The Voices in Our Heads Read Free Page A

“Holy Jesus” over and again.
    They snapped the left wing off at the base of the humerus, and the right halfway up the ulna, the point of the second digit piercing one of them through the palm, sending him shouting and cursing and shaking it as if a snake was attached. For poor Adam, it was a thick swirl of black and dark red, and there was a plea to end it quickly and a stronger argument that claimed murder was a sin before God. If he bled out, he bled out, but they were to steer clear of the brain, the heart, and the jugular. One oily voice protested that they would be caught and tried, and the more guttural tone Adam recognized as that of Mr. Claypool said they had to make it look like ritual, the way them zealots up in Coatesville did to them other Jews.
    Adam wanted to choke out that his mother was from Ireland and didn’t that count for something, and they turned him over. Someone put all his weight, palms down, upon his shoulders, and Mr. Claypool came into his vision on a slant with a pair of tin snips.
    “It was of her own free will she gave you up,” he said gently, “once I explained how aberrations like you can poison the mind.”
    There was nothing left between them but a thick kind of silence, and so Claypool took a breath through the nose and bent to it, the others helping him intermittently, and by the latter half of the rough surgery Adam Michael Rothman finally passed out. By the time they took his eyes, he lay dead.
     
    They were tired and sweat-drenched and blood-covered, and half down the path to the birches, a hand fell on Claypool’s shoulder.
    “Did you check his pulse, John?”
    He shoved the hand off and fought back a shiver.
    “It’s done.”
    “You sure?” They’d made a small ring now, blocking the way. John Claypool turned, pushed through them, and trudged back up to the clearing. And there lay scattered the results of their grisly work in the pale, cross-hatch spill of the moon: a farmer’s sack coat rumpled next to two broken wings, base bones angled, jutted up like fractured Chinese architecture, dark feathers soaked and flattened, a litter of digits, one boot laying on its side, blood stained down the side of the well in half-dried streams following the rough contours of the mortar lines between the field stones.
    And no corpse.
    Adam Michael Rothman had vanished.
     
    April 2011
     
    “And ever since then, these woods have been haunted.”
    “That’s it?” Kyle said. Brandon had been doing his best straight scary face, and he still tried to hold the sincerity.
    “Yes. And every twenty years or so, someone goes missing back here. Never any evidence left, just a witness or two that sees a figure dart between the trees, or a shadow pass overhead.”
    Everyone kind of shrugged, and he poked the fire with the knobby stick he’d found down by a short ravine choked with elderberry and pricker bushes. A burst of sparks twirled up toward the sky, which had gone all but dark between the pitch and cast of surrounding trees.
    “But what happened to the father?” Melanie said.
    “Yeah,” Krista added, “and how about the perverted old store owner?” Robbie leaned forward and gave that crafty, goofy grin he was known for.
    “I’ll bet he broke a hip fucking her on their wedding night!” He rolled back in peals of laughter that the boys joined in with and the girls did their best to show they didn’t appreciate.
    “Pig,” Valencia said. She adjusted the rubber band at the back of her braces and tried to turn her marshmallow. It slid off the stick and hissed into the fire.
    “He got them all,” Brandon said, even though his little audience really knew it was over at this point, the best part at least. Here he was just making up shit as he went. “He killed Ezra Fletcher that following year when the old geezer went out to the privy to take a dump, and he got John Claypool when he went hunting for deer the next winter. All the body parts they cut off Adam Michael Rothman