Thursday, January 22, 2009

In The Belly Of The Beast - Part One

I’ve already said that my neighbor Mrs. Price was pretty weird. Mrs. Price's house could hardly be seen, even when you walked past it in broad daylight. She and her son John were a mystery to us. We called John Price John-John: a childish name, because it seemed odd to us that a grown man would still be living with his mother, and his behavior was just as odd as hers.
Mark Gerber had told me long ago that Mrs. Price was a witch, and I believed him. It wasn't difficult to believe it either; Mrs. Price's actions gave rise to all sorts of rumors about her and her son. The Price house was our own version of the Bates Motel. It was dark and dirty, and it was obscured from view by trees and bushes and vines. An atmosphere of gloom hung over it, and when you passed by at night, only a pale 40 watt bulb dimly lit the front porch, and there was only the slightest hint of light on inside.
Mrs. Price was a retired English teacher. John-John was supposed to have been a very intelligent student when he was in school. As an adult he was seldom seen and never spoke to anyone. John Price was our Boo Radley, but we didn't dare go near the house to get a look inside.
Sometimes Mrs. Price would talk to my mother. She would comment on how nice and polite she thought Carl and I were, but at the same time condemn us for wanting to play in the woods. Mrs. Price was an environmentalist and very protective of her own woods, and she didn't like the idea of a bunch of wild kids climbing trees and building forts and just having a good time. I don't know what she thought we were doing in the woods, and anyways, the woods behind our house didn't even belong to her. The woods belonged to Mr. Rizzuto just down the street, and he didn't mind us being there, so what's the big deal anyhow?
Mrs. Price was odd and she acted odd and there were times when she literally appeared out of nowhere, as if she rose up out of the ground, and she'd scare the living daylight out of us all. She was always dressed in real thin dresses and dirty old sweaters. Her hands were always covered by the work gloves she wore, and her glasses always seemed smudged up. Her hair was always in need of combing, and the stockings on her legs were torn and grimy. She was a sight!
So you can see it wasn't hard to believe that Mrs. Price was a witch.
My neighbor Paul Avis invented even more outrageous stories, mostly about John-John. Paul was convinced that John-John roamed the streets at night looking for stray dogs and cats. He had seen John-John walking around one evening with a small sickle in his hand, and so his imagination just went wild. John-John was killing all the stray animals and cutting off their heads, to be used in strange ceremonies performed by him and his mother, somewhere in the woods behind their house. Mark Gerber confirmed all of this, and told us that the woods behind Mrs. Price's house was lined with the heads of all of the cats and dogs that John-John had caught. He told us that he had gone back there and seen it all with his own eyes.
One day our curiosity got the better of us, and we decided once and for all to see for ourselves whether or not Mrs. Price's back yard was full of animal heads.

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