Freaks in the Flood

Annabelle didn’t have time to react to the change in current. Halfway through a downstroke on her fiddle, her makeshift raft crunched against the roots of the willows and cypress exposed by years of floods. The reeds cut across her face. Something in her leg gave a loud crack. She sat among the cattails. Her chest heaved under her denim overalls soaked through with mud and river water. She looked up at the sky, and was relieved to find in it the imperfect darkness of night. That would not last long, here on shore. The Freaks would come out soon enough. She scrambled to her feet and pulled the plastic baggy of matches out from her pocket with shaking hands. Around her, the shadows grew denser, darker. She dropped a couple matches trying to strike them against the box. The stars blinked out one by one and a whisper disconnected from the running noise of the river’s progress, rising in Annabelle’s ears. She struck and struck, blind, her own hands invisible to her, with not a spark, until finally…

 

Light returned to the world. Small, fragile, but light. That was all it took. A handful of stars returned to the sky like the eyes of a family of curious, celestial squirrels, interested but not enough to interfere. Annabelle trudged out of the mire further inland holding the match out, a ward against the whispers in the dark, lighting a new one when needs were. She found dried leaves, twigs, sticks, anything she could burn, collecting it while trying to ignore the voices at the edge of her awareness. Walking by the river, her foot bumped against a tank of gasoline she had had strapped on her raft. She lugged it with one arm to the pile of detritus, stopping to catch her breath. She held the match out and unscrewed the plastic canister’s lid, coughing at the sickly sweet fumes. This would have to be done quickly. Annabelle took a match out and placed it between her lips, then taking a deep breath, threw the old one into the grass. As the darkness rushed back in and the voices began to crescendo in her ears, she grappled with the gasoline tank and dumped as much as she felt safe pouring out on the pile. The world was drowned in voices, pleading, cajoling, taunting, admonishing. Annabelle roared against them as she struck a match and threw it at the brush pile.

 

Light returned to the world in the form of a roaring flame. The darkness retreated in an inky mass with tendrils catching on the uneven stones and roots of the shore. A hole opened to the dim stars above. Annabelle slumped against a small, gnarled tree while shapes swirled around the edge of the light. Within this small bubble, she was safe. But she would have to tend the fire until she could get back on the river. Which meant she needed wood. Groaning, Annabelle stood up on unsteady legs. She made a makeshift torch of a torn strip of cloth, and collected a bundle of sticks. Then she searched the waterlogged reeds and grass for the remains of her raft home. She managed to collect one additional gasoline canister, the smaller of her two garbage bags of clothes, a handful of her foodstuffs, and, miraculously, her fiddle and bow. 

 

Returning to her camp, she laid out everything she had found. It was not much, but it was better than nothing. And more than anything, she had her fiddle. She let the old instrument dry out while she busied herself preparing a new raft. 

 

“Annabelle? Baby is that you?” It was the voice of her mother. She went stiff, and turned around slowly. “Oh Annie, it’s you!” The thing stood at the edge of the circle of light, looking for all the world like Annabelle’s dead mother. It had her dark, lustrous complexion, her heavy, work-worn shoulders, and her scuffed apron. “C’mere baby, co-”

 

“You keep Mama’s voice out your filthy mouth, Freak,” Annabelle snarled. 

 

The Freak wearing Mama’s face frowned, then distorted into shadows with shining white eyes and teeth and returned to the darkness. Annabelle fought to keep her breathing steady. She sat down with her fiddle, tuned it the best she could, and played a lullaby that her real mother had taught her years ago. All along the edge of the firelight, the shadows curled and probed. Voices whispered, some sounding almost recognizable. Bright eyes watched her, circling around and around.

 

“That was no way to talk to your mother,” one of the voices said. It was the sweet baritone of her father, now, in his ironworker’s slacks, circling the encampment. Annabelle ignored him. His features distorted as he circled the fire, and eventually he retreated into the shadows.

 

“Why don’t you come out?” This voice stopped her playing. Annabelle looked up, and caught her own gaze from across the orange-bathed clearing. “It’s so easy. Let the dark wrap you up. You could join them.” The Freak held out a hand.

 

“You could be with me,” a smaller voice said. Annabelle’s pulse quickened. Her jaw clenched, and tears stung her eyes. “It’s cold out here, and we miss you. Please come back,” the Freak said, wearing the face of her dear brother Samuel.

 

“You’re not Samuel!” Annabelle shouted. She was not sad. She was not scared. She was angry. “You’re not Samuel, you’re not Mama, you’re not Daddy, and you ain’t me!” She picked up one of the sticks and swung it at the circling Freaks. They dissipated into black mist where the light got too close, or otherwise showed their true forms with their many eyes and crooked mouths. Annabelle returned to her seat by the tree and continued playing the fiddle, a little shaken, but it was all she could do to stay calm.

 

It wasn’t for several minutes that she noticed she was not alone anymore. A Freak sat at the edge of the firelight, looking vaguely like a great dog with a twisted, pointed snout. It watched Annabelle with its strange eyes.

 

“You’re not even trying, are you?” Annabelle scoffed, stopping in the middle of her tune. “What, I suppose you’re just going to threaten me? Done playing games?”

 

“No,” the Freak said. Its voice was like rushing water, scraping sand, radio static.

 

“Then what’re you here for?”

 

“I just wanted to listen to you play.”

 

Annabelle snorted, but went back to playing. The Freak watched her, undulating with the shadows and voices around it, but continuing to stare unblinking, unmoving. It unnerved her, but she grew to simply be used to it. She set her fiddle down, and began working on her raft again. It was several hours of hard work for someone so beat up and tired, but she managed it. She was running out of wood, however, and the fire was going down. The Freaks circled the camp and whispered in the voices of the people Annabelle had known in life, drawing closer and closer. The one strange Freak disappeared without a sound, and Annabelle felt strangely alone without it listening to her fiddle. 

 

The sound of large chunks of wood clattering nearby tore Annabelle from a sleep she did not know she was in. Her first thought was that her fire had gone out, and the Freaks had come for her. But her fire still burned. And the only Freak she could see was the weird one sitting not three feet away from her.

 

“They are for you,” it said. It took Annabelle a few moments to realize the Freak meant the considerable pile of logs. 

 

“You’re… helping me?”

 

“I like your music.”

 

“But what do you get out of it?”

 

The Freak did what Annabelle assumed was its version of a shrug. “Nothing, I suppose.”

 

Annabelle grunted, took the logs, and started lashing them together. “So, what?” she said as she worked. “I’m just to trust you now?”

 

“Prey should never trust the creature nature has appointed to be its predator.”

“Even if they help?”

 

“Even if they help.”

 

“You don’t build a great case for yourself, Freak.”

 

“I do not intend for you to trust me.”

 

Annabelle laughed, despite herself. She did not understand the Freak at all. But then again, she didn’t understand the Freaks in general. No one seemed to. One day the world was dark, and that seemed to be that. People disappeared. People reappeared. Annabelle was used to not understanding things, used to continuing living simply thankful to wake up another day. So she finished her raft, mounted a small flame on it, and pushed herself back onto the river.

 

“Thank you, Freak,” she said as she waded into the reeds.

 

“You do not need to thank me. It is not generosity.”

 

“Whatever you say.”

 

The imperfect darkness of night returned around her as she continued drifting down the river. The roiling clouds where the Freaks lived stopped just short of the flowing water, and she could see shadows pacing back and forth, eyes like floating wisps watching her. She took out her fiddle and sat against the small cabin she’d built into the raft, playing her mother’s lullaby as she drifted on south to the city where she would no longer have to fear the Freaks, benevolent, weird, or otherwise.