Tallow on Badger Road
While clearing their late uncle’s isolated New Hampshire farmhouse on Halloween, estranged siblings Corinne and Jude are hunted by Gideon, a seemingly indestructible butcher who mimics his victims’ voices. After Jude is gravely wounded, Corinne confronts the truth of her flight from their abusive father and refuses to abandon him again, fighting their way to escape. Their bond begins to heal, but Gideon’s voice follows them over a stolen radio—speaking in Corinne’s own words.
By MyAudioBooks.ai ·
Listen free: Tallow on Badger Road
Corinne scraped a curl of hardened tallow off the inside of the storm-door glass with her thumbnail and smelled burnt pig fat where lemon oil should have been. Across the gravel turnaround of her late uncle Hal's farmhouse, her brother Jude came limping up from the woodshed with the splitting maul across his forearm, favoring the left ankle a chainsaw kickback had put two steel pins through in May, and the hickory haft in his fist was wet and dark to the wrist.
Corinne pushed the screen door open with her hip. "Tell me that's bar oil on your sleeve."
Jude stopped at the bottom step, looked down at the sticky red smear along his flannel cuff, and wiped his palm on his jeans with a short, barking laugh that did not quite land. "Somebody dressed a gut-shot doe against Hal's cordwood stack and left the hide hanging on the latch, which is exactly the kind of hill-town welcome I told you we'd get if we came up here on Halloween night instead of hiring a clean-out crew from Manchester. You're the one who wanted the keys turned over by November first, Corinne, not me, I would've let the probate lawyer burn the whole place for the insurance and split the ash."
Corinne came down one step onto the granite slab, the damp cold of late October in Derryfield biting through her wool socks. They were six miles above the covered bridge at the dead end of Badger Road, packing out Hal's farmhouse before the town shut the unplowed lane for winter, and the only other house on the ridge had stood empty since the old rendering and tannery pit closed in the seventies. Half an hour earlier, while Corinne was setting their childhood porcelain jack-o'-lantern candy dish on the hall table—the one piece she had carried up from her apartment in Nashua, hoping Jude might see it, remember their mother's kitchen before their father's drinking broke the family in two, and finally stop treating her like a deserter for leaving home at twenty-two—Walt from the town highway barn had idled his orange municipal pickup by the mailbox.
Walt had rested his elbow on the open window frame, squinting past the orchard wall where the sun was already dropping behind the hemlocks. "Culvert down by the tannery brook is taking water over the planks, so if you two aren't out in twenty minutes you're sleeping here till the brook drops. And lock the bulkhead, because the sheriff's got two county brush-cutters missing since noon up by the rendering pit, and Hal never left that porch bulb burning after dark on October thirty-first."
Corinne had thanked him, assuming it was an old road-agent's way of hurrying flatlanders off a dead-end lane before dark. Now she looked from the smear on Jude's cuff to the iron head of the maul. Tangled in the splintered wood collar just below the steel wedge was a wet gray braid of human hair with a yellow plastic highway-department ear-loop still snapped to the strands.
Her stomach dropped hard against her ribs. She reached for Jude's wrist. "Look at the collar on that axe, Jude. Look at what is caught in the wood."
Jude turned the handle toward the yellow porch bulb. His mouth stayed open for a beat, the defensive swagger draining out of his face, and then he shook his head too fast, backing up half a pace until his pinned ankle clicked. "No, hold on, that's horsehair or binder twine from the shed rafters, you work twelve-hour trauma shifts at Southern New Hampshire Medical so every wet rag looks like an emergency room to you. Guys poach up here all autumn, they leave gut piles in the weeds, they drop ear protection, nobody is leaving a county road worker in Hal's woodshed."
Corinne grabbed the front of his wool jacket with both hands and hauled him up the steps into the mudroom. "Binder twine doesn't have a county hard-hat clip tangled in grey roots, and deer blood doesn't smell like boiled lard. Get inside, drop the oak bar on the storm door, and give me your phone."
Jude fumbled his phone out of his Carhartt pocket while Corinne threw the brass deadbolt and flicked the wall switch by the coat hooks down. Outside, the yellow porch bulb did not go dark. A heavy black grease-pencil line had been written across the painted fuse-box door beside the boots in Hal's cramped carpenter script: pull the ceramic fuse at sundown on Halloween, and if someone speaks to you from the yard using words you already said, do not answer the mouth.
Jude held his glowing screen up between them, his thumb jabbing the glass. "No bars, not even emergency roaming, which is just great because the copper landline by the pantry has been dead since the August windstorm. Wait a second—be quiet and listen to that."
On the tongue-and-groove wall beside the pantry hung Hal's old Bakelite barn intercom, wired on a closed twelve-volt battery loop to the lambing stall fifty yards across the wet pasture. The Bakelite speaker was hissing softly, its brass listen toggle wedged down with a snapped wooden matchstick. Beneath the hiss came the tinny chatter of a Boston sports recap playing from a truck dashboard radio, and over the radio came a slow, wet, rhythmic *shuck-scrape, shuck-scrape*, like a curved iron blade peeling fat from a stretched hide on a butcher's bench.
Corinne leaned close to the Bakelite grille, her breath shallow in her throat. "Hal took the battery out of that box five years ago. Why is the barn unit live?"
Jude reached for the toggle, then froze as a pair of heavy rubber boots shifted on the barn floorboards across the wire. A voice spoke two inches from the barn microphone—not Walt's voice, though it wore the cadence of Walt's throat like a stolen coat, thick and wet and clicking on the consonants as if the speaker's cheek were split open to the teeth.
Gideon spoke into the barn receiver. "Culvert down by the tannery brook is taking water over the planks, so if you two aren't out in twenty minutes you're sleeping here."
A wet, leveraged crunch followed over the wire—the unmistakable sound of a human molar being pried out of a jawbone with iron pliers and dropped with a dull clink into a sack of bone and teeth.
Then the voice spoke a second time, shifting mid-breath from Walt's gravelly Yankee register into Corinne's own contralto from three minutes earlier on the porch steps. "Tell me that's bar oil on your sleeve."
Corinne yanked the matchstick out of the slot and snapped the toggle up, cutting the speaker dead. Her fingers were ice-cold, her pulse hammering behind her eyes. For twelve years Jude had acted as if she had walked out of their father's house in Derryfield because she thought she was better than him; she had never told him that the night she packed her Civic, their father had swung a cast-iron skillet at her head and she had been too terrified to wait until Jude's school bus came home at three. Looking at his pale, stubbled face under the kitchen bulb, she knew with sudden, sickening clarity that if anything in that barn touched him tonight, she would never get a second chance to say it.
Jude backed away from the wall box until his hip hit the cast-iron sink. "That was Walt's pickup radio in the barn. Corinne, my keys are dangling in the ignition of my Silverado thirty feet from the steps, and if that culvert washes out we can't walk six miles through the woods on my ankle."
Corinne stepped between him and the mudroom door, bracing both palms against the pine frame. "We are not opening that door while he is between the barn and the driveway. We pull the fuse for the porch light so he can't see through the glass, we lock the kitchen doors, and we wait until the state police come looking for Walt's truck."
Jude caught her wrists, his hands shaking as anger and claustrophobia overran his judgment. "Nobody knows Walt stopped here, Corinne! He wasn't on a call sheet, he just pulled over by the mailbox, and the sheriff isn't driving up a flooded class-six road before morning! You always do this—you lock the door, you make the rules like you're the charge nurse and I'm twelve years old, and meanwhile some lunatic in the barn is about to walk out there and take my truck! It's thirty feet to the cab, I can be in the seat and backing up to the steps in ten seconds!"
Before Corinne could grab his belt, Jude wrenched the brass deadbolt back, lifted the oak bar out of its brackets, and lunged out through the storm door onto the granite steps.
Corinne snatched the heavy cast-iron fireplace poker from the hearth bucket and sprinted onto the top landing. "Jude, stop—behind the tailgate!"
From the blind side of the pickup's rear fender stepped a man six feet four inches tall, wearing Walt's bright yellow county road-crew slicker buttoned to the throat. In the harsh glare of the porch bulb that refused to switch off, Corinne saw him whole. His skin had the tallow-white, waxy sheen of suet cured in cold brine, and the left side of his face had been split from the corner of his mouth to the ear lobe and pinched shut with three rusted iron hog-ring staples that pulled his gray gums bare. In his left fist hung a sodden burlap grain sack that clinked like broken crockery; in his right he gripped a curved, two-handled iron hog-scraping bell, its sharpened lip black with clot and yellow fat.
Gideon tilted his staple-split jaw toward Jude and spoke in Walt's stolen voice. "And lock the bulkhead."
Jude swung the splitting maul with both hands, aiming for the center of the yellow slicker, but his pinned left ankle rolled on the wet pea gravel and the iron wedge buried itself three inches deep into the steel rim of the pickup's tailgate instead. Gideon moved with terrible, butcher-shop economy. His four-fingered left hand clamped over Jude's forearm, pinning him flat against the truck bed, while his right drove the razor-ground concave edge of the hog scraper down across the back of Jude's lower calf just above his boot top.
Wool sock, skin, and the thick belly of the gastrocnemius muscle parted in one wet, ripping unzip. Dark blood jetted across the white gravel as Jude's leg folded under him, exposing the glistening white strap of the Achilles tendon before the gash filled and overflowed.
Jude hit the gravel on his hip, screaming through his teeth as Gideon hooked two gray fingers under Jude's collarbone to drag him toward the dark orchard wall.
Corinne leaped off the second granite step and swung the cast-iron poker with all the weight of her shoulders into the side of Gideon's neck. The square iron point punched through the yellow oilskin collar and grated hard across his collarbone. Gideon did not grunt or bleed like a living man; thick, amber-black grease welled around the iron shaft, smelling of wet sheep wool and old cellar tallow. He turned his head slowly until his staple-torn cheek brushed Corinne's knuckles, his corneas milky as boiled egg white under the porch bulb, and his jaws parted with a wet click of rusted wire.
Corinne wrenched the poker free, hooked her left arm under Jude's armpit, and dragged her brother backward up the granite steps while Jude kicked frantically at the gravel with his good right boot, painting a wide red ribbon across every stone.
Corinne heaved Jude over the mudroom threshold and threw her shoulder against the heavy inner oak door just as Gideon's long, gray-knuckled fingers curled around the jamb to catch the latch. Two hundred pounds of seasoned oak slammed shut against the iron strike plate.
A dry *snap* echoed in the small entryway, like a frozen hickory branch breaking under a boot. Corinne shot the deadbolt and dropped the oak bar into its iron brackets. On the linoleum beside her heel lay the severed top joint of Gideon's left ring finger, sheared clean through the bone—gray, cold, and bloodless, its thick yellow nail scraping once against the wax before going still.
Outside the frosted glass, Gideon did not curse or throw his weight against the wood. His wet palm slid slowly down the pane, smearing yellow grease and Jude's blood, and then Walt's brass municipal key ring tapped three measured times against the glass.
Gideon spoke through the door in Jude's exact, ragged baritone from two minutes earlier. "It's thirty feet to the cab, I can be in the seat and backing up to the steps in ten seconds."
Jude dragged himself backward across the kitchen linoleum by his elbows, both hands clamped around his laid-open calf while bright blood pulsed between his fingers onto the braided rug. "Corinne—Jesus Christ, Corinne, he opened the back of my leg to the bone, I can feel the cold air inside it, don't let him come through that glass!"
Corinne's trauma-shift discipline slammed down over her terror like a steel shutter. She yanked a clean linen dish towel from the oven rail, knotted it four inches above Jude's knee, twisted a maple rolling pin through the knot as a windlass until the bright arterial spurting slowed to a dark venous seep, and snatched the stainless veterinary skin-stapler from Hal's lambing kit on the lower pantry shelf.
Corinne dropped to both knees beside his boot. "Bite your jacket collar, Jude, I have to pull the fascia and skin flaps together so you don't bleed out on this floor before we reach the truck, and I don't have lidocaine."
Jude bit down hard on the wool lapel of his coat, tears cutting clean tracks through the gravel dust on his cheeks as Corinne pinched the parted, slippery edges of muscle and skin together with her blood-slick fingers and fired eight steel staples down the length of his calf—*clack, clack, clack*—her hands steady even as the slow, dragging footsteps left the porch boards and circled along the north clapboards toward the cellar bulkhead.
Jude let his head fall back against the cast-iron stove base, shivering hard as shock set in. "Why did you come down the steps for me? You were inside the mudroom, you had the bar in your hand, you could've locked the oak door and waited till morning. I've treated you like garbage since the week you moved to Nashua."
Corinne lashed the rolling-pin windlass to his shin with butcher's twine so it could not unwind and looked straight into his face. "Because the night I left Derryfield, Dad put my head through the pantry drywall before your bus got home, and I drove away at eighty miles an hour telling myself he'd never hit you if I wasn't there to start the argument. I've spent twelve years waking up at three in the morning knowing I left my sixteen-year-old brother alone in that house. I'm not leaving you in a house again."
Jude's hand came up and caught the bloody sleeve of her sweater, his voice dropping to a raw scrape. "I thought you just got tired of looking at us."
Corinne gripped his wrist. "Never you. Not once."
From the dark cellar beneath their boots came the groan of rotted pine planks and the sharp *ping* of rusted masonry nails popping out of damp lime mortar. The exterior cellar bulkhead—the slanted double doors on the orchard side of the foundation—had been torn off its hinges. Heavy, unhurried boots came clomping up the thirteen wooden cellar treads toward the hollow-core kitchen door, and with every step the burlap sack clinked against the pine risers like a bag of river stones.
Corinne looked at the propane stove. On the front burner, a two-gallon blue enamel stockpot of water and caustic lye soap that she had set to boil for soaking Hal's grease-caked oven racks was rolling at a hard, white-frothed boil. Beside the hall arch stood their mother's heavy porcelain jack-o'-lantern candy dish.
Corinne hauled Jude upright against the butcher-block counter with his good right leg braced under him and pressed the bent cast-iron poker into his hands. "Listen to me: that cellar door is hollow veneer, it won't hold one blow. When he comes through, he's going to reach for whichever one of us looks pinned. Don't swing at his ribs—iron doesn't slow his body down. Aim for the staples holding his jaw together, and the second I blind him, hook your arm round my neck and we go straight out the mudroom for the Silverado."
The hollow-core cellar door did not open at the brass knob. The curved iron hog scraper punched straight through the center panel at chest height, hooked the inner stile, and ripped the upper half of the door off its hinges in a jagged shower of painted luan splinters.
Gideon stepped over the lower half of the ruined door into the kitchen, filling the narrow frame, Walt's yellow slicker glistening with cellar spiderwebs and Jude's blood. Before Jude could swing the poker, Gideon lunged across the linoleum, caught Jude by the throat with his four-fingered left hand, and slammed him flat against the pantry casing, lifting Jude two inches off his good heel. Gideon raised the iron hog scraper and pressed its sharpened concave lip hard beneath the angle of Jude's jawbone, nicking the skin so a bright red thread ran down Jude's collar.
Gideon turned his milky, unblinking eyes on Corinne and spoke in a wet, overlapping chorus that began in Hal's dead baritone and finished in Jude's voice. "One mouth for the tallow sack and the lane stays clear till next October. Leave the boy on the hook, Corinne, or I scrape you both to the teeth."
Jude's boots kicked against the wainscoting as his fingers clawed at the oilskin wrist crushing his windpipe, his voice strangled to a thin, bubbling wheeze. "Run for the truck, Corinne—the keys are in the dash, just go!"
Corinne did not look toward the mudroom door. She snatched their mother's heavy porcelain jack-o'-lantern candy dish from the hall table with her left hand, stepped inside the sweep of Gideon's elbow, and smashed the thick ceramic rim across his staple-pinned left cheek with everything she had left.
Glazed orange porcelain exploded into jagged shards. Two of the rusted iron hog-ring staples tore out of the gray, fibrous flesh, and Gideon's split cheek flapped open to the bare yellow molars and black, stitch-scarred tongue inside. As Gideon's skull jerked sideways and his mouth gaped wide in a wet, whistling roar that smelled of dead pond water, Corinne lifted the two-gallon enamel pot of boiling lye water from the propane burner with both hands and poured the entire scalding torrent straight into the open side of his face and down his gullet.
White steam and the suffocating stench of boiled tallow billowed to the kitchen ceiling. Gray tissue blistered, curled, and sloughed in thick ribbons across Gideon's throat and milky corneas as his hand spasmed open, dropping Jude to the rug. Gideon staggered half a step back into the pantry doorway, clawing at his scalded tongue with his four-fingered hand. Corinne snatched the fallen cast-iron poker from the linoleum, planted both boots wide on the blood-soaked rug, and drove the sharpened iron point upward through the soft, blistered flesh beneath Gideon's chin—angling the rod through the roof of his mouth and four inches deep into the solid pine pantry stud behind his skull.
She threw her whole weight onto the poker handle until the iron bent and pinned his head upright against the timber like a butcher's hook, his heavy rubber heels drumming twice against the cellar threshold while black grease and lye foam bubbled between his shattered molars.
Corinne grabbed the front of Jude's flannel shirt and hauled him upright. "Arm round my neck—now, Jude, hop!"
They crashed through the mudroom and down the slick granite steps into the freezing wind off the orchard. Jude hopped on his good right boot with his arm locked around Corinne's shoulders until she wrenched the Silverado's passenger door open, shoved him across the bench seat, scrambled behind the steering wheel, and twisted the key still hanging in the ignition cylinder.
The eight-cylinder engine caught on the first turn. Corinne yanked the column shifter into reverse, backed hard around the bloody cordwood stack, and slammed the transmission into low gear down Badger Road. As the high beams swept across the farmhouse porch, Corinne looked up into the rearview mirror.
Inside the bright rectangle of the kitchen window, the tall silhouette in the yellow county slicker gripped the iron poker protruding beneath its chin with both hands, wrenched its head sideways with a visible tear of jaw cartilage and splintered pine, and pulled its skull free of the pantry stud. Before the pickup's taillights cleared the stone orchard wall, the mudroom storm door swung wide and Gideon walked out onto the top granite step directly beneath the burning yellow bulb, the iron hog scraper still in his fist.
At the bottom of the ridge, brown floodwater was boiling four inches deep across the timber planks of the tannery brook culvert, carrying drowned hemlock branches and dirty white foam over the guard rails. Corinne did not touch the brake pedal; she locked both blood-crusted hands on the wheel, floored the accelerator, and drove the heavy pickup straight through the washout in a twin wall of spray that hammered the floorboards until the front tires bit solid town asphalt on the far bank.
Only when the amber glow of the state highway intersection appeared through the bare birches did Jude let his head drop back against the headrest. His breathing was ragged and shallow, his skin the color of wet ash, and his right hand was wrapped tight around Corinne's forearm on the steering wheel—holding on, not pushing her away.
Jude looked down at the triangular orange shard of glazed porcelain still wedged in the bloody knit of her sweater cuff and spoke in a hoarse, stripped whisper. "You broke Mom's pumpkin dish on his face."
Corinne let out a breath that shook all the way to her boots and covered his cold knuckles with her palm. "We'll buy superglue at the pharmacy in Nashua as soon as they stitch your leg."
Under the dashboard, where Walt's spare municipal handheld radio had rolled when Corinne kicked it onto the floorboard, the red receive light clicked on by itself. Through the wet hiss of static came a voice from the dark orchard six miles behind them—not Walt's voice anymore, and not Jude's, but Corinne's own low contralto, repeating her words from the kitchen floor with slow, unhurried precision as the green highway sign for Derryfield flashed past in the headlights.