Boys in the Valley

by Philip Fracassi

Johnson is a hateful man. A towering giant with long, dingy hair, brown teeth. Heavy eyebrows shade dull brown eyes.

The screams continue, for a few more moments, to echo from the foyer, before they finally disappear into the afternoon light, his voice cut off sharply by the closing of the orphanage doors, as if sliced with a knife.

Stuck in a pine box, nailed shut while you screamed for mercy, settled three feet beneath the ground. The guards would laugh while they threw dirt over the makeshift coffin.

standing so close to the window that the breath of his words fogs the glass.

Andrew stops at the doorway, his curiosity getting the best of him. I must see his face, he thinks, then watches as Sheriff Baker grips the top of the soiled sack. Baker pauses. Uncertain. Afraid. The laughter stops. The room goes still.

The teeth are rotten and black—and quite evident—as Paul Baker stretches back his pale, wormy lips in an effort to fully expose them in a fiendish rictus. A devil’s grin.

The flesh of the man’s chest is partially torn away, exposing red meat and white rib beneath blood-slicked skin. His entire torso, from neck to waist—on what skin remains—is covered in symbols. Occult and blasphemous. Some designs appear to be roughly tattooed into the skin, others seemingly burned into the flesh, as if drawn with heated steel.

Before I can think further, I watch in disbelief as the heavy iron cross hanging above the doors—the one I have seen every morning, noon, and night for the last ten years of my life, seemingly unmovable—dislodges from its mount and falls, clattering like a broken bell against the floor, where it rests.

Bartholomew is close now, almost beneath us. He still stares upward, and for a moment it feels like he’s not only studying the windows, but looking at me directly. I can’t help the sensation that he’s meeting my eye. I realize then what’s off about him—something I’ve never seen from a boy who just spent a long, cold night in the hole. He’s smiling.

“No,” Poole says, staring at the distant horizon, Baker and his men already small shadows pushing up the gentle slope of the valley road.

I’m hoping the kitchen is preparing breakfast, even if it is just biscuits, because my stomach is filled with needles, sharp stabs of hunger piercing me every few seconds.

He has a big heart, bold as a rose in full bloom, even if it is surrounded by protective thorns.

In the front row, two boys sit side by side at the end of a long bench. They are, at this point, the only ones still sitting. The rest are lined up like sheep waiting to be clubbed on the brain and sold for wool. All but the two. Bartholomew and Simon.

Andrew is not a stupid man, and he realizes the dangers of putting coal too near an open fire, but he also doesn’t want to hide the boy from the world only to have it revealed to him later, when he’s already a priest and his life decisions, forever finalized, are based on limited experiences.

I never told her, or anyone, about my other, darker thoughts. As open as I became with Grace, I worried those parts of me would alarm her, perhaps cause her to question her feelings toward me. So, even with my secret letters, I stayed silent about my greatest fear: the knowledge that something dark and alive lived deep inside of me. Hidden in the folded shadows of my soul. A poisonous barb stuck through my heart that tainted my thoughts, turned my dreams into terror-strewn nightmares.

Basil nods, but still doesn’t make to move. He sniffles, then runs a finger absently along the steel bar at the foot of my bedframe. “A lot of them are waiting, I think.” I stand, knowing my time is up. I know I shouldn’t be impatient, but I am, and I can’t help myself. My words to him are curt, almost cruel. “Waiting for what? Enough mystery. Just tell me so I can be off.” Basil looks up, his large brown eyes still locked on mine. He has a rare look of annoyance on his face, as if I’m too thickheaded to understand what he’s saying. “To see which side you take, of course.”

None of the boys answer. Most look into their laps. Some keep their eyes raised, faces masked with feigned innocence.

He looks up at the open square of darkness and sees a boy with no face staring back. Johnson flinches at the sight, momentarily terrified, before realizing it’s nothing but a damned feed sack stretched over his face. “Jesus,” he murmurs, his fear turning quickly to ire.

Johnson tries to ignore the oddness of what his peripheral vision caught on a few faces as he walked through the boys. He could have sworn he saw a few of them smiling. Not friendly smiles, either. Cunning. Cats with sealed lips, their mouths filled with canaries.

Johnson figures, based on his limited experience with such things, that Basil must have been alive when they cut him. There is too much blood for it to be otherwise. His mind conjures up images of them holding the rope tight to his neck … somehow, someway, dragging him through the front doors and into the chapel, where they stripped him, hanged him, and butchered him.

I felt like I was wearing a small part of John Hill’s history. A small part of his grief. “Don’t worry, you’ll grow into it,” John said, and knuckled my hair affectionately. Tears stung my eyes when he’d done that. It was a fatherly thing to do. A kind of affection I’ve craved my whole life, a type of love that was taken away from me by the blast of a gun and a flame-soaked cabin.

You must be fully aware of all aspects of each decision you make in this world. All sides. Only then can you be certain that the choice you make is the correct one.”

“Just be careful, Peter,” he says. “Guard your feelings like gold coins from those who would steal them, or pick them from your pocket.”

David stands, and now he feels the icy tendrils slip away, fall to the floor and shatter like shards of glass. His distant, painful memories catch fire like dry paper put to flame; they turn to ash and blow away, out of his mind.

“Quiet!” Poole’s voice is like the crack of a whip, and just like that, the room is his once more.

As Poole turns, I feel a draft of air on my face. I don’t know where it could have come from. All the windows are sealed tight. Suddenly, the dormitory doors—open as bird wings—slam shut with such violence that the metal cross leaning against the wall drops on its face with an audible clunk.

I don’t know if it’s my frayed nerves, my lack of nourishment, or my exhaustion, but as I look around the room, I see not only boys, but flitting shadows. They slip from boy to boy, dashing in and out of corners, resting in laps, on tables, over shoulders. I blink and rub my eyes. Why am I cursed with seeing things? Phantoms and prancing shadows?

The smoke is thick and black. The heat all around is so intense that it feels as if my skin is being cooked, my insides boiled.

The dormitory is dark, but the silver moonlight coming through the windows give the room a soft, hazy glow. “Bad dream?” I gasp, twist over in my bed to see Simon right next to me. Standing over my bed. He looks down at me, head cocked slightly to one side. His face is a deep shadow. An abyss.

Simon turns to the window, stares out into the night. My breath catches when I see a shadow cross his face, as if something broke the flow of moonlight through the window. Something passing by outside—quickly, silently, in the night. I want to speak, to yell in alarm, to question what I think I saw … but the words won’t come. I’m frozen. I’m terrified.

And now Andrew thinks he can smell other things, as well: the thick planks of knotted pine Johnson used to construct the box and—yes, another aroma, one that lies beneath the woody smell of pine, the mildewed rot of the tapestry—the body itself, of course. The decomposing corpse bloated with gases, the eyes sunken, the flesh cold.

A guttural, wet scream splits the air, and Andrew’s attention is drawn quickly back to Simon and Father White. Simon has thrust his knife into White’s throat. The old man’s eyes are wide as boiled eggs. Blood sprays in an arc as he twists away from Simon’s grasp and falls backward to the floor.

The inside of the barn is dark, musty, and oddly welcoming. An animal warmth. The smell of shit and hair and muscle. A good smell. A wholesome smell.

He finds the iron handle of the trapdoor and yanks it upward. A pitch-black square opens within the thick white blanket. He leans down on hands and knees, sticks his face near the opening, looks for signs of life.

I stand, shaking. Something inside of me stirs, then settles into place. As if some lost, inner piece of me, floating through the ether of my mind all these years, has only now found its destination. Locked into place like a final puzzle piece.

Bartholomew takes a step forward, and Johnson—inexplicably—fights off the urge to take a step back. Something’s wrong with him. Something is very off about this boy.

Here, in the dark beneath the earth, Johnson is stunned to realize he’s frightened of the child. He feels it in his bones, in his guts. Pure, naked terror. What’s wrong with me?

Bartholomew drops the hammer at Ben’s feet. “I’m going to give each of you the same choice. Ben here, if he chooses, can pick up this hammer and beat your skull with it. Beat it against your thick head until it’s nothing but broken bone and red mush. Like William’s was, now that I think about it. And here’s the kicker … Brother Johnson,

are you listening? Believe me when I say this: You won’t lift a hand to stop him. You’ll sit right where you’re sitting now, and you’ll take it. You’ll feel every blow, hear every crunch of breaking bone as your vision grows dim and blood pumps out your ears and nose, and then you will hear the beating of your heart slowing, slowing, until you slump over … and die.”

The voices above hoot and laugh. Sticks and feet clamor against the wood through the snow. The sound grows—more insistent, faster, louder. The chaotic rhythm fills the hole, clouds Johnson’s mind.

The insects crawl through his mind, his ears, his nose, his mouth. They scream their song, buzzing louder, louder. A deafening, pulsing chaos.

With a quick movement, Johnson grabs the boy’s head between his strong hands. He pulls his body toward him with a hard, decisive jerk. Ben screams, but Johnson can’t hear it. Can’t hear the begging and the tears. Can’t feel shame or remorse or guilt or indecision.

“Brother Johnson…” Bartholomew says. An order. He knows what he must do. The instructions come to him from the flies. They are as clear and commanding as the voice of God.

he badly wants to stay inside this dark place forever because it feels safe, like a mother’s womb, like a lover’s embrace.

Curious, Johnson raises his hands to gently feel his new face. Whatever damage was done, it does not hurt. Instead, it tingles, as if there is an enormous amount of pain waiting for him, waiting to be released, just on the other side of some thin neural membrane currently blocking it from his mind. A membrane he knows (somehow, deep inside, he knows) could easily be popped. Removed.

Moaning, he frantically moves his hands higher. Groping now. He touches his eyes. The one he can open feels normal, unobstructed. Working. The other is gone. A hollow of gnarled flesh. A lump of gristle. He moans louder, his tongue thick and useless in his mouth.

And now his face changes, becomes misshapen. The eyes bulge and leak. The lips flake away and his teeth grimace and shine. His body shivers as the tissue falls away from the bones on his hands. I see pale skull where a patch of skin has rubbed away.

“I am, with the help of God,” I say, and feel something shift inside me. A rush of strength flows through my body, coursing from my heart to my limbs. A growing warmth that clears my mind like an elixir.

Bartholomew turns back, and when I see his face I know once more that I am right. That is no child’s face, no young boy’s expression. It is not the visage of Bartholomew I see in the dim, winking orange light, but a wrinkled mass of black flesh with deep-set red eyes, a mouth filled with too many teeth.

And that word … priest … it cuts through the swarm, like a sword slashing through mist. It’s there, then gone.