A Soft Barren Aftershock by F. Paul Wilson
There were stories . . . tales of the Jersey Devil roaming the woods here, of people poaching Foster’s land and never being seen again. Those who disappeared weren’t fools from Newark or Trenton who regularly got lost in the Pines and wandered in circles till they died. These were experienced trackers and hunters, Pineys just like Pa . . . and Gary.
Never seen again.
“Pa, what if we don’t come out of here?” He hated the whiny sound in his voice and tried to change it. “What if somethin’ gets us?”
“Ain’t nothin’ gonna get us! Didn’t I come in here yesterday and set the traps? And didn’t I come out okay?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Yeah, but nothin’! The Fosters done a good job of spreadin’ stories for generations to scare folk off. But they don’t scare me. I know bullshit when I hear it.”
“Is it much farther?”
“No. Right yonder over the next rise. A whole area crawlin’ with coon tracks.”
Gary noticed they were passing through a thick line of calf-high vegetation, dead now; looked as if it’s been dark and ferny before winterkill had turned it brittle. It ran off straight as a hunting arrow into the scrub pines on either side of them.
“Looky this, Pa. Look how straight this stuff runs. Almost like it was planted.”
Pa snorted. “That wasn’t planted. That’s spleenwort—ebony spleenwort. Only place it grows around here is where somebody’s used lime to set footings for a foundation. Soil’s too acid for it otherwise. Find it growin’ over all the vanished towns.”
Gary knew there were lots of vanished towns in the Barrens, but this must have been one hell of a foundation. It was close to six feet wide and ran as far as he could see in either direction.
“What you think used to stand here, Pa?”
“Who knows, who cares? People was buildin’ in the Barrens afore the
Revolutionary War. And I hear tell there was crumblin’ ruins already here when the Indians arrived. There’s some real old stuff around these parts but we ain’t about to dig it up. We’re here for coon. Now hesh up till we get to the traps!”
Gary couldn’t believe their luck. Every damn leghold trap had a coon in it! Big fat ones with thick, silky coats the likes of which he’d never seen. A few were already dead, but most of them were still alive, lying on their sides, their black eyes wide with fear and pain; panting, bloody, exhausted from trying to pull loose from the teeth of the traps, still tugging weakly at the chains that linked the trap to its stake.
He and Pa took care of the tuckered-out ones first by crushing their throats. Gary flipped them onto their backs and watched their striped tails come up protectively over their bellies. I ain’t after your belly, Mr. Coon. He put his heel right over the windpipe, and kicked down hard. If he was in the right spot he heard a satisfying crunch as the cartilage collapsed. The coons wheezed and thrashed and flopped around awhile in the traps trying to draw some air past the crushed spot but soon enough they choked to death. Gary had had some trouble doing the throat crush when he started at it years ago, but he was used to it by now. It was just the way it was done. All the trappers did it.
But you couldn’t try that on the ones that still had some pepper in them. They wouldn’t hold still enough for you to place your heel. That was where the Gary and his Slugger came in. He swung at one as it snapped at him.
“The head! The head, dammit!” Pa yelled.
“Awright, awright!”
“Don’t mess the pelts!”
Some of those coons were tough suckers. Took at least half a dozen whacks each with the Slugger to kill them dead. They’d twist and squeal and squirm around and it wasn’t easy to pound a direct hit on the head every single time. But they weren’t going nowhere, not with one of their legs caught in a steel trap.
By the time he and Pa reached the last trap, Gary’s bat was drippy red up to the taped grip, and his bag was so heavy he could barely lift it. Pa’s was just about full too.
“Damn!” Pa said, standing over the last trap. “Empty!” Then he knelt for a closer look. “No, wait! Lookit that! It’s been sprung! The paw’s still in it! Musta chewed it off!”
Gary heard a rustle in the brush to his right and caught a glimpse of a gray-and-black-striped tail slithering away.
“There it is!”
“Get it!”
Gary dropped the sack and went after the last coon. No sweat. It was missing one of its rear paws and left a trail of blood behind on the snow wherever it went. He came upon it within twenty feet. A fat one, waddling and gimping along as fast as its three legs would carry it. He swung but the coon partially dodged the blow and squalled as the bat glanced off its skull. The next shot got it solid but it rolled away. Gary kept after it through the brush, hitting it again and again, until his arms got tired. He counted nearly thirty strokes before he got in a good one. The big coon rolled over and looked at him with glazed eyes, blood running from its ears. He saw the nipples on its belly—a female. As he lifted the Slugger again, it raised its two front paws over its face—an almost human gesture that made him hesitate for a second. Then he clocked her with a winner. He bashed her head ten more times for good measure to make sure she wouldn’t be going anywhere. The snow around her was splattered with red by the time he was done.
As he lifted her by her tail to take her back, he got a look at the mangled stump of her hind leg. Chewed off. God, you really had to want to get free to do something like that.
He carried her back to Pa, passing all the other splotches of crimson along the way. Looked like some bloody-footed giant had stomped through here.
“Whooeee!” Pa said when he saw the last one. “That’s a beauty! They’re all beauties! Gary, m’boy, we’re gonna have money to burn when we sell these!”
Gary glanced at the sun as he tossed the last one into the sack. It was rising brightly into a clear sky.
“Maybe we shouldn’t spend it until we get off Foster’s land.”
“You’re right,” Pa said, looking uneasy for the first time. “I’ll come back tomorrow and rebait the traps.” He slapped Gary on the back. “We found ourselfs a gold mine, son!”
Gary groaned under the weight of the sack, but he leaned forward and struck off toward the sun. He wanted to be gone from here. Quick like.
“I’ll lead the way, Pa.”
“Look at these!” Pa said, holding up two pelts by their tails. “Thick as can be and not a scar or a bald spot anywhere to be seen! Primes, every single one of them!”
He swayed as he stood by the skinning table. He’d been nipping at the applejack bottle steadily during the daylong job of cutting, stripping, and washing the pelts, and now he was pretty near blitzed. Gary had taken the knife from Pa early on, doing all the cutting himself and leaving the stripping for the old man. You didn’t have to be sober for stripping. Once the cuts were made—that was the hard part—a strong man could rip the pelt off like husking an ear of corn.
“Yeah,” Gary said. “They’re beauts all right. Full winter coats.”
The dead of winter was, naturally, the best time to trap any fur animal. That was when the coats were the thickest. And these were thick. Gary couldn’t remember seeing anything like these pelts. The light gray fur seemed to glow a pale metallic blue when the light hit it right. Touching it gave him a funny warm feeling inside. Made him want to find a woman and ride her straight on till morning.
The amazing thing was that they were all identical. No one was going to have to dye these babies to make a coat. They all matched perfectly, like these coons had been one big family.
These were going to make one hell of a beautiful full-length coat.
“Jake’s gonna love these!” Pa said. “And he’s gonna pay pretty for ‘em, too!”
“Did you get hold of him?” Gary asked, thinking of the shotgun he wanted to buy.
“Yep. Be round first thing in the morning.”
“Great, Pa. Whyn’t you hit the sack and I’ll clean up
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
“You’re all right, son,” Pa said. He clapped him on the shoulder and staggered for the door.
Gary shivered in the cold blast of wind that dashed past Pa on his way out of the barn. He got up and threw another log into the pot-bellied stove squatting in the corner, then surveyed the scene.
There really wasn’t all that much left to be done. The furs had all been washed and all but a few were tacked up on the drying boards. The guts had been tossed out, and the meat had been put in the cold shed to feed to the dogs during the next few weeks. So all he had to—
Gary’s eyes darted to the bench. Had something moved there? He watched a second but all was still. Yet he could have sworn one of the unstretched pelts piled there had moved. He rubbed his eyes and grinned.
Long day.
He went to the bench and spread out the remaining half dozen before stretching them. Most times they’d nail their catches to the barn door, but these were too valuable for that. He ran his hands over them. God, these were special. Never had he seen coon fur this thick and soft. That warm, peaceful, horny feeling slipped over him again. On a lark, he draped it over his arm. What a coat this was gonna—
The pelt moved, rippled. In a single swift smooth motion its edges curled and wrapped snugly around his forearm. A gush of horror dribbled away before he could react, drowned in a flood of peace and tranquility.
Nothing unusual here. Everything was all right . . . all right.
He watched placidly as the three remaining unstretched furs rippled and began to move toward him. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with the way they crawled over his hands and wrists and wrapped themselves around his arms. Perfectly natural. He smiled. Looked like he had caveman arms.
It was time to go back to the house. He got up and started walking. On the way out the door, he picked up the Louisville Slugger.
Pa was snoring.
Gary poked him with the bat and called to him. His own voice seemed to come from far away.
“Pa! Wake up, Pa!”
Finally Pa stirred and opened his bloodshot eyes. “What is it, boy? What the hell you want?”
Gary lifted the bat over his head. Pa screamed and raised his hands to protect himself, much like that last coon this morning. Gary swung the bat with everything he had and got Pa on the wrist and over the right ear as he tried to roll away. Pa grunted and stiffened, but Gary didn’t wait to see what happened. He swung again. And again. And again, counting. His arms weren’t tired at all. The pelts snuggling around them seemed to give him strength. Long before the fortieth swing, Pa’s head and brains were little more than a huge smear of currant jelly across the pillows.
Then he turned and headed for the back door.
Back in the barn, he stood by the stretching boards and looked down at the gore-smeared bat, clutched tightly now in both of his fists. A small part of him screamed a warning but the rest of him knew that everything was all right. Everything was fine. Everything was—
He suddenly rotated his wrists and forearms and smashed the bat against his face. He staggered back and would have screamed if his throat had only let him. His nose and forehead were in agony! But everything was all right—
No! Everything was not all right! This was—
He hit himself again with the bat and felt his right cheek cave in. And again, and again. The next few blows smeared his nose and took out his eyes. He was blind now, but the damn bat wouldn’t stop!
He fell backward onto the floor but still he kept battering his own head. He heard his skull splinter. But still he couldn’t stop that damn bat!
And the pain! He should have been knocked cold by the first whack but he was still conscious. He felt everything.
He prayed he died before the bat hit him forty times.
II
No one answered his knocking at the house—house, shmouse, it was a hovel—so Jake Feldman headed for the barn. The cold early morning air chilled the inexorably widening bald spot that commanded the top of his scalp; he wrapped his unbuttoned overcoat around his ample girth and quickened his pace as much as he dared over the icy, rutted driveway.
Old man Jameson had said he’d come by some outstanding pelts. Pelts of such quality that Jake would be willing to pay ten times the going price to have them. Out of the goodness of Jameson’s heart and because of their long-standing business relationship, he was going to give Jake first crack at them. Right.
But the old Piney gonif’s genuine enthusiasm had intrigued Jake. Jameson was no bullshitter. Maybe he really had something unique. And maybe not.
This better be worth it, he thought as he pulled open the barn door. He didn’t have time to traipse down to the Jersey Pine Barrens on a wild goose chase.
The familiar odor of dried blood hit him as he opened the barn door. Not unexpected. Buy fresh pelts at the source for a while and you soon got used to the smell. What was unexpected was how cold it was in the barn. The lights were on but the wood stove was cold. Pelts would freeze if they stayed in this temperature too long.
Then he saw them—all lined up, all neatly nailed out on the stretching boards. The fur shimmered, reflecting glints of opalescence from the incandescent bulbs above and the cold fire of the morning light pouring through the open door behind him. They were exquisite. Magnificent!
Jake Feldman knew fur. He’d spent almost forty of his fifty-five years in the business, starting as a cutter and working his way up till he found the chutzpah to start his own factory. In all those years he had never seen anything like these pelts.
My God, Jameson, where did you get them and are there any more where these came from?
Jake approached the stretching boards and touched the pelts. He had to. Something about them urged his fingers forward. So soft, so shimmery, so incredibly beautiful. Jake had seen, touched, and on occasion even cut the very finest Siberian sable pelts from Russia. But they were nothing compared to these. These were beyond quality. These were beautiful in a way that was almost scary, almost . . . supernatural.
Then he saw the boots. Big, gore-encrusted rubber boots sticking out from under one of the stretching boards. Nothing unusual about that except for their position. They lay on the dirt floor with their toes pointing toward the ceiling at different angles, like the hands of a clock reading five after ten. Boots simply didn’t lie like that . . . unless there were feet in them.
Jake bent and saw denim-sheathed legs running up from the boots. He smiled. One of the Jamesons—either old Jeb or young Gary. Jake bet on the elder. A fairly safe bet seeing as how old Jeb loved his Jersey lightning.
“Hey, old man,” he said as he squeezed between two of the stretching boards to get behind. “What’re you doing back there? You’ll catch your death of—”
The rest of the sentence clogged in Jake’s throat as he looked down at the corpse. All he could see at first was the red. The entire torso was drenched in clotted blood—the chest, the arms, the shoulders the—dear Lord, the head! There was almost nothing left of the head! The face and the whole upper half of the skull had been smashed to a red, oozing pulp from which the remnant of an eye and some crazily angled teeth protruded. Only a patch of smooth, clean-shaven cheek identified the corpse as Gary, not Jeb.
But who could have done this? And why? More frightening than the sight of the corpse was Jake’s sudden grasp of the ungovernable fury behind all the repeated blows it must have taken to cave in Gary’s head like that. With what—that baseball bat? And after pounding him so mercilessly, had the killer wrapped Gary’s dead fingers around the murder weapon? What sick—?
Jeb! Where was old Jeb? Surely he’d had nothing to do with this!
Calling the old man’s name, Jake ran back up to the house. His cries went unanswered. The back door was open. He stood on the stoop, calling out again. Only silence greeted him. The shack had an empty feeling to it. That was the only reason Jake stepped inside.
It d
A moment later Jake stood panting and retching in the stretch between the house and the barn.
Dead! Both dead!
More than dead—battered, crushed, smeared . . . but those pelts. Even with the horrors of what he’d just seen raging through his mind, he couldn’t stop thinking about those pelts.
Exquisite!
Jake ran to his car, backed it up to the barn door, popped the trunk. It took him a while but eventually he got all the pelts off the stretching boards and into his trunk. He found a couple of loose ones on the floor near Gary’s body and he grabbed those too.
And then he roared away down the twin ruts that passed for a road in these parts. He felt bad about leaving the two corpses like that, but there was nothing he could do to help the Jamesons. He’d call the State Police from the Parkway. Anonymously.
But he had the pelts. That was the important thing.
And he knew exactly what he was going to do with them.
After getting the pelts safely back to his factory in New York’s garment district, Jake immediately went about turning them into a coat. He ran into only one minor snag and that was at the beginning: The Asians among his cutters refused to work with them. A couple of them took one look at the pelts and made a wide-eyed, screaming dash from the factory.
That shook him up for a little while, but he recovered quickly enough. Once he got things organized, he personally supervised every step: the cleaning and softening, the removal of the guard hairs, the letting-out process in which he actually took a knife in hand and crosscut a few pelts himself, just as he’d done when he started in the business; he oversaw the sewing of the let-out strips and the placement of the thousands of nails used in tacking out the fur according to the pattern.
With the final stitching of the silk lining nearing completion, Jake allowed himself to relax. Even unfinished, the coat—That Coat, as he’d come to call it—was stunning, unutterably beautiful. In less than an hour he was going to be the owner of the world’s most extraordinary raccoon coat. Extraordinary not simply because of its unique sheen and texture, but because you couldn’t tell it was raccoon. Even the cutters and tackers in his factory had been fooled; they’d agreed that the length of the hair and size of the pelts were similar to raccoon, but none of them had ever seen raccoon like this, or any fur like this.