Bentley Little - The Burning

He took the path on the left.

The trail looked as though it ran along the side of the buildings back toward the entrance, but several yards in, after a short jog around a bush, the dirt path suddenly veered off in another direction, through a copse of trees behind the buildings, opening out before a small rocky rise. A series of stone steps had been carved into the side of the low ridge, and, curious, Dennis climbed them, holding on to the welded pipes that served as a railing. What was this?

Before him was a pit filled with what looked like liquid clay, a bubbling grayish green mud that gurgled and popped as though boiling.

"It's where they used to throw them."

Dennis jumped at the sound of the voice. He whirled around to see a gnomish little man standing to the right of him.

He pretended he hadn't been startled. "Throw who?" he asked, keeping his voice calm.

"Evildoers," the old man said. "Witches, unbelievers. You know." He looked at Dennis as if he should know, and Dennis wanted to say, / don't know, I don't want to know, I don't care, I only stopped here because I was tired of driving and got suckered by your sign.

Instead, he just nodded.

Niggers and Kikes.

He turned to go.

"Did you see my noose?"

Dennis stopped, a chill caressing his spine.

"Bought it off a farmer. He had it in his barn all these years."

Dennis didn't know what to say. He forced out a noncommittal smile that he hoped was polite.

"I saw a video once of a fat guy trying to hang himself. He put the noose around his neck, then jumped off a picnic table. He weighed so much that his head popped off; his neck wasn't strong enough to support the weight underneath, you see?"

Why is the old man telling me this? Dennis wondered.

Was it because he was Chinese?

Niggers and Kikes.

He should've stayed in Pennsylvania. He should never have left.

Why had he left his damn cell phone in the car?

The gnomelike man had moved closer. / can take him if I have to, Dennis thought. The old man was scrawny and his breath came out in a hard, harsh wheeze. One kick to the balls and he would be down. Then Dennis could run away. Unless, of course, the man's compatriots were waiting farther up the path.

"I was going to add a sex room to The Keep, but my old lady put her foot down. I have stories. ... I remember one time I ate out this one skank's pussy. She'd filled it up with salsa before spreading her legs." His laugh turned into a cough. "It was like chowing down on an old fish taco."

"I have to go," Dennis said disgustedly. The old man grabbed his arm, bony fingers digging painfully into muscle. "They're coming back," he said, and there was fear as well as fervor in his eyes. "They're rising again." Against his will, Dennis felt a twinge of alarm. "Who?" he forced himself to ask. "Them."

As if on cue, a hand popped out of the muck, a spindly skeletal arm attached to a horribly wrinkled palm from which protruded five writhing clawlike fingers. It shot up from the middle of the pit, grasping at air.

"I told you!" the old man cried, and began beating down the arm with a long-handled wooden pole that looked like an extra-thick broomstick handle. Dennis hadn't seen the pole before, didn't know where it had come from- had it been meant for him?

-and he stepped back as the old man began whaling on the spindly arm. "Fuck you!" the man said vehemently, his face turning red, his breath growing harsher and raspier. "Get back in there!"

The force with which the hand and arm were being assaulted would have shattered a normal limb, but the wrinkled skeletal appendage remained unfazed, the clawlike fingers trying to grab the attacking staff. Then the pole hit sideways, hard against the wrist, and Dennis heard something crack, saw the wizened hand flop forward, limp, even as the arm continued to stretch upward from the boiling mud.

He was reminded of his dream on the first night of his trip, where he'd been beaten by that man in the steel yard yelling crazily at him in incomprehensible English. There were echoes of that fury here, and with a shout of glee, the old man renewed his efforts, spurred on by his success, seemingly getting his second wind as he two-handedly swung the long stick like a baseball bat.

Feeling scared and more than a little sickened, Dennis hurried up the path toward the exit, the trail sloping down the small ridge and past a deadfall of old trees and brush before reaching the wooden fence separating The Keep from the parking lot. The path followed the fence past the series of buildings until it reached a previously unnoticed gate. Dennis pushed the gate open-and he was out.

The parking lot was still empty save for his car and the red pickup, and he ran across the gravel-strewn asphalt until he reached the Tempo. Pulling out his keys as he ran, he unlocked the door and gratefully got inside. Minutes later, he was back on the road, heading west, The Keep in his rearview mirror.

What was that arm that had popped out of the mud pit? Was it some mechanical device used to trick tourists? He didn't think so, but he didn't dare think beyond that, didn't really want to know the truth, and he pushed the image from his mind as he accelerated past the speed limit and drove as fast as he could away from The Keep.

The Tempo died half an hour out of Selby, a nondescript town on the border between forest and farmland. There was a series of bumps; then suddenly the car had no power. Dennis pushed down on the gas pedal, flooring it, but instead of accelerating, the car lost speed at an alarming rate. In a matter of seconds, he was stopped in the middle of the road. There were no other cars coming from either direction, and he hadn't seen another vehicle for the past forty-five minutes, but he moved the car to the side of the road just in case, pushing on the doorframe while trying to steer. The Tempo slid onto the dirt shoulder, and Dennis slammed the door shut.

"Damn it!"

He pulled out his wallet, found his AAA card, flipped open his cell phone and tried to call, but he was out of range. It was not until he'd walked a mile or so down the road that he was finally able to get through, and it was forty minutes after he returned to his car, his head full of Deliverance daymares-

Niggers and Kikes

-that a tow truck came and towed him back to the Ford dealer in Selby.

He expected to be given the runaround because he was an outsider with Pennsylvania plates, and he was not disappointed. The service manager was dressed in a blue blazer and greeted him with a used-car dealer's smile, but when Dennis pressed for a time estimate, the man's Joe Friendly routine disappeared. "We're very busy right now," he said flatly, though Dennis could see only two vehicles in the dealership's service bays. "It'll be a day or two before we can take a look at it. Depending on the problem and what you decide to do, we can have work completed maybe two days after that."

Four days!

Dennis wanted to assert his customer's rights, wanted to speak to someone higher up, the manager or owner of the dealership, but he sensed that that would only add time to the estimate, so he said nothing. He tried the polite route. "I'm just passing through and I'm in kind of a hurry, so any help you could give me would be great."

The service manager's smile was back. "We'll do what we can," he promised insincerely.

His insurance covered the price of a loaner car, but since he was from out of town and out of state, the dealership made him put the rental on his Visa card and said he could get the insurance company to reimburse him once he got back home. He drove out with a car even older and crappier than his own, and the first thing he did was hunt down a place to stay.