How Pace Wilkens Died

        Deputy Burke waited all night long for the phone to ring. He went ahead and dressed in his uniform. At four am, only flashes of passing headlights disturbed his dark home. Red and platinum beams cast long hurdles onto his ceiling that wound to the wall. The phone sat still. He ran out of coffee, eggs, bacon. He sat in the dark of his home watching the night slip away. An hour and a half after he gave up trying to sleep, he received a call from the Wilken’s residence. At first he sighed, recalled all the domestic turbulence he’d been summoned to address in the past. This time he dropped the phone and bolted out the door. He drove past the coffee shack, and the fast food parlor despite his urging hunger and shaking headaches caused by caffeine deficiency.

       Morning rose over the Wilken's farm. Frost of late February stiffened the dirt. Curtains of mist swirled around the house. The Deputy came into the Wilken’s kitchen. The dog chewed on a human mandible. Lilith Wilken’s held her robe shut. The deputy didn’t ask about Pace’s absence. Lilith didn’t need to say a word. He began his search. No chickens occupied the coop. No machines idled in the barn. The windmill stood tall, rusted in place. He thought for a moment that he saw a caped figure watching him from between the blades. When he shined a light towards the dilapidated rotors, a flock of dark birds lifted away. The deputy zipped up his coat and made his way to the field. He walked along the barb wire. Far off cattle bleated. A school bus droned down the highway at the end of the property. The deputy turned and walked along the drainage ditch. He shined his light within. The sun rose and burned away the clouds and mist, but the trench still stunk of dark mire. His foot kicked a glass capsule. He looked down, sucked on his teeth and put his light back into his belt. Several broken bottles lay scattered among a few last bottles intact. In the middle of the broken glass rested half a pelvic bone, the lower segment of a spinal chord, and some ribs peeking from the dirt. The deputy sucked his teeth, and nudged the bottle he kicked back to its gap in the dirt.

         He called off the search on his radio, and went inside. He watched Lilith sip steaming coffee, and his lymph nodes stiffened. He swallowed dry spit, and told her he found her husband.

         “I worried it would end this way,” he sighed to her, taking a seat before her. “Ever since the first night I got called over to keep him from swatting your head off...and the time after that...and the time after that...”

        The dog devoured the mandible. A few teeth lay under his foaming tongue.

       “This harvest, I finally kicked him out. I boxed up his whiskey and wine, and I sent him away.”

        “I just want you to know, that whatever happened, I don’t blame you. The report is going to say exactly what you told me. He went out there, drank himself to death. Animals got to his body. Not much is left now.”

       The deputy stood up and walked to the door. In his car, he called for a coroner. In the middle of the driveway, under the shadow of dark clouds, stood the hooded figure from the windmill. The deputy got out, and walked with rapid strides, calling for the faceless stranger to reveal himself.

When he came to the figure, he pulled away the hood, revealing canvas stitching with worms squirming out of crude eye holes. Hay and fur fell out from under its torso. The cape and straw blew away in the wind. The deputy shielded his eyes from the hail of dust and hay. When he opened his eyes, a heap of maggots devoured a heart at his boots.

       Lilith Wilkens went to check on her daughter. She carefully tapped on the door. “Gwynth... please get up.” She whispered, then tapped again and repeated herself louder than before. Lilith ripped knots from her hair, and dropped blonde tangles to the floor. She worried- perhaps Gwynth may fail to recognize her own mother. So much changed since she killed Pace.

      He lived up to his tyrannical reputation before she married him, and it grew worse with every year. He started fights with strangers as much as her. He broke into an old woman’s home and urinated on her couch after her dog scratched his truck. Every bar in the county banned him. No farmers lent him any supply or equipment. Most intolerable to Lilith, he swerved to hit animals in the road, living or dead. Each hunting season, he hung up and gutted deer on the front lawn to rot for everyone driving by to see.

       After ten years of mayhem, he crashed his car into the creek, and after spending weeks in the hospitable swore never to touch substance again. Lilith watched him transition into the nicest man she ever met. He went to town meetings. Volunteered to clean up litter. He even made her a stain glass window from his old liqueur bottles and placed it in the barn.

       One night he received a phone call, and left without explaining where he was going or why. When he returned, he didn’t say a word to anyone, and over following nights he developed curious habits. He ate with his hands, and thew up anything he ate. Lilith gave him stomach medicine, but he tossed it out, telling her he didn’t want any pills.

       His behavior only grew more outlandish. Words of books and manuals no longer made sense to him. He worked short hours, let the crops die, and watched as pieces of the house crumbled. At last, a strange derangement tormented his behavior.

     Lilith awoke every night in sweat and shivers. Pace stopped sleeping and lived the night standing in the moonlight, glaring out the open window into the dark leagues around the property lines. After a week of silently observing, Lilith bothered to ask him, “what’s out there?”

     “Can’t you hear them?” he trembled to whisper. When he saw his wife’s confusion he snapped back to the window, smacking both hands onto the pane. “They’re coming, they’re closer...”

She climbed out from the sheets and pulled him towards bed. He growled, and shoved her to the floor. She covered her head with her fists. The nightstand corner caught her by the eyebrow and both slid against the side of the bed. Lilith rocked on the floor, the socket of her eye crunched like a can. Blood dripped from between her fingers. She looked up at Pace opening the window and sticking his head out. Only when the blood tapped the floorboards did she take her quivering eyes from her husband to see the blood on the nightstand, and the drops on her bare legs. Vision faded and floated back. No pain alarmed her. She touched the bleeding gash, ran her finger over the edge of a broken plate above loose flakes, and scraped the red flap of flesh in the corner of her eye with her fingernail before she realized what happened. Pace’s breath escaped in white clouds. When he stepped away, Lilith tried to crawl in his way, but he stepped over her. Glass broke, and he returned with baring a bolt action Remington. His attention remained on the window, his nostrils flaring, he stomped his heel from the doorway. Lilith covered her wound as he planted a heel between her forearm bones. Blinding flashes stripped the dark away with each steaming round fired into the darkness. Pace slammed the window shut, stepped into Lilith’s blood and tracked it down the hall back to the cabinet. His daughter came from her bedroom, sleep stolen eyes near closed, walking in the dark with short, shackled steps, until she saw the blood print reflecting in the moonlight. Her mother crawled from the bedroom, her eyes shined under unfurled fringes of hair, moans tickled the back of her throat.

       Gwynth pulled her mother into the passenger seat of her car. Lilith spent time waiting in the doctor’s office wondering what happened. The doctor took his glasses off and asked about her husband.

      “No, he quit drinking years ago.”

       They gave her pain pills and sent her home with the top half of her head wrapped up.

She awoke at five am with a love note and a flower from the garden. She robed herself, and went down the stairs. As she cracked open eggs, she wiped the fog from the window. Blue sun rays peeked over the distant bluffs. Treeline shadows sharpened against the wet lawn. A shadow stood at the chicken coup stabbing hay bails with a pitchfork. The roosters called.

        Pace Wilkens impaled the hay bail. Wind blew lost strains against the wire fence. He gasped at the paw print in the dirt. He got down to brush away the loose hay, uncovering a trail leading to the chicken coup. He stole the pitchfork. The scrap wood door grinded against the frame, bending the screws as it pulled against the hinges. The hens bocked in their nests like quivering warts. He stalked the isle, looking to the corners, stabbing piles of hay, but finding nothing. Scratches fell from the rafters above. Pace listened, and through cracks in the ceiling he saw short fur. He left, came around the back, and climbed up the stack of hay bails to the roof where he sighed in relief. A fox curled up and looked at him with evolving concern, its nails clicked on the roof as it bolted to its feet and darted to the retreating fog over harvested fields. As he climbed down, the re emergence of cold wind reminded him of the howl of coyotes. The barks and yips strained the fabric of his neurons. He still remembered the attack in the recesses of his earliest memories, when he awoke from his fathers screams, and rushed to the window to watch a pack of coyotes pull him apart in the front lawn.

Pace came inside, wiped his boots on the rug and peeled his gloves off and shoved them into a corner of his coat pockets. Dark fluid soaked into his facial hair. Lilith asked nothing of it. Her stomach closed when she thought of the days when Pace started fights with old men and crashed cars into ATM machines.

        “I have something to tell you-” but the dog barked from the porch. He let the animal inside the house. The dog’s nail clacked on the tiles. It braced itself before the clock shaped like a lighthouse, with the dial replacing the bulb- Pace made it himself and gave it as a gift to Lilith after quitting alcohol and pain killers. The dog growled, and prosecuted the clock with a chain of unleashed howls and barks.

       Lilith stopped scraping the pan with a spatula to pull the dog away.

       “Leave the dog be.,” he shut the stove off, “come to the basement with me.”

He lead her down the steps. He pulled the chain and the light flooded the basement. He took her to the drain in the floor. He removed the cover, reached inside, and pulled out a heavy bottle of dark fluid. Red lather filled the neck.

     “Where does this come from?” he asked. “Who is placing this around the house?”

       Lilith shook her head. Pace ripped out the cork and drank from the bottle. The bittersweet reek of nightshade permeated from the fluid. He assembled his tool box and left to fix the holes in the chicken coop.

        Their daughter sat down for breakfast. Pace repaired loose boards. Lilith book the bottle, sniffed the fluid and her guts heaved. She took the opened bottle outside and hurled it against the pavement once used to bath cows on. Whispers escaped. The fluid ran down cracks and steamed until it all soaked into the earth. When inside, the dog still barked at the clock. she opened the bottom and retrieved a hidden bottle. She poured its contents out into the grass. The grass turned yellow, curled up and blew away in the wind. She put her ear to the bottle. In the droning waves within, she heard coyote snarls and paws beating nearer, the patter of bare feet fleeing- and the ripping of flesh.

Pace drove to town. When he returned, he found another bottle under his brake. He spent the daylight scratching at shadows on the wall, and boarding up windows.

       Prowling steps awoke Lilith from dreams. She felt around and found her husband not in bed. She panicked and put on slippers, rummaging through the house, she found cold mist blowing in from the open back door. Outside he heard a storm in the chicken coop. She recoiled when she saw her husband emerging shirtless, on all fours with a hen bleeding over his collars and down his chest, his teeth deep within its neck. He sat before the musk of feathers and dust, tearing the chinking into strips, swallowing its guts, and sucking the marrow from its bones. Lilith ran barefoot through mud. The hen still kicked and fluttered its wings. Pace growled at her with red teeth, his eyes darker, pupils dense with bronze.

       She ran back to the house with his pouncing heels digging through the mud towards her. His feet sank and he collapsed into the ground. Lilith slammed the door behind her, and waited in the bedroom with the Remington, watching the windows for Pace.

        He stayed in the chicken coop, devouring chickens until he vomited up a stomach full of splintered bones and vermilion slush. He sat in the corner, his sweat pants moist and coated in feathers. The sun rose, and he simmered in a stew of sweat, blood, and goo leaking from his ears. Putrid tubes and bladders rested on his shoulders. The cold wind swept through and the fluids frosted on his body. An unfamiliar engine revved. Pace rose to look out the window.

        Headlights appeared down the driveway and stopped at the tree line. His daughter waltzed from the a gleaming Pontiac Firebird- he recognized, 1983 model, with no license plate. She walked through the morning dark to the back door where she slipped into the house like a sock behind a dryer. The tail lights glowed in the morning mist and with a brief rev of the engine it crunched gravel and disappeared down the far road.

        Pace looked around at the carnage he caused. He tore his hair out, trotted across the yard. He stored all the bottles he found in a hole under the porch. He dug them up, and drank them until his pupils returned to normal.

        He walked upright into the house, showered, clogged the drain with the flayed remains of fowl. Unable to drain, the shower filled up with a pink soup. Pace wandered around the house. The dog slept on the marital bed. Lilith’s car still idled in the garage. He went to his daughters room, and found her sleeping. Lilith stood over her with the gun leveled towards him. Bags of name brand clothing peeked from under her mattress.

      “You need to leave.” She demanded of him.

       “Lilith, it isn't what it seems.” He stepped forward. The board creaked. His daughter rolled her head, and from the window glare she saw a black bar materialize into the weapon. Lilith’s shadow cut across the room.

        “Leave now. Take all your possessions with you.”

       “The gun isn’t loaded. I spent all the bullets.”

      Lilith noticed his pupils returned to their natural shade.

      “It’ s all a bad dream. One that I can’t wake from.” He pleaded.

      Cold air flushed through the screen and brushed dust from the floor. Pace kicked dirty clothes out of the way. His daughter held her breath at the sight of her mother aiming the rifle.

       “Come, let us be a family once more...”

        The daughter lifted, and backed towards the screen.

        “Gywnth,” her mother pleaded. “Stay there.”

The girl listened to nothing, she reached to unhook the latches. With a shove the screen popped out. She stuck her head out, but her moth caught hold of her foot with one hand. The muzzle dipped floorward. Pace pounced for the gun. Lilith pulled the trigger, and pace collapsed to the floor, pressing his ankle. Blood flowed to the floor. His howls echoed down the hall, the stairs, and out the door. Gwynth’s silence shattered and she screeched like a falling missile. Lilith released her, and rushed to her husband rolling into the vanity table. The mirror on top swayed. Pace watched his eye widen, his face tipping nearer to him. Lilith tried to catch the mirror but she she saw daughter slip out the window so she reached back, catching the end of her gown as glass crashed.

         Gywnth climbed down the trellis, and jumped into the bushes. Once out she fled towards the rusted windmill. Squawking crows watched from the blades. She climbed up the ladder to the small seat, weary and fatigued, even hung over from all the substance her suitor provided to her, she held his invitation close to her chest- he promised her everything bedreamt, if she came with him to the city. The barn door scraped. She looked towards it. A hooded figure strolled out and approached the windmill.

        Lilith walked over the broken glass to lift the mirror from Pace. Shards protruded from his face and neck. She quivered, hiding her teeth behind her hand, dropping the weapon, and pulling out the glass. With each fragment her husband moaned a little more, until his fingers reanimated and grasped her windpipe. His grasp constricted. Lilith’s tongue swelled from her mouth as her lungs shriveled up. She reached for a long piece of glass in his cheek. Holding it firmly, she guided it across Pace’s neck.

        Finally his last breath escaped in a white puff. The open window chilled the room with late autumn shivers. Lilith's flesh felt like marble. The dog barked from outside, and jumped at the door.

Lilith rolled his body onto a sheet, and dragged him to the stairs where she slipped and the body tumbled down. Dust fell from the ceiling. She dragged a wagon from the barn, hoisted her husband inside limb by limb and plowed the wagon through the harvested field to the drainage ditch where she rolled the body down. She took his clothes off, and burned them in a barrel.

         Gwynth remained on the windmill. The hooded man walked with two crutches and braces on his legs and spine. He stood beneath the windmill, filled his cheeks with air, and when he expelled the breath purple clouds gathered and sunk. A cyclone of dust speared the harvested fields. Sediment mist filled the air as wind streams deafened the sounds of distant highway travel and the grating of the wagon wheels. Gwynth held on, her hands slipping, her legs fell from the seat, and she grabbed onto the windmill blade. The crows lifted and fled. Her weight shifted the blades. As she slid they sliced into her palms. She held on tighter, but the blade bent, and broke away and fell down with her.

Lilith dropped her wagon when she saw her daughter fall. She ran through the mud, through the uncut weeds, to a sight that sucked the life from her. The blade fell against her neck. Gwynth’s head rolled to the boots of the hooded man.

       “You did this,” Lilith barked. “You’re behind all of it.”

         “Yes. This may be...” The dog ran and heeled at his side. The wind died and bursts of light burned through the clouds behind the hooded stranger. He staggered on his crutches, shifting his body like an adjusting track. A grin stretched across the lightened half of his face. “...The proudest moment in my life.”

       He wiped away a tear.

         “I will offer you what I offered Pace-” He produced a bottle of pulpy wine from his sleeve. “I’ll leave this for you. Keep it. Don’t let anyone else drink from it. And I will make this scene appear like suicide. As for your daughter...”

          The dog brought him her head and dropped it at his feet. “… She can return to life yet.”

         “You're a liar.”

          “No, no. To show my good faith, I will give her back to you. All I ask is that you keep this bottle. Go ahead, take it.”

           Lilith reached, her eyes latched onto the hallow horror, like a person sinking in quicksand, expressed on the drooping flesh of her daughters face. She took the bottle.

         “Good. It’s all that’s left of my family. You don’t remember, because it was so long ago. Your husband threw me across the room, fractured my skull and nearly tore my lumbar in half. While in the hospital my father burned all his assets. My mother drove my Firebird into the river. And I inherited nothing but this degenerative disease. So please, take care of it. Go inside. Now. Hide it. And I will bring your daughter to life. Then, I will see to it that Pace Wilken’s body is never found.”

Lilith took the bottle from him. The dog followed the stranger into the barn. The door closed behind them.

          Lilith spent the remaining daylight scrubbing blood and sweeping broken glass. The clocks stopped. The dog lay on the bed. The front door grinded open. Footsteps went up the stairs. Lilith found something she missed before. The bags of clothes from a store in the city- one she never dared spend money. The tags on the clothes, the lowest price- fifty dollar stockings. Nylon, lingerie- straps and belts, and a love note at the bottom from “Daddy”. The hallway planks moaned. Lilith tossed everything back inside the bags.

        “Oh my god, mom- what are you doing in my room?”

Lilith hugged her daughter. Her neck felt soft like warm cheese, but the rest of her felt as animate as the day she escaped from the womb.

          Harvest season cooled to winter, froze and frosted, then upon the thawing period, Lilith cleaned the chicken coup and sold Pace’s tools and belongings.

         Even as the frozen pastures melted to slush, she awoke before sunrise reaching over to find spare room where she expected to find warm flesh. The dog barked outside. Short, muffled, slobbering barks. She lit a cigarette and watched the sunrise over the windmill. As the sun rays reached over the distant bluffs, the windmill shadows stretched towards the house, standing between the blades she thought she saw the hooded stranger’s cape flutter in the screeching wind. The dog tore the screen with his claws. Lilith idled down the stairs. She let her daughter sleep in, and no longer made breakfast for her. She tried to remember the last time she saw Gwynth, but her mind always swept to the red bottle in the shelf of her fridge door. Every morning she poured it out. Every morning, another bottle returned.

         She let the dog in as she poured the new bottle down the drain and tossed it in the bin with the others. The dog growled at her. She turned to him to see what at first looked like a piece of riveted lumber. She took hold of it, but the dog tightened its grip. It broke in half, and only then did Lilith see the teeth. She held a human mandible.

         When Lilith entered her daughters room to tell her what happened, she met a cold gust of wind. The window wide open, the closet empty, the sheets and blankets on the floor. The expensive clothes gone. A nylon stocking hung from an open drawer. Week’s worth of dust coated the makeup table, the mantle over her bed, and the floorboards.

        Lilith went downstairs. The dog entered the room with the bottle of red elixir. She took the bottle from the dog's panting mouth. She uncorked the mouth, and swallowed hard.