Lee Klein - Jrzdvlz

Sheriff Hopkins was found in bed, hands flat against his chest, middle fingers meeting at their tips, his black mustache a covenant with death across his grimace. It was unexpected, considering his age and health. Nothing was out of order in the room but this was no natural death. A delicate cut ran across the stomach. A fine knife or needle had left a tattoo of dried blood. The mark looked like the head of a ram, its curling horns bracketed by wings like mine. Some called it the mark of the beast.

They wouldn’t openly slaughter. Their actions required artfulness. If they had hacked the sheriff in the street, they would have been overtaken and destroyed, stamped out by the men they wished one day would sacrifice them. To supplant the sacrificial virgin they needed to make her forgettable. Branley Jukes had murdered two men—they would exceed that number until everyone feared for their lives.

After Hopkins’ murder, the beast was seen again. Some claimed it was Branley Jukes in natural form, stalking his daughter’s capturers. Regardless, something far too large for flight had descended into the branches of an oak that under its weight thrashed as though in a windstorm. A man and not a man.

That was the extent of news I detected thanks to civic scurrying and commotion. As far as I knew, the only ones with anything to fear were rabbits, doves, quail (particularly), a fawn at most when gluttonous. I tried to limit myself to corn and other vegetables, but we all succumb to instinct now and then. If one of her attendants wished to slit December’s throat, what could I do? But if I had a chance to intervene I would.

To say Hopkins had represented order to the town was an understatement. His words had come in intelligible, predictable succession. His smile was even and slow, consistent in its ability to calm, and he’d seemed strong and compassionate. He was the sort who took a knee as though to pray or examine the dirt when collecting himself, trying to enter as deeply as possible into the complexities of a situation, opening himself to concealed shreds he would miss if unable to occupy the moment. His removal from the town had put them all on edge. No one protected them now.

Some said they deserved it for agreeing to put the girl to death. Others said it was the girl herself who had done it, or at least she could be blamed. An airing of concerns stirred their confusion and fear. Voices relaying hysterical exaggeration and nonsensical psychosis united to improvise dissonant hymnals to Umbria’s state. Some said the Jukes had always been sensitive to instabilities in the land and atmosphere. Something about the terrain of this spot with three thousand miles of water and three thousand miles of land on either side, existence here experienced unexpected shifts as water and earth pushed and pulled one way and another. The death of Nathaniel Leeds was the first shot and now they were at war with some evil among them. The only way to appease it, obviously, was to sacrifice the Jukes girl. And those who protested that this plan was the truest demonstration of evil were howled down to such a degree they feared for their lives. She had to pay as soon as possible, they said, and so December’s attendants accelerated their operations.

Armonica at rest beside her, Georgia Jukes was discovered in bed like Hopkins, another ram head and wings carved by a light hand into her stomach. If she had gone first, it’s possible that Hopkins would have discovered that December’s attendants had done it. But his successors were more or less inept. No apparent struggle. Skin that had stretched when pregnant with December was now tattooed with a pagan visage. News of her mother’s death seemed to come from another life. Her mother was already far too gone, so perhaps it was better, although she thought of little more now than spending an hour, let alone the rest of her life, outside again. Not long ago she had leaned on the trunk of a tree with her brothers. Not long ago she had slept in a shack in the woods with her family.

The way Hopkins’s successor, a comparative halfwit named Sampson Torp, told December about her mother, it was as though he thought she already knew. The newly appointed Torp examined her face for an intimation of guilt, a sense she’d made her trackless way to her mother’s bed where she ended her mother’s life, motivated by the fact that her mother had failed to recognize the death of her sons and capture of her daughter.

Something in Georgia Jukes had opened once they’d removed her from the woods. The specter of her husband had held her together, but once he was gone, beyond the rounded tones of her armonica, she had lost all shape. No one could say whether the instrument attracted the mad or whether it accessed something mad inside them the music externalized. Some believed her music had invited the devil to her room. It could not be a coincidence that they had also discovered an armonica in Hopkins’ sleeping chamber. He was not known to play it. Some believed the true culprit was, in fact, the instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin.

Every armonica was smashed in the central square, the shards carried to the Mullica. For some, if no such instruments existed in Umbria, security would be secured.

December’s attendants thought punishment should have reached them by now. Someone other than the incompetent Sheriff Torp should have discovered a footprint, a fingerprint, or through careful investigation deduced how Hopkins and Georgia Jukes had lost their lives. The town had gone so mad they blamed a musical instrument.

On the morning of their sacrifice, as they envisioned it, the water slides by like coppery oil, its red enhanced by new green boughs and flowers of every color, some as tall as saplings, and once at water’s edge the girls see everyone transform into half-flower human-sized daffodils, irises with crocus children accompanied by yellow-rose servants, followed by marigolds, the air suffused with pollen dust and a steady hum, an open vowel, nothing more. The girls wave goodbye to family and friends and kiss all goodbye as tears meet the warm and flowing water. On each forehead they feel the touch of Umbria’s attention, anointed, celebrated, everyone so thankful, wishing them well in the afterworld, everyone in bloom with a paradise to come. As the girls step into the water and sub-merge, their ceremonial veils spread as they float and rotate downstream like imitation water lilies.

Such a peaceful, joyous, celebratory, perfectly clear May morning no longer seemed possible. After the smashing of the armonicas it seemed that, unless the town calmed, its citizens would unleash their fear in another violent event. The girls now envisioned their inevitable end: cooked on a spit and consumed by all.

Each day proceeded as though torn apart by their guilt and their ceremonial dream, and yet each day they visited December who, unlike everyone else, reflected no change. She rarely smiled, her body thin and tender and tensed, expecting a flurry of punches or even a knife in the neck, as though she could sense that the girls’ attention was now an act.

The bartender of the Bucket of Blood lay dead in his bed. On his bloated hairless stomach they found a ram head and wings. The pagan image leaned to the left this time, rushed, dug deeper into the flesh, a sketch more than a diabolical mark executed to perfection. Nevertheless, this matter was not widely broadcast as the Bucket was shuttered and searched and they held everyone who had ever entered for questions.

Among themselves, the attendants insisted not to have done it. Each swore it hadn’t occurred to her to repeat their atrocity alone. None could imagine how she might seduce him, coax the poison into his mouth, and drag him to his final resting spot without at least three others or the help of a man.