The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron by Ross E. Lockhart, Justin Steele Page A

sobbing. Then he suddenly let me fall onto my bed and left the room, chuckling to himself. That was how he paid me back for “fuck you! fuck you!”
    “You could kill him, you know,” my mother would say to him sometimes. He liked pouncing on me, whipping me off my feet and hurling me all around the room with sudden barks and cries that made him sound like he’d gone wild. Then he’d right me and put me down on my two feet and go on about his business. Whistling. He didn’t really whistle, but it was like that, nonchalant. When my mother complained, he would chuckle. But once I overheard him say, raising his voice and laughing through his words:
    “I know, I know… we need him, I haven’t forgotten…”
    I wasn’t supposed to hear that, or to know that my parents had some special reason to keep me alive—a reason that I sensed at once had nothing to do with nurturing feelings. I knew, too, that there were unusual practices in my family, and things taken for granted that were anything but in the families of the other children I knew. It did not take me a great while to learn that I could not speak freely about what went on at home. My parents never told me to keep any secrets, although more than once, come to think of it, my mother did ask me if the other kids were curious about us. We lived far enough away, though, on the other side and beneath the hills, so that it was taken for granted we would be different. Hicky hillbillies.
    Dad was not a squeamish man. He took to hunting, in particular, with gusto, and he loved cleaning fish or the carcass of a bigger animal, liked flicking blood on us for a laugh. He was always up to his elbows in some carcass and the house stank like a butcher shop. He taunted me and frightened me out of my wits when he could, but he never struck me. A man like that and he never struck me once. Something restrained him, and it wasn’t love.
    His only friend was his cousin, Tyler. Tyler’s son Amos was a little ahead of me in age, and we played together whenever Tyler came over. I got the feeling that Amos did not always want to come with Tyler, that he was brought along to keep me distracted, and perhaps to keep him out of something too. Tyler had a locked room, too, but Amos was handier than I was.
    During these visits, Tyler would vanish with Dad behind the door to the room and I would hear the snap an instant after it was drawn to, which meant they were locked in together. An ear to the door—nothing. Silence. No window to peek through. I asked Amos if Tyler ever hit him. He said no, never.
    “Not ever?”
    “No,” he said. Wonderingly.
    “Dad never hits me either.”
    “Huh.”
    “He grabs me and throws me around the room, up in the air.”
    “You mean he swings you around?”
    I nod.
    “Mine does that to me,” Amos told me.
    At the time I supposed it was family taboo. Tyler had never said anything in Amos’ hearing about needing him for anything.
    After I killed Dad, then, away we—
    That sound again. The motor. Up and then down. Only the one road. They back already? How long has it been?
    “Michael,” the voice says behind me. “Learn to kill.”
    I turn. Nothing. Violent pain in my back. There is nothing behind me but the outer wall of the house. A window, though. Coming on to dusk outside. Wind. Just now starting. It rustles up and dies away.
    All quiet again. No sound but me, the creaks of the chair as I return to my position, facing the door. Stephanie and Brian aren’t back yet, but they will be back soon. When they come back, it will be them or me. I don’t know how I know, but I know. Today.
    A brief flurry of nausea. Must have been the turning. A rib scraping something, squeezing. And there’s a pain in my back, too. Incipient cramp.
    No sound at all. Only the breath in my nostrils, and tinnitus. Big nostrils. Dad’s were huge and stiff in his coffin. They take the brain out through the nostrils, and shellac them. No motor. Nothing.
    He hated me enough.