Page 36 of Together We Rot

Lucas shakes his head. “The guy’s got to have something on him.” He whips out his phone. “Here, I’ll google it. Can you spell the name for me?”

I clear my throat. “A-L-D-E-R-W-O-O-D.”

He mumbles back the letters, his fingers moving overtime on the keyboard. He scrolls through the length of the page with his thumb. “You don’t happen to have a year or something I can add, do you?”

I offer it up to him and listen to the four resounding clicks of his nail against the screen.

He groans. “No dice here either. I’m checking this graveyard site. This thing’s got grave photos and death records and all that stuff. I can’t seem to get a hit. No obituary, no nothing.” I shake my head. “He was my father’s older brother. There should be records of him somewhere. I’m sure there’s medical or hospital records at least. There’s got to be something.”

I’m hyperconscious as Wil looms over my shoulder. “Could it be another set of pages ripped out?”

“Doubt it,” Kevin offers. “It only seems like there’s two parts torn and neither line up with the death records at all. Here, let me show you.”

He flips through the ledger again and leads us to the other missing passages. I hadn’t noticed them on my own, but he’s right. There’s a handful of rips toward the beginning of the book, pages upon pages lost.

The surrounding passages deviate from the stiff historical retellings and note keeping.

They’re Old Testament in nature, one long, unforgiving scripture. “Well, what’s it say?” Wil demands.

Kevin clears his throat, his fingers going white under his intense grip. “When thy God calls for blood”—his words break, the confidence sapping the further he reads—“thou shall offer your sons unto him. The blood shall water thy crops and the bones shall nourish the earth. For with life there is death, but with sacrifice there is eternity.”

I stiffen to my very bones. I’m a caterpillar helpless to my father’s parasitic prayer. His words lay their eggs under my skin and devour me from the inside out. He read my death sentence aloud and I smiled.

I smiled.

Lucas’s face goes ashen. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means Wil was right. I’m nothing but fertilizer. They knew this from the day I was born. My mother marked me the moment I came out of the womb. They’re going to sacrifice me.” I stagger away from the book and the horrible truth inside. “And Prudence’s child is next.”

How many people have died? How would they have done it? Would they have woken me early and dragged me into the trees kicking and screaming? Or would they have taken mercy on me and laced my food with poison and let me die in my sleep?

No, mercy isn’t something this town knows.

“Whoa, buddy, we don’t know that for sure,” Lucas tries, but he wasn’t there in church with me. My father’s hand didn’t rest on his shoulder and Sheriff Vrees didn’t threaten to lock him in a cell. “What reason do they even have to kill you? To kill anyone?”

Kevin coughs. “I mean, we never read what they ‘had’ to do to survive. All of this probably stems from whatever sick thing they did in the past.”

I fall to my knees and bury my face beneath trembling fingers. The dark thoughts have returned. There’s no pushing away from them now. Images flash on a loop in my skull. Different ways my father will find me, my mother holding me down as my father drags the knife.

What’s another scar when the alternative is bound wrists and a cutting blade in my ribs? The ground pulses alongside my heart. So loud, it’s all I hear. They’re speaking, all of them, lurching up from their seats as the ground quivers. But I don’t hear them.

Ba-dump. Ba-dump. Ba-dump. The noise flares through me like a second heartbeat, a creature living and breathing just beneath the skin.

“Elwood!” Wil shouts, and the sound of my name is enough to send me spiraling further. “Get it together. You’re not dying on my watch. On any of our watches.”

Lucas is frantically shaking his head. “Elwood—This isn’t—None of this makes sense.” He’s taken to pacing. “Wil has hated your family from the start, and Kevin—y’know I love you to death, man, but you’re the biggest conspiracy theorist I know. Your dad mowed the lawn weird one time and you thought it was a crop circle. I know you’re all eager to believe this, but are we all forgetting how far-fetched it is? The Bible is filled with batshit sayings like that.” He grips the ledger for himself and taps on the photo beside it.

It’s a black-and-white newspaper clipping of the Pine Point Lumber Mill. There’s a factory’s worth of men standing dutifully outside of the building.

“You know the saying: blood, sweat, and tears and all that. That passage could mean a million other things and we’re all here freaking ourselves out in this spooky basement.” He wets his lips. “I’m sorry. Things like this don’t happen in Pine Point. It’s weird, but...”

“Typical,” Veronica says. “You always turn a blind eye to things you’re too scared to face.”

“Is that what you think?” He grits his teeth. “Fine. It’s weird, okay? All of this is weird, but I don’t want to incriminate a whole church due to superstition and hearsay. Your own mother goes there, Veronica! In case you forgot.” That last line has him squinting in her direction. “Elwood, if you’re really worried, we need to do the sensible thing and take this to the cops.”

Wil scoffs. “Oh, good old Vrees. I’m sorry, did you forget that he’s in on it? We’re on our own on this one.”

Lucas looks ready to throw a barb back at her, but Kevin clears his throat. “Do you have any idea where a ripped page could be, Elwood?”

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