Kidney Pie

Farmer Keets wanted kidney meat for kidney pie, but there weren’t any cows. There was a crumpled up old dog belonging to that couple down the way, but something worse went on in their house than did in Keets’, and anyway the dog was probably diseased. And Keets couldn’t bring himself to take from Clark Musterford’s harvest, not after what he’d done to Clark’s youngest. But in this place, there weren’t too many more options.

So he’d have to find the meat himself. Long ago, he’d given up on finding beef for the usual steak and kidney pie—it was too rare a meat on the Highway, and he liked just kidneys better, besides. But he couldn’t give up his kidney pie. He had it every single day, and now had only about three weeks’ meat left for it. Going without was simply not an option.

So, on that brutal late-fall morning, Farmer Keets pulled on his thickest fleece coat, and settled an old moth-eaten toboggan over his head, and yanked some socks over his hands because he had no gloves. He stepped out of his front door and directly onto the overgrown underbrush, curling its thin thorn fingers into his pantlegs as it did every day; his little one-room shack had never had a front stoop, or a yard of nice trim grass, or even a well-worn dirt path leading up to the main road. Whatever mark he left on these woods always disappeared by the end of the day.

Dry, curling leaves hung from their sickly branches, rattling like a thousand diamondbacks as the wind blew harsh. Crows called in their eerie voices before and behind him, and squirrels hopped through fallen leaves afar off, but no living thing dared to approach him, as it had always been. He wandered about for a while in this lonely, muted, soulless place, glancing around in the vain hope of seeing a color other than grey and pale brown, until he happened upon the creek.

It changed positions every few days, but he always managed to stumble upon it if he only searched long enough. It was the only thing that could get him out of the woods and back to the Highway: any map or memorized directions only got him lost deeper among the trees. But if he followed the creek in the direction it flowed, he’d always get back to the main road. For the few years he’d been living in this place, this path had always proven true, even if the rest of the wilderness could never be trusted.

In time, he emerged from amid the twisting trunks and into a barren field, and then he stepped onto the Highway. He stood amongst the weeds and the clumps of broken asphalt on the shoulder, surveying his surroundings only by the movement of his eyes. Even the people living on this stretch of road found his motionless figure disturbing. Many had once or twice mistaken him for one of the ghosts who’d wandered too far from the junction. But no one ever bothered to voice those complaints to his face, much less demand that he give up his strange observations and return to his shack, so he carried on.

For hours that day, he stood on the shoulder, but despite his efforts he found no meat. The cars just whizzed by too fast. One did go quite a bit slower, so slow, in fact, that he could make out all the features of the panicked couple arguing inside, and he thought about following them until the same car with the same couple drove by again, and then again. Clearly, they’d fallen into Old Pa’s loop; they weren’t his to take, and anyways he couldn’t snatch them, even if he tried. Aside from them, no one else he could catch went by. Not even a cat or a raccoon or one of those shamblers from the Pickenses’ yard.

Keets was thinking again about that old dog, wondering how desperate he had to be to cross that couple down the way and how close he was to reaching that point, when a pickup truck he’d never seen rattled by and on down the road. Rusted right through to the chassis, it made no sense that it kept on running, much less that it could haul the rowdy crowd inside it, but here on the Highway lots of things lived on past their natural time. The truck squealed and clattered horrifically as it slowed down, made a terrible series of clicks as it turned onto a dirt road, and then sputtered right along without too much trouble. Keets followed it like a man in a trance.

Wealth along the Highway meant a two-storey farmhouse on a giant plot of land, but power on the Highway meant a home that never moved, and a yard of vibrant green grass despite winter’s fast approach, and a patch of cloudless blue overhead when the rest of the sky was blanketed in low slate clouds. And that was the sort of place this pickup truck drove merrily towards. Keets stayed away from the powerful people and things around—the couple down the way, the Musterfords, Old Pa, that factory way past the junction—but that didn’t mean they were all bad. Maybe choosing to use their strength to build an oasis within the dead forest meant they had better intentions than most of the folks around. It wouldn’t be a hard bar to clear.

The truck banged along towards the front porch of the house before sighing to a stop, a cloud of red clay dust kicked up in its wake. A gaggle of kids popped out, none of the five of them much older than sixteen, all dressed in flannels and unstained jeans and brand-new boots without so much as a scuff on the toe. Keets wondered how in the world he could tell all of this from his distant spot along the Highway, only to glance around and see that he was suddenly, inexplicably, standing on the bottom step of the stairs leading to the big farmhouse.

He looked up, and all five of them looked back down at him in perfect synchronicity. They had skin pale as the dead, and hair dark as an oil slick, and eyes so brown they seemed black, so that the pupil and the iris melded together.

They blinked as one, and then the one closest to Keets said, “Who the hell are you?”

It had been a long time since Keets had seen a child, but he remembered enough about them to guess that the girl who’d spoken couldn’t be but ten or eleven, and yet her voice seemed much older. In tone and pitch she sounded her age, but in surety, in authority, she sounded thrice it.

“My name is Farmer Keets,” he began, his words wavering. So sharp was this little girl’s gaze that he turned his own away.

“You’re with the Musterfords?” asked the oldest boy. He was a gangly creature, hardly a scrap of muscle on his skinny frame, yet he placed himself protectively in front of his siblings.

“No, no, not them. Not with them. Not anymore.”

“Are you a farmer like them?”

“Not so big as them. I wouldn’t dare.”

“You grow the same sort of stuff?”

“Oh.” He swayed a little, scraping around in his old cobwebby brain for a convincing lie, but nothing sprung to mind. “Well. You know. What else is there to grow around here?”

“I’m Benjamin,” said the littlest of them, all out of nowhere. The eldest shoved Benjamin behind him in one rough, practiced motion.

“Nice to meet you,” said Keets. He even tried for a smile, which only served to inch the children closer to the house. “Your parents around?”

“Why don’t you go on.” The first girl, the rude one who’d sworn at him, made a shooing gesture, as if Keets was a stray cat that needed to be swept off the porch. “We don’t need no farmer. We already got a guy that cuts the grass.”

Keets clasped his hands before him. “Maybe you could put a garden in here somewhere. You’ve got plenty of space. Then I could come help you good folks out.”

“No thank you,” said the eldest boy, and started to usher the others inside.

Just before the boy stepped into the house himself, Keets, too desperate now to bother with his usual frivolities, called out, “Hey, boy, wait!”

Surprisingly, the boy did stop, frowning at Keets over his shoulder. “What?”

“You people got any kidneys?”

The boy crossed the threshold and let the screen door slam behind him. “Kidneys?”

“Yes, kidneys. Got any?”

“Don’t everybody?” the kid said, and closed the main door up tight, and that was that.

###

Days passed in all their usual ways, until one night, Keets went to his freezer to pull out a kidney and found only seven left. And a pair of them had come from a small dog he’d snatched up before he’d had to flee the city, so he’d have to cook those two together to have enough for one meal. So, really, he had less than a week’s worth of food left for himself.

It wasn’t that food was all that hard to find on the Highway. Old Pa’s convenience store served hot dogs and a sandwich of some kind alongside all the usual gas station fare, and Miss Maggie ran a little corner grocer’s at the junction, and the Musterfords would serve you just about anything you could ask for so long as you didn’t ask how. But none of them had kidney meat, and Keets simply felt that there was no reason to eat anything else.

The planters that lined his hovel hadn’t sprung up much of anything at all. Maybe it was the type of soil that kept the Musterfords in business, or perhaps the fact that their planters were not old water-rotted cardboard boxes. Or perhaps it had something to do with the activities they’d done behind doors Keets could not open and, in some cases, could not even find. Either way, no matter how he tended to the seedlings and sang to them and hoped and dribbled different fluids over top of them, nothing sprouted up.

So that night, he set up his traps—coating his floor with mousetraps, tossing bird seed outside his front door, and sliding a tree branch through a crack in his wall in the hopes a deer might wander by—but nothing worked. Two mousetraps snapped on his own toes, and though a third caught a rat of good size, it was still so small that he completely destroyed the kidneys trying to fish them out. No birds came along for the seed, but a possum did stop, though Keets was too noisy when he lunged for it, and it skittered off unharmed into the woods. And though he held the branch up for several hours, soon enough both his arm and his eyelids grew heavy, and he woke the next morning to sunlight illuminating the empty woods and the paltry stash in his freezer.

Rising and stepping carefully across his floor, he made his way through the house in a few awkward strides and pushed aside the piece of plywood that served as his front door. Right there, right outside his door, was a lithe orange cat, its face downturned in a pile of gore, its eyes flicking up to Keets before determining him to be harmless and returning to its meal. Keets saw after several seconds of squinting at the blood and guts that it was the remains of the rat he’d captured last night. The cat carried on tearing into the thing, none the wiser to its doom standing only a few feet away.

Keets, ever the opportunist, did not even hesitate before moving in to kill the creature. Compared to the birds and mice he’d expected to catch, a cat’s kidneys would make a very fine meal, indeed. It took very little time for him to cross his small home and find his best knife, and he was pleased to see that when he returned, the cat still had not moved. It only regarded him with disinterest as he came closer, closer, closer.

“Here, cat.” He held out his hand and rubbed his fingers together like he’d seen others do before. In all these years, he’d never gotten very good at seeming natural. “Good cat. Here, cat.”

The cat, amazingly, did indeed sidestep the carcass and saunter closer to Keets, its tail flicking back and forth as it did so. It even drew right up against his leg, rubbing its face across his shin, and, scarcely daring to breathe, he lifted the knife over his head, estimating the force he’d need, judging which way the thing might move and which direction he would need to stab.

And then the cat bit him.

He grunted in pain and yanked his leg back, but it cost him too much time. His window had passed. The cat leapt away and bolted off with long, frantic strides, turning back once to hiss at him before disappearing into the ever-changing woods.

For a very long while, Keets sat there in his open doorway, head in his hands, knife dropped carelessly between his feet. This had been so much easier in the city. Even when the store on his corner had stopped selling kidney meat, he’d had so many dogs and people around that he hardly even noticed the difference. He’d even been able to stockpile; by the time the cops came poking around his apartment complex, he had almost a year’s worth of meat from his neighbors and their pets and whatever other animals he could snatch up, and he had simply packed it on ice and driven away. But these Highway people were so strange and so sparse and so suspicious. He could never trick them and hide like he did in the city.

His thoughts returned in time to that big, cheerful house on that wide lawn, to the identical cautious eyes of those children, to little Benjamin, so quick to speak up and yet unwilling to give up a smile. Keets had a feeling those kids’ parents weren’t inside the big farmhouse; country folk were too naive, too trusting, letting their spawn run around unguarded for any old man to pluck right off their own porch. And he didn’t have to make Benjamin smile. He just had to get the boy to step a little closer.

“I done told you, we don’t need no farmer.” The harsh girl met him on the porch before he even had time to knock, leaning against the rickety frame of the screen door with crossed arms. Her maturity now made sense: with their parents gone for an unknown length of time, these children had needed to grow up quickly.

“You’re sure you don’t need any help? Since your parents are out, I thought I could maybe lend a hand.”

Her inky eyes settled over him, a deep, dark pool so murky, he could not read the intent behind their gaze. Again he tried to match her glare, and again he failed; it was unnerving the way her pupils disappeared so that he was just staring into giant gaping blackness. “You ain’t even good at this,” she said. “You’re a creepy old man and you don’t even bother to hide it.”

“That’s really no way to speak to your elders.”

“I won’t born yesterday, mister. You’d best get back on down to whatever hole you crawled out of.”

“If it’s because I’m not from around here, I think it’s quite rude to—”

“That ain’t half the reason why.”

From inside their house, a space as dark as their eyes, there came a faint movement, a sliver of something just a few shades lighter than the abyss beyond the door. The eldest boy appeared in the doorway, and behind the dust-coated mesh of the screen door, he looked a bit odd, a bit flat, a bit intangible. But it was just a trick of the light; when he stuck his head out, everything seemed to be back in order.

“Lacey,” he murmured to the girl, though still loud enough for Keets to hear, “we talked about this.”

“I’m tryin’ to get him to go.”

Keets cleared his throat. “Why don’t your parents come out and try to get me to go?”

“Get out, mister,” said the oldest boy. He tugged at the back of his sister’s shirt, bending down to whisper something in her ear, and she sneered at Keets before going inside.

“Lacey is a very pretty name,” he called at her retreating figure.

“You got folks around here?” said the boy.

“No,” Keets said. “It’s just me.”

“And you’re sure you ain’t related to those Musterfords?”

“Positive. They don’t like me all that much.” He shuffled from foot to foot, eyes downcast, his best attempt at looking harmless, looking meek. “I really don’t mean you good people any harm. It’s just been hard finding work since I moved here.”

The boy lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes, as if seeing Keets from a new angle would give him the upper hand. “You…moved here?”

“I did.”

“Sure.” He reached behind him, blindly grabbed the door handle, and backed into the house. “You’d really best go on, mister. And stay gone.”

But Keets, of course, did neither. Instead, he waited for the boy to close the main door, ensured no one was peeking at him through any windows, and wandered around towards the back of the house. Unlike the pristine facade, around the sides, cobwebs and dust clung to the windows, and dark smears of dirt and mold climbed up the cracked siding. A narrow side door seemed particularly untouched and unnoticed, so Keets stepped towards it, wrapping his hand around the knob.

Just as he began to turn it, though, a familiar voice floated up to him from the backyard. “Not the Ashtens,” said little Benjamin, to which someone else answered in whispers. “Because whatever goes on there is worse than what goes on here.”

More whispers followed, harsh and hissing and wordless to Keets’ ears. The man crept along the side of the house, nearing the back of it until he could just barely peek around it. There, in the yard very near to the back deck, sat Benjamin in the grass, pinching blades of it in his tiny fingers and pulling them languidly out of the ground. Before him stood the last two of the siblings, who had not yet bothered to make much of an appearance before Keets. They were twins, eerily and perfectly alike, clustered together, looming over Benjamin, as if he were the elder and they were the anxious youngsters.

Benjamin made a quiet sound of annoyance. “I know what they are. That dog isn’t a dog at all.”

The whispers erupted once again, the words again indeterminable, sounding as if they came from the twins, though neither opened their mouth. Benjamin was unperturbed.

“If he really is with those farmers—” He listened to the wordless muttering. “You’re right, we would have heard. But there was that death last year.”

He stiffened; perhaps Keets had made a sound. Benjamin’s eyes were not a child’s eyes for the half a second before his gaze connected with the man. There was a cold calculation in them. And then he turned fully to Keets, and the face returned to something age-appropriate, a familiar shy smile curving his lips.

“Hi,” he said, with a nervous look back at his siblings.

“Hello,” said Keets. He did his best to make his posture relaxed. “You’re just the young man I was hoping to see.”

“Me?”

“That’s right. I just had the most curious little visitor at my house this morning, and I thought you might like to meet him.”

He pulled a thick clump of grass up, clenched it tightly in his hand for a moment, then let the blades flutter to the earth. “What was it?”

“A sweet little cat.”

“Cat?” The boy all but shuddered, hunching his shoulders to hide the violence in his shivering.

What if he was afraid of them? Keets hadn’t even considered. He never considered anything; that’s what got him here in the first place. “It won’t hurt you. It’s very nice.”

The look he threw back at his siblings was unreadable. One of the twins shrugged. The other glared straight at Keets, which he did not appreciate, though he couldn’t find the guts to reprimand the kid.

Benjamin stood on his spindly little legs and padded over. Keets felt almost sorry, because the parents of these children had been gone so long that their youngest had no sense of danger, and their twins were willing to just let him walk away. But he could not protest, because as he put his hand on the small of Benjamin’s back, he imagined the dark nephrotic meat that lay below it, and swallowed down the saliva in his mouth.

All the way back to the shack, Benjamin kept perfectly quiet, perfectly obedient, but his little frightened face was almost too much for Keets to bear, so he turned himself away from the boy and pushed him blindly onwards. As they walked, Keets explained how the woods shifted, explained how to find your way by following the river. Benjamin would never need to find his way around again. He really was small. Maybe he didn’t even have enough meat. Maybe Keets was just wasting his time.

But he knew, deep down, no matter how small and innocent the boy seemed, his meat was enough. He was not the first, and Keets’ conscience would abandon him once the boy was face down on his floor.

The cat had returned, which he honestly hadn’t expected. Maybe he’d get a two for one. It sat on the space before the door that would have been a doorstep, its head held high and regal, its ginger tail flicking back, forth, back, forth, and then lying straight down behind it as Benjamin came into view.

Keets swore Benjamin hissed something that sounded like, “Ashten.” But the word meant nothing to him, and he pushed the boy forward as kindly as his impatience allowed.

“What is this?” Benjamin asked him in an undertone. It was a very adult question, and his eyes took on that sharp look again, but this time that look held.

“Shoo,” said Keets. He made a half-hearted sweeping motion, and the cat leapt away and bounded off into the woods.

Shaking himself, Benjamin shuffled closer to the doorway, but hesitated when Keets opened it. “May I enter?”

“Of course.”

Keets crossed the threshold last, and the whole world plunged into darkness. He never had any time to process it; in fact, he thought for a moment that he had somehow closed his eyes without his realizing. But then the light returned and Benjamin was looming strange and inhuman above him and his heart began to shutter in his chest.

“How do you know the Ashtens?” the thing above him demanded. It had Benjamin’s voice but nothing else. It was sharp, like if a shadow had edges, and Keets worried when it leaned forward that it would cut him on its silhouette.

“Don’t know,” he choked out. The shaking spread through his whole ribcage. His heart was thudding, heavy, heavy, slower and slower until it felt like a stone between his lungs. Breath came as if through a straw. “Ashten…don’t know…don’t know.”

“Then why’s that thing hanging around?” All at once, in a blink, in the space between one gallumping heartbeat and the next, Benjamin was himself again, small and curled into himself and looking frightened. Perhaps Keets imagined the creature. He was fairly certain, however, that he was not imagining the pain.

His eyes were wide open now, every nerve alight, every pulse of pain an agony that lasted forever. Heart attack, that’s what this was, it had to be. Someone had told him long ago that if all he ate was kidneys, his heart would just give out on him one day. That day must be today. Surely, there had not been a thing in his home. Surely, it was a hallucination, his mind’s last mad bout of desperation to make sense of his demise. All he mourned at this moment was that he’d never again get to taste human meat.

Then again, perhaps he wouldn’t have tasted it anyway, because he had a strange feeling about these children. Benjamin may have looked like himself, but there was a thing speaking to him from the threshold now, a thing casting a massive shadow from the open doorway, a thing with one pale, clawed hand gripping the door jamb. And Keets knew without a doubt who that was.

“It was watching?” Lacey said. It was her voice and yet not.

“I suppose,” said Benjamin. “Or spying for him. Or on him.”

“What if it was a normal cat?”

“Sure, and that dog’s just any old dog. I’m not messing with the Ashtens.”

One of Lacey’s eyes came into view from outside. It was blacker than anything he’d ever seen, like a well a thousand feet deep, the darkness spread to the whole of her eye now, and with the vertigo setting in he felt like he was tumbling down into it. “I’m not either,” she said. “But you know what we have to do with him. We can’t use him. They know he’s here, they’ll take him. I won’t let ’em have him.”

Once more, Benjamin was young and scared. “I don’t want to do it.”

“Well, he didn’t bother to invite me in before he crumpled up.” She was looking at him again, and it was more tortuous than his failing heart, his quivering lungs.

In the next second Benjamin was above him, gripping his favorite knife in two tiny hands. Keets threw up a hand of his own, pleading, and the boy backed off just enough for Keets to choke out, “Use them. They’re yours now.”

“Them?” said the boy.

“My—mine. Use them. It tastes so good.”

“We have to take your eyes.” The thing that had been Lacey looked almost sympathetic. “Or else those damned Ashtens’ll come along for you.”

But Keets was hardly listening. “It’ll make…a good dinner…enough to go around. My treat.”

Pure disgust curled the boy’s face, and Keets knew Benjamin wouldn’t do as he requested. It was almost enough to bring him to tears. How he hated for anyone to waste perfectly good meat.