The Nest
by Christian De Matteo
The loft is high, the climb up the ladder shaky and nerve-wracking. Bats sleep in the rafters of the ancient barn, wings wrapped tightly around them, swaying slightly with the booming wind colliding against the roof outside. I watch them carefully as I ascend. I wonder when the last time was someone dared this rotting ladder.
A rung crumbles under my foot just as I lay my hands on the bat shit covered planks of the loft floor. The collapse drops me, my chin crashing hard into the floorboards while my hands scramble for grip. I hang for a moment, tasting the blood in my mouth, feeling a small piece of tongue floating in the blood, my teeth ringing with pain, my slight breasts scraped behind my thin shirt. I lift my foot onto the rung above the broken one and, at once pulling with my arms and pushing with my leg, manage to roll my body up into the loft. I spit blood and the small chunk of tongue on the boards. The sight makes me nauseous. I remembered the bats and snap my attention upward. They still seem to sleep, but in their sleep several walk their upside-down bodies inches left and right. I wait moments before moving, waiting for them to settle down. They’ve been disturbed by the commotion and waking them would be easier now. I do not want this to happen.
The coating of splattered shit on the ground itches my exposed arms. I know my t-shirt is ruined, my shorts too. This is not important. I wonder what I am breathing up here. Bird, bat and mouse shit and piss, dust and rot at least. My throat itches like my arms. I need to move.
As quietly as I can, I roll to my side and force myself to place flat palms on the wood, pushing myself into a kneeling position. My eyes adjust to the darkness enough to see, just past the huge piles of decomposing hay, the wooden crate. Large, I wonder how this rotting loft has supported it all this time. Different than the barn, the wood of the crate looks healthy, strong, no signs of rot beyond water stains and mold. My stomach cramps as I study the distance I need to traverse to get to it. So many chances to fall through the floor and be impaled on broken beams or ancient farm equipment below. The old thresher sits rusting directly beneath the loft, exactly where I would drop if the loft collapsed. Plenty of opportunity for death at the least, gaping wound and tetanus at best. Walking straight up would concentrate all my weight on each step, tempting fate beyond its capacity to resist. Crawling would amplify my chances of jabbing myself with rusted nails, coating my hands and knees in vermin filth, but at least it would redistribute my normally insubstantial weight. And a long jump would be pure insanity.
I crawl, scraping my palms and bare knees against the floorboards, pushing and shuffling through the putrid hay. Mouse shit like ice cream sprinkles press in under my hands, hard little seeds of feces gathering against each other into the grooves of my palms. An old gypsy at the town fair had shown me my lifeline a few months ago and I picture it now filled with shit, wondering what she’d read into that. As it was, she hadn’t seen much good fortune in my future, or much time.
Disgust pushing way down into my stomach, I continue slowly, praying not to fall through the floor. My t-shirt and shorts are strong regrets, and not just for the screaming wind. They had been unavoidable; there’d been no time to change. Pa had sent me to check on the chickens and the cows earlier than normal, a task usually taking at least an hour as the cow pens are pretty far out on the property. Pa is a powerful man and when he says go, you do. My fault I hadn’t thought to dress for dinner like I’d be going back out. I should have known better, especially with what I had planned. I would kill for a pair of heavy overalls and denim jacket. And gloves. Thick, thick gloves.
The itching on my arms and legs is much worse now, the rotting hay scraping and spreading the decomposition it nurtures. I sniffle, sneeze and cough, each making me stare back up to the moldering rafters at the bats, so many of them all quivering restlessly, some ready to awaken and attack. They aren’t interested in me as food, but they could certainly scare and scratch and bite and, even worse, get tangled in my long hair.
My hands and knees are filthy now, smeared in old dust and dirt and shit. I practically lust for a sink and heavy-duty soap. But the crate is only feet away now and –
My right hand plunges through a disintegrated floorboard. My face slams against the ground cutting off my scream, only the old hay providing any cushion. Nails and splintered wood scrape all the way up past my elbow. I can’t see the blood, but I feel it sticky and running. Shrieks ring out and I am covered in panicking, leathery wings, scraped by tiny claws. The sound so similar to the sounds in our basement, the sounds driving me mad, driving me to this night’s task. The bats circle me in a tight, frightened knot, a whirlpool of furry blackness focused on my back, my legs. My arm is stuck. Huffing in short, jabbing breathes, I try to slide it out but the wood just bites deeper. The bats are grabbing at my hair now – my worst fear so close to happening – tearing at my t-shirt. Their musky smell cuts through the dust in my nostrils. I am dizzy. I drop down, the skin of my trapped arm tearing, pushed farther in the hole. I stay dead still and try not to faint.
The airborne panic slows. I feel several bats land on me, walking on my torn t-shirt, feel their little claws on my bare arms, my exposed back. On the backs of my thighs. I might be crying now. I’m certainly shivering. Whether much time passed or simply feels like it, I don’t know. Blood drips off the fingertips of my right hand, the cuts in my arm aching. One-by-one the bats fly off. Dark night has come. The hour is theirs now.
In a while, I feel sure they are gone. I don’t want to be here when they come back. I raise my head and look around as best I can. Then I go to work on the shattered boards. They’re rotted through. I claw at the edges around my arm, scraping back wood fragments, splinters, my fingers speckling with droplets of blood. I manage to break enough of the wood away to pull my arm slowly out. It’s a mess of scratches and cuts, smeared in the red of cooling blood. If I fail tonight, I’ll have to wear long sleeves for months and suffer the questions that come with them. But I have no intention of that future.
Inhaling deeply – a mistake leaving me gagging – I push on toward the crate, spitting flooding saliva into the hay. The wind keeps battering the barn, cold drafts speeding in through the holes in the walls and roof, but the sweat is still matting down my hair, coating my face and sticking my bloodied shirt to my chest. Closer now, I begin to rush. Another mistake. Lifting hands and knees instead of dragging them, something pops between the fingers of my left hand, coating my fingers with sticky wetness and bristles as I press down on small snapping structures. The smell of offal rises instantly. A chill runs up my arm, electrifying my elbow and zinging my pounding heart. I sit back on my haunches and stare at my hand, seeing guts and small bone fragments between my fingers. Plaintiff squeaking comes from beneath the rotting hay. Wanting desperately not to, I clear the hay and find the mouse nest. One of four babies still lives, its lower half as crushed and oozing as its siblings, mewling for its mother. Disgusted as I am by the mice, tears well in my eyes. I put the thumb of my gory hand on the baby mouse’s head and press down until I feel the skull crunch. My chest lurches with gulping sobs. I wipe the awful hand on my shorts. So little comes off, a chunky jam remaining especially on the webbing between my fingers.
I push aside the small, murdered nest and continue toward the crate, only two feet ahead of me now. The wood on the side had been branded, a dark black circle around the symbol in the center. The symbol itself provides the first comfort I’ve had in what feels like ages. My great-grandfather’s mark, the Flying XIX, two wavy lines indicating the flying coming off the far tips of the Xs. The mark of our damned ranch. Forcing myself not to speed up, I make the next few feet. Time is running out before Pa will come looking for me. Bad enough the condition I’m going home in, if he finds me up here, who knows what kind of fire and brimstone he’ll rain down. The old barn was forbidden from my birth, a rule so staunch even my wild brothers hadn’t tried to sneak in. But I have, daddy’s little girl. Mini-Missy Misty Mae, he calls me. His angel who can do no wrong. If he finds me here, his assessment would most certainly shift violently. Without what is in the crate, all will be for naught. I know I’ll get no other chance here.
I walk my shitty, stinking, gore-coated hands up the side of the crate, reveling in the solid roughness of the wood, pulling myself to a kneeling position. Though I know what the result will be, I hook my thumbs as far under the top of the crate as I can and try to wrench the box open. Failing as I expected, I take from the back pocket of my shorts the small flat bar I’d secreted from my father’s tool shed.
I slide the edge of the flat bar under the top of the crate and push down heavily. For a moment I hear only the low scrape of gauging wood, then an ancient nail budges with a long groaning creak. I move the flat bar an inch over and again push down. Another nail joins the first in screeching choir. I push down harder and feel the floorboards beneath my knees actually sway. I stop pushing and concentrate on staying still. This whole thing could come down and me with it. Too late to stop now, though, not so close to the prize. I work my way around the top of the crate, the nails pulling out in screaming groups.
The top pops off and the loft collapses at approximately the same moment.
The noise must be tremendous, but I only feel the drop, the crate landing on top of me and splintered wood jabbing into me like freshly shaven stakes. At least three pierce me, two in the back and one through the flesh of my neck, the continued pounding of my heart the only proof it’s managed to miss the big artery. The two in my back lodge up against ribs, thankfully too big to pass between them and into my lungs. At least it feels that way. I am still breathing anyhow, erratically, but still.
Directly to my left, blades inches away, is the thresher, burst through the disintegrated loft. I’ve only just missed it. Atop me is the sideways, open crate. A coughing fit overtakes me, the dust and dander rampaging through the air, packed into every breath I take, so thick up my nostrils, I can feel the particles burning. Each cough shifts and digs the stakes farther into my body. Tears pour down my face. I concentrate on steadying my breathing, first gagging out the filth in my throat, then counting time between breaths. I hear my sobs lessen.
Ignoring the tearing, shattered planks inside me, I shift my body just enough to reach my right arm inside the crate, rummaging through old newspapers used to fill the empty space within. Panic rises in me. If it isn’t here, there’s nowhere else to look on the property, unless it was buried, in which case it might as well be gone from the planet.
Then I hear the jingle, feel the large iron ring. I pull out the key ring too fast, every piece of wood piercing me shifting, digging in farther, twisting. I need to survive this. I pull myself forward, stakes at all different angles carving their way through my screaming nerves, flesh giving way in chunks and smears, the hole in my neck gaping, pouring a hot torrent of blood down my back. I’m sure I’m screaming, but I hold tight to the key ring. My white shirt is red now, caked and clinging, torn and exposing bloody flesh beneath.
I’m not done. All needs to be completed tonight. I can’t risk discovery before I’ve done it all. I can’t risk capture. As it is, I’m too late for the poor visitor in the house. Too much time has passed. Pa will already be walking the grounds, from the chickens over to the cows looking for me, looking to see if I’ve gotten my foot stuck in a hole and twisted an ankle, had a problem with the animals, or gotten myself wrapped up feeding the chickens. He knows how I love the chickens. He won’t be mad, just concerned. Unless he comes here. Then… I need to not be here if he does. I won’t be safe otherwise. And the nightmare will never end.
I push the key ring over my fingers and around my wrist. It fits tightly, which is good. I will somehow need to run next. First, the floorboards piercing me.
The one in my neck seems most immediate. After all, should it be nicking the carotid artery, pulling it out would mean my swift end, so why bother with the pain of removing the other two first? I crane my neck forward, cringing at the gauging wood inside it, crunching my stomach muscles to move me upward, each squeeze elevating my desire to vomit from the feeling of the rotting wood scraping and scratching and slicing inside my neck. With an almost audible pop, the stake is out and burning hot blood spills in what seems gallons over my shoulder and down my back into my pants, pooling under my ass. I wait to die but don’t. The blood slows and the aching pain makes it clear I’ve survived another step. Now to stand. Crunching again my stomach muscles, I lean farther forward, gripping the crate across me for leverage. The tip of the stake farthest in my back snaps off within. I gasp and then cry out, losing my hold on myself and falling backward. The second stake jabs farther in. I feel my ribs consider parting to let it through into my lungs. I am gagging again, no oxygen entering my lungs. I can taste the dirty particles of rot and feces from the air on my tongue, feel them clogging my nose and no oxygen coming in. Panic. My whole body shakes. I’m exhaling the only air I have, emptying myself completely. My bladder twitches, ready to go. Do I throw myself back and just end it all? It would be a way out. But this isn’t just about me.
I launch myself forward at the waist. The stakes tear out of my back. My ribs ring like struck bells. I twist myself to the right so I don’t fall back on the same boards and crumble through more rotting planks. Vomit streams out of my mouth. I inhale deeply and sneeze violently, blood coating my upper lip, its syrupy copper seeping into my mouth, over my bitten tongue. I vomit again. I am sure now I won’t survive this night. I am ravaged. I must find the strength to finish my task. But if I have the strength for that, I have it for nothing else.
For the second time this evening, I crawl. I push through the piled debris of the forever demolished loft, pull my legs out from under the crate. The debris ends at the door of the old barn. I roll out into the windy night. I lay there. The wind whips through my tangled, filthy hair. I can’t see my legs and know this is a good thing. I can feel the missing chunks, long cuts and scratches gathering infections I may not live to see bloom. My torso has fared no better; a quick pass of my hand tells that much. I loll my head to the side and spit profusely, trying to clear all the horrors from my mouth. I exhale hard from my nose, snotting on my face but not caring, just wanting all the foulness out of it. I feel myself nodding to sleep after a few minutes. It feels so good.
Roughly, I roll myself to my hands and knees and push myself up. Awake. Sleep will come later. Maybe temporary, maybe forever, but later.
Pa will be following the path I was supposed to take, from the chicken coops to the faraway cow pasture. He’ll be up on the hills at this point which means he’ll be able to look down and maybe see a ragged figure skulking through the night. The choice is the long route down behind the new barn which will hopefully block me from his sight, or simply to run as fast I can and hope he can’t catch up before I get to the basement of our home.
I run. Every muscle screams in protest, every laceration stretches and splits, the blood moving faster over my flesh than my feet do over the grass. The house is just ahead when I sprawl headlong to the ground, my foot caught in one of the very gopher holes my father always worries about when I go checking the property at night. I land hard on my right side and roll, the keys over my wrist digging into me as I go over them, my head bouncing off the hard night ground. I don’t come to a rest. I get my feet under me in the roll and propel myself forward, completely off balance, careening briefly left and right before I find my jumbled equilibrium.
My name. My mother’s voice shouting my name. The house is just ahead, the basement entrance down cracked stone steps around the back, my mother has spotted me from the front porch. She shouts louder, her voice riding the wind, drowning in it. She sounds desperate, as afraid as I am, but I run on, my lungs sacks of boiling acid.
I almost miss the turn around the back of the house, my headlong fury wanting no part in changing directions. Only the wind helps slow me into a big looping turn and I run for the stairs. If not for the wind, the keys would be a hellacious symphony in my hands, but the wind is even stronger now than before, like it knows what lies ahead.
Mom is calling for my Pa now, shrieking in the wind for him to return, to get to the basement. She knows what I’m doing. She’s figured it out. I’m out of time. At the far end of the house, I throw open the hurricane doors where – thank God – I’d thought to unlock the padlock hours ago. I race down the stone steps to the basement, But the door at the bottom is still locked, always locked, as forbidden as the rotted barn.
My father’s voice carries strongly on the increasing wind, stinging drops of water flying sideways within it. Even down the steps I can feel the rain gathering, intensifying in the whirlpool air. His words whip around trees, tear away leaves, flatten the grass. I guess only seconds remain before one of my parents is upon me.
The first three ancient, rusted keys on the ring fail to open the heavy basement door. I think I can hear something from within, but it’s hard to know in the wind. I don’t need to hear it, though; its echoing rustling is tattooed inside my brain, the ambient noise of every day, every long night. Huge drops of rain now strike the stairs behind me heavily, like the sound of falling crows. The fourth key turns the lock and the door bursts open, throwing me back onto the stairs. My spine echoes agony, my wounds stretch and pour blood, but I feel none of this because around me rush the shrieking ghosts.
How many furious spirits, I don’t know. Around me, through me, covering me like an icy, blanket, they keep coming, the ghosts who’ve haunted our house, our dreams, our waking moments since I was born, the victims of a hundred years of our family’s dark secret. Wanderers, strangers, hobos. Passing cowboys and salesmen and hiking students seeking a night’s respite between walls, under a roof. Willing to pay for a hot meal offered free by my accommodating ancestors, my parents and brothers. Poisoned, bludgeoned, exsanguinated at the kitchen table, in the spare bedroom, in the living room. Their belongings robbed, their bodies harvested.
What great-grandpa did to lock their souls in our home, kept entombed in our stone and dirt basement I found in a decomposing book in a far corner of the attic, so thickly wrapped in spiderwebs I needed my knife to cut it open. His cursive-crafted words slashed out a proud confession of how’d he’d kept the family solvent and fed through thin times, how he’d trapped the souls of his prey so even God wouldn’t know what he’d done.
But I won’t abide another death. I won’t eat another bite of human meat. I won’t allow another wailing spirit to invade my sleep and make me relive its final moments again and again. I won’t kill again. Not for my parents, not for my brothers, not for my grandfather.
“Misty! What did you do?” my father shouts just behind me and then his mouth is full of spirits more powerful than the wind and rain, choking him, clogging his throat, suffocating him. He falls to his knees at the top of the stairs, gripping the sides of his chest like his lungs might explode. And then they do. His ribs burst out the side of his body in a cataclysm of blood and splintered bone and skull-faced, wailing ghosts. Hot blood pours from his nose and spasms in torrents from his mouth and he collapses halfway down the stairs, dead.
Mother is screaming somewhere. My brothers too, their shrieks topping the wind from the bedrooms upstairs. I close my eyes and wait for the ghosts’ vengeance to turn to me. The rain has angled its way down the stairs. My clothing is one with my skin. I’m freezing. But I know it won’t matter soon.
Then the screaming stops. The wailing stops. The rain continues to batter my body, the wind to shrill. I open my eyes.
I’m in a glowing, glistening, tremoring fog. My eyes adjust until I detect individual shapes within it. Shapes that are the fog, translucent and overlapping each other. I feel a deep sadness vibrate through the air, no longer a fury. One ghost rises above the others, hovers a moment and then disappears into the wind. What’s left of its human form is just smokey tendrils and wilting face. Another follows. Another. A group. I watch under the blanket of spattering rain until the last one rises to disintegrate into the wind.
My wounds ache, but I am alive. I don’t know why. I’m almost disappointed. But this is my punishment. So much to live with, the final claimant to this house of death. I roll to my side and push myself upward. I turn to the basement, silent now, and limp inside the freezing darkness. The time for cleansing has begun.
Past my shoulder, black as the hearts of those who lived in this house, a bat flies in.
The End