From the darkness, the
wind whispers across Lake Tallahatchee. It whispers my name.
Celia
put down her pen and looked to the window. The wind howled and hammered the
cabin with a steady onslaught of snow and ice. The dark interior walls were
suffused in lamplight and the warmth of the fire burning in the hearth, but
neither afforded the slightest comfort. Sweat slickened her thin, aged skin,
glistening in the flickering light.
She
took another drink from the glass. The heat of the room had warmed the
liquid. She grimaced.
Bitter.
With
trembling, withered fingers she picked up the pen and continued.
We have always lived
on this lake. For four generations, the Mulrays have been as much a part of
this lake as the water that spills across its banks, as the woods that surround
it, as the sky that hangs over it. The roots of the weather-etched oaks that conceal
our cabin hold the ground in a fierce grip, their beginnings laid against the
earth like exposed knuckles, digging their fingers deeper, ever deeper. Such
is our claim on the lake. And its claim on us.
It’s
dark tonight, a black, moonless darkness that drapes the trees and the lake in
a death shroud. If this is to finally be the hour of my demise, I shall
welcome it. I have become so very tired.
“Mother?
He’s coming, Mother.” Mary’s voice echoed down the hall. The wood of the long
hallway was lighter, newer than the weathered oak of the outer walls. Celia
heard her daughter’s footsteps shuffling slowly, cautiously closer. She could
envision Mary’s fingertips tracing the walls of the narrow hallway, dancing
lightly over picture frames and mirrors, inching forward, betrayed by
blindness.
The
strokes of her pen became more hurried.
The troubles began
before I came into this world, and may continue long after I’m gone, though I
pray this will not be the case.
Many of the natives
that predated my family feared the lake. Early settlers had named it
Tallahatchee, after the Indian tribe that first lived on its banks. But that
is not the name the natives used.
“Sica,” they called
it. Bad. Short and simply, “bad.”
The Micmac and Shawnee had long feared the Tallahatchee. When my family came, the Tallahatchee had
vanished, but their mark would still be felt. None of the other tribes dared
to settle near the lake.
A bulb above the
kitchen sink blinked once and burned out with a sizzle. Sweat began to seep
through the thick wool of her dressing gown. Her breaths were becoming more
labored.
It was 1836 when my
grandfather discovered the lake. The area was beautiful then, a lush green
thicket of trees surrounding a placid body of water. The sun glanced off of
the lake at sunrise and bathed the banks in warmth. It is no wonder that
Seamus Mulray’s westward trek ended on the banks of this lake. Seamus and his
family built this cabin, a cabin that still stands one-hundred and sixty-three
years later.
The howling
of the wind barely masked the cries buried within.
Mary
appeared at the end of the hall, her white hair wild, haphazardly scattered.
The purple veins in her hands marked a path to long, claw-like fingers. Her
face still bore the scars of her blinding, deep gashes that trailed into the
lines that old age had wrought.
“Go to bed,
my precious one,” Celia said. The words sounded more pleading, cloying than
she’d intended.
“I’m
hungry, mother. So very hungry.”
“I know,
beloved. It won’t be long.”
It was not
long after my great-great grandfather put up stakes on this land that the
troubles began. My father, Joshua Mulray, and his brother Michael were
swimming. The boys took to grappling with each other, trying to pull each
other under, as young boys are prone to doing. Although my father was older by
several years, Michael was the bigger and stronger of the two. After several
minutes of playful wrestling, Michael got the better of my father, grabbing him
by the shoulders and forcing him downward. Even as my father began to
struggle, Michael continued to hold him down, kicking at his waving arms,
avoiding his frantic hands. Finally, Joshua stopped moving. Michael,
realizing what he had done and fearing the worst, quickly grabbed the limp form
of his older brother and pulled him to the shore.
My father
was not breathing when he reached dry land. Michael shook him and beat on his
chest, somehow forcing the water from his lungs, but still he did not breathe.
Michael ran to the cabin, tears streaming down his cheeks, shouting for his
father. When Seamus and Michael returned to where my father lay, they found
him sitting up, smiling, his cheeks flushed with color but otherwise apparently
unharmed. This of course filled Michael with both relief and rage. The latter
of the two being the stronger emotion, he shook my father and screamed at him
until he was blue in the face, but my father continued to smile. Michael later
received quite a beating at the hands of Seamus Mulray, but that would be
nothing compared to the fate he would ultimately suffer.
My father’s
mind appeared to be elsewhere after that. His family would talk to him
directly, but he seldom answered with anything more than the same distant grin
he wore the day the change occurred. They began keeping their distance from
him, fearing the worst: that he’d gone mad. They did not know that madness
was not the worst of their worries, or that he was only waiting.
When winter
came, the wait was over. Lake Tallahatchee is set in a valley, surrounded by
bluffs that are treacherous to cross in the best of conditions. This, in part,
was the charm of the area. The lake was secluded and safe from the outside
world. Protected.
But in the
winter, it became a fortress, impenetrable. In the winter, the natives left
the valley, knowing that staying inside meant certain death. Only the
Tallahatchee had ever survived a winter in the valley. But then, the
Tallahatchee were devourers. Cannibals.
When winter
settled on my family’s land, Seamus, his wife Alice, and Michael found out what
my father was grinning about. In the lake, my father had seen what had become
of the Tallahatchee, and he knew what he had become.
My father
had seen death in the lake, and death was hungry.
By the time
springtime rolled around, all that was left of my father’s family were the
bones that he hauled into the lake at the first thaw.
Of course,
my father was no longer himself from the day he entered the lake. He was
Tallahatchee, and the Tallahatchee were sica.
The
Tallahatchee had survived for years on stranded settlers caught by winter in
the valley or the stragglers from other tribes, left behind due to illness or
injury. In the valley, the Tallahatchee were the hunters, all else were prey.
Ultimately,
they became too greedy, too cunning, and too ravenous for their own good. The
best hunters tried to hoard food from the weakest. The weakest were not
lacking in cunning, and they soon set traps of their own, killing those that
would deny them food, dividing the tribe into warring factions. They did not
see the error of this infighting until winter held them firmly in its grasp and
it was too late. My father says that in his dreams he can see the last two
members of the tribe, shivering with cold, afraid to fall asleep lest the other
attack. By the time one man finally passed on, his flesh was so weak and
damaged it no longer held any power, and the second succumbed himself shortly thereafter.
But evil
never dies. It simply moves on.
Since the
winter that my father first felt the hunger, more than a century and a half has
passed. My father took a bride, hoping for a son to carry on the family name,
not knowing that death would not claim him so long as he continued to harvest
others. Shortly after I was born, he devoured my mother, succumbing to a
craving deeper than sex or companionship. He says he felt grief about that,
but I’ve always doubted his sincerity, watching the way he attacks the last
morsel of meat attached to the bone. He must have felt something though,
seeing that he has allowed me to live all of these years.
Of course,
my daughter and I are hardly innocents. I was given human flesh from the time
that my mother was killed. I understand that I even partook of her, although I
was too young to have any distinct memory of it.
Mary came
about by accident. It was no accident that I desired the man who became her
father, but finding myself with child afterward was quite unexpected. It made
me wish that he were still with us, but of course that was not to be. Winter
was coming, after all.
My father
and I hid our cravings from Mary for years, until she was old enough to
understand them, or so we thought. We fed her the meat of an Indian woman,
boiled to a deep brown, before revealing the dinner’s source. We were not
prepared for her reaction to the Indian woman’s corpse. Mary’s eyes dangled
from their sockets, her fingers drenched in her own blood, before my father and
I could restrain her. Her blindness ended up being more of a blessing than a
curse, however, as we continued to feed her, and she stopped asking what it
was. I realize that the hunger had taken her, and she knew what the answer
was, whether she asked or not.
Over the
years, we’ve gotten efficient at gathering food for the winter. At first it
was difficult, and there were lean times, but as more and more people moved
westward, there was little to worry about. In the early 1900’s, there was a
time when my father had to venture out of the valley for food, but he was a
successful hunter and we seldom went hungry. We kept to ourselves and kept up
a good front for our inevitable neighbors, even growing vegetables out behind
the cabin to allay suspicious minds.
When the
population slowly began to accumulate around us, we were forced to adhere to a
strict rule of not harvesting any neighbors closer than five miles. The last
thing we needed was a lynch mob at our door. We kept to ourselves, secluded
from the rest of the community, and were rarely hungry.
By the
1940’s, there were roads running through the valley and we found that travelers
were plentiful and nearly untraceable. It would be more exciting to tell you
that there were close calls, but the fact is that there weren’t.
But there
is, as you might have guessed, another side effect to the life that was thrust
upon us. My daughter is nearly one-hundred and thirty years old, and I am
twenty years older than that. My father is eighteen years my elder.
Most people
nowadays simply assume that we are either husband and wife (although they don’t
know which of us is the wife) or some other arrangement of family. We are
ancient, bony and ugly, but still healthy and stealthy as ever. I suppose that
our appearance has made hunting easier than ever. Who would suspect us?
I may sound
smug and a touch glib (and reading over what I have written, I realize that
this is the case), but I am tired. Desperately tired.
Celia
stopped. She could sense her father’s presence, getting closer. She grasped
the box of poison in her unsteady hand and dumped the remainder of it into the
half-finished glass of cloudy water. Grimacing, she lifted the glass to her
lips and swallowed it down. Her vision was beginning to blur. Her handwriting
became an unsteady scrawl as she rushed to finish.
The trees
are dead. They have aged as we have aged, withered as we have withered. Their
branches reach to the heavens like greedy skeletons, seeking to pull down the
sky. The banks of the lake are mottled and gray. Beneath the ice, the water
is an impenetrable black.
Sica.
The snow
outside is deep. The interstate, a four lane superhighway that arcs around the
outskirts of the Lake Tallahatchee valley, was unveiled early in the fall and,
combined with the extreme foulness of the weather, it has sapped the traffic
through our valley to a trickle. We were overconfident, lazy, and have failed
to stockpile in recent months, knowing that there was more, always more.
My father
has already taken our nearest neighbors, the Cavanaughs, and we are sure to be
discovered in springtime. The extreme chill of the winter has brought the mice
inside, enticed by the warmth of our fire and the fresh corpses in the cellar;
another recent addition, dug by father last spring. Father brought rat poison
from the Cavanaughs. I’ve dragged more than one hundred tainted carcasses from
the cellar thus far.
It has been
weeks since we’ve been able to leave our home, and between ourselves and the
rats, our food supply was depleted more than two weeks ago. This morning I
discovered Mary crouching in the darkness of the cellar, the bodies of
dismembered rats littering the floor around her, the smell of fresh blood on
her breath. The small amount of poison in their bodies doesn’t seem to have
affected her. The sight of Mary’s face, her cheeks smeared in flesh and blood,
brought the realization that immediate and extreme action had to be taken.
We are
ravenous. We’ve not gone this long without nourishment before, and I know that
it wouldn’t be long before we’d suffer the fate of the Tallahatchee, if I were
to let it come to that. But I will not.
Before I
go, hear my final words of caution: whatever you might find here, leave
immediately upon reading my words and burn this place to the ground. Leave and
never look back, or run the risk history repeating. This place is bad. This
land is sica.
May God
look on us with mercy,
Celia
Mulray
December 2006
Celia felt
a creeping pain in her belly as the poison began to take hold. She prayed that
it would be enough for all of them.
She looked
up from her writing. Mary had not moved. She stood at the end of the hall,
breathing shallowly, listening.
“He’s back,
Mother,” she whispered, her face taut with expectation. “He’s here now.”
The knob on
the front door of the cabin began to open. Celia stood, stopping to retrieve
the razor-sharp hunting knife her father used to skin the bodies. The knife
scraped the surface of the table as she pressed it into her shaking palm. Her
father had returned, and he had returned empty-handed, as she knew he would.
The bone-chilling winds and whipping snow wouldn’t have allowed him to stray
far enough to find sustenance.
“Mother?
What was that noise?” Mary stood, facing the door, her head moving from side
to side.
Celia
plunged the knife deep into her own belly and yanked upward. A burst of air
escaped her lips, echoing the gasp that Celia heard her father utter behind her.
Hot, wet blood slicked Celia’s hands, pain slamming into her with the force of
a sledgehammer.
Mary’s head
swayed back and forth, her nose wrinkling in staccato sniffs. She was
hunting. With stunning quickness, Mary was upon her, her face buried in
Celia’s chest with ferocious zeal, her chin slathered in blood as she gnawed.
As Celia
swooned toward darkness, she saw her father appear over Mary’s shoulder, his
face a mask of insanity. Mary howled in a rapacious rage as Joshua tore at her
hair, growling like a rabid beast. They clawed at each other, shredding flesh
and cloth in a frenzied battle for the prey that lay before them. Joshua was
stronger, heaving Mary aside with a shove. He yanked the knife from Celia’s
chest and plunged it into Mary’s throat. Mary continued to clutch at his back,
consumed by a hunger more powerful than death, oblivious to her own pain.
As darkness
overwhelmed her, Celia felt her father’s teeth scraping against her bones,
tearing the flesh from her ribs.
