THE SWORN STATEMENT OF ENOCH FLAGG
A Short Story by Lewis Smith
Rendered
before the Jackson County Criminal Court on the morning of April 12th,
20**
Before
you say anything about my story, yes, I do realize I am under oath. And yes, I understand that you may not
believe my story, Your Honor. Frankly,
no one believes me – not my friends, not my mom, not the police. Frankly, if I
had not seen what I did with my own two eyes, I would not believe it
myself. So your skepticism does not
surprise me at all.
But the fact remains that Gene Turpin
is dead, and that I am the only one who was there when he died. As for the others, I can make a pretty good
guess as to what happened to them, based on what I saw and heard. So, honestly, I don’t care if you believe me
or not. I don’t want to go to jail – you
have no idea how badly I want not to go to jail! – but if I do, our system has
failed. You will have failed. I know in
my heart I am innocent of their deaths.
Gene’s, and the others’ as well.
I told them not to go in there. I warned Gene, too, right there before
the end. I knew something bad was in there. But no one believed me, and now they are
dead. So, as you can tell, by this point
I am used to people not believing me.
They wanted me to take them fishing,
you see. Gene, Rob, Virginia, Kassi, and
Craig were all city raised, and none of them had ever done more than drop a
line in the pond at Graham Park to catch a bluegill or a mud cat. They wanted to get out on a real lake, in a
boat, and catch something that would put up a fight. I grew up on Bakers Canyon Lake, and my Dad
had left me his cabin up there when he passed five years ago. It had a boat slip and a nice, twenty-foot
Bass Tracker in the shed. When Gene
found out about that, he insisted that I take the whole group of them fishing
on spring break.
I didn’t really want to go – there was
something about the lake’s north end that I never had liked. The water was too dark, and too still, even
on windy days. I didn’t like the way the
cliffs seemed to lean over us whenever we fished there, and those moss-covered
cave openings gave me nightmares as a kid.
The lower end of the lake was fine – sand beaches and lots of
trees. But the canyon always gave me a
bad vibe.
But
they all pleaded and begged, and to be honest, I would have done just about
anything that Kassi asked me to – I was always sweet on her, and she and Craig
seemed to be on the brink of breaking up.
One more good fight between them and she might become available, you
know? So when she joined the chorus I
said sure, why not, Padre Island is too crowded anyway, plus it’s a hellaceous
long drive down to the Texas coast from Missouri State.
It was funny how they all scrambled to
get their fishing licenses purchased, and all the gear they bought! I tried telling them that Dad had at least a
dozen rod and reel sets up at the cabin, but they all insisted on buying brand
new fishing gear. Virginia even got one of these ridiculous vests at the
Outdoor Pro shop, one with all the pockets and zippers for putting hooks and
lures and lead weights in. Gene got him
a big old Cowboy hat to keep the sun off his head and stuck a couple of trout
flies in the band on either side so there would be no doubt that he was an
angler and not a goat roper! Did the
deputies ever find that hat?
Get to the point? I am, Your Honor, it’s just a long story, and
if you want to understand what happened, you must hear all of it. We loaded up in two Jeeps and headed up to
Bakers Canyon as soon as our last class dismissed Friday – all of us are
pre-law, and Dr. Rudoff had scheduled a mid-term for Friday afternoon before
spring break, so none of us could take off any earlier. But it was only a three-hour drive from the
University to the lake, and all of us were finished with the mid-term by two o’clock,
so we got there with an hour or so of daylight to spare. Gene wanted to go swimming, but I knew how
cold that water was this early in the year and stayed out. He jumped in for about five minutes, and that
was all he could stand! We unloaded our
gear, and I drove down to the gas station to fill up three cans’ worth – Dad had
always taught me to drain the tank on the boat at the end of the summer, so the
gas wouldn’t go bad over the winter and mess up the engine. I filled up the boat before we went in for
the night, and then everyone picked a bedroom.
Sure enough, I heard Kassi and Craig fighting through the wall around
midnight, and the next morning I woke up and found him sleeping on the
couch. I’m embarrassed to say it now,
but I was really glad. He was a jerk and
she deserved better. Dear God, they all
deserved better than what finally happened!
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Bakers Canyon Lake was built back in
the Depression by workers from the WPA.
Bakers Creek was a big, swift flowing tributary of the Arkansas River
that ran for a hundred miles or more through the Ozarks before dumping down
into the flatlands. There were all kinds
of Indian camps up and down it, mostly underwater now. When I was a boy I would find lots of
arrowheads along the lake shore during dry years, and my Dad hung a couple of
picture frames full of them up in the cabin.
I wish to God I had taken them down and sold them to that collector from
Texas who liked them so much! Maybe then
. . .
But I didn’t, and Virginia was
absolutely fascinated with them. That
first night she asked me to take the frames off the wall, and everyone gathered
around the table as I showed them off and told about finding them. Well, it has been a dry year, as you know. The lake was almost six feet below normal,
prime hunting conditions. But, Bakers
Canyon is also a Corps of Engineers lake, and in recent years they have gotten
downright nasty about folks picking up artifacts on the shores. Some of the beaches I used to hunt on the lower
end, the wide end of the lake where the best camps are, actually have big signs
warning of fines and even jail for picking up an artifact. When I told them about that, the group calmed
down a bit, but Virginia kept going back to the wall and studying those arrowheads.
The next day was a lot of fun and made
me think that my worries were for nothing.
We went out and fished all day down on the south end and caught a bunch
of channel cat; we got out on one of the beaches and waded and swam for a bit –
although I pointed out the big sign warning folks against picking up artifacts
in case my friends got any ideas! A five-thousand-dollar
fine was more than any arrowhead was worth – although now, honestly, I wish we’d
gone ahead and taken our chances.
That night we fried up the fish we
caught, and I dug out Dad’s old recipe for hush puppies and we made those, and
some French fries. Kassi had avoided
talking to Craig all day long, and that night as we sat around the den shooting
the breeze and watching movies, she made a point of sitting by me. Craig sulked the whole time, but I just
smiled and ignored him. I thought things
were working out just the way I wanted them to.
Then Virginia spoke up.
“Do you think that the Corps is
watching the other end of the lake like they are those beaches?” she said.
“It would be a lot harder for them,” I
said. “That end of the lake is narrow,
with steep cliffs on either side. There
are lots of trees and overhangs along the shoreline, and caves that go back pretty
deep in places.”
“I just want to find one arrowhead
before I go home,” she said. “Are there
any up there around the caves?”
That was a complicated question. The old timers who had lived in the area
before the lake went in all talked about the bluff shelters and caves that used
to overlook Baker’s Creek – but they also said that it was bad luck to dig
there. Why, no one could say. But if you look at the local records, in the eighty
years or so since Bakers Canyon Lake was built, nearly a hundred people have
died there. Twenty or so of those were
run of the mill drownings, mostly on those big beaches down near the dam – people
swimming too far, out or getting caught in sudden squalls that capsized their
boats. But almost eighty people have
simply gone missing in that lake. Bodies
never found, just drifting boats or empty life vests. Now, that sounds like a lot, and it is – but they
were spread out over such a long period of time, so no one paid much attention.
The lake is deep, and there are lots of boulders and underwater ledges where a
body could hang up and never float to the top.
However,
in most of those cases, the missing people were last seen up there on the north
end, in the canyon where the caves come close to the lake shore. A few search parties had ventured into the
caves looking for clues, but nothing had ever been found. At least, no one would admit to finding
anything. Now I wonder. Those searches never seemed to go on for very
long before being called off.
But Kassi was looking at me with her
big blue eyes – my God, your honor, that girl was so beautiful! Hair black as midnight, halfway down to her
waist, and skin like fine bronze! Virginia
looked so eager as she asked, and with Kassi now expressing her interest, I
gave in. I did. I never had liked that end of the lake, but for
the girls’ sake I figured I’d try to find an Indian camp washing in.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Tomorrow morning you guys can sleep in, and
I’ll take the boat out early and try to scout us out a campsite where you can
find a point or two. If I see a likely spot, we can head up there tomorrow
afternoon. Fair enough?”
Virginia have me a hug, Kassi’s eyes
lit up, and Gene gave me a high five.
The only one who didn’t seem to like the idea was Craig, but frankly his
happiness didn’t matter much to me at that moment. We sat up and drank a while longer – they all
drank more than me, because I was determined to get up early and find them a
spot. In fact, when I went upstairs a
little while later, I dug around in the closet of Dad’s old bedroom and found a
box that he had kept there when I was a kid.
If Kassi wanted to find an arrowhead, I was going to make sure she did –
and everyone else who wanted to look, for that matter. Dad had a shoebox full of points that he’d never
had time to make a frame for, and I intended to sow a pocketful of them along
the shoreline for my friends to pick up.
It wouldn’t matter if I found a site or not, they were going to find
some points!
I woke up nice and early the next
morning and slid out of bed feeling pretty great. Kassi had kissed me long and hard after Craig
stumped off to the room he had intended to share with her. I was already planning
on asking her to dinner and a night club when we got back from break. I had a smile on my face as I walked down to
the boat slip at dawn, arrowheads rattling in my pocket. The sky was clear and blue,
and the sun was rising over the far shore of the lake, looking as bright and
radiant as I have ever seen it. I fired
up the motor and headed up lake, ready for what I thought was going to be one
of the most enjoyable days of my life.
God, if I only knew!
It was a couple of miles up from the
cabin before the lake narrowed into the canyon, and another half mile after
that before the caves and overhangs started.
I made it up there in about ten minutes, running the boat wide open and enjoying
the wind in my hair. There was a huge
rock that stuck out of the water in the middle of the lake just before the cliffs
drew in – we called it Split Rock, since it appeared to have broken off one of
the cliffs long ago. Dad and I used to
fish around it some. I steered past it and began scouring the banks in earnest. They were mostly vertical on this end, and
you could still see the remains of Indian petroglyphs on some of the rock
faces. A half mile or so past Split Rock
I saw where a fresh landslide had come off of the east bank, leaving a hundred
yards or so of beach exposed at the base of the cliff, with several downed
trees lying in the water’s edge. It was
the kind of erosion my Dad always taught me to look for; a fresh slough where prehistoric
artifacts would be exposed. I also saw
the mouth of a cave there that I had never seen before – I think the dirt slide
may have revealed it. It was in deep
shadow, at the back of the narrow strip of sand and rock, with the cliff rising
vertically above it a hundred feet or more.
The minute I got out of the boat, I
realized I needn’t brought any artifacts to seed the beach with. There were white flakes of chert everywhere,
and I picked up three or four points in the few minutes I spent scouring the
beach. Then I took the ones I brought
and dropped them in the edge of the water, on either side of where I’d beached
the boat, for the length of the shoreline.
As I turned to go, that cave caught my
eye. I wondered if there was anything in
it – I’d heard stories of fabulous artifacts being found in Ozark caves over
the years, and honestly, picking up those points had given me a bit of the old
artifact fever I used to feel when hunting with my Dad. As I walked across the beach towards the
mouth of the cave, I saw a very worn remnant of a petroglyph in the cliff next
to it. I thought it was a sunburst design
of some sort, with long crooked rays shooting out of the center orb. Only as I got closer did I see that it looked
more like a big spider or crab motif. I
was still studying it when the stench hit me.
I’ve hunted and fished for most of my
life, and I know what dead things smell like.
There was something dead in that cave, and it was NASTY! The closer I got, the worse it was. I did stand at the entrance and look back as
far as I could, but I couldn’t really see anything. I heard something, though – some sort of
shuffling or skittering sound, pretty far back away from the entrance. I figured it was wolves or coyotes, or maybe
even possums, feasting on whatever dead critter was back there, and made my way
back to the boat.
I don’t know if that smell physically
made me ill, or if I had gotten ahold of a bad piece of fish the night before,
but as I motored back down the lake towards the cabin, I felt sicker and
sicker. My bowels were seizing up, and I
didn’t know if I was going to make it to the bathroom or not! When I pulled into the boat slip, I tied a
single half hitch around the docking post and did a tight legged, penguin style
run up to the cabin. The others were
starting to stir, but I ignored them and went straight to the upstairs bathroom
– Kassi and Viriginia were in the downstairs one putting makeup on, and I could
not wait.
Stomach bug, food poisoning, whatever
it was, that bout of diarrhea saved my life.
I was in the bathroom for a half an hour, and when I came out I felt
weak as a kitten. Rob was teasing me
about melting the toilet, and I told him he had room to talk – I’d smelled his apartment
before, and it was like standing downwind from a landfill! I stretched out on the couch, and Virginia
came and sat next to me.
“Did you find anything?” she asked,
eyes still big.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I found a great beach up past Split Rock,
flint lying everywhere! You guys should
be able to find lots of stuff there.
Just let me rest for an hour or so, and I’ll take you on up.”
Rob joined her, throwing his arm
around her shoulder and kissing the top of her blonde head. They really were a great couple.
“Why don’t you let me take them?” he
said. “You look like death warmed over, and I bet you’ll rest better with us
out of the house. Gene’s still asleep, but
Craig and I will be glad to take the girls.
Just show me where the spot is on the lake map. I’ve driven my Dad’s boat many times; I
promise not to mess yours up!”
I should have said no, Your
Honor. I know that now. I should have said no, made them wait, taken
them up myself, and kept them away from that damned cave! But I was weak and still feeling pretty sick –
I thought I’d have to run back to the bathroom, but as it turned out, I didn’t. So I told Rob to take the boat and showed him
the spot on the lake map. They were whooping
and hollering as they headed down for the boat.
Kassi was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit, and she looked like an
absolute goddess. Moments later I heard
the engine start up and then fade away as they headed up the lake. That was the last time I ever saw or heard
them – well, saw them anyway. There was
. . . there was that sound! Dear God, that sound! I can’t . . . please, can we have a brief
recess, Your Honor? (Sobs)
At this point Judge Hollister ordered
a 30 minute recess, and then Mr. Flagg resumed his statement.
Thank you, Your Honor. I’ve tried hard not to think about that afternoon,
even when I’ve been required to talk about it.
But recounting the story from the beginning like this – well, it got to
me. I think I am OK now. Where was I?
Gene woke up about a half hour after
they left, none the worse for his liquor intake. In all the years I knew him, I don’t think he
ever had a hangover. I was feeling a
little more settled by then, and even got up to help him find a frying
pan. The others had eaten energy bars
for breakfast, but he wanted bacon and eggs!
I had a couple of eggs myself, and my stomach began to settle down.
I didn’t really get concerned until
around one o’clock. I’d made it up to
that isolated beach in twenty minutes; even allowing for them going slower to
search for it, they should have been there in a half hour or less. The beach
wasn’t that big, either – around a hundred yards long and less than twenty across
at its widest point, with nothing but sheer cliffs behind it. I’d dropped
twenty arrowheads along the waterline, more than enough for everyone to find
something – not to mention the artifacts that were already there! But they’d been gone for five hours now, and
I was beginning to worry. Gene and I
talked awhile, and then I decided to act. I couldn’t get that foul-smelling
cave out of my mind. Bears are still
active in this part of Missouri and can be pretty aggressive when they emerge
from hibernation. I hadn’t seen any
tracks, but rain could’ve washed them away.
What if my friends had been attacked?
I went to the next cabin up the shore
from Dad’s, where Mr. Pettigrew lived.
He and Dad had been friends, and he was glad to see me and more than
willing to let me use his boat. Gene got
two flashlights, and I found my Dad’s old Army .45 and grabbed a pocketful of
shells. By two o’clock we were headed up
the lake looking for our friends.
I saw that the boat was still on the
beach while we were still nearly a mile off, and as I drew closer I saw that
not one of our friends was anywhere on that beach. I’ll never know which one of them went into
the cave first, but I would bet anything it was Virginia. She always was too curious for her own good,
and going out with a macho dude like Rob, she always felt she had to prove
herself fearless.
When we got there, we both saw the
footprints. Four sets of tracks leading
into the cave, none leading out. The stench
pouring from it was stronger than ever. Gene gave me a look as he caught his
first whiff of it.
“Ugh, what IS that? Why on earth would they go in there?” he
asked.
“Herd instinct!” I said with a laugh –
but I was scared now. Why would they all
go in? As we neared the entrance, I saw
something that made me stop. Scattered
in the sand, next to a woman’s footprints – I am pretty sure they were Kassi’s,
her foot was longer than Virginia’s – was a pile of arrowheads. Four complete ones and two broken ones, lying
together where they were dropped. I
studied her tracks. It looked as if she
was going to walk past the cave, then dropped her finds, doubled back, and went
straight in. I noticed those last few
tracks were mainly the balls of her feet.
She had been running! What had
she heard? What made her run into that awful, dark place?
“I have to go in there,” I said, and
Gene handed me one of the flashlights. “You can wait out here if you want to.”
“They’re my friends, too, Enoch!” he
said.
And so both of us entered the
cave. It was much bigger than it looked
from the outside. There was a passage
you could stand up in that went back maybe ten feet or so, and then it opened
up into a large chamber, probably a hundred feet across and fifty feet
deep. Right where the passage widened
into the chamber, I saw a flip flop lying there with a plastic sunflower on the
thong. It was Kassi’s.
The stench of rot was overpowering,
and as I stepped into the chamber, looking for movement, something soft and wet
landed on my forehead. I felt it move,
and when I picked it off with my hand, I saw it was a maggot. I shone the light directly over my head and
saw something so grotesque it made me freeze in place for just a moment,
another maggot barely missing my face as it dropped.
There was a deer hanging there, dead
for some time, crawling with fly larva.
It was wrapped up in white, translucent cables, almost like a mummy,
with only its rotting head hanging out the bottom. As I shone the light above us, I saw
several other bundles hanging from the cave’s ceiling, which was at least
twenty feet above us. Each one was
wrapped in the same white filaments, bigger than clotheslines. One of them had tufts of black fur sticking
out, and I could see a massive paw poking through the cocoon that encased it –
a paw with long, sharp claws. What could
wrap a bear up like that? I wondered.
“I found Virginia’s vest,” Gene said. It was lying about twenty feet in front of
me, halfway to the back of the cave. As
I grew closer, I saw there was some sticky, greenish-black fluid that had
dribbled on it. When I touched the end
of my finger to it, I felt a sharp, burning sensation, followed by numbness.
That was when I heard it. A muffled, squealing cry, a voice faint but
unmistakably human. And unmistakably
Kassi’s.
Near the back of the cave was another
opening, about ten feet wide and perfectly round. Black roots of some sort were sprouting from
its edges in a semicircle, thick and dark and glistening slightly in the beams
of our flashlights. But the faint cry had not come from inside that dark
opening; it had come from above our heads and in front of us. Our beams swept through the darkness until
they came to rest on another dangling bundle – a bundle that was moving.
We ran over to the point directly
beneath it, shining our lights over our heads.
It was Kassi, I am sure of that. All
I could see of her head as it dangled above us was a single lock of her long,
dark hair hanging down – and one eye, frantically rolling as it peered at us
from a gap in the ghastly cables that trussed her up there above our heads,
more than ten feet up.
“Hang on, we’ll get you down!” I
shouted.
I am not entirely sure, but I think
the word she tried to say through the foul cords that covered her mouth was “Run!”
There was no way for us to reach
her. We needed a ladder, a tree,
something to let us get up there above our heads where she dangled like a
grasshopper in a spider’s web. That was
the analogy that sprang into my mind at that moment, as I swept my light around
the cave trying to find something that would help us reach her. That was when my beam swept across that dark
opening again.
My first thought was that the black
roots we’d seen protruding from the edges had suddenly grown – grown by six
feet or more and increased greatly in diameter.
But then the rest of the creature hauled itself out of that monstrous
burrow, pulled by those huge, long legs, and the sight blasted my mind free of
its moorings.
A spider? Ha!
Calling that thing a spider is like calling a giant squid a hunk of
calamari! I guess, of all the creatures
I have ever seen on this good earth, it probably resembled a spider more than
any of them. But that doesn’t mean it
WAS one. And I don’t think it was anything ever meant to exist on earth,
either. It had way too many legs, for
one thing – at least a dozen of them.
Black, thick as tree trunks, hauling its awful bulk into the main part
of the cave. Its head was six feet
across, and when it opened its mouth, six fangs spread apart to reveal an
opening big enough to swallow a moose.
Or a man. Its abdomen was huge and
swollen, palpitating with odd bulges here and there – one of them suspiciously
man-shaped. It made no noise at all; no
hiss, no roar, no sound except those giant legs scraping the wall and floor of
the cave – the same sound I had heard faintly from outside that morning!
Gene froze to the spot. I shouldn’t say this, but I am under oath,
aren’t I? The last thing I saw was a
dark spot spreading across the front of his pants as he wet himself in
terror. My bladder followed suit seconds
later. Then four of those awful, multi-jointed
legs snatched him up and pulled him towards that dreadful maw. A single, black fang, dribbling with the same
ichor I’d seen on Virginia’s vest, shot out and plunged into his throat, and he
screamed like a child for a second or two before going limp.
I ran.
I dropped everything and ran for the mouth of the cave, that monstrous hell-beast
skittering and slathering behind me. How big was it? Too big!
That’s all I can say. I got out
with those hideous legs snatching at my back; the deputy saw the slashes in my shirt
when I called him to the cabin that night.
I jumped into the boat, frantically pushing it off and gunning the
engine. As I looked back one more time,
I saw those same nightmarish “roots” sticking out of the cave opening in a
semicircle, waving and feeling around for me. I get the feeling it didn’t like
the sun. I also saw the odd petroglyph I had seen that morning, fully
illuminated in the afternoon sun, and suddenly realized it was a crude representation
of the thing I had seen in the cave.
That was when I began laughing maniacally, laughing and crying at the
same time, racing down the lake with the engine at full throttle - and then I blacked
out.
When I came to, it was nearly
dark. I was drifting in the open waters
of the lake, my boat out of gas. I guess
I had pulled back on the throttle as I fell, and had been cutting semicircles
across the lake’s surface for hours. How
I didn’t hit anything, I’ll never know.
An old fisherman, returning to his cabin after a day down by the dam,
saw me and pulled alongside, offering to tow me back to the cabin. I beached the boat and walked into my Dad’s
summer fishing cabin, seeing the things my friends had left behind, and knowing
that I would never see any of them again.
I broke down and wept, sitting at the kitchen table and crying like a
baby. There was a bottle of Scotch
there, still half full from the night before.
I downed it to the last drop, and then called the police. That’s why I registered as over the legal
limit when they did the breathalyzer.
The deputies didn’t believe me, and
when the search party found the cave, all they found was the vest and the flip-flop.
I still say you should have those black stains analyzed, Your Honor! The opening
at the back of the cave was gone, and so were the hanging carcasses. So was Kassi.
So was Gene. Gone, all of
them. Dead, and it was all my fault. That’s all I’ve got to say, Your Honor, and
it is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, whether you
believe it or not.
End
of statement
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