* * * * *
Relish
The heady scent of moist soil and blood shook Jerry Thornton back to reality like a slap to the face.
It was impossibly dark and cold and he could feel the touch of midnight dew on his body. In fact, he could feel it all over and as he forced his eyes to pierce the black, he came to the realisation that he was stark naked. His knees rested in the wet grass and his hands were pulled taut away from his sides at right angles.
He was naked, tied up in the dark, in the middle of nowhere and he didn’t know why.
The sweat seeping to the surface of Jerry’s skin sent a shiver through his spine. His shuddering triggered shards of pain in his jaw and he could taste blood in his mouth. He ran his tongue along his gums and found that at least two teeth were missing. His efforts to work out where he was and how he got there intensified the pain in his head.
He cried out for help as loud as he could, but his echo was the only reply. He pulled at his bonds, but the thick ropes only obliged by cutting deeper into his wrists. His fingers ached in the cold night air and his heart pounded with fear, as if someone was beating on his chest like a drum.
Jerry closed his eyes and tried to breathe, to calm his thoughts. He was smart, he could figure out what had happened. He was always one step ahead. So what went wrong?
He lifted his knees off the ground and crouched into a squat position. The move pulled tighter on his wrists and shoulders, but at least he could take the weight off his knees for a while. He was fairly tolerant of pain, but he couldn’t tolerate being taken by surprise.
Slowly Jerry’s thoughts came back to him. The last thing he recalled was sitting in Reilly’s Bar, enjoying a scotch and the enticing sights around him. He’d been watching a blonde waitress serving drinks; she’d served his scotch and he was enthralled by her casual smile and southern drawl.
He got talking to her and took great pleasure in watching her full lips move with each syllable. He couldn’t remember much of what she told him, but he would never forget the angle of her hips and the black silk stockings that seemed to go on forever, all the way up under her ridiculously short skirt. She was lithe and fit, just the way he liked them. He watched her the whole night, enjoying her and his drink. The smoothness of the scotch equalled the smooth look of her fine skin. He planned great plans for her, but then everything went black.
What happened? Jerry shook the beads of cold sweat off his brow and pushed through the pain in his head to think. He’d just been drinking and enjoying the show. How the hell did he end up in this mess and who put him in it? Whoever ruined his plans was going to pay – big time.
His sudden anger flowed into his arms and again he tried to pull himself from his bonds, but all he freed was a scream as his right shoulder threatened to dislocate. The new pain mingled with the one in his jaw and rocked around inside his skull. Nausea quickly followed and before he could stop it, he threw up on the grass. The foul stench of malt whisky and gastric juices burned in his nostrils.
The drink! That was it!
Jerry thought again of the earlier hours of the night. While at the bar he had to use the john and he left his drunk unattended. Some asshole must have spiked my drink and kidnapped me, he realised. Jerry suddenly felt clear and victorious and he shouted out into the night.
‘I’ve figured it out, asshole! You might as well come out!’
There was no reply. No kidnapper. But Jerry wouldn’t relent. He knew he had his man.
‘Show yourself!’
A sharp scratching sound suddenly struck the air, like steel on stone. There was a tiny spark and Jerry was bathed in a soft golden light. He could see tombstones sprouting out of the grass and a black man sitting in a fold-out chair, just metres away, holding a thick, black candle.
He had been sitting there the whole time.
The black man stood and Jerry flinched backwards. His kidnapper must have been more than six and a half feet tall and built like giant. He was dressed in a black wool suit and a floral print silk scarf was tucked tight around his neck. Between his teeth was a cigar.
‘Hello, Jerry,’ he said, with a thick Caribbean accent.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Jerry yelled back, his scream becoming fog in the freezing air.
‘My name is Legrand, Rene Legrand.’
‘Who?’
‘You don’t know me Jerry, but I know you. It has taken me a long time to find you.’
Jerry squinted; the light from the candle was actually hurting his eyes. He tried desperately to recognise the black man, this Legrand, but he had never met him in his life. Legrand smiled at Jerry through the cigar smoke.
‘What are you smiling at?’ Jerry said.
‘A man who is helpless for the first time in his life,’ Legrand replied. ‘The irony is amusing.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Legrand crouched in front of Jerry and stared at him; there was something not right about the Negro’s eyes.
‘I know who you really are Jerry. I know about the secret life that you lead.’
Jerry recoiled, but he tried hard not to show his surprise. ‘What do you mean?’
Legrand stood and walked around behind the tombstone. ‘You like girls.’
‘What?’ Jerry said, exasperated.
‘You like watching them. You like seducing them – but not as much as you like raping them and gutting them like fish.’
Jerry felt his body trying to pull itself free; the rope was stripping the skin off his wrists. His other life was meant to be secret, but this Legrand knew everything about it. The sweat began to pour faster and the drumbeats of his heart pounded deeper and harder.
‘What do you want with me?’ Jerry heard fear in his voice. He hadn’t heard that tone since before his father died.
Legrand gazed into the candle. He wouldn’t look at Jerry. The flame seemed to jerk towards Legrand’s lips as he spoke. ‘There was a girl – here in Memphis. You watched her. You seduced her. Then you raped and gutted her. Do you remember?’
Jerry tried to focus on getting free, but he could not look away from the flame reflected in Legrand’s murderous eyes.
‘Do you remember her?!’ Legrand roared, his breath quivering the flame.
Jerry recalled the last girl in Memphis. It was about a year ago in yet another bar with yet another girl – a black girl. She was sexy, with skin like melted chocolate. He conquered her and left her to die in the swampy marshlands of the Deep South.
‘You knew her?’ Jerry muttered.
Legrand slammed his hand down on the tombstone and Jerry thought it would break. ‘She was my kin!’
Jerry’s head dropped, but oddly he didn’t feel afraid, he felt like laughing – and that’s exactly what he did.
‘You’re family,’ Jerry’s whole body rocked with laughter. ‘That’s just perfect!
‘Do not laugh at me!’
Legrand’s bellow shook Jerry’s bones and he stopped laughing. The huge black man strode over and gripped Jerry’s tiny jaw in his hand and squeezed. Jerry wailed as he felt bone crunch on bone. Legrand’s eyes were as black as the night that swarmed around them.
‘You will not laugh again! Not after this night!’ Legrand told him.
Legrand slapped Jerry across the face. Then he left him, striding back to his place behind the tombstone. He picked up the candle and poured hot wax over the stone. The drops looked like foul blood. Then the Negro started to whisper and chant and move, as if he was caught in some strange waltz of madness.
‘What are you going to do?’ Jerry begged him.
Legrand kept on with his barbaric dance, leaping and twirling through the candle smoke. Jerry watched as Legrand retrieved a small cloth bag from his coat. In a seamless rhythm, the big man emptied its contents onto the wax. The dust lingered in the air like flakes of ash.
‘Let me go!’ Jerry pleaded.
Legrand ignored him and instead tore off his coat and shirt, revealing a muscled
torso, slick with sweat. His eyes were glazed white and Jerry wondered if he could even hear him anymore. Jerry’s fear swelled and he tried again to free his hands. Legrand pounded on the top of the tombstone, boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom, over and over, a crescendo that quickened the pace of Jerry’s already screaming heart. Jerry pulled and pulled at his bonds until finally his shoulder popped in wrenching agony. His scream became the climax of Legrand’s sickening ballet.
‘This pain you feel now,’ Legrand said, suddenly beside Jerry again. ‘Is nothing compared to what she felt; you cut her and stabbed her and bled her dry into the ground Jerry, but so much more will you feel.’
Legrand painted Jerry’s face with the wax-tainted ash and sneered.
‘She will relish this.’
‘Who is she?’ Jerry screamed through the pain.
Legrand leaned back, and like a crazed game show host, he underlined the name on the tombstone with his hand, a great toothy grin on his face. The engraved letters shimmered in the candlelight and Jerry feared the name had come to life:
Marie Legrand.
Legrand stood over Jerry and smiled. ‘She was my daughter and you killed her. It took me a long time to find you Jerry, but eventually all your girls led me to you. Their bodies spoke to me and told me where you would be – tis strange that you would come back to the same town where you first met my Marie.’
‘Look, I’m sure that nothing I say will go as an apology, but I think we can both safely say that I have a problem,’ Jerry explained. ‘I need help. But I’m also very wealthy. I could repay you for your loss.’
Now Legrand laughed – a laugh that seemed to come from the depths of hell.
‘Repay me? You do not need to repay me, Jerry Thornton.’
The air was still, but the ground beneath Jerry’s knees began to shake and split. The grass at the base of Marie Legrand’s tombstone burst upwards and maggots, in the hundreds began to crawl to the surface. Jerry tried to scream, but no sound would come. He could only gape at the squirming, slithering mass as it swelled higher and closer.
Yet something else stirred under the moving carpet of living filth – something much larger. How slowly it emerged; five mottled stalks broke through and wriggled more freely than the worms. At first, Jerry thought they were stems, but then he saw the fingernails at the tips.
The rotten hand pushed the worms aside with ease and stretched out of the ground. Jerry jerked and pulled at the rope around his right wrist and surprisingly he slipped free. When he forced himself to turn away from the thing coming out of the ground to look at the rope, he beheld the skin of his right hand hanging between the bonds. He shrieked in agony.
But Jerry’s cry was cut short. Feeling the cold, dead hand on his shoulder, he turned back to see more of its owner bearing down on him. The corpse was half-free from its grave; its skull was almost stripped bare of flesh, its teeth cracked and brittle in its jaw. Spiralling threads of raven black hair were scattered about its crown, but its abyss-like eye sockets were what burned Jerry’s heart the most.
He swatted its hand away, but it just keep reaching for him and crawling towards him. Jerry tried to free his left hand, but his raw right hand was a useless mass of blood – blood that he knew the corpse could smell.
‘Look at my Marie,’ Legrand cried. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’
Marie’s corpse pulled itself along the ground towards Jerry, as if he was its one singular purpose in death. It shuffled on its ribcage towards him, making a squelching sound on the bloody carpet of maggots. Its hips broke free of the ground, then its thighs and finally its feet.
Jerry began to scrape and pick at the broken flesh of his left wrist like a man possessed. He didn’t want to look at Marie’s corpse. It wasn’t real. She was dead and he killed her. One year ago. He raped her and then he slit her from crotch to throat. He watched her bleed out into the swampy waters of the Mississippi. He left her for dead.
He felt tears on his face as Marie’s corpse reached for him; its claw-like fingers digging deep into the flesh of his thigh. He kicked it away, but it just kept coming. He felt its fingers again, this time groping at his stomach. He tried to fight it off, but he knew it would never stop.
Jerry bellowed and writhed, but Legrand’s laughter was even louder than his screams. Marie’s corpse bit into his chest and neck and Jerry felt his blood explode into the air. The last thing he saw was Marie Legrand’s blood-soaked teeth sink into his eye.
The last thing he heard was Rene Legrand’s voice:
‘Don’t worry Jerry, I not finished wit’ you yet.’