Dog With a Rabbit’s Head
Sheldon Lee Compton
The whole place was one big crust of ice in the early morning. The sawmill area was the stillest, the coldest. Bam didn’t have a lot of options but to install the mill right out front. He inherited the big house less than a year ago when his daddy, Birch, died of old age. Bam was Birch, Jr., but Bam worked better all the way around.
Bam went bald young the same way his dad did. Birch used to say he lost his hair in the war. It was a joke, but everybody knew what he went through overseas. Birch landed on Omaha Beach at Normandy and the way he said it, that was about enough right there. He came home and got his master electrician papers, worked for a couple decades, and then figured out a way to run cable television along every creek in Red Knife for the first time. From sunrise to sunset, he was a force.
Bam helped him with all the television work, and helped run the small cable company for a long time. They turned over a hundred fifty thousand a year for a long time until Birch sold it to the Martin family and that’s how Martin Communications got started, a monopoly to this day. And that’s also how Birch got three million dollars. Not bad at all. That lasted him and his family all the way up until the last five years or so before Birch died. Since then Bam had worked the sawmill.
He did get the big house and enough money left to get the mill going. But income dropped once he had sold wood to most of the people interested in buying wood. Turned out people liked television better than wormy pine for flooring and cap wedges for failing underground mines. And he only had that because of Birch’s still solid connections in the coal mines. Without that, Bam would have had to sell the mill a long time ago by now. For now, he could still cut, stack, and tie off cap wedges and come off with enough money to cover the bills.
Something busted downstairs. Bam thought it sounded like something colliding against a wall inside the house. He walked the length of the hallway and down the stairs until he stood in the middle of the living room. He held his breath and listened for anything in the house. Then he walked the entire house. No areas that seemed any different than usual. Whatever it was, it was outside. Had to be. But after looking around the house and out by the mill, Bam got too cold and went back inside.
Without checking the time, he made a pot of coffee. Birch always kept the light on in the kitchen and had snacks through the night. Back then he sat at the kitchen table and sort of just stared at the small door leading to his wife’s room. She used to do all kinds of things there—pottery in the early years and then sewing after that. And there were some things that were hers alone. In a family with big, male personalities, she had to find some space for herself, she said.
There’s something Bam would only ever say inside his head, but he never let himself get too comfortable around his mother, who everyone called Kate Batts, or just Batts, her maiden surname. He got the strong feeling even as a boy that she simply did not like him. Even though there was mostly no reason for Bam to feel this. She tucked him in, made him breakfast, helped with homework. But it never mattered much. Many times when he walked by the little room, his mother would have the door partly open. In this way, Bam could only see exactly one half of her sitting at her worktable until she turned. One fearsome eye floating blue in the dark, part of her mouth pulled down into a disturbing frown, and both her hands, as she had her arms out toward the table. And with her hands she would clutch whatever she was holding, the blue eye full of all that fearsomeness never looking away from Bam. Later, he would tell a friend he figured that was as close to seeing a ghost as a person could get without actually seeing a ghost.
Bam fell asleep sitting on the couch thinking about his mother in circles, thinking about her in circles. Circles, circles, circles.
By morning there was a fresh crust of ice. But as white with the snow as the world was, the sky was the bluest Bam had ever seen. The color cast a loneliness over him in some deeply physical way. He felt it wrap him up and he stopped halfway to the mill, turned to the big metal garage. Birch bought the garage about a decade into the television business for no other reason Bam could ever figure out except to have a big metal building.
He stopped on the way to the big sliding bay doors. There at the edge of the building was neighbor Malcolm’s lanky hound. Only way Bam could tell was by the long scar across its shoulder blade where no hair grew. It got that fighting a German Police off Malcolm’s land a few years ago. It wasn’t a dog Bam was particularly afraid of, though.
He walked toward it but was distracted by a strong wind blowing a cedar tree around like a handful of straws. The movement was hypnotic, and by the time he turned to see where the dog was, it was less than five feet away. Its head had become the head of a rabbit. The rest of the hound was the same. The difference now was that it had this large rabbit head with bulging eyes and huge buck teeth. It twisted back and forth on the dog’s shoulders like it was gazing around to get a feel for its environment.
Bam’s first thought was he was hallucinating. The head, the rabbit’s head, more a jackrabbit, big and long-eared, turned left to right much farther than the head of anything should have been turning. One or two more inches on either side and the creature would have been looking behind it. When it faced Bam again, the eyes were bright silver. Then the dog shuffled around, first to the left and then to the right, and settled back into place. Stunned from the moment Bam saw it, he backed away and made a half circle until he was back on the front porch with the door directly at his back. He reached behind him and pulled on the doorknob while keeping his eyes on the dog, which had not moved again and actually seemed stuck in place among the swaying branches of the birch trees.
Inside, Bam went straight to the gun closet and took out his shotgun, packed it halfway across the living room, and then returned it and got the .22 with the old banana clip. No use getting overly excited. A small gun would do fine. Back on the front porch he could immediately see the dog was still there. Right away it shifted and faced him. As soon it did so, Bam fired on it, six shots fast and loose. He had no real way at all to know if any of the shots landed because the dog blurred first left and then right. There was a fierce howl and it scorched across the yard and into the hills out of sight.
A few days ago Bam hired a boy to tie cap wedges for Bob Allen’s coal mine. He’d rented one of Birch’s old houses up the holler. Spent most of his time trying to prove he was a decent boy. Only shortcoming Bam had found was that he smoked weed. Made no move to even try to hide it. The boy had opened the window by the front door, sat in a chair, and smoked the first day he moved in. The open window seemed to be so the music could drift out to him from CDs of old 60s and 70s songs as far as Bam could tell. The music wasn’t bad at least.
He had made it most of the morning without thinking about the rabbit-headed dog before he heard a stick break behind him. His first thought was of the dog from the night before. He physically shook that thought from his head and let out a long white breath. It was the boy, Bam thought, and looked to see if it was him. The boy, Casey, needed to be here at nine and it was fifteen after. First time late. Bam walked up the holler and passed Malcom’s big two-story, across Malcolm’s big bottom field leading all the way to Jamerson Cemetery, morning fog burned away across the fresh-cut grass like it always did a few hours after sunrise, but it always stunned him. He stopped to admire the way that happened, just like he did every time he’d seen it growing up. He’d been standing there less than a minute when Casey walked directly into him on the road.
“Damn, son,” Bam said. He staggered back a couple steps.
“Shit didn’t see you there,” Casey said. “Knew I was late so I was hurrying fast as I could and was running and didn’t see you.”
Casey poured out words, fast and panicked. Bam tried to say something and felt the sides of his throat clamp together. The clamping moved from his throat into his mouth. He could breathe like this but couldn’t speak. It seemed like even his teeth were paralyzed. His tongue lay sideways and stuck out the corner of his mouth. He mumbled and Casey turned his head sideways.
“You don’t seem okay.”
Bam tried to say what he was thinking. No shit. But all that came was more mumbling. Behind him, he saw a dull sweep of gray fur move up the hillside behind the rental house. He held a finger up to Casey, who stared confused, and ran in the direction of the house. He rounded the front porch and got behind the house where the gas meter curled up like a green worm crawling forever. Nothing on the hillside. He went into a clipped run up the hillside.
The ridgeline behind the house was small. He could search to the top without getting too out of breath. A quarter of the way up the hill, Bam heard rustling behind him. He turned and saw Casey jumping up the hill holding onto and pulling himself along by small poplar trees. He moved fast and soon got up to pace with Bam.
“What in the hell is going on?” he asked when he finally caught up.
“I’m looking for the dog with the rabbit head!” Bam’s eyes went wide and he slapped his hand across his mouth. Don’t say another word, he thought. Instead of saying anything, he put a finger against his lips and held his hand up. “Shush, listen,” he whispered.
Nothing at all. Gone. Completely normal.
Bam let out a long breath and joined Casey in panting and holding the top of his knees. The two stayed like this, bent over in the cold, until Casey asked again.
“What in the hell?”
The last thing Bam wanted to do was say anything about the rabbit-headed dog to this boy. It was a slip of the tongue that could follow a man around. Could end up all the way to Bob Allen’s front porch. And Bob Allen was not going to contract with a man who went around talking about hybrid, supernatural dogs. Besides that, Bam was not quick to discount that he could be hallucinating all of it.
“I just yelled whatever cause you wouldn’t hush,” Bam said. “I thought I saw Justin Baylor sneaking around the sawmill again. That goddamn bastard took a band saw off me just this past summer.”
Casey stood and started down the hillside. Bam followed him. The two didn’t speak until they reached Bam’s front porch. And when they did it was of no substance. Bam went inside and brought out two cups of coffee and the two sat on the front steps, looking out at the sawmill in the front yard. The mill and the yard and property because of the mill was in terrible shape. Half cut logs dotted the land around the mill, nearly stacked onto Route 8, the two-lane road about ten feet from where Bam set the mill up. But the house was simply beautiful.
Choosing rounded creek stones instead of bricks, Birch spent two years finishing it. And where most houses of this size would boast four to five bedrooms, the house Bam had inherited had only two. The rest of the house was an assortment of odd rooms used for odd things. One had only musical instruments, another was his mother’s room just off from the kitchen, the place he remembered with a kind of low dread, as if she and whatever she had in that room could still harm him sitting on the porch with Casey Eversole sipping coffee in the cold.
“My mother had a room here in the house that nobody was allowed to go in,” Bam said. He held his coffee mug so that the lip nearly rested against his chin. He didn’t look at Casey when he spoke.
Casey sat quietly, only staring at Bam.
“I still ain’t went in there,” Bam continued. “How crazy is that? I mean, how fucking crazy is that?”
Casey looked at his feet. “That ain’t crazy,” he said. “That ain’t crazy, nope.” He paused very briefly. “Well, maybe a little crazy. Weird more like it. Weird.”
That goddamn room. And his mother when she was in there with the door open, which was more often than one might think. His mother sitting at her little table studying intently on something on the table in front of her. And as soon as Bam passed the open door and looked at his mother, she would deliberately turn her head, only her head, the rest of her body staying in exactly the same pose and fix her stare on him in a way so menacing Bam always ran. Up the stairs to his room.
It wasn’t anything he ever talked about. Once or twice he came close to saying something to his dad about it, but Birch would always cut him off. The backhoe needed fuel injector work and needed the coolant drained and replaced, racoons tore out the duct work again, they were going to have to take a close look at all the control devices for the entire ground transmitter for the television service, and even the mundane, reminders of basic chores. But always work. Birch steeped himself in work, whereas Bam’s mother did nothing when she wasn’t in her room. Often, she would sit on the couch in the front living room eating her hard candy and watching whatever happened to be on television when she walked into the room. If the television wasn’t on, she’d still take a seat and eat her candy in silence. Bam remembered a number of times when she did this without lights on in the middle of the night. It could be that his mother was more than just weird. Bam felt it was about to happen, letting the thoughts about his mother out into the open.
“She was weird, young man,” Bam said. “You just don’t know. There was something off about her, sideways, and not in a silly way. She had something she kept away with her in the dark.” He suddenly started nodding his head affirming something to himself, aloud and to the world, or at least to Casey Eversole. “Yeah that’s it. Something hid away, tucked into her somehow. I believe Dad told me pottery and sewing because he didn’t know either, what she did in that fucking room.”
For a man in his early twenties, Casey was a good listener. When Bam stopped talking, Casey let everything hang in the air for several seconds, giving them both the chance to consider how it sounded being said out loud.
“What were you chasing a while ago up the hill?”
Bam hadn’t expected that question. He didn’t really know what to do with it. And now he remembered the surreal nature of it, a dog with a rabbit’s head.
“Who knows?” Bam answered in the way someone does when they’re concluding a lengthy debate. “But what I do know is that a walnut log won’t saw itself.”
That night Bam had a nightmare. His room was in the attic instead of the second floor. The attic in his nightmare had to be his mind fixing together other attics he had seen to make this one, because he had never been in the attic.
He had a brother. He didn’t see the brother, but he knew he was there, somewhere near the back of the attic. Bam lay uncomfortable in the front section, closest to the pull-down stairs on a pallet made out of three thick blankets. Just before it seemed like he was about to sleep, Bam rolled from his left side to his right.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor was a girl the color of gray pearls. There were patches of watch across her arms and her eyes were the same, solid white without variation. Her hands were in her lap. Ponytails. An older style dress that was barely noticeable until he noticed it was a light green. That was all Bam had time to take in before he pulled himself from the floor. When he looked again the girl was gone.
No time passed before he was in the back of the attic. He had a pallet on one side of the space and his brother had one on the other. From somewhere a doorway appeared in the attic, at the foot of each of their pallets. Through this doorway the girl from before came holding the hand of a toddler, a little boy. The toddler had no clothes on, only a diaper heavily soiled. The toddler resisted the girl and she pulled him along with her. She was agitated, and, before the two misted from view, they turned their heads, and only their heads, and stared at him.
When he woke, Bam felt ants crawling over his body. He slid fast out of bed and pulled the chain on the ceiling fan. Light bolted the bedroom into view. He immediately slapped both his forearms and then pulled his shirt off and started slapping his chest and torso. A part of him knew full well there were no ants, but he kept at it anyway. A nightmare, he thought to himself. A nightmare, a nightmare, a nightmare. But nothing helped. Bam had to get out of the bedroom.
Downstairs he sat in Birch’s old recliner, upright and on guard; he entertained the fear that he could feel his atoms flying apart while he tried like hell to keep himself together. Christ all mighty breathe you goddamn coward, Bam thought. The dream was easy enough to explain. Somewhere in there was his mother, stiffly turning her head and then turning it back but leaving her eyes on him the whole time.
He made himself put on a pot of coffee even though he didn’t want coffee. He listened to it percolate and then hiss when done and only sat looking at the coffee pot. He sat avoiding thoughts about the closed door of his mother’s old room. His indifferent mother. His goddamn strange mother.
The longer Bam sat staring at the finished pot of coffee while not going to it and pouring a cup like a normal person the more disturbed he became. The mother fucking door to his mother fucking mother’s room. Disturbed bubbled over. It bubbled slowly, pressure cooker style, and into the collapsing of his entire world, this collapse as close to becoming a reality as the distance between his thoughts and his full-throated blaring of voice into the open air.
In one fast motion he stood and went to the door of his mother’s old room and put his hand on the doorknob, started to fling it open, and stopped. There were sounds coming from the other side of the door.
Bam stood stock still and listened. A shuffling around inside. And then, low and gradually, a growl. Like a dog. Like a dog with a goddamn rabbit head. Like a night terror turned loose on whoever it wants to attack. The sounds remained. He kept waiting for it to stop, but it become clear that it wasn’t going to stop. Bam took three huge breaths and flung the door open.
Immediately he saw nothing but darkness. He shot his arm out to the side and slapped the wall, hunting for a light switch with no luck. His eyes adjusted to the darkness in seconds, and he could see the outline of his mother’s table. Of course, Bam thought. First thing I see. He stood in the doorway waiting for his eyes to adjust to the rest of the room, but they wouldn’t, even with the door open. He saw the kitchen, bright and normal, and completely in another world. Bam had the feeling he was looking at some kind of picture of a kitchen, like a big painting of a bright kitchen hanging against a black wall. And he had the sense that the painting was fading fast. Looking as far as he could into the darkness, Bam saw only more darkness. In fact, the darkness darkened. There was no way he could move another inch, so instead he placed his hand flat on the table.
Bam came to in the middle of his yard, flat on his back, and thirsty. He was freezing too. There had to be more than four inches of snow across everything. The sawmill was so covered it might have been part of the hillside. He sat up and grabbed two huge handfuls of snow and eat them down. He took two more and closed eyes while he ate them down. It wasn’t water but it wasn’t not water. It was enough for as thirsty as Bam was.
“Bam!”
With the misty, unreal outline of his mother’s table dispersing behind his eyelids, Bam was unaware of anything else.
“Bam, buddy!”
It was Casey Eversole yelling. What in the world is going on? Bam thought. And then he was back in snow, laying on his back. Only now Casey was standing over him. Bam could tell Casey was panicking. His eyes were bulging out of his head and he kept waving for people to come.
“Casey Eversole,” Bam said. “I need to tell you something.”
“Well it can wait until they get you fixed up. How long you been laying out here.?”
“Casey,” Bam said. “Casey, Casey come here.” He motioned with his hand. Come down here. Come down her.
Finally Casey went to one knee. Bam saw some ambulance guys circling around behind Casey. He reached up and clasped Casey at the back of his head and pulled him down.
“Casey,” he called out. “Casey!”
“I’m here Bam. Right here buddy.”
Bam rubbed his ice-covered mouth with the back of his hand. “My mother was a demon, Casey. My mother was a goddamn demon.”
The nurses had some information, but Bam had to talk it out of them like pulling teeth. It was insane but they told him he’d been missing for two days until he showed up outside laying in his yard. He had some serious frostbite, by the way. Serious.
Bam couldn’t care less if his whole leg fell off. He’d only been in the hospital room for a matter of a couple hours when he saw it in the corner, the growling darkness. He knew it was the dog with a rabbit's head. And in there behind the dog was the impatient girl. Now she held the little boy on her hip. Both looked at him with eyes completely white. Silent. Waiting.
The next person who came in his room was with housekeeping. She flitted around the room changing garbage bags, the one by his bed and the one in the bathroom. When she closed in on the corner where they were all hiding, Bam paid close attention to her. She had gotten a broom from somewhere and was now sweeping directly in front of the corner. Sweep, sweep, sweep. Then she stopped and raised her head, the broom frozen in place on the floor.
She sees them, Bam thought. She sees them!
The housekeeper, as if hearing Bam’s thoughts, dropped her broom and walked up to the side of his bed. She sat lightly at his side and looked at Bam with total pity, looked at him with so much underlying revulsion, that he could feel it around his neck, wrapping itself around his waist. She leaned close to him, close enough that Bam could feel her lips bending the small hairs along the edge of his ear. She smelled like a coal stove.
“Yes,” it said. “Your mother is a demon.”
Your mother is a demon. Not was a demon. Bam was back at the sawmill with Casey, who was turning out to be a solid worker. A light snow, a dusting they called it, was twirling around the walnut they were working on.
After the housekeeper came into his room, Bam fell asleep and didn’t really wake up until they released him two days later. Walking to the parking lot at the hospital, Bam had found his truck, got in, and stared into the distance for awhile. The longer he sat and collected himself, the easier it was to discount the housekeeper, the lost time, the endless dark of his mother’s room. By the time he pulled in at his house, Bam had cleared his slate. All of it. But what the nurse said to him wouldn’t be put away so easily.
Is a demon. Not was a demon.
“We about done for the day?” Casey wiped at his forehead to keep the sweat from freezing. “I don’t know how much more I can handle this fucking cold.”
Bam snapped to and studied the work for today. Casey was right. This was enough work. The temperature had dropped by thirty degrees since morning. Thirty degrees, Bam thought. Maybe the whole world was just as strange his mother.
“Yep, we’re done for the day. Casey wait. I’ve got your pay.”
Casey followed him to the house and stood on the porch while Bam went for his money. A few seconds later Bam stepped out and handed him three one-hundred dollar bills. A good deal more than Casey was owed.
“You got me overpaid there, Bam.”
“No, I don’t think so, as long as you don’t say no to what I’m going to ask of you.”
“Well that don’t sound good.”
“No I guess it don’t,” Bam said. “You’ve heard about Sister Hall ain’t you? I need you to go up there to where she stays and ask her to come down here, come to Birch Smith’s old rock house. I’d do it myself but it’s a good ways up there,” Bam said. “More’n half of it is walking, big ruts on the road to the point that it ain’t a road at all. You’re just going in the hills until you get almost to the top.” Bam stopped, took a breath. “I can’t make that walk. Just can’t. You keep the three hundred whether she comes down or not.”
Casey was cold and hungry. If Bam wanted him to climb the hill up to Sister Hall’s house and extend an invite, he’d have no problem with that. “Yep, I can do that,” he said. “Now I need to go warm up, smoke a little, and eat everything I can find at the house.”
Bam nodded. “Head up there first thing in the morning.”
Casey never came back.
Months after Casey went up the hill and disappeared, Bam faced the fact that he wasn’t coming back. So he went to the little rental house where Casey had stayed and gathered up all the boy’s stuff and put it in boxes. He left the boxes in the living room and locked up the house. He’d have it ready if anybody come asking for it.
And he’d found a way to talk to his mother. He called to her and she came out of the dark right away like a good dog, like a precious child, like the demon she was and always would be. Bam smiled because it was all he knew to do. He had to get this demon under control. It wasn’t easy to get a demon to tell its name.
At the kitchen table Bam drank strong coffee and watched the door to the demon’s room. Strong as ever. He could feel it pulsing from inside the room. No need for games, no need to be coy now. He wondered when he had lost his mother. It’s a slow process, possession.
Bam finished his coffee in one large gulp and sat it on the counter.
“Lucifer?” he said.
Stillness.
“Abadon?” he said.
Only the sound of his own breathing.
“Beelzebub,” he said.
“Sathanas,” he said.
“Is your name Belphegor?” he asked. “Are you Mammon?”
He would keep going. Tonight he would turn out the lights, pull down his covers, and sleep. Come morning he would make fried eggs and toast. There would be a good seven or eight hours at the sawmill. There would be the routine as if nothing had happened or would happen. Then at nightfall he’d take his place at the kitchen table, watching the door, speaking names in the crevasse that separated the world of the living and the world wherever the thing that took his mother rested.
“Asmodeus?” he asked.
“Pazuzu,” he said.
Bam sipped his coffee.
“Aim?” he asked.
“Agaliarept? Gamigin? Preta? Legion, goddamnit. Haagenti. Corson. Naberius, you fucking three-headed dog.”
It always seemed never enough, and then the sunrise. Or the beginning of sunrise, and Bam saw her floating slowly out of the darkness. She was nearly to him when he gave one last name, closed his eyes.
Sheldon Lee Compton
The whole place was one big crust of ice in the early morning. The sawmill area was the stillest, the coldest. Bam didn’t have a lot of options but to install the mill right out front. He inherited the big house less than a year ago when his daddy, Birch, died of old age. Bam was Birch, Jr., but Bam worked better all the way around.
Bam went bald young the same way his dad did. Birch used to say he lost his hair in the war. It was a joke, but everybody knew what he went through overseas. Birch landed on Omaha Beach at Normandy and the way he said it, that was about enough right there. He came home and got his master electrician papers, worked for a couple decades, and then figured out a way to run cable television along every creek in Red Knife for the first time. From sunrise to sunset, he was a force.
Bam helped him with all the television work, and helped run the small cable company for a long time. They turned over a hundred fifty thousand a year for a long time until Birch sold it to the Martin family and that’s how Martin Communications got started, a monopoly to this day. And that’s also how Birch got three million dollars. Not bad at all. That lasted him and his family all the way up until the last five years or so before Birch died. Since then Bam had worked the sawmill.
He did get the big house and enough money left to get the mill going. But income dropped once he had sold wood to most of the people interested in buying wood. Turned out people liked television better than wormy pine for flooring and cap wedges for failing underground mines. And he only had that because of Birch’s still solid connections in the coal mines. Without that, Bam would have had to sell the mill a long time ago by now. For now, he could still cut, stack, and tie off cap wedges and come off with enough money to cover the bills.
Something busted downstairs. Bam thought it sounded like something colliding against a wall inside the house. He walked the length of the hallway and down the stairs until he stood in the middle of the living room. He held his breath and listened for anything in the house. Then he walked the entire house. No areas that seemed any different than usual. Whatever it was, it was outside. Had to be. But after looking around the house and out by the mill, Bam got too cold and went back inside.
Without checking the time, he made a pot of coffee. Birch always kept the light on in the kitchen and had snacks through the night. Back then he sat at the kitchen table and sort of just stared at the small door leading to his wife’s room. She used to do all kinds of things there—pottery in the early years and then sewing after that. And there were some things that were hers alone. In a family with big, male personalities, she had to find some space for herself, she said.
There’s something Bam would only ever say inside his head, but he never let himself get too comfortable around his mother, who everyone called Kate Batts, or just Batts, her maiden surname. He got the strong feeling even as a boy that she simply did not like him. Even though there was mostly no reason for Bam to feel this. She tucked him in, made him breakfast, helped with homework. But it never mattered much. Many times when he walked by the little room, his mother would have the door partly open. In this way, Bam could only see exactly one half of her sitting at her worktable until she turned. One fearsome eye floating blue in the dark, part of her mouth pulled down into a disturbing frown, and both her hands, as she had her arms out toward the table. And with her hands she would clutch whatever she was holding, the blue eye full of all that fearsomeness never looking away from Bam. Later, he would tell a friend he figured that was as close to seeing a ghost as a person could get without actually seeing a ghost.
Bam fell asleep sitting on the couch thinking about his mother in circles, thinking about her in circles. Circles, circles, circles.
By morning there was a fresh crust of ice. But as white with the snow as the world was, the sky was the bluest Bam had ever seen. The color cast a loneliness over him in some deeply physical way. He felt it wrap him up and he stopped halfway to the mill, turned to the big metal garage. Birch bought the garage about a decade into the television business for no other reason Bam could ever figure out except to have a big metal building.
He stopped on the way to the big sliding bay doors. There at the edge of the building was neighbor Malcolm’s lanky hound. Only way Bam could tell was by the long scar across its shoulder blade where no hair grew. It got that fighting a German Police off Malcolm’s land a few years ago. It wasn’t a dog Bam was particularly afraid of, though.
He walked toward it but was distracted by a strong wind blowing a cedar tree around like a handful of straws. The movement was hypnotic, and by the time he turned to see where the dog was, it was less than five feet away. Its head had become the head of a rabbit. The rest of the hound was the same. The difference now was that it had this large rabbit head with bulging eyes and huge buck teeth. It twisted back and forth on the dog’s shoulders like it was gazing around to get a feel for its environment.
Bam’s first thought was he was hallucinating. The head, the rabbit’s head, more a jackrabbit, big and long-eared, turned left to right much farther than the head of anything should have been turning. One or two more inches on either side and the creature would have been looking behind it. When it faced Bam again, the eyes were bright silver. Then the dog shuffled around, first to the left and then to the right, and settled back into place. Stunned from the moment Bam saw it, he backed away and made a half circle until he was back on the front porch with the door directly at his back. He reached behind him and pulled on the doorknob while keeping his eyes on the dog, which had not moved again and actually seemed stuck in place among the swaying branches of the birch trees.
Inside, Bam went straight to the gun closet and took out his shotgun, packed it halfway across the living room, and then returned it and got the .22 with the old banana clip. No use getting overly excited. A small gun would do fine. Back on the front porch he could immediately see the dog was still there. Right away it shifted and faced him. As soon it did so, Bam fired on it, six shots fast and loose. He had no real way at all to know if any of the shots landed because the dog blurred first left and then right. There was a fierce howl and it scorched across the yard and into the hills out of sight.
A few days ago Bam hired a boy to tie cap wedges for Bob Allen’s coal mine. He’d rented one of Birch’s old houses up the holler. Spent most of his time trying to prove he was a decent boy. Only shortcoming Bam had found was that he smoked weed. Made no move to even try to hide it. The boy had opened the window by the front door, sat in a chair, and smoked the first day he moved in. The open window seemed to be so the music could drift out to him from CDs of old 60s and 70s songs as far as Bam could tell. The music wasn’t bad at least.
He had made it most of the morning without thinking about the rabbit-headed dog before he heard a stick break behind him. His first thought was of the dog from the night before. He physically shook that thought from his head and let out a long white breath. It was the boy, Bam thought, and looked to see if it was him. The boy, Casey, needed to be here at nine and it was fifteen after. First time late. Bam walked up the holler and passed Malcom’s big two-story, across Malcolm’s big bottom field leading all the way to Jamerson Cemetery, morning fog burned away across the fresh-cut grass like it always did a few hours after sunrise, but it always stunned him. He stopped to admire the way that happened, just like he did every time he’d seen it growing up. He’d been standing there less than a minute when Casey walked directly into him on the road.
“Damn, son,” Bam said. He staggered back a couple steps.
“Shit didn’t see you there,” Casey said. “Knew I was late so I was hurrying fast as I could and was running and didn’t see you.”
Casey poured out words, fast and panicked. Bam tried to say something and felt the sides of his throat clamp together. The clamping moved from his throat into his mouth. He could breathe like this but couldn’t speak. It seemed like even his teeth were paralyzed. His tongue lay sideways and stuck out the corner of his mouth. He mumbled and Casey turned his head sideways.
“You don’t seem okay.”
Bam tried to say what he was thinking. No shit. But all that came was more mumbling. Behind him, he saw a dull sweep of gray fur move up the hillside behind the rental house. He held a finger up to Casey, who stared confused, and ran in the direction of the house. He rounded the front porch and got behind the house where the gas meter curled up like a green worm crawling forever. Nothing on the hillside. He went into a clipped run up the hillside.
The ridgeline behind the house was small. He could search to the top without getting too out of breath. A quarter of the way up the hill, Bam heard rustling behind him. He turned and saw Casey jumping up the hill holding onto and pulling himself along by small poplar trees. He moved fast and soon got up to pace with Bam.
“What in the hell is going on?” he asked when he finally caught up.
“I’m looking for the dog with the rabbit head!” Bam’s eyes went wide and he slapped his hand across his mouth. Don’t say another word, he thought. Instead of saying anything, he put a finger against his lips and held his hand up. “Shush, listen,” he whispered.
Nothing at all. Gone. Completely normal.
Bam let out a long breath and joined Casey in panting and holding the top of his knees. The two stayed like this, bent over in the cold, until Casey asked again.
“What in the hell?”
The last thing Bam wanted to do was say anything about the rabbit-headed dog to this boy. It was a slip of the tongue that could follow a man around. Could end up all the way to Bob Allen’s front porch. And Bob Allen was not going to contract with a man who went around talking about hybrid, supernatural dogs. Besides that, Bam was not quick to discount that he could be hallucinating all of it.
“I just yelled whatever cause you wouldn’t hush,” Bam said. “I thought I saw Justin Baylor sneaking around the sawmill again. That goddamn bastard took a band saw off me just this past summer.”
Casey stood and started down the hillside. Bam followed him. The two didn’t speak until they reached Bam’s front porch. And when they did it was of no substance. Bam went inside and brought out two cups of coffee and the two sat on the front steps, looking out at the sawmill in the front yard. The mill and the yard and property because of the mill was in terrible shape. Half cut logs dotted the land around the mill, nearly stacked onto Route 8, the two-lane road about ten feet from where Bam set the mill up. But the house was simply beautiful.
Choosing rounded creek stones instead of bricks, Birch spent two years finishing it. And where most houses of this size would boast four to five bedrooms, the house Bam had inherited had only two. The rest of the house was an assortment of odd rooms used for odd things. One had only musical instruments, another was his mother’s room just off from the kitchen, the place he remembered with a kind of low dread, as if she and whatever she had in that room could still harm him sitting on the porch with Casey Eversole sipping coffee in the cold.
“My mother had a room here in the house that nobody was allowed to go in,” Bam said. He held his coffee mug so that the lip nearly rested against his chin. He didn’t look at Casey when he spoke.
Casey sat quietly, only staring at Bam.
“I still ain’t went in there,” Bam continued. “How crazy is that? I mean, how fucking crazy is that?”
Casey looked at his feet. “That ain’t crazy,” he said. “That ain’t crazy, nope.” He paused very briefly. “Well, maybe a little crazy. Weird more like it. Weird.”
That goddamn room. And his mother when she was in there with the door open, which was more often than one might think. His mother sitting at her little table studying intently on something on the table in front of her. And as soon as Bam passed the open door and looked at his mother, she would deliberately turn her head, only her head, the rest of her body staying in exactly the same pose and fix her stare on him in a way so menacing Bam always ran. Up the stairs to his room.
It wasn’t anything he ever talked about. Once or twice he came close to saying something to his dad about it, but Birch would always cut him off. The backhoe needed fuel injector work and needed the coolant drained and replaced, racoons tore out the duct work again, they were going to have to take a close look at all the control devices for the entire ground transmitter for the television service, and even the mundane, reminders of basic chores. But always work. Birch steeped himself in work, whereas Bam’s mother did nothing when she wasn’t in her room. Often, she would sit on the couch in the front living room eating her hard candy and watching whatever happened to be on television when she walked into the room. If the television wasn’t on, she’d still take a seat and eat her candy in silence. Bam remembered a number of times when she did this without lights on in the middle of the night. It could be that his mother was more than just weird. Bam felt it was about to happen, letting the thoughts about his mother out into the open.
“She was weird, young man,” Bam said. “You just don’t know. There was something off about her, sideways, and not in a silly way. She had something she kept away with her in the dark.” He suddenly started nodding his head affirming something to himself, aloud and to the world, or at least to Casey Eversole. “Yeah that’s it. Something hid away, tucked into her somehow. I believe Dad told me pottery and sewing because he didn’t know either, what she did in that fucking room.”
For a man in his early twenties, Casey was a good listener. When Bam stopped talking, Casey let everything hang in the air for several seconds, giving them both the chance to consider how it sounded being said out loud.
“What were you chasing a while ago up the hill?”
Bam hadn’t expected that question. He didn’t really know what to do with it. And now he remembered the surreal nature of it, a dog with a rabbit’s head.
“Who knows?” Bam answered in the way someone does when they’re concluding a lengthy debate. “But what I do know is that a walnut log won’t saw itself.”
That night Bam had a nightmare. His room was in the attic instead of the second floor. The attic in his nightmare had to be his mind fixing together other attics he had seen to make this one, because he had never been in the attic.
He had a brother. He didn’t see the brother, but he knew he was there, somewhere near the back of the attic. Bam lay uncomfortable in the front section, closest to the pull-down stairs on a pallet made out of three thick blankets. Just before it seemed like he was about to sleep, Bam rolled from his left side to his right.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor was a girl the color of gray pearls. There were patches of watch across her arms and her eyes were the same, solid white without variation. Her hands were in her lap. Ponytails. An older style dress that was barely noticeable until he noticed it was a light green. That was all Bam had time to take in before he pulled himself from the floor. When he looked again the girl was gone.
No time passed before he was in the back of the attic. He had a pallet on one side of the space and his brother had one on the other. From somewhere a doorway appeared in the attic, at the foot of each of their pallets. Through this doorway the girl from before came holding the hand of a toddler, a little boy. The toddler had no clothes on, only a diaper heavily soiled. The toddler resisted the girl and she pulled him along with her. She was agitated, and, before the two misted from view, they turned their heads, and only their heads, and stared at him.
When he woke, Bam felt ants crawling over his body. He slid fast out of bed and pulled the chain on the ceiling fan. Light bolted the bedroom into view. He immediately slapped both his forearms and then pulled his shirt off and started slapping his chest and torso. A part of him knew full well there were no ants, but he kept at it anyway. A nightmare, he thought to himself. A nightmare, a nightmare, a nightmare. But nothing helped. Bam had to get out of the bedroom.
Downstairs he sat in Birch’s old recliner, upright and on guard; he entertained the fear that he could feel his atoms flying apart while he tried like hell to keep himself together. Christ all mighty breathe you goddamn coward, Bam thought. The dream was easy enough to explain. Somewhere in there was his mother, stiffly turning her head and then turning it back but leaving her eyes on him the whole time.
He made himself put on a pot of coffee even though he didn’t want coffee. He listened to it percolate and then hiss when done and only sat looking at the coffee pot. He sat avoiding thoughts about the closed door of his mother’s old room. His indifferent mother. His goddamn strange mother.
The longer Bam sat staring at the finished pot of coffee while not going to it and pouring a cup like a normal person the more disturbed he became. The mother fucking door to his mother fucking mother’s room. Disturbed bubbled over. It bubbled slowly, pressure cooker style, and into the collapsing of his entire world, this collapse as close to becoming a reality as the distance between his thoughts and his full-throated blaring of voice into the open air.
In one fast motion he stood and went to the door of his mother’s old room and put his hand on the doorknob, started to fling it open, and stopped. There were sounds coming from the other side of the door.
Bam stood stock still and listened. A shuffling around inside. And then, low and gradually, a growl. Like a dog. Like a dog with a goddamn rabbit head. Like a night terror turned loose on whoever it wants to attack. The sounds remained. He kept waiting for it to stop, but it become clear that it wasn’t going to stop. Bam took three huge breaths and flung the door open.
Immediately he saw nothing but darkness. He shot his arm out to the side and slapped the wall, hunting for a light switch with no luck. His eyes adjusted to the darkness in seconds, and he could see the outline of his mother’s table. Of course, Bam thought. First thing I see. He stood in the doorway waiting for his eyes to adjust to the rest of the room, but they wouldn’t, even with the door open. He saw the kitchen, bright and normal, and completely in another world. Bam had the feeling he was looking at some kind of picture of a kitchen, like a big painting of a bright kitchen hanging against a black wall. And he had the sense that the painting was fading fast. Looking as far as he could into the darkness, Bam saw only more darkness. In fact, the darkness darkened. There was no way he could move another inch, so instead he placed his hand flat on the table.
Bam came to in the middle of his yard, flat on his back, and thirsty. He was freezing too. There had to be more than four inches of snow across everything. The sawmill was so covered it might have been part of the hillside. He sat up and grabbed two huge handfuls of snow and eat them down. He took two more and closed eyes while he ate them down. It wasn’t water but it wasn’t not water. It was enough for as thirsty as Bam was.
“Bam!”
With the misty, unreal outline of his mother’s table dispersing behind his eyelids, Bam was unaware of anything else.
“Bam, buddy!”
It was Casey Eversole yelling. What in the world is going on? Bam thought. And then he was back in snow, laying on his back. Only now Casey was standing over him. Bam could tell Casey was panicking. His eyes were bulging out of his head and he kept waving for people to come.
“Casey Eversole,” Bam said. “I need to tell you something.”
“Well it can wait until they get you fixed up. How long you been laying out here.?”
“Casey,” Bam said. “Casey, Casey come here.” He motioned with his hand. Come down here. Come down her.
Finally Casey went to one knee. Bam saw some ambulance guys circling around behind Casey. He reached up and clasped Casey at the back of his head and pulled him down.
“Casey,” he called out. “Casey!”
“I’m here Bam. Right here buddy.”
Bam rubbed his ice-covered mouth with the back of his hand. “My mother was a demon, Casey. My mother was a goddamn demon.”
The nurses had some information, but Bam had to talk it out of them like pulling teeth. It was insane but they told him he’d been missing for two days until he showed up outside laying in his yard. He had some serious frostbite, by the way. Serious.
Bam couldn’t care less if his whole leg fell off. He’d only been in the hospital room for a matter of a couple hours when he saw it in the corner, the growling darkness. He knew it was the dog with a rabbit's head. And in there behind the dog was the impatient girl. Now she held the little boy on her hip. Both looked at him with eyes completely white. Silent. Waiting.
The next person who came in his room was with housekeeping. She flitted around the room changing garbage bags, the one by his bed and the one in the bathroom. When she closed in on the corner where they were all hiding, Bam paid close attention to her. She had gotten a broom from somewhere and was now sweeping directly in front of the corner. Sweep, sweep, sweep. Then she stopped and raised her head, the broom frozen in place on the floor.
She sees them, Bam thought. She sees them!
The housekeeper, as if hearing Bam’s thoughts, dropped her broom and walked up to the side of his bed. She sat lightly at his side and looked at Bam with total pity, looked at him with so much underlying revulsion, that he could feel it around his neck, wrapping itself around his waist. She leaned close to him, close enough that Bam could feel her lips bending the small hairs along the edge of his ear. She smelled like a coal stove.
“Yes,” it said. “Your mother is a demon.”
Your mother is a demon. Not was a demon. Bam was back at the sawmill with Casey, who was turning out to be a solid worker. A light snow, a dusting they called it, was twirling around the walnut they were working on.
After the housekeeper came into his room, Bam fell asleep and didn’t really wake up until they released him two days later. Walking to the parking lot at the hospital, Bam had found his truck, got in, and stared into the distance for awhile. The longer he sat and collected himself, the easier it was to discount the housekeeper, the lost time, the endless dark of his mother’s room. By the time he pulled in at his house, Bam had cleared his slate. All of it. But what the nurse said to him wouldn’t be put away so easily.
Is a demon. Not was a demon.
“We about done for the day?” Casey wiped at his forehead to keep the sweat from freezing. “I don’t know how much more I can handle this fucking cold.”
Bam snapped to and studied the work for today. Casey was right. This was enough work. The temperature had dropped by thirty degrees since morning. Thirty degrees, Bam thought. Maybe the whole world was just as strange his mother.
“Yep, we’re done for the day. Casey wait. I’ve got your pay.”
Casey followed him to the house and stood on the porch while Bam went for his money. A few seconds later Bam stepped out and handed him three one-hundred dollar bills. A good deal more than Casey was owed.
“You got me overpaid there, Bam.”
“No, I don’t think so, as long as you don’t say no to what I’m going to ask of you.”
“Well that don’t sound good.”
“No I guess it don’t,” Bam said. “You’ve heard about Sister Hall ain’t you? I need you to go up there to where she stays and ask her to come down here, come to Birch Smith’s old rock house. I’d do it myself but it’s a good ways up there,” Bam said. “More’n half of it is walking, big ruts on the road to the point that it ain’t a road at all. You’re just going in the hills until you get almost to the top.” Bam stopped, took a breath. “I can’t make that walk. Just can’t. You keep the three hundred whether she comes down or not.”
Casey was cold and hungry. If Bam wanted him to climb the hill up to Sister Hall’s house and extend an invite, he’d have no problem with that. “Yep, I can do that,” he said. “Now I need to go warm up, smoke a little, and eat everything I can find at the house.”
Bam nodded. “Head up there first thing in the morning.”
Casey never came back.
Months after Casey went up the hill and disappeared, Bam faced the fact that he wasn’t coming back. So he went to the little rental house where Casey had stayed and gathered up all the boy’s stuff and put it in boxes. He left the boxes in the living room and locked up the house. He’d have it ready if anybody come asking for it.
And he’d found a way to talk to his mother. He called to her and she came out of the dark right away like a good dog, like a precious child, like the demon she was and always would be. Bam smiled because it was all he knew to do. He had to get this demon under control. It wasn’t easy to get a demon to tell its name.
At the kitchen table Bam drank strong coffee and watched the door to the demon’s room. Strong as ever. He could feel it pulsing from inside the room. No need for games, no need to be coy now. He wondered when he had lost his mother. It’s a slow process, possession.
Bam finished his coffee in one large gulp and sat it on the counter.
“Lucifer?” he said.
Stillness.
“Abadon?” he said.
Only the sound of his own breathing.
“Beelzebub,” he said.
“Sathanas,” he said.
“Is your name Belphegor?” he asked. “Are you Mammon?”
He would keep going. Tonight he would turn out the lights, pull down his covers, and sleep. Come morning he would make fried eggs and toast. There would be a good seven or eight hours at the sawmill. There would be the routine as if nothing had happened or would happen. Then at nightfall he’d take his place at the kitchen table, watching the door, speaking names in the crevasse that separated the world of the living and the world wherever the thing that took his mother rested.
“Asmodeus?” he asked.
“Pazuzu,” he said.
Bam sipped his coffee.
“Aim?” he asked.
“Agaliarept? Gamigin? Preta? Legion, goddamnit. Haagenti. Corson. Naberius, you fucking three-headed dog.”
It always seemed never enough, and then the sunrise. Or the beginning of sunrise, and Bam saw her floating slowly out of the darkness. She was nearly to him when he gave one last name, closed his eyes.