Kippie

The bar was full of old men who never went out. I was dining there the third night in a row because I hadn’t bought groceries since I found the hand out there. Though there was no window, I looked across the room in the direction where it had happened. Eventually Kenny brought me my burger. He was a friend. I think he didn’t know what to say.

           “Cold tonight,” he said.

           “It’s cold every night, Ken.”

           “Yeah, but right now, oh boy!”

           “Lot of people out though.”

           “Oh, yeah…”

           “Never saw a lot of these guys around the place before.”

           “Well, Simon, you know they’re getting pretty excited about things. It’s a reason for everyone to get together.”

           I looked at him darkly. “I don’t think this is exciting.”

           “Oh, um, God I’m sorry that’s not what I meant.”

           I guess he didn’t deserve that.

           “You know what they’re saying, Simon?”

           I knew what they were saying.

           “No,” I replied.

           “These guys think what you found,” he said, leaning in, “was Keppie.”

           “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

           “C’mon, Si, you gotta admit, it sounds a lot like it. Black hand and all.”

           “Kenny, listen to me. What I saw out in the woods was just some poor old frost-bitten tramp who probably froze to death sometime in winter. The other thing is just a stupid story they told us as kids so we would stay in bed.”

           “But what did the rest of him look like, Simon?” Ken was really getting excited now. “Did you see if he had ears?”

           “Like I told you and the cops and the whole world, all there was to see was the hand coming up out of the snow. The rest of him is still melting out. You can’t see anything.”

           “But still, the hand was black as coal all over! You said that.”

           “Lack of circulation.”

           “And besides, it makes sense with everything that you-“

           “Everything that I what, Ken?”

           He looked embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

           “It’s fine. I’m gonna go home now.”

           We must have been raising our voices as we talked, because I couldn’t leave without being bothered by old Mr. Kalk.

           “You’re the guy what found the monster.”        

           “Wasn’t any monster out there, Mr. Kalk. Excuse me.”

           I walked quickly out.

           “Wait, tell us about the Keppie!” he shouted after me. As I left, his glassy blue eyes were dead set on me.

           It was a cold night. It was cold every night. I walked home. Ten minutes. I owned a car, but I hadn’t driven lately. I was being careful. Not many people were out, but I looked left and right at every crossing multiple times. I stayed in the streetlights until I was home. John’s room and mine and Gwen’s were quiet as tombs. I slept on the couch. I don’t like to disturb.

           The next morning was Sunday, so I supposed I should go to church. Good-intentioned, but I didn’t get there until past noon. The last of the service goers were finishing up their chats, mostly about me probably. I sat in one of the long oak pews and looked around. Our town had a fairly small but nevertheless very old church, constructed out of stone when the town was starting out and so optimistic about its prospects that they spent the effort and money to drag the blocks of rock out of the hills three miles off, but furnished and decorated with only wood as the long winters dragged on, devastating the settlers’ stocks of capital and food. Bas-relief carvings were placed high above the pews, depicting on one side the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Ten Plagues, the Crucifixion, and on the other, scenes from the days that the town starved, and people made tough choices. They always seemed to make the church seem taller than it was.

           “It’s always good to see you here, Simon,” said the middle-aged man who sat behind me.

           “Better late than never, Father August.”

           “I understand you’ve been tested very much since last week. I am praying for the soul of that poor man you found.”

           The priest’s voice was low, and solid, and effortlessly authoritative. I turned to him, and his face was stony.

           “That is, Father, if you assume that it was a man.”

           We sat in silence for some moments. Through a window depicting a bleeding and pathetic-looking saint, I noticed it was starting to snow.

           “We’ve known each other a long time, Si. Why don’t you call me August?”

           “Fine. It’s good of you to consider the man in your prayers, August.”

           “I’ve always known you to be a dutiful Christian, Simon, even as a boy.”

           I stood up and buttoned my coat.

           “August. I’ve always appreciated that you supported me when I lost Gwen and Johnnie. I think I’ll go for a walk.”

           “That’s just my job, Simon.” He stood and moved towards me. “To be a comfort to the lost. To free these people from fear,” he grasped my hand in both of his weathered palms, “of what is not real.”

           I nodded at him but said nothing, and walked down the aisle, and thought to myself that one walks the other way to be married.

At the instant I would have opened the heavy front door, it was opened from the other side by a violent snowy breeze. No, it was opened by a young Police Sergeant who appeared out of the storm a second later and pushed the door closed behind him.

“Sorry, sir, I don’t think you can go out there. A real storm’s coming in, we’re advising everyone to stay inside. Hey, you’re the guy that found the body, aint’ya?”

“You took my statement already,” I said, and went to sit in one of the naves, staring out a high window at pure white.

           The sergeant ushered in three more officers and two passerby and we all settled in the old stone building to wait out the storm. Most of the cops on the scene of my discovery had been brought in from out of town, so I didn’t know them, but still the Sergeant came over to talk to me.

           “You know, my grandparents actually lived in this town,” he said.

           “Oh.”

           “Yeah, I used to come here summers to stay with them. Heard some crazy stories.”

           “What we found out there actually reminded me of one.”

           “Sure.”

           “One of those things old people talk about, I guess.”

           “I guess.”

           “The Kappie, weren’t it?”

           I rounded on him. “The Keppie!”

           He was wide-eyed. “That’s it.”

           “And do you think that’s what this is?”

           “Well, you gotta think, he’s got those creepy hands and, well, more of him has been uncovered by forensics now.”

           “Good, so you’ll be taking him back to the morgue now and this’ll end.”

           “Probably not, no.”

           “What do you mean?”

           “We’ll be here a while, I guess, because they’ll want to open an investigation.”

           “Why’s that?”

           “Well, they’ll want to know who cut his ears off.”

           “What the hell did you just-”

           I didn’t have time to finish being shocked by the Policeman because at that moment, the window with the bleeding saint shattered, and shards of glass and heaps of snow flew all around the church. People were running for shelter and covering their heads, afraid the storm was becoming really violent. The Sergeant ran off to calm the situation. August and I had the same thought- we moved towards outside, where a large tarp was kept in a small shed.

           “Wait, father, wait!” said the sergeant. “It’s dangerous out there!”

           “It’s dangerous in here!” he shouted back.

           August and I heaved open the door and pressed through the storm towards the shed. The wind was a slap across the face and chilled your very bones. We had almost made it to the shed when we saw another group of earnest men walking through the snow on their way out of town. At the head of them was the old Mr. Kalk, whose steely eyes seemed to force a path for him through the thick carpet of slush.

           August put his strong hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been afraid of this for a long time. I have to go save them. You stay here and put up the tarp Simon.”

           With that he was off after the pilgrims. I watched him grow smaller against that unrelenting white backdrop. After a few moments, I walked off too, but I didn’t follow him. I knew a quicker way to where it lay.

           Every step was exhausting in that sludge, and the farther I got out of town, the more precarious it was. I tried to focus on each footfall, but inevitably my mind wandered. When you walk through a town you’ve known your whole life, every corner has ten memories. I saw the places where I was the happiest I’ve ever been, in the eight years I had a wife and a son. It could never have lasted long.

           Growing up, my grandmother told me how she saw the Keppie before grandpa went to the hospital. A tall pale man, who she told me had burnt his hands a long time ago because he couldn’t hear his friends warning him about the fire. “Why couldn’t he hear them, Grandma?” I would ask as a kid. And she would lean in close to me and whisper, “Because he has no ears, child.” And I would pull the covers of my bed tight around me.

           I grew out of that fear and ignored it when I thought I saw a strange man one night in college watching me from far off, and the next morning I got the call about my parents’ accident.

           I was through to the place where the body lay. It was marked off by bright yellow police tape, but the cops had all gone to shelter from the storm. Present were old men from the village, and Father August coming up behind them, struggling through the thick snow. None of them saw me. Most of the men were trying to avoid looking at it, except for the strong blue eyes of Mr. Kalk.

           “Bring out the gifts, boys,” he said to the others.

           Each man lay something- some food, some piece of jewelry in front of the awful corpse while Kalk and another started in with shovels to uncover the rest of the body.

           There he was. Long, milk-white body. Two igneous-black hands. Ears missing. The Keppie’s arms were reaching in front of him, his whole body was frozen in a strange contortion expressing extreme pain.

The men shied away. August was close enough to speak to them now.

“Kalk, leave here and stop this now!”

The noise of the storm had picked up so much that no one had heard him approach, and they jumped at the sound of his voice. Only Kalk was unphased.

“Get out of here, Father, you don’t know what you’re dealing with!”

He turned back to Keppie. He was shouting over the wind.

“If you are not invited, you will come! If you aren’t asked, you will smash your way in!”

August came up closer and kept arguing with the men. Kalk kept on shouting to the Keppie. August walked in front of the group and, staring them down, started gathering the gifts in his strong hands. No one seemed to want to challenge him. The wind was picking up and I could see less and less of the scene through curtains of snow. It was as if I had my eyes closed, and only let in light for the time it would take it to blink.

Blink. Kalk stopped talking to the Keppie.

Blink. He was holding his shovel and chastising his companions.

Blink. August was on the ground, bleeding from his temple and trying with all his strength to stand.

Keppie stood up. Just us. I didn’t run. I walked towards him and stopped a few feet away. With a surprising amount of ease, he turned and faced me. I had forgotten how calm his old eyes were. It was the same calm face that took my son the winter before, and my wife the winter before that.

Somewhere else in the snow men were shouting. But the storm was starting to die down. I was ready.