So what, exactly, were the creatures escaping from?
Another thump, this one louder, and Dexter began to open the locks, his fingers clumsy, his hands slick with sweat, the thought scuttling and skittering in his mind as insistently as the claws of a thousand fleeing rats: run, run, run.
The last locked turned. The door yawned open. The trees in the back yard rustled in the wind, and the old man from next door—now hatless—leaned on his walkingstick by the back fence, face lost in shadow, and shook his head.
Dexter sprinted from the house, but the back fence seemed to get smaller as he ran, and the old man seemed farther away with every step, and Dexter realized, before he fell—before something fell upon him, radiating ancient, indifferent heat—that he’d never reach the corner or hole or exit in time. That he was too small, and the world, and all the things in it, were just too big.
∇
Lord of the Land
Gene Wolfe
The Nebraskan smiled warmly, leaned forward, and made a sweeping gesture with his right hand, saying, “Yes indeed, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m most interested in. Tell me about it, Mr. Thacker, please.”
All this was intended to keep old Hop Thacker’s attention away from the Nebraskan’s left hand, which had slipped into his left jacket pocket to turn on the miniature recorder there. Its microphone was pinned to the back of the Nebraskan’s lapel, the fine brown wire almost invisible.
Perhaps old Hop would not have cared in any case; old Hop was hardly the shy type. “Waul,” he began, “this was years an’ years back, the way I hear’d it. Guess it’d have been in my great granpaw’s time, Mr. Cooper, or mebbe before.”
The Nebraskan nodded encouragingly.
“There’s these three boys, an’ they had an old mule, wasn’t good fer nothin’ ’cept crowbait. One was Colonel Lightfoot—course didn’t nobody call him colonel then. One was Creech an’ t’other ’un…” The old man paused, fingering his scant beard. “Guess I don’t rightly know. I did know. It’ll come to me when don’t nobody want to hear it. He’s the one had the mule.”
The Nebraskan nodded again. “Three young men, you say, Mr. Thacker?”
“That’s right, an’ Colonel Lightfoot, he had him a new gun. An’ this other ’un-he was a friend of my grandpaw’s or somebody—he had him one everybody said was jest about the best shooter in the county. So this here Laban Creech, he said he wasn’t no bad shot hisself, an’ he went an’ fetched his’un. He was the ’un had that mule. I recollect now.
“So they led the ol’ mule out into the medder, mebbe fifty straddles from the brake. You know how you do. Creech, he shot it smack in the ear, an’ it jest laid down an’ died, it was old, an’ sick, too, didn’t kick or nothin’. So Colonel Lightfoot, he fetched out his knife an’ cut it up the belly, an’ they went on back to the brake fer to wait out the crows.”
“I see,” the Nebraskan said.
“One’d shoot, an’ then another, an’ they’d keep score. An’ it got to be near to dark, you know, an’ Colonel Lightfoot with his new gun an’ this other man that had the good ’un, they was even up, an’ this Laban Creech was only one behind ’em. Reckon there was near to a hundred crows back behind in the gully. You can’t jest shoot a crow an’ leave him, you know, an’ ’spect the rest to come. They look an’ see that dead ’un, an’ they say, Waul, jest look what become of him. I don’t calc’late to come anywheres near there.”
The Nebraskan smiled. “Wise birds.”
“Oh, there’s all kinds of stories ’bout ’em,” the old man said.
“Thankee, Sarah.”
His granddaughter had brought two tall glasses of lemonade; she paused in the doorway to dry her hands on her red-and-white checkered apron, glancing at the Nebraskan with shy alarm before retreating into the house.
“Didn’t have a lick, back then.” The old man poked an ice cube with one bony, somewhat soiled finger. “Didn’t have none when I was a little ’un, neither, till the TVA come. Nowadays you talk ’bout the TVA an’ they think you mean them programs, you know.” He waved his glass. “I watch ’em sometimes.”
“Television,” the Nebraskan supplied.
“That’s it. Like, you take when Bud Bloodhat went to his reward, Mr. Cooper. Hot? You never seen the like. The birds all had their mouths open, wouldn’t fly fer anything. Lot two hogs, I recollect, that same day. My paw, he wanted to save the meat, but ’twasn’t a bit of good. He says he thought them hogs was rotten ’fore ever they dropped, an’ he was ’fraid to give it to the dogs, it was that hot. They was all asleepin’ under the porch anyhow. Wouldn’t come out fer nothin’.”
The Nebraskan was tempted to reintroduce the subject of the crow shoot, but an instinct born of thousands of hours of such listening prompted him to nod and smile instead.
“Waul, they knowed they had to git him under quick, didn’t they? So they got him fixed, cleaned up an’ his best clothes on an’ all like that, an’ they was all in there listenin’, but it was terrible hot in there an’ you could smell him pretty strong, so by an’ by I jest snuck out. Wasn’t nobody payin’ attention to me, do you see? The women’s all bawlin’ an’ carryin’ on, an’ the men thinkin’ it was time to put him under an’ have another.”
The old man’s cane fell with a sudden, dry rattle. For a moment as he picked it up, the Nebraskan glimpsed Sarah’s pale face on the other side of the doorway.
“So I snuck out on the stoop. I bet it was a hundred easy, but it felt good to me after bein’ inside there. That was when I seen it comin’ down the hill t’other side of the road. Stayed in the shadow much as it could, an’ looked like a shadow itself, only you could see it move, an’ it was always blacker than what they was. I knowed it was the soul-sucker an’ was afeered it’d git my ma. I took to cryin’, an’ she come outside an’ fetched me down the spring fer a drink, an’ that’s the last time anybody ever did see it, far’s I know.”
“Why do you call it the soul-sucker?” the Nebraskan asked.
“’Cause that’s what it does, Mr. Cooper. Guess you know it ain’t only folks that has ghosts. A man can see the ghost of another man, all right, but he can see the ghost of a dog or a mule or anythin’ like that, too. Waul, you take a man’s, ’cause that don’t make so much argyment. It’s his soul, ain’t it? Why ain’t it in Heaven or down in the bad place like it’s s’possed to be? What’s it doin’ in the haint house, or walkin’ down the road, or wherever ’twas you seen it? I had a dog that seen a ghost one time, an’ that’n was another dog’s, do you see? I never did see it, but he did, an’ I knowed he did by how he acted. What was it doin’ there?”
The Nebraskan shook his head. “I’ve no idea, Mr. Thacker.” “Waul, I’ll tell you. When a man passes on, or a horse or a dog or whatever, it’s s’pposed to git out an’ git over to the Judgment. The Lord Jesus Christ’s our judge, Mr. Cooper. Only sometimes it won’t do it. Mebbe it’s afeared to be judged, or mebbe it has this or that to tend to down here yet, or anyhow reckons it does, like showin’ somebody some money what it knowed about. Some does that pretty often, an’ I might tell you ’bout some of them times. But if it don’t have business an’ is jest feared to go, it’ll stay where ’tis—that’s the kind that haints their graves. They b’long to the soul sucker, do you see, if it can git ’em. Only if it’s hungered it’ll suck on a live person, an’ he’s bound to fight or die.” The old man paused to wet his lips with lemonade, staring across his family’s little burial plot and fields of dry cornstalks to purple hills where he would never hunt again. “Don’t win, not particular often. Guess the first ’un was a Indian, mebbe. Somethin’ like that. I tell you how Creech shot it?”