I don’t know if there are any out here willing or interested in reading and helping edit this, but I’m going to publish CHUK here serially as I edit. Here are the first few pages for your consideration. I will be publishing a chunk like this every few days (I hope) as I work my way through editing this novel. At the end, my goal is to have something to either submit for publication, or else self-publish. I’ve put this off for far too long. I hope you enjoy.
1
“Welcome to Bayou Bonhomme,” the thin man said with a toothy but debonair grin as he stood at the door, with perfect posture, ushering his guests into the small dining room that was never empty, rain or shine. “Welcome to Leroy’s Grill, home of Louisiana’s best barbecue.”
He’d almost look like a gentleman if he weren’t wearing an apron that was constantly smeared in barbecue sauce and grease. Leroy’s beloved mother had always told him that there was no excuse for poor manners, whether you were speaking in church or serving up barbecue, it didn’t matter. Do it all as unto Jesus, she’d say, and even though Leroy had seen things – some horrible, some incredible – since then that had made him question the whole Jesus thing, old habits die hard, and so Leroy honored his mère’s memory and her Creole heritage by always being polite to his guests.
Outwardly, Leroy was polite and courteous to the dozens of tourists that flooded through his doors each day, because that’s what his mère would want. But oh, if his mama only knew what he had to put up with each and every day, how he had to smile and laugh at the outsiders’ jokes – most of them at the expense of Leroy himself – or folks Leroy liked. They found the Cajun lingo some folks around the bayou spoke charming or quaint, and treated the people of Bonhomme like curiosities, which was really just city folk’s way of looking down their noses at the Creoles and the Cajuns. City folk watched too many movies, and seemed to have a picture of what the bayou should be like, and Leroy was happy to oblige them so long as they had money to spend. Leroy could put on the heavy Cajun accent when he needed to, and could even drop in a smattering of French words for authenticity – after all, his grand-mère had been Creole, and not one word in three that came out of her mouth was English.
The tourists came from all over – some folks from as far away as Texas or Florida – heck, there was even one couple made it all the way down from Kentucky last summer – drawn by the legend of the green man – Ol’ Remy LeVert as he was known around these parts. Things had been slow for the past few months, but then that little boy and his dog had gone missing a couple of weeks back. While the proper newspapers were writing it up as a likely gator attack, The Bonhomme Gazette had run the headline Legendary Swamp Monster Returned? This had infuriated Oscar Blanchette, the Chief of police, but editor Amie LeBeau insisted that the presence of a question mark indicated that she was merely speculating on what she thought was a viable possibility, and Oscar only scowled at her and prepared himself for the tourist invasion. As expected, the monster hunters and gawkers had swarmed into Bonhomme like flies to shit, and Bonhomme welcomed them with open, hungry arms. The people of Bonhomme were, as a rule, flat broke. Remy LeVert was the town’s meal ticket, and so the coals of the legend needed to be turned from time to time to keep the fire burning.
There were Remy LeVert t-shirts and bumper stickers to be sold, and anyone with a boat was hiring it out for tours of the bayou. Tourists lined up for hours to take one of these tours with old Jean-Baptiste Levesque – not a tooth left in the old man’s head, but he made himself understood well enough when he gave a tour of the swamp and told the story of the angry old swamp god that the first peoples called C’thuN’Chuk, which, he said, meant “The Good Man” – hence the name of the town. The truth is, ol’ Jean-Baptiste was one hell of a yarn-spinner, and if any of the tourists recognized that his stories were basically a jambalaya of H.P. Lovecraft, Len Wein, Ramsey Campbell and Stephen King, well, they never let on. After all, that kind of melangerie was all part of the Creole tradition.
There was even a sign as you entered the town proclaiming Bonhomme as the home of the legendary swamp monster, and some local kid had drawn a picture of Remy, though it was really just a drawing taken from an old Swamp Thing comic. If the man who created the comic book character ever came to town, well, the folks of Bayou Bonhomme could only hope he’d be flattered and not litigious.
Leroy passed that sign every day and shook his head and laughed, because he knew first hand that Ol’ Remy didn’t look anything like that.
2
Chief Blanchette sat his double-wide ass down at Leroy’s lunch counter and ordered an MGD and a salad.
“And doan’ be puttin’ any o’ dat coonass barbecue in dere, y’hear!” His accent, normally slight, was thicker than ever. Whether it was the heat, or the aggravation brought by the recent unsolved disappearance, it always seemed to thicken up when he was under stress.
“Yes, sir, Oscar,” the young waitress said, turning to the kitchen. Before she could make her getaway, Oscar reached out with remarkable speed for a man his size and grabbed her arm, turning her back around to face him.
“It’s Chief,” he said, pointing a thick, dirty finger at the badge on his porcine chest. “Doan you be fergettin’ the pecking order ‘round here, cher.”
“You’re hurting me,” she winced, trying to pull away from the Chief’s claw-like grip.
“Ne’ermind that,” Oscar said with a sadistic, lecherous grin. “Just you run along and faire my salade, eh?”
Oscar watched the waitress – who was actually his cousin – walk away to the kitchen, taking special interest in her legs, and the place where they disappeared under her tight black skirt.
“Oh, leave Sheryl alone, Oscar,” Leroy said, coming out of the kitchen to bring the Chief his beer. “Let me get you a sandwich.”
“I doan tink so,” Oscar said ruefully. “I tink what I want today is la vérité, yeah?”
“I already told you the truth, Oscar,” Leroy said under his breath. “I had nothing to do with that little boy and his dog.”
Oscar laughed, tits jiggling and face flushed red. It was a wonder he didn’t drop dead of a heart attack at any moment.
“Oh, I know you din’ have rien to do widdit,” Oscar said, gasping and wheezing. “But what about your friend, eh? L’homme vert. He ‘ave anyting to do widdit?”
“Jesus, Oscar!” Leroy said harshly. “Keep your voice down, will you! Are you drunk?” It wasn’t busy just yet, like it would be in another hour, but even at ten in the morning, Leroy’s had customers within earshot.
Two weeks previous, Jimmy Singleton was visiting Bonhomme with his family – more monster hunters – and went missing. The parents were from a neighboring parish, but were staying in town at Ellie Gillette’s little four-room boarding house down on Lafayette Street until things got settled one way or the other. For the first few days Chief Blanchette had wanted to believe it would end one way, but since then he’d resigned himself to the idea that it would most likely be the other. Chet Singleton was a weak, pasty man whose wife Alice wore the pants and did the talking, and the Chief joked with his secretary (a cute little thing named Suzanne who was a regular fantasy of his when he jerked off two or three times a week) that he wouldn’t be surprised if Chet snapped and ended up killing his harpy of a wife before this was all over. Suzanne didn’t think it was all that funny; did not, in fact, like anything about Chief Blanchette, least of all the way his eyes never failed to find their way down her top.
The Singletons told a pretty simple story: Jimmy’s dog had run off, and Jimmy, twelve years old and big enough to look after himself, had gone off hunting for the damn fool thing. This was in broad daylight, and so they weren’t concerned about it at all until it started getting dark and Jimmy hadn’t come back to Ellie’s boarding house (which everyone still called Josie’s Hotel, even though Josie Ammon was long dead.)
Sheryl returned with Oscar’s salad and quickly retreated back to the kitchen. She didn’t like to spend any more time in the fat man’s presence than she absolutely had to.
“Merci, cher,” the Chief said and began digging into his greens and shoveling them into his sweaty mouth.
Between mouthfuls, he glared at Leroy and pointed his fork at him. “I’m not talking no merde, ‘ere, Leroy. I find out you or your green friend ‘ad anyting to do with dis and I will fuck your shit up, mon ami. I ain’t havin’ any more o’ that bidniss like we ‘ad back in ‘98. Nossir. Sheriff’s breathin’ down ma considerable neck to find me someone to pin this on, and I’d be happy as a gator wid a chicken pie to hand him your sorry ass. This town’d be happy to see the ass end o’ you carted away, yes we would.”
Leroy leaned in close to the big man, placing his hands on either side of his plate, nearly poking his skinny hawk-like nose right in the Chief’s bulbous counterpart.
“Don’t you threaten me, you gelatinous glob of greasy shit,” Leroy said calmly but menacingly, smiling his best gentleman’s smile. “Your hands are just as dirty as mine, you son of a bitch, and there’s no washing off what we put our hands into. You best remember who you’re talking to, Chief.”
Leroy leaned back just as calmly and regarded the Chief’s suddenly pale face with something like satisfaction.
“You enjoy your salad now, Chief. On the house.” Leroy said with a flourish of his hand. “And then you go out and you find that boy, y’hear?”
3
The dinner crowd was heading out of Mel’s Bar and Grill just as the sun set over Bayou Bonhomme, which meant that the serious drinking crowd was already there to stay or else on their way. Mel was short for Melissa, but the bar had originally belonged to her daddy, whose Christian name was Elmer, but who had always gone by Mel. When Melissa’s father died back in that weird summer in ‘98, Melissa, who had hated being called Mel, took the name anyway as a tribute to her daddy, and ran the place as good as he ever did; maybe better. It took a while before the locals afforded her the same respect they did her father, but after she broke up a skirmish between the Fontenot brothers and some poor tourist with nothing but her fierce disposition and an empty bottle of Jack Daniels, people stopped referring to her as Cute L’il ‘Lissa and started calling her Mel. She didn’t stand but five foot nothing, but when she was in a mood she seemed to swell to almost six foot five, at least.
She was in a mood that night, and there were a few causes. The heat, for one – if ever there’d been a summer like this one, Mel had no recollection of it, and even the faint breeze coming off the Bayou wasn’t giving any relief. But it wasn’t just the heat – or at least, not the temperature. No, there was something in the air – something sickly and uneasy, and nobody talked about it, but it showed in the faces of everyone who walked in her doors. They still hadn’t found that boy, or his dog. ‘Not a trace’ was the last word she’d heard. She was growing tired of hearing about it. She wasn’t unsympathetic – she was deeply concerned – but each and every one of these sad sacks that walked into her place was talking about it, and while they could walk away and go somewhere else, Mel had to hear it all. All the gruesome theories, and the conjecture and innuendo – it was making her feel ill.
Then there was Victor – Varney, the locals called him, on account of his… condition. Varney worked only evenings, and then cleaned the place up after everyone cleared out. In a town the size of Bayou Bonhomme, with his special needs, it was lucky he’d found a job at all. But Mel’s father had felt sorry for the boy and Mel didn’t have the heart to cut him loose, even if he was generally unreliable, and a little creepy, if she were being honest about it. As usual, he was late, and Mel tried to understand, but tonight Leroy was supposed to be coming by to pick up his weekly cases of beer, and Mel had no energy to deal with that scoundrel.
Mel had always known that her daddy did business with Leroy Angell, but she also knew her daddy never trusted the man.
“Somethin’s not right with that one,” Mel Sr. told her once after a meeting with Leroy. “I can’t rightly say what, but I don’t trust a man who talks with one voice to some and another when he’s at home. Nossir.”
Mel thought there was more going on with Leroy Angell than her father ever suspected. For one, she’d never known any woman (nor man, for that matter) that’d taken up with Leroy, and for a town as small as Bonhomme, well, that just wasn’t right. It’s not like he wasn’t good looking – he wasn’t bad. A mite thin for Mel’s taste, but then, she always did like a little squeeze to her man.
Then there was that BBQ shack of his – people came from miles around just to eat at that shithole, and she couldn’t get her head around that for the life of her.
Mel was interrupted from her reverie by the very devil she’d been thinking of calling her name from the open front door.
“‘Ey Melissa, you wanna send ol’ Varney out back so’s I can load up?”
“He ain’t here yet, Leroy,” Mel said, hoping the man would go away. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow night?”
Leroy wandered into the bar and sat down in front of Mel. He looked at her not unkindly and told her he’d wait if it were all the same with her.
Mel nodded and poured him a beer and placed it in front of him.
“I ain’t got time to chit chat, Leroy, sorry ‘bout that – ‘til Victor gets here it’s just me behind the bar.”
“That’s okay, cher,” Leroy said, slipping into a bit of Creole like it was a pair of slippers. “I’ll just sit a spell and enjoy the… heh… ambiance.” He pronounced this last word the way his great-great-grandfather might have.
Mel knew when she was been poked fun at, and she didn’t appreciate it. She just smiled and went about her business, ignoring Leroy. Mel’s wasn’t much to look at to be sure, but it was her name over the door, and more importantly, on the deed, and she never had any complaints about the food or the service.
“When are you gonna hire another bartender, Mel?” one of the permanent residents of Mel’s barstools asked. “No one wants that ghoul behind the bar.”
Leroy stifled a little chuckle, and added, “I hear the Chief’s daughter’s looking for work.”
“Ah, shit, Leroy,” the man responded with a laugh so hard he had to spit out his beer. “That girl’s dumber’n a toad!”
“Ah, be fair, you!” Leroy said, hamming up his secondhand Creole.
“The girl’s a bonne a rienne, that’s all I know,” the old barfly said between gulps of his beer.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Leroy said with a lascivious grin, “I can think of a couple of things she might be good for.”
The other man seemed to consider this, and then laughed in agreement.
“Y’both are pigs,” Mel said. “And you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Martin Lapierre. Your own daughter and Celine were in diapers together.”
Martin, the old barfly flushed in mild embarrassment, and then downed the rest of his beer and motioned for another. The moment had passed, and he would leave a larger tip than usual. He respected Mel’s father, and he saw the same grit in his daughter.
“Any word on that lost boy?” Leroy asked. Mel figured it had taken him long enough.
“Why are you asking me?” Mel replied. “Way I hear it, you’re on the suspect list, Leroy.”
“Zat so?” Leroy asked mildly, and then shot her a thin smile that reminded Mel of a gator she was unfortunate enough to meet face to face one night while skinny dipping. She was lucky to escape with her life, if not her looks. Men said it gave her character, but Mel knew that the five-inch scar that traced her cheekbone wasn’t likely to land her on the cover of Pretty Girl magazine any time soon. Leroy looked at her just like that gator had, and Mel knew in her bones that this man was just as cold, just as dangerous.
“Ah, the Chief’s got his head up his ass,” Mel said, trying to pass off her remark as just an off-hand joke. “Plenty o’ room up there, anyway.”
Leroy just smiled that cold, thin smile, and Mel smiled nervously in return. The sound of Varney’s decrepit Buick pulling up around back saved her more discomfort. There was no mistaking that bucket of bolts, held together (in some ways quite literally) with elastic bands and duct tape.
“I’ll tell Varney you’re waiting,” Mel said, and turned to leave the thin man’s chilling glare.
“You do that, cher,” Leroy said, still grinning and glaring. “You do that.”
4
Leroy was still waiting for Varney to start bringing out cases of beer when he saw a girl he thought he recognized – but couldn’t quite place – running down the street, soaking wet, toward Mel’s in a right hurry. Her face was red, and not just with exertion. When she entered into the glow of Mel’s floodlights, Leroy could see that her eyes were bloodshot from crying and she had runners of snot on her upper lip that weren’t the least bit attractive.
“They found him!” she cried, bursting through Mel’s door. Every head turned to look at her. The chatter died down, leaving a pause that would have been eerie if it weren’t for some old Allman Brothers tune playing on the jukebox.
“They found him,” she repeated absently, then turned pale and collapsed in a limp pile right in the doorway.
“Goddammit!” Mel yelled. “Someone pick ‘er up and lay her out on one o’ the tables!”
The girl would come to, of course, and tell her tale to Mel’s customers, but Leroy had heard all he needed. He hopped in his old Dodge Duster and sped off in the direction of his BBQ shack on the bayou, where he was stopped by flares in the road and the yellow police tape that Chief Blanchette so rarely got to use and overused whenever the occasion called for it.
Leroy pulled over and got out of his car, only to see Oscar’s shuffling form coming toward him in a huff, hands up as if he were the victim of an old-fashioned stick up.
“You stay back now, Leroy!” he said, with only the slightest trace of his accent. The Chief looked scared and angry, which was never a good combination in Leroy’s experience. “This ‘ere’s a crime scene. Just get back in your car and drive away, you.”
“If there’s been a crime here, Chief, maybe I can be of assistance,” Leroy said congenially enough, but the Chief bristled nonetheless.
A woman screamed behind the Chief and he turned his head just long enough for Leroy to slip away like a snake.
“Ah, now get her outta here!” the Chief yelled and headed back to the body of twelve-year-old Jimmy Singleton – or, what was left of it, anyway. They’d have to get his parents to identify the boy, of course, but there was still part of the Saints jersey his folks said he’d been wearing on the day he disappeared. Oscar could still see part of the black and gold fleur-de-lis on what remained of the boy’s shoulder.
One of the Chief’s officers was doing his best to keep gawkers back, but it was an exercise in futility. It looked like the whole town had shown up to see what had washed up at Leroy’s dock. Martha Rae LaFleur and her boyfriend were going for a night swim and discovered the body. It was Martha Rae who had gone running to Mel’s to spread the news, while her boyfriend went to tell Oscar and then went home to find comfort from the fright with his unsuspecting wife.
Flashes went off from the gathered mob, setting Oscar off in a snit.
“Go on! Get outta here, you ghouls!” he yelled, waving his arms at them as if he were swatting flies.
“Is it Jimmy, Oscar?” a familiar voice asked. Oscar turned toward Amie LeBeau, who was already on his shit list for that whole Swamp Monster name drop in the Gazette.
“We haven’t identified the body, yet, Miss LeBeau… and call me Chief, goddammit! Ain’tchu got a lick o’ respect?” Oscar replied, exasperated.
“Well a’course it’s the boy,” someone from the mob shouted.
“Was it gators, Chief?” Amie asked, and the Chief just shook his head and cleared his throat.
“Bill, you want to get these people back from here so’s we can fish the boy out of the water. If the gators haven’t already been at him, leavin’ him in the water’s like ringin’ the dinner bell.”
Bill, the officer who had been keeping the crowd back, waved for one of the other officers to assist him while a third joined Oscar down by the dock, where Leroy was already crouched and staring at the boy’s remains. The boy’s left arm was completely missing, and he was naked from the waist down. Parts of the muscle were gone from both of his thighs and calves, with bright white bone showing through – but no visible signs of bite marks or teeth broken off like you sometimes saw with gator attacks. The right side of the boy’s face was nearly completely peeled off, and his cheekbone had been crushed, along with the eye right in its socket. What was most perplexing was that some of the wounds almost looked corrosive – as if something burned or melted the boy’s flesh rather than tore it from his bones.
Leroy felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“You’re a sneaky bastard, you,” the Chief said without a trace of humor in his voice. Leroy started a little, but only because he thought the Chief might push him into the drink just to spite him.
“This weren’t no gator did this,” Leroy said under his breath.
“No, it weren’t,” the Chief agreed quietly. “Just like in ‘98.”
Leroy grabbed the fat man’s enormous hand and used it to pull himself up.
“Couldn’t be,” Leroy said. “We took care o’ that, you and I.”
Oscar pointed at the mutilated body of Jimmy Singleton and shot a sick smile at Leroy.
“Did we now?”
++++++
Later that night, after the crowd dispersed and all that remained was the crime scene tape, Leroy loaded a large canvas bag into his little boat with its quiet outboard motor and headed out on the bayou. Leroy wasn’t a terribly brave man, but his livelihood depended on him being wrong about his suspicions and so he was willing to take the risk of a midnight ride out into the swamp. Besides, once he got to where he was heading, he wouldn’t have to worry about gators anymore. Where he was going, even the gators feared to swim.
Leroy knew his way to where he was going, having made the same trip at least twice a month for the last fifteen years, though he usually tried to avoid doing it at night. He always kept a sawed-off handy in case some gator got ambitious, but so far he’d never had cause to use it.
He remembered the very first time he’d gone out there, back in that horrible summer of ‘98, back before all the craziness, back when he’d thought, just like everybody else, that L’Homme Vert, or Remy LeVert, or C’thuN’Chuk – or whatever you wanna call it – was just a figment of some old drunk’s imagination, and that there couldn’t possibly be such a thing as swamp monsters. Leroy knew better now, not that it helped him sleep any better at night.
He killed the motor as he approached the clump of cypress trees that formed something almost like a cave. As he drifted toward it, Leroy shined the beam of his big lantern over the roots of the trees until he found what he was looking for.
“Chuk!” Leroy called. “Hey Chuk, is that you, ol’ gal?”
Leroy watched for movement, and was about to move his beam a little further along when a shape among the tree trunks shifted a bit, and then slowly began to unfurl itself in a serpentine manner. Leroy watched in fascinated horror as dozens of thick, tentacle-like appendages writhed in front of the creature, which could by no means be described as humanoid in shape or manner. No matter how many times Leroy came face-to-face with the creature he called Chuk, (if such a thing could be said to have a face) he could not get past the revulsion; the utter sense of alien-ness that he felt in its presence.
One wet slit opened, and then another, and another, and in a matter of seconds, Leroy found himself being stared at by Chuk’s numerous orange and black eyes. A vertical slit began to open in the center of what Leroy thought of as Chuk’s head, showing the bright pink of Chuk’s mouth. It writhed and swelled, wet and obscene, like a ten-foot long vagina with teeth, and when it spoke, its maw made hungry, rude smacking sounds.
“What do you want?” Chuk asked, more bored than annoyed.
Leroy shined his light in the creatures many eyes, making it wince and squint.
“We need to talk, Chuk.”
Who is Jessica B. Bell? 