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

Why didn’t he beat me? Why didn’t Tyler beat Amos? He struck his wife. Amos told me. Dad hit Mom. They weren’t peaceful men.
    After I killed Dad, away we went, Mom and I, then Angela, and so on. They did not quite fight over me like two people who wanted nothing more to do with each other. They fought over me like two people who were going to have to go on with each other. I noticed that. They obviously despised each other, but something bigger made them set hate aside.
    It was all very mysterious, but not interesting. Amos and I attended the same miserable high school, and wasted our time with the same pack of beer-mad wretches, beer conspirators, brigands of the cheapest, the very worst liquor imaginable. The day came when, drunk, Amos was challenged, on pain of ritual thrashing, to shoot a can out of another boy’s hand with a rifle. We had always been forbidden even to touch a gun. Dad kept his guns locked up like art treasures, and so did Tyler. I couldn’t have picked my father’s rifle out of a group of three, I saw so little of it.
    Amos was given three chances and missed each time, somehow managing not to hit the boy who gingerly held out the can. As punishment, he would have to hold the can for someone else to shoot at. An older boy, a good shot and a bit less drunk, took the shots, but Amos couldn’t help himself. He flinched and winced, kept drawing the can back in again with a look of abject defeat on his face.
    The boy who would administer the whipping was a wet-lipped pale fellow named Curtis. He always wore a heavy belt, and now he slipped it loose and began assailing Amos with it, chasing him around, smacking at him. Amos ran off and hid. Curtis went after him. When I next saw them, Amos had Curtis up against a wall in the shadows and was ramming his fists into Curtis’ stomach as regular as pistons and with such force that Curtis bounced against the wall. The bigger boys tried to pull Amos away—couldn’t budge him. His face was dead calm, it was a corpse’s face. Those punches struck, one, and again, and again, regular. Regular. Punching. Curtis rebounding from the wall. Sagging over the fist.
    Amos stopped of his own accord. Curtis collapsed. The blows had been all that held him up. Blood poured from his nose and mouth in a steady stream. We all watched. Curtis was dead. Amos looked down at him, grey and calm. Then he turned away.
    Amos told me what had happened, years later. He was out—how? Parole?
    Curtis had found him in the cabin and started drubbing him with the belt. Amos, smarting and confused, could only ball himself up and wait for it to be over. He said it was awful, not because it hurt, but because he had no idea what to do.
    I saw a flame, he said.
    I went numb, he said.
    I felt nothing. I knew he was still hitting because I swayed, but I couldn’t feel it any more. There was a flame right in front of me, but nothing was on fire—I couldn’t see what was burning it, it was just one light like a candle, straight up and down in space ahead of me, well back. Well back in the room. And there was no flickering or anything, it was so still. Even in the air from the belt—nothing. Straight. I didn’t look away, but I was sort of taking it all in, and when I looked again, then there was a ring of them around the first one. I could see the first one up through the ring. They were just standing there in space. Then they came toward me, all in the same formation. The moment before that happened, though, I saw a face beneath the first one. I couldn’t see it quick enough. It was too faint, I wasn’t sure, but there was something there. Then they all came at me, in the same formation, not too fast. They swooped over to me and I saw the fires around me, around my head. Not like a crown. They were out around chin level. Maybe chin level.
    The next thing I knew, Curtis was on the floor. And I was… looking down.
    His father never beat him because he knew what would happen if he did.