GUYANESE HORROR FICTION…THE VAT

Dec 09, 2019 News

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By Harold A. Bascom

(Brent Holder and two policemen visit the abandoned Jonestown settlement, where they find the remnants of the container in which Jim Jones had missed his deadly brew; the same container that four young men had found…)
“So how it reach back in here?” the sergeant said. “This is real-real jombie story… Pure jombie story.” He showed his bare, burly forearms to Brent and the other policeman. “Look how mih fickin pores raise up!”
“We have to bury this thing!” Brent said firmly, taking control. “We have to make sure that nobody coming here after we—don’t find that thing and touch it.”
“I have a small shovel on my ATV—always carry it with me—lemme get it!”
As they waited for the sergeant to return with his shovel, the corporal said to Brent. “I always knew them guys death was strange—but I didn’t say anything.” He shrugged. “You know—nobody don’t want to sound like they—you know … full of superstition and things like that.”
The sergeant returned, and he began to dig into the soil a foot away from the rusted thing. Brent and the Indian cop took turns until there was a pit close to four feet deep.
Afterwards, the sergeant used a long stick to push and then tip the metal vat into the hole. The three men filled it in afterwards, leveled it, and then camouflaged it with bushes.
And that was when Brent Holder heard a sound like a suck-teeth in the windless stillness, and felt like a sharp slap to his face—and reacted.
“What happen, Town-man?” the corporal said.
“Something hit—sting me on my face!—Jeeze!”
“Lemme see,” said the corporal. The man pried Brentnol’s palm away from his cheek, and saw what looked like fingerprints quickly fading from ‘town-man’s skin.
“Is a sting?” Brentnol asked.
“No-No!” the cop said quickly, and then turned to his colleague. “Budday—is time we get outa dis place!”
The newspaper columnist was sure he sensed a tremor—a panic in the man’s voice.
When Brent Holder returned to the guest house, his sister was out. She was with the Regional Chairman at the closest thing to a night spot in the mining township. The cook served him dinner; but he was too filled with anxiety to eat. There was so much material in his mind. He knew he could not write about the truth behind the suicides. It would be a truth that would, indeed, be stranger than fiction. But then he thought, I’ll write a novel—this can be material for that supernatural novel I know that’s in me!
He put his dinner in the refrigerator, then retired to his room that was over from his sister’s He locked his door, and then—like an afterthought, unlocked it. He felt grimy from the trip to Jonestown, and took another shower. He just pulled on shorts afterwards —just in case he fell asleep and his sister should come into his room; he always slept butt naked. He took his laptop from off the vanity, and flopped onto the huge bed.
He stacked pillows behind him for a comfortable seat as the huge generator that lit the guest house hummed. Like the night before, there was yet another power outage. As Brent Holder typed, he heard the muted voice of the surveyor who had flown up the gold-mining township with him. The man’s voice, nasal and snarling, came through the walls to his modestly furnished room with one window that overlooked the main street, and another that opened up to the foot of a forested hill that was beautiful to behold through the morning mist.
Brent stopped typing. Maybe, I shouldn’t type just yet. Maybe …I should just think—relive everything I learned today—I shouldn’t rush to write things down. I should just let what I learned today become a deeper part of me.
And he found himself thinking of the remnants of the suicide vat he had led the cops to bury. How could it have gotten back into Jonestown after Chauncey Timmerman said that he, Sean Lacruz and the others had brought it out? Did Mr. Timmerman himself take it back? Brent sighed. His grandmother always said that there was more in the mortar than the pestle.
Maybe I should sleep on all this! Brent thought. He was, however, no stranger to insomnia. Vonny was leaving tomorrow. Maybe he ought to leave too. Even for him, deep down, he knew this place was creepy.
And in the silence of his room, the muted sound of the generator came through. He put the laptop aside, and thought of Fiona … Fiona … the only woman he ever loved, but whom he had calmly talked out of a lasting relationship with him. He had told her that he had found a ‘truth’ after myriad experiences with ‘women’: That all relationships are destined to fail.
He shook him head. How could he have hurt her like that?
Carnally, however, he couldn’t get enough of her. With her, he surprised himself every time at the intensity of his abandon. He sighed… yawned. My kingdom for a magic wand to make Fiona appear—poof—next to me.
Then there was that sharp, momentary pain—like a burning slap on his left cheek, that he had experienced in Jonestown, and immediately after, Brent Holder fell asleep—but did he? When he awoke, however, his room was dark, and he was on his stomach though he never slept on his stomach.
The sound of the generator was not there—only a distant hooting from the forest that hemmed in the little township.
The darkness in the room unsettled him, so he thought to turn on the little electronic lantern on the vanity where his cell phone was. He found, however, that he couldn’t raise himself from his stomach—couldn’t sit up. It was as if he was bolted to the mattress through the small of his back. It was then he felt a chill on his ass—his shorts were down—how?
And then something gripped his angles and began to spread his legs open despite him resisting.
A harsh, unintelligible whispering from above.
He arched his torso, twisted his neck painfully to look up and discovered fear: A dark, spread-eagled smoky shape—infested with myriad smoke shapes was descending slowly, and a thick, phallus-like form that moved like a snake, preceded it. Brent Holder began to scream but no sound came out of mouth. It became suddenly filled with a sticky ball. He threshed—began rushing the twenty-third Psalm, frantically, through his mind, but to no avail. The phallic-like, snake-like thing preceding the malevolent-looking darkness descended slowly still—and with it a stench as if from a latrine pit. Now he was panicking. The intent of the dark shape was obvious—
“Then this night—I hear he crying out in ‘e sleep again…” The father looked at his common-law wife. There was something very sheepish about his demeanor. He bent his head and his words were more or less mumbled.
“I didn’t get that,” Brent Holder said to the man.
Then the wife spoke up: “It start to sound like somebody was ‘sexing’ he in the room—”
The man’s voice shook now: “I start to rap on the door—pound on the door—but ah couldn’t get it…That was when ah decide to throw me shoulder against it—to break it in—but just about then a heard a sound…”
“That was when,” said his common law wife, “the boy throw heself bodily out the window—and break he neck on the concrete slab by the stand pipe…”
And then the menacing darkness was rank on Brent Holder’s back—and suddenly it recoiled violently—and vanished.
Brent Holder awoke, beaded in perspiration, breathing in a tremulous panic, and his sister, her face contorted with fear, was cradling him in her arms.
“Oh God, Brent!—I just come in and I hear a sound like you were stifling and gasping for breath—as if somebody strangling! I rush in and see you fighting up on this bed as if somebody holding you down—and I put this chain my sweeper gave me, around your neck—and just like that, you woke up hollering!”
Brent Holder sat trembling, in his immodesty, in his sister’s arms.
“What was happening, Brent?—What was happening?”
“Something—something…” His voice shook. “Something was trying to-to molest me, Vonny!” And he broke into weeping.
“Oh my God—Oh my God!” his sister whispered. “Brent—you flying back with me tomorrow!”
He shook his head. “No. There is some kind of evil around me. I need to travel back by boat. If I cross water, maybe this evil won’t be able to follow me.”
“Okay—but I’ll leave this chain on you—and don’t take it off, for Christ sake, Brent!”
“I won’t,” he whispered.
When his sister left, he got up, wrapped himself in a robe, went to the window that overlooked the street and its closed wooden shacks. He gazed beyond them to the waterside where the trawlers nestled in the fore-dawn gloom.
He knew now what caused those young men to kill themselves: The spirit of Jim Jones had become an incubus.
But I did not touch the vat—why was I attacked?
And it came to him in the form of his grandmother’s voice: “Brenty… you stopped them two policemen from touching that vat. You make them bury it! You saved plenty others going into that place from this evil—and because of that, it mark you! Remember the thing like a slap? It mark you. Thank God your sister had that spirit guard! …
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood… but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
“It wasn’t a bad trip,” psychologist and crisis counselor, Yvonne Holder, was saying to, Debra, her assistant, “but in the end…” shook her head, “I couldn’t get to the bottom of why the spate of suicides happened.”
“But there haven’t been any more”, the assistant said.
Yvonne Holder was tempted to say, ‘not yet!’ Instead she said, “Thank God for that.”
“Well…” her assistant said, “It’s over—and thank God, indeed, for that.” She stood next to the filing cabinet nearest the window out of which poinsettias, bloomed tropical red, in the windless humidity of Georgetown City.
The charwoman, entered with a broad smile. “Glad to see you’re back, girl. How was it?”
Yvonne Holder shook her head. “Miss Beulah, Port Kaituma is a place and a half—and thanks for that chain—I won’t be surprised if it saved me from something.”
“When you go strange places like that,” Beulah said, “there’s nothing wrong against protecting yourself, child.” She tilted her head and looked at the low-cut neck of the psychologist’s suit. “You didn’t bring it today?”
“I forgot it home, Miss Buelah,” she lied. “When I came in this morning and was adding lipstick in front of the bathroom mirror, I realized—‘shucks!’—I forgot Beulah’s chain!”
“No problem—bring it tomorrow… I have a grandson who going in the bush this weekend, and they have a lot of spiritual nastiness going on in them gold fields. I need him to walk with it.”
Yvonne, thought of her brother Brent. The boat from the Northwest district would be in Georgetown City by mid-morning. Soon he would be home. She hoped he’d be okay. Seeing him as if pinned onto his stomach and his shorts pulled down was frightening—very disturbing. She knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Beulah’s chain had saved her brother from something vile that night. She knew! Would he ever be the same? She was worried for him.
She gazed out of the window overlooking the city avenue, and thought of Port Kaituma, and wondered, when new reports of suicides by young men at Port Kaituma, would start coming in again.
THE END?

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