WITCH BABY part 2

Copyright (c) 2018 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

By R. Peterson

The inside of the car glowed with the same khaki green color as the infant’s eyes. The speedometer’s needle nudged past the hundred miles an hour mark, and still the battered gray Nova on my tail repeatedly nibbled the Goat’s rear bumper. Porky Junior leaned out the window waving a gun.

The steering wheel jerked under my hands. We were losing control in the gravel. I fought the wheel … but then a tire blew or was shot out. There was a bump as we crossed a buried pipe for an irrigation canal. We hit it hard almost sideways. My G.T.O. became airborne - rolling over in midair … I grabbed for the baby and she was gone.

            Time appeared to freeze and then move forward in slow motion. I wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was thrust upward toward the headliner as the car rotated around me. The steel toe from my left boot made contact with the steering wheel and a large chunk of hardened plastic broke free from the circular metal. My right boot shattered the windshield. A blanket floated from the empty basket belted to the passenger side and spread outward like the wings of a bird ready to take flight. The jagged piece of plastic from the steering wheel cut through it like a knife. Porky Junior’s Nova came into view from the side windows skidding to a stop below and behind me. The surprised look on Lemont Morris’ face quickly turned to a smile as my muscle-car Pontiac bounced once on the right front and right rear tires and then rolled through a fence dragging broken posts and barbed wire as it plowed through a field of plump golden pumpkins. Time reverted to its normal speed and then quickened as Porky Junior, Ned and Glen Hicks and Eddy Poole all vaulted from the Nova and ran toward my wreckage.

            “Should we call an ambulance?” Ned Hicks’ eyes looked like black baby moon hubcaps mounted on white rims as he strained to open the sprung-door on my goat.

            “What and have him blab to the cops about how we ran him off the road?” Porky Junior swung out the revolving cylinder from a six-shooter checking to make sure it was still loaded. He removed three spent cartridges and then spun it. “Only dead men keep secrets!”

Glen Hicks and Eddy Poole dragged me out, tearing my Iron Butterfly t-shirt on the broken glass that littered the inside of the car.

The full moon turned Lemont Morris into a dark leering silhouette as he aimed the gun at my head. There was a green glow surrounding the weapon that seemed strangely familiar. Porky Junior was close enough for me to smell the Mad Dog (Mogen David) wine on his breath. I closed my eyes a second before he pulled the trigger … there was a sadistic click. I opened my eyes, hopefully not for the last time. A pair of yellow flickering headlights appeared about a half-mile down the road. ‘That’s Amos Grover’s milk truck,” Eddy Poole bawled. ‘Let’s get out of here!”

            “One more time #%%$^&#,” Porky Junior said as he placed the gun barrel this time right against my left eye. “You’ll be able to see this one coming!”

The blast that I expected never came … only another ghostly click. “You’re one lucky mother #%$^%$ … but you won’t be next time,” Lemont promised as he kicked me hard in the head and then ran with the others toward his car.

They disappeared in a cloud of dust thirty seconds before Amos first slowed then pulled off the road, eight-gallon milk cans rattling off the wooden rails they were tied to on both sides of his flat-bed truck. I didn’t feel very lucky. I looked around for the baby but she seemed to have vanished. Amos Grover was running toward me hitching up the belt on his baggy trousers. “I saw that other fella go by without stopping,” he stammered. “What the Hell is this world coming to?”

-------2-------

            The police paid me a visit shortly after Parley Descombey III bandaged my head and put seven stiches in my arm. I knew they wouldn’t believe me about the baby and Porky Junior was my problem, so I kept mum. “It’s too late for a breathalyzer but I’m sure we can figure out what happened,” Deputy Keith Porter said as he dropped an empty bottle of Mogen David wine onto my hospital bed. I ended up pleading guilty to inattentive driving and property damage to the farmer’s fence. I received a three-hundred dollar fine/restitution, a suspended license and two weeks of community service.

            The community service turned out to be picking up litter on five miles of highway leading east from Cloverdale toward Missoula. This first week there were six of us walking along with large orange bags hooked to our belts and spearing fast-food bags, napkins and Twinkie wrappers using long wooden handles with a ten-penny nail band-clamped to the end. By the last part of the second week I found myself alone, the others having served their time and rejoining society … I had about a half-mile left before I could stop for the day.

            Dozens of cars passed me every minute I don’t know what made me look twice at the gray blur approaching at high speed. By the time I realized it was a Chevy Nova all I could do was turn and try to run toward the fence on the far side of the borrow pit. I had taken about three steps when I saw the thirty-five pound cinder-block come flying out the car’s side window. It was like a white bowling ball spinning through the air at sixty miles an hour and I was a wobbling pin about to go down and make someone a bloody spare. Whoever lobbed the lethal building block had deadly aim. The cinderblock was coming right toward me …. There was no way it could miss.

Suddenly the projectile exploded inches from my face in a blinding flash of shattered concrete, powdered lime and bits of Khaki green sand. I heard Danger Zone blasting from a car stereo as the Chevy roared past. I heard what sounded like a giggle and turned. A girl of about eight stood on the banks of an irrigation canal just the other side of the fence. Pulsing tendrils of green smoke appeared to swirl and flow back into her outstretched fingers. She wore a dress made of some kind of glimmering fabric that absorbed the colors and textures surrounding her, causing her to appear almost invisible along the weedy edge of a large pasture. She smiled and then disappeared with a flash of light and a loud cracking sound like huge dry bones being snapped into kindling. A tall cottonwood tree across the road shook perceptibly before turning the sky ebony with thundering wings and the cursing of crows. Storm clouds circled the sun forming a dark halo. The previously tranquil herd of steers stopped grazing the pasture and broke into a stampede disappearing into a cloud of dust and feverish mooing. I climbed the fence and walked both sides of the ditch for more than an hour … she was gone.

-------3-------

                There was too much damage to the GTO to be repaired with my depleted funds. So after my license was restored, Ben Leston loaned me the use of his late mother’s vomit-colored 1963 Rambler station-wagon. The embarrassment of being seen in an old lady’s ride with a smashed-in hood was partially cancelled out by the fact that Porky Junior would never expect me to be driving such a rattletrap. Dating now seemed to be out of the question. I resolved to turn my 2.3 GPA into something that might actually land me a job higher on the ladder of success than an assistant manager at McDonalds. My fraternity Phi Sigma Kappa had other plans and since I was paid up till the end of the year, and needed the test files they kept locked in the back room, I didn’t feel I could turn them down.

            This time the sister-sorority girl without a date for the spring mixer was Brenda Boom-Boom Clawson a three-hundred pound Dental Technology major with a lawyer father, two battery charges behind her and one dropped charge of attempted rape. What kind of woman gets charged with attempted rape? What kind of milk toast Mike files the charges? There might have been more … but it was such a long way around. I picked her up in the Rambler and hoped she wouldn’t break a spring, and if she did … that Ben wouldn’t notice.

            She opened a brown paper bag and pulled out a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label, two thirty-six ounce thermo-lined Big Gulp drinking cups, a bag of ice, and a gallon of orange juice even before her door closed. She locked her door and then reached across the seat to lock mine. Her left breast felt like a parachute stuffed with down-feather pillows. “We have to be careful!” She smiled showing off two long rows of perfect teeth. “It’s a dangerous world out there!”

I don’t know what she was making, but I prayed to God and the Devil both that it wouldn’t be me.

-------4--------

            She was on her third drink and I was still thinking about secretly pouring out my first when she suggested that we skip the dance and instead go swimming at Makeout Lake. “I didn’t bring a suit,” I stammered. “Neither did I!” She smiled coyly and gave me a wink that made me feel like I was being skinned alive with a rusted salad fork.

            We weren’t the only ones at the lake and I hoped without hope that I might still find a way to ditch her. She climbed out of the Rambler singing Do it to me one more time and looking like the monster from the movie The Blob.

            Everyone was taking off their clothes and I ran when I realized I couldn’t tell if she was wearing underwear or not. I slipped off my jacket and tennis shoes and hit the water in my jeans and a loose t-shirt that said Save the Whales …. Breed with Them! I’d bought the shirt shortly after I found out my brothers at Phi Sigma Kappa had ordered me to go on this death sentence date. Brenda had laughed when she’d seen the shirt and suggested she buy one the same color so that we would look more like a couple.

            I swam hard toward a raft floating in the middle of the lake. Power-stroking through the rippling waves like a sunken-boat tourist crossing Loch Ness.

-------5-------

            I stood on the raft with three others and swore I could hear the tuba music from Jaws playing as Brenda plunged in the water and swam toward us. The others dove in the water when she got close, but I froze, sure that one of her beefy hands would grab my leg and pull me under when she realized I was trying to escape. The raft was made by nailing two by fours across two rows of lashed-together twenty-four inch diameter stumps with a three inch gap between each board.

Brenda came at the raft from the side and when she did the boards spread apart making the three inch gap five inches where I was standing. My shoeless foot slipped into the widened crack and when she climbed aboard the crack returned to normal and my foot was caught.

I screamed in pain as her roaming hands tried to give me comfort and I finally convinced her that if we were really going to have any kind of a fun night she had to figure out a way to free my foot. She backhanded my head three times and exclaimed that I better not try to lie or break a promise to her. She plunged into the water and swam toward the cars and I seriously considered chewing off my trapped foot and swimming toward the opposite shore. I might have if something far more serious hadn’t come up. Brenda was just waddling onto shore when a gray Chevy Nova skidded to a stop next to my parked Rambler. What I first thought was engine backfire turned out to be gunshots as Porky junior emptied his pistol in the air.

            I’ve never seen so many cars leave the lake so quickly in my life. Most of the people leaving were half naked …. All of them were wet. I saw Brenda climb up on Fred Grover’s dad’s milk truck. Two of the milk cans had been replaced with beer kegs and she laughed as someone jammed surgical tubing spraying beer into her mouth just before the truck roared away. I was left alone at the lake with Lemont Morris, Ned and Glen Hicks, and Eddy Poole.  I was praying that Porky Junior and the others didn’t know how to swim … but I found out they didn’t have to. The raft was attached to the parking area by an underwater chain and within minutes they were pulling me toward shore like a two-hundred pound sucker … the catch of the day.

-------6-------

I tried again to free my foot again but it was lodged tight. When the raft reached land I would be at their mercy. My only hope was that someone else would come driving into the lake area, preferably a cop, but I was willing to take anyone. I looked in all directions there were no headlights coming this way. It appeared to be getting blacker as if even the stars had turned their backs on me showing their dark matter side. It was then that I noticed the glow from the water, as if hundreds of green lights were being lit on the lake bottom. I was close enough to land to hear Porky Junior exclaiming in a loud voice what was going to happen to me. “I’ve got twenty pounds of dog #$%$ in my trunk,” he said. “It took me two weeks to gather it up with a shovel. You’re going to eat all of it. Then we’re going to bounce you upside down until you puke … then you’re going to eat everything again!”

“I’ll pass,” I told him. “It’s not the food …. It’s the company!”

My smart mouth seemed to enrage him. Porky Junior let Ned Hicks and Eddy Poole yank on the chain while he retrieved a bulging burlap bag from his trunk as if to show me he was serious about the dog turds. “If you eat it all I’ll let you brush your teeth before the second course,” he promised.

            The lake was definitely becoming a more brilliant green. The ripples from the moving raft seemed to have an almost ethereal quality. Although the sky appeared to be darker than ever, I could see twinkling stars reflected in the water. I first noticed small twigs and pieces of floating debris being swept toward the center of the lake. Ned and Eddy for the first time appeared to be losing ground. I saw the tight chain yank them forward. Ned actually fell and was submerged to his waist before he found his footing and was able to stand. The raft I was on and everything else was moving toward the center of the lake. I don’t know if the wind created the pull or if the pull created the wind. Branches broke off from dead trees and flew mostly to the center of the lake where a churning vortex had opened like a huge drain in the lake bottom. Porky Junior, Ned, Glen and Eddy all ran toward the Nova. It was too late. Even though the parking brake must have been engaged, the battered Chevy slid toward the green water leaving two sunken trenches in the rocky ground to mark its progress. Trees began to bend split and slide. Several rotted tree stumps suddenly lost all their packed dirt and rolled like barrels into the water. She was there in the trees no longer eight years old but over fourteen. I felt her there with my mind and then with my eyes. The raft I was on had reached the center of the lake and began to spin. The entire wooden structure lifted into the air, the center more than the outside. The crack between the boards opened and I pulled my foot free. I was being pelted by leaves, twigs, tiny rocks and bits of gravel. I turned and watched the Nova slide into the water spraying jets of water from the duel exhaust just before I dove off the raft.

            I now knew how a spider feels when someone flushes it down a toilet. Even though I was a strong swimmer I was pulled round and round the center of the lake like everything else. I don’t know if it was a hand that pulled me to shore but I felt her touch. I lay on the bank and watched as a water spout opened above the center of the lake sucking everything on and in the water including the Nova, with engine revved to the max and horn blaring, upward into a swirling green cloud.

            The sound grew in volume until it reached the level of a thundering freight train crossing a rusty metal bridge and then it was gone leaving only silence and a single green leaf floating in the exact center of the lake where no ripples danced and only stars crowded the edges.

-------7-------

I woke up in Cloverdale General Hospital but it wasn’t so bad this time. The cops left me mostly alone. It appeared I wasn’t the only one who had seen the tornado over Makeout Lake. They never found the infamous Nova or the monster that used it to prowl the streets of my small Montana town. I became something of a celebrity. Lots of strange things happen to people in Cloverdale. Those who survive are accorded a mark like an invisible badge of acceptance. I got a good part-time job with the Highway Department repairing bad roads and managed to finish my second year of college with a 3.4 GPA. My knowledge climbed a tall ladder. Water is the source of life and it makes things grow … you have to give it time. I was also able to restore the GTO to her former glory. I spent an extra four hundred dollars on a plush metallic green paint-job that made my ride look like a giant emerald on wheels. I could also feel her in my dreams … and I knew the night was coming.

            It was almost a year after the cyclone incident at the lake. It was a full moon with dark clouds forming for a surprise attack and I found myself driving to the dead-end of Vineyard Road. After State Hospital North and Black Rose Cemetery everything seemed to get much darker, like climbing down into an old well with a rope at night. I almost turned back … but I didn’t.

Rotted beams on a sagging front porch trembled from the sound of distant thunder. The uncut lawn looked like weedy swamp muck. An oily salamander slithered away as I skulked down a broken stone path. I felt like I was coming home. Fear is the greatest hallucinogen and it’s there for a purpose. My hand brushed a spider-web as I reached for the brass knocker in the form of a snarling Gargoyle. The figure was crouched to leap at any door-to-door salesman foolish enough to risk his life for a sale or perhaps just for a young guy looking for love. The metal made almost no sound on the heavy oak planks and I was turning to leave when the door groaned open. I heard soft singing and could see glowing green light coming from inside … and I smiled.

THE END?