Eighteen
Caitlin's scream pierced the morning dawn and wound
Leon Biggs' nerves to the breaking point. He recognized the shriek from
drunken interludes in the past when he had awakened the girl from the
depths of sleep by his touch. Slouched in his chair at the kitchen table,
he sat up, panicky and disoriented. His chest was a mass of pain. He
felt sick at his stomach and light-headed. But he knew where the sound
had originated. He knew where Caitlin was hiding.
She had never tried to hide in the old barn before.
It had never been a place of refuge in the past, not so close to the
house. The structure was too clearly dangerous, leaning precariously on
its foundation and about to collapse. He rushed out the back way thinking
that if she had made herself ill, if she made accusations at the hospital,
he would have to live up to the repercussions of his behavior after all.
He'd kill himself if that happened. If his heart didn't get him first,
he'd put a bullet in his head to show the world the consequence of pushing
too hard and expecting too much from a man.
The onrushing conclusion to his life startled and
frightened him. Six decades had slipped past him far too quickly. He
plodded to the barn one step after another, all but incapacitated by the
crushing pain in his chest and marginally aware that he'd never survive
long enough to commit suicide. He had put off the crises in his life too
long. Too many crises. Too little time left to resolve even one of them.
He paused in the cool, musty mouth of the barn. It
was wetter inside than out in the hot morning sun. Water still dripped
from the leaky roof overgrown in moss. Any day now, the whole flimsy
framework of rotting wood was going to collapse into the surrounding weeds
where it would be left to decompose.
Leon scanned the gray shadows of the loft.
"Caitlin? Are you in here?"
The only ladder to the loft was in the terminal
stages of dry rot. If Caitlin wasn't up there, he'd take the old sledge
hammer propped by the door and knock it to pieces to make sure he would
never have to look again. But for one last time, he climbed up to the
dark loft engulfed in the stench of rotting hay.
He saw her almost immediately, a pale mass huddled
against the back wall. Her bare legs were in motion, twisting about as if
caught in a delirium. "Caitlin?" he cried in alarm. "Have you hurt
yourself?"
His heart palpitated in his chest amidst the pain.
Caitlin was only a child. What if she, too, had sought refuge in death as
he had contemplated? What if she had slashed her wrists, or drunk
poison? He crawled to her on hands and knees in tears, thinking what a
tragedy it would be for young Caitlin to kill herself over the likes of an
old fool filled with more bark that bite.
He reached out and grasped a bare foot, feeling the
power of the convulsions wracking her entire body. Her skin was on fire.
He crept closer to her, all but blinded by the blossoming pain in his
chest. "Caitlin, are you sick? You'll catch yourself pneumonia running
the woods in the rain."
He sat cross-legged before her, feeling like a fat
child mourning a lost friend. His right arm had gone numb. He cradled it
absently in his lap.
"Caitlin, it ain't so bad," he murmured through his
tears. "I never really hurt you. You got good food, a roof over your
head. I buy you pretty dresses, don't I, and all the music you want?" He
ran his hand to the calf of her leg, grieving the young body he would
never hold in his arms. Had he broken her spirit to bring her to this,
the one thing about her that he cherished most of all?
It was then that he saw the dark, unidentifiable mass
surge near her head and separate itself from her. Ice ran through his
veins as Caitlin relaxed, freed from the strange passion that had
possessed her. In that instant, Leon sensed danger. For a brief moment,
he had the horrible thought that the girl was comatose, that some animal
had been gnawing at her body. He had seen it happen in the past, drunken
hunters awakening with their face and hands devoured by scavengers in the
woods.
The creature poised alongside her head had no
definable shape. The depth of the mystery associated immediately with the
swarms of green meteors that had plowed to Earth night before last. With
a cry of alarm, he grasped both of Caitlin's ankles and tried to pull her
away.
It struck at him then with a slender gray snake-like
tongue that punctured the back of his hand with a black spike an inch or
so long. He felt its venom injected into his arm.
Shock coursed through his body, and instant
paralysis. With his mouth wide, he could not complete his scream. And he
wanted badly to scream. He saw his own hand turn black before his eyes,
and his flesh melt away from his bones without breaking the skin. The
gray snake-like tongue pulsated, liquefying him inside and sucking him
dry.
Astonished, he fell to one side, anxious for the
painless process to hurry up and finish with him, almost pleased that life
should end this way, with punishment, an eternity of hell wrapped up in a
compact two or three minutes so that he could get the guilt over with and
die in peace. He had never meant to be an evil man. If only Caitlin had
known how much he had loved her.
Blissful numbness followed in the wake of the pain.
Inch by inch, he felt his body die and fall away from him. When the
poison touched his heart, he felt it falter. It would have stopped of its
own accord soon enough anyhow, so it hardly mattered that it happened in
this painless manner. An eerie silence fell upon the darkening world.
Consciousness and memories of a lifetime drained away and were whisked
into oblivion like delicate strands of spider silk caught in the last sigh
of a passing breeze.
