Lower Voices

Lower Voices

A Hallowe’en Tale

by S.K. Orr

There it came again. Soft, but intentional, like a breath exhaled with measured force, or a hand across the painted wood of the clapboards at the back door.

She paused at the stove, the spoon motionless in the stew like an oar in calm water, opening her mouth slightly so that she could hear better.

Whissss.

Her head came around with as much slow and deliberate control as she could manage. Through the window, she could see the early evening woods marching up the hill towards the eastern pasture, and some sort of bird flitting from branch to branch in the bare brown bones of the nearest wild cherry’s leafless branches. She stood still for a long minute, controlling her breath and staring into the center of the pane so as to use her peripheral vision. A slight breeze, and some of the branches were moving in their waving way. But nothing else. No sound. Nothing.

But as soon as she turned back to the pot on the stove, it came once more. Whissss. Then stillness.

She refused to look back at the window again, and put the spoon on the rest and wiped her hands on her jeans. She followed the spill of light on the floorboards into the living room.

He was sitting there, eyes closed, listening to the whisper-quiet television. He opened his eyes when he heard her enter the room and he smiled, shrugging. Then he saw her face and stopped smiling.

“What’s the matter?”

She lifted her hands, palms towards the ceiling. “I heard that noise again.”

“Just like before?”

She nodded. “I’m going to go have a look around. I’m worried something might be after the sheep. Or even the goat.”

He made motions as if to arise, and she waved at him in refusal. “No, your feet are bothering you. I can tell they’re really hurting. I’ll go. I won’t be long,” she said.

He shook his head in dismay. “I swear, they feel like they’re splitting in half. Never hurt this bad before.” He paused, watching the indecision in her face.  “Take a pistol with you, at least. Maybe the shotgun’d be better.”

She crossed the room to him but stopped a few feet away as if she’d reached the end of a tether. “There. There it was again. Did you hear it?”

He inclined his head, listening, and opened his mouth just a bit, as she had done at the stove. Several seconds, then he shook his head and raised his eyebrows in apology. “No, I didn’t hear anything.”

She went to him and kissed his forehead and placed his phone within a few inches of his veined hand. “I’ve got my phone with me. Call me if you hear anything weird. I’ll call you if I run into trouble. If something’s after the livestock, you might have to call Trey Don.”

He reached for her hand and caressed it for a moment, then nodded at her. “Might be time for him to earn his pay, since we helped elect him. Be watchful, little girl.”

She shook her silver curls at him and grinned. “Always am.”

At the back door, she shrugged into a jacket and picked up the flashlight and started to grab the knob, but she stopped, listening. Listening. Nothing. Then she remembered and turned to the table by the door. Pistol or shotgun? She didn’t fancy the idea of toting the heavy shotgun up through the woods, trying to maintain her balance on the rocky, uneven ground, so she checked the magazine in the pistol, jacked a round into the chamber, took the safety off, and eased the  hammer to half-cock. She pocketed the pistol, checked the flashlight’s strength, and opened the door.

As soon as she closed the door behind her, she heard it again. It wasn’t coming from the porch, or the back yard. The sound had filtered down, soft but strong, from the woods, right where she was heading. A minute to reconsider. She tapped the phone in her hip pocket to reassure herself, then stepped off the porch and headed to the fence. Beyond the gate stretched an acre of woods between her and the pasture. The gate gave its metallic hiss as it swung on the hinges, and she stepped through.

A few yards up the incline, she stopped and listened, but there was no sound except the breeze high in the tops of the pine and the poplars. She moved on, aware of the slap of her boots on the wet leaves. Every few yards she paused and listened, but the sound did not come again. Up ahead, the light was dying as the cloud-covered sun went to its place of rest, and the way grew dim for her. She came to a hard stop as she saw an oak sapling dressed with flames of red leaves. There looked to be a man, or some sort of figure, standing slightly to the left of it. She put her hand in her pocket, the cold pressure of the pistol a comfort to her. She closed her eyes, drew a breath, and looked again. Whatever it was was still there, but it was motionless. Keeping her eyes fixed to the left of the tree, she made her way up the slope.

When she was twenty feet from the tree, she stopped again and allowed herself a silent laugh. The figure had apparently been made by a convergence of limbs and a dead trunk near the oak, and it had vanished when she neared it. Whoo-ee, she thought. Boogeymen all over the place tonight. She moved on.

Reaching the fence at the top of the incline, she could see the sheep two hundred yards from her. The muddy goat was just a few yards in front of her, and he lifted his horned head to look at her, his jaw moving in its elliptical orbit, the beard waving in the near-dark.  The gate was about fifty yards down to the left, and she decided to simply climb the woven-wire fence instead of walking all the way down there. She was almost over the fence when her jacket caught one of the wire knots and stopped her progress. Muttering under her breath, she yanked and pulled to free herself, and she didn’t hear her pistol fall from her pocket onto the ground onto the soft cushion of wet leaves and pine straw.

On the other side of the fence, she scanned the flock and made her count. All of ’em there. She was just about to walk out a bit father when the sound rushed up at her, much louder now.

Whissss.

It had come from where the goat was standing. She walked towards him, flicking on the flashlight at the murky last moment when dusk becomes night. “Hey, ol’ Mordecai,” she said in a soft voice.

Whissss.

She stopped, her boot heels digging into the damp earth. That sound had definitely come out of the goat’s mouth; she had been looking right at him when she heard it, and his jaw had dropped and she had been staring right at him. Her first thought was that there must be something wrong with him. Gas? Lungworm? Didn’t Freddy over at the feed store say something about someone’s goats having lungworm last month? She approached the goat, holding her breath against the powerful smell she knew would flood her nostrils. She grasped Mordecai’s beard and lifted his chin, peering closely into his face. The queer horizontal pupils always unsettled her, and the goat’s eyes, held in the battery beam of the flashlight, were fixed on hers, and his jaw continued to rotate even in her grip.

“You feeling poorly, old boy?”

The goat stared at her, then shook his head hard enough to loosen her grip on the scraggly hairs under his chin. She released his beard and ran her hand along his neck. The goat looked again up into her face and then reared up on his hind legs and stood, still as a fence post, hooves pointed at her, looking directly into her face. She stepped back, almost losing her balance. Old Mordecai opened his mouth, his square lower teeth a dull glow in the flashlight’s beam, and said to her in a low, gravelly voice, “Do you know him?”

Her heart almost exploded in her chest, and she fell to the ground. The goat began walking towards her on his hind feet, his movements smooth and natural, not like an animal trained to do a trick, but like a hidden and well-practiced talent being displayed for the pleasure of it. She scrambled to rise before he got to her, her hand plowing in her pocket for the pistol, her heart hammering in her throat as she realized that it wasn’t there. She rolled to the left and tore her wrist open on a plate-sized rock sticking halfway out of the ground. Digging her knees into the ground, she managed to get one boot under her and stood up, dropping the flashlight, and when she turned to face the goat, he was a mere six feet from her. He wheezed out at her again.

Whissss. “Do you know him?” asked the goat, his voice low and grinding, cold as a new moon’s black presence.

She screamed then, more to try scaring the goat than to give rein to her own terror, and she turned for the fence and began running.

But after just a few step, she saw what looked like the mellow glow of her husband’s plaid shirt just on the other side of the fence.  Even at light’s end, she could see his eyes. What –?

She heard the goat right behind her, and felt its hoof fall hard onto her shoulder, and she heard a voice in front of her, a voice from her husband’s shirted shape, and it whispered, “Why don’t you answer him?” and then the night became full and deep and unknowable.

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