Page 76 of Backwoods
Nick slowed his pace, his feet suddenly feeling as if they were cast in lead. He didn’t want to find out why Grandpa Lee had crossed over the bridge and come to the Overseer’s house. Grandpa Lee was supposed to be home, locked in for the night. He didn’t belong here.
All of us bear the curse . . .
Despite his dread, Nick’s feet carried him forward. Crossing the yard, he walked past his grandfather’s truck. A tarp covered the flatbed, something that hadn’t been there earlier when they’d driven the pickup . . . but Nick averted his gaze from the vehicle, unwilling to consider what his granddad’s presence here meant to him, meant to everything.
To set them free, you have to kill him . . .
The porch’s floorboards were firm under his feet, though he felt as if he might collapse at any moment. He dropped his hand on the doorknob.
He turned it, pushed open the door.
The Overseer stood across the room, in front of a flickering hearth. He looked over his shoulder at Nick.
“Welcome home, son,” his grandfather said.
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Nick stepped inside the house slowly, as if caught in a fever dream. He carefully shut the door behind him.
He didn’t trust himself to speak without screaming, so he said nothing.
The interior of the house had been reinvented, but it contained few furnishings. A dresser with a mirror, table, a bed that looked as if it had never been used. The only light in the room issued from the flames dancing in the fireplace; two chairs flanked the hearth.
Grandpa Lee wore the Overseer’s complete set of clothes: the brown Stetson hat, black pea jacket, and dusty leather boots. The clothing fit as if it had been tailored to his measurements. Perhaps it had, yet another aspect of the malicious magic at work in this place.
“I knew you’d come soon,” Grandpa Lee said. He turned back to the fire, knelt in front of it. He manipulated some sort of tool that he had placed in the flames. Nick shuffled forward, hesitant, and saw that it was exactly what he had feared.
The branding iron.
Nick finally spoke.
“It’s been you, all this time?” he asked.
“It’s beenus,” Grandpa Lee said. “Before me, my father. For me, it goes all the way back to Great-Great-Great Granddaddy John. John was the first who actually served at Westbrook—the Overseer. He took the devil’s bargain and cursed us all.”
Upon entering the room, Nick had felt dizzy. But the vertigo had faded, replaced by a sharp sense of horrifying clarity.
Hadn’t he always known, in his heart, that his grandfather was at the root of what was going on? The bizarre behavior as nightfall approached, the staunch refusal to ever consider selling the property, or to even allow outsiders onto the land? All of it had been evidence of the deepest of secrets that Granddad had been keeping for so many years.
“You knew it, son,” Grandpa Lee said. “It’s written in your eyes.”
“You come over here, every night,” Nick said. “To put on these old clothes and terrify the prisoners you’re keeping here.”
“They deserve . . .punishment,” Grandpa Lee said, his voice dropping several octaves. His eyes growing unfocused as if he had slipped into a trance, he moved his hand to the whip holstered like a handgun on the waist of his jacket. “Split open the skin on their backs and let the blood flow with their tears. Pain is the best teacher; it instills discipline.”
“Grandpa Lee? That’s not what you believe; that’s not who you are.”
Hearing his name uttered reeled him back. He blinked, shuddered, eased into a chair near the fire.
Nick sat in the wooden chair on the other side of the fireplace. Grandpa Lee gazed into the dancing flames. The business end of the branding iron, resting in the rippling lip of the fire, glowed orange.
“You’ve got to let them go,” Nick said. “Set them free, and set yourself free, Grandpa. Leave this place for good.”
“Sell it to the corporate masters and watch them tear down the trees and build monuments to the new gods of capitalism?” Grandpa Lee chuckled, and his gaze narrowed. “Have you learned nothing here today, son?”
“There are people here, suffering. You have the power to let them go.”
“They’ve got the mark,” Grandpa Lee said, nodding toward the simmering branding iron. “That tool, most of all . . . that’s where the power resides. Enchanted by the ancient entities who feasted on our pain, channeling their magic.”
