won his battle with inertia, rolling atop the fiend and pinning it to the floor, the way he sometimes had to do with the brawlers in the railyard.

Then suddenly a thought came to Petey Paul, arriving with the sudden clarity of a voice in his ear. “Bite the bastard, Daddy!” came a childlike call. “Use your teeth for God sake!”

Rearing back like an angered mule, Petey Paul thrust forward again, driving his teeth deep into the other’s cheek, his face moving past the ancient garb to meet with bone and leathered skin.

A scream went up from beneath him as he tore a jagged hunk of flesh away. A kind of insanity claimed the entity as it began to thrash about in panic.

“What have you done to me?” the being suddenly cried aloud, his mouth now in motion for a change. Something viscous and cold, certainly not blood, began to puddle beneath them, filling the room with the smell of leaves and wet soil.

“How low! How unfair!” the thing cried, flying now to the window. Its voice was filled with lamentation and seemed to have an echo, as if arriving from some other dimension.

Petey Paul was instantly on his back and running at full speed towards his night visitor. But before he could reach it, the entity was up and moving back out of the window, its tattered garments obscured by the motion of the wind-blown curtains.

He looked out to see the figure traveling off at super-human speed, as fast as a stallion moving at high gallop. Before it reached the edge of the yard, though, it turned and gave Petey Paul a pale and gauzy stare. And Petey knew in an instant the meaning of that look. Tomorrow night it would come again. And the night after. Every evening, in fact, until it had at last claimed its morsel of tender life. And should he manage to preserve her now, why, the infant would be all the easier to devour in its eventual crib, for the barriers of mother and womb would no longer be a factor.

Eventually, Shep whined to be let outdoors, and so Petey rose from the bed only to find a raw soreness in his lower back and a swelling in one elbow.

It was barely dawn, just past in fact, and the day loomed over him like a visceral intimidation.

That dream.

It sent a pulse of dread through Petey Paul just to think of it, a certain heaviness in his stomach, a stony weight in the very pit of him.

Shrugging painfully into yesterday’s shirt and yesterday’s britches, Petey Paul found the resolve to do something essential today. First a black coffee, and then a stroll to the lumberyard with Shep to pick through the toss-offs and find a few pieces to take home.

And thus into the day he went, moving with a resolve he did not truly have.

At the lumberyard, a heap of broken carpentry awaited his perusal. There was effort in his labors as he sifted through first one pile of wooden leavings and then another, occasionally pausing to locate Shep, who was sniffing about the lot and randomly hoisting a leg to mark his ground.

The walk back was less cumbersome. The pain in his spine had lessened with activity, but the annoyance in his elbow remained. With the morning finally breaking true and bold, Petey Paul stretched his chest to the fullest and drank in the dewy air beyond what a man could reasonably expect to hold. His lungs kicked with exhilaration as he ambled past a stretch of low-cut azalea bushes not now in bloom and a solitary pear tree reclining against a section of crumbling cinder blocks.

Now that the dream was out of his system, Petey Paul found his customary lightness of step once more. Where before he had moved in haggard defeat, he now had a new bounce in his walk. Shep tagged along, wagging in response to random scents and occasionally darting ahead and then running back to him, as if on command.

But then at the next rise, something claimed Petey Paul’s attention. It came riding bareback on the breeze - a high and mournful wailing, punctuated by deep-throated sobbing and occasional intakes of air.

Human wailing.

A woman.

Coming from the worst of all possible directions.

Home.

“Come on, Shep, let’s get!” he called, dropping the wood as his body suddenly found the will to run. Even the elbow was forgotten in the panic.

Moving with a speed usually saved for the railyard, Petey Paul found himself standing before his humble little place again.

Only it was curious. The wailing wasn’t coming from his place at all, but across the way.

From Jibby Wilson’s.

“Em?” he called.

Detaching herself from the clustered assembly at Jibby’s doorstep, Emma Lee turned and began making her way back towards him. From behind her, the sorrowful sobbing renewed itself with fresh vigor. A murmur of indistinguishable voices replaced it as one neighbor after another offered up useless and empty compassion.

“Oh, it’s so terrible, Petey Paul,” Emma Lee said with profound sadness in her voice.

“Their little one has died. Gone in the night, poor thing. She found him this morning, still on his back in the crib. Just went to sleep and never woke up.”

With that, she came and put herself into his arms, resting her head against his pectorals.

Momentarily resting his chin on her shoulder and looking across the way, Petey Paul noticed the raised window pane again.

Hadn’t he lowered it last night?

Yes, that’s right. He certainly had.

“Hurry, Em,” he said of a sudden, taking her by the shoulders. “There isn’t much time, but there’s enough of it if we get moving now..”

“But Petey, this doesn’t make . . . I mean . . . I just don’t . . .”

“Hush now,” he told Emma Lee with as much softness in his voice as he could summon. “Like I said, there isn’t much time.”

“But you just aren’t making sense, Petey,” she said, offering up a measure of resistance.

“I know, but I’ll explain it on the way. I swear it.”

“Petey, no. We can’t leave poor Maggie like this.”

“Yes, my Emma Lee,” he countered. “I’ll even make a deal. Leave with me today. We can get you to a hospital. This ain’t no place for a birthin’. I promise to tell you why. I know it’s sudden but we need to leave this place for good.”

And that’s exactly what they did, the three of them.