The Duck Hunters

A Short Story

I.

The autumn sun is low in the sky when I pull into the grocery store parking lot. “It would be easier if he just came to the house,” my wife says, but Sully’s pickup is a behemoth, and the camping trailer hitched to the bed makes navigation difficult on the narrow streets of our subdivision. Besides, the parking lot meet-up is part of the ritual. I lay my shotgun in the back, next to a dull yellow crowbar. I hoist the crowbar and shoot a crooked grin to my wife as Sully frowns – his truck is neat as a pin, and it goes against his nature to leave tools lying about. We have been driving from Nashville to eastern Arkansas since 1995 for the annual duck hunting trip, and the camping trailer will be our home for the next five days.

I kiss my wife goodbye and slide into the passenger’s seat, and Sully hands me a beer with a conspiratorial wink. In the old days, we would split a twelve-pack over the duration of the six-hour drive, but we’re older and marginally wiser, so we will limit ourselves to one drink each. It’s part of the ritual, I think. We are returning to the place where Preston Sullivan and I came of age, and the small observances take on greater significance as my waistline expands and my beard grows ever more gray.

Hell, we’ll even hunt some ducks while we’re there.

II.

St. James’s Academy is about ten miles northwest of Forrest City, a squat rectangular edifice of Indiana limestone that rises from the cottonfields of the Mississippi Delta like a castle. Founded as a Jesuit mission, the school took in the children of French Creoles from New Orleans and Bavarian Catholics from St. Louis, and when I attended, the student body continued to be drawn largely from the region’s Catholic population. I was one of the rare exceptions, a scholarship kid of fair intelligence and dubious lineage whose family had not even a nodding acquaintance with the parish priest.

Of course, all of that is in the past, for the school has been closed for twenty years.

III.

Sully and I are on the water at first light with a borrowed dog, an old Chesapeake Bay retriever who growls when petted and moves with arthritic slowness. “Best dog I got,” Leroy assures us. Leroy retired from his groundskeeping duties at St. James in 2000 and lived for another decade as a duck hunting guide, but he has not sat in a duck boat for the last five years. “I’m too old for that shit, and you boys know where you’re going.” I shoot first, taking down a crossing mallard that falls to the water forty yards from our blind, and Sully produces the flask (“First blood, first drink”) as the dog paddles to the kill. In truth, not much is flying this morning – the wind is too blustery, and the skies are the ominous gray of a passing weather front.

“Ducks are sleeping late this morning,” Sully says.

“That’s because the ducks have more sense than we do.”

Morning lumbers onward toward noontime, and the dog warms a little as I feed him bites of my ham sandwich – by eleven-thirty, I can even scratch his ears without eliciting a growl. Finally, we give up and head back to the trailer for lunch. Sully and I chat about Leroy’s trailer (“that damn shed at the back is sturdier than the busted-up double wide where he sleeps”), the state of his business (Sully owns a trucking company and can talk for hours about commercial logistics; today, he is surprisingly quiet), and the quality of our meal (“Eastern Arkansas barbecue, best in the world.”). I drink more whiskey than I should, but hunting is finished for the day, and there is nothing to do but sleep for the next few hours. The alcohol also serves to calm my nerves, for I am oddly nervous about this evening’s drive.

IV.

The library was my favorite place at St. James’s, for I had grown up in a trailer similar to Leroy’s, with cardboard on the windows, no air conditioning in the summer, and nothing more than a cobbled-together woodstove for winter heating. I found it strange that they took me as a student, but it seems even stranger that I would delve so deeply into the works of Aristotle and Augustine, or that the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas would leave its mark upon my own soul. “No Playboy here, no Rolling Stones magazines,” the ancient librarian used to say. “Only the classics.” The classics included a fair amount of Greek and Roman literature, and anyone with a passing knowledge of ancient languages discovered sufficient erotica to satisfy an adolescent boy’s curiosity – an explanation, perhaps, for Sully’s unnatural fluency in Latin.

On the north wall hung three giant oil paintings, donated in 1870 by an alumnus with an instruction that the paintings be displayed in perpetuity for the edification of the youth. The style was grotesque, a series of haunting images that evoked the plague paintings and memento mori of and earlier age, and the librarian frequently paused in his work to explain the meaning of each. “These represent the three implacable enemies of God’s plan – the world, the flesh, and the devil. As you can see, the man in the center of each work is depicted as succumbing to the various temptations depicted on the canvas.” Sully used to nudge me whenever we passed those hangings. “The world, the flesh, and the devil – the three food groups.” The paintings were unnerving to me and funny to Sully, but they exerted a wholly different influence upon Patrick, one that would remain hidden until much later.

Patrick Chalon was an oddity among the student body, marked by wealth and talent, and the other students admired and despised him in equal measure. Born to a patrician family in St. Louis, his intellectual horsepower far outshone our own, and he could easily have studied math at Philips Exeter or music at Juilliard. Too rich for the sons of prosperous farmers and well-to-do car salesmen, too brilliant for the linebackers and point guards, and too athletic for the skinny and awkward, Patrick defied classification. If one had asked him, I suspect that he would have placed himself atop every hierarchy, a god of Olympus who contemplated the mortals at his feet. He moved through the student body with the easy disdain of one born to power, his very presence at St. James’s a mystery that I have not unraveled after three decades of contemplation. The paintings rarely attracted more than his passing glance and the occasional cryptic comment: “Painted by an ancestor of mine some four generations back. Competently executed, but the themes are somewhat derivative.”

We encountered them again in a class on Scholasticism, and Sully and I joked about it afterward. “Which one are you choosing? I think the flesh sounds pretty good.” It was easy for him to say, for Sully turned the head of every teenage girl during our rare forays into town. I was Sully’s height but a good fifty pounds lighter, and while I would have chosen the flesh quite readily, it seemed unlikely that the flesh would choose me anytime soon. I dithered, trying to think up a witty reply.

“The devil.” Patrick had been listening so unobtrusively that I jumped when he spoke. “Think of it logically – if you choose the devil, you get the others thrown in as an added bonus.” Sully found this hilarious and launched into an air guitar rendition of Highway to Hell, but I was watching Patrick’s face, and he neither grinned nor looked away. It was a throwaway line, and I gave it little thought.

Not even when the disappearances started.

V.

The sun is setting when we pull into the parking lot. I used to do groundskeeping work for Leroy during the summer, an exchange for room and board and an excuse to stay away from home, and the grounds looked good in those days. Back then, the hours spent mowing the grounds and hauling mulch were some of the happiest of my life, and when I see the weed-choked fields now, it darkens my mood for days afterward. A pint of whiskey rests on the center console of the truck, and Sully twists off the cap.

“Drink up.” He takes a long draught. “To St. James’s.”

“To St. James’s,” I reply. I rarely drink whiskey at home, and the liquor tastes exceptionally good – a burning sensation on the lips and tongue that lends a pleasant warmth to the innards. “To old friends and wise teachers.”

“To old friends and wise teachers,” Sully repeats. There is a brief pause, and then, “To Patrick?”

“To Patrick.” The words hang unpleasantly in the air, a litany spoken to some chthonic spirit, and I add quickly, “May he rest in peace.”

I never knew my father, and my mother spent her last two decades in a haze of alcohol and pills. I think of her now and feel a pang of guilt, for as I was piling up accomplishments – college, then graduate school and a decent job in Tennessee – she was going steadily downhill, a mother unloved by her neglected son. My mother died of an oxycontin overdose in 2008, just before the end of my first marriage, and when we buried her, my children milled about the cemetery in confusion. Mourners at the grave of a stranger, I remember. I think of Hernando de Soto, buried secretly on the banks of the Mississippi, the location of his grave unknown to this day, and –

“Sully.” I jab him with one elbow. “There’s a light on in the old library.”

VI.

The weather improves, but the following morning’s duck hunting is as bad as yesterday’s. I have a good laugh when Sully drops a merganser, for they eat mostly fish, and their diet imparts an oily taste to the meat. “Next year, leave the gun at home, and we’ll go for sushi.” The dog agrees with my assessment, for he leaves a steaming pile at the corner of our blind after dropping the duck at Sully’s feet. The dog is in a lousy mood, and not even the bits of sandwich that I toss (peanut butter and jelly) can entice his affection. When we quit for lunch, I skip the alcohol and drink coffee.

“Hey Sully, can I borrow the truck? I want to drive into town for a couple of hours.”

The grounds of St. James’s are even more depressing in daytime, for the sunlight reveals the flaws concealed by yesterday’s shadows. Technically, I am committing a crime by breaking into the building, and if caught, I hope to plead for mercy on the grounds that I don’t intend to steal anything. The hallway has an unpleasant wet smell, and I tick of the name of each classroom as I pass. Grammar and English literature. Math. Philosophy. Science. If I keep walking, I will enter the gymnasium, where we performed daily exercises after morning prayer, but I make a hasty right turn and head for the library.

The first person to vanish was an alcoholic drifter who wandered off the road one late winter night, and had he simply frozen in an empty cotton field, there would have been little mystery. Instead, his remains were found six weeks later in a flooded stretch of woodland under circumstances that the police refused to discuss. “We always hold back a few details, things that only the killer would know.”

The library is mostly empty, for the books were removed when the school closed, but a table has been pushed to the window. Two candles have been placed on either end, a crude altar of sorts, and I tell myself that the arrangement is simply a prank by some delinquent – even the dead rat in the center is nothing more than the morbid humor of a cruel teenager. Still, the words that are scratched into the wooden surface, a clumsy hieroglyph carved with a penknife, give me a moment’s pause.

De Vermis Mysteriis.

VII.

I stop in town for groceries – bologna, white bread, apples, and cigars – and head back to camp. Sully is cleaning his shotgun when I pull up.

“You’re late. Thought you got lost on the way.”

The cigars – cheap ones, not the ten-dollar stogies that spend their lives in a humidor – are part of the ritual as well, for Sully and I used to slip off in the evenings for a smoke. A priest caught us once, and had we been educated in the public schools, we might have been suspended for the infraction, but our punishment was less formal, and we spent the next month of weekends cleaning toilets. We light up as the first stars appear, and I consider telling Sully of my visit to the library, but he cuts me off and pipes up with the same question that he asks every year.

“So what do you reckon happened?”

The second victim, a waitress from McCrory, was never found, but she was the first connection to St. James’s, for her nephew was a student, a pimply fourteen-year-old named Harold Webb. Harold’s aunt received an urgent phone call, purportedly made by her nephew, and her car was found less than a mile from the school, the driver’s side window smashed and blood on the seat. No arrests were made, and Harold left the school that day and was never seen again.

“We go through this every year,” I say, thinking of Harold. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Sure, I can guess,” Sully says, “but I was playing football half the time and sleeping in class the other half. You weren’t – you always paid attention, and if anybody figured it out, it would be you.”

“Maybe it was me.” I flick the ash from my cigar and crush the embers beneath my boot. “Maybe I had you fooled the whole time.”

Sully lets out a short, barking laugh, and I join in, for my drunken mother and absent father notwithstanding, I had no skills for a life of crime. Especially not a triple homicide, I think.

“So you really think he did it?”

Something jars a memory in my brain, a snippet of conversation between Patrick Chalon and Harold Webb. Harold’s aunt had been a good-looking woman, and I wonder if Patrick ever noticed her.

“It’s not the devil. Didn’t you ever read St. Paul? Principalities and powers, things in the air and things beneath the earth. The mysteries of the worm are at the fingertips of those who have the proper skill.”

VIII.

We sleep poorly that night, and I dream of the old librarian. Hernando de Soto served on Pizarro’s expedition against the Inca before coming to North America, I remember from my history lesson. A man of charity who provided for souls in purgatory and the dowry of orphan girls, but also a bloody-minded conqueror whose death was concealed, lest his passing provoke an uprising among the tribes that he had suppressed with such brutality. The grimoire was an odd bit of schoolboy lore, one unsupported by historical evidence. It couldn’t be destroyed, so a priest carried it into the wilderness to be hidden away at a secret location. I always liked the tale, for it was a welcome distraction from the tedium of my lessons. I fall asleep sometime before dawn, but not before I hear the rumble of an engine – Sully’s truck, departing for parts unknown. Guess I’m not the only one who’s still awake.

The next day’s duck hunting is the best that I’ve seen in years, but neither of us enjoys the morning – the aftertaste of burned tobacco lingers on my tongue, and Sully is red-eyed and moody. His hands are cut up, and when he mumbles an excuse, I wonder if last night’s excursion was a visit to a roadside watering hole. Perhaps he got into a fight, I think. Only the dog appears truly joyful, but his morning ends early – by nine o’clock, we have shot our limit. Lunch is a desultory affair, and as Sully guzzles black coffee, I retire to the trailer and close my eyes. When I awaken, the sun has traveled across the sky.

And Sully’s truck is nowhere to be found.

IX.

I punch a number into my phone. “Leroy, I need a ride.”

Leroy arrives twenty minutes later in a battered Toyota pickup, and I throw the shotgun behind the seat. Leroy would come with me if I asked, but he is old and deserves to spend his final years in peace, so I drop him off at his trailer. I drive as fast as the truck will carry me, but the old Toyota dates back to the Reagan administration, and it rattles like hell at any speed faster than a crawl. Choose the devil, and the others will follow, I remember. Not the devil… principalities and powers… the mysteries of the worm are at the fingertips of those with the proper skill. Darkness comes quickly this time of the year, and the light is fading as I pull into the parking lot. After a moment’s hesitation, I grab the shotgun.

The old librarian was the final disappearance and the only one with a solid lead, for the police had an eyewitness. When he failed to show up for morning prayers, someone whispered that Patrick had been at the library, and though the police never revealed the source of the tip, I heard that one student, a good-looking football player who had slipped from his room to smoke a cheap cigar, had provided the crucial details. It was rumored that a second person had been present, but the witness could not provide a positive identification – he only noted that the second suspect was unusually tall, and that a pungent odor wafted from his body. Patrick might have done those things – the police certainly thought so – but there was no direct evidence linking him to the crimes, and he was never questioned. That very morning, Patrick Chalon was found hanging in a shower stall of the gymnasium locker room.

In the library, I hear the grinding of stone upon stone. The double doors of the entrance are thrown open, and a half-dozen tiles are pried free as Sully works furiously at the broken floor with a crowbar. I clear my throat, and he looks up with the guilty countenance of a boy caught in onanism. In the distance, I hear another sound, barely audible over Sully’s banging – the the slow gurgle of something oozing across the gymnasium floor.

“My business is failing,” he stutters. “I got overextended with creditors, and when I got the call from St. Louis… the money is enough to pay off all my debts. All I need to do is to deliver the book.”

“There is no book.” I glance toward the open door and fumble with the shotgun shells in my pocket. “Or if there is, it’s not what they really wanted.”

The oozing sound is much louder now, and Sully’s eyes widen with dreadful recognition. That’s right, a voice whispers in my head, and I wonder if Sully hears it as well. We made our first fortune through slave trading and our second running bootleg liquor. Choose the devil, and the world and the flesh will follow. We are here as a sacrifice, an offering to restore the fortunes of a family in St. Louis that have, perhaps, ebbed in the decades following Patrick’s death. A shape, dark and impossibly tall, fills the doorway, and the shotgun feels useless in my hands as I stand frozen in place. I have time for one final thought – St. George killed the dragon with an ordinary sword – and fire three shots in rapid succession. My ears are ringing, and the library is filled with the aroma of burning cordite, but nothing can block the putrescence that assails my nostrils or drown out the howling cacophony that rings out from the open doorway. Wounded, it retreats, ebbs, and fades into nothingness as the muscles of my legs fail. I faint, and the only thing that saves me from injury is the strong hand of my friend, which catches me as I fall.

X.

The disappearances ended, but the school fell on hard times as parents quietly pulled their children at the end of the term. Sully and I graduated that spring, and St. James’s limped on for a few more years before closing its doors at the turn of the new century. Only one living tie remains, and when we arrive at Leroy’s trailer, I am surprised to see a light burning in the window. He offers whiskey, and we sit outside until the sun rises, saying nothing. The dog rests his head in my lap for a while, then curls up at my feet and falls asleep.

“I got something to show you boys.” Leroy gestures toward the shed. “Saved it from the library when the school closed down.”

The paintings are nearly four feet high and wrapped in brown paper for protection against the elements. Sully carefully unwraps one, and we stare at the canvas.

“The world, the flesh, and the devil,” he whispers.

“I imagine these would be worth quite a bit of money if a man found a buyer,” Leroy says. “Between you and me, I always thought they were damned ugly.”

“Hey Sully.” I point to the man in the center of the painting. “Does that remind you of anyone that you know?”

“Maybe. Patrick always said that it was one of his ancestors.”

“Ain’t that something.” Leroy squints at the canvas. “It does look like him, but I’d have sworn it was a different boy when I took it from the library.”

Something else is different about that painting, and it takes a moment to recognize what I am seeing. My memory is not infallible, and perhaps it was always there, a detail that I have forgotten with age. Still, I stare for a long time at the book in his hand, its title clearly visible.

De Vermis Mysteriis.

Author’s note: This story was written as an homage to M. R. James, whose storytelling method revolves around a picturesque setting, a nondescript gentleman scholar as protagonist, and the discovery of an old book or object that calls down the wrath of a supernatural menace. You can find more information on the life and work of M. R. James at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._R._James.