First Thrills: Volume 2 Page 3

  When my father, Janey Sue, and Brambles led Johnny on into the dining room where a feast was awaiting his return, I held back, pulling on Brent’s arm. “You are—a horse’s ass!” I hissed to him. “What? Were you wishing that Johnny wouldn’t make it home? What’s the matter with you?”

  I had grown up with Brent as well. He was lean and tall like Johnny, dark haired, handsome, light eyed, and he’d been bred with the same ethics. I couldn’t understand him being so bitter and churlish, not about Johnny coming home. I knew he’d taken some hard hits. He’d married a girl in Virginia, and she’d died before any of the family had even managed to meet her. To be sad and even bitter seemed to be one thing; to be so cold to his cousin seemed quite another.

  Brent studied me. I couldn’t help but think that his eyes were green—not the beautiful blue Johnny’s had once been. And yet today …

  They were alive. Deep set and steady, and somehow, wise beyond all that I had seen before.

  “I loved Johnny like a brother,” he told me.

  I frowned. “Then give him a hug and a real welcome, and be happy that he is home!” I told him.

  He gripped my hands tightly. “Jules,” he said, his voice suddenly heated and passionate, “be careful. Be very careful, please.”

  I jerked away from him, staring at him. “Be careful—of Johnny? Brent, you have lost your mind.”

  I swept on into the dining room.

  Mable, the cook, had gone all out. Johnny’s favorites were all on the table. There was ham, chicken, roasted lamb, cornbread, turnip greens, summer squash, tomatoes, fresh berries, and for dessert, sweet-potato-pecan pie.

  Johnny barely touched his food. He thanked Mable and told her how delicious everything on the table tasted.

  But he didn’t really eat. He simply pushed his food around the plate.

  When the meal had ended, Janey Sue and I gave the gentlemen a few minutes alone in the study for brandy and cigars. She and I were both chafing. Johnny had just come home. And so much that was innocent and traditional had already been lost—why were we delegated to the ladies’ room?

  “Time enough!” I said firmly. Janey Sue smiled, and she and I headed to the study.

  Johnny was seated in his father’s huge old leatherback chair behind the desk. Brent was at the settee, and my father was standing by the mantle, perplexed as he watched Johnny. “What’s done is done. How would we change anything now?” My father was asking.

  Brent seemed to be looking out the window, paying no mind to what was going on.

  “Maybe the world needs a clean sweep,” Johnny said. “A mighty flood to rise up, and clear us all out, those who were greedy and made their fortunes on the backs of other men, and those who will sweep down now to make their fortunes on the broken backs of those trying to come to terms with the war. What has been … the past is gone. It can never be relived.”

  He stood up. “My dear friends, and family,” Johnny said, glancing tenderly at his sister, glancing at Brent, “I am exhausted. Forgive me.”

  Everyone agreed that he must rest. But I raced out into the hall after him. He didn’t mean me, of course. He would need me. Naturally, a Southern lady did not sleep with her beau until they were married.

  But such myths had gone away in the river of bloodshed that had been the war. I had lain with Johnny many times. I did not shout it from the rooftops, nor did other Southern women, well aware that their opportunities for intimacy with their loved ones might be limited and quickly ended by a volley of cannon fire.

  “Johnny!” I said, stopping, laying my head against his chest. “I will come up later, once we’ve settled for the night. Father will understand that I am staying with Janey Sue, and Janey Sue has long known that I stay with you.”

  He pulled away and stared at me, frowning. He shook his head. “No, no, you must go home tonight.”

  “Johnny—”

  “Tonight, please. You must.” His hands cupped my face. “You must go home, far from here. You are not … you must. I love you as I have always loved you. But tonight, go home.”

  He walked away from me. I stared after him, incredulous. I had missed our nights together. I had dreamed about them time and time again as I had prayed that he would return from the war.

  My father emerged from the study. “Jules, we must go home, and let these fine folks rest for the night.”

  “But—” I began.

  “Jules, please,” my father insisted.

  Brent stared at me. He was not going to help me. And even Janey Sue, next to Brent, appeared to be a little lost.

  I had no choice but to leave with my father. I was not invited to stay.

  The next morning, fishermen from Douglas Island boarded the schooner which had brought Johnny home, but not into the docks.

  The schooner was empty. There was not a soul aboard her.

  My father, commonly looked upon as the people’s leader on the island as we had no mayor or other governmental structure there, listened gravely to the men, then announced that we’d be going out to Fairhaven to speak with Johnny while he sent other men in one of our fastest ketches to alert the proper authorities on the mainland.

  Brambles, deeply distressed, opened the door. He told my father that Johnny was doing poorly. He would get Mr. Brent.

  Brent, looking worn, came to the foyer and led us into the study. My father told Brent about the lack of a crew or other passengers on the schooner. Brent listened gravely. I thought his face became more ashen as he did so.

  “That’s quite a mystery,” Brent said.

  “Surely, Johnny can tell us something!” my father said.

  “Johnny is sedated right now; he had a very hard night,” Brent said. He grimaced. “I have laudanum, for my hip, you know. Johnny needed sleep, very badly,” he said.

  “Well, I must speak with him. Authorities will come from the mainland, and they will demand to know something,” my father said.

  Brent nodded. He looked like a man under torture. Still, I was resentful. I was convinced he was jealous of Johnny, and that he was hiding something.

  “May I see Janey Sue?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “She is resting, as well.”

  “Brent, damn you—!”

  “Jules!” My father said with horror. “The war is over. We will not become animals because it existed, or because it is over!”

  Brent looked away. “It’s all right, Mr. Shelby. I realize that my own behavior must appear far less than hospitable. Forgive me.”

  I wanted to slap his face. My father, however, had my elbow. He apologized for me, and we were quickly out of the house.

  “He’s doing something to Johnny—it’s Brent. Father! Maybe he’s trying to kill him. Brent would probably like to inherit the property. You must stop him!”

  My father looked at me. He was grave, but didn’t share my fear or my passion. “Child, war is hard on the women who wait. It is devastating to the men who fight, who stare at their fellow human beings, sometimes look them in their eyes, and shoot them or stab them through with their knives or bayonets. Let it be; we will see. Brent knows that Johnny must answer to me. Give it the day.”

  I had no intention of giving it a day. I rode out to Johnny’s beautiful Fairhaven, and I came around the back. I left Mathilda, my horse, behind the stables, grazing on long grasses, and I slipped through the kitchen door. I knew my way around the house, and I looked out for both Brambles and Mable as I climbed the stairs.

  What I found horrified me.

  Johnny’s room had been boarded; there were nails imbedded in the wooden planks that now walled him in. I walked to the door and called his name.

  He did not answer. I tried and tried, and then hurried down the hall to Janey Sue’s room. Her door was not barricaded, but she wasn’t there.

  I slipped from the house, furious now. Brent was locking his cousin away! What had he done with Janey Sue?

  I rode hard, straight back to my home, determined that my father
was going to do something, and do that something now. But he wasn’t there, and as I stood in the parlor of our home on Main Street, not far from the docks, I heard the shouting.

  The sound was distant, but so loud it carried on the breeze. I left the house and ran down Main Street until I reached the long boardwalk that stretched out so that the larger ships could avail themselves of the deep harbor, and there, found the reason for the horror. People had backed away, but they were in a circle around something on the dock.

  I pushed through the crowd.

  And I saw what they saw.

  Bodies. White, swollen, and bloated, and torn to shreds. They had been gnawed upon.

  Eaten.

  “Sharks,” someone cried. “The water is infested!”

  “This was not a shark attack,” one of the older fishermen said. He shook his grizzled head, rubbing his chin. “This is not a shark attack. I’ve seen what the big fellows can do to a man left in the water. The bodies are … not missing any limbs. They’ve been chewed by something. But not a shark.”

  As I stood there, Brent arrived at the docks. He pushed his way through the crowd until he could stare at the bodies. He became the color of burnt ash, and he turned around without a word, and strode back to his carriage.

  I ran after him. I caught him at the end of the dock, grabbed his shoulder, and forced him to face me. He stared at me for a minute as if he didn’t even see me. I slapped him across the face, I was so scared and furious. “What is going on, Brent, damn you, what is going on? I went to the house. I saw what you did to Johnny, and I will not stand for it, do you hear me?”

  He did then. The slap had angered him, but it had brought him back to the reality of the moment—and me, forcing the issue, in his face.

  “Go away, Jules,” he said duly. “Go away, and lock yourself in your house. Better yet, take your father and go far, far away.”

  “You have lost your mind, Brent. What are you going on about? What is happening?”

  He hesitated, but then indicated the tavern on Main Street. He set an arm around my shoulder and led me toward it, and around to the benches that sat outdoors to where, in better times, many a fisherman and farmer had gathered together to drink beer and eat their noon meals.

  Now, the area was empty, and he made me sit down.

  Across from me, he closed his eyes for a moment as if gathering both his strength and his sense of sanity, then, he looked at me. “There’s something really wrong with Johnny.”

  “What?” I demanded. “I know he has been at war. I know he might have been injured, I know that many men bear mental wounds, that they’ve seen things, but…”

  “You saw the men on the dock,” he said. It wasn’t a question. It was a fact. “I’ve seen just a similar thing—before.”

  “Go on,” I said, frowning, and truly puzzled. Maybe Brent had returned more damaged than any of us had imagined.

  He let out a breath and looked at the moss dripping from one of the old oaks that bordered the small outdoor dining area. He didn’t want to look at me.

  “It was at Cold Harbor,” he said.

  I shook my head, still trying desperately to understand what he was talking about. I placed my hands on his. “Brent, Cold Harbor was a victory for Lee. I know that dead men are still dead men, and I know that more than two thousand of your own troops died as well, but—”

  He looked at me, dead on. “Men die. It’s how they die that’s terrifying. We were near Bethesda Church, camped out there. Yes, it was a Rebel victory. But on the night of the tenth, there was a break, and two companies of Feds made it through the lines. We might have been slaughtered in our sleep, but Johnny was on guard duty.”

  “So he saved your lives!” I told him.

  Brent said, “We woke up and found them. At least fifty of them. Torn to pieces. Like the men on the dock. It wasn’t as if they had been killed; it was as if they had been eaten. I don’t know what happened; I never will. They were bloated from the sea, but they were … gnawed. Chewed. Eaten.”

  I ripped my hands away from his and stood up. “Brent! You’re trying to say that Johnny did it, that Johnny … ate the men on the schooner? You must be insane! I’m telling my father what you said, I’m … Brent! You’re horrible, don’t you see that? How dare you imply that Johnny could … and where is Janey Sue? She wasn’t at the house.”

  He looked up at me, startled. “What?”

  “Janey Sue isn’t at the house,” I told him.

  Ignoring me, he jumped to his feet, and he was gone down the street. I saw him reach his horse, and in his wake, the road became dust.

  I left him to find my father. At the docks, I was horrified to find that he’d left a message for me. He was gone. He had climbed aboard a boat with the bodies to take them back to the mainland.

  I was frustrated beyond belief, but it was almost dark. I went back to my house, seething, trying to determine what I could do before he returned.

  Finally, I determined that I would wait until the morning. In the daylight, I was going to find one of my father’s friends to accompany me out to Fairhaven, and I would demand that Brent produce Johnny and Janey Sue.

  I locked my doors carefully, and I went upstairs to sleep. I tossed about, but finally dozed, and I believed it was Brent’s horrible story that made me dream. And in that dream, Johnny was outside. He was high in the branches of the massive oak beyond my window, begging that I let him in. I opened the window, deliriously happy to know that he was all right, and that he needed me.

  But something was wrong with him.

  His eyes. The color, the pale blue color, a dead color …

  He was cold, although it was June, and he seemed strong, though he shouldn’t have been so strong. He held me, he cradled me, and then he pulled away from me. Suddenly, he seemed tortured, and he pushed me away. “No, God no,” he shouted. “Oh, God, no, oh, God, no!”

  Then, he was gone. He leaped through the window, and he was gone.

  I had been dreaming, of course. He had never been there. I opened my eyes and roused, and discovered that my window was open.

  Through the open window, I heard the screams.

  My father owned a Colt; he kept it in his drawer by his bed, and I raced to retrieve it, my fingers shaking as I loaded it with six bullets. I was in my nightdress, but I didn’t care. With slippers on my feet I went tearing from the house and down by the docks.

  I didn’t believe what I saw.

  Something. Something like a man.

  I could hear him. I could hear him eating, hear him drinking, human flesh, for he had torn open one of the dock workers, and another lay at his feet, and a woman was torn in half just a few feet away. The creature, the thing on the docks had picked up human beings and ripped into them like a man might tear into ribs at a barbecue.

  I was frozen. Then I came to life. Screaming, I headed for the thing, my father’s very trusty Colt raised high.

  I started shooting.

  It didn’t fall. It did stop eating. The horrible, frenzied slurping sound stopped.

  The thing turned toward me and was staring. Then, with uncanny speed and agility, it was running at me, and running hard.

  I was dead. Worse, I was about to be gnawed to death, ripped in half, my flesh consumed before my heart ceased to beat. I was so horrified that I was barely aware of the sound of the horse’s hoof beats behind me, and I couldn’t even scream when I was swept up off the street, and thrown over the neck of a horse.

  It was then that I heard Brent, who had rescued me from the road, shouting above the sound of screams and terror. “Get into your houses. Get your swords, you have to remove the head … swords, people, swords, bullets do nothing, aim to decapitate!”

  He whirled his horse around, and still, so casually rescued and tossed, I could see little. People came to the streets then bearing their infantry and cavalry swords. One fellow had his machete; he had once worked in the sugarcane fields.

  I was righted at last. An
d I thought he was going to set me upon the ground. He looked at me and then did not. “Sit tight,” he said. He drew his sword and we road hard down the docks, leaping to bit of poor shoreline at the end. I screamed as I saw something rise from the water; Brent did not. He swept his sword out in a mighty arc; the head of the thing went flying, and the body crashed down to the water, lifeless.

  I heard screams of triumph, and knew that the island folk were now holding their own.

  And then, it was over. Brent called out orders, and people started a bonfire, and the stench in the night air grew sickening. As the body parts were collected for the fire—those killed as well as those who had done the killing—I saw that some of the things had been Federal navy. Men from the schooner.

  Daylight came. Exhausted, Brent sat back at the table outside the tavern again. I took the bench opposite him. He looked up at me miserably. “I think it was a girl in Richmond. Johnny was Johnny then. Soldiers on the street were harassing her, calling her a monster. Johnny stopped them, but the next morning, he looked like hell. He told me that she had been a monster.”

  “You still say Johnny did this? The men from schooner did this. I saw their bodies, Brent.”

  “And how do you think they became what they are?” he asked me wearily. “I found a doctor, a surgeon, a man with the Union. That’s when I was captured. He’d seen it before; he was trying to find a cure. I prayed that Johnny would die, or that this man would find the cure. But…”

  “I don’t believe you,” I told him. “Johnny didn’t do this.”

  Brent started when we heard shouting again. He jumped to his feet. We ran back to the place where the smell of burning flesh was so terrible now, where the bonfire burned.

  I heard Brent cry out and fall to his knees and I knew why.

  He had found Janey Sue. Her throat had been ripped out; her left cheek was gone entirely.

  I watched as Brent sobbed, and I was too numb to find tears myself for the girl who had been my best friend throughout the long years of the war.