The 5000 Fingers of Bob, pt XVII
I ran outside, headed to my house at full speed. The raw emotion spilling from Jack grew an urgency inside me to get home immediately. I hadn't run that hard since high school and when I finally made it, everything looked the same as we'd left it on the outside. No sooner had I stepped inside than I heard Nettle whimpering. I was relieved and afraid all over again as I stepped into the kitchen. Nettle sat with her back pressed against a wall, huddled up against herself, face all puffy. Her arms were bruised, but she looked otherwise unhurt.
"Honey, what happened?" I asked, kneeling down to her.
She screamed like an animal and shoved me off of her. I fell on my butt and slid a few feet, bumping my head against the kitchen table.
"Don't you touch me, Thomas Richards! Don't you dare!" she screamed, pulling her skirt down past her knees and clutching her legs until her knuckles went white.
"Net, what's wrong?"
"Shut up, shut up! Don't talk!"
"Net, it's me. It's your Tommy."
"I know who you are! You didn't come home last night 'cause you was killin' that boy!"
I gasped in surprise. "What?" I said reflexively.
"You killed him, you killed him. I know you killed him. And afterwards he came here and told me everthing ya did."
"That's crazy talk, Net. Ain't no such thing as ghosts."
"I didn't say nothin' 'bout no ghost. Wasn't no ghost come in this house 'til you got here!"
"Nettle, please," I said, reaching out to her. She sat there with her head turned down from me and eventually she broke into whimpering again. I approached her again and put my arms around her, this time she didn't strike out, but she didn't relax in my arms. She moaned like a wounded animal as I held her in my arms for the next hour. I could feel something had been lost and my feelings were confirmed three months later when she killed herself.
In the next few days Jack, Ed, Howie and I discovered something had happened the night we'd killed Bob. People who'd been attacked said it had been Bob they saw, minus the look of innocence he'd always had. He'd stolen their jewelry and killed their animals, he'd banged on their bedroom doors screaming at them or looked up at them outside their houses as they stared down terrified from bedroom windows. Over and over again the Sullivans watched horrified as he went through the front door and out the back, then walk through the front door again in the same instant the back door shut. The Kenney boys could only stand and watch as their father was beaten to death by five men who all could have passed for him, screaming, "Hi, Bob hi, Bob, hi, Bob!" He'd done something to almost everyone in a town of five thousand plus people and he'd done it all in one night. For those who noticed the hour, it was the same time as when somebody else said he was at their house. Someone had found Bob's mother's body in back of the house, half eaten. The coroner in Atlanta said she'd been dead at least a week, but some of the teeth marks were more recent. All of them were human.
