The Captive Condition by Kevin P. Keating

coworkers might be lurking nearby. They needn’t have worried. The men of the Bloated Tick had no use for books. Many of them were functionally illiterate and signed their names with pentacles and hexagrams and occult crosses meant to signify their belief in the world’s end.
    “One thing’s for sure,” they told me. “The Gonk bought that cottage in the woods for a reason. And he reads them books for a reason, too.”
    But what this reason may have been the men did not know and would not hazard to guess, nor did they attempt to interpret the strange things he mumbled as he drew up his plans. They simply accepted the fact that they would never know anything more than what the Gonk wanted them to know.
    —
    During that interminable summer the ticks butchered and burned the grass, cutting it too short and spilling big bags of fertilizer on the quad so the campus resembled a barren wasteland with an occasional oasis of dogwoods and sycamores instead of cactuses and tumbleweeds. The Gonk did not always pardon their brainless behavior, but in his more generous moods, whenever he had the rare desire for camaraderie, he invited the men back to the cottage to play poker at a makeshift table of particleboard and sawhorses and to sample the moonshine he made in the antiquated still that hissed and rumbled in the stone cellar.
    The still came with the cottage, part of the deal when he purchased the place from Colette Collins. In his estimation the old woman was an indisputable genius and the still her bona fide masterpiece. Sequestered for decades in that vaulted cave, scrupulously avoiding contact with humanity, never seeking recognition, waiting for the black hour of death to arrive, Colette Collins built the enormous still from durable pieces of fine copper and pliable tin. Using only a clawhammer and tongs and her prescient inner eye, she moved nimbly around the still and crafted a series of well-wrought scenes on the boiler walls. Below the vapor cone, circling the uppermost portion of the still like an elaborate garland, she fashioned a deep shaded valley, a powerful girdling river, a vast churning lake, a lonesome village and its unruly multitude. There was a funeral and an epic conflagration and a sailboat tossed asunder by heavy seas. On one side of the boiler a young woman hid in the hayloft of an abandoned barn; on another an immense ship awaited rescue, its mighty hull trapped in a frozen lake under a sky crowded with constellations.
    “The boneyard comes with the cottage, too,” said the old woman.
    It was a warm day in early June when she handed over the keys, the sky an intense and burning blue, and she gazed wistfully at the crumbling monuments in the adjacent cemetery. Despite the decayed grandeur of her exterior, Colette Collins seemed as old-school tough as the Gonk.
    “There isn’t much in the way of maintenance, if that worries you,” she said. “Mow the grass before it gets completely out of hand and spray the weeds. Put the headstones back in place whenever a storm blows through the valley or if a pack of those frat boys comes loping down the road late at night. They always scatter after I fire a warning shot from my Winchester, but I find I can’t keep up with their nonsense anymore.”
    Between small sips of grain alcohol from a mason jar and two quick drags on a cigarette already reduced to a wobbling pillar of ash, she assured the Gonk he had no obligation to provide guided tours should anyone show up unannounced, not that he would have to worry too much about unexpected visitors since the covered bridge spanning the river had been washed away in a flash flood in spring so now there was no direct connection with the main highway except the narrow road that snaked through woods and fields until it reached the cottage of unmortared stone sitting atop a low hill silent and inviolable like an ancient oracle awaiting a wizened seer to read the signs and make grim pronouncements.
    “In the fall,” she