Chapter 12 #2
One of the things about being an only child, cherished by his parents, was that Benjy had intuited early just how far he could step over the line, when he could pretend not to hear them, and what his punishment would be.
In that moment, he knew disobedience would earn no punishment at all, just a wag of his father’s finger.
Ruth knew this about her son, but he’d always been such a sweet boy that she saw no harm in letting him strain at the yoke a little.
He’d need to make his own way in the world someday, and testing boundaries was natural.
Benjy stepped closer. His left foot rested only inches from the hole in the ground. Whatever had erupted from the field would be beneath him now, that mushroom flesh right under the spot where he stood.
“Careful, kiddo,” Bill said. “The ground could be unstable. Don’t want you falling in.”
Benjy should have made a face. He’d always been overly dramatic, even as a toddler. Normally, he’d have pretended to tumble backward, throwing his arms wide, making light of everything. Or he’d have gone rigid in mock fear and tiptoed away like he was Lou Costello eluding Frankenstein’s monster.
“Benjy?” Ruth said, voice cracking.
All the excitement had drained out of her boy. His arms hung limp at his sides, his smile erased. His eyes were dull and faded, the flat buttons of an antique doll.
“Bill, what’s wrong with him?”
Ruth approached carefully. In the back of her mind were echoes of old wisdoms, like the one about not waking a sleepwalker. But Benjy wasn’t sleepwalking. He had been wide awake, almost bouncing with fascination just a moment ago.
The damage to the field and the oak tree had been forgotten.
Even the split in the ground and the enormous mushroom seemed peripheral.
She watched as Bill took Benjy by the wrist and, with a tug, got him moving away from the edge of that furrow.
The rain fell a little faster, a bit harder.
The pale, oil-sheened thing in the ground jerked, shaking dirt loose around the edges.
“Jesus Christ!” Ruth shouted, backing away. “Did you—”
“What?” Bill stared at her, then at the furrow.
“It moved. That thing is alive!”
“What do you mean, it moved?”
Ruth shot him a hard look. “It moved, Bill. I think it’s a giant snake or something!”
Benjy stood by his father, gaze focused on nothing, as if he’d gone entirely blank.
Bill stared at the thing down in the furrow, and Ruth mentally urged it to move again, if only to prove she hadn’t been seeing things.
A thick root had broken when the thing shifted, leaving a gouge where the root had been attached to its flesh, and small bits of bark attached. Bill had to see that—no denying it.
He stepped closer to the furrow, and suddenly, it didn’t matter to her if her husband believed her. Ruth didn’t want him to go any nearer.
“Bill, wait,” she said.
As she spoke, Benjy lunged at his father.
Ruth cried out as he grabbed Bill, twisted, and hurled him to the ground.
Bill let out a pained cry and a stream of profanity as he tried to push their son away, but Benjy held him down.
Impossibly, their boy had the strength to keep him there.
The illogic of it froze Ruth for a few seconds, but then she strode toward them.
She leaped over the furrow in the ground, avoiding the low-hanging branches of the leaning half of the oak tree.
She grabbed Benjy by the shoulders. “That’s enough!”
He struck her with the back of his hand, the blow so hard it sent her reeling.
Wilted cornstalks caught at her heels, and she fell backward into the whipping, scraping, postharvest tangle.
Her pulse drummed at her temples and hammered her chest as she scrambled to her knees in the rain.
Something snagged and tore the hem of her dress.
Bill roared at their son to release him.
Ruth staggered to her feet, legs scratched and bloody.
A wind kicked up, gusting around her, whipping the rain at her eyes.
What she saw when she wiped them confounded her—Benjy, a third his father’s weight, holding him down.
Bill grabbed him with both hands, tried to hurl him away, but Benjy knocked his father’s hands away and then struck him in the head, hard enough to turn Bill momentarily senseless.
Beyond her husband and son, the pale thing slithered from the furrow in the ground.
What she’d seen before had been its back or hip.
Roots cracked and broke away. Clods of dirt cascaded from its body as it dragged its lower half out from beneath the broken oak tree.
As it rose to its full height, tall and bone thin, a breeze blew the stink of the thing toward her.
Ruth inhaled the odor only once before she bent and vomited into the field with such force that it felt as if her insides were torn.
In the midst of his struggle with their son, Bill finally noticed the thing. He shouted. Though bleeding and probably concussed, and though Benjy had been the one to injure him, Bill pleaded with the boy to run.
“Get back to the house!” Bill shouted over the sound of the rain. “Damn it, Benjy, let me go!”
Ruth barely noticed them now, focused entirely on the thing that had emerged. It quivered as if sickly, and then it began a rhythmic, moaning lament, like a wounded animal or a grieving mother.
Her cheek pulsed with pain from where Benjy had struck her. She wanted to run, but the creature seemed weak and anguished, and she knew she had to get Bill and Benjy away from here. The moment she took her first step toward them, Bill shouted at her. Frantic, he tried to wrestle away from Benjy.
“No, Ruthie! Go and get help!”
Yes, she thought. That made sense. Go and get help for this insanity.
The Bergting farm was only a mile away. She’d run for the truck.
The keys were in the glove box. She’d drive there and bring someone back—someone who would tell her she hadn’t lost her mind, that her little boy had turned on them with the strength to hold his father down, that the thing from the ground really existed, skin sickly pale and glistening in the rain.
It felt as if her mind had tilted too far and capsized, with any rational thoughts struggling to stay afloat.
Ruth backed up, glancing at Benjy, his eyes and expression dull as death.
The thing from the ground turned to look at her, showing its face for the first time. Fish-belly white, crinkled in pain, it drooped its head and took a step toward Benjy and Bill. The eyes were alight with fascination, as if both this pain and this world were fantastic and new in its experience.
She began to scream. Everything in her wanted to run, but how could she leave her boy and her husband here, with this thing whose slender, dirt-crusted fingers had nails that had grown and curved like a corpse in the grave?
For the first time, she made that connection, that it had come from the ground like a corpse, but whatever this thing was, it had never been human. She would never believe that.
Weak as if newborn, it stumbled to its knees just a foot from Bill and Benjy.
“Ruth, run!” Bill shouted, just before the thing grabbed his hair, yanked his head back, and sank savage teeth into his throat.
Lifeblood jetted across the thing’s face while Benjy held Bill down.
Bill tried to claw at its chest, tried to push it away.
The thing shoved Benjy off him, drove its fingers through Bill’s chest with a hideous tearing noise, and cracked him open.
It drove its face into the cavity of his chest, broken ribs gouging its cheeks, and began to root inside, painting its nose and chin with dripping red. Benjy sat to one side where he’d been placed, and watched the rain fall.
Ruth found herself shaking. Unable to move, yet unable to stop herself from moving. Screams came from inside her and settled into a wail, rising and falling, somehow in harmony with the thing.
This time, when it snapped its gaze toward her, she found she could run.
She managed half a dozen steps before it took her down.
The stink of it choked her. Vomit surged up her throat again.
The thing barely seemed to notice. Fear turned even her voice limp, and she stared up at the thing.
Her husband’s blood dripped from the monster’s face into her own.
It tilted its head, studying her, and she saw that it was still in devastating pain, trembling as it held her down.
Bits of viscera dotted its face and dangled from its black needle teeth.
Could she fight it? In such pain, shaking, could the thing be killed?
It turned toward Benjy, spoke to him in guttural nonsense, a harsh, clipped language like nothing she’d ever heard.
Benjy only stared at it curiously, a white film covering his eyes.
He did not understand. That same keening song of pain issued from the thing’s mouth again, wet and thick with her husband’s murder.
Now, Ruth thought. If she wanted to try to fight, and to run, it had to be now.
The thing tried to speak with Benjy again, but the boy didn’t move.
Ruth reached her hands out to either side, fingers searching for a sharp stone, anything that might be a weapon.
Sneering in frustration, the thing raised its right hand and drove a fist into her skull, which cracked easily.
She uttered a grunt, and that was all. The thing pried long, grave fingers through the skin of her temple and pulled apart the shattered skull fragments.
It dug those fingers into the spongy, jellied matter of her brain, scooped it out, and began greedily to eat.
Minutes passed. The thing drew strength from its meal, but much more than that. It drew knowledge. All that Ruth had known of her little patch of the world, including her language.
“Come, boy,” the thing said. “We have far to go and much to do before the sun rises again.”