Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

Ruth’s fingers jerk by her sides. “Ceph’s here too?”

Zeke twitches his cheek as a horse’s flank disturbs a fly. “No. Not anymore.” An answer so vague, it’s sinister. Darkness opens in the house.

Mr. Bell stands to shield Ruth, placing his body between theirs. “Ruth,” Mr. Bell says as Zeke also stands, his awful head, Mardellion’s terrible noseless face rises up, ripe, over Mr. Bell’s. Moon leaves umbra.

“Run,” Mr. Bell tells her. “Run. Run. Run.”

Out the kitchen door into twilight. Ruth runs through the wet snow barefoot. She breathes air in leaden chunks. The snow has stopped. Ruth sees the Father’s truck parked in the drive. There’s no mistaking its huge, stupid tires, its flaming paint job. She takes off in the other direction, feeling her mind about to split. Things set in motion so many years ago. Ruth tramps though drifts so deep, her escape is in a dream, running without movement, making her slow-motion way down to the lake. The wind has swept its icy surface clear of snow, tracing paths across a surface that is solid in places, slurry in others. Ruth runs across the lake. Her bare feet flush with frozen pain.

132 Out of whose womb came the ice?

Ruth’s flesh burns. The woods take little notice of her panic. Mr. Bell runs after her into the dusk light, out onto the lake, and Zeke follows behind both of them. He doesn’t run but takes his righteous time in comfortable winter boots, rubber and fleece. The chase happens in silence as if one of them is imagining it.

Mr. Bell cuts off from Ruth’s path, a decoy trail across the lake leading away from her. “Mardellion,” he yells. “I’m over here.”

A number of crows fly away and Ruth stops running. She’s scared for Mr. Bell. The evening’s quiet. Zeke’s rolling gait looks like trouble, smiling in a proper snowsuit. The rough edge of his sinus cavity has caved in as though the hole will swallow his entire head. His face is collapsing.

“What happened to your nose?” Mr. Bell asks.

Zeke inserts a thumb into the crusted cavity, clearing dried sinus debris. Slowly as a television preacher, he smiles. “I let some light in.” This makes Zeke laugh.

Pines click hoarfrosted branches. Ruth turns and flees again across the lake’s slush and ice sharp as volcanic rock. Her bare feet are numb, the flesh raw. She swoops like an injured Sasquatch. As she nears the center of the lake, the surface jolts. The sound of the crack lashes deep into the woods and back again. A fault line lifts on the surface. Mr. Bell and Zeke brace themselves after the crack, arms out, knees bent low as surfers. Ruth runs for the other side.

“Whoa. Whoa,” Zeke speaks like a cowboy, throwing up his hands in mock surrender. “You don’t have to run from me. I don’t want to hurt you.”

She sloshes on. “Nat,” she calls. “Nat?”

Zeke dislodges sputum from his bronchial tubes.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks.

“Why? The End’s always coming. Right? You feel it?”

Ruth does feel something coming but can’t say what. “No.”

“Sure you do. Always have. Turning the last page, closing the book after a huge explosion destroys everything ever built. What do you think?”

“I think you’re mentally ill,” she manages.

“Some call it illness; I call it faith.” He smiles broadly, strangely. “So after Carl here pointed out that your scar was a map of what’s coming — comets, collisions — I thought you’d understand.”

“No,” Mr. Bell says. “No.”

“Son, you’re feeling bad about serving your wife up to me like a tasty piece of pie, but that doesn’t mean you can just give her my money.”

Sound travels so easily over the ice.

Ruth drops her chin. That’s the weight. Once there were two spacecraft built and raised together. “What?”

“It hurts. I know.” Zeke sounds pleased. “But Carl thought your scar could freshen up my followers. Rejuvenate the cause.”

Mr. Bell takes his head in his hand. “I thought it might stop you from killing them all. Yes. I thought it might prevent mass murder.”

“What?” she asks again.

“Your scar oddly resembles a map of all the meteorites we’ve got. Including Tahawus, mine, the great one to come. Kind of cosmic. Right?”

“My mother burned me with bleach,” Ruth says.

Zeke snorts. He closes some of the distance between Ruth and himself. “Yeah. See, I know that now. Turns out there’s nothing special about you.”

“She’s my wife.” Mr. Bell looks up at her. “You are my wife, and I made a huge mistake when I told him about you. I didn’t even know you yet. I’d seen you once, peeking through the curtain at the Father’s house. I was desperate.”

Zeke claps his hands. “He traded you for information about his mom. But he knew you weren’t worth much, so he trumped up your value. Made up some BS about a map on your face, blah, blah. ‘Gilding the granite’ we call it.”

Ruth watches Mr. Bell.

“A junk rock from a motel parking lot. Right, son?” Zeke laughs, nods. “I can’t believe I fell for it, Carl. A moment of weakness. I forgot you’re an expert con man.”

Mr. Bell is squatting in the ice, ruined. “I didn’t know you, Ruth, and I was desperate to find my mom. I didn’t know he’d come for you the way he did. I should have never seen him again, but I’m trying to undo this mess. I’m trying to fix it.”

“By bringing me to his house?”

Mr. Bell looks at her.

“You gave us the money to undo your betrayal?”

“Steady on,” Zeke interrupts. “That’s my money and I’ve come to get it.”

“It’s as much mine as it is yours,” Mr. Bell says.

“’Cause your mother stole it from me?”

“You stole it from the Etherists. It’s been in your house for years, and you were too thick to find it. All that time I was gone, it was sitting in the pantry with the toilet paper. I never came for it because I figured you’d found it years ago. I didn’t even know it was still ‘lost’ until Ruth told me.”

She walks away from both men. “Nat!” Her call bounces across the lake’s surface.

“It’s Ruth’s money now,” Mr. Bell adds.

“Afraid not, son.” Zeke notices her flight. “I need you to come back, Ruth, and show me where you put it.”

But she doesn’t come back. She keeps heading to the far side.

Zeke snickers through a thin, diseased beard. “I really need you to stop now,” and from the hollow of his back, as if scratching an itch, Zeke produces the tool of a coward and a cheat.

“What?” Mr. Bell greets the gun.

“Belonged to Ceph.” Zeke holds it loosely, like it’s a harmless tract he wants them to read, something to guide their steps in a brotherly gesture of friendship. “He”—Zeke coughs—“umm, gave it to me. In so many words.” Zeke cracks a creepy smile.

“Don’t,” Mr. Bell says. “Don’t—” But Zeke fires the gun into the trees past Ruth, forcing an unfair end to a slow race. Ruth stops, focused as a magnet now, rattling in the waves of that much sound. The three of them make an irregular triangle around a hot center. She bounces from bare foot to bare foot.

Zeke brushes hair from his cheek using the gun’s barrel to do it, clipping his ear with the steel sight. He lifts his chin, trying to strike a less horrifying profile. “Hi.” Zeke snickers, having captured her attention, gun still pointed in her general direction. “What’d you do with my money?”

“Why do you want the money?” Mr. Bell asks. “You can’t take it with you wherever you’re going.” Mr. Bell waves his fingers up into the sky.

Zeke looks up, stroking his thin chin hairs, as if the stars are his cohorts. “I’m not going anywhere.” His chin still lifted.