Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

The man’s head lists to one shoulder. “I tried to stop him,” he says.

Ruth nods. “I know.”

The man’s glasses are off. I see the forest through the hole in his head. He staggers back as if shot again. I shut my eyes, and when I look, he’s gone.

Ruth remains guarded. She pokes into the night with a stick, making sure he’s gone. “You spoke,” I tell her as she passes by me. “I heard you for real that time and I’m not dreaming, Ruth.”

“Are you sure?” she asks. The thinnest string of a dream as it slips away, a snake across the ground. Even as I try to convince myself I heard her, I don’t believe it. I hear a lot of things on the road that aren’t really there. And what’s a Ceph anyway?

Ruth packs our things. Dead and dark of night we walk, but I can still feel him behind every tree watching me. I’m filled with holes, night breezes inside chill me, all that fear and the impossible hole in his head. The baby turns and stretches inside, and a house I thought had many rooms turns out to have just one, where birth and death duke it out to decide whose turn it is this time.

The sun comes up. Ruth fingers the trunk of a bare tree. There’s a pattern, a larvae fringe some creature tracked back and forth, drunk on whatever it ate, making writing no one can read. I want to get out of here. I want life to win, for now. I want to be a mother. We keep walking, trees and trees and sometimes a small clearing. I take no breaks. Dead leaves, dead needles, dead logs, but green everywhere. I can see the sky and I can see Ruth. Every now and again, a bird. We do not rest because now I know what we are running from, and it looks a lot like death. Still it is hard to understand when we step out of the forest and onto a road, stepping into Technicolor. Even Ruth laughs. What’s a road doing in a place so lost?

We kick the dirt of it for a moment, testing its material.

“You know where this leads eventually?” I ask her. She raises her brow, and I’m about to say a McDonald’s equipped with free Wi-Fi, but that seems mean. I look back into the forest. We both do, but the path we walked is already gone forever.

IN THE MORNINGRuth hears a rusty rhythmic duck squawk. Sounds like bedsprings or a trampoline. The sound’s coming from outside, where, somehow, it is still snowing. Drifts have blown as high as the second story.

Dressed again in winter gear, moving through new snow, Ruth feels like a spaceman stumbling in anti-gravity. She circles the house, looking for the noise, and sees Mr. Bell’s head clear a drift then disappear, clear a drift then disappear again. He’s on a trampoline. Up and down, up and down goes his head. Ruth makes her slow way toward him. Mr. Bell is jumping on a diving board. Below him an empty pool is filling with snow.

“Hola.” He’s wearing only his combat boots and a trench coat against the storm.

“A pool,” Ruth says.

“Bit cold for a swim.”

She reaches the edge and looks down. The wind’s cleared snow from one side of the pool, collected it in the other. Where it’s clear, she sees rotting leaves and chunks of ice. The blue paint is chalky and chipped. Just below the diving board, as if it jumped, is something not pool-shaped, a snow-covered tumor in the deep end. “What’s that?”

Mr. Bell keeps on jumping, shrugs.

Ruth pops out of her snowshoes and climbs an ancient, curved, and rattling ladder down into the pool. At the last rung, she drops into the snow, sinking up to her hips in the deep end, below the synchronized swims that once took place above, the underwater trysts. On her knees, Ruth shuffles to the lump and grabs hold of it, dusting new snow from its top. SCOTTIES it says. Ruth carries the box to the shelter of the diving board.

“Carl?” she says. The plank overhead shields her from the falling snow.

“Don’t call me that.”

“I can’t call you Mister anymore.”

“Then just Bell. OK?”

“What’s wrong with Carl?” The board above continues to bounce close, ping back, close, and back again.

“It came from Mardellion.”

“He was that bad?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Bell.” Ruth rips the weathered packing tape off the box. The flaps open, and there inside, safe from the storm, are many, many hundred-dollar bills bundled together, massed into a snug pile. Ruth would never imagine that a box this size could hold half a million dollars, but what has Ruth ever known about the shape of money before?

Mr. Bell stops jumping. He lies down on the board, dangling one ungloved hand over the side, a white bird out of reach, stretching, making slow signs. The hand tenses then calms, conducting the blizzard.

“Bell?”

The board creaks against the cold. “I’m here.”

“There’s a box of money in the bottom of the pool.”

“Just like Nat said there’d be.”

“I didn’t believe him.”

“What’s the harm in believing?”

“You put this money here.”

“Why would I do something like that?”

“I don’t know. Why would you?”

With a box of money under one arm, Ruth climbs back out of the pool.

Nat is making his slow way toward them now through the deep snow, looking like an Arctic explorer. “What’s up?” he asks.

“Well.” Ruth has a seat on the diving board. Nat sits beside her. The box of money is between them like their messed-up newborn child.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

She opens the flaps of the box. Both of them look inside, and it takes a moment for Nat to understand what he’s looking at. They stare and wait for the box’s contents to do something, to breathe or mew, sneeze or explode.

“Where’d that come from?”

“I found it in the pool.”

Mr. Bell rolls onto his back, facing up into the falling snow.

“Why’d you say there was a box of money in an empty pool, and then there was a box of money in an empty pool?” Ruth asks.

“I was lying.”

“That’s what I thought. We saw that movie, and you made up a story to match it.”

“Right.”

“So then how’d you know the names of the kids’ moms?”

“Jesus, Ruth. There was a list, a Xerox from the State, in the kitchen drawer every week. Everyone’s mom, some dads, names, numbers. It was easy.”

Ruth remembers the list now, can even picture her mom’s name on it.

“They let me lie,” Nat says.

“Paid you to lie.”

“They paid you too.”

“So just to be clear, there are no dead people?”

“There are dead people, but they don’t talk to me. And they don’t talk to you either.” Nat opens the box flaps. “But this is real.” Again they stare down into the box. “Mr. Bell?”

“Yes?”

“Is this yours?”

“You found it. It belongs to you now.” He sits up. “But you better hide it somewhere. Not in the house.”

“Why?”

“Besides kidnapping moms and raping underage girls, Mardellion wants a meteorite, big as an atomic bomb, to strike this house. He’s been talking about it for years. He can’t take care of his followers anymore, so a meteorite to blow the Etherists sky-high, a million bits of love and light.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“No, it’s not, which is why he’s making his own meteorite.”

“How?”

“He’s stockpiled a mining explosive called ANFO. The stuff that was left behind here. Says he’s got enough to make a comet.”

Ruth looks at Nat. “Comet?” she asks.

“Another kind of space rock. Bigger than a meteorite.”