One Way Ticket - (Tales From the Crypt Homage)

One Way Ticket by William Cook

From the belly of the swamp issues forth a visit in the middle of the night from a force as dark and unimaginable as hell itself. Poor pig-farmer Abel Laroux, must battle the demons of his past as well as the nightmarish reality of the present, as he confronts a devilish visitor who has come to collect on an outstanding debt, inherited by Abel from his forefathers.

Off the highway heading north-west from New Orleans, near the Bayou Piquant that borders Lake Pontchartrain, sat Abel Laroux's small pig-farm. An old ramshackle house sat in the center of a large field with a row of large pens behind, housing up to fifty plump swine at any given time. The land had been reclaimed centuries before and the dirt had long since baked hard, collecting mud from the tidal marshes and bayous in the wet season and long swamp grass in the warmer months. Surrounding fields and land once ran huge Creole colonial plantations for as far as the eye could see. Tall oak trees dripping with Spanish Moss bordered the property, a throwback to more prosperous times in the area and a reminder to Abel of the legacy left behind from his forefathers, both slaves and masters.

Winter nights were still warm in January and the lake fog crept through the cypress swamp trees, across the field towards the house. Abel sat on the porch in the shadows, sipping from his pipe, puffing small wisps of smoke into the night air. The noise from the marsh was electric even at this time of the year: the jug-o-rum bullfrog calls echoed through the swamp, Loons howled and moaned with their mournful cries and the occasional sound of a swamp alligator bellowing, cut through the night air.

Every evening for the past thirty years he had sat on the same wooden stool, watching and listening to the night. Mary, his wife, and his two daughters Amaya and Mia, had long since gone to bed. Mary had recently come down with an intermittent vomiting bug that caused her to feel quite unwell; they had agreed it best that she go in to town tomorrow and visit the doctor if she felt no better. He looked in the window, peeking through a crack in the curtains, and watched his wife sitting on the bed with the latest Stephen King novel, propped up on pillows, her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, a white ceramic bowl at her side just in case. Abel smiled, she looked a lot better than she had a few hours ago; in fact she looked positively radiant, the rich warm hue of her mocha skin looked healthy and a world away from the pale hue, similar to the natural color of his own skin, that it had been earlier.

He sat back down quietly in the shadows of the porch, the half-moon above hidden behind a mass of rolling cloud. He could sense the heavy weight of rain in the air, as could the noisy swamp creatures that dwell along the banks of the labyrinthine bayous and streams that fed in and out of the marshes. The massive lake basin beyond and the great Mississippi River to the south, fed the outlying estuaries and marshes with a rich supply of flora and fauna; combined with the sub-tropical climate it was a furtive breeding ground. If it wasn't mosquito infestations or biblical plagues of crickets, the area was crawling with amphibious snakes and reptiles. Before he had reinforced all the pig-pens and ringed them with steel-mesh, Abel had lost three of his prize sows to alligators one summer. That was the same year the hogs had unearthed a bevy of human bones with their rutting in the winter months – the weather was cooler and the ground was damp and soft and up they came.

At first, Abel thought they were animal bones but he had discovered soon enough that the skeletal remains were human. Six skulls in all and a barrow full of rusted iron shackles still clasped around the dislocated limbs. The police came and then the coroner who removed the remains and interred them in a pauper's cemetery south-west of New Orleans City Park. No further excavation was made on the Laroux property which relieved Abel and Mary but perturbed them at the same time. They had asked themselves why the police weren't interested in what had happened there, but Abel knew the answer. His father had sworn him to secrecy as a boy when Abel's pet dog had dug up a thigh bone from his Mammy's flower garden. "This," his father had told him in a hushed voice, balancing the bone in the palm of his gnarled hand "is the leg bone of someone buried here on the farm. It is a very old bone and looks similar to others that I have found over the years. See here . . ." He pointed to some deep crevices in the white mottled bone. "This person was murdered and buried here and there are more of them out there that we will never find . . ." His father had pointed north out towards the marshes. Abel noticed a deep cross cut into his father's palm and had wondered if anyone had tried to kill his Pappy too.