Field Mouse (The Fooder)

                                     Field Mouse (The Fooder)

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                                                                   Prolog
                                                      "Field Mouse (The Fooder)"

"Drafts of wind wailed high in the barn's rafters. Sheets of rain hissed against the dingy windowpanes. The nighttime sky was laced with lightning, and thunder exploded and reverberated in an unending procession. Yet, above the storm's unmetered orchestration, a woman's screams rose and fell like a demented aria. Thick, oaken beams and joists shuddered as the old, cavernous building waited for heaven or hell to claim another soul.
     "The woman was lying on the damp, straw-littered earthen floor, her head bent back and her mouth twisted in agony. She was naked from her waist down, with only a thin blouse straining to contain her swollen breasts. Her knees were open for childbirth and she was desperately pushing at her distended belly to force her reluctant babe out into the world. Her brain was muddled and dull from the relentless pain, but in a lucid fragment of her consciousness she was terrified that her child would survive birth only to face the murderous wrath of a lunatic.
     "He stood to one side, waiting, a shotgun cradled on one arm. He was tall, thin and gaunt, a weather worn man in bib-coveralls. The dim, yellowed light of a lantern cast his eyes in black pits, while strobes of lightning caught his hate-twisted features in a series of unearthly images. The rising tempest and the young woman's shrieks were wearing on his patience; he wanted this done. It seemed as if she would never drop the bastard, the damnable abomination. But he had to let it run its course. If the devil's spawn died, it would relieve him of the chore. He didn't want to lose the woman, but that too, was in the hands of the Almighty Lord.
     "The woman's ordeal wore into the hellish night as the man, her husband, watched piously from his shadows."

                                                                   Excerpt
                                        Field Mouse (The Fooder)

"She was right, when she got to the end of the driveway, turned south, and walked a short distance, she could just make out the structured shape of the bridge brooding in the darkness up ahead. She walked as fast as her full stomach let her, glancing toward the slightest noise and giving wide berth to suspicious shadows.
     "If the bogeyman got me now, I'd sure make him a delicious meal. The grim reflection generated a nervous laugh in her chest that died in her throat. She shivered instead.
     "A heightened sense of foreboding crept over her as she approached the bridge. It wasn't the big, imposing sign on the tree that told people to stay away (or they would get shot) that bothered her (Ma used to get mad when she heard the boom of Charles' gun, saying she would run away someday.); it was what Charles always said about trolls living under bridges and hunting people at night that worried her. But she couldn't very well go in the river because of the crocodiles and hippo...hippopotrusses. Nor could she get her legs to stop. With a defiance born of desperation, ignoring the load in her belly, she set her lips tight and began to run...straight across the center of the decaying planks.
     "It seemed like she was flying; her feet barely skimmed the ground. The girders overhead stepped past her one at a time without end. She kept glancing at the dark holes in the boards and at the rails, expecting something dark and slimy to slither up and grab her. She imagined scaly hands pulling her down, foul breath sucking the life out of her, teeth ripping at her tender throat. A scream crawled to her voice box and waited to be used. Her fear had turned to terror, and terror was giving way to panic. She had to pee...."

                                                          Author's Note

      Charles Willoughby had an abiding faith. He was brought up in a God-fearing family, where his father would set his farming chores aside to administer the strop to his son to "cleanse his sins" when the occasion demanded, which was often. Charles' mother, an obese woman who was terrified of her husband, kept her teenage son to her breast in order to harvest some comfort and security.
     Charles knew no other life and accepted his father's whippings, "Physical pain purged guilt; suffering was transient." He suspected that his relationship with his mother was queer, but he didn't know that he could deny her.
     But what he learned at his thirteenth birthday party (especially from Jennifer Farley) would force him to demand independence from his family and, not inconsequentially, would lend him an excuse to commit his own extreme cruelties after his parents finally died.

                                     This is where Field Mouse (The Fooder) begins...