Deviant (7 page)

7

BETH SCOTT and MICHAEL NORMAN,
Haunted Heartland

“
The bond between a mother and her child is often beyond comprehension—a slight, unexpected stirring from the baby’s nursery can awaken her from deepest slumber, an almost sixth sense warns of imminent danger to her little one. But does the sense of peril end at what is taken by most to be death? Or can a mother commune with her child even as she lies in the grave
?”

I
t is early evening on a drizzly fall day, several years after the death of Augusta Gein. Her bachelor son, now in his mid-forties, has just returned home, having spent the afternoon performing an errand for his neighbors, Lester and Irene Hill, proprietors of a tiny country store in West Plainfield. The Hills purchase their provisions from a warehouse in Wisconsin Rapids, twenty-some miles from Plainfield, and Eddie, having very little else to do with his time, often volunteers to make the trip into the city when the Hills are too busy to pick up their supplies.

A cold gust of wind blows the rain across Eddie’s stubbled face as he moves across the sagging rear porch of his house, the warped, weatherworn boards creaking under his feet. He pushes open the door into the dank and lightless summer kitchen, letting his watery blue eyes grow accustomed to the dark. He listens for a moment to the mice as they scurry for the corners. Above his head, cobwebs tremble in the blackness between the ceiling and rafters. Nothing else in this place stirs. Apart from the rodents and spiders, Eddie is alone.

Moving carefully across the trash-littered floor—around decaying cartons of household junk, piles of moldering feed sacks, a couple of rank, mildewed mattresses—he steps to the heavy wooden door on the opposite wall of the shed, enters his kitchen, and puts a match to the oil lamp on the table. The lamp flickers to life beneath the kitchen window, clearly visible behind a curtain so motheaten and tattered that it is nearly transparent. Eddie gazes at the windowpanes, but the glass is coated with such a thick layer of grime that it gives back no reflection.

It is cold in the house, and Eddie keeps on his plaid flannel jacket and deerhunter’s cap as he prepares his evening meal. Throwing a few sticks of wood into his ancient cookstove, he gets a small fire going, just big enough to warm up his usual pork-and-beans supper. There’s no need for a pot. Eddie just takes an opener to the lid, then set the can right on the stovetop.

Reaching into his mouth, he removes the moist lump of Wrigley’s he has been chewing and carefully adds it to his gum collection, which he hoards in a one-pound Maxwell House coffee tin on a shelf, along with his other dustcoated treasures. A gas mask. A bunch of used medicine bottles. Three old radios (still workable, though of limited use in a house with no electricity). A boxful of plastic whistles, toy airplanes, and other breakfast-cereal premiums. A decomposing sponge rubber ball. Two sets of yellowed dentures. A wash basin full of sand. His special handmade bowls.

Eddie sticks a finger into the beans and, satisfied with their temperature, empties them into one of the bowls. He rummages through the jumble of unwashed utensils in his sink and comes up with a spoon. Then, carrying the spoon and bowl in one hand and his oil lamp in the other, he makes his way out of the kitchen.

The floor is so crowded with filth and debris—food scraps, rodent droppings, grimy rags, empty food cans and oatmeal containers, cardboard boxes overflowing with crime magazines, a half-empty sack of plaster, a stiffened horsehide buggy robe—that, even in the daytime, Eddie cannot negotiate it easily. Now, in the dim circle of light shed by his oil lamp, he cannot avoid stepping into an ash pile or knocking his shins against a rusted metal tub filled with bits of twine, tattered children’s clothes, and shards of broken china.

As he traverses the kitchen, his shadow slides across the items he has tacked onto one of the dingy, flaking walls. A dozen promotional calendars, a few dating back to the 1930s. An automobile reflector disk inscribed “Accidents Spoil Fun.” A card from the telephone company reading “In Case of Fire, Call 505.” (Eddie does not own a telephone.)

Then, passing beneath a pair of deer antlers, a rusty horseshoe, and a withered Christmas wreath, all mounted over the doorway and dripping with cobwebs, he steps inside his bedroom.

It is the only other room in the house that Eddie ever enters. Beyond it lies the Sacred Place, boarded off by Eddie years before. The second story is visited only by an occasional squirrel scuttling down through the chimney.

Eddie sets his oil lamp and handmade bowl on a wooden crate. Because its underside is so irregular (Eddie has tried to file down some of the bumps, but with limited success), the bowl threatens to tip over, and Eddie takes a moment to balance it on the crate top. Then, picking up a few sticks of kindling from the floor, he starts a fire in the potbellied stove near his bed.

The room is, if possible, even more squalid than the kitchen, a chaos of discarded food tins, empty cartons, crumpled newspapers, corroded hand tools, old musical instruments (including a broken accordion and a violin without strings), and a three-foot stack of tattered coveralls. A clothesline hung with soiled handkerchiefs is strung above Eddie’s iron bedstead. Amid the insane clutter and filth, the only objects that seem to have been treated with care are Eddie’s firearms: two .22-caliber rifles, a .22 pistol, a 7.65-millimeter Mauser, and a 12-gauge shotgun.

Outside, the rain has stopped falling, but—though a full moon has emerged from behind the clouds—no light enters the room. Its two windows have been tar-papered shut.

Seating himself on his sagging, grease-stained mattress, Eddie sifts through the pile of books and periodicals at his feet and selects his reading matter for the evening: a pulp magazine called
Man’s Action
, with a lurid cover painting of an impossibly big-breasted blonde, outfitted in a Gestapo uniform and applying a riding crop to the naked back of a writhing concentration-camp prisoner. Then, picking up his food, he takes a mouthful of the viscous mixture, opens the magazine on his lap, and begins to read.

Lately, he has been studying accounts of Nazi barbarities, and tonight, as he spoons down his supper, he pores over a story that relates, in loving detail, the atrocities committed by Ilse Koch, the infamous “Bitch of Buchenwald,” accused of collecting human heads and using the tattooed skin of her victims for lampshades and book bindings. He also likes reading about the deeds of Irma Grese, the angelic-looking nineteen-year-old SS warder who wore a sky-blue jacket that matched the color of her eyes, kept a horse whip stuck in one of her jackboots, and performed her primary duty—selecting enfeebled women and children for extermination at the Auschwitz and Belsen death camps—with uncommon zeal and enjoyment.

Eddie’s tastes, of course, aren’t limited to Nazi horror stories. He has a special fondness for South Seas adventure yarns, particularly ones concerning cannibals and headhunters. Only recently, he came across a supposedly true-life narrative that he can’t seem to get out of his mind. It concerned a man who murdered a wealthy acquaintance and escaped on his yacht, only to be shipwrecked on a Polynesian isle, where he was captured, tortured, and flayed by the natives. Of particular interest to Eddie was the graphic description of the process used to shrink and preserve the victim’s head, though he also enjoyed the part about the drum that had been fashioned by stretching the skin of the dead man’s abdomen across a hollow gourd.

Stories about exhumations are also among Eddie’s favorites. He has read everything he can get his hands on about the English “resurrection men,” or “body snatchers,” who peddled corpses to nineteenth-century anatomy schools. Another story set in nineteenth-century Britain, about a club of depraved young aristocrats who dug up corpses of beautiful young women and put them to unspeakable uses, has left an equally lasting mark on Eddie’s fantasy life.

Lately, Eddie’s imagination has been fired by an astounding tale unfolding in papers and newsweeklies across the nation. And ex-GI—a good-looking young man from New York City—has traveled to Denmark and undergone an operation that has transformed him into a woman. Eddie is fascinated by this story. Since childhood, he has often daydreamed about becoming a girl and imagined what it would feel like to have female sex parts instead of a penis. For a very long time, of course, his concept of female sex parts was exceptionally imprecise, based entirely on a crude illustration of human reproductive organs in a medical textbook he bought in Wisconsin Rapids. Recently, however, he has been able to study the private parts of several women firsthand. The expression on his face is a perfect mixture of lewdness and contentment as he thinks of these wonderfully intimate and exciting experiences.

When Eddie can’t find an interesting magazine article about cannibalism, grave robbing, Nazi war crimes, or sexual mutilation, he relies for entertainment on the local newspapers—particularly the
Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune
and the
Plainfield Sun
—searching their pages for stories about killings, car accidents, suicides, or unexplained disappearances.

And there is one other kind of news item he examines with great care and gratification.

He always makes sure to read—and, in certain cases, to tear out and save—the obituaries.

Having scraped the last of the pork and beans from the inside of his bowl, Eddie drops his magazine onto the floor and gazes up at his Trophies dangling from the opposite wall. Their presence comforts him a bit. Still, he feels very lonely tonight. He misses his mother.

He closes his eyes and listens for her. On several occasions since her death, he has heard her voice, quite clearly, telling him to be good. But tonight, he hears only the rattle of the branches in the wind and the mice scuttling across his kitchen floor.

Life in Plainfield has been painfully empty for Eddie since his mother was taken from him. He feels angry and resentful toward his neighbors, who repay his kindness with cruelty and deceit—teasing him, cheating him of his wages, borrowing equipment from him and never giving it back. True, there are exceptions. Some of the womenfolk in particular—like Irene Hill—treat him nicely from time to time, offering him a meal, letting him sit for a while in the living room with the family and watch Red Skelton on TV. But for the most part, Eddie feels friendless and bitterly alone.

Indeed, for a while after his mother’s death, he gave serious thought to selling the farmstead and getting as far away as possible. He no longer had any desire to work the place. He thought he would let it reforest itself, get whatever money he could for it, and move to a different part of the country, maybe even a different part of the world. But, in the end, he did not have the energy or the will to do anything.

Nothing has seemed real to him since she went away. He often feels as if he is living in a dream.

He has, in fact, had a number of strange experiences over the past few years—seen, heard, and even smelled such peculiar things that he sometimes thinks he is imagining them. Like the time last spring when he was squirrel hunting on his property. He suddenly had the strongest sensation that someone—or something—was watching him, and when he looked up at the trees, all the leaves were gone, and hunched on every branch was a black, slack-necked buzzard that glared at him with blood-red eyes.

Another time, as he was walking through a field, he glanced down at a pile of yellow leaves and saw a bunch of human faces peeking through it. They grinned at him evilly, and as he turned and ran away, he could hear their mocking laughter.

And then there is the miasma that rises from the ground and fills Eddie’s nostrils with a dizzying stench.

Eddie lies absolutely still and tries to visualize his mother’s face. For some reason, he can’t remember how she looked when she was younger. Whenever he thinks of her now, he pictures her as he saw her last, in her coffin.

For a long time, he was convinced that he could get her back, that his willpower was strong enough to raise her from the grave. On several nights, when the rest of the world was sleeping, he even drove out to the Plainfield cemetery and attempted it. But his efforts were not successful.

There are the others, of course—the women who have become such an important part of his life. But they are a poor substitute for his mother.

Stretched out on his shabby, unmade mattress, he knows what is coming. When it hits him, his whole body begins to tremble, and he has trouble catching his breath.

He bolts from his bed and hurries from the farmhouse.

Outside, the rain has left a clean, almost springlike aroma in the air. But that is not what Eddie smells.

By now, he can barely control himself, so powerful is his craving. Clearly, it has been too long since he last made a visit.

Small Midwestern towns are not renowned for their night life, but Eddie knows at least three places nearby where the women are always waiting and available.