HALF-MADE GIRLS
SAM WITT
PITCHFORK PUBLISHING
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental. HALF-MADE GIRLS All rights reserved. Published by Pitchfork Press Copyright © 2014 by Sam Witt Cover art by KPGS This e-book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author. This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. First Edition: September, 2014
To my wife, who helps me become better every day. To my daughters, for inspiring me to chase the dream. To my readers, whose energy and feedback helped make this book everything it could be.
WELCOME TO PITCHFORK
All Joe Hark wants is for the monsters of Pitchfork County to leave him be long enough for him to drown his haunted memories in an ocean of whiskey. But when someone hangs a mutilated girl from a cross, Joe’s duty as the Night Marshal drags him out of the bottle and into the deadliest case of his career. As Joe’s hunt for the killer carries him into a nest of meth-addled cultists, he discovers the occult conspiracy has roots in his own tortured past. His enemies have plans to call up a nightmarish entity that will destroy Joe and his family, and wreak a terrible vengeance on the world beyond Pitchfork’s borders. To stop this dark god from rising, Joe must join forces with an unlikely group of allies, including his own cursed family. But when faced with the growing power of the vile cult, Joe soon realizes that the only way to stop the madness may be to offer up a final sacrifice: himself.
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1
he Night Marshal had wanted to start his Sunday morning around midafternoon. He’d T wanted to roll out of bed and drown his hangover’s ghost in a belt of Gentleman Jack straight out of the bottle. He’d wanted a breakfast of fried sausage patties sandwiched in one of his wife’s drop biscuits, the whole mess slathered with drooling-warm honey butter. Instead, he’d started the Sabbath by hauling his eight-year-old daughter across Pitchfork County to get a look at the mutilated girl some asshole cultists had hung from a cross. The Night Marshal took a deep breath, killed the truck, and climbed down from its cab. He couldn’t remember the last day that had gone as planned. The Night Marshal picked his way through the labyrinth of police cars and wandering peace officers surrounding Red Oak Baptist Church. His skull ached and his guts rumbled with the memory of last night’s bottle of whiskey. He crossed his fingers behind his back and offered up a silent prayer that this would be nothing, that he could pass it off to the sheriff as a mundane crime and crawl back into bed until the unfriendly morning gave way to a more reasonable afternoon. Elsa, his daughter, hopped along beside him with her peculiar, hands-and-feet gait. A heavy clay mask covered her face, and her tawny hair frizzed out around its twine straps like a lion’s mane. Strange mumbles leaked from the mask’s ragged mouth slit, an old man’s voice struggling to form words with a little girl’s lips. Joe had never been able to get used to his daughter’s little friends speaking through her mouth.
A half-dozen eager young deputies stopped picking their asses long enough to try and stop Joe from ducking under their crime scene tape, but he tapped the Night Marshal’s badge pinned to his flannel shirt, and they faded from his path like the early morning fog burning off in the sun. “What’s in there?” Joe’s hobnailed boots crunched to a stop on the gravel drive. The sheriff turned to the Night Marshal and squirted a brown glob of tobacco spit into the weeds lining the crushed stone driveway leading up to the old church. The two men stared at each other for most of a minute, breath steaming in the chill morning air between them. Joe stared down at the sheriff and shifted the strap of the heavy shotgun hanging from his left shoulder. “This is a crime scene, Joe.” Sheriff Dan Schrader hitched his belt up over his sagging gut and tossed a thumb back over his shoulder at the church. “How ‘bout I give you a call when my boys are done in there?” “This is Pitchfork County, Dan.” If the sheriff had dispensed with titles, Joe saw no reason to keep up the formalities. There’d been simmering resentment and mutual disgust between the two of them since Joe had taken up the badge and started rousting haints most of two decades ago. “You don’t get to decide whose crime scene this is. I do.” Joe took a step toward the church, but the sheriff stepped in front of him. “You can’t go in there. I’m asking nicely, but if you try and walk around me again, you and I are going to come to a hard place.” Elsa hissed at the sheriff, the mask amplifying her thin voice with echoing layers of menace. Joe glanced down at his daughter crouched next to him and nudged her with the side of his boot. The girl folded her arms around her knees and snorted with agitation. “Dan, did you call me while the sun was still dreaming and tell me to drag my sorry butt out of bed and halfway across this godforsaken county with my sleepy little girl in tow?” Joe waited for the sheriff to answer his question, then went on when it became clear he would get no response. “You did not. Now, who do you think did wake me up at the ass crack of dawn on a Sunday morning?” The sheriff rubbed the stubble on his flabby chin with the pad of his thumb. He stared down at the dusty gravel between the toes of his worn-out boots. Mentioning the Long Man, the strange old bastard who crouched above Pitchfork at the Black Lodge and gave orders to the Night Marshal, was enough to give most men raised in the county
pause. “Dan, are you trying to upset the person who called me?” The sheriff grumbled and stepped aside. As Joe passed the lawman, he heard the faint, crisp snap of a holster’s safety strap popping free. Joe froze, his back to Dan. “Next time you lay hands on that gun around me, we’re going to find out who’s faster.” Joe stomped up to the church’s heavy doors. He plucked his deeply creased Stetson from the crown of his head, revealing a thicket of night-black hair salted with a shotgun blast pattern of stark white at each temple. He hung his hat on the top corner of the open door. The Night Marshal licked the ball of this thumb and drew a single vertical line in the air, then wiped his thumb dry and crossed the threshold with his daughter scurrying along behind him. Joe stopped inside the church and let his eyesight adjust to the sanctuary’s gloom. After the bright morning sun, the shadows were a welcome relief for his throbbing hangover. The bitter tang of incense filled the small church, which did little to hide the sharp tang of blood that leaked into Joe’s nose with every breath. That didn’t help his hangover quite so much as the gloom. Elsa growled and scampered away from her father, mask bobbing up and down between pews as she made her way around the church, hunting. Joe didn’t worry about her while she wore the mask. With one of the spirits inside her, the girl was more mature and better prepared to deal with this mess than he was. The dead had seen it all. The biting stink of the incense made Joe’s head throb and his empty, whiskeycurdled stomach roil in protest as he drew near the altar. His appetite shriveled up and died, which was just as well because that sausage-and-biscuit sandwich was long hours away judging by the mess hanging from the church’s crucifix. Joe stood before the altar and pinched the bridge of his nose. Guttering flames clung to the wicks of heavy candles on the old oak, and thin columns of black smoke rose from them to disappear under the filthy-white dress of the young woman hanging from the cross. Thick coils of barbed wire dug into the pale skin of her biceps and thighs. Blood dripped off the wire’s tines to form silver-dollar-sized puddles on the altar below. Knowing this place, the ancient wood had drunk up far more blood than it left standing. Red Oak’s appetite was a thing out of legend.
“Who did this to her, little bit?” Elsa’s head poked up from between a pair of pews and shook slowly from side to side. The mask’s eyes glowed a flat blue that left lingering trails in the gloomy air. “Of course, you don’t know.” Joe stepped closer to the altar and rolled his aching head on his stiff neck. Elsa had a deep well of knowledge to drink from in the shadow world of spirits, but there were limits to what she could dredge up. The blood stink crawled down the back of Joe’s throat and stirred the burbling pool of bile and stale whiskey it found at the bottom of his belly. He should not have picked up the second bottle last night, no matter how Stevie tested him. Even with all that booze in his belly, so drunk he could hardly stand, he’d still almost gotten up from the couch and stumbled down to his wife’s shack in the dead of night. The unwholesome attraction was like a lodestone in his guts, pulling at him night and day since the moment they were married. Joe wished to all the gods he knew that woman had never crossed his path, and knew she felt the same. They hated one another now, the innocent love of their teenage years knotted into a noose around their hearts by a hateful love hex. Joe swallowed hard and looked up into the bloody mess where the girl’s face should have been. Whoever had taken the time to wire her up had also taken the time to peel her skull from the ears forward. They’d taken her hand, too, and flensed her forearm away so her wrist narrowed to a spear tip of glistening white bone. They’d taken her feet, too, whittling her calves down to rough points. Joe took a bandana from his back pocket and held it under the girl until it caught three drops of blood. He folded it over on itself and tucked the worn cloth back into his pocket for safekeeping. He got as close to the altar as he could without touching it and took a good hard look at the girl. Her legs were ringed by spidery spirals of smudged-ink script that crawled down from her knees in flowing strings that made Joe’s brain itch when he looked at them straight on. He paced around to examine her left forearm and saw the same curving line of madness swirling out from her elbow. He went over her wounds again. The edges were tapered and smooth, not like cuts. Like her skin had never been there at all, and was just now starting to grow over the exposed bones. “You come to any conclusions yet?” Schrader stood in the doorway with both hands on his belt. “Or are you just f*cking up my crime scene for sh*ts and giggles?”
Joe rubbed his dry eyes. His headache wasn’t getting any better. “You think this is what I want to be doing on a Sunday morning? I want to be sleeping in my bed as much as you want me gone.” Joe returned to the front of the altar to get a clearer look up at the girl’s bloody face. Her hair hung down on either side of the carnage and ran into the thick red bib that stained the front of her tattered white dress. Flies crawled across the bloody cloth, wings buzzing, labella licking. They walked in eccentric, widdershins circuits around one another, crossing paths in complex, eye-watering patterns. Joe looked away from the flies and up into the girl’s face. He could just make out the edges of more script, a band of arcane bullsh*t that tangled in the roots of her widow’s peak and followed her hairline back behind her ears. He watched the girl for several long seconds, until he saw what he hoped he wouldn’t. “But I don’t think either one of us is going to get what he wants this morning.” “Why not? You’ve let us clean up plenty of dead bodies for you over the years. Don’t see why this poor girl’s gotta be different.” “Well, Dan, that’s the first place you’re wrong.” Joe straightened up and lifted one of the candles from the altar, careful not to touch the old wood. “This girl’s not dead.” “This is God’s house, Joe. Why you want to tempt fate by lying to me here?” Dan walked up the central aisle of the sanctuary, giving Elsa a wide berth and hitching his belt up as he went. “That girl’s been up on that cross all night, at least. You and I both know she’s lost a lot more blood than what we see on that altar. I can see from here she’s not breathing. That’s what we professional law enforcement types refer to as deceased.” “You ever get used to being wrong all the time, Dan?” Joe held the candle’s flame just beneath the mess of the girl’s left leg. Soot stained her exposed bones black, and the words written on her skin grew blacker still. They gleamed like molten silver in the candlelight. “This is still a crime scene. Try not to f*ck it up by setting the corpse on fire.” “Patience is a virtue, Sheriff.” Joe raised the candle up to the girl’s knee and watched as rising heat from the candle brought a pink blush to her milky skin. The crucified girl moaned, a low, grating sound. Her leg jerked against the barbed wire, and fresh drops of blood spilled onto the altar. Joe pulled the candle away and turned to the sheriff.
“This one’s not dead yet. She’s not alive just yet, either.” Joe jerked his thumb back over his shoulder toward the crucifix. “You still want the scene?” “I never should have taken this job.” Dan’s shoulders slumped. “What do you want me to do?” “Cut that girl down and lock her up at the station.” Joe snapped his fingers and Elsa came scrambling to him over the pews. “I’ll come by after sundown for a chat. Maybe she’ll be livelier then.” Elsa jumped into Joe’s arms and wrapped her arms around his neck, hooked her legs around his hips, and pressed her masked face against his cheek. The words she spoke were not her own. “She is the first seed, the planting before the harvest. Others will follow. The Haunter will reap them all.” The little girl shuddered and went limp in Joe’s arms. A dainty snore leaked out from behind the mask. It was time to go. Joe walked out of the sanctuary, whispering soothing words to his daughter. The mask was already crumbling, and the spirit it held would be leaving her soon enough. He didn’t want her at the scene when that happened. Last time, things had gotten messy. He was nothing if not protective of his family, even the members that scared him spitless. The sheriff trailed Joe out to his beat-up pickup and leaned against the hood while the Night Marshal got his daughter buckled up and tucked a heavy wool blanket up under her chin. It was chilly out, and he didn’t want her catching cold once the spirit wasn’t there to keep her warm. “Is it starting again, Joe?” The sheriff chewed at the inside of his cheek. A brown bead of tobacco juice sprouted at the corner of his mouth and trickled down through the rusty stubble on his chin. “Most of my boys are new. They aren’t ready for your brand of business just yet.” Joe walked back to the church. He fetched his hat off the door and eyeballed the girl inside. The first glimmers of real fear crawled up his spine and got their hooks deep into the kicking haunches of his lizard brain. He crammed the hat down over the top of his head and stomped back to the truck. “Joe, I asked you a question.” Dan spit onto the ground between them. Joe’s eyes flicked to the brown stain on the ground, then back to the sheriff. “This is Pitchfork. It’s not starting. It never stopped.” Joe hauled himself into the
pickup’s cab, started it with a rough crank of the ignition, and slewed the truck around in a gravel-spewing circle as he headed to his next stop. He watched the sheriff in the rearview. Dan stomped back to the crime scene and barked nervous orders to his men, who seemed unsure of how to follow them. No one moved toward the church. Joe hoped the girl didn’t get too lively while the sheriff was getting her off the cross. Dan would never stop bitching if she ate all his deputies, and Joe just didn’t have the stomach to listen to his whining this morning. He had monsters to catch.
2
hated Pitchfork County. Driving along its sh*tty roads under the shadow of its J oe haunted mountains felt like picking at scabs. Every landmark held some cursed tale; every little town festered like a boil on the Earth’s face. All he’d wanted from the time he was old enough to drive was to get the hell away from this place before its demons could drag him down and ruin him like they’d ruined his old man. He’d even left, for a while. Headed out in the summer of ‘86 in the old pickup, with nothing but his hat on his head, his shirt on his back, and an empty wallet shoved into the back pocket of his well-worn jeans. That trip had ended with his best friend’s death and Joe back in Pitchfork trying to make amends. A few years after that he’d left again, spent a decade wandering the back roads of America before a steady diet of walking nightmares and booze had driven his life off the rails. Then his father had tracked Joe down and shamed him into coming back home to help out with the family business of killing monsters. That was more than a decade in the past. Before the old man died. Before Joe knew about Alasdair. When he’d still thought he could be free of the county and its curse. Now, the burden of protecting the place fell on his shoulders. In the end, Pitchfork always called its own back home. It was a bad place that needed bad men to keep its evil from seeping out into the rest of the world like an infection. For now, Joe was that bad man and would be until the job killed him. He tried not to think about whom the badge would go to once he was in the ground. Maybe no one would be fit for the job, and all the madness Pitchfork held would spill over its borders and drown the rest of the world. Sometimes it felt like that, as if Joe was all that stood between the world of
men and a rising tide of monsters. Joe’s thoughts throbbed around his memory of the church girl, his hangover aching like a bad tooth. Maybe he could swing by the big house, pick up a six pack to take the edge off what he’d just seen before he took Elsa home to her mom. Maybe snag another sixer from the Whistle Stop on his way over to talk to Preacher Walker about the bullsh*t that had gone down in Red Oak while the minister sat on his fat ass in his big house on the hill. Just thinking about those visits made Joe’s throat yearn for a shot of whiskey. Elsa mumbled in her sleep and curled up tight against the passenger door, tugging her blanket up to her chin. Her ghost mask cracked, bit by bit, as Joe drove home. Gray flakes of dry clay tumbled into her lap like falling snow, drifting into the ratty old blanket’s creases. Joe wondered what it was like, sharing your meat and bones with strangers. He wondered if it was right to let Elsa share like that, if he was going straight to hell for letting his little girl help him with the job he’d fallen into when his daddy died. He downshifted, slowing the truck to navigate the precarious mining track an asshole politician had decided to label as a highway in order to steal some federal money for maintenance that never happened. The truck’s engine whined, and the transmission grumbled, but Joe ignored their protests. The truck ran as much on his willpower as it did on gasoline and motor oil. It would do its job for as long as Joe had to do his, and wouldn't be any happier about it. “Not like I have a choice,” Joe grumbled. “Everyone has choices,” a chill voice said. Joe started at the words, and the truck’s wheels slipped near the steep downhill side of the road before he could get it back under control. Gravel spit and pinged against the truck’s undercarriage, and for one heart-stopping moment Joe stared down over the edge of the road to the steep, treacherous slope below. He eased the truck back toward the center of the road and let out a long, slow sigh. Elsa’s mask was crumbled to dust, the twine straps tangled in the golden curls of her hair. An old man’s ghost floated in the space between Joe and his daughter, squinting through round owl’s-eye glasses and adjusting fancy clothes that would have looked right at home on the streets of St. Louis fifty years ago. “Some of us have less choice than others,” Joe replied and put his attention back on
the road where it belonged. Sometimes Elsa’s ghosts hung around for a few minutes after her mask broke to chat. It annoyed the piss out of Joe. “My daddy didn’t offer me much alternative when the Bog Witch stuck that hawthorn branch through his heart. He named me, and on came the star.” Joe tugged at the tattered lapel of his heavy duster, showing the spirit the silver pentacle-in-a-circle of the Night Marshal’s badge. “Pass it on.” The spirit shrugged. “No one can make you do this job.” “You know what will happen if there’s no Night Marshal to keep an eye on the goings-on here in Pitchfork?” The spirit chuckled to itself, a sound like a stream flowing into a hole in the ground. “I do not, Marshal. But I wonder—do you know what would happen if there were no Night Marshal to ride herd over the good folk of Pitchfork County?” “Madness. Chaos. Rains of blood and frogs. Rivers running back on themselves. Dogs chewing off their tails and cats stuffing their bellies with thistles until they burst?” Joe shrugged at the spirit. “Just a guess.” “Girls nailed to crosses? Witches and witch-hunters bound together by curses? Daughters possessed by impish spirits?” The old man's ghost had a smirk on its lips and a mischievous twinkle in its eye. Joe wanted to punch a hole right through that smug face. “I believe you and I are done speaking, spirit.” Joe forked his fingers at the old man and hissed an ancient word between them, the syllables of which burnt his tongue and set his teeth to tingling. “By my warrant and sign, be on with ye.” Joe rolled down his window, and the spirit vanished into the morning air with a puff of honeysuckle perfume and the faintest of sighs. Elsa stirred, rubbed her eyes with balled fists. She yawned and fussed with the straps in her hair until they were untangled and lying flat in her lap. Her tiny hands brushed the clay from the folds of her blanket and onto the truck’s dusty floor. “You all right, little bit?” Joe patted his daughter on the leg and forced a smile to crease the weathered skin of his face. “I’m fine, Daddy.” A lazy smile, warmer and more sincere by miles than Joe’s, lit up her face. “Did I help you?” “You did, my dear, just as you always do.” Joe didn’t say anything else, because he was still mulling over the words his
daughter had whispered to him inside the church. The words had come in the tongue of the dead, which was always tricky to decipher, but what she said made Joe wonder just how deep his troubles were getting. “You want I should get old Billy to make you some more of them special bullets?” “Not yet, honey.” Joe didn’t want his little girl trucking with another spirit just yet. He didn’t know what it cost her to call up the dead and let them ride around in her skin. “I’ll ask him anyway.” Elsa looked out her window. “You might need them when you go looking for the people who worked on that girl.” “You remember that?” The curdled dregs of last night’s booze sloshed in Joe’s stomach. He didn’t like the idea of Elsa remembering what happened with the spirits. As long as she was a passive flesh vessel for the spirits who could give him the answers he needed, Joe could keep on doing what needed to be done. But if Elsa remembered the spirits, if she remembered the crime scenes and grisly images Joe saw all too often… “Scraps and shreds and pieces. What he said to you, mostly. About, you know, the church girl.” “Does it scare you?” Because it sure as hell scared Joe. It was hard for him to digest the spirit’s words. It had to be harder for a little girl barely ten years old. “I don’t think so.” She sucked on her bottom lip and cleared the curls of hair from in front of her eyes with an exasperated puff of breath. “Why’d they leave her like that? It seems mean to not finish what they started.” Joe guided the truck into the mouth of the long, winding drive that led down to the homestead. The length of the road was flanked on either side by white ash trees, transplanted and kept healthy by Stevie and their boy, Alasdair. Blackberry bushes, thick and dense, grew in and around the trees, forming a tangled, thorned wall that smelled sweet and sticky. The bushes scraped against the side of the truck, reminding Joe he needed to get out there with some clippers to trim them back. Stevie wanted the cruel bushes gone, but Elsa and Joe loved the rich, ripe berries that lurked among the heavy thorns in the spring and summer, and so the blackberries stayed. “It wasn’t very nice, that is for certain,” Joe said. “But I don’t think they meant to leave her like that. I think someone stopped them before they could get done with whatever it is they were up to.” “Oh,” Elsa nodded to herself, as if that made sense. “Then whoever stopped them
was mean. They should have let the other ones finish with the girl, so she could have…“ Elsa gestured at her face and her feet, wiggled her fingers. Joe didn’t say anything to that. Elsa didn’t always understand how others viewed the world or why Joe had to do the things he did. Joe didn’t know how to explain to her that he was going to kill everyone involved with that poor girl. He had a sinking feeling that he’d have to put a bullet through the girl’s head, as well. Joe couldn’t let anyone finish what they’d started with her, and he damn sure couldn’t leave her half-made the way she was now. That was just asking for trouble. But, first, he needed to figure out who’d hung her on that cross and what they were trying to accomplish. “Don’t be sad, Daddy.” Elsa patted him on the shoulder, a gesture far too comradely and world weary for her tender years. “We’ll get to the bottom of this mess. We always do.” What he’d seen in the church that morning had upset Joe’s head and stomach more than the hangover. He needed something to calm his nerves and focus his thoughts. He drove on past the rambling, cobbled-together big house and steered the truck along a deeply rutted trail that led to a clearing nestled up against a narrow spot in the Black River. Stevie’s house was one step up from a tar paper shack, held together with spit and good wishes. She’d moved down there when the curse got to be too much for them to handle, not long after Elsa had come along. He could see her at the sink, watching him through the window, and it took everything he had to keep from storming out of the truck and into that house. His fists clenched on the wheel, and he tried not to think what would happen if he did go into that house. “Baby girl, can you go in and ask your mom for some of her morning herbs?” Stevie had put her healing skills to use when it became clear Joe’s drinking wasn’t going to slow down. The bitter elixir helped Joe cope with his demons, even if the concoction couldn’t exorcise them. “Sure, Daddy.” Elsa cracked the door and leapt down onto the long grass. The morning air had a cold bite, but Joe’s daughter let her warm blanket fall from her shoulders without a backward glance. Half the time, Joe wasn’t sure the girl wasn’t a spirit, herself. He watched her run through the rising sun’s light, beads of chill dew
spraying like fairy dust into the air around her shins. Alone with his thoughts, Joe wondered if he was up to the challenge of the church girl. Someone new was in Pitchfork, someone with the power and know-how to build themselves a young woman out of cast-offs and sorcery. That was serious work, the kind of witchery Pitchfork hadn’t seen for a century or more. Worse, whoever was doing it hadn’t finished the job, then decided to leave their mess up on a cross for the whole world to see. It didn’t make sense, but it wasn't Joe's job to make sense of it. His job was to find whoever was sh*tting in his county and put an end to them. Or die trying.
3
o one volunteered to take the girl off the cross. NNo amount of cursing or cajoling would get any of the deputies to set foot inside Red Oak. Dan had to do it himself. “Chickensh*t asshole motherf*ckers,” the sheriff’s curses puffed out of his mouth on cold little clouds as he climbed the stairs to the pulpit. Outside, the sun was rising, its rays of warmth and light stabbing down through the treetops. He envied his deputies, who stood outside in the clean air while he breathed in black smoke and stinking incense. Being the boss was a serious pain in the ass. “Just get her down and get out,” he told himself, but his words sounded weak and scared, even to his own ears. Dan walked around the choir benches and opened the little door that led to the baptistery. The sheriff stood in front of the open door, palms sweating, but he did not enter. His parents had taken him to Red Oak Baptist Church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night from the time Dan was born until his twelfth birthday. Dan had been a loyal member of the small congregation, bellowing out hymns and shouting amens with as much fervor as any of the adults. Just before his thirteenth birthday, Dan heard the call. Jesus banged on the door to Dan’s heart, and he wasn’t going to stop until the young man let him inside. When Preacher Walker, old when Dan was a boy and ancient as the very hills now, had called for the faithful to heed God’s will to be saved, Dan had strutted to the front of the church with his chest out and his thumbs hooked into his belt loops. Jesus had spoken to
him. Dan was one of the Chosen. Dan said the words, invited Jesus into his life, but he was never baptized. Thirty years ago, he’d frozen at the tight staircase to the baptistery, just as he was frozen now. His breath came fast and hard, lungs working like a locomotive’s engine. No matter how many years passed, Dan knew there would always be a little bit of that terrified boy lodged inside him. The space beyond the door seemed much smaller than Dan remembered, a constricting passage that led up into shadows. The stairs were oak, worn smooth and dark from generations of feet marching up to salvation, almost black with age. There was a smell, like animals in a pen or tarnished pennies in a Mason jar, that caught in his nose and drove spikes of fear into his brain. “C’mon, Dan. You’re not a kid. You’re the sheriff of Pitchfork County.” He whispered the words to himself, and they helped, even though the sounds they made were flat and dead in the cold air. Dan lurched into the tight stairwell. He took one step, then two, breathless and panicked. Something waited for him in the baptistery, the old and thirsty God that had laid its hand upon every man, woman, or child who had ever been dunked into those waters. It knew Dan, remembered his fear from across the chasm of years. Dan could feel its desire, its raw need, to touch him in some special, secret way. The sheriff took the last few steps at a stumbling run. He stubbed his toes and barked his shins on each wooden plank, but stood at last at the top of the stairs. Dan looked down into the cramped copper well, dry and empty now, and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be submerged within its waters. The thought filled him with a nameless dread, a suffocating terror that reminded him in a rush why he’d stopped coming to church. If that’s what God’s touch felt like, the sheriff knew he was bound for hell. Whatever waited to claim his soul in that little tub terrified him. Not for the first time, Dan wondered if he was really cut out for life in Pitchfork. A foot-wide, tiled ledge ran around the top of the baptistery to a cramped storage room. Dan squeezed his belly through the door and reached for the wooden wheel mounted against the back wall. A pair of thick, cobwebbed chains ran up from the wheel into holes in the ceiling; Dan loosened the wheel with slow turns, and heavy iron links rattled in the ceiling above his head. The weight on the wheel dropped away, and the chains grew slack. Satisfied the
crucifix was safely down, Dan headed back to the baptistery and its shadowed stairwell. “Let’s just get this over with,” he muttered. He was stepping over the empty pool when the church shook and a metallic snap rang through the sanctuary. Dan jumped at the sound, avoiding a nasty spill into the dry tank by a hair, and rushed down the stairs to the pulpit. The crucifix was down, but it wasn’t resting on the altar. The girl on the cross knelt beneath its weight. She’d torn her savaged legs free of the barbed wire and was working her arms against the sharp metal tines, struggling to get them loose. She was frantic, a wounded animal willing to rip its own limbs off to be free of a snare. Dan groped for his revolver with a fear-numbed hand. The girl stared at him, her wide eyes boring into his, her lipless mouth open and gulping air beneath the oozing slits of her nostrils. The pain in her eyes was a bottomless pit that threatened to drag the sheriff down into its depths. He felt the weight of his pistol in his hand. It shook in his grip. “Do it,” the girl gasped. Blood dripped from fresh barbed wire wounds. It ran down her arms, trickled down from her throat, and streams of it leaked out from under the hem of her tattered dress. “Don’t let him be the one to kill me.” Dan stared at the girl over the shaking barrel of his pistol. “Stop it,” he said, his voice was weak and wavering. “Don’t let me go like that,” the girl begged. “Don’t let him do me like he done all them others.” The girl opened new wounds as she struggled to tear herself loose from the cross. Dan watched as a puncture in her bicep became a ragged tear, a bloody lightning bolt ripped through her skin. “Stop. Let me cut you loose from there.” Dan put his revolver away and raised one hand, trying to soothe the girl. Her suffering raked at his conscience, made him feel like he’d failed her. “Just hush, now, and we’ll get you some help.” “Can’t help me,” the girl sighed. “Please, mister, just get me out of here before he comes back and puts me down like he did those others.” “No one’s going to do any such thing to you,” Dan said. “Tell me who he is, I’ll have my boys go and round him up right now.” The girl gave her head a hopeless little shake and let out a frustrated moan.
Dan tried to ignore the echo of that moan, the hungry sound that came from the baptistery. “It weren’t supposed to be like this,” the girl said. “Hurts something fierce. I figured I wouldn’t hardly even feel it.” Dan pulled the wire cutters from his belt, showed them to the girl. “Just stay like that, all right? I’m not going to hurt you, just need to get you loose.” The girl didn’t respond, but stayed on her knees, head bowed to the floor. Her bleeding was unnaturally loud, heavy plops that echoed through the church as the ruby drops splashed onto the floor. Dan took a step toward the girl and the church shuddered beneath the soles of his heavy boots. It reminded him of the temblors that sometimes wriggled through the earth when the mines were going, an undulating, serpentine shrug from deep beneath his feet. It made him want to vomit. “Okay, then,” Dan said. He was close enough to the girl to touch her. “Just going to cut you loose, all right?” “Sure.” The girl said, and her voice was younger, a toddler’s pitch and inflection. But there was another voice there, too, a half-heard string of guttural sounds that scratched at Dan’s ears like the burring rasp of beetle wings. Dan shook his head and stepped away from the girl. This was a bad idea. A stupid idea. He needed backup before he did anything else. He didn’t know anything about this girl or where she’d come from. She wasn’t natural. What was he thinking? “Just wait here,” Dan said. He went down the steps from the altar and headed toward the front door of the church. “Come back,” the girl whined like a whipped pup. “Please don’t leave me, mister. He’ll come back for sure.” Dan stopped, turned back to the girl. “Who is he?” “The one what caused this,” the girl said. “Who?” Dan’s heart went out to the girl. He didn’t know who or what she was, didn’t know if she was a monster or an angel, but the fear in her voice rang true and clear as anything he’d ever heard. “The man who aims to kill me,” the girl said. “The one you call the Night Marshal.”
4
J oe licked the gritty residue of Stevie’s herb juice from his lips and stared through the bug-flecked windshield at Walker’s estate. The place was huge, by far the largest home in Pitchfork County, and the sight of its thick stone columns and gaping windows made him want to break something. He’d thought of plenty excuses not to come here, but none of them would wash. The girl’d been found in Red Oak, which meant Joe had to come and talk to the preacher. “Just get it over with,” he muttered, and hopped out of the truck. A pair of young boys in white choir robes opened the gate for him as he made his way toward the house, their skin pale against the wrought iron. Joe tipped his hat to the boys, but their eyes were focused on the middle distance. Shaking his head, Joe made his way up the ruler-straight walkway to the mansion’s front door. Another boy opened the oversized front door and waited in silence for Joe to cross the threshold. “Where’s the preacher?” Joe asked. “In the parlor, like a civilized man receiving his guests,” Walker’s heavy voice thundered from the left side of the high-ceilinged entryway. Joe lifted his hat from his head and held it over his heart as he made his way through the preacher’s house. The place was bright and airy, with tall, open windows letting in the early autumn sunlight and a chill breeze, but Joe could already feel an uneasy sweat forming along his spine. Walker made his skin crawl, and the army of little choir boys didn’t do much for his nerves, either. There was something not right about Red Oak and its people, something Joe didn’t trust. There was a darkness there, but he’d never been able to prove it. Maybe this was his chance.
Walker smiled when Joe entered the parlor, his teeth polished white and straight in the dark frame of his face. A pair of young boys flanked Walker, dabbing at his sweaty forehead, cheeks, and neck with wilted silk cloths. A third boy sat at the preacher’s feet, polishing designer shoes that cost as much as most cars. “Well, Marshal, thank you for paying me a visit this morning. A call would have been nice, but I suppose that would be expecting a bit much from you.” “Been a little busy cleaning up a mess down at your church.” Joe stood across from Walker, hat in hand. “I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that?” “That poor girl.” Walker pressed a heavy palm to his massive chest. “I was as disturbed to hear about what happened as were you.” Joe nodded. “I bet.” Walker leaned forward in his enormous oak chair and slapped his hands on his knees. For a man far on the wrong side of morbidly obese, he moved fast. “You sound suspicious.” Joe let loose a harsh caw of a laugh. “I reckon I am. Ain’ like you’ve never had weird sh*t going on up at that old place of yours.” The boys gasped, their pink lips forming identical little O’s. Walker patted the boy at his feet on the shoulder. He turned cold eyes to Joe. “You will watch your mouth in my home.” “Sooner you answer my question and stop playing dumb, sooner I can get the f*ck out of here.” Joe rolled his shoulders. “Because I do not want to be here anymore than you want me here.” Walker lunged to his feet, choir boys scattering away from him like startled doves. He took two heavy steps and planted himself before Joe. “You will pay me the respect I deserve.” Joe leaned in until he could feel the heat washing off Walker’s forehead. “Who did you piss off so bad they hung that f*cked-up mess of a girl in your church?” Walker took a long breath, sucking wind through his teeth with a tight whistling sound like a tea kettle working its way up to a scream. “Many people misunderstand my faith. But I assure you, I have done nothing to deserve this.” “Try to recruit any of the hill folk lately?” “No, I leave them to their ignorant ways.” “Messing with the yarb doctors again?”
Walker ground his teeth. “You know I have no truck with sorcerers.” “Steal any little boys from their mamas?” “The children who live in my home are orphans. I saved them.” “Make any orphans lately, then?” “Get out.” “f*ck you.” Walker backed away, eyes squinted to glittering black slits. “Why do you insist on goading me? There was a crime committed against me and mine, yet you treat me as if I were the criminal.” Joe eyed the preacher’s heavy gold rings and expensive clothes. “That’s because you are a criminal. I know what you ask of those people you suckered into worshiping the Red Oak. I know how deep your tithes cut, you piece of sh*t.” “Maybe if you had not been sleeping off a drunk, that girl would still be alive.” Walker’s fingers cracked and popped as he clenched his fists. “Maybe if you had done your job, you would not be here, in my home, cursing at me.” “What have you done, you co*cksucker?” Joe’s rage was blinding, a flame that sent blazing words flying from his tongue. “What the hell are you up to?” “Get out.” Walker stabbed a fat finger at the door. “I am done speaking to you, and my church is done speaking to you. The next words I hear from you had best be the names of the men who killed that girl in my church.” Joe stepped in until his chest bumped against the mound of Walker’s flab. “Or what?” “My God is old and protective, Marshal. Your father understood that.” “Is that a threat?” Walker stared into Joe’s eyes. “Yes.” Joe left, hands clenched into bony white clubs, as he stomped out of the house. He really needed that drink.
5
he yarb doctor leaned over the possessed girl and slapped the top of her head, once T with his forehand and then again with a sharp backhand. Her eyes rolled up in her head so far the whites glowed out at Joe where he stood in the doorway to the doctor’s cramped home office. She grinned at the Night Marshal, showing a mouthful of blackand-yellow stumps, and licked her pale lips with a tongue coated with gritty, green slime. She tried to reach out for Joe, but the yarb doctor was no fool and had the girl strapped into a wrought iron chair by thick hanks of hemp rope. The chair was bolted to the floor, grounded with a silver spike speared through each of its legs. The doctor followed the girl’s eyes and turned his bald head toward the door. His great gray beard, streaked with yellow ribbons of tobacco juice and brown flecks of gnawed betel nut, trailed behind his head and dangled over his shoulder. “I’m busy, Marshal.” The yarb doctor, Ezekiel Hathorne, spared no more than a cursory glance for Joe and turned back to his patient. “Ya’ll need ta come back later.” “I’m busy, too, Zeke.” Joe closed the cluttered shack’s door behind him. His eyes adjusted to the wan candle light, but his nose rebelled against the stink of burning herbs with a trio of hearty sneezes that drew a second irked glance from the doctor. “I’m looking into something bad.” “You think I had something to do with whatever’s got your hackles up? Here to burn my place down?” Zeke chuckled to himself and slapped the girl again, a hard smack to the forehead that rocked her skull back between her shoulders. “Accuse me of dark hoodoo? No? Might as well be useful then. Hand me that ooze there.” The Night Marshal lifted the pale-green jar from the crowded shelf to his right and
unscrewed the lid. His nose protested with another sneeze when the stinging scent from the jar curled into his nostrils. It reminded Joe of ashes and rain, underlaid with the sticky sweet aroma of boiled honey. “Thank ya kindly.” The doctor dipped two greasy fingers into the jar and scooped out a thick dollop of the reeking mess. He smeared it all over the girl’s neck and forehead, working it into her skin even as she snapped at him with a mouthful of snaggled teeth and snarled broken words that raised Joe’s hackles. Her veins rose black and swollen against the skin of her throat, and Joe watched as the darkness spread up into her face and outlined her skull in a swarm of black threads. The demon was rising, pushed toward the girl’s mouth by the yarb doctor’s ministrations. Joe let his shotgun swing loose on its strap, ready to blow the girl and her demonic rider straight back to hell if she got loose. “I hear ya thinkin’, but no.” The doctor smeared the last of the ooze onto the filthy bib of his coveralls and stood up. His knees and back crackled and popped like green branches in a fire as he pushed his stool back. “Let’s have some sassafras tea, since ya ain’ leavin’.” Joe nodded and followed the old man through a short doorway into a tiny sitting room. The two men crowded around a stump table, squatting on hand-carved stools worn smooth by years of use. The yarb doctor lifted a boiling cauldron off a little fire set into the back wall of the room. Joe opened up the battered copper teapot and settled a wire mesh filter into its open top. The doctor poured the pink-brown tea through the screen, careful to slow as sediment and little chunks of bark bogged up the mesh. Despite the twitchy tremors in his hands, the yarb doctor lifted out the filter and poured two cups of tea without spilling a drop on the wooden tabletop. “Sugar?” Joe shook his head and took the offered cup. He blew across its fragrant surface and took a sip. The sassafras tingled on his lips and tongue, a spicy, bitter taste that cleared away a big chunk of his hangover and left him feeling refreshed and eager for more. His next drink was deeper, and the tingle spread out through his arms and legs. “That perty wife of yers oughter be makin’ ya the tea, not me.” Zeke laughed, coughed, and laughed again. “Didn’t come for the tea. Was hoping you might be able to help me.” But the tea was good. Joe took another healthy drink. “You hear about Red Oak?”
The bound girl screeched and jerked up and down against her bindings so hard the bolts creaked against the shack’s wooden floor. The air thickened and grew shadows around her words. Joe found himself on his feet with the shotgun in his good hand before he had time to think about what he was doing. His tea spilled and ran off the edge of the little table, puddling on the floor around his feet. “Ya will not.” The yarb doctor shoved his way past Joe and towered over the girl. He chanted a handful of words that did nothing to set Joe’s mind at ease, and the girl quieted. She murmured something, and the yarb man stroked her long, thin hair. He left the girl and came back to the table. “Yer not much like yer daddy.” “Am where it counts,” Joe grunted and sat back down. He started to pour himself a new cup of tea, but a harsh tut from the yarb doctor stayed his hand. “Nah. Yer daddy knew to judge the man, not the tool.” Zeke pushed past Joe and took his seat. “He also knew savin’ a poor, methed-up girl is a might better’n shootin’ her.” “She’s not dead yet.” Joe gladly took a new cup of tea from Zeke and drained half of it in one go. His head felt better than it had in weeks, and his stomach gurgled with appreciation and a sudden, resurgent hunger. He nodded toward the possessed girl in the next room. “But I’m willing to bet I’ll end up putting her down before winter comes. Meth freaks are easy targets for demons. Next time she might not get to you before she makes a mess.” “She needs help. She don’t wanna do wrong.” Zeke’s bushy brows drew together over his eyes as he stared at Joe. “Ya know that’s why she come to me, not to ya?” “It’s not my job to help demon mounts. It’s my job to protect Pitchfork from those who walk the Left-Hand Path. Meth heads like her hold the door open for the demons that pour into this county. I reckon we’re better off without them. I don’t have to tell you that.” The yarb doctor harrumphed and shook his head. “Ya ever think the demons come afore the meth? Might be these people ya hate so much aren’t weak, they’re victims. Yer old man wasn’t too trigger happy to lend a hand to those afflicted like that ‘un.” “How’d that work out for my daddy?” Joe patted his shotgun. “I don’t figure I’ll end the same. Now, can you help me with this? There’s something evil out there, and it aims to bring hell down on this county. Maybe you heard something that might help me find whoever’s behind it before they do something really stupid.”
“One of them squirrels told me ya was comin’ to ask about that poor girl. Wish I coulda sent it back and saved ya the trip. ‘Fraid I got nothin’ for ya on that count.” Zeke drank his tea in one big gulp, then licked his lips. He dug a battered puck of a can out of his pocket and pinched out a dip of snuff, which he offered to Joe. When the Night Marshal shook his head, Zeke plugged the moist clot of tobacco down in his own lower lip. “What happened with that girl is a kinda witchin’ I ain’ never touched. I stay well shed of that brand of bullsh*t.” “I know that. Maybe you’ve got some idea who would touch it?” Joe forced himself to relax, to unclench his fingers before they shattered the cup between them. Why did people always have to fight him? “I need to know. You have to tell me.” Zeke laughed and slapped the table so hard everything on it jumped a half inch into the air. “Say I knew who might get up to that dark work. I tell ya, what happens? Ya march up to their house and kick their door in. Maybe shoot someone? I don’t believe in settin’ the hounds out on people who might be innocent, just on account of a hunch I might have.” “Better me at your door than whatever’s messing with those girls.” “Really? Addin’ more notches to that fancy shotgun of yers ain’ gonna stop the bad winds blowin’.” Zeke poured the last of the tea into his own cup and drank it down. “Why’nt ya come back and bring yer perty li’l wife up here and we’ll jaw on this a bit, see if we can find a peaceable answer to yer questions.” Rage rippled through Joe at the mention of his wife. “This isn’t my wife’s business, it’s mine.” Joe’s hand slapped the top of the stump table. “You’d do well to remember that.” The girl howled from the other room. The yarb doctor shook his head and creaked up out of his chair. “Yer gonna need to go. Yer upsettin’ my patient.” “You really won’t help?” Joe watched the old man limp out of the sitting room. “Not even knowing how bad this is going to get?” “Things’re always bad, Marshal. Don’t see no reason fer me to make ‘em worse fer anybody. Yer a smart feller. I reckon ya’ll get on fine without an old man tellin’ ya what to do.” Zeke disappeared into the candle-lit glow of the main room, leaving Joe alone. For a moment, the Night Marshal considered putting a hurt on the doctor to loosen his tongue. It was fleeting, a dark shadow of intent that he pushed away before it could take root. There were rules, and Zeke hadn’t broken any of them. He was off-limits to
the Night Marshal’s punishments, for the moment. Joe eased into the main room and watched the yarb doctor at work. The girl was tainted; a demon held the reins to her soul. If he’d seen her out and about, he wouldn’t have hesitated to unload both barrels into the back of her head. He’d seen what happened when you tried to save the tainted. His father had thought he could redeem the Bog Witch, and that had ended in a flood of tears and a whole river of blood. It was a mistake Joe was determined never to repeat. The girl thrashed her head back and forth, spewing a vile torrent of curses in a language so old and profane it made angels weep to hear it. “You sure you can handle her?” “Git on out, Marshal. Yer not making things better.” “That’s your final word? You won’t even tell me who might get up to this kind of sh*t?” “I already told ya more’n I oughter, and a hell of a lot more’n ya think. Now git.” Joe let himself out. He dug the bloody bandana out of his pocket. It was time to do something else he’d hoped to avoid.
6
lasdair slapped the top of the truck’s cab, and Joe pulled over to the side of the A gravel access road. He killed the truck’s engine with a shotgun backfire that sent a whippoorwill crying from its roost. Joe pushed the door open and winced as its hinges let out an anguished squeal. “Well, no use sneaking around now.” Alasdair hopped out of the pickup’s bed. “You have any flares you want to shoot off? Maybe start a forest fire just to make sure everyone knows we’re here?” Joe took a swig from Stevie’s bottle of bitter herb juice. Drinking the stuff was like gargling battery acid, but it sliced through the remnants of his hangover the sassafras tea hadn’t banished like a butcher’s knife through hog fat. He threw the empty plastic bottle into the pickup’s bed. “Not trying to be sneaky.” “That’s good, because, you know, you aren’t.” Al pressed Joe’s bloodstained bandana to his nostrils and breathed in deep. Then he lifted his head and let his nostrils catch the wind. His black hair ruffled in the breeze, and his eyes drifted closed. “It’s not far.” Joe didn’t want his son out here working with him, but he couldn’t see any other options. Walker and Zeke, the two men with their ears closest to Pitchfork’s darker side, had been less than helpful. Without Al, finding whoever half made that girl would take forever, and there was no telling what shenanigans they’d get up to while Joe was chasing his tail. Al was a natural tracker, though, able to follow scents and pick out paths no one else would ever find. As it was, they’d spent the last of the morning and
the better part of midday running around the backside of Pitchfork County, chasing one dead trail after another. He just hoped relying on Alasdair’s strange abilities wouldn’t stir up the darkness in the boy. That was a shadow Joe could do without. Joe took a moment to strap his shotgun scabbard to his back. This was rough country, and a simple sling wouldn’t keep the weapon secure. “Lead on,” he said and followed his son up the steep hill next to the pickup. “Try not to run off without me.” “Whatever,” Al said and put his long legs to use. Joe kept up, but only just. This late in the year, the sun never found its way this far up Bleacher’s Canyon, and the air was cold and moist. Despite the chill, Joe was slick with sweat after a few hundred yards of chasing Al’s back through the thickening forest. “Hold up,” Joe panted. Al stopped and turned back to his father with a wolf’s grin splitting his face. He looked so much like his mother, despite his dark hair and black eyes. Joe wanted to take back all those missed years, the lost time he should have spent raising his boy. “Tired?” Al looked like he could keep going for another few hours without breaking a sweat and a few hours more after that before he’d need a rest. “Just need to get the lay of the land.” Joe pretended to survey his surroundings while he caught his breath. “You know what’d really help you out?” Al asked. “Not drinking yourself stupid every night.” “Such a bright young man. Thank you for the advice.” Joe wished he could quit the whiskey. But the thought of Stevie so near, without booze to dull the siren's call of their curse, made his stomach heave. Easier, and safer by far, just to keep drinking. “Mom says you need to slow down. She says you’re killing yourself.” Al looked away when he spoke about his mother. “Your mother doesn’t know everything.” Joe mopped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “You sure we’re going the right way?” Al flared his nostrils, and a dark shadow passed over his eyes. He stomped away from Joe, long strides chewing up the hill with ease. “Goddamnit,” Joe cursed and took off after Al. Talking to the boy was a minefield of old wounds and flaring egos. Maybe if Joe had stayed in Pitchfork, maybe if Stevie had told him he had a son before Al was more than half grown, then Joe wouldn’t feel
like he was always at war with the boy. Joe pushed his way through the scrubby pines and lifted his feet over their grasping roots. The hill was determined to stop him, one way or another. He staggered and almost fell on a patch of exposed scree that shot out from under his feet like a burst sack of marbles. A moss-covered rock, still beaded with slippery dew, sent his left foot skidding out to the side. Joe fell back against a gnarled cedar and caught himself on its knotted branches. Angry at his careless slip, Joe wrenched himself away from the tree and nearly plunged headlong into an old mineshaft, its mouth hidden by heavy brush. Cool wind gusted up from the pit’s black depths, stinking of sulfur and rust. Joe stared down into the abyss for long moments. The deep blackness called to him, a vertiginous drop that wanted him to take one. More. Step. Joe shook his head and eased back from the edge. He never should have brought Al up here. The canyon was littered with dead holes like this one, deep, dark throats that would gulp up the careless without a sound. Joe’s heart skipped a beat when he thought of his boy at the bottom of one of these holes, broken, bleeding, ruptured. Dying. “Al,” Joe shouted, his voice echoing through the canyon. Mocking silence returned. Joe left the empty mine behind and headed up the hill. He wasn’t in the same league as Al, but Joe grew up in these hills and knew how to follow a trail. He found a broken twig, followed it to a muddy footprint, then to a torn patch of lichen. The sun was rising, but the forest grew darker as Joe moved up the hill. The canopy thickened overhead, snaking limbs winding around one another, blotting out the light. “Al,” Joe called again. His scalp tingled, and his thumbs twitched. There was something in the forest with them. Joe hurried after his son, hoping he hadn’t lost the track, praying he wasn’t chasing some wandering deer's trail. A branch snapped to his left. Something heavy crashed through the undergrowth to his right. “Joe?” Al called from somewhere ahead. “Is that you?” The Night Marshal drew his shotgun from the scabbard between his shoulders. He pushed his way through a knotted mass of tree limbs. The brush exploded, and something slammed into his chest. Joe’s feet shot out from under him. He crashed onto his back, hard enough to click
his teeth together through the very tip of his tongue. He kept his grip on the shotgun but held it far out to the side to avoid blowing his own head off if the weapon went off. Someone was on top of Joe. He bashed them aside with the barrel of the shotgun and rolled away. He came up against an old oak and pressed his back tight to the trunk, shotgun stabbing out in front of him like a spear. Angry red runes glowed like dying embers along the weapon’s length. “Don’t shoot,” Al screamed, and Joe let the gun's barrels drop into his lap. The adrenaline surge washed out of his veins, leaving behind a dull, tingling ache. He spit the blood from his mouth and rubbed the wounded tip of his tongue against the back of his teeth. “You okay?” Joe asked. “Something’s here,” Al said. He pulled Joe to his feet, and they turned in a slow circle, back to back. “It smells.” Joe could smell it, too. A funk that clung to the hairs in his nose, clogging his nostrils with its heavy stink. “I can’t smell the girl,” Al said and gagged on the ammoniac reek. “sh*t,” Joe cursed. Something stirred in the forest around them, a rustling that seemed to come from the very earth. “We have to get out of here.” “Yeah,” Al agreed. “Which way?” The leathery noise grew louder; the trees around them shook with it. The shadows grew thicker, clotting around the branches, filling the spaces between the leaves. “Al,” Joe said. He could feel the danger gathering its strength, coiling to strike. “Yeah?” “Get down.” Joe shoved his son to the ground with one hand. He swung the barrel of the shotgun toward a surging cloud of shadows with the other. Then the bats came, and the forest was filled with teeth.
7
squeezed the shotgun’s triggers, and both barrels roared into the oncoming J oe swarm. Dense, black smoke, lit from within by venomous green flames, erupted from the weapon. A special blend of lead shot, powdered silver, and iron shards carved a bloody swath through the flapping cloud. Shredded meat and batsh*t rained down onto the forest floor. “C’mon,” Al yelled. He scrambled to his feet, pulling at Joe’s shoulder. The surviving bats spiraled up into the forest canopy, screeching to each other, regrouping for another attack. “Wrong way,” Joe shouted, his ears still ringing from the shotgun’s thunder. Joe shrugged Al off and pointed up the hill, at a big shadow disappearing into the woods. “He’s getting away.” Joe didn’t wait to see if Al was following. He hustled through the forest, trying to watch the ground for pitfalls while keeping an eye on the shadow flitting through the trees ahead of him. Whoever it was, they were fast and knew the woods well. Joe slowed to shove a pair of shells into the shotgun. His eyes darted overhead where the bats were gathering into a cloud once more. Thoughts of rabies and plague swirled in his head; he wanted to be ready if the flying rats took another shot at him. “Which way…” Al started, but Joe cut him off. His target was already slipping away and becoming just one more shadow in a forest full of them. This was his lead, the best chance he had to crack this case open and put it in the ground where it belonged. He just had to get his hands around the motherf*cker’s throat.
He knew he would never catch the runner. But Al was as quick as a wolf and as sure-footed as a goat. The boy could chase the bad man down with no trouble. But then what? The last thing Joe wanted was his boy tangling with some warlock without so much as a knife. No, that wasn’t true. The last thing he wanted was to let one of the assholes who’d dared bring dark magic into his county get away. “Don't let him go. Get ahead of him, drive him back to the east.” Joe pointed into the trees. He offered up a silent prayer he wasn’t sending his son off to die, that his plan would work. Joe watched Al disappear into the forest, amazed at his son’s natural feel for the woods, the way he slid under branches and leapt over deadfalls and slipped around boulders. Al flowed like water through the wilderness, and Joe watched him go with equal parts admiration and envy. Their quarry fled up the hill, crashing through the trees like a spooked deer. He was fast, but Al was faster. Joe could sense more than see them and grinned when he heard his son driving their prey back toward his position. He pushed hard through the brush, breath rasping in and out of his lungs, fires burning in his muscles. Joe battered the forest out of his way, smashing tree branches and dangling vines aside with his shoulders to get into position to intercept his target. The forest came to an end, and Joe hugged a tree for cover, staying out of sight. A tall man burst from the trees and skidded to a stop, halted by the trap Joe had laid for him. He was standing at the edge of a ravine, a quarter-mile long slash that carved away a chunk of the hillside. He turned to face Al, who’d come out of the trees with that wide grin splitting his face. The runner held his ground, shoulders pumping up and down with each deep breath. He clenched his fists and ground his teeth, ready for a fight. Joe emerged from his cover, shotgun leveled at the big man’s chest. “Watch your step. Nasty drop-off back there.” “Go home, Marshal.” The man’s face was obscured by a drooping mop of greasy, black hair. The wind coming off the ravine carried the ammonia stink of bat guano from his skin, but also the distinctive chemical perfume Joe had come to associate with meth cooks. “This is out of your hands now.” “Boy, this is my county. Nothing here is out of my hands.” Joe kept the shotgun
trained on the man. “Get your hands up where I can see them.” “Last chance, Marshal.” The man’s voice was thick and slow, like it had to work its way up from some hidden depths to be heard. “We’re going to finish what we started. No sense anyone getting hurt.” “No one except a few more girls?” Joe raised the shotgun until it was pointed at the man’s face. “I don’t think I can stand aside for that. “Get down on your belly.” Joe stepped forward, shotgun centered on the man’s gut. He was less than five yards away. At this range, the shotgun would tear even a big man into ragged halves. They’d be picking his scraps off the side of the hill for the rest of the day if it came to that. “No, Joe.” The man whipped his hair back out of his face with a sharp jerk of his head. His sunken cheeks were red with weeping pustules, and his lips were bloody and ragged. But the man’s eyes were deep and still, sober and intense. “Put your gun down.” There was a metallic click five feet behind Joe’s left ear, the sound of a pistol’s hammer locking back. An icy drop of fear ran down his spine. “You think this ends with me?” Joe let the shotgun droop until the barrels were pointed at the ground a few feet in front of him. “You kill us out here, others will come poking around to see what happened. Whatever you’re up to out here, it’s over.” From the corners of his eyes, Joe could see more men coming out of the forest. Two behind Al, another to Joe’s right. At least five to two; he did not like those odds. “No one will come, Joe.” The man took a few steps closer to Joe. “You’ve had your way here for years. We think it’s time to try something different.” The big man’s hand was empty, and then it wasn’t. A wicked antler-handled blade appeared in it as he lunged forward, closing the distance to Joe’s heart so fast the Night Marshal almost didn’t have time to react. Almost. Joe swung his head to the left and swung his shotgun up at the same time. The knife was closing on his belly, its glinting tip whistling through the air like a diving raptor. Joe let the shotgun rip. The air filled with smoke and fire and shotgun thunder. At that range, the man with the knife should have been cut in half, his guts turned to a fine red vapor. Instead, the shotgun blast tore into a seething cloud that swarmed up over the edge of the ravine to form a living shield between Joe and the big man.
More f*cking bats. Something hot and red slashed down the side of Joe’s neck, a searing pain that knocked him to his knees. His empty shotgun skidded out of his hands, clattering across the rocky ground. Liquid warmth ran out of his neck and onto his hands. His eyes blurred, but he could still make out the life draining out of him. Al was shouting something, but Joe couldn’t make any sense of his words. His ear wasn’t working on one side, and his head felt like it was filled with cottonweed. Joe crawled toward the shotgun. If he could just reach the weapon, he could fix this. He’d kill them all. A cloud of bats beat him to the shotgun. They crashed onto the weapon like a screeching shroud, wings slapping against one another. Their scything fangs slashed the air, keeping Joe from the weapon. They shrieked toward Joe, forcing him to press his face to the dirt and cover his bleeding neck with his hands. When they’d passed, Joe lifted his head to see the big man standing just a few feet way, holding Joe’s shotgun in his left hand. “Bring them in,” the slow voice said. Al’s shouts were cut off by a meaty impact. Joe crawled forward. Not like this, he thought, not like this. A wedge of pain drove itself into the back of Joe’s head and everything turned white. Then the world went away.
8
omething with needles for teeth was gnawing on Joe’s right side, just above his hip. S The chewing ripped him from the cold, painless depths of unconsciousness to a world filled with jagged torment. “Motherf*cker,” he grunted and tried to shake the creature off his hip. Except his arms didn’t work, and neither did his legs. His hands were trapped against his chest by his knees, and something wet and cold was wrapped tight around him. Something hard and heavy pushed against the back of his head, forcing his chin down. Joe pushed against his restraints, but all he earned was a shooting pain along the side of his neck, a reminder of the injury he’d suffered up on the ridge. The Night Marshal’s badge came with a certain amount of supernatural resilience, but Joe knew he was going to need more than a little time to heal from that wound. His eyes were glued shut by something thick and sticky. Joe forced his right eye open, but the goo clung to his lashes and made his vision red and blurred. He could see he was lying on his left side, atop warped and charred floorboards littered with cigarette butts and empty Sudafed boxes. Whatever was wrapped around his body was pale and leathery and covered with interwoven spirals of runes. They reminded him of the symbols he’d seen on the church girl. From somewhere below him, Al screamed, a raw, pained explosion of sound that made Joe start. The teeth sank into Joe’s side again. The biter yanked its head back and forth, wrenching a hunk of flesh loose.
The pain burnt away the last of Joe’s daze. He imagined a big rat, tearing its way into his innards. Maybe a possum. Something ornery and toothy. “That’s enough of that sh*t,” Joe growled. He pushed out with his knees and wriggled his left hand off to one side, ignoring the pain in his back and shoulders the effort caused him. His whole arm was wooden and tingly, dead asleep from being trapped in the same posture for God knew how long. Joe flexed his fingers, clenching his fist again and again to try and pull blood back into his arm. Al screamed again. Joe tried not to imagine what would make the boy raise such a ruckus. Was something eating his son, too? Joe wriggled his arm up toward his chin, and his outstretched fingers found the edge of whatever was wrapped around him. It was smooth and greasy on one side, rough and dotted with short, bristly hairs that bit into his fingers on the other. He hooked three fingers over the edge of his prison and pulled down while he pushed out with his knees. His spine creaked with the effort, and spitting sparklers burned across his vision before his hand worked its way loose. He kept on pushing, forcing his arm up and out. With his arm no longer pinned, Joe found his prison had loosened just a bit. Enough for him to worm his left leg down, freeing up a little more breathing room. The biter did not take kindly to his shenanigans. It scrambled up higher on his side and chomped down hard on the tender center of his armpit. Joe shouted in surprise at the intensity of the pain. Al answered his father with a wordless howl of his own. The desperate sound spurred Joe to action. He had to get them out of here. Joe pushed with his right leg and heard something tear apart along his back. He had a little more room. Enough to slip his right hand away from his chest. He felt along the floor, digging his hand through the old medicine boxes and garbage, trying to find something he could use as a tool, or a weapon. He hadn’t heard anyone else moving about, but he didn’t want to be unarmed if the freaks who’d captured them came home. The biter sank its jaws into Joe again, tearing loose another nugget of flesh. Joe could feel it chewing, swallowing. It was burrowing, trying to get inside him. Joe forced his right arm up, cramming his fist through the gap under his chin. He
wriggled and thrust with his arm, screwing it up and out. Both of his arms were up, pressed tight against his cheeks, pushing his head back and choking him. He imagined himself dying like that, suffocating while his son screamed. He imagined the nightmare from the bluff coming home and tearing them apart. The beast in his armpit bit again, and Joe was sure he could feel its snout snuffling against his ribs. He tried to howl in pain, but his arms pressed against his throat choked the sound down to a thick gurgle. Joe’s vision blurred, pulsed in black-and-white strobes. He had to get out. With the last of his strength, he levered both his arms down. The motion was slow, and it pressed the biting thing deeper into his side. He ground his teeth against the pain and forced his arms down, dragging his torso up and out of his bonds like a cork from a bottle. The biter at his side snapped its teeth through his flesh again, and Joe could feel its claws digging into him, as if it could sense his impending escape and was desperate to finish what it had started before he could get away. Joe grabbed the wriggling fiend with his right hand. It was slick and bony and wrapped in a film that bulged between his grasping fingers. He tore it loose with a roar of pain and flung it away. The thing screeched and thumped against the floor. Joe heard it skittering through the trash, coming for him. Joe cleaned the goo off his eyes with the backs of his hands, saw that it was thick, clotted blood. He rolled onto his back to get a look at what had him trapped. He was up to his waist in a pig’s carcass. The swine’s head lolled back against his hip, and it had thick, crude stitches running up its belly. Its pale skin was covered with a series of interlocking spirals and primitive glyphs, an occult graffito that made Joe’s eyes itch and his brain throb. He kicked and shoved at the carcass, desperate to get free. He lay on his back and scraped his fingers down his chest and abdomen to sluice away a thick, curdled layer of old blood. There were symbols scrawled across his flesh, dark marks that made his vision throb and his heart lurch in his chest. What had these assholes done to him? The trash off to his left exploded up from the floor, and the biter flew through the air. Its body was long and lean and bone white. It spread thin wings, and its wrinkled snout peeled back to reveal twin rows of scythe-like teeth as it came at him. Joe punched the little monster away, knocking it across the garbage-strewn room.
The feel of its skin against his knuckles warped his thoughts into knotted tangles of revulsion. The biter hit the far wall with a brittle crunch and slid down into a bloody heap on the floor. That wasn’t good enough for Joe. He could imagine it crawling through the garbage, clawing its way toward him, teeth slashing the air. He had to find it, kill it, before it had a chance to come at him again. It squealed when it saw him coming and tried to dart away, but one of its wings was contorted out of true and hung limp by its side as it lurched through the trash. Joe stomped its legs flat, grinding his heel down until he felt the bones crack and blood run out from under his toes. The biter squealed and slapped at the floor with its one good wing until Joe lifted his foot and brought it down hard in the middle of the creature’s back. Its mouth burst open to vomit blood and viscera onto the scorched floor. Al screamed from below, his voice raw and frantic. Joe got to his feet and took a step back. Streams of chill sweat carved their way down his chest and back, sluicing through the thick blood. Dread took root in his gut. This was more than he’d bargained for when he’d answered the black phone that morning. He fell to his knees and puked up a gout of foul-smelling, nearly black blood. His ears rang, and he could almost make out voices thrumming through his head. They were insectile and rasping, alien sounds that he couldn’t escape or understand. They’d done something to him, but Joe wasn’t sure what that something was. He felt weakened, as if the power gifted to him as the Night Marshal was remote, diffused. His skull felt too full, his mind crowded by some other, unseen presence. He had to get out of here, get his boy and get gone, get some space to figure out what was wrong with him and how he could put it back to right. Joe stumbled to his feet and headed for the room’s only door on unsteady legs. He stopped at a scarred table where he found his clothes in a tangled pile. He shrugged his arms through the sleeves of his flannel shirt, managed to cram his bloody legs into the stiff legs of his jeans. He couldn’t find his boots or his duster. He couldn’t find his badge, either. He kicked his bare feet through the garbage, hoping it had just fallen from his shirt, but he couldn’t find the heavy silver symbol. Al’s voice vibrated through the house, a raw, primal denial of an animal with its leg
in a trap, a man facing his doom. A boy about to die.
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ut loose from the cross, the girl crumpled to the floor with her ragged stumps curled C under her, sobbing. “Just,” Dan said, unsure of what to do next, “stay there.” He opened the heavy door at the front of the church. His deputies were clustered together in patches of morning sunlight, drinking bad coffee from their thermos bottles and shooting the sh*t. They didn’t even pretend to be doing anything productive when they saw him frowning in the doorway. “Go on,” Dan barked. “Do something useful. Roust some meth dealers or shake down the working girls at the Flying J. No point in hanging around here playing with each other’s peters while I do all the work.” The deputies didn’t wait to be told twice. They loaded into their motley collection of patrol cars and fled the church’s meager parking lot in short order. Dan wished he had some real deputies, men he could trust and depend on, but all he had were those too lazy or too stupid to secure other jobs. He watched the pack of morons disappear down the gravel road, then went back into the church. The less they saw of the poor girl, the fewer rumors they could spread around the county. Dan had enough problems without a bunch of looky-loos coming down to stare at the freak in his jail. Sitting on her stumps, her good hand covering the jagged point of her naked arm bone, the girl looked like any other skinny teenager. Then she turned to Dan and brushed her hair back with blood-flecked fingers. His guts roiled at the sight of the raw meat where her face should be. She blinked and those eyelids, pale and pink, and somehow whole, made the mess so much worse.
Dan gulped down his revulsion like a cup of drain cleaner. He couldn’t leave her here. “Let’s get you out of this place.” He knelt down next to her. She smelled like old flowers, wilted and thrown out with the garbage. He hooked one arm around her waist and the other around her shoulders, scooped her off the bloodstained floor. She was too light in his arms, like a sack of autumn leaves. He could feel a tingling buzz where she pressed against his chest. It reminded him of roaches, scuttling through the dark. Dan crossed the sanctuary as fast as he dared, careful not to drop the girl or stumble, but hurrying just the same. As he crossed the threshold he felt a cold draft against his back, a dreadful sigh of relief. The church door slammed behind him, startling a cawing murder of crows. The birds rained sh*t onto the sheriff as they launched themselves into the sky. “f*cking birds,” he growled. He sat the girl on the cruiser’s hood and fumbled with the key chain on his belt. He found the right key and popped the cruiser’s door open. “Where we going?” The half-made girl’s voice belonged to a girl many years younger than she appeared. That and the other voice, deep and dark, rustling beneath her words, made Dan’s skin crawl. He scooped her off the hood and eased her into the passenger seat. She was limp as a doll, letting him arrange her arms and legs as needed to get her situated and buckled into the car. She watched him through the veil of hair hanging over her face until he answered. “Back to the station.” “You scared?” The girl tilted the raw mess of her face up and peered into his eyes. He tried to suppress a shudder and failed. Dan could see the memory of a face in the bloody mask. It felt familiar, like a word on the tip of his tongue. He looked away before he could recognize it. “Aren’t you?” The ride back to the station was long and rough on roads that were more gravel than asphalt. The girl sat next to Dan, hunched forward with her good arm folded over the bad, long hair hiding her face, glittering eyes peering through the lank strands. Dan watched the treacherous road, both hands on the wheel, grateful for the distraction. The silence hung between them like a curtain for half the ride. “You gonna let him do me in?” Dan wanted to lie to her, but her deep, black eyes boring into him made him an
honest man. “That remains to be seen. We’re going to have ourselves a talk.” “He never talks.” The girl’s voice sank. “That’s not his way.” Smoky images rose from the ashes of Dan’s memory. A burnt-out barn. An old woman kneeling in the dirt. A malformed boy with a goat’s head crawling across dewdappled grass with his guts trailing behind. A shotgun that spoke with the voice of an angry god. “He walks a hard road,” Dan swallowed. “Pitchfork needs a man like him to keep an eye on the darkness.” “That what he told you?” The girl pushed her hair out of her face. “That’s what I know.” Dan didn’t like Joe, but he’d seen what was out there. He knew sometimes the darkness could only be fought back with blood and fire. It wasn’t a job for men like him. That kind of work did something to those who picked up the burden. He didn’t think he was strong enough to survive that kind of change. “He’ll burn me,” she said with a voice as small and lost as anything Dan had ever heard. “Why can’t you just let me go?” Dan thought it over. He could stop the car here, let her loose in the woods. No one would ever know what he’d done. He’d say she escaped, or that someone came and took her. He’d tell lies; maybe someone would believe them. He might even get lucky and she’d just crawl off into a hole somewhere and die. Her eyes were fever bright in the red mask of her face. Dan could hear the buzzing beneath her skin. The insectile hum scraped across his nerves. “Where are you from?” he asked. “Here.” Her teeth flashed white in the raw gash of her mouth. She made a vague gesture with her stump. “Who did this to you?” She shrugged and drew a lazy spiral around the jagged bone jutting from the stump of her forearm with her index finger. “We was all scared.” “Of?” “Him.” She smoothed her blood-stained dress across her thighs with her remaining hand. “What he’s done. What he’s gonna do.” They drove in silence for miles more. Dan tried not to look at the girl, but his eyes were drawn back again and again. She sat still and silent, hand folded over her stump, elbows on her knees. Watching. Waiting.
The fly-wing buzzing crawled through Dan’s ears, plucked at his courage with spider fingers. He wished he’d left the girl up on the cross. He wished she’d been just another dead girl. He didn’t have the guts for this. Dan pulled the cruiser around behind the station house. There were no cars; all his deputies had been with him at Red Oak and were now out looking for trouble or hiding in quiet places where they could smoke their pot or drink their booze in peace. There should have been a dispatcher to take calls and route the law, but Dan had let Alice go last year. There wasn’t enough money for anything anymore. Pitchfork was drying up, the whole county so deep in the red he didn’t know how it’d ever get back to black. He reached over to unbuckle the girl. Her breath whispered against the side of his neck. “Don’t let him burn me. You know it ain’t right.” She looped her arms around Dan’s shoulders. He could feel the slick flesh of her ragged stump pressed against the back of his neck. It throbbed there, cool and buzzing against his skin. Dan carried her out of the car and into the station house. “You’re gonna lock me up?” Dan didn’t answer, but shoved the unlocked holding cell’s door open with his foot. The girl’s arms tightened around his throat. “What hold’s he got on you, Sheriff?” The girl pressed the cool, moistness of her face against Dan’s cheek. He could feel the ragged slit of her mouth moving against his ear. “What makes him right?” Dan froze on the cell’s threshold. He’d asked himself that question again and again. The answer shamed him. Dan was the law here, the protector of the people. But the sheriff knew there were things he could never do, things he could never face. Pitchfork needed Joe, even if it didn’t always understand why. “He does the hard things. Things we can’t.” Dan whispered. “He kills our monsters.” Flies crawled over the edge of the cell’s toilet bowl. Their eyes were red beads set in glittering green heads. They left crimson trails on the white porcelain. “What happens when he runs out of monsters, Sheriff?”
10
J oe zipped his pants and buttoned his shirt with trembling fingers as he headed for the door. Al’s screams were like a tangle of fish hooks in his heart, tugging at him. His hands shook with growing tremors, and his head throbbed with the pangs of an impending headache. He needed a drink. The pictures nailed around the door hauled him up short. What he saw raised the hair on his arms and the back of his neck. There were shots of him. Black-and-white photos cut from the county’s weekly paper, bigger prints taken with a sh*tty camera, all yellowed and faded with age. A dozen pictures of him, a dozen more of an old woman with white hair and close-set, black eyes. For the moment, fear and caution outweighed the need to rush out of the room. He needed to know what he was up against. Joe limped over to the room’s solitary window and spat on the flyspecked glass. He rubbed a clean spot big enough to peer through, and his heart sank at what he saw. He recognized what was left of an old barn, blackened beams jutting from the ground like a dead giant’s rib cage. He recognized the apple tree burnt down to a gnarled stump beside the road. Alasdair screamed, his voice ragged and lost. The sound spooked a crow, which flapped past the window with a rough caw. This was Alma Pryor’s place years ago, an old farm tucked up tight in the Francois Foothills. Joe recognized it, because he’d burned the hellhole down. Or thought he had. He left the room and stepped onto a fire-scored landing. Chunks of wood were missing, chewed away by the fire he’d set years before. The whole place smelled of
ash and decay, a clinging stench that made Joe pull the collar of his shirt over his nose and mouth. He listened for sounds of movement, for the telltale creaks and groans of an inhabited old house. There was nothing but the rattle of chains from somewhere below and the saw-edged sigh of the wind through the house’s warped walls. His heart ached with the knowledge that all of this might be part of some sick bastard’s revenge against him. Had someone hung that girl in the church just to draw Joe into an ambush? He tried not to think of Elsa and Stevie, alone down in the valley. If the people who’d done this were out for revenge, and weren’t here with him in the house, then where were they? Alasdair’s voice came again, a wordless pleading, begging for rescue. It tore at Joe’s heart, but the Night Marshal knew if he rushed down to rescue Alasdair, he might miss someone, something, that would spell disaster for them both. He really needed a drink, just a sip, to steady his nerves and clear the fog from his mind. There were three rooms off the landing, the doorways empty holes in the walls. Joe could see where fire had melted their hinges into useless clumps and heat had warped the frames. He poked his head into the first room and yanked it back out twice as fast. All of the room’s walls were covered in thick, squirming lines and eccentric spirals. Strange symbols marked their intersections and scrawled pictograms occupied the empty spaces. The arcane scrawls burned bright in his mind’s eye, and arcs of fire flared across Joe’s vision. He stumbled away from the door until his back bumped into the landing’s creaking railing. Just a glimpse was enough to imprint vivid images into the empty spaces of his mind. He took a deep, cleansing breath and blinked again and again to dispel the burning afterimages before their dark magic could take root in his skull. “What are you idiots up to?” Joe reached for his badge before he remembered he didn’t have it, and instead muttered a prayer to a deity he’d lost faith in long ago. He’d learned that the prayers were like mathematical formulas - whether you believed in them was irrelevant as long as you knew how to string their pieces together. Gods didn’t care about men, but they would listen if you were willing to pay their price and knew which words would reach their distant ears. He’d take whatever edge he could wrangle. Something dark and strange had found a home in this place. A heavy footfall shook the landing. Joe whirled around, and another foot crashed onto the floor to his left. He flicked his eyes around, searching for the source of the
sound. Thick, black tar oozed up between the charred floorboards, sticking to the soles of his feet. Alasdair shouted, and his voice was engulfed in a strange, pig-like squealing that mimicked his words. “They’re coming,” the voices screamed together. Another heavy footstep crashed against the floor, and tar splashed into the air. Joe ran for the stairs, feet trailing sticky tar with every step. At the top of the steps, the Night Marshal felt his head turning against his will. A bubble rose from the thick tar, a great mass heaving its way up out of the floor. The bubble stretched into the air, dripping foulness. It split open, malformed eyelids parting to reveal a three-lobed eye. The pupils were bulging black shot through with veins of furious red, hatred boiling out of them. Joe’s feet tangled as he ran down the steps. Whatever was back there, whatever he’d seen, whatever had seen him, was not something he could fight. He’d get his son and get the hell out of here. Then he’d come back with enough flares and gasoline to turn this place and everything within its walls into a bad memory. On the next floor down, he passed doorways gaping open on two more rooms. One was being used as makeshift chemical storage, filled with enough open canisters and spilled fluids to cook meth for half the county. The other bedroom looked like a wild animal’s den. The bedding was shredded and stained, broad strokes of filth scarring the walls with indecipherable scrawls. Joe wasted no time investigating these rooms. He had to get Alasdair and get the f*ck out of here. There’d be time to figure out how to deal with this godforsaken mess later. Joe took the stairs three at a time, praying he wouldn’t plunge through a chunk of bad wood or stumble into some hole he couldn’t see in the dim light. Distance from the staring nightmare helped to clear his thoughts, but he couldn’t shake the dread he felt. Whoever had brought him here wanted him and his destroyed. They were willing to traffic with old things, creatures from days best forgotten, and they were willing to create blasphemy to get their revenge. “They’re here,” Alasdair screamed, his voice a fractured wail.
11
he last step crumbled to gritty ash under Joe’s heel. Off-balance, he caromed off the T mildewed stairwell walls before skidding to a halt in a cramped hall. The kitchen to his left was a nightmare of filth. The sink overflowed with unwashed dishes scabbed with molding food, and the table was littered with scraps of maggoty barbecue and stale pizza crusts. Broken glass pipes and empty, punctured beer cans with blackened, scorched lips jutted up from the squalor, signposts that meth lived here. Al screamed again, and Joe followed his son’s tormented voice. A muffled whirring came from somewhere deep under the house, like a lonesome chord struck from a guitar at the bottom of a dry well. Joe’s feet picked up splinters from the naked wood flooring as he ran. The knife felt small and pathetic in his hand, and he yearned for the comforting weight of his shotgun. The house was a tumble-down maze of squalid rooms and labyrinthine hallways, built up over the generations to contain the Pryor clan’s burgeoning numbers. They’d all lived together, generations of the inbred and bent, stewing in a witch’s brew of strange religion and old rites that Joe believed he’d shut the door on years before. Joe’s memories of the place were worn thin and faded by the passage of years and countless bottles of whiskey. He tried to keep track of his steps; it would be too easy to get lost in this place. He pushed through a warped door and remembered a little girl, screaming in her bed, terrified of the man chasing her grandmother. Another door and the memory of a young man on the floor, choking on blood from a nose smashed in by a savage strike from the butt of Joe’s shotgun.
Joe kept his eyes low to avoid the cryptic scrawls that scarred the walls and kept moving to outrun the ghosts of his past. He cursed himself for not finishing the whole family off when he’d had the chance. One day of mercy was going to cost him a whole mess of pain. Al’s voice broke into a pitiful whine. Joe chased the sound through a grungy utility room filled with empty chemical canisters and found what he was looking for on the other side. The stairs to the basem*nt, dusty and stinking of the depths. This was where he’d found the old woman, Alma Pryor, clutching her dress up to form a pouch loaded with so many fetishes and idols the fabric was stretched near to breaking. She’d come here hoping to make one last stand, but her gods had abandoned her that day. Joe stood at the top of the stairs, half his mind looking to the future, the other falling back into the past. He remembered her screeching, dark words tripping over her tongue and fouling the air with the overpowering scents of decay and ozone. He remembered leveling his shotgun at her face, the weapon warm and heavy in his hands. Alma had trafficked with the darkness, she’d made deals with creatures Joe was sworn to oppose, and the Night Marshal was well within his rights to blast her skull apart. But there were children begging for their grandmother’s life. Half-witted sons pleading with him to spare their sick old mama. And Joe had shown them mercy. He’d given them fifteen minutes to pack whatever meager belongings they could, barring those that could be used for the kind of sorcery he’d come here to end in the first place. Then he’d gone room to room, splashing gasoline and dropping road flares. He’d walked out the front door, past the crying family gathered on their pea gravel driveway, tossed the last of his gas and flares into the barn, and drove his pickup into the night. His strongest memory was of the flickering in his rearview mirror, fire and shadow, and the huddled, weeping family. A pathetic clutch of broken humans who should have been singing praises that they were still alive instead of crying over what they’d lost. Had Joe known what was to come, he’d have made those brats watch as he torched the whole place and their granny with it. Then he’d have put a bullet through each of their incestuous heads and called it a day. He’d been merciful, and look where that’d gotten him. f*ck mercy. The smell wafting up from that old stone passage was thick with age. The stairs and
the old basem*nt they led to were older by far than the house built around them. Joe paused on the first step as the throbbing presence of a dark power set his teeth on edge. He didn’t want to go into that basem*nt. He didn’t want to face whatever was down there in the darkness. But more than that, he did not want to leave his son to the thing’s attention. Joe crept down the steps on the balls of his feet, knife held out ready to slash or stab anyone or anything that got in his way. The staircase was made up of thirteen stone steps with a right-angle bend to the left in its middle. Nothing came for him; nothing tried to stop him. He found himself in a small, earthen room lit by guttering candles melted inside crude sconces hacked into the walls. Elaborate, runic carvings ran around the room and exerted a magnetic pull on his eyes. The whirring he’d heard upstairs was much louder here, a heavy rasping that made it hard to think. The Night Marshal focused on the one thing in the room he understood. “Joe,” Al gasped. “Get me the f*ck out of here.” They’d laid Al on his back atop a low stone table. His arms, legs, and head draped over the edges and were bound in thick chains fastened to the table’s base, bending Al into a bent, crab-like posture. “It’s on me, Joe.” Al whimpered, his voice breaking with fear. He bucked against the chains, but there was hardly any give to them. Close up, Joe could see it wasn’t a table. The round rocks were the top of some sort of pit, a well maybe, the bottom hidden in shadow. The whirring was coming from the hole’s depths, a leathery whisper that grew louder as he peered into the darkness. “Get it off,” Al whimpered. “Get it off me before it gets in.” Al was stripped down to his boxers, but Joe couldn’t see anything on him. The boy’s skin was bruised and scratched, but he was in better shape than Joe. “Al, I don’t—” “Get it off!” Al screamed and bucked. His body arched up against his chains in the throes of blind panic. He thrashed from side to side, and Joe was afraid the boy would rip his own arms out of their sockets if he kept it up. Joe reached under his son and ran his hands along Al’s back. He brushed against something soft and warm that turned on him with demented ferocity. Pain blossomed as needles plunged into his hand again and again, shredding the skin of his palm.
The Night Marshal clenched his fist around the tormentor on Al’s back. It squirmed in his grasp, claws scratching at his wrist even as its teeth tried to rip chunks out of his hand. Scalloped wings jutted from between his fingers, black and velvety with hooked talons on the tips. Joe squeezed, and the bat’s body ruptured like an overripe peach. He flung it to the floor in disgust. Even as damaged as it was, the demonic bat limped across the floor with one mangled wing. Its single, enormous eye, glared at Joe, all three bulging pupils filled with an ageless hatred. Joe lifted his heel and brought it down on the monstrosity’s upturned face. “Get me out of here, Daddy.” Al panted. “Hurry.” Joe tested the chains. The manacles around Alasdair’s wrists and ankles were corroded and sticky with filth, but the old iron was an inch thick. Even if he had a bolt cutter and the time to work on the heavy links, Joe knew he’d never get through them. “I need the key,” Joe said. Countless wings shuffled and stirred in the pit, readying for flight. “They’re coming,” Al whispered. “They can smell my blood. I can smell their hunger.” “Al,” Joe licked his lips. His hands shook. He needed a drink. “I have to go back upstairs and find the key.” “Don’t leave me,” Al begged. “Daddy, please. Don’t leave me down here with them.” Joe rested one calloused palm on Alasdair’s sweat-slick forehead. “Hang in there. I won’t be long.” “Then just kill me.” He stared into his father’s eyes. “Don’t let them eat their way into me. Don’t let it end like that.” “I’ll be back,” Joe headed for the stairs. He had to get away from Al. He couldn’t take seeing his son in such torment. “I’ll change,” Alasdair whispered at his father’s back in a low and petulant voice. “If you leave me down here with them, I’ll do it.” Joe turned to stare into his son’s eyes, trying to see the limits of the boy’s desperation. Alasdair was up against the wall. He wasn’t lying. If push came to shove, he’d do the one thing he’d spent most of his life avoiding. Joe hoped the boy would be able to find his way back from the abyss if he did let loose.
“Don’t make me put you down, Son.” Deep sorrow tinged Joe’s words at the thought of what might come to pass. “Don’t force my hand like that.” “Then don’t leave me,” Al said. His voice was a panicked whisper. “Please.” Joe turned his back on his son and headed for the stairs.
12
lsa jabbed the needle into the pad of her left thumb and squeezed a heavy drop of E blood into the bowl of clay. Outside, scraggly tree limbs bowed before the gusting wind, throwing grasping shadows through the window and over Elsa’s face. “One for the angel who watches me by day.” She squeezed her thumb until another fat drop splashed onto the clay. The flames of the seven candles on Elsa’s little workbench grew tall and burned golden white. “One for Granny Moon’s light that shows me night’s way.” Elsa squeezed out another offering of blood. “One to call Strangers to hear the words they say.” Each of the towering candle flames curved inward, bowing over the heavy wooden bowl and the bloody earth it contained. One by one, the flames shrank and winked out. Elsa licked the blood off her thumb and prepared to plunge both hands into the clay. “Elsa, only your right hand.” Her mom was always reminding Elsa of The Rules. “You don’t mix old blood with new.” She wrinkled her nose at her mother’s warning and held her thumb out for inspection. “It’s already closed, look.” “Let’s not take any chances, little lady.” Stevie went back to sorting her herbs. It made Elsa sad to see her mom doing such boring work. People said her mom was something special back in the day, when she was younger. Elsa obeyed her mother, but resented being told what to do. She knew what she was doing; she was good at this. She held the bowl with her left hand and worked the clay with her right. The moist earth soaked up all three drops of her blood as Elsa folded it
over and over, its color warming from a greasy gray to a rich, chocolate brown. Just the right color to draw in a curious Stranger, not dark enough to get the attention of the always-hungry bogeymen. She lifted the bowl over the workbench with both hands and upended it. The clay fell to the wooden bench with a wet slap, flattening slightly before drawing back up into a smooth dome. Elsa smushed the bottom of the bowl into the clay, then flipped it over. She smoothed the clay down the bowl’s sides, forming the rough shell of her new mask. Her stomach felt all fluttery looking at the blank circle. She wondered what would answer her call this time. “Why do we have to do this down here?” Elsa asked her mother. It was stuffy in the shack when the two of them were both working. She wanted to take her things up to the big house, maybe set up a nice space in the basem*nt where she could spread out. “You know why.” Stevie didn’t look up from her mortar and pestle, but Elsa could see her bear down harder on the stone mortar. “It’s not fair.” She traced the grinning line of a mouth with her pinky, then again with her index finger to deepen the crease and form the lips. Elsa liked to do the mouths first, so she could get the happy ones. “I’m not the Night Marshal. I shouldn’t have to follow his dumb rules.” “Elsa,” Stevie warned. “Hmmph.” Her fingers tingled where they touched the clay. From the corners of her eyes, Elsa could see shadows shifting, straightening up and standing tall as they crowded toward her. She wondered what it would be like to do this in a bigger room, where more of the Strangers could gather round. Maybe she would have more to choose from then. Maybe she would get more girls that way. Elsa loved her daddy, but she didn’t like the way he made her feel about her gifts, like they were secrets she should keep to herself. Unless he needed her help. Then it was just fine to talk to the Strangers and wear her masks. Then it was okie-dokie to walk along the edge of the Left-Hand Path her father was always warning her about. “Your daddy loves us, Elsa. But he has to be careful.” “Maybe he should live down here.” Elsa turned the bowl this way and that, trying to find a good place to start working. “There are more of us. We shouldn’t be all jumbled
up together down here. We should stay in the big house.” “It’s best this way.” Stevie brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Your father only wants what’s best for all of us.” “I’m going to ask him to let us move up to the big house. We’re his family.” “Don’t.” Stevie rubbed her arms, suddenly cold. “Leave it be.” “Hmmph.” Elsa wasn’t one to disobey, but she decided then and there things had to change. Her daddy had a big house with enough rooms for all of them. He’d have to learn to get along with his family. He’d have to learn to let them do what came natural. She was proud of her daddy and what he did. Why couldn’t he be proud of her the same way? She gouged an eye from the clay with her right thumb and flung the wet scrap onto the stone floor. The eye looked strange, a little out of place. She was good with eyes, and the simple mistake irritated her to no end. Elsa thought about smoothing the hole over and trying again, but she knew better. Once the mask began to take shape, it was dangerous to change it. You might call one of the formless demons doing that. One of the Strangers stood taller than the rest. It flowed toward her and hovered just at the edge of her sight. “Do you like that?” Elsa’s voice took on a singsong lilt as she coaxed the shadow closer. “It’s a little funny, isn’t it?” She took a deep breath. The air was cool in her nostrils, and had a strong, musky scent, like a wet dog. She shivered a little and went back to work. She dug her thumb into the clay and scooped out the second eye, then frowned at her work. This eye was even more out of place than the first. It was on the same side of the face as the first one and too high, way up on the forehead. Elsa turned the mask this way and that, trying to figure out why her hands were playing tricks on her. No matter which way she turned the clay-covered bowl, it didn’t make any more sense. Elsa frowned and pushed her thumb into the clay again, a third hole for a third eye. The three divots made a tight triangle, their edges almost touching on the right side of the mask. The left side was still empty and smooth. “Mama,” Elsa started to say, but her voice froze in her throat. Blood welled up in each of the three eyes, fusing them together into a single scarlet pool. The tall shadow leaned in over Elsa, and she could hear it sniffing her long hair. The cold fell on her like a cloak, heavy and thick.
“You you you can come live in my my my house.” The voice made her ears itch. It buzzed like a bee hive. “Your daddy daddy daddy is here.” “You’re not supposed to talk until the mask is done,” Elsa said. Her words frosted the air as they left her mouth and sounded dead to her ears. She wanted to ask her mama if this was all right. Elsa looked for her mother, but her eyes felt fuzzy and weak. She couldn’t see anything except for the mask. “We we we will be together,” the Stranger whispered. Elsa’s head throbbed. She thought of wings, a storm of wings, billowing up from some dark hole. “All of you you you and all of us us us.” Elsa struggled against the Stranger. Her hands felt clumsy, like the time she forgot her mittens and played in the snow too long. She reached for the mask, but it slid away from her stiff fingers. The bloody eye gleamed with ancient malice. “By the tithe and shade,” Elsa began the words of banishment, forcing them from between numbed lips. This wasn’t fun anymore, it was scary. “Begone from my -“ Thunder rolled through the little house, and Elsa’s mouth snapped shut before she could finish the old words. The mask spun on the table, whirling faster and faster, the clay bulging and warping as it turned. The eye glared into Elsa, and she felt its hate, a vile darkness that had been fermenting for eons, waiting for this moment. It was coming. It would kill them all. It already had her father. It already had Alasdair. She could hear their shouts and screams, feel their pain. The blood spilled out from the eye, and she could see her father drowning in it. Elsa struggled to open her mouth, to warn her mother. But she was afraid it was already too late.
13
J oe hustled up the stairs, panic shifting his heart into sixth gear. He had to find the key or something to break Al’s chains before his captors returned. He made his way through the first floor, stopped dead at the door to the kitchen. There, on the table, the familiar dark-brown neck and black label of his old friend, Jack. Joe licked his lips, clenched his fists. Pyramids of old pizza boxes, empty tins of Spam crusted with old flecks of processed pork, mounds of gnawed rib bones crowned by green-eyed flies surrounded the bottle. Joe didn’t care. It could have been stuck in a pile of sh*t, and it wouldn’t have made any difference to his thirst. He took three swift steps into the kitchen and yanked the crusty bottle off the table. He flicked curds of something yellow and sticky off the bottle’s mouth with his fingers. He stared at the whiskey, knowing he should put it down and walk away. His forehead itched, and the discomfort pushed him over the edge. Joe tilted his head back and poured the booze in, gulping the first draught so fast he didn’t even taste it. His tension and fear eased back as the liquor scorched the back of his throat. The second drink was more satisfying, a rich, oaky flavor that reminded him of campfires and summer nights. His hands stopped shaking. He had time for a couple more slugs, enough to get him back on top of things. Enough to smooth the edges of his nerves. Joe leaned against a filthy kitchen counter, ignoring the roaches that scattered at his approach, and lifted the bottle to his lips again. He’d get around to finding the key, right after one more drink.
The third drink went on and on. His lungs burned with their need for oxygen, but still he drank. The Jack sloshed around in the hole in his soul, enough to whet his appetite but not enough to satisfy. Never enough for that. The bottle ran dry just as the front door screamed open on rusted hinges. Joe clenched the thin neck in his hand. Greasy drops of sweat trickled through the dried blood on his chest and back. His vision blurred, steadied, blurred again, and his head felt thick and loose on his neck. “f*cking idiot,” he cursed himself. Faded copper light poured in through a window at the kitchen’s west end. The sun was going down and dragging Joe’s heart along with it. He thought of the bat he’d killed in the attic, the other one he’d smashed in the basem*nt, the big swarm of them up on the ridge, and the well filled with still more of the f*cking monsters. With the darkness descending, they’d be coming out to feed. Al was strapped right over their hole, a helpless meal for the taking. Joe clenched his fist around the bottle. He wanted to smash it against his own head, clear his thoughts with the bright, pure fire of pain. He hated himself as much as he hated his need for the bottle. The gang piled into the house like a pack of dogs, growling and jostling one another as they headed for the kitchen. The cat-piss stink of longtime meth heads poured into the house along with them, stinging Joe’s nose before he could see them. The Night Marshal shuffled around the table on the balls of his feet, then pressed himself tight up against the doorway. He drew his hand back over his head, ready to swing the bottle down at the first freak to come through the door. He hoped his aim was steady enough to get the job done. He didn’t have long to wait.
14
he first of them never saw the bottle coming. Joe brought it down across the bridge T of the kid’s nose so hard it dropped the young man to his ass in a spray of blood and snot. The kid’s eyes fluttered up to show their jaundiced whites, and his breath glubbed in and out through the mushy ruin of his nose. He fell to his knees, then crashed forward onto the kitchen floor. Blood ran out of his face and flowed across the curling linoleum tile. “What the hell?” A second man shoved his head through the door to get a look at what was happening. The Night Marshal switched his grip and brought the bottle down in a vicious overhand stab. The blow slammed into the second man’s forehead with a hollow pop, and Joe followed it up with a punch to the solar plexus that drove the man back into the others behind him. Joe ducked his shoulder and threw his weight into the knot of confused men. His feet skidded on the tile, turning his attack into a headlong fall into his attackers. Their legs tangled as they tried to regain their balance, and the whole pack of them fell back into the entryway. They hit the ground hard enough to crack the old floorboards. Al screamed from the basem*nt, a wordless exclamation of rage and panic that dumped an ice-cold wave of fear down Joe’s back. He was running out of time. They all were. Adrenaline shoved Joe back to his feet, and he took advantage of the meth heads’
confusion to get clear. He scrambled over the four of them and fled deeper into the house. He was no longer searching for a way to free Al, but for a weapon. He needed to even the odds, before it was too late. Al howled from the basem*nt, the sound so tortured it no longer held any humanity. Joe knew that sound. It wouldn’t be long now. Joe crashed through the mess of a bedroom, threw himself down an L-shaped hall and into some sort of parlor. Something glowed in the little room, a ball of oily light sitting on a low, triangular table made of hickory branches and deer antlers strapped together by strips of tendon and leather. The light ignited the runes scribbled on Joe’s torso and neck. The glow itched like poison oak, but Joe found himself helpless to do anything but stare at the light. It burrowed into his mind and strangled thoughts before they could form. There were words, buzzing, rasping, but he couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell him. “Nice try, Marshal.” Joe recognized the voice behind him. It was the man from the ridge. “Shoulda gone out the front door when ya had the chance. Now yer f*cked.” A thick arm wrapped tight around Joe’s neck, squeezed. “You don’t want to do this,” Joe wheezed, shaking off the witch light’s mindnumbing power at last. “You need to let us go.” The man laughed, and Joe felt hot breath against his cheek. “We ain’ never lettin’ ya’ll go, Marshal. Not after what ya done to the family.” “You don’t understand,” Joe gasped, “he’ll kill us all.” The man squeezed Joe’s neck harder still. “No one can kill me. Not anymore.” Joe’s vision flashed red, then black. His lungs screamed for air. He dug his fingers into the arm around his throat, but the big man didn’t loosen his grip. They didn’t understand what was happening. He had to make them see the danger before it was too late. He curled his legs up to his chest, using the unexpected weight to pull the man holding him forward. The big man bent at the waist, and Joe’s heels hit the floor. He snapped his head forward, then slammed it back, driving the attack with the strength of his legs. Something crunched against the back of Joe’s head, and he felt warmth roll down his neck. The noose of muscle and bone around his throat went slack, and he lunged forward. He stumbled into the room, opening up some distance between himself and his
attackers. Joe rubbed his throat and turned back to his attackers. He had to get out of here, get them all out of here before Al turned and came upstairs looking for blood. “Run,” he croaked, “get out of here while you still can.” The big man and his brothers (the grimy family resemblance was unmistakable) laughed and cracked their knuckles. The big man shook his head. “You don’t call the shots around here just now.” They came at him in a rush, no tactics, just a wall of heavy fists and flab-sleeved arms pummeling Joe’s head and shoulders. They put the boots to him once they had him on his knees, slamming kicks into his ribs and arms as he tried to shield himself. Joe didn’t want his boy to kill these men. He couldn’t have Al breaking the Night Law. Nothing was worth that. “Please,” he raised one hand, only to have a punch knock it aside and plow into the side of his head. He felt dizzy, couldn’t tell if it was a concussion or the booze or whatever they’d done to him while he was trapped in the belly of the pig upstairs. A guttural howl rose up from the basem*nt and coiled like a noose of ice around Joe’s guts. The boy had done it. Al had gone and changed. Now they were all f*cked.
15
“
e been waitin’,” the big, greasy motherf*cker said. He towered over Joe and W had to bend at the waist to wrap his thick fingers in Joe’s hair. The addict wrenched Joe’s head back and stared down into his bruised eyes. Joe stared back. The big man’s left eye was wrong, the pupil so dilated it seemed to have swallowed all but the thinnest sliver of bloodshot white around its edges. “Been waiting’ a long goddamned time.” The big guy punctuated his words with a backhand slap that split Joe’s lips and made his ears ring like a firehouse bell. Half-deaf, Joe could still hear Al’s howling. The sound was so much worse than his pain. Joe stared back up at the freak, trying to form the words to warn him. But his lips were too swollen, and his jaw felt slack and too loose. He stared at the big, black eye until he realized the pupil wasn’t a single black hole. There was a trio of pupils, mashed together inside that thin band of white. They swirled around one another, a mad orbit that made Joe’s skin crawl. “Let us go,” Joe said, his voice thick and slurred. “Before it’s too late.” The men laughed, rough-edged hyena cackles. Joe felt sick, not for himself, but for Al. For what he’d done to his own boy. He’d used his kids. Tramped Elsa all over the county to look into so much weird sh*t he couldn’t even remember it all. Done the same to Al, night hunting trips and dawn hikes through the backwoods that ended with shotgun fire and shallow graves. Hunting the darkness was never easy, but Joe had lightened his load by leaning on his family. He’d warned them against walking the Left-Hand Path, threatened them by showing
them what he did to others who fell to the darkness. If he didn’t get Al out of here, the boy would end up being one of the very monsters Joe had used him to hunt. And if Joe survived this mess, he’d be the one who’d have to kill the boy for falling to evil. Joe tried to push himself up, but the big man kicked his legs out from under him. Someone else kicked him in the kidneys, another someone planted a boot in his hip. Another howl echoed through the house, an ululating predator’s cry that froze the meth heads. Their eyes widened and Joe could see they all shared the same monstrous pupils in their left eyes. He knew once they turned their attention back to him, it would only be a matter of minutes before they’d stomped him to death. He took advantage of their distraction to draw on one of the gifts of his office, reaching deep into the dark hollow of his mind that held a portion of the Long Man’s eldritch power. With the wound on his neck now healed, Joe could turn that power to other uses. The supernatural strength poured into his veins, pushing his flesh far beyond its mortal limits. Hanging on to that kind of raw energy made Joe stronger, faster, tougher than he’d ever imagined possible. But for every second it blazed inside him, the power demanded a price and stole a day from the end of his life. Joe let his newfound strength propel him onto his feet. His fist hooked up under the chin of the big man with enough force to lift the freak off his feet. He followed through with a backhand that took the skinniest addict down. Joe felt something shift on impact, but couldn’t tell if it was his knuckles or the man’s jutting cheekbone. The big man came back at Joe, still dazed from the sucker punch but game for the fight. He threw a left hook, then a vicious swooping right when Joe tried to dodge away. The blow caught Joe in the ear, and the ringing in his head became a deafening dial tone buzz. “Still got some fight in ya?” The big man snorted and spat out a blood-slicked tooth. Joe led with a right jab that the big man slapped out of the air. Joe let his momentum carry him forward, and he stomped his left foot down on the inside of the big man’s right knee. The big man’s leg gave up on the job of supporting him with a sound like ripping cloth, and he went down with both hands wrapped around the ruined joint. One of the others hooked his arms around Joe from behind, bending him into a
clumsy full nelson. The man clung to his back like a burr, wrenching at Joe’s arms while the big man struggled to get back to his feet. Joe reckoned he could beat the three of them if he put his mind to it, but he didn’t have time for f*cking around. If Al broke loose and found him tangling with these idiots, there’d be nothing but blood and scraps left of all of them, including Joe. As if sensing Joe’s worries, Al roared from the basem*nt, and a brittle, metallic crunch echoed through the house. The Night Marshal threw himself backward, fell into one of the bentwood rockers, and set the witch glass wobbling on its heavy table. The man on Joe’s back screeched in pain as the chair splintered apart under their weight. The big man lurched forward on his good knee, hands stretched out for the globe. Joe grinned from the floor and kicked the edge of the table with both feet. “Catch.” The big man cried out, and the other addict, still on his, feet stared at the luminous ball in horror. The glowing globe tumbled off the edge of the table. Joe rolled off the wounded meth head behind him, grinding his foot into the man’s groin. He ran from the room, grinning at his attackers’ howls of pain and despair. As he fled, Joe released the Long Man’s power. It had served its purpose, he’d do the rest on his own. There was still time. He needed the freaks to chase him out of the house. Al would still get loose, but if he couldn’t find anyone to kill, Joe wouldn’t have to worry about dealing with the aftermath. He ran, kicking open doors and throwing himself down hallways, trying to stay just ahead of the assholes, keep them running. The big man thumped after Joe, shaking the whole house with his limping strides. Joe blew through a door that slammed back against the wall behind him and fell off its hinges. One of the tweakers was waiting and threw a clumsy punch that caught Joe on the chin. The blow threw the Night Marshal to the side, and he caught himself against a wall coated in peeling paper. Joe came back around with punch of his own. He pulled it at the last second, landing a blow just hard enough to get the addict’s attention. If he knocked the idiot out, Al would have him filleted in a heartbeat. “Run,” Joe growled, and kicked the downed man in the ribs. “Get out of here if you want to live.”
Another metallic crunch came from the basem*nt, followed by the sound of something heavy falling to the floor. An enraged roar shook the floorboards, sending Joe and the addict running in opposite directions. Joe’s memory was fuzzy. He could remember the general layout of the house from his last visit, but the specifics were lost to years of marinating his brain in whiskey. He kept his head down and his legs pumping, doing his best to get back to the front of the house and out the door. Other feet were pounding the floorboards, the addicts trying to catch Joe or escape, running every which way. Something heavy hit the basem*nt stairs at a full run, its steps a rolling thunder as it scrambled up to the ground floor. Joe’s mouth went dry. He wanted another drink more than he’d ever wanted anything. Al was coming. “Run!” he shouted. Following his own advice, Joe scrambled for an exit. He felt sick and clumsy, the booze in his gut agitated and bubbling from the adrenaline dumping into his system. Another roar shook the house, this one close enough Joe could almost feel its pressure against his skin. They were all running out of time. Joe burst into a hallway he recognized and darted to the left. The front door was wide open. He just had to get to it. Two of the junkies beat him to it and tangled up as they tried to get through the doorway. They pushed and shoved at one another, their drug-addled brains misfiring with panic. Joe ran toward them, intent on pushing them both through the door. Ten long steps, a quick shove, and they’d be in the wind. He could deal with them after he got Al back under control. Now that he knew who was behind the mess at the church, he could clean it up later. A sleek, blood-slicked figure burst into the hall before Joe. Its arms were long enough to drag the ground when it stood upright, and its legs were squat and coiled to spring. All-too-familiar eyes glared at Joe over a canine snout bristling with fangs as the beast let out a hunter’s cry. The Night Marshal’s stomach tightened, and he felt his pulse pound in his ears. Years had passed since the last time he’d seen his boy change. It was still terrifying.
“Al,” Joe said, “don’t do this.” The demonic figure whirled in the hall and swept its, long, taloned fingers at the men in the doorway. They shrieked in pain and fear as they were thrown through the door. Al followed them into the fading light of the setting sun, howling his rage as he disappeared down the front steps. Joe chased Al, racing toward the doorway. He couldn’t let the boy kill those men, couldn’t let him break the Night Law. Things were bad enough without having to kill his own son.
16
made it to the front door in time to see a battered pickup fishtail down the J oe driveway. Al raced after the truck on all fours, covering the ground with terrifying speed. Joe watched his son leap, arms stretched out in front of him, wicked claws flashing in the moonlight. The truck’s rear window shattered, and chunks of fallen glass twinkled on the pea gravel drive. Al was halfway into the cab, thrusting his long body through the broken window. “Don’t kill anyone, Al.” Joe crossed his fingers, as the truck slewed across the gravel. The rusted pickup missed a curve and jounced sideways off the road, wheels chewing gravel, then grass, then spewing clouds of chalk-gray dust. It swerved from side to side, then spun into a tree with brutal force. The collision bent the truck into a crooked V and sent one of the passengers flying through the windshield. The addict crashed into the scrub grass and rolled, arms and legs pinwheeling with bone-snapping force before he tumbled to a stop. Joe shouted his son’s name and headed for the smoking truck. He clomped down the crumbling porch, hardly noticing as his naked heels cracked steps and jarred planks loose. Joe stalked to the edge of the house, trying to summon the energy to run. He had to get there before Al lost control and tore the freaks to shreds. He could see the boy stirring, dragging his long, sleek body out of the truck’s cab. Streaks of blood ran down his back, dripped from his elbows and the curved tips of his foot-long talons. Despite the blood, Al didn’t look hurt; he looked pissed. “sh*t,” Joe said. “Don’t do it, Al.” Joe pushed himself harder, half jogging toward the truck. The rough gravel bit into
his naked soles with every step, but Joe ignored the pain and pressed on. He had to get to Al before the boy lost control and turned the dazed occupants of the truck into so much shredded pork. He had to get them both out of here before the whole flock of bats poured up out of the well and ate them alive. The small group brave enough to fly in the morning sun had been bad enough. Joe didn’t want to face the whole nest once the sun was down. And the sunlight was close to gone. All that remained was a bloody glow struggling to hold on to the rounded shoulders of the St. Francois Mountains. Joe hustled toward the truck, head down, shoulders hunched around his ears, praying he’d beat the bats. Al roared as the survivors of the truck crash pulled themselves out of the banged-up cab. They ran in opposite directions, one limping toward the rural highway that wound past the farm, the other scrambling for the scorched orchard behind the farmhouse. Al roared once more and bolted from the truck, heading for the road. The wounded man stumbled and tripped over his own feet, desperate but far outmatched by the beast on his heels. A shadow limped out from among the trees ahead of Joe, a familiar weapon hanging loose in its hands. “Well, lookie what we got here.” Joe skidded to a stop as the barrels of his shotgun swung up toward his face. His hands shook; he licked his lips as terror spiked his nerves. He felt weary and energized at the same time, ready to run in a random direction but frozen to the spot. In the last light of the sun he could see greased hair, and gray coveralls spotted with blood and oil. Joe had no idea how the big man was up and walking. He looked as if the busted knee Joe’d given him minutes before wasn’t slowing him down. “Just the man I was looking for,” Joe said. “Hand over the shotgun so we can wrap this up.” “On your knees, Marshal.” The big man kept the shotgun’s barrels pointed at Joe’s head. “You’ve had a good run, but time to git what’s comin’.” A man screamed from the road, the lost wail of a doomed soul. Alasdair answered with a predatory howl that made Joe’s stomach clench. “You hear that? That’s the sound a real monster makes. That’s the sound of death coming for you and yours. Give me the shotgun, and maybe some of you get out of this mess with your hides intact.” Joe sneered at the addict, doing his best to hide his horror as he listened to his son hunt.
“The Marshal fights monsters, not bring ‘em out to play.” The addict took a step closer to Joe, stepping out from between the trees. “Don’t exactly follow rules, now do ya?” “I do my job.” Joe clenched his jaw. “I burn witches’ nests, I kill devil worshipers. I should have killed your whole f*cking family back then.” “You f*ck a witch, and she whelps devils.” The addict was two yards away. His eyes glittered like dying embers in the failing light, crimson gleams from the deep shadows of his face. “The only difference twixt us is this here badge.” Joe saw it then. The circled pentacle, pinned to the man’s ragged coveralls. The sigil of his sacred duty, stuck on this devil-lover like a trophy. The sight made Joe want to tear the man apart with his hands. He regretted the mercy he’d shown him years ago. “How’s it feel, Joe?” The shotgun’s barrels were as big as train tunnels. Red runes glowed an angry warning around the black holes. “How’s it feel to know all that stands between life and death is one man with his finger on the trigger? A man with every reason to want you dead?” “It’s not the badge that makes us different.” Joe forced himself to breathe, to let the jagged sawtooth burn of the adrenaline mellow, settle into his muscles and nerves where it could do him some good. This wasn’t over yet. “It’s the duty.” “Scaring old women? Burning down farms? That duty?” The shotgun inched closer to Joe’s face. “You ruined my granny, threw down our gods, burned my family out of our f*ckin’ house. Ya think this is what we wanted? Weren’t hurtin’ no one. Then you come along with yer big gun and yer shiny badge, and we lose it all.” Joe could hear the creak of the shotgun’s stock. The man was squeezing the weapon so hard Joe was amazed he hadn’t pulled the triggers yet. Joe stared into the man’s three-pupiled eye. “What was your granny doing down in that basem*nt? Why do you think I came out here all those years ago?” “She was a witch. She helped folks, birthin’ babies, makin’ sure the harvest came in clean.” The addict took another step, jabbing the gun at Joe with each word. “Your daddy wouldn’t never have done what you did.” “My daddy died,” Joe growled the words, keeping his voice low, “because he didn’t know how to handle Left-Hand Path hillbillies like your granny.” “What did you say?” The big man was leaning in close to hear what Joe had to say. The shotgun was a foot from Joe’s face now. He could feel the draw of the gaping
barrels, the scent of death wafting from the old weapon’s throat. “You’re gonna die, like your old man.” “Then f*cking do it,” Joe shouted, and the big man jumped at the sudden sound. Joe slapped the barrels away from his face with his right hand. He slammed his forehead into the man’s nose and grinned at the smashed-melon squish of pulped cartilage. The Night Marshal tore the shotgun from the addict’s hands and drove his knee up between the man’s legs. The big man jackknifed, stumbling into Joe, gasping for air and spraying blood from the wet mess of his shattered nose. The Night Marshal shoved him away, and he fell to his knees, coughing and choking on his own blood. Joe growled and smashed the butt of the shotgun down into the back of the man’s head. The addict’s arms and legs went limp, and he slumped to his knees on the gravel, hunched over and leaking blood onto the ground. For one moment, Joe thought about putting the shotgun to the back of the cultist’s head and emptying whatever was left of his rotten brain onto the gravel. But, at least for the moment, he needed the man alive to explain what the hell he’d been planning with that half-made girl. “Al,” Joe shouted. “It’s over. Come back.” Night had fallen over the farmhouse. The sky overhead had become a velvet blackness lit with the silver gleam of starlight and the milky face of the moon. A mad beast howled in the distance, a hunter’s challenge, a throaty cry of primacy. The cultist’s shoulders shook, and Joe thought the man was having a seizure. Maybe he’d hit him a little too hard, jangled something important loose in that rotten gourd he called a head. Then he heard the wet, rhythmic chuckling. Rage burned hot in Joe’s guts. He kicked the man in the ribs, shoving him over onto his back. He pushed the shotgun’s barrels into the ruined smear of the man’s nose, thumbed the safety off with a satisfying, solid click. The red runes around the ends of the barrels crackled and glowed white-green like the afterglow of a summer lightning strike. “What are you laughing at, asshole?” “Too late,” he laughed. “You’re too f*ckin’ late.” “This isn’t over yet.” “Ain’ got the stones to do it.” The big man lifted his head, pressing his nose against
the shotgun’s barrels until blood ran free over his cheeks and down the sides of his face. “Didn’t then, don’t now.” Joe heard Al’s voice rising over the shrieking voices of the bats, howling as he hunted in the darkness. He stared down at the asshole in front of him, the man who had risen up from Joe’s past mercies to drag him and his son to hell. He pushed the shotgun against the man’s forehead, shoving his skull back and grinding it against the gravel. Joe felt his fingers tightening. An ounce more pressure on the triggers, and he’d turn this f*cker’s head into a stain on the gravel. “Go on, then. Ya think this ends here?” The man laughed again, his breath bubbling the blood from his nose into a pink froth. “We didn’t start this, Marshal. This is your doin’.” “Bullsh*t,” Joe said. “I didn’t make you call to the darkness. We all choose our own path.” “That what yer daddy told ya afore he died? Be free to choose any path ya want, long as it’s the one that led to his f*ckin’ badge?” The man laughed, choked on his own blood and sprayed red into the air. “We all choose, but sometimes the hand at your back gives ya a little shove along your path, don’t it?” “Like you and your granny? She the one who taught you to play with half-made girls? Did she sell your useless ass to the darkness for a jug of ‘shine and a carton of Marlboros?” Joe leaned in closer. “I’ll find her, you know. When I’m done with you and your little pack, I’m going to find that old woman and finish what I started.” “Ya don’t even know. Yer so f*ckin’ blind.” Another cough, blood drooling out of his mouth. “Come closer; I’ll tell ya what’s comin’.” The front door of the farmhouse blew open, shoved to the side by a seething, flapping mass of screeching vermin. Their voices filled the air, a multitude of piercing squeals that dug into Joe’s ears like gigging forks. More bats poured out of the empty mine shafts scattered through the hills around the farm. The bats hit Joe like a twister filled with razor blades. Their screeching drowned out everything, filled his head with a throbbing agony that mirrored the myriad pains of his body. Fangs slashed through his shirt, sliced through his jeans, dug bleeding furrows along his scalp. The weight of their bodies pushed Joe to his knees, pressing him on top of the big man. The bleeding man grabbed the Night Marshal. He glared at Joe, one eye swollen
and bulging from its socket. His three-lobed pupil burned with a crimson fire, pulsing in time with Joe’s pounding heart. “I I I taste you you you, Marshal,” the voice droned like a swarm of cicadas, forcing its way through the bats’ wall of sound. “You you you are so delicious.”
17
he bats clung to Joe like a cloak of fangs, scraping furrows in his scalp and T shoulders. They lapped at his blood and gnawed on his scabs, sucking the life from him as he struggled to tear them from his body. For every one he snatched away and crushed in his fist, three more fell on him and crammed their greedy muzzles against his flesh. “Feel them them them? The weakness? The draining?” The words flowed out of the man beneath Joe, pouring out of an open mouth that did not move, as if the real speaker lurked deep inside his chest. Each syllable thrummed and trembled in the air, formed from a hundred different voices, like the chorus of rasping cricket legs rising from the grass or the choir of peep frogs chirping from the creek. “This is how all things things things will end. Torn. Hollowed. Empty.” “f*ck you,” Joe snarled. “They they they drink,” the voice droned on, “and I I I grow more powerful. Soon, you you you will be finished.” Joe felt the truth in the words. He was losing not just the strength to fight, but the will to do so. He had to end this before they leeched him dry. He fought against the weight of the bats and pushed himself up onto his left elbow, putting some space between himself and the freak. Joe swung the shotgun’s barrels up into the cultist’s chin, smashing the freak’s teeth together with a sharp click. But his finger wouldn’t squeeze the trigger. His left hand was numb as a block of wood, separated from his brain by a wall of ice and pain. Joe looked down at a footlong blade jutting from either side of his forearm, blood running down its length. The freak grinned up at Joe, ripped the knife free, and drove it into his arm again, skewering
his bicep. The shotgun fell from Joe’s nerveless hand, and bats swarmed it. “This this this body will not die so easily,” the voice droned, and the big man slid the knife out of Joe’s arm, scattering blood in a glittering arc across the gravel. His left arm flopped loose and weak from the shoulder, twitching at his side. “We we we will feast on you you you.” Joe looked down at the cultist and saw his last chance. He curled his fingers around the Night Marshal’s badge. It filled the palm of his right hand, solid silver engraved with runes of protection and power. It fastened with a two-inch spike, sharpened to a spear point. Joe wrenched the badge loose from the big man’s coveralls and flicked it open with his thumb. He shifted it in his grasp, and the heavy needle jutted from between his first and second knuckle. “Not today,” Joe reared up under the cloak of bats. He punched the spike through the center of the freak’s bulging eye, tore the weapon free and drove it in again. The eye sprayed like a stomped packet of jelly, squirting dark and stinking fluid in all directions. Joe moved his attack to the man’s throat. He swung his fist in vicious arcs that carved a bloody groove across the freak’s throat, trailing arcs of blood. The man’s neck yawned open, revealing the tube of his airway, pumping blood vessels, and striated, ragged flaps of muscle. Joe kept swinging until the man’s neck was an open crater, sleek knobs of spine gleaming up through the gore. He felt the wind stir across his back as the bats lifted from his shoulders. They spiraled overhead, voices raised in a mad keening. The flock broke apart and scattered into the night. He shook his head and thumped his fist against the dead man’s chest. Fatigue settled in his guts, leaving him weak and nauseated. He wanted to stay there, letting the cool night air dry the sweat and blood on his skin, but he knew there was too much work left to do before the sun rose. Joe struggled to his feet. He grabbed his shotgun from the gravel and held it tight in his right hand. A throaty growl and the crunch of heavy steps called Joe’s attention down the driveway. Al’s eyes glowed firefly green in the moonlight. Long strings of slobber dripped from his jaws and pattered onto the gravel. He swung his arms forward and dropped a pair of bodies that crumpled into boneless heaps on the driveway. Joe looked from the bodies back to his son. Al was painted with blood, a red stain
that ran down from his crimson snout and across his chest. “Son,” Joe began and reached out for Al with his injured arm. His fingers shook, twitching as damaged nerves struggled to carry the message of his brain, trembling as his muscles cried out to be soaked in alcohol. He shifted his grip on the shotgun and raised it. “It’s over.” Al’s muzzle rose into the wind, sniffed the air. He turned his eyes back to Joe’s, then lowered to the shotgun. His bestial head shook, slowly. “You know what has to be done,” Joe said. But his guts churned at the thought of it. Al had done wrong, but he’d done it for the right reasons. He’d killed these men with his dark talents, which made what he’d done a capital offense. As Night Marshal, Joe had no more choice in carrying out his son’s execution than he did in putting an end to the black magic shenanigans of the idiots he’d just fought. That didn’t mean he had to like it. “Don’t fight me on this. Make it easy on us both.” Al snorted and stabbed a bloody finger at the ruined body behind Joe. Joe ignored the silent accusation and lifted the shotgun. Aimed it at Al as best he could manage with one good hand. “You know the law.” His son grabbed the shotgun’s barrels and pulled them to his chest. Pressed their open mouths against the flesh over his heart and held them there. Joe’s blood ran cold in his veins. “I’m sorry, Son. I never should have brought you into this. But what you did was wrong.” “No,” Al said and pushed his weight against the shotgun. “What you believe is wrong.” One of the bodies groaned, curled in on itself like a wounded snake. The other one cried out and clutched at the bloody wound across his face. They lay side by side, wounded, bloody. But alive. Joe stared at his son. He flicked a glance to the injured men, and the shotgun dropped back to his side. “Why?” There was a sound like grinding meat, like heavy paper being crumpled. The air stung Joe’s eyes, and when his vision cleared Al stood naked before him, slight and bloody and human. Long scratches covered Al’s arms and legs, and his torso was cross-hatched by shallow cuts and scrapes. “I had to know,” Al said.
Joe watched his son walk away and disappear into the darkness.
18
J oe rolled his badge from hand to hand. Stared at the front, then the back, rolled it over to the front again. Blood and ichor had settled into the engravings, staining them deep black. The spike was mangled from the abuse it had suffered. Joe had turned it into a tarnished fishhook with a dulled point. His left palm was split by crescents of blood where the badge had chewed into it with every punch. Joe sighed and hunched over, careful not to break open any of his scabbing wounds. The bleeding had stopped for the moment, but experience told Joe he was one hasty move from tearing something open and leaking more of his vital fluids into the dirt. The Night Marshal was gifted with the ability to heal from his injuries much faster than other men, but he knew he was close to his limits. He was worried too, about the weakness he’d felt since waking in the house. As the Night Marshal, he was gifted with supernatural strength and vitality, the better to stand up to the evils he faced. It rested inside him, a heavy weight of energy that he’d been able to feel since the day he picked up the badge. But, now, that weight felt lighter, less substantial. It was still there, but Joe felt as if there were something in his way when he reached out for it. He’d gone through the house and found his duster and boots, tossed in the corner of the kitchen with the rest of the trash. His hat hadn’t turned up, and he didn’t have the strength to go looking for it. He already missed it. One of the Pryor boys had gotten into the wind, fled in the mayhem. With any luck, the stupid f*cker would fall into one of the dead mine shafts littering the hills around the farm and kill himself before he could stir up any more trouble. Joe didn’t think he was
much of a threat, in any case. The dead one in the coveralls seemed like the limited brains of the operation, and he was a cooling corpse. Sitting on the porch, Joe wondered how he’d come to this point. He should never have answered his father’s call all those years ago. Should have stayed on the road, far from Pitchfork County, far from Stevie, far from the son he hadn’t known. Maybe then his father would still be alive. Al and Stevie would be able to live as they chose, without worry about what Joe thought or what the Law said. He spat, angry with himself for regretting a decision most of a decade past. All he’d wanted was to save his county from the darkness, to uphold the Night Law and keep people safe from the strange powers and eldritch monstrosities that called Pitchfork County home. Somewhere along the way, his best intentions had turned to blood and nightmares. People he thought he was protecting were afraid of him. Idiots he should have killed had crawled up out of his nightmares to make him regret his moments of mercy. He didn’t see how any of this would end well, for anyone. Headlights crawled off the main road and up the long, winding driveway. The yellow glow played over spilled blood and broken bodies: the corpse in coveralls, the two wounded Pryors, the Night Marshal. The old car rattled to a stop, and its lights died. Joe limped off the porch over to the car. He felt old. He needed a drink to calm his twitching nerves. But there was still so much work left to do before he could rest. The sheriff hauled his belly out of the patrol car. He flicked his flashlight from body to body. The bright light swung up to Joe’s face. The Night Marshal raised his hand to shield his eyes. “Really, Dan?” The light shifted back to the ground. “Thanks for coming.” “Can’t be too sure.” Dan stepped up to Joe and looked him over. “You look like roadkill.” “You bring the stuff?” “Much as I could get on short notice.” The two men walked around to the back of the cruiser and the sheriff opened the trunk. There were six blue-and-white cylinders that looked like oversized tubes of cookie dough, a black box with a big red X taped across its top, and sacks of plastic bottles of kerosene in various colors. Joe picked up a cherry-red bottle and held it to the trunk’s weak light. “Cranberry?”
“Best I could do. Least it’ll smell good while it burns.” Joe grunted at that and loaded the bottles of kerosene into the ratty Walmart bags in the sheriff’s trunk. “I’ll take the top floor, you do the —“ “No.” The sheriff shook his head. “I’m not burning down a house. That is not my job.” “Dan, these freaks made that girl down at the church. Burning this place is justice. It is your f*cking job.” “That’s your justice, your law. You got a court order to start a fire here?” Dan spat a grainy glob of tobacco juice onto the gravel. “No? Then burn the place yourself. I can’t be party to that.” “Fine. At least carry some of this sh*t.” Joe shoved a pair of bags into Dan’s hands, then loaded up two more for himself. “You owe me at least that much for cleaning up this sh*thole.” “I don’t owe you f*ck-all,” Dan muttered. But he followed Joe up the rickety front steps and into the house. Joe wound his way through the house, splashing kerosene around as he went. Dan followed in Joe’s footsteps. “You slaughter the whole family?” Joe laughed, a raw bark that rattled through the house like a kicked can. “Should have the first time I came here. Didn’t this time either. Two of the three out front are still alive. Another one of the slippery assholes got away.” “Too bad. Sounds like paperwork for me.” “I could drag the two live ones in here and light ‘em up, if that’s what you want.” Joe emptied the last of the bottles and led Dan into the sitting room. “A little late now.” Dan spat again. “You can’t just tell me that kind of sh*t. Have a little consideration for the actual law.” “What’s gotten into you, Dan?” Joe took a bottle from Dan’s bag. A high keening filled the room, crawling out of the witch light on the table and digging at his eardrums, scratching at his nerves. Joe shoved the shaken sheriff out of the room. “You-know-who isn’t going to be thrilled if you keep bristling up every time I ask for a little help.” “I’m tired, and I’m the sheriff here, not your errand boy. I won’t stop you, but you can’t ask me to break the law.” Joe didn’t say a word as he finished soaking the place with kerosene. His head swam from the fumes, and he was too tired to fight. He led the sheriff back out of the
house to the trunk. “We’ll talk about this later, after I’ve had a chance to get a drink and sleep for a few weeks.” Dan shrugged. “Caps in the box with the X. I’ve got the detonator right here.” Joe stuck his hand out, and the sheriff slapped a little black wand across his fingers. “Just hit the button when you’re ready to blow it up.” The Night Marshal tucked the detonator into his shirt pocket and picked up the caps and explosives. The tubes felt warm and heavy in his hands, like living things waiting to attack. He carried them into the house, ready for it all to be over. He found his way to the basem*nt, tried not to look at the rim of the well, splattered with blood, or the chains with moist shreds of Al’s flesh still clinging to them. Joe crouched next to the hole and opened the box of detonators. He stabbed one into each of the tubes, pushing and twisting them in to secure the electrodes in the clay. He threw two of the tubes down next to the old well, then left the basem*nt. He chucked another pair into the sitting room, threw one up the stairs, tossed another into the kitchen. Back outside, he grabbed the dead man in the coveralls by the ankles and hauled him up onto the porch. He didn’t like the way that one had sounded toward the end. No sense in taking chances. Joe waggled the wand in the sheriff’s direction. “Mind giving me a ride up the road before I set this off?” “Sure.” “Can we load these two up?” He pointed down at the two groaning men. “Put them in a holding cell until I can get down to see them in the morning?” “Fine.” When the sheriff didn’t move to help him, Joe sighed and bent his aching back to load the unconscious men into the back of the cruiser. They were covered with blood and bruises, but Joe didn’t think their injuries were life threatening. Just painful. He felt sick to his stomach, thinking how close he’d come to shooting his own son for a crime he hadn’t committed. Maybe Dan was right; maybe he’d gone too far. But he didn’t have time to think like that. Doubt slowed him down, made him weak and uncertain. When facing the madness that seethed just beneath the surface of Pitchfork, second thoughts were not a luxury Joe could afford. The Night Marshal slid into the cruiser’s passenger seat and slammed the door. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead as they reversed down the driveway toward
the road. After a few seconds, he lifted the wand and pointed it at the house, pressed the button. “Ignitium Assholium.” Dan snorted. “Harry Potter, you are not.” A pillar of flame lifted the old place off its foundation, tearing the main building loose from the rickety additions. A shockwave roared down the driveway, kicking gravel and dust into the windshield and shoving the car hard to one side, rocking it up onto two wheels. It banged back down, shocks screaming in protest. Through the dust, Joe could see the ruins of the house, jagged splinters thrust up from the earth, shattered stones in pools of fire. Ragged fissures in the earth radiated out from the blast site, spewing flames into the night sky. Black shadows flitted through the rising smoke, deeper pockets of darkness swarming toward the stars. The shadows caught fire and fell back, their power burnt away, their connection to this world lost as whatever dark arts had bound them to the house were destroyed. “They were monsters, Dan.” Joe pointed at the burning shadows. “You know I’m right.” “You have your law,” the sheriff said and spun the car away from the carnage, “and I have mine. Where’s your truck?” Joe gave directions and eyeballed the sheriff on the ride back to where he’d left his old truck. There was something different about the man, more than this new streak of rebellion up his spine. A change. Joe worried at it like an old hound with a bone, but he couldn’t put his finger on what had changed in the man next to him. “I’ll hold them for twenty-four hours, Joe. After that, I have to cut ‘em loose.” Dan stopped the car next to Joe’s beat-up old truck. “You’ll hold them until hell freezes over if that’s what I want.” Joe threw the door of the cruiser open and unfolded through it like a praying mantis out for a stretch. “You need to remember who pulls the strings around here. You keep this sh*t up, I’m going to make a phone call, and the three of us can have an old-fashioned palaver.” “One day,” Dan snarled and threw the cruiser into reverse. Joe just managed to jump away from the still-open door as the sheriff swung the car in a tight half circle. The cruiser’s engine revved, and the door slammed shut. Joe watched the patrol car blast off down the winding road, and its lights were out of sight long before the whine of its engine had died away. He didn’t know what had gotten into Dan, but he’d beat it out of him if need be.
He drove the truck home, grumbling right along with the ancient engine. He was dead tired and felt like he’d been run over and dragged down a gravel road for a couple of miles. All he wanted was a bottle of Jack and his bed. He eased the truck up the driveway, mouth dry with anticipation of the smooth amber liquor waiting for him. Joe’s house was a big place, imposing. Natural stone walls rose to a steep roof clad in layers of overlapping clay tiles. The windows were all dark, but the porch light was on, and a golden-haired angel sat in its pale glow, rocking in the old chair Joe’s father had made for his dead mother. The Night Marshal climbed the steps to his porch, slow and with great care, trying to keep from running, from charging, at Stevie where she sat. His vision blurred, and he wanted to snatch his wife into his arms, crush her against his chest, and kiss her until her heart beat its last and her lungs emptied into his mouth. He loved her, he hated her, and he was in no mood to deal with her after the day he’d had. “Go on back down to your place, Stevie. Been a bad day.” She didn’t move. Just watched him climb the steps, her green eyes fierce, her mouth a straight slash between flushed cheeks. “No.” “Stevie,” Joe’s left fist clenched, and his right fingers twitched. “Not tonight.” “What have you done, Joe?” Stevie stood up from the chair and her long black dress flowed out around her feet like spilled ink. “What followed you home this time?” “Stevie, I—” The slap rocked Joe’s head hard to the left. He caught himself against the porch railing with his good hand. He turned back to Stevie, squared his shoulders and licked the blood from his split lip. Her hand came back the other way and split Joe’s lip wide open on that side, too. “What have you done to my babies?”
19
J oe snared Stevie’s swinging hand out of the air and spun his wife toward the house. Her feet tangled, and she stumbled into the screen door, face pressed tight against the wire mesh. She shook her hand loose and whipped around to face Joe, fingers hooked into talons at her sides. Stevie glared at Joe, cheeks flushed red, eyes burning bright with rage. Joe’s face stung where she’d laid hands on him, an infuriating pain that dredged old hurts up out of the darkness of his heart. He breathed deep, forcing air past his bruised ribs, willing his thundering heart to slow. “This isn’t us, Stevie.” Joe forced his hand to relax, his fist to open. “This is what your mama did. Let’s not get tangled.” His words splashed over Stevie like a bucket of ice water. She blinked hard and shook herself, as if she could shrug off the dark mojo her mother had wrapped around them both all those years ago. “Something’s wrong, Joe. Bad wrong.” She opened the door and held it for him. “We need to talk.” Joe took the door from Stevie, careful to hold it high above her hand, let her get ahead of him before he went inside. No point in risking another touch and stirring up the bad blood between them. After all these years, they still couldn’t harness their passion and keep it from turning dark and hateful. Al was waiting in the family room, naked except for a pair of jeans he’d hacked off at the knees. His chest and shoulders were scored with deep scratches and angry bruises from his ordeal at the Pryor house. He crouched on the back of the sofa,
hunched over his little sister where she lay quiet on the cushions. Al glared at his father. “Happy now?” “What happened?” Joe stepped past Stevie and knelt before his daughter. He took her cold hand between his palms, rubbing them together to try and warm her freezing fingers. Elsa stared up at the ceiling, eyes wide and clear and blind as if they’d been plucked from her skull. “Who did this?” Stevie walked around the back of the couch and put her hand on Al’s shoulder. He winced, and she moved her hand, only to land on yet another scabbing slash. Al reached up to hold her hand. “Why don’t you tell us, Joe?” Stevie asked. “It isn’t me,” Joe said. “Al and I finished that mess tonight. When did this happen?” “Hours ago. Near sundown.” “Before or after?” Joe’s thoughts were back under the bats, the swarm falling around him, their wings whispering, the eye boring into his skull. He remembered the thing tasting him, drinking his blood through the mutant bats it controlled. It had seen him, but more than that, it knew him. “After what?” Stevie gnawed her lower lip and watched Joe study their daughter. “Sundown.” “Sure. I guess.” Joe tried not to think of the change in the man he’d killed, the strange presence he’d sensed in the house. Had it come for Elsa? Her gifts made her strong, but vulnerable, a vessel waiting to be filled. It all made a terrible, sickening sense. He held tight to his daughter, hoping he could hide his trembling fingers by hanging on to her. He drew another deep breath, aware of the weight of his family on his shoulders, of Al’s rage and disappointment, of the storm of emotions brewing in Stevie’s heart. He had to be strong. He had to look. Joe leaned forward and looked at Elsa’s right eye. One pupil, wide and black and empty as a moonless autumn night. So far, so good. “Come on, baby.” The Night Marshal rubbed his little girl’s hands. “Please come back to me.” He stared at Elsa’s left eye. His breath gushed out of him, relief sucking the air from his lungs and leaving him weak and ragged.
“She’ll be all right,” he said, though he wasn’t sure that was true. Something had happened here, even if it wasn’t related to what he’d been involved in for the last few days. But there was just one pupil in her little eye, which meant that thing hadn’t come beaten him home, hadn’t burrowed into his daughter’s special head and taken root. “She’s going to be fine.” “You believe that?” Stevie’s voice cracked like a whip, cutting through Joe’s relief and slashing open his doubts. “Do you really believe that?” Al leaned over and scooped Elsa off the couch, pulling her hand from Joe’s grip with deft, strong hands. Joe watched his children vanish from the room, heading into the shadows of the kitchen, to their rooms on the other side of the house. The rooms they’d never slept in, because Joe didn’t trust himself to be so close to their caged darkness. “I do,” Joe stood and turned from the couch. He walked over to the liquor cabinet next to the small television and took his time pouring a tumbler of whiskey. He took one slow drink to steel his nerves, then turned back to his wife. “Everyone is going to be fine, Stevie. We put an end to whatever it is they were doing out there. Ask Al if you don’t believe me.” “Al won’t talk about what happened. He turned up at the little house naked and bloody, wouldn’t say a word to me.” Stevie blew her hair out of her eyes with an exasperated sigh. “He could have been killed, Joe. It looks like he almost was.” Joe held his tongue. Stevie didn’t need to know how close Joe had come to killing the boy. Some secrets are better left to lie. “And this problem with Elsa…” a lone tear tumbled down her cheek, and she swept it away with her hand, cutting the sentence off with the same gesture. “What happened?” Joe was relieved that what he’d been fighting hadn’t come into his daughter, but something had hurt her. He had to figure out what, so he could fix it. “She was working, and she fell,” Stevie tried to put her thoughts together, but the fragments of memory wouldn’t line up straight for her. “There was a noise that wasn’t a noise, like a television with the sound all the way down. And the mask, it was dark. Almost black.” “Where is it now?” Stevie didn’t say a word, just turned and walked out the front door. Joe followed her down the driveway that led to her house. She moved like a ghost, her black dress hiding her long legs, her pale feet flashing in the moonlight as she walked. Her golden
hair caught the moonlight in its curling waves, held it, wore it like a bow. She stopped, pushed a wayward lock of hair back over her ear and half-turned to Joe. Her eyes were wet with tears that she refused to let fall, but her voice was calm and steady when she spoke. “Things could have been different, couldn’t they?” “I think so. I hope so.” Joe cleared his throat. He loved Stevie in a way that threatened to tear his heart out of his chest and set it afire. He hated her with a pure, cool fury that threatened to slice her clean through. His conflicting emotions warred within him, locked in place by the death curse her mother had loosed on them the day Joe killed her. “I loved you so much, Stevie.” She nodded, remembering. She lowered her eyes, giving Joe the privacy to remember, too. His father, the Night Marshal then, screaming as the Bog Witch bled him dry. The bone hooks crawling over the old man’s face, lacerating, digging deep to the bone. Joe fighting his way through the brackish water, struggling to reach the only man he’d ever admired, the only man whose approval ever meant a damn to him. Seeing it then, in his father’s eyes, that disappointment that robbed him of his strength and stole away his will to fight. He’d let the old man down again. “You beat her.” Stevie whispered the words, as if afraid her ancient, dead mother would hear them and strike her down for such impudence. “Did I?” Joe pushed the rest of the memory away, shoving away the vivid images of his flayed father and the scorched crater he’d left in the Bog Witch’s face. Her curse had flowed out of her like the stink of sour milk, binding Joe and Stevie together, tying their love to the hate she felt for him. They could never have one without the other, not so long as they both lived. “It doesn’t feel like it.” Stevie led him the rest of the way to the shack, slowing so he had to step with care to avoid running into her. He wanted to touch her, to feel his wife’s hair flowing across his fingers, to feel the soft curve of her cheek under his palm. His fingers yearned to squeeze around Stevie’s throat until her eyes bulged from their sockets and her tongue jutted black and dead from between purple lips. “Wait here,” Stevie said. She disappeared into the little house, and Joe wondered how it felt from her side of things. Did she dream of poisoning him, of watching him beg for death while one of her potions melted his guts like candle wax? Did she wonder
what it would feel like to slit his belly open and bury her hands in his entrails? Did she miss him? She came back to him with the mask. It was thick and misshapen, a crude lump compared to Elsa’s usual artistry. Stevie pushed the lumpen clay at him, and he took it with dread. The mask was dark and heavy as wrought iron. Its mouth was a jagged slash that sneered at Joe from beneath a sloppy gouge of a nose. The triangle of close-set eyes filled Joe with dark hate. “You f*cker,” he snarled and clenched the mask until his fingers ached. Joe could almost hear its laughter. He stormed back to the house, grinding the gravel beneath his hobnailed boots. Stevie called his name, but to Joe it was no more than the buzz of a mosquito in his ears. He blew into Elsa’s room like a spring gale. The Night Marshal stood over his daughter’s still body and held the mask overhead. “Let her go,” he shouted, and slammed the mask to the hardwood floor. It landed with a muted clang and did not bounce. Joe raised his foot and brought it down on the center of the mask, driving all his weight down into it. His heel struck the mask and bounced off. Joe fell to one side, sliding down Elsa’s dresser to the floor. He reached for the mask, but Stevie beat him to it. She lifted the dark lump to her chest and held it close. “You recognize this?” Joe nodded. “Let my baby go,” Stevie whispered and shoved the fingers of her right hand into the mask’s eyes. “You can’t have her.” She folded her hands, and a white light jumped from her to the mask with a whip crack. The mask flew from her fingers and bounced across the floor. Elsa blinked and sat up, yawning. “Did I do good, Daddy?” She grinned and reached for Joe, arms wide. “You did great, baby.” Joe hauled himself up and pulled Elsa up into her arms. “But you scared us a little.” She wriggled in his arms, making herself comfortable. “It was scary,” she said. “But just a little.”
“It’s gone, now.” Joe kissed the top of Elsa’s head. “We’ll see,” Elsa whispered, stroking the back of her father’s hand. “I reckon we’ll just have to see.”
20
drank. He sat in the big chair in the family room and cracked the top on a J oe Budweiser and stared out the picture window overlooking the long road down to Stevie’s house. He was so beat, the act of lifting the beer to his mouth almost wasn’t worth the effort. Almost. The beer, pale and watery as it was, flowed over Joe’s taste buds and soaked into his parched throat. His nerves jumped at the trickle of alcohol, twitching awake and yearning for more. He finished the first beer in two swallows and leaned forward to place the empty can on the coffee table. “You should take a shower.” Stevie. Still nearby, instead of down in the little house where she belonged, away from him where he couldn’t hurt her. “Let me look at you, see how many stitches you’ll need this time.” “In a minute.” Joe didn’t look at his wife. The fury of battle was gone, leaving behind a raw ache that felt like his muscles had been torn off, flipped over, and then stitched on upside down. His stomach was a clenched fist, growling for something more nourishing than alcohol. He finished his second beer and stacked it on top of the first. Joe reached down into the cooler resting to the left of his chair and fished another beer out of the melting ice. Stevie was at his side before he could pop the top. She pulled the cold, wet can from his fingers, careful not to touch his skin. She popped the tab and handed the open beer to him, then lifted another one from the open cooler. “You hate beer.” Joe guzzled half of his drink, not daring to look at his wife. She was too close, within easy reach.
“Suffer not a witch?” Stevie snapped her own beer open and took a gulp that even Joe could respect. “I can see it in your eyes.” Joe opened his mouth, but his feelings were too conflicted, too complex to fit into a smart-ass comeback. He remembered the beating he got for watching Doug Henning do his fake magic on a friend’s television. Remembered helping the old man bury a devil cat at Broken Pole Crossing while it hissed curses at them both. That last look as Joe lifted the old man’s shotgun and blew the Bog Witch straight back to hell. Memories that haunted him, made him wonder if he could ever fill the shoes his father left behind; or if those were shoes that should be filled. The old man had been hell on Joe, but the people of Pitchfork had trusted him and came to him with their problems. They feared Joe, and rightly avoided drawing his suspicion. It was a difference that troubled Joe, a difference he tried to wash away from his thoughts with another drink of beer. “Your father. My mother. I know.” Stevie sat down on the couch to Joe’s right and leaned back. She ran the cool bottom edge of the beer can across her forehead. Took another long pull. “Elsa wants us all to move up here. With you.” “No.” Joe finished his beer, dunked his hand for another. “There’s room for them down with you. It’s safer.” “It’s not.” Stevie looked out the window at her house, which no longer seemed quite so cozy. Darkness had crawled through its window. “That got to Elsa under my roof, Joe. How much more dangerous does it have to get before you let us live with you?” “You want to die? That it?” The third empty can joined the tower growing in front of him. He took another beer despite Stevie’s disapproving scowl. He could tell the alcohol was in his system, but only because he no longer felt quite so many of his cuts and bruises. He wasn’t drunk. Not yet. “That’s who I am, Stevie. A witch hunter.” “You’re the Night Marshal. You don’t hunt witches, you hunt the evil of the LeftHand Path.” “I am the sword against the darkness, the shield against iniquity.” Joe cracked another beer. “Same old bullsh*t.” Stevie lunged off the couch so fast her beer sloshed out of the can and misted the air behind her. “Then why don’t you just do it?” Stevie crouched over her husband and shoved her face so close to his he could feel her breath on his lips. “You’re the bad man, the executioner; is that right? Then let’s stop pretending and get it over with.”
She let the can fall from her hand to the floor. Beer fizzed from it and splashed over their feet. Stevie took his left hand in both of hers and lifted it between them. His fingers dangled, nerveless and useless from the knife wound in his arm. Joe tensed. His instincts screamed for him to lash out. His upbringing combined with the spell the Bog Witch had laid upon his heart had crumpled Joe’s soul into a ball of misery. “You haven’t broken the Law.” Joe pushed Stevie back and drained the last of his beer. “Not where I could see.” “You’re a good man, Joe. I’m your wife. They’re your children.” Stevie braved the darkness and brushed Joe’s forehead with a quick kiss before dropping his hand and stepping back. “We won’t break the Law. You won’t ever have to put us down like you did those men tonight.” Joe shoved himself up from the chair with his good arm, and Stevie gave a quick jump back out of reach. He smiled at her, eyes cold and flat. “Even you don’t believe it, Stevie. You know what my father always said? All magic turns. All witches burn.” He left her there with his empty beer cans and her tears. Afraid to stay with her. Afraid to comfort her. Afraid to be the husband she deserved. Joe hauled himself to the bathroom, pausing in the kitchen long enough to snatch a bottle of whiskey from his stash on top of the refrigerator. He shed his clothes at the bathroom door, peeling them away from the sticky wounds on his back. Two hard swallows of whiskey, the kind that burned going down and wedged themselves in the center of his chest, eased the pain a little. He sat on the toilet and took another swallow, splashed the bowl with equal parts piss and blood. The Night Marshal cranked up the shower and held his head under the still-cold water. His scalp throbbed, and the water ran red from his injuries and the blood from the Pryors that had soaked into his skin. His forehead itched, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong, something lurking at the edges of his thoughts. He stared down at his feet and watched streams of black and red pour down his legs and swirl together in the tub. He drank while the water grew hot, then drank until it went cold and every pelting drop raised new goosebumps across his flesh. He stood shivering in the cold water, drinking to warm himself, drinking to numb the pain, drinking to forget. Stevie shut off the water and took the bottle from his hand. “That’s enough.”
Joe stared at her with bleary eyes and stumbled out of the shower, nearly falling when his toes clipped the edge of the tub. He walked naked out of the bathroom into his bedroom. He flopped down on top of the covers and let the chill night air lick the water from his skin. The room swam around him, and his eyes were too heavy to hold open. The alcohol haze closed around Joe’s brain like a coal-black fist, and drowned him in a fitful, twitching sleep. He woke deep in the night, hauled up from his blackout by a series of sharp bites along the side of his neck. Too drunk to fight, he stared into the darkness until Stevie’s face floated out of the shadows. She was bent over him, a curved needle in one hand, her other hand holding Joe’s head flat against his pillow. “Shhhh,” she whispered, “it’s only stitches.” Joe drifted on the pain, the tender torture that was the only way his wife dared to touch him for more than a moment. While she healed his battered flesh, Stevie could fight the Bog Witch’s curse with her own gifts, trading one kind of pain for another. Joe let himself fall back into the lake of alcohol sloshing in the bottom of his skull. Without Stevie’s skills, he would heal, but it would take days longer. Joe let her work. He dreamed of bats, hungry mouths and bottomless, sucking gullets. The sun had only begun to rise when the black phone on the nightstand rang. “Hello?” Joe was talking into the phone before he realized he’d picked it up, almost before he was awake. Years of conditioning made him respond without thought - the black phone rings, the Night Marshal answers. “You should get yourself down to Chickinee Springs, my friend.” The voice on the other end of the line was smooth and mellow, but it commanded respect, demanded obedience. “It’s awful f*cking early for this sh*t.” Joe’s skull throbbed, an insistent pressure that threatened to crack open his head and let his brains ooze out onto the sheets. “Get down to the Springs, Jonah.” “What now?” Joe was out of bed, careful not to pull the stitches Stevie had sewn into him during the night. “They left you another one.” There was a soft chuckle on the end of the phone, a sound that echoed with depths of chilling insanity. “Another what?” Joe didn’t want to know the answer to his question. He wanted to crawl back under the covers and spend a few weeks healing.
“Another girl, Joe. Another f*cked-up, broken girl.”
21
he old truck did not want to make the trip to Chickinee Springs. It groaned and T rattled as Joe forced it up and over the low Houngan’s Pass through the St. Francois Mountains’ western leg. It backfired and shuddered when he wound it down the far side of each mountain. It skidded and barked its tires around a hard left into Fallen Star Hollow. The truck let out a wheezing, smoky gasp when Joe pulled it over to the side of the road and killed its engine. On the drive over, Joe had dredged his memories for every scrap of information he knew about the burbling source of Gold Dust Creek. The people of Pitchfork County regarded its waters as sacred, and hundreds of them had been dunked in the springs’ wide, shallow basin in the years before Red Oak installed its own baptistery. It was a calm, peaceful place where hikers came to relax and the local witches and yarb doctors gathered under the moonlight to fill vials of its pure water for use in their work. It was one of the most peaceful places Joe had ever visited, and he was pissed that someone had tainted it. Joe’s heart lurched at the sight of the police cruisers down near the edge of the springs. He tried not to think of the oil and gas and antifreeze and transmission fluid leaking out of the aging cars and dribbling down into those clean waters. He reached for his hat out of instinct, then remembered he’d lost it the day before. The early morning sun hadn’t quite crawled down into the hollow yet, but it was still bright enough to make his eyes burn. “I’ve got to get a hat.” Joe grabbed his shotgun from the rack in the truck’s rear window and slung the weapon’s strap over his shoulder. He called out to the officers
gathered around the spring, “Good morning.” They watched him walk down from where he’d parked, talking to one another out of the sides of their mouths, eyes narrowed to belligerent slits. Joe didn’t have time to adjust their attitudes just then, but he made a promise to himself to straighten them out later. Just then, he was more concerned about the black spike jutting up out of the spring. “What’s this?” He asked the sheriff. “No idea.” The sheriff didn’t bother to stifle his yawn or look at Joe. “Let me know what you think after you’ve had a look. I’ll be in my car.” Joe watched the sheriff and his deputies saunter away and slither inside their rattletrap vehicles. He envied the hats he saw the men pull down over their eyes as they settled in behind the wheels of their cars. “Gotta get a hat,” he said. It wasn’t just the stale alcohol and curdled bile that made Joe’s stomach churn. Thick clouds of blood swirled in the water’s depths, spilling out from around the wrought iron spike as if the spring itself were mortally wounded. The rising blood formed thick streams on the surface that ran out of the spring and into the creek, splashing red onto its banks and the larger river rocks jutting up from its bed. Joe reached out over the bloody water and grabbed the spike with his right hand. The black iron was cold and rough, pitted with rust and scabbed with patches of venomous-looking verdigris. Joe pulled, but the spike didn’t so much as wiggle in his hand. It was stuck fast; he wasn’t going to get it loose alone. He walked over to the sheriff’s patrol car and smacked the rolled-up window with the knuckles of his right hand. The sheriff removed his sunglasses and placed them on the dash with exaggerated care. He adjusted his hat and pressed the button to lower the window. He yawned and turned to face Joe. “You look like buzzard sh*t.” “Get a couple of your boys to help me drag this sh*t out of the spring.” Joe jabbed a thumb over his shoulder toward the spike. “And get your f*cking cars back from the water before you have a miniature Exxon Valdez on your hands.” “We’re here to keep an eye on the scene, not to take orders from you.” The sheriff pushed the button, and the window rolled up in Joe’s face. Joe stared at the sheriff through the glass, jaw clenched. There were rules—the Night Marshal and the sheriff worked together to keep the peace. Joe did not like the
attitude he was getting from Dan the past couple of days. Yesterday, the lawman had been a little arrogant and bowed up. Today he was just being a dick. He tapped the glass again. Inside, Dan sighed and rolled the window down again. “You get your ears hurt last night?” Joe speared his right hand through the open window and closed his fingers under the sheriff’s jaw. His fingertips dug into the folds around Dan’s neck. Joe stepped away from the car and half-dragged the sheriff through the window. Dan’s belt hung up on the edges of the window, and Joe hauled harder. The sheriff’s pants caught around his ankles as he spilled out onto the oil-stained grass in a heap. Dan staggered to his feet, yanking at his pants with one hand and fumbling for his pistol with the other. “You asshole, you are not—” Shotgun barrels banged off the sheriff’s Adam’s apple, silencing him. At the other end of the shotgun, Joe glared at Dan. “The f*ck is your problem?” “I’m sick—” “Choose your words very carefully, my friend. I am not the only one listening.” Dan’s jaw clenched as he struggled to get his temper under control. “You don’t have to remind me. But there’s nothing in the Compact that makes me your goddamned slave.” Joe pointed the shotgun at the ground. “You’re right, Dan. Will you and your crack troop of trained monkeys pretty please haul that spike out of the spring so I can figure out what in the f*ck happened down here?” “All you had to do was ask nice.” Dan thumbed the mic on his lapel and muttered something into it. Joe heard one of the cruisers growl to life and crawl down toward the spring. It stopped next to a big old oak with thick branches that spread out over the spring. Joe and Dan stood at the water’s edge, silence thick between them. Joe tried not to watch Dan, but his eyes kept swiveling over to the sheriff. Something had changed, and Joe couldn’t shake the feeling it was important that he figure out just what that was. But other than being more of an asshole than normal, Joe couldn’t put his finger on what was different. He turned his attention back to the spike, a problem he could deal with. Two of the deputies had tossed a thick cable up over one of the oak’s branches and fastened it around the spike. The other end of the cable ran back to the patrol car’s winch.
“Go slow,” Joe said. The deputy manning the winch looked at him like he’d just been told to choke on his own sh*t. He spat a glob of tobacco juice and hauled on the winch’s lever. “I know how to do my job, thanks.” The cable snapped taut, and the spike quivered in the water. The winch whined, and the cable hummed as tension mounted. The old oak groaned under the strain, its wood creaking and thick bark crackling as the cable dug into the branch. Inch by inch, the spike rose from the water. The water around it darkened with gushing blood. By the time the iron had risen a foot, the spring was the color of old wine. “Careful,” Joe started, but the deputy shook his head. The winch’s whine rose an octave. The spike sprang into the air on a geyser of bloody water. The winch screamed and yanked the cable in faster, reeling it up so quickly the spike bounced across the ground between the spring and the trunk of the big oak. It thunked into the ground with a visceral splat after each hop, blood splattering the ground around it. By the time the deputy shut off the winch, the spike dangled six feet off the ground, a tangled mass of flesh and blood speared on its tip. The smell of bad meat filled the hollow. “What the f*ck is that?” The winch operator gagged. His partner bent at the waist and poured his guts out between his boots, back working like an oil derrick against the heaves of his belly. Joe took a deep breath and walked over to the spike, trying to steel himself against what he knew he would find. The spike had harpooned a tangled mass that was red and raw and studded with white knobs of bone the size of his thumb. He walked around it, taking it in, trying to make sense of the obscenity. “Howdy, Marshal.” The voice was thick and syrupy, dripping with hatred. Joe followed it around to the other side of the spike. “Get a good look.” Joe tried not to let the half-made girl get to him, but what he saw burned itself right into his brain. Her face was pale and beautiful and tattooed with hair-fine lines that formed an interlocking pattern of symbols that Joe recognized from the last mess of a girl he’d found. Her eyes were ice blue and twinkled in the sunlight. “Don’t be sad, Marshal. Not yet.” She winked at him. She was knotted up like a worm on a fishing hook, the spike piercing her at the left shoulder and emerging from
just below the ribs on her right side. It plunged back into her left hip and erupted from the right side of her back. Her broken legs were impaled through the thighs, and her arms were folded in three places before being skewered on top of her legs. Long strips of skin were missing, as if they’d never been there, revealing spirals of raw flesh that leaked blood. Just a few moments out of the water, and already there was a puddle of the stuff forming around her. “Why?” Joe asked. “You’ll see,” she whispered, craning her head toward him as far as she could reach. “Very soon.” Joe left the half-made girl hanging from the tree and stalked back up to the sheriff. His nerves were restless under his skin, and his thoughts scattered. He wanted a drink. Or ten. It was too early, and he was too hungover for this sh*t. Dan watched Joe come up the hill and didn’t even take one step to shorten the Night Marshal’s walk. “Tell me our friends are still locked up.” “Of course. It hasn’t been twenty-four hours yet.” “The girl say anything?” “Why would she talk to me?” Dan squared his shoulders, and his hand brushed the handle of his pistol. “No, she hasn’t said a word.” Joe jerked his arm down the hill. “Lock this one up. Don’t take her off the spike.” “What the hell are you talking about?” “You’ll see.” Joe didn’t know where this girl had come from, but nothing seemed simple anymore. He’d thought it would be so easy, he’d kill the bad people and the problem would go away. Only it hadn’t. Someone else was out there, doing something dark. “I’m going to come in to the station and have a little chat with our friends.” “If it gets them out of my cells faster, fine with me.” Dan started walking down the hill, and Joe followed along behind him. The sheriff strode like a man in charge of things, strutting like he was running the whole show. It made Joe uneasy. What did the sheriff know that had him up on his high horse? Joe watched the sheriff go down and join his deputies. Unlike the puker, Dan didn’t seem moved at all by what he saw. He took it in like he was looking over the day’s catch at the docks, and had his boys to work in seconds. Someone came up with a cutting torch and went to work, burning the iron spike into two pieces. Five minutes
later, the half-made girl was on the ground, four feet of iron hooked through her flesh. “Get ready,” she shouted, and her words splashed against Joe like a bucket of ice water. “We’ll be seeing you. Very soon.”
22
J oe barreled down the gravel drive to his house, letting the old truck’s rear-end slip and slide on the loose rocks as he headed for home. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched, that something vile was peering over his shoulder, lurking just out of sight. He killed the engine ten feet from the front porch, lifted the shotgun from its rack, and jogged up to the door. Guitar sounds, halting and jerky, drifted out of the house, the almost-music of Al plinking away on his battered six string, struggling to master the dirty blues rock he’d taken to the year before. “Stevie,” Joe shouted from the foyer, “time to go.” Al froze, his strumming hand floating above the guitar’s scratched body. He got up off the couch and laid the guitar down where he’d been sitting. “What now?” Stevie drifted into the living room on bare feet, her mane of hair leashed by a thick band of black cloth that matched her skater shorts and wifebeater. Smudges of rich, black earth dotted her cheeks, and her fingernails were tipped with dirty half moons. “I’m in the middle of replanting the—” she started. “No time. Pack a bag for you and Elsa.” Joe turned to his son. “Get some clothes and your toothbrush, Al. You’re going with the girls.” “Joe,” Stevie held one hand out to her husband, palm facing out. “We’re not going anywhere. This is our home.” “It’s not over,” Joe’s temper fought with his rising panic. The half-made girl’s words were lodged in his lizard brain, making him nervous and twitchy. There was a storm coming, and he had to get his family out of its way. “They’re coming for me, Stevie. I need you three gone, need you to get the kids somewhere safe.”
Stevie rolled her shoulders, brushed a loose strand of golden hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. “Where would we go? You want us to drive out of Pitchfork and hole up in a motel somewhere?” “Don’t tell me. Just drive until you don’t recognize anything, then find a room and dig in for a few days.” “And wait by the phone to hear if you’re alive or dead?” Stevie took a step toward her husband, hand half raised to touch his cheek. She stopped and clasped her hands behind her back. “That’s not the life I signed up for when I took your ring.” “They’ll kill you, Stevie. They’ll kill you all.” Joe struggled with the mess he’d seen this morning, kept imagining his wife’s face atop that tangled pile of scraps. “I need you safe so I can fight this.” “Let us help you.” Stevie took another step in Joe’s direction, and the air between them simmered with the heat of tangled emotion. “None of us are defenseless.” Al cracked his knuckles and stretched to his full height. “She’s right.” “They almost killed both of us last night.” “But they didn’t.” Al furrowed his brow and clenched his fists. The skin over his knuckles shimmered, stretched, grew hardened and thick, then returned to normal in the blink of an eye. “We took them down.” “You think that’s what I want for you three?” Joe came into the living room, Stevie trailing behind, and flopped down in his recliner, exhausted. He felt like he hadn’t slept for days and knew there wasn’t any rest coming until this mess was sorted out. “To do my job? To live like I do?” He felt Stevie’s hands clench on the back of his chair. “Please don’t shut us out.” Joe leaned forward, away from his wife’s touch, and buried his face in his hands. He could feel the cuts and swollen bruises under his fingers, remembered Al’s injuries, tried not to think about Stevie or Elsa cut up, bleeding, eyes swollen shut, stitches marching in ragged lines over their flesh. “I can’t.” That was the dark truth. After what happened to Al and what almost happened to Elsa, he couldn’t put anyone else in the line of fire. “I never should have brought you all into this.” Stevie’s fingers grazed his scalp, her healer’s touch gentle against the bat bites that covered his head like a bloody rash. “Is that what you think happened? That you lured us into danger with our eyes closed? I knew what a mess this would be when I married
you. Al knew the danger when he went up there with you yesterday. Elsa knows more than all of us - she can see the other side, she knows what’s out there.” “That’s over.” Joe hauled himself out of the chair and knuckled his lower back until his spine cracked and rattled like the old truck’s suspension hitting a pothole. “You’re out. All of you. This one’s on me.” “It’s not that easy.” Al shrugged from where he stood a few feet from Joe. He locked eyes with his father. “It ain’t fair for you to ask us to sit by while you’re in danger. I don’t want to run. I can fight.” “There aren’t any heroes here.” Joe took his son by the shoulders, held him at arm’s length. “You want to help, you watch your sister and keep your mother safe.” “I don’t need anyone to keep me safe.” Stevie’s eyes grew dark, and her shadow swelled into the air around her. “My mother was the Bog Witch of Pitchfork County. I inherited all of her strength. You have no idea what I can do.” “Stevie.” Joe’s voice was a low rumble. “You swore an oath to never touch what your mother left you.” “That was before my husband brought darkness to my doorstep. I will do whatever it takes to keep my family safe.” “Don’t make this harder than it has to be. You know the Law.” Joe tried to rein in his temper. His stomach roiled with emotion and old whisky, his head ached from wounds and conflicting desires. “Would you throw everything away just so you don’t have to run?” “It’s not about the running. This is our place. Our life. We’re bound together. Don’t ask me to leave you to die.” “I’ll stop them. If I know you three are safe, I can concentrate on what I need to do. I’ll burn down this whole f*cking county to stop them. But I need to know you’re safe.” “What happens if they kill you?” Elsa’s singsong question was muffled by the expressionless mask hanging over her face. “What happens to us if you die?” “Elsa, don’t.” Stevie hauled her daughter up into her arms and held her close. “Take off the mask, baby.” “They want so much,” the little girl’s voice filled the room. She held the mask tight to her face with both hands, shrugging away from her mother. “You’re just one bite for them. One tiny bite.” Joe dug his mangled badge out of his back pocket and stroked the runes on its
surface while muttering the old words his father had taught him. The badge sparked once, but didn’t glow. The only spirit here was the one Elsa had invited into the mask, and it was benign as such things went. “They won’t kill me,” he said, but the words sounded thin even to his ears. “I’ll find who’s behind this mess and end them before they get the chance.” “Let us help,” Elsa’s voice was joined by dozens of others, whispering, crying, screaming. They came from every corner of the house, rattling the floor with their insistence. “You know not what you face.” “That’s enough.” Joe slung the shotgun over his left shoulder. “I have to talk to someone. Please don’t be here when I get back.” “I’ll keep them safe.” Stevie stood with her back straight, Elsa in one arm, the other wrapped around Al. Unfelt winds stirred loose strands of her blond hair, and Joe could see the lightning deep within her eyes. “Just run.” Joe stomped out of his house and slammed the door behind him. He had to end this, soon. Before Stevie’s stubbornness got everyone he held dear killed.
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he sheriff and his deputies carried the mangled mess of flesh and iron away from the T spring while doing their best not to look at it. The beautiful face didn’t speak, but when anyone made eye contact with it, it smiled wide and bright. More than once a deputy stumbled or lost his grip as a result of that smile, making everyone grumble and struggle to keep from dumping the girl onto the ground. It wasn’t big, but the weight was a tremendous burden, as if it wanted to be dropped. “Stop looking at the f*cking thing,” Dan growled. He opened the tailgate of one of the sheriff service trucks and slapped the bed. “Put it in here.” “I am not an it,” the mangled lump of pierced flesh said, its voice cold and sweet as a glass of iced tea spiked with arsenic. “I am a she.” Dan didn’t respond. He’d learned that much from dealing with the Night Marshal and his messes. Sometimes it was just best to ignore the supernatural and keep your head down. Not that such wisdom had kept him from talking to the other girl. “Take her back to the station and lock her in one of the cells. Alone.” The deputies were watching him with veiled eyes. One of them decided to speak up and voice the concern they all shared. “Why we gotta keep cleaning this sh*t up?” “We do what needs to be done to keep the peace.” Dan shrugged. “We’re just holding this for the Marshal. Twenty-four hours, no more.” One of the men huffed at that. Dan stared at the gathered deputies. “You don’t believe me? Well, f*ck you, too.” He spat on the oil-streaked grass. “Things are changing around here. Don’t you doubt it. Go do something useful.” The deputies drifted back to their rides. Dan watched with a growing sense of
disgust as they jockeyed for position to leave the hollow. It took twenty minutes and six fender benders before his men managed to untangle the snarl of patrol cars and get on the road. “Bunch of limp-dick puss*es,” he muttered as he returned to his car. He could still feel Joe’s shotgun barrels pressed to his throat, the bowel-loosening fear that came from seeing the calm deadness in the Night Marshal’s eyes. The whole drive back to the station, most of forty-five minutes, that fear never left his heart. He took another lap around the block to try and shake it, giving his deputies time to find a cell for that poor mess of a girl. He didn’t know if he could stand to see her skewered on that iron like a chunk of bait on the world’s biggest fishing hook again. By the time he clomped up the short flight of steps to the station’s front door, Dan felt better. Not great, but better. He’d keep these sh*theels and monsters on lockdown for one more day, then tell the Night Marshal to come clear them out. They wouldn’t be his problem for much longer. One of the deputies, a young woman named Tracie, nodded to Dan as he came through the front doors. There were blood stains all over the front of her uniform, and her arms and hands were streaked red. “What the f*ck now?” Dan looked around for more casualties, but there was only one splotch of blood on the floor and no one else standing around covered in crimson. “Bailey slipped. Dropped the girl.” The deputy shrugged. “We’ve got her over in Holding 6, for now. I just need to get cleaned up. Shift’s over.” “Go ahead.” Dan dropped his hat on the rack next to the door and hiked his pants up a couple of inches. They were always drooping these days, pushed down by a belly that wouldn’t stop growing. Dan was starting to wonder what was going on in there, because his appetite had been shrinking even as his waist expanded. “See you tomorrow.” “Sure.” Tracie disappeared into the women’s bathroom. Dan took the long way to his office, walking through the bullpen rather than past the cells. There were six of them, and he couldn’t remember the last time they’d been half full. He certainly did not want to see what they held today. His office was small and cramped, made even smaller by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves he’d installed on two walls a few years before. Dan shut the door behind him and ran his hand along the spines of his treasured possessions. They weren’t
hardbound first editions or rare texts from far-off lands. They were just paperbacks from Walmart and a few cellophane-sheathed hardbacks he’d scrounged from library sales. He’d started the collection as a teen, then kept on adding to it as often as he was able. These weren’t his favorites, those he kept on the walls of his garage at home, but they were special nonetheless. Books about being a cop, books about big-city crimes, novelizations of the exploits of serial killers, anything about crime, criminals, or cops he could lay his hands on. Dan wished his life was more like these books. Pitchfork didn’t get many criminals outside of the meth heads who tended to blow themselves to sh*t before he got involved in their lives and the occasional speeders he caught while tooling around the back highways. Mostly, though, his county was infested with black magic bullsh*t that he was powerless to stop. Dan hated the Night Marshal, not because of what Joe did or was, but because of what the position said about Dan. Joe did things Dan couldn’t. Joe had the ear of the Long Man. Dan had a bunch of sh*tkicker deputies who respected him even less than he did them. This wasn’t what Dan had signed up for when he got elected sheriff. The front door banged closed. All of his deputies were gone. He was alone with the things in the cells. Dan went down that hall, he told himself, to make sure his deputies hadn’t f*cked up and left one of them unlocked. But even as he walked down the short hall, he knew there was another reason. He wanted to talk to her, again. She stood with her face pressed to the far wall. Silent, unmoving. She didn’t touch the floor, but dangled six inches above it as if a great hand held her aloft by the top of her head. She didn’t turn, but she did speak. “Hello, Sheriff.” Dan couldn’t get his mouth to work. He stared at the girl’s back, at the space below the red, ragged stumps of her legs. Her hair floated above her head like a tangle of kelp waving in the tide. She was fascinating and dreadful. “He’s coming, Sheriff.” Her voice was soft, but it held Dan’s attention as if she’d screamed straight into his ear. “He’s coming. He’ll kill me and my sister. He’ll torture the boys, and he’ll kill them because they don’t have the information he seeks.” “Why are you here?” Because as horrible as Joe’s temper could be, and Dan had seen it get downright terrifying, at least he was human. He made sense. These girls, on
the other hand, were something else. They made Dan doubt everything he knew about the world. “Why now?” “The Long Man isn’t the only power in Pitchfork. Another has set designs in motion.” She chuckled and sobbed and clasped her hand and stump to the sides of her head as if her skull was trying to shake itself apart. “The winds of change are blowing, Sheriff.” She raised her hand to the barred window at the back of the cell, and a fierce wind blew against the glass. It spat a red mist onto the window, then thicker droplets, until the sky was blocked by a red smear. “The loyal will bend before the wind, but others will be stripped bare by the storm of teeth. Their bones will glisten under the moon. Their blood will feed the roots of the Red Oak and its brothers.” “I don’t understand.” “Choose.” She laughed again, and rain splattered against the red curtain, washing it away in moments. “Before it is too late.” “I don’t even know what I’m choosing.” Dan scrubbed his hands through his hair. He felt as if he were swimming in deep waters, struggling to keep afloat as the undertow sucked at his legs. “Side with the Night Marshal, and you will see horrors that will follow you to the end of your days. You will see everything you hold dear torn asunder and the pieces left to rot where they fall. You may win this battle, but you will lose everything by doing so.” “Or?” “Open the cell doors for my sister and me. Go back to your office. Read your books.” She turned, and her brilliant green eye rolled toward him in the raw meat ruin of her face. “When we need you, we will come for you. You will be rewarded for what you do this day.” Dan walked away from the cells. Conflicting thoughts ricocheted within his skull like a bucket of rubber balls dumped down a well. He had no doubt the girl spoke the truth about changes coming. They were already taking root in the people of Pitchfork, even in Dan himself. A week ago, he’d never have dared speak against the Night Marshal. But he didn’t think he could throw in his lot with these monsters either. He wasn’t sure which side was going to win this fight. But he knew he couldn’t let Joe kill these girls. Whatever else they were, they were
still just girls, victims of something Dan didn’t understand. He wouldn’t let the Night Marshal come into his station and shoot them dead. He also didn’t think he could stop Joe from doing just that if the girls stayed here. Their pleas wormed their way into his thoughts, and Dan couldn’t let that be on his conscience. Dan walked to his office and unhooked the key ring from the wall inside. He came back to the cells, opened the first girl’s door, and shoved it open. “Just the two of you?” “And the boys,” she said. “Please.” Dan nodded and opened the second girl’s door, then walked back down the hall to set the Pryor boys loose. He shoved their door open. “I suggest you two get the f*ck out of here and be far away before the Night Marshal comes looking.” “No need,” the girl said and squeezed past Dan, who jumped away from her as if her skin were made of fire. Her sister followed her into the cell, whipping across the floor like a snake with a broken back, the iron bar through her flesh wiggling in the air above her. It reminded Dan of that Disney movie with the mops jumping around on their own. Only this mop ran red. The boys cowered back against the back wall of the cell as the first girl slammed the door shut behind her. “Sheriff,” the older one said with a voice cracking from raw terror. “Get us outta here. You don’t know sh*t about these girls.” “Shhh,” the first girl pressed her finger to her lips. “You should leave, Sheriff.” Dan sagged against the wall, his arms and legs limp and weak. He wanted to run, but he couldn’t bring himself to look away from the mess he’d made. He’d thought he was being brave, he’d thought he was standing up for what was right. The second girl whirled into one of the boys, her flailing arms latching onto his leg. She yanked him off his feet and she mounted his chest in a flurry of flailing limbs and torn flesh. He screamed, and Dan could see his arms and legs windmilling as he tried to dislodge the thing. There was a wet, crunching sound that reminded Dan of a butcher’s knife punching through the rind of a stream-cooled watermelon. He saw the iron spear rear and thrust as the second girl went about her business, and the crunching sound came again and again and again. Streams of blood ran across the cell’s sloped floor and disappeared down a drain in its center. The boy’s screams sank to a weepy bubbling, and his limbs ceased their
thrashing. The second girl slopped off the mess she’d made of the boy. Countless inchwide holes had turned his abdomen into a spongy ruin. Wrinkled gray noodles of guts poked up through the mess, split and torn in places to reveal oozing globs of slimy sh*t. Dan puked his breakfast onto the hallway’s floor, adding the sting of vomit to the earthy odor of blood and waste already filling the air. “Here we are,” said the second girl. She used the iron spear to tear a long wound in the boy’s thigh. Her delicate fingers pulled aside his stained jeans and pried open the lips of his torn flesh. She gripped his femur and pulled, thrashing her damaged body to and fro as she worried it loose from its housing of flesh. Tendons and muscles tore and snapped away from the bone as she wormed it out of its hollow. She turned the bone lengthwise in her hand and rammed it into her own body, pushing it into the red interior of her side. There was a thick, swallowing sound and her breath leaked out in a long, satisfied sigh. “So much better,” she sang and dug into the boy’s other leg. "Get her off'n him," the other young man screamed. "Sheriff, she's killin' him. Get her off." The first girl laughed and beat at her head with the stump of her wrist. She rose higher into the air, and static electricity arced through her hair like a crown of lightning. The unhurt boy threw himself at her, face contorted into a desperate snarl. He jumped and closed his hands around her throat. The girl didn't even bob in the air, but remained still as a statue. He squeezed until the veins bulged on his hands, but the girl just smiled at him. She took hold of his index finger with her good hand and snapped it to the left. Bones crunched, and tendons gave way with wet snaps. She rolled it back to the right, popping his finger loose from his hand with a soggy crunch. The boy fell away from her, screeching as blood flowed from the gaping socket where his index finger had once been. The girl pressed the finger to the top edge of her stump, holding it still as her wound stirred and absorbed the bloody root of the severed finger. It squirmed like a worm, struggling to come to terms with its new home as part of the girl's strange flesh. “Look,” she howled, her voice a chorus of spectral screams, “look upon the works you have made possible and rejoice. For the time of change is at hand.” Dan sank to the floor, legs splayed out in front of him, hands loose in his lap. He
wanted to look away, but his eyes would not obey. He watched as the girls took the boys in the cell apart, reducing them from young men to scraps of flesh and disarticulated bones in less time than it would have taken him to fillet a catfish. Blood ran down the drain in the center of the cell, and Dan swore he could hear something down there gulping as the thick red juice disappeared into the darkness. The cell door clanged open when they were finished, sparks leapt from the dark shadow of the key hole and smoke rose from the bars. Dan’s eyes jumped up as the first girl floated from the cell. The raw, red stump of her wrist was gone, replaced by a blossom of fingers and toes plucked from the dead men and grafted to her flesh. They stretched toward the sheriff, opening and closing around her stump like the tendrils of an anemone. “What the f*ck are you?” Dan’s question leaked from him, a whisper, a plea. He couldn’t remember why he’d let them go, couldn’t understand what he’d been thinking. Worse, he knew his actions had thrown his lot in with theirs. He was tied to them now, bound up in their darkness. “What have you done?” The bloody fingers closed gently around Dan’s face, touching him with tender, precise taps, like the legs of a spider exploring his head. She smiled down at him, her face beaded with blood, her hair floating in the air above her. “We were called, Sheriff.” Her voice thrummed in the close air of the station, reminding Dan of a flight of locusts on the horizon. “Who would call you? Who would want this?” “Oh, Sheriff.” She crossed her legs and drifted down until she was almost at Dan’s eye level. Her fingers closed around his cheeks, and she pressed her new fingers against his lips, staining them red with blood from one of the boys. “We were called by the people you serve. They wanted us here. We’ve come to set them free.” Dan tried to shake his head loose from her grip, but there was no strength left in him. All he could do was moan and pray to be released. “We must go for now. Our sister is coming and needs our help.” She rose into the air and dragged Dan up onto his feet by his face. “But we will return. And we shall see this through. Together.”
24
J oe’s hangover was alive, a weasel gnawing at the nerves inside his skull. He hadn’t given Stevie the time to brew up another batch of herbs, and sorely missed their healing powers. By the time he got to the sheriff’s station house, he felt raw and his temper was primed and ready to blow. The old truck slid to a growling stop in front of the station and announced Joe’s arrival with an ill-tempered backfire that rattled the small building’s windows. He clenched his fingers on the steering wheel and swallowed down the pain. He could end this. He just had to get the girls to talk, squeeze them and the Pryor boys until someone told him what was going on and how he could stop it. The Night Marshal came through the front door of the police station with his shotgun held high. “Where are my prisoners?” Joe could see Dan sitting in his office, feet up on his desk, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t wait for the sheriff to come out and meet him, but stormed through the bullpen and wrenched the office door open. “I wondered when you’d get here.” Dan didn’t move, just shifted his eyes from the ceiling to Joe. “You have sh*tty timing.” “Where are they?” Joe shouldered his shotgun, but the threat in his voice was clear. “I’ll show you where they were.” Dan struggled to his feet, wrestling with his pants and belt. “Haven’t had a chance to clean up yet. Should have. Knew you were coming.” Joe followed the sheriff, hairs rising on the back of his neck. There was something wrong with Dan and whatever it was gave Joe a hollow feeling in his guts. The sheriff seemed like he was sleepwalking.
He smelled the mess before he saw it. The rich aroma of spilled blood and punctured entrails spiked with the acidic tang of vomit riled up the hangover weasel and it stirred Joe’s guts with its tail. Something terrible had happened in the station. “Tell me those girls are still locked up, Dan.” “They’re gone.” Dan gave Joe a numb shrug and leaned against the hallway’s wall. He waved his arm forward, gesturing for Joe to go ahead to the cells. “See for yourself.” The Night Marshal didn’t want to open the door to the holding cells, but he had to get a look at what he was up against, what kind of monsters he was chasing. He also had to know what they’d done, because if there was one rule he always followed, it was certainty before meting out punishment. All six cells were empty, their doors wide open. He walked down the hall, breathing through his mouth to keep the stink from soaking into his nose. The first five cells were clean, gray cubes that looked like they’d never been used. Dan kept a tidy house. Joe stopped in front of the last cell. He wiped the back of his mouth with his injured right hand and tried to blink away the nightmare splattered across the inside of the cell. The gray cube was a slaughterhouse. Someone had drawn a large circle across the cell’s floor, then drawn three smaller circles inside it. Grisly pyramids of yellow fat and striated muscle rose inside the smaller circles, their tips marked by nuggets of bone, clustered together in groups of three. Heavy clouds of green-eyed flies buzzed around the mess. “Goddammit.” Joe’s fingers squeezed the stock of his shotgun. He wanted to kill something, to make someone pay for this mess. He stomped back down the hall. Dan saw him coming but couldn’t muster the energy to get out of the storm’s path. Joe’s forearm slammed into the sheriff’s chest and rammed him back across the floor and up onto one of the bullpen’s desks. Joe leaned into Dan, bending the sheriff back until his feet left the floor and he was pinned to the desktop. The Night Marshal stared down into the sheriff’s eyes. For a flickering moment, Joe thought he saw Dan’s left pupil stretch and split. He thought about how easy it would be to press a little harder, bend Dan back a little farther, and snap his neck. Joe blinked and saw the sheriff’s eye was wide and staring, terrified. Joe’s rage subsided, though there was still an ugly part of him way back in the shadows of his mind that wanted to
end the sheriff. “Where are they?” “They left.” Dan licked his lips and looked away from Joe. “They opened their cells, made that mess back there, and left.” “You didn’t try to stop them?” Dan cracked a tortured grin at Joe. “Isn’t that your job?” “I told you to hold them.” Joe stood and smacked Dan across the forehead with the butt of the shotgun. “All you had to do was keep them in the f*cking cell for one goddamned day.” “f*ck you.” Dan shoved the Night Marshal back and rolled off the desk. He caught himself before he crashed to the floor and managed to stand without losing his pants. His hand dropped to his holster, and his eyes locked with Joe’s. “You weren’t here. You got no idea what it means to stand up to them girls.” “One of those girls didn’t have any feet. The other one had every bone in her body busted nine ways to Sunday.” Joe’s eyes burned with savage rage. “What, they crawled out of your motherf*cking jail on their bellies?” “They don’t have no trouble getting around.” “What are you talking about?” “One of ‘em flies. Floats. Whatever. Other one flops around like a sidewinder with a broken back.” “You’re not making any sense.” “That’s how she moved. Sorta like,” Dan swirled his hands in sloppy circles while weaving them back and forth. “Did you try and stop them from killing those boys?” Joe sat on the edge of a desk and laid his shotgun across his lap. “You mean your other prisoners?” “You have someone else locked up back there?” Dan scowled and hiked up his pants. His hand fell back onto the sandalwood grip of his pistol. “No. And I didn’t try to stop them. You have no idea—” “I do have an idea.” Joe tilted the shotgun toward Dan. “Which is why you’re going to tell me true, did you have anything to do with what happened here today?” “You think I killed those boys?” Dan’s eyes widened into pink-rimmed circles. “If I thought that, we wouldn’t be having this little chat, and you wouldn’t be breathing. But I will find out what happened here today, Dan. Pray to God I don’t find
out you were involved.” “And if I was, you’ll come back to kill me.” Dan popped the snap on his holster. Joe co*cked an eyebrow in the sheriff’s direction. “There is only one fate for those who have turned to the Left-Hand Path.” “You can try and pass judgment on me, Joe.” Dan took his hands off his pistol. “That’s what you do best. But you might find I’m not an old hag or a meth head you can gun down while I piss my pants in fear.” “I hope you’re smarter than you’re f*cking acting.” Joe whipped the shotgun onto his shoulder and turned his back on the sheriff. He kicked a chair out of his way, and it rolled across the floor before banging to a halt against the wall. Joe stopped at the front door. “I will find out what’s going on. Be better for everyone involved in this bullsh*t to come forward and make my job easier.” “I know.” “Everyone responsible, everyone involved—they’re dead. No exceptions.” Joe shoved the door open with his left shoulder and stomped out into the morning sun. He made his way down to his truck and looked back into the police station. Dan sat limp and hunched onto the corner of a desk, head in his hands. Joe felt pity for the man, who was caught up in something he didn’t understand and couldn’t handle on his own. He hoped the sheriff had enough sense to keep his head down when the sh*t started to fly, but couldn’t escape the feeling that Dan was doomed no matter who won the war coming to Pitchfork.
25
ith his prisoners dead or on the run, Joe only had one lead left. The skinny Pryor W boy who’d escaped the previous night’s carnage and been lucky enough to not be in the cell when his brothers got shredded by the monsters they’d called up. If he hadn’t fallen into a hole and broken his neck or overdosed, Joe was pretty sure the little junkie would end up at the heart of Pitchfork’s meth scene sooner or later. It was just a matter of waiting for the little f*cker. Nancy Woodhawk and her sister, Lizzie, ran the Hanging Rooster, a gritty dive set back in the woods outside Ironville. Joe knew the bar by reputation and the girls from their years together in middle school. He wasn’t sure how such nice young ladies had ended up playing hostess to the festering underbelly of Pitchfork County, but he wasn’t surprised. Between its soul-crushing poverty and the dark escape offered by its ubiquitous crystal meth networks, Pitchfork did a near-flawless job of snuffing out promise and turning pretty little things into ragged scraps blowing in the wind by the side of the road. The sun was clawing its way up over the mountains and headed toward noon by the time Joe rolled into Ironville, but gathering clouds shrouded its face and left its light watery and weak. Something about the sullen skies seemed to suit Ironville, a town as gray and hard as its namesake. The iron ore mine, once a boon for the whole county, had shut its doors a few years before and left behind a thousand families who now drifted through life with little purpose and less money. Those who remained spent their days waiting for welfare checks and food stamps, clinging to the shreds of the independent lives they’d once known.
His old truck rolled through town, grumbling at the near-empty streets. Joe couldn’t shake the feeling he was being watched. More than once he imagined a swollen, threepupiled eye glaring at him from a darkened alley or the shadow of a doorway. Passing the burnt-out shells of abandoned businesses and staring windows of vacant homes, he sensed something patient and hungry flickering in the shadows. Poverty was a special kind of vampire, a presence that sucked the hope out of every community it touched. Joe’s trigger finger felt heavy, and he wished a few shotgun shells could solve that problem. Near the outskirts of the dying town, foot traffic picked up. A scattered handful of skin-picking meth zombies shuffled toward the bar, and Joe couldn’t help but shake his head at the sight of them. They walked alone, oblivious to everything but the hunger that drove them out of their holes to look for more drugs. One of them swirled a soda bottle filled with roiling fluid as he walked, cooking a personal batch as he went, risking blowing his hand off for the promise of a fix. Joe considered punching the accelerator and rolling over the junkies, doing his part to clean up the cancer gnawing at Pitchfork’s heart. In some ways, Zeke was right—the meth traffic and lack of jobs was almost as dangerous as the monsters who walked the Left-Hand Path. Joe remembered his own childhood, free of toxic sludge pits and burning labs, where men worked the mines or plowed fields to keep their families clothed and fed. He never thought it would happen, but he longed for those days and feared he’d never see their like again. The world was changing into something he didn’t recognize. Joe parked in front of the bar and locked the truck up. One of the meth heads shambled in his direction, but Joe was having none of that. “f*ck off,” he hollered at the nearest addict, who clapped scabbed hands to his ears and stumbled away. “Any of you dipsh*ts touch this truck, I’ll take you apart with my bare hands.” The truck, engine dead for most of a minute, backfired as if to punctuate Joe’s threat. With the report still ringing through the desolate streets of Ironville, Joe shoved his way into the Hanging Rooster. The gloomy day outside was bright as a desert sun compared to the bar’s interior. Its windows were covered with heavy black curtains that smothered any sunlight before it could find its way inside. Battery-powered candles flickered with sullen orange light
on the tables scattered around the place, and ropes of purple LEDs traced the perimeter of the sad little dance floor with a weak glow. The brightest lights in the place came from the red Men and Women signs over the restrooms, and those were only a hair stronger than the flickering bulbs of the wheezing jukebox. The bar was small, it couldn’t hold more than fifty people if they were holding hands and scrunched in close, but even at midday every table was full. Hunched shadows crowded around small tables, exhaling whispers shrouded in blue-gray clouds of nicotine smoke, eyes red with the reflected light of their cigarette cherries. They all did their best to ignore Joe as he headed toward the bar, but he did his best to take in all the faces he recognized. There were troublemakers, for sure, but most of those he saw were tired and beaten down, not looking for any fuss. They were in the bar to smoke their cigarettes and chase down watery shots of Southern Comfort with cans of Busch, maybe score a little meth. They eyed Joe with a mixture of fear and resignation, and kept on drinking. Joe’s fingers trembled on top of the bar as he took his seat. His mouth filled with saliva at the stink of spilled beer, and he longed for a cigarette despite having given it up years before. Places like this could bring out the worst in any man. He raised two fingers on his left hand to get the bartender’s attention. Lizzie Woodhawk floated his way with a young woman’s springy step. The weak light carved her face into harsh peaks and benighted valleys, the years of living in Pitchfork etched into a face Joe still thought of as belonging to a high school cheerleader with her whole life ahead of her. She did a double-take when she saw the Night Marshal at the end of her bar, and an honest grin chased ten years off her face. “Well, lookit who came to see me. I heard you been kickin’ up a fuss, old man. What’re you drinking?” “Can of Busch is fine,” Joe said. He wanted a slug of Jack, maybe two, but the beer would have to do. This day wouldn’t get any better if he tried to get through it sh*tfaced. “Sure.” She reached under the bar and came up with a blue-and-white can dripping with shards of melting ice. A quick swipe with her apron left the can mostly dry. She dropped it into his outstretched hand. “Been too long. What brings you around?” “Probably got tired of Stevie. Wanted to trade up.” Nancy Woodhawk sidled up next to Joe and draped her scrawny arm over his shoulders. “That it, Marshal?” Joe tilted the can toward Nancy and cracked the top. A spritz of beer mist dotted her
face and tickled her nose. “I like Stevie just fine, ladies.” “I bet.” Nancy slapped Joe on the arm and faded away, carrying drinks out into the darkness, a priestess hauling the sacrament of numbness to the heathens. “You see any of them Pryor boys around here?” Joe watched Lizzie over the top of his beer can as he poured a healthy drink down his throat. “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Lizzie tried to keep her voice light, but Joe could see the veil of caution draw over her eyes. “We got our share of assholes around here, but we don’t serve maniacs.” “Sure.” Joe left the can on the bar top and turned it slowly with his fingertips. “You hear anything about what they’ve been up to?” Lizzie cleared her throat. Joe felt every eye in the bar turning in his direction, burning on the back of his neck. “Them questions are gonna get you hurt.” Her grin never faltered, but Joe could see the tension in her face. “Already been hurt.” “I hear tell most of them boys are already dead. Why you wanna go picking at their ghosts?” She kept looking over Joe’s left shoulder. He kept his eyes locked on Lizzie’s, watching for any sign of guilt. She was anxious, scared of Joe, but he didn’t see the Woodhawk girls behind this. “Who’re you looking out for?” “You make people nervous. Makin’ sure no one gets squirrelly.” “I’m a big boy. You don’t need to watch out for me.” Joe drained the last of his beer. “If you know something, you need to be straight with me before it’s too late.” A heap of stinking flesh flopped down on the bar stool next to Joe. “Already too late. Why don’t you get the f*ck out of here before I have to get blood on my knuckles?” Joe flicked his eyes to the side. The man next to him was a foot taller and two hundred pounds heavier than the Night Marshal. His bushy white hair was streaked with yellow nicotine, and grease gleamed on all of his wobbling chins. Joe recognized him and let out a weary sigh. “Frank Blackbriar. Aren’t you still on probation?” “You’re not a real marshal.” Frank laid a sweaty palm on the back of Joe’s neck and
gave a squeeze that Joe felt in his bones. Frank was a big, drunken idiot, but he was strong enough to snap a man’s spine with one hand. “Whyn’t you just leave us to drink in peace?” “Just as soon as I finish talking to Lizzie, I’ll be on my way.” “I say you’re done talking.” Joe could hear others moving in the bar, chairs shoving back, drunk steps in his direction. He wished he’d brought the shotgun. “Lizzie,” he held her eyes with his. “I don’t want to f*ck up your bar, so maybe you can calm these boys down.” She looked at Joe long and hard, then gave one quick shake of her head. Joe spun to the left, slamming his good hand into the inside of Frank’s elbow, driving with all the strength he could muster as Frank tried to crush his neck in that brutal grip. The big man bellowed as the pain from his elbow burrowed through his thick skull to reach his brain. Joe hooked his hand onto the back of Frank’s bicep and corkscrewed his arm around, using leverage to force the bigger man off his stool and onto the floor. Frank was full of surprises. On his way down, he drew a knife and took a wild swipe. The blade scythed toward Joe’s thigh. The Night Marshal pivoted and stomped down on Frank’s swinging arm. He pinned the man’s wrist to the floor under his heavy boot, crunching bones like popcorn. Frank shouted in surprised pain, then yelped even louder when the Night Marshal leaned all his weight on the broken wrist. Joe stepped over Frank and ducked down to grab the knife from where it had fallen. Joe came up with his back to the bar, knife in his right hand, razor-sharp tip pointed at the small knot of drunks and addicts easing up on him. He could smell their fear and feel their anger, a sharp-edged stink and swampy heat that made it hard to breathe. One of the men scratched at a bloody divot on the side of his chin, scraping away meat to get at the bugs he imagined burrowing there. Another ground his teeth with such ferocity his lips were flecked with foam and the tendons on either side of his jaw stood out thick as tow chains. Another had dug a bald patch into the side of his scalp. The scars of meth were on most of their faces, the rest had the flushed noses and ruddy cheeks of lifelong drunks. A good mix had both. They were as wretched a group as Joe had ever laid eyes on.
“Let’s not.” A wave of bone-deep weariness washed over the Night Marshal. He could fight these men, probably kill more than a few of them. He might even get out alive. But it wasn’t why he was here. He wanted information, just a little tidbit to help him protect these people from whatever madness was coming to Pitchfork County. He wondered if his footsteps would always fill with blood, or if there might be a better way. Just then, he was too tired to think of anything. He showed the crowd the knife, and they shuffled their feet and muttered, working up the courage to rush him. “Enough,” Lizzie shouted and slapped both hands on the bar. Joe could hear the fear in her voice, the terror that things were spinning out of control and heading down a road that could only end in spilled blood. “Everyone just sit right the f*ck down before I have to get violent with ya.” The fire alarm brayed as a shaft of gray light blasted across the bar from the emergency exit beside the restrooms. A slight figure vanished through the door, then slammed it shut and plunged the bar back into semi-darkness. “f*ck,” Joe snarled and headed for the front door. He ground his heel on Frank’s broken wrist as he took off, grinning with dark glee at the drunk’s anguished howl. He recognized the skinny runner as the last surviving Pryor. He’d have the answers the Night Marshal needed. Joe just had to catch him.
26
tevie wasn’t a runner. She decided she’d stay and fight before Joe had left the house, S and by the time she heard his old pickup rattling down the driveway, her plans were firm in her mind. “Al,” she snapped, “you and Elsa check the seals, then get yourselves tucked away.” Her son put his guitar aside, and Elsa dropped her Harry Potter book and slid off the couch. Stevie watched them for a moment as they moved from window to window, checking the old beeswax seals she’d laid in years ago. Then she headed upstairs to get ready for whatever was coming. She paused at the door of the bedroom she’d shared with Joe before her mama’s curse had driven them apart. Just before Elsa was born, Stevie’d made a promise to her family and set aside the tools of her trade. She’d left them here, tucked away in a chest of drawers were Joe could keep an eye on them. Stevie crossed the threshold and hurried to the chest of drawers. With shaking hands, she yanked open the drawer and lifted out a battered, red-laquered box. She opened it and ran her fingers over the contents. Though her birthright, the awesome and terrible power of the Bog Witch flowed through her veins, it was these symbols that let her call upon that strength. These were the things she had promised her husband she would never again take up. These were the things she would wear once again to protect her family. Running just wasn’t in her nature. She lifted the heavy copper bracelet from its resting place inside the box and slipped it around her wrist. The metal tingled against her skin and raised goosebumps
up both arms. Stevie’s teeth flashed in a fierce smile as her long-neglected power swelled within her heart. The shadows in the corners of the rooms grew deeper and spread across the floor like spilled ink, black tendrils oozing toward her feet. Next, Stevie retrieved a threaded loop of witch bullets and slipped them over her head. The little pellets of honeycomb, horsehair, and grave dust hung heavy around her throat, but Stevie was glad of their weight. Fueled by her rage, a thrown witch bullet was as deadly as any firearm. Last of all she pulled out her mother’s old spook bell and the ancient dish rag used to polish it. She placed the red box back on the chest of drawers she kept in the big bedroom she’d once shared with her husband. She set to cleaning up the old silver bell, rubbing it vigorously to bring back its lustrous shine. Stevie turned the bell to work on a dusty section, and the dish rag slipped through her fingers. She watched it flutter away, fanning out to land flat on the floor. “Stranger coming,” she whispered to herself, reading the old sign, “a man.” A dot of red appeared in the center of the grimy fabric, then spread rapidly until the whole cloth was a bloody mess. A thunderous bang shook the house on its foundation, jangling the wind chimes on the front porch. Al shouted a wordless warning, and Elsa yelped with surprise. Stevie rubbed her thumb along the black cord strung around her neck. She headed downstairs, stretching her arms over her head, folding her fingers together and pressing her hands out until her knuckles crackled like hail on a tin roof. She made her way into the living room, arms hanging loose at her side. For the first time in years she felt alive, filled with that bad old energy that made everything sharp and exicting. “I hear you knockin’,” she whispered to whatever was banging on her door. “But you ain’ comin’ in.” The house shook a second time, and a long crack ran down the glass in the front door. “That will not do.” Stevie stomped across the living room. She tugged one of the wax beads on her necklace as she went, and it slipped free of the black cord. Stevie rolled the witch bullet between her left thumb and forefinger and reached for the door handle with the right. Whatever was banging on her door was about to get a big surprise. “Ye are not welcome in my home, whatever ye may be. Lurk as ye will upon my
threshold, but the way in is barred to all who art my foes.” Stevie whispered the words, but they echoed through every room in the house. The beeswax seals she’d placed on every door and window glistened with honey-colored light for a brief moment as her power filled them. She wrenched the door open before another blow could fall upon it. A woman’s laughter, high and raucous, rang through the forest around the house. Despite the midday sun, owls hooted and loons cried in answer to the mad laughter. Stevie stepped onto the porch with her fists clenched. This was her home. Her children were behind her, and whatever thought it would frighten them was about to learn a hard lesson. Something darted through the forest toward the east side of the house, a sinuous shadow flickering between the trees. One moment here, the next there, a herky-jerky slide that made Stevie’s head buzz when she tried to focus on it. She blinked to focus her eyes and just caught sight of the shadow disappearing around the far corner of the house. The front door slammed behind her so hard she felt it in her feet. The lock shot home with a sharp click and Stevie’s stomach fell. “Al,” she shouted, angry at the way she’d let herself be tricked. She should have known it was a trick. “Get your sister upstairs.” Stevie twisted the doorknob back and forth, but the heavy door wouldn’t budge. She ran for the edge of the porch, slapped one hand on the wooden rail, and leapt across it. Her knees groaned when she hit the ground, one more pang to mark the passing years. Despite the pain in her legs, Stevie was fast. Her bare toes gripped the grass with each long stride, drawing strength from her land as she pursued the shadow. Clouds gathered overhead, blowing in on a wind that tugged at Stevie’s hair and set the tree branches swaying. The wind chimes jangled behind her and gave way to another peal of lunatic laughter that raked at her nerves with its raw, mad edges. She ran down the long side of the house, careful not to smash the wax bead in her hand as she pumped her arms and legs for all she was worth. She’d need it when she caught up with this asshole. The dark shadow appeared at the next corner of the house ahead of Stevie, then ducked out of sight around it. Glass shattered, and Stevie’s heart leapt into her throat. It was in the house, despite all the protections she’d laid upon it. Whatever was coming for her family knew its business and had blown through her wards like they weren’t
even there. She felt the first twinge of doubt in her heart and wondered if Joe had been right to ask the family to run. She came around the corner of the house at full speed, head down, leaning into the curve. She was close; she still had time to catch the shadow before it got to her babies. All she had to do was follow it through the window. Pain like a thunderbolt erupted in the center of her skull. Stevie’s head rocked back, and her feet shot out in front of her, coming up off the ground as the blow flattened her. She crashed to the ground, limp and senseless. “Yer old man did this,” a droning, buzzing voice carved the words through the fog around Stevie’s head. Thick fingers wrapped themselves in her shirt and lifted Stevie off the ground. Her eyes rolled wild in their sockets before she could get them under control. The one holding her was a bear of a man, his face scorched tight against the bone and his hair burned down to greasy nubs across the top of his head. He stank of smoke and charred meat. His left eye was a gaping crater rimmed with black ashes and weeping burns. “An eye for an eye. That’s what the good book says.” He spun Stevie and slammed her into the side of the house so hard she felt herself sliding into the black void of unconsciousness. The big man pressed his thumb under Stevie’s eyeball, and it wobbled in its socket. “Mama!” Elsa screamed from upstairs, her voice shrill with raw panic. Stevie struggled against the big man’s hand, digging her short nails into his wrist to no avail. She kicked her feet, hammering his stomach and thighs, but the big man just laughed. “I like a girl with some spunk in her.” “Joe’ll kill you for this.” Stevie hated the way she sounded, the empty threat that her husband would settle this score. She was the Bog Witch’s daughter, and years spent birthing babies and curing hangovers couldn’t change that. Not so very long ago, she would have killed this lump of sh*t herself. “He done did,” the big man snorted. “Didn’t stick.” Alasdair roared, an inhuman sound that sent quail flying from the woods. Elsa screamed, and Stevie hoped she was only startled by her brother’s change, that her fears weren’t turning real. “Let’s see about that eye,” her captor whispered. He licked his lips and a scab stuck
to his tongue. He put his thumb back under her eye and pushed. The pressure was slow, inexorable, and Stevie felt her eyeball bulging up over his thumb. Her mind raced. The witch bullet, her only weapon, was gone. It had fallen from her hand when she’d been hit in the head or slammed into the wall. The heavy hand released her shirt, but closed around her throat before she could escape. It squeezed, increasing pressure in sync with the thumb at her eye. The big man’s rotten breath pumped in and out of his lungs, fast and harsh. He leaned into her, and Stevie felt something warm mash against her throat. She envisioned the necklace, the string of waxy beads. Her witch bullets. She still had a chance, even if it might kill her to take it. Stevie dug her nails into the inside of the big man’s hand, raking furrows in his wrist down to his thumb. For one, brief instant, he shifted his grip, and Stevie felt the pressure on her neck ease. He was still digging in her eye socket, she could feel her eyeball starting to droop and she couldn’t see out of that side, but she had the breathing room she needed. She spat one word past the loosened grip on her throat, hurled it with the last of the air in her lungs. It was a curse and a plea, her last desperate hope. She had no idea if it would work, or if it would work too well and kill her instead of the man. But she had to try. The mashed beads pulsed as one, then tore free of the black cord around Stevie’s neck. A trio of them blasted through the big man’s hand, separating his thumb from his palm and tearing his middle and pinkie finger down to ragged stumps. Another plowed through his gray coveralls, leaving behind a black burn on the front of his chest and a fist-sized, scorched crater in his back. Stevie fell from his grip and staggered away from the shuddering man. Blood poured from his wounds, splattering onto the ground like falling rain. Wisps of black smoke curled from his nostrils and his empty eye socket. The man took one step and toppled over, legs collapsing under him like snapped matchsticks. Stevie staggered from the side of the house, desperate to reach her children. She could see the broken window from where she stood, like an open mouth with jagged glass teeth. Just a few more steps. But her neck felt like it was on fire, and a bone-deep weariness made every step a chore. Stevie wondered what her little trick had cost her.
Elsa screamed again. and Stevie sagged against the house, next to the window, hands on her knees. She gasped for breath and prayed for strength. She saw the red drops but it took her a long moment to realize it was blood splashing from her throat onto her bare feet.
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J oe burst outside and ran for his truck. He realized he still had Frank’s knife clenched in his good hand and jammed it into his belt so he could unlock the truck. He heard an engine cranking up behind the bar. A shot of adrenaline set his fingers to shaking. “Come on, motherf*cker. Pull it together.” The tip of the key hooked in the lock, and Joe slammed it home with a savage twist. He wrenched the door open, and the screech of its rusted hinges mingled with the ragged roar of a misfiring engine. Joe hauled himself into the cab of his truck, cranking the ignition so hard his knuckles popped. The old truck thundered to life. Joe threw it into reverse and spun away from the bar in a cloud of gray dust and pea gravel. He followed the rattle of the misfiring vehicle, grateful for the almost-empty streets and lack of traffic. Ironville was small, and the roads leading into it were smaller still. Since the mine closed, no one had a job to go to; no one had the money take shopping trips. Within a handful of minutes he could see the smoke-belching Jeep weaving across the road ahead of him, the driver struggling to maintain control. Joe was grateful he hadn’t time to get serious about his drinking in the bar. Ironville receded in his rearview mirror, the little scab of a town fading away and then gone behind a low hill. The blacktop of Babco*ck Road changed to the loose gravel and ancient iron dust of Babco*ck Farm Road just outside of town. The old truck’s tires kicked up rocks and skidded on the bad road, but the Jeep had a worse time rounding corners and almost left the road entirely. The driver wrestled his vehicle around to the left at an intersection and hit the gas too soon. The Jeep’s back end banged through a deep rut and bounced into the air,
wheels spewing out rooster tails of dirt as they spun in the air. Joe took advantage of his prey’s sh*tty driving and slammed his old truck into the Jeep’s side. The lighter vehicle spun off the road, wheels spinning in the air and engine screaming. It plunged down into the ditch, then launched up the far side into the fallow field beyond. Two of the Jeep’s bald tires burst as it crashed back to Earth. Its windshield shattered and ran down the sloped hood in a glittering crystal cascade. The Night Marshal leapt out of his truck and grabbed the shotgun; he wouldn’t be leaving it behind again after the mob scene in the bar. He reached the Jeep just as its driver shoved the door open and fell out onto the tilled earth. Joe grabbed the man by the back of his filthy T-shirt and hauled him to his feet. The skinny runner struggled, but Joe shoved him hard against the Jeep, and he sagged on to his knees. “They’ll f*ckin’ kill me, man.” The wiry man flailed his arms, and Joe bounced him off the Jeep again. Blood splattered from the man’s nose. “They don’t get a chance if I kill you first.” Joe threw the man onto the ground and stomped a heavy boot onto his chest. Now that he could see his face in the daylight, Joe remembered the last surviving Pryor boy’s first name. “Why were you running, Walter?” “Sudafed.” Walter sniffed and started to wipe the blood from his face, weaseling around the question. He froze when the shotgun shifted in Joe’s hand. “Like, a sh*t ton of it in a cooler. Didn’t want you to take it.” “I’m not the sheriff. I don’t have any f*cks to give about your meth.” Joe leaned is weight on his boot and watched Walter’s face turn red. He held it there for a few more seconds, until the veins in the smuggler’s neck bulged. “Try again. Why were you running?” “Dude. You realize you’re f*ckin’ terrifying, right? Christ, please point that shotgun somewhere else.” The junkie’s eyes kept shifting toward the rear of his trashed ride. “What else?” “Nothin’. Just the Sudafed. I swear.” Walter’s bloodshot eyes flickered to the knife at Joe’s belt. “I’m just smurfin’ the pills. I swear. I got no idea what my idiot brothers was doin’.” “Don’t move.” Joe left the pill mule on the ground and made his way to the back of the Jeep. Its hatchback was sprung, dangling on one busted hinge like a dog’s tongue on
a hot day. Joe reached into the filthy rear of the vehicle and yanked the stained blue cooler onto the ground. He kicked the lid off and coffee grounds spilled out onto the dirt. “The f*ck is this?” Walter lifted his head so he could see what Joe was asking about. “Coffee.” “I know that, asshole. Why?” “Dogs, man. I didn’t want any of them cop dogs to smell the Sudafed if I get pulled over.” Joe kicked over the cooler and nudged his boot through the pile of coffee and pill boxes. Among the cardboard cartons there were several larger, wooden boxes. Joe knelt and reached for the nearest one. “Hey,” Walter said, his voice low and shaky. “You don’t wanna touch that.” “What is it?” The addict’s eyes flicked to the knife on Joe’s belt, then back to his face. “Can’t say.” “Then let’s find out.” Joe plucked a box out of the mess. It was heavy, much heavier than it should have been given its size. It was warm in his palm, like an exposed organ. His stomach roiled as if he’d just gulped down a glass of spoiled milk, and his head ached like the morning after a bottle of mescal. “f*ck.” Joe dropped the box, but the memory of its touch clung to his flesh like tar. Rolling thunder grumbled from the cloudy sky, and warm, greasy globs of rain splattered onto the gray earth. A fat raindrop splashed off Joe’s hand and left behind a rusty red splatter. “Oh, sh*t.” Walter scrambled toward the Jeep like a crab, then helped himself up to his feet on the door. “You shouldn’ta done that.” The clouds thickened overhead, and an ugly black stain boiled up through their gun metal-gray contours. Joe tucked his chin down to his chest against the bloody rain and began kicking the wooden boxes back into the overturned cooler. Even through the steel toes of his boots, he could feel the stomach-churning presence in each box and tried not to think too hard about the kinds of people who would actively seek out these abominations. He wondered how Walter had managed to handle these without losing his mind, or if he really had. Satisfied he had all of the boxes, Joe kicked the cooler’s lid closed and grabbed its
handle. He pulled it through the ditch and up to his truck, then swung it up into the bed. A grinding squeal sent Joe stomping back down to the field. Walter was crouched behind the wheel of his ruined Jeep, cranking the starter again and again. The engine screamed in protest and vomited thin streams of black smoke and oil from under the hood. “Out,” Joe snarled and dragged Walter away from the truck by his hair. Walter squawked, locked his hands on top of Joe’s clenched fist, and kicked his heels as Joe pulled him through the ditch. Joe swung his arm around in a tight arc and shook Walter loose. The junkie’s feet tangled together. He pirouetted on the gravel road and slammed into the side of the Marshal’s truck. He flopped back onto his ass and the air shot out of his lungs with a harsh whoof. The smurf sat in the dust, hair standing up like someone had jammed an angry hedgehog against the side of his head, blood running out of his nose, mouth hanging open as he gulped for air. Joe felt it in his gut, a cold fist clenching in his bowels. Something was coming. “Get in the truck.” Walter nodded and scrambled to the door, hands and feet churning up gray dust, mixing it with the red-tinged rain to create a ruddy slurry. He lost his footing twice trying to get into the truck and lost it again opening the door. Sheet lightning flared across the sky, an actinic blue-white blaze with no thunder behind it. Joe considered leaving the junkie for whatever was coming. He wanted to be long gone when the darkness arrived with its freight of horrors. But he still needed the Pryor boy, at least until he’d wrung all the information out of his soggy brain. “Your lucky day.” Walter’s muddy hand landed on the truck’s passenger seat and started to slide backward as he lost his balance again. Joe grabbed the addict’s wrist and yanked him halfway into the cab. “They’re comin’.” Walter’s feet were dangling out of the truck. He slithered on the seat like a gut-shot squirrel, too wired and scared to pull himself into the cab. Joe’s badge throbbed in his pocket, the mangled pin digging into his thigh. The air chilled around the truck, smudging its windows with condensation. Joe seized the collar of the smurf’s ratty shirt and yanked for all he was worth. The skinny man kicked his
feet and wound up on the bench seat, curled up like a whipped dog. “The door,” Joe shouted and cranked the engine. The old truck coughed, sputtered, stalled. Walter slammed his door and sat up. He plucked at a raw wound on his jaw, twitching fingers worrying at the frayed edges of the pick spot. “Gotta go, gotta go.” The truck’s engine caught on the second try, and Joe threw it into gear. He kept his hands loose on the wheel, letting the truck shimmy and shake on the gravel as he floored the accelerator. The windshield wipers struggled to clear the red rain. Joe was driving on reflex and instinct as much as sight. He couldn’t shake the feeling that time was running out. “What the hell were you assholes doing up at your old place?” Walter drummed his fingers on the dash. He squirmed in his seat like a toddler who had to pee. “Can’t say.” Joe’s injured hand slapped the junkie in his bleeding nose hard enough to get the blood really flowing. “f*ck, man.” Tears filled Walter’s eyes and he leaned his head back and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Didn’t I warn you about what would happen if I caught you dicking around with that sh*t the last time I was up at your place? What were you doing?” “I’m not telling you —” Joe stomped the brakes, and Walter’s head snapped forward and bounced off the dash with a thunk. He jammed the gas to the floor, and the truck rattled down the gravel road. “What?” “Okay.” Walter’s fingers went back to the pick spot, drawing blood as his nerves got the best of him. “Okay. Just don’t hit me again.” “Talk.” Joe raised his hand, and Walter flinched away. “I get it, all right?” Walter pulled his fingers away from his face and sniffed their bloody tips. An ammoniac stink wafted to Joe from the junkie’s wound. There was a familiar scratching sound, claws on flesh. Joe took his eyes off the road to get a look at Walter. “They sent me over to Springfield, to that place out on 44.” Walter coughed, took a deep, gasping breath. His words tangled in his throat. Joe saw the lump on Walter’s neck, a plum-sized knot that squirmed when the junkie
spoke. “Hurts,” Walter said and scraped at his throat. His eyes were wide. “I can’t —” “Just say it.” Joe brought the truck to a skidding halt on the side of the gravel road. “Tell me before it’s too late.” “Don’t let it —” Walter started, then gagged. His mouth hung open, and drool ran from his chin in thick, bloody strings. The lump shivered under the skin and moved up his neck, following the line of his jaw. Walter dug at his pick spot, scraping away ribbons of flesh that clung to his ragged nails in tangled coils. “Out!” Walter screamed, blood spraying from his lips. “Get it out.” Joe drew the knife from his belt and jammed its tip into the back corner of Walter’s pick spot. He needed what Walter had to tell him, but he’d never hear it if the addict died. Joe didn’t know if digging that nasty lump out of Walter would help, but he didn’t reckon it could hurt. Blood welled around the knife’s tip as Joe worked it back along Walter’s jaw toward the twitching lump. Thin skin parted to reveal blood-stained bone and knotted muscle. Joe sliced along the jaw until he hit the lump. A spade-like snout thrust through the slit, followed by a furry head. Walter screamed and hooked his fingers into the flap of loose skin dangling from his jaw. He tore it back toward his ear, and a bat flopped out of the gaping wound. It shook blood from its wings and stretched them wide, rearing its head back to unleash a piercing squeal of rage. “f*ck you,” Joe snarled and flicked the knife down through the thing’s neck. The bat’s head rolled free and tumbled down Walter’s leg onto the floor of the cab. Walter’s hands fumbled at his wound. Blood poured between his clumsy fingers, running down his throat to soak his filthy T-shirt. Joe dug under his seat for one of the spare flannel shirts he kept in the truck. He smacked Walter’s hands aside and shoved the shirt against the wound. “Hold that.” Walter nodded and pressed both hands to the makeshift bandage. “Hospital,” he croaked. “Sure,” Joe said. “Soon as you tell me what you were doing.” “Okay, okay.” Walter coughed. Gagged. Joe could see another lump rising under Walter’s skin, just above his ear. Then
another on his forearm. A bulge stretched out from his chin. Something moved under Walter’s bloody shirt. Joe lifted the knife. Walter screamed.
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started with the twitching bulges closest to the surface of Walter’s skin. He J oe pinned the writhing addict’s head to the back of the seat with his wounded left arm and used his right hand for the cutting. “You’re killin’ me,” Walter gasped, but he didn’t fight. The feeling of violation was so strong he’d tolerate anything to get the f*ckers out. “Just get it done.” “Tell me who was buying that sh*t.” Joe drew the sharp edge of the curved blade across the center of the swelling. It parted with a sound like tearing paper, and blood spritzed into his eyes. He jammed the knife into the back of the truck’s seat and dug in the wound with his fingers. He blinked away the blood and squeezed the bedraggled bat out of Walter’s scalp. “f*ck me,” the junkie screamed and beat his hands against his thighs. The bat screeched and tried to bite Joe, but the Marshal was faster. He squeezed its wiry torso in his fist until blood gouted from its snout and the hellish light went out of its eyes. “There’s too many. Too f*ckin’ many.” Walter focused on a lump in his thigh and turned his fists against it. He pounded his leg with rhythmic punches, one after another, crushing the moving lump until it stopped twitching. There were tiny cracking noises coming from his leg as he kept on smashing the dead thing. Joe grabbed the smurf by the chin and turned him so their eyes met. “We don’t have much time. Tell me who bought this sh*t.” “Gotta get ‘em out.” Walter found another lump on the inside of his left arm and scraped the fingernails of his right hand over it. “Makin’ me crazier’n goddamned crank
bugs.” The junkie panted and kept scraping at his flesh until red weals appeared and the blood began to flow. Another lump throbbed with an irregular rhythm, swelling as the creature within tried to thrust its way into the world. “C’mere, you little f*cker.” Joe slapped Walter. “We’ll get them out, but you have to tell me who did this.” “There’s a list,” Walter started, then went back to digging at his arm. The flesh tore open like a sack of wet tissue, and the addict screeched a cry of victory. He hooked his fingers inside his arm and yanked the bat out with such force he tore a six-inch wide swath of his own flesh off at the same time. Walter mashed the bat against the passenger-side window, smearing it against the glass until its guts spilled out of its screeching mouth, choking it on its own innards. “Where’s the list?” Joe pinned Walter again and sliced his t-shirt open with a long swipe of the knife. There were three lumps moving under the smurf’s pale skin, stretching it so tight Joe could see the bats’ furry heads through it. He stabbed the bats, one, two, three, skewering them through Walter’s flesh. Joe felt sick and helpless. The sheriff had lied to him, all the rest of the Pryors were dead, and his last lead was just about to kick off. He needed this list. Without it, he had no idea who to chase after. He’d never stop this mess before it spiraled out of control. He had to get Walter to talk. Walter was panting, his eyes little more than puffy slits. He was soaked with blood that ran out of him like water from a leaky balloon. “The list. Where’s the list?” Joe slapped the junkie, trying to bring him back around. He thought of applying a tourniquet, but there was too much blood, too many holes to plug. Walter lifted his eyelids. Gave Joe a slow blink. “Hid that sh*t. They’d f*ckin’ kill me if they found out I kept the list. Guess it don’t matter much now.” “Help me put a stop to this.” Joe squeezed the junkie’s hand. “Give me the list.” “Don’t let ‘em take me. I was scared, that’s all. Didn’t know no better.” Walter’s eyes widened as if he saw something far beyond the horizon, something dark and hungry and drawing near. “We all was, I guess.” “Who?” The Night Marshal resisted the urge to shake the junkie. “I can’t help you, if you don’t help me.” “Reckon I’m gone, anyhow.”
“It’s the right thing. You know that.” “It true what they say?” Walter’s words came out slurred and dripping with blood that ran over his lower lip and stained the gray stubble on his chin. “That you got the big man’s ear?” “Yeah,” Joe said, trying to hide his frustration. He didn’t have time to explain his job and the complicated connections that bound him to the powers that be. The big man listened to Joe, but often he didn’t seem to give much of a sh*t what the Marshal had to say. “Can you forgive me?” Walter’s eyes were wet with unshed tears. “For what I helped ‘em do?” “I can say the words,” Joe started, but Walter kept on pressing his point. “I done bad, Joe. I done real bad.” Walter coughed, and blood slopped from his wounds. The lump on his forearm split, red leaking over its edges. Walter hissed in pain as a shrieking bat shoved its head through the slit. “Goddamn. That burns.” Walter dug inside his own arm and ripped the bat out, crushing it in his shaking fist. “Walter, I forgive you.” Joe didn’t know what else to say. “You can still help make it right.” “We were just tryin’ to make it.” Walter grimaced, and the bulge on his chin juddered up toward his lower lip. He spat a mouthful of blood into his hand. “The world left Pitchfork behind, Joe. Whole damned place was dying. All we had was the old ways, and we was scared you’d take that from us, too. Remember that, all right?” “The list. You don’t have much longer to make this right.” “Yeah.” Walter took a deep breath and screamed. Blood sprayed in the cab, and three of his teeth spilled out of his mouth, stuck to his chin. His tongue jutted from between cracked lips and whipped back and forth as if pulled by an unseen string. Walter pulled away from Joe and slammed his bloody hand against the window. His fingers spasmed against the glass, tapping an erratic tattoo on the window. “Walter, please.” Joe tried to pull the man back around, to see if he could least try to read the dying man’s lips. But the junkie was having none of it. He shrugged Joe off and spat strange words that scorched the air in the cab and smelled of sh*t. His back bubbled with huge blisters that swelled and burst, soaking his shirt with dark, sticky blood. Writhing figures pushed against the cotton T-shirt; white fangs shredded it to reveal hungry, furred faces and glaring eyes with too many pupils.
“f*ck,” Joe shouted and threw his door open. The cab was filling with bats, their hungry mouths tearing Walter apart. He turned back to Joe, his face stripped down to the bone in places, one eye dangling from its socket with a bat clutching it. “Forgive me,” he mouthed, and a wordless scream poured out of him on a tide of blood. Joe ran around the truck and tore the passenger door open. Walter splashed onto the wet ground, his blood running into the mud as his scream went on and on. Joe watched as his last lead shrieked toward the grave. He didn’t know what to do now, where to look, who to interrogate. The darkness was coming, and he had no idea how to stop it. “God keep your soul, Walter. May he shelter it in his furious fist and hide it from the evil that haunted you in life.” Joe eased the barrels of the shotgun down onto Walter’s forehead. The red ran out of the rain, as if in answer to Joe’s simple prayer. The Night Marshal closed his eyes, tilted his face to the sky, and let the rain wash the blood from his face. Joe let out a long, shuddering sigh and pulled the shotgun’s triggers.
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purred by his mother’s words, Al scooped Elsa into his arms and hit the stairs to the S second floor at a dead run. He bounded up the steps three at a time and rushed for the big bedroom at the end of the hall. He hit the door with his shoulder, and it flew open, bouncing off the wall to slam shut behind them. Elsa wormed out of Al’s arms and dropped to the floor with an irritated hiss. She adjusted her mask and turned back toward the door. Al shot the deadbolt and laid a heavy hand on his sister’s shoulder. Elsa tried to brush him away, but he held her firm. “She needs us,” Elsa growled. “You left her alone out there.” Al tightened his grip on her shoulders to keep her from bolting for the door again. “If you promise to stay here, I’ll go see what’s happening.” Al knelt before his sister and looked into her mask’s black eyeholes. There were tiny sparks of sapphire glittering in the deep shadows, but he couldn’t see Elsa’s eyes at all. The spirits were gathering within her, responding to her rage and fear. “Promise me.” “I promise,” she said through gritted teeth. “Be quick.” Al nodded. “I’ll be fast.” He shot the deadbolt open and pointed to a chair at the small desk in the corner. “Use that. Lock the door behind me.” Elsa wrestled the chair over to the door. Al waited in the hall until he heard the door lock behind him, then headed for the stairs. He leapt down the stairwell, landing on all fours in the living room. He could feel a presence gathering outside the house, something old and foul. He tilted his nose
into the air and took a deep breath. Rot and char came to him from the back of the house. He crept into the kitchen, tracking the source of the stench. A gray shape lumbered past one of the windows, and Al ducked low to the floor to avoid its attention. The thing moved fast for its size, flowing forward with a predator’s gait. Al lunged, racing toward the window, roaring a challenge at the intruder. He leapt for the window, jaws spread wide. He closed his eyes and crossed his arms in front of his face to shield himself from the worst of the breaking glass. He imagined himself coming through the window, wrapping his arms and legs around the big man, and tearing him to the ground. He never saw the shadow coming at him. The window shattered, and whirling glass shrapnel exploded into the house. The shards bit into his forearms and chest, slicing ribbons of flesh from his bones and burying themselves in his muscle. He crashed to the kitchen floor, something heavy and smelling of death on top of him. Pain crawled up his sides, lanced his stomach, slashed at his head. Fangs gored chunks from his flesh, leaving him gasping and breathless from the pain. Something hit the side of the building and rattled the windows in their frames. Al heard his sister scream from the room above him, calling for her mother. The sound was a jolt of energy to his system. He had to get up; he had to protect Elsa. Alasdair roared and threw his weight to the left. He rolled onto his attacker, shifting their positions to give himself the leverage to rip it apart. Blood ran into his eyes, but he could see the dark shape beneath him, a swirling mass of fur and fangs that seemed to be all talons and teeth. Wherever it touched him he bled, and the myriad thin cuts were starting to take their toll. He slashed his hands through the swarm, tearing chunks of it free. They were and were not bats, clumps of fur studded with gnashing fangs, wings of smoke. Al kept shredding it, and the enemy beneath him grew weaker. Its fangs tore smaller and smaller pieces from him, leaving behind pinpricks of blood that were little more than tick bites. Then it was gone, leaving Al on his knees, blood running from a hundred shallow wounds. He hooked his claws into the kitchen table next to him and hauled himself up onto his feet. The little cuts were healing, a side benefit of his bestial curse, but he needed meat to restore his energy. His knees were weak and wobbly, Much more of this and he’d be out cold. Al’s head jerked up as Elsa screamed again. He hadn’t beaten it, the swarm had just
gone after easier prey. He forced himself to move. He put one weak, stiff leg ahead of the other and made his way up the stairs one bloody handhold at a time. The black shadow flattened itself against the door, smudging it with charcoal-gray wing prints and splattering fine sprays of blood across the pale wood. Al took a trio of lumbering steps and laid into it again. He smashed chunks of it flat against the door, tore other pieces of it loose and sent them fluttering down the hall behind him. He tore and bit and crushed, but its mass did not diminish, and Al continued to bleed. His legs gave way, and he sagged onto his knees, arms buried in the swarm up to the elbows. “Elsa,” he croaked. “Hide.” “Al?” she whispered, her voice thick with fear. “Don’t leave me.” “Hide,” he gasped. “You have to hide.” He separated more squirming chunks from the monstrosity, but he knew he was losing the fight. He couldn’t cut or bite the swarm to death, but it had no trouble doing the same to him. “Al?” Elsa whispered through the keyhole. “Hide,” he gasped, but his voice was too weak to be heard. The bolt clicked. Elsa opened the door.
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sat on the pickup’s tailgate, sucking deep breaths through his mouth. Walter’s J oe body lay behind him, wrapped in layers of blue nylon tarp and duct tape. Either the smurf was heavier than he looked, or Joe was older than he’d imagined. At this rate, he was going to need a bottle of oxygen to get through the day. He hated to think how he’d feel without the supernatural strength that came with the Night Marshal’s job. The rain had dwindled to little more than a thick mist, an annoying dampness that chilled the air and made Joe want to sneeze. He forced himself up onto his feet and walked down to Walter’s Jeep, watching the sky for bats. The little f*ckers had dispersed when Walter died, but Joe didn’t trust them to stay gone. The Jeep’s interior was as much of a disaster as its rusted shell. Taco Bell wrappers and empty cans of Busch littered the floor, filling the vehicle with a greasy, yeasty stench. The ash tray was an overflowing mound of butts and gray ash, runnels of which trickled down onto the floorboards. There was a fistful of little glass pipes as well, cracked and stained and thrown around like broken ornaments the day after Christmas. Joe dug around in the garbage with the barrels of his shotgun, looking for something, anything he could use to find Walter’s buyers. Light flashed from under the seat. Joe reached into the darkness and found a sleek glass-and-metal rectangle. He pulled Walter’s cell phone out and allowed himself a sigh of relief. Joe didn’t have a mobile phone himself, nor did most of Pitchfork’s residents. There were no cellular towers in the central section of the county, and the signal from the perimeter was often blocked by the hilly terrain. But Walter had spent much of his
time smurfing pills in Springfield or Rolla or St. Louis, urban areas where a cell phone was more than just an expensive status symbol. The screen was black with four white rectangles across its center and a keypad below them. The phone vibrated in his hand and Joe tapped 1, 2, 3, 4, hoping Walter was too stupid to bother with a real password. A red bar flashed over the blank rectangles. Joe punched in four 1s, and the bar flashed again. Whoever was calling Walter gave up, and Joe wanted to smash the phone onto the ground. He needed the numbers out of the phone, along with whatever else he could find in its encrypted innards. But first he had to get the code. Joe shoved the phone into his shirt pocket and hiked back up to his truck. He stared at the mess inside the cab and groaned. There was blood everywhere, clotted on the seats, smeared across every glass surface as if a pack of maniacs had gone berserk with their finger paints. He rooted around under the seat for the rags and alcohol he kept on hand just in case things got messy and started cleaning the windshield. The phone buzzed in his pocket. Joe flopped into the driver’s seat and dug the phone out. He stared at the white squares, and his head ached. He didn’t know much about these phones, but he did know he couldn’t just keep jabbing random numbers into the passcode. Even if he had time for that kind of sh*t, which he didn’t, the phone would lock him out after three or four failed attempts. He looked around the inside of the cab, hoping something would show him the answer. The phone buzzed again. He remembered Walter sitting next to him, screaming, scrabbling at the window. His index finger jabbing at the blood coating it. Joe looked at the window. In the smears, he could make out what looked like a pattern of smeared dots. He tried what he thought he saw, punching in 4589. The red bar flashed. The phone buzzed again. Joe stared at the bloody smears. Maybe it wasn’t a five. He punched in 4289 and the passcode screen disappeared. A phone number flashed on the screen, with red and green buttons below it. Joe punched the green button with his finger and pressed the phone to his ear. “Ah, Jonah.” The Long Man’s voice was half laugh, half sob. “So glad you were able to figure out modern technology.” “How did you get this number?” Joe’s head throbbed. He didn’t have time for this. He had the phone unlocked, and now he just needed to start working through the
numbers in it. “You don’t sound pleased to hear from me.” There was a long, liquid noise from the other end of the line, as if someone were taking a deep drink from a tall glass. “I need you to come up to the Lodge.” “I don’t have time to go all the way up there. I’m working.” “You think I don’t know that?” The Long Man’s laughter reminded Joe of a bucket of glass thrown down a stairwell. “You need to make time for this. We have much to discuss.” “No.” Joe felt a tingle of fear as the rebellious word left his lips. But he didn’t have time, he had things to do. The second half-made girl’s threat hung heavy around his neck. He didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but he wanted this wrapped up and buried before anything worse happened. “I can’t do it now. After this is finished, then we can talk.” “Jonah. I am not assured there will be an after.” Rage crackled down the line, and Joe felt it like a slap across his face. “Come to the Lodge. Now.” The Night Marshal felt the command tighten around his neck like a noose. He’d gone years without the leash being yanked, and the reminder of the Long Man’s power was unnerving. He couldn’t catch his breath, his heart raced. Worse, he felt weak, puny. His injuries no longer seemed like annoyances, but life-threatening wounds. “I’m on my way,” he said through gritted teeth. The pressure around his throat tightened the slightest bit, then the oppressive weight of the Long Man’s displeasure was gone. “Good.” The line went dead. Jonah spent a few minutes cleaning up the worst of the blood and securing Walter’s body in the pickup’s bed. He made sure the boxes were still in the cooler, then tucked it in behind Walter’s corpse where it wouldn’t flop around too much. He had a feeling the Long Man was going to want to see those.
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tevie pressed her palms to her wounded throat, but the blood continued to spill. She S watched it dribble onto her feet, staining her toenails red while her head rang with a feedback whine. She tried to calm down, slow her breathing, settle her thundering heart. She could fix this, she just had to give herself time to remember the words. Something hammered at the walls inside the house with a hundred fists. Stevie blinked away the fog gathering over her eyes and straightened up. Her babies needed her, she couldn’t leave them alone with whatever was making all that racket. She just had to remember the words. “Been under that man’s thumb too long, girl.” The Bog Witch’s voice was strong and firm. “All I taught ye blown away like dust afore the wind of his blatherin’.” “No, Mama.” Stevie shook her head and winced as jagged hooks of pain sliced their way out of the wound on her neck. “I’m hurt. Just need to think a second.” “Go on, then. Not like I ken stop yer thinkin’.” Stevie tried to ignore her mother and focus on her injury. The blood on her hands reminded her of moonless nights spent in the swamp calling to the spirits and bending them to her will. It was long ago, but the words were still there, still waiting for her to whisper and claim their power. All that stood between her and that ancient strength was a promise she’d made to the only man she’d ever loved. “Your man know ‘bout that?” The Bog Witch was in Stevie’s ear. “Blood magic strikes me as well along the Left-Hand Path.” “Not the same,” but Stevie couldn’t help but wonder. Was it the same? What would answer her call when she offered up her blood? What would she let into the world in
exchange for sealing the hole in her neck? “It’s not.” “We’ll see,” the words boiled with laughter. “We will.” But Stevie didn’t say the words. They were right there, burning like stomach juices in the back of her throat, but she wouldn’t let them out. “Better get to it, yer babies need yer help.” She stroked her daughter’s hair, a careful, wistful touch that lodged in Stevie’s guts like a fishing hook. “If ye ken still help ‘em.” Stevie hooked her hands into talons, index fingers and thumbs tracing eccentric orbits in the air. She’d break her promise, but Joe would understand. He had to understand she couldn’t leave her babies alone with the darkness. Stevie let the first word fall from her lips, and it struck the palm of her left hand along with a droplet of blood from her torn throat. The air hissed as the fabric of her world grew thin and frayed. “Don’t have to stop with yer throat.” Stevie let the next word fall. The blood in her hand boiled, red vapor rising from its bubbling surface. Black veins shot through her vision, cracks in reality that thudded with a tripartite heartbeat that squeezed Stevie’s throat in its grasp. “Whatever’s in yer house, ye think yer babies ken stop it?” She raised her hand to the sky and let her head fall back. The sun pulsed purple, and Stevie saw flashes of the spirit answering her call. Long limbs, crooked and warped like lightning-blasted trees. Eyes that shed an oily radiance that clung to everything they saw. A hand like a scorpion’s pincer fastened around her neck, holding the blood. “Let it go, girl. Earn my name.” Grave-cold hands settled on Stevie’s shoulders, rubbed her muscles with a mother’s familiarity. “Make them pay for what they done.” The last word gushed from Stevie and painted the world black. For one moment there was no air, no life, only the darkness of the enslaved spirit that dissolved her damaged flesh and stitched it back together strange and fresh. Thirteen enormous eyes shone through the blackness, and the grip around Stevie’s throat faded away. She could feel the monstrosity leashed to her will, waiting for her to guide it. She felt the words ready to spill forth, a simple command that would send the specter raging into the house, ready to destroy anything that threatened Stevie or her family. “This is who ye are, girl. This is what yer meant to be.”
Stevie bowed her head and brushed her palms together, scattering flakes of dried blood. The empty blackness gave way to the warm yellow sun, and she felt her mother’s presence wane. “I can’t kill my way out of this, Mama. Death don’t solve nothin’.” Stevie felt her old accent coming back, poking through the layers of hard-fought education. When push came to shove, she was who she was. “Someone oughter tell yer man that.” “Someone should have told you that.” Stevie limped to the back door and left her mother’s shade behind, staring holes in her back. She came in through the back door into a kitchen in shambles. The table was covered with gouges and slivers of glass. Blood splattered the cabinets and ceiling, while weird, inky stains writhed on the floor to form a shifting pattern of shadowed glyphs. The blood called to her heart, which thumped in panicked sympathy. This was the blood of her children, spilled in her house. The fear fell into her stomach like a spear of ice, pinning her feet fast to the floor. She listened for sounds of life, of conflict, for anything other than the tidal thunder of her pulse pounding against her eardrums. She heard nothing. The crackling memory of her mother’s words haunted Stevie. Should she have unleashed the broken spirit she had called to heal her throat? Would it have made a difference if she had embraced the dark lessons she had learned at her mother’s knee and turned her hoodoo against these intruders? Had her fear of Joe, her terror of calling down his Night Law, stayed her hand when she most needed her power to protect her children? Stevie pushed the fear back and followed the trail of blood and wreckage out of the kitchen and into the hall. The sigils on the floor were angular spikes of dread that hooked her attention with every step she took. They were words she recognized from the Black Book in her mama’s house, the symbols for broken spines and shattered dreams, threats and promises of a dark day to come. “Not in my house,” she whispered to herself, “not while I still breathe.” The blood led to the stairs, and Stevie climbed against the weight of dread clinging to her heart. The silence made her fear the worst; if her children were still alive, then they would be fighting the shadow. Al would roar, Elsa would shriek her anger at the
intrusion. But silence could mean anything. In that moment, her children were many things. They were huddled together, exhausted, but victorious. They were taken. They were bleeding out onto the floor. They were defeated and dead. From the top of the stairs she could see the door to Joe’s room. It hung from the hinges in three pieces, torn apart by blows that had smashed chunks of the heavy wood into splinters. The doorway was framed with more symbols, a tapestry of alien threats and dire prophecy. Stevie looked at them a second too long and found herself kneeling in the hall with her head down, vomit pouring out of her in sour torrents. She clenched her teeth against the nausea, demanded her body rise. She got to her feet and walked ahead. The door was slathered with blood, bright and red and wet. Stevie moved the ragged sections of the door aside, careful to keep her hands away from the spilled blood. Her senses were still acute from the magic she’d worked and touching blood now might trigger dark work she’d later regret. She froze just inside the room, eyes wide. The bed was smashed, the big posts at its corners torn free and smashed against the walls and left broken on the floor. The bedclothes were soaked red and stained black. The sodden sheets moved through the air in a sinuous pattern, airborne serpents that wove around one another to form a sphere of gliding, gore-laden ribbons. In the center of the sphere sat Elsa, her face hidden behind a mask wreathed by shifting shadows, head bowed over her brother’s still form. Alasdair lay curled on the floor before his sister, his skin studded with shards of broken glass and striped with raw, red wounds. His head was in his sister’s lap, and Elsa stroked his gore-matted hair with the back of one hand. Stevie waited in the doorway, afraid to move. She held her breath and prayed for Al to be alive, for Elsa to be unharmed. “Baby?” she whispered. Elsa’s head turned toward the door like a wind-up toy with broken gears, jerking to one side, then slipping back to the other. The shadows parted, and Stevie could see streaks of blood on her daughter’s mask, crimson lines leaking from the cavernous eyeholes. “Mama, I’m tired,” Elsa said and her mask cracked in half. She collapsed over her brother, and the bloodstained sheets fell from the air to cover them both.
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rouched atop a wide hill overlooking the old Ratliff Cemetery, the Lodge looked as C if it had fallen into the future from the Dark Ages. Its tall, white stone walls were topped with barbed spikes and pierced by a single iron-clad gate of black wood. The gate swung open on silent hinges to swallow Joe’s battered old pickup. Sleek, black cameras with bulging lenses tracked the vehicle, swiveling atop the walls as the truck breached the walls. Joe drove down the long, thin ribbon of blacktop between the gate and the main house. Black oak trees grew up on either side of the drive and tangled their long branches overhead to block out the sun. The shadows deepened, and Joe tried to shake off the heaviness that settled onto his shoulders. The closer he got to the Lodge, the smaller he felt, like a little boy bringing a willow switch to his angry father. Outside the walls, Joe was a man to be feared and respected. In here, he was just the hired help. The dogs met him where the trees ended. The shadow-black mastiffs stood four feet tall at the shoulder and ran with the tireless, loping gait of pack predators. Five of them escorted the truck up to the house. They sat on the steps leading to the front door, long red tongues hanging from jaws that could close over a man’s head without their teeth touching him. Joe killed the truck. The dogs stared at him with bottomless black eyes, enormous teeth bared in vicious snarls. “Well, that’s new.” Joe drummed his fingers on the truck’s steering wheel. He thought about getting out of the truck and just walking past the pack, but their malevolent stares gave him pause. He waited, and the dogs glared, and the clock on the dash ticked away a quarter of an hour.
The Lodge door opened at last, and the dogs stood and backed away from Joe, watching him with deep hostility as they slipped inside. The Long Man appeared in the doorway after the last of the dogs had vanished, his thin face a pale blot against the velvet dark of the shadows. He beckoned with one gaunt hand for the Night Marshal to join him inside. Joe left the shotgun after a long, sad look and hauled his tired body out of the truck. Under the Long Man’s watchful eye, Joe’s walk to the front door felt like it took half the day. His dread grew stronger with every step. He respected his boss, even admired him in some ways, but he knew enough to fear the man. The Long Man closed the door behind Joe and gestured toward the sitting room at the end of the long, tall foyer. Joe tried not to look through the doorways they passed, but the scents and sounds kept dragging his attention through the shadowed portals. Something white and moist fell from the wall of one room and flopped on the floor like a decapitated copperhead. Another chamber stank of rot and stale sweat, and Joe caught the briefest glimpse of a young woman dancing with some sort of scaled squid. “Eyes ahead, Jonah.” The Long Man laughed at Joe’s discomfort and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “You have been here often enough to know that much.” Joe grunted at that and let himself be led into the sitting room in which the Long Man held their meetings. The Night Marshal crossed the room to the low bar against the far wall and poured himself a heavy glass of the good stuff. He raised the tumbler of amber heaven toward his lips, but it never made it to his mouth. The Long Man held the glass Joe had poured in his own hand, across the room. He raised the tumbler in a mocking toast. “Let’s hold the drinks for a bit.” Aggravated at having his liquor swiped, Joe flopped down on the overstuffed horsehair sofa in front of the bar and drummed his fingertips on his knees. The Long Man hunkered down in his customary chair, a strange contraption of bent wood and copper struts held together with knots of barbed wire and cured deer tendons. The chair looked more like a torture device than a seat, but the Long Man sat in it as if it were a plush throne. Joe tried to get a handle on the conversation before it ate up his whole afternoon. “I can’t stay long. What can I do for you?” The Long Man leaned back in his chair and drained the glass of whiskey in a single slow draw. He rolled his hand around his wrist, and the glass was gone. He seemed to be stalling, trying to put his words in order before he let them carry his thoughts out into
the world. “How are you feeling?” “You mean aside from being almost killed last night and digging a pack of demon bats out of a junkie today? I reckon I feel fine.” His boss stared at him over steepled fingers, eyes measuring, probing. “Something seems different. Perhaps it is just the ordeal.” Joe shrugged. He couldn’t deny the Long Man’s analysis. He felt different, stretched thin and frayed at the edges. Fear for his family, anger at the people he was trying to protect, it was all crowded in his thoughts. “It has been a tough couple of days. Imagine it’s going to get worse before it gets better.” The Long Man nodded. “I heard you’ve been rousting the locals. Vigorously.” “I’ve been investigating an issue within the purview of my office.” Joe wished he had a drink. He’d take a beer, at this point, as long as he could drink it fast. His hands were shaking, and sweat pooled at the base of his spine. He kept his words formal, hoping he could mask the bloody reality with careful grammar. “Some of the offenders became violent. There were unavoidable altercations.” The Long Man’s laugh cracked the air in the room and made Joe’s testicl*s crawl up into his gut. He tried not to look at his boss when he laughed. There was something canine about the man’s face, the way it sloped down to his nose and receded back from his chin. It didn’t help that the Long Man lived up to his name, seeming to stretch out and up at the edges of a man’s vision. All of the rooms in the Lodge had fifteen-foot ceilings, and Joe swore the man’s head scraped them from time to time. “The way I hear it, everyone you talked to about this mess has ended up dead. And by dead, I mean that you have killed them.” “They were cultists.” Joe clenched his hands in his lap to keep them from trembling. “Fanatics are hard to reason with.” “They shot first? You were just defending yourself?” The Long Man leaned back in his chair, his body curving into its confines, thin legs dangling to the floor. Shadows flickered behind him, long and tattered, spreading from his shoulders into the darkness of the room’s high ceiling. “But you are making progress despite all the violence?” “I have this.” Joe fished Walter’s phone out of his pocket. “One of their smurf’s phones. Someone in this contact list is behind those girls. I’m sure of it.”
“Are you? Because I wonder if that is the case.” The air in the room shuddered, and the Long Man was suddenly beside Joe, offering him a heavy crystal glass half-filled with amber whiskey. “Here, calm your nerves.” Joe was grateful for the distraction and the time it gave him to gather his thoughts. The Long Man rarely talked to Joe except to point him toward black magic. He’d never questioned the Night Marshal’s methods, and Joe found this whole meeting both annoying and terrifying. He wasn’t sure that he could be fired, but he also didn’t want to wind up stuck in one of the rooms he’d just passed, a curiosity for the Long Man’s amusem*nt. He took a healthy slug of whiskey and let it work its magic before he spoke again. “There aren’t many people who could work up those girls, unless they had outside help.” He took another drink. “Walter was bringing them that help. He’d have called his buyer, at least once. Or they would have called him. The name of the person who was buying his sh*t is in this phone somewhere.” The Long Man snapped his spidery fingers, and one of the mastiff’s padded into the room with the handle of Walter’s cooler in its enormous mouth. It dropped the container at the Long Man’s feet and loped back out of the room. “I assume this is the help you meant? What do we have here?” He popped the top off the cooler with his bare left foot and wrinkled his nose like he’d just smelled something beyond foul. “Now, this is unexpected.” Joe kept his mouth shut. If anyone knew what those things in the cooler were, it would be the Long Man. Anything Joe had to add would just sound ignorant. The Long Man’s hand darted into the cooler as if he were reaching into a bear trap. He tossed one of the little boxes in the air, caught it with his other hand, bounced it between his palms for a few seconds. He snared it between his index fingers and pushed against the wood until its thin walls shattered. Something small and white dropped into his palm. He balanced it on his open hand, pointed at it with his free index finger. “What do you plan on doing about this?” Joe drank the last of his whiskey. “I don’t even know what the f*ck that is.” “It’s a Kirshnir Marg, a —” “I didn’t ask what it was. I know it’s more Left-Hand Path bullsh*t for me to deal with. My plan is pretty simple. I’m going to look at all the people in this phone’s contact list. I’m going to start visiting them, one at a time. I’m going to talk to them until
one of them tells me something useful. Then I’m going to follow that chain to its end and blow holes though every person along the way.” The Kirshnir Marg landed on the arm of the sofa with a melodic ping. Its proximity curdled Joe’s stomach and filled his veins with bubbling kerosene. He wanted to slap it away and bolt from his seat, but the thought of touching it froze him stiff. “And you think that’s the best way to pursue this?” The Long Man stretched across the room to settle next to Joe on the couch. “Or are you taking this all a bit personally?” The Long Man seized Joe’s injured arm before the Night Marshal could react. “Don’t,” Joe started, but the Long Man’s black-eyed stare silenced his objection. Skeletal fingers probed the edges of Joe’s wound. The Long Man’s index finger tugged at the stitches Stevie had sewn in the night before, slipped under them. Joe could feel his boss inside him, a cold violation that made him dig his fingernails into the sofa’s arm. One by one, the stitches popped free until the last one was out and the Long Man’s finger left Joe’s flesh. The Long Man twisted Joe’s arm roughly between his hands, one cold grip winding left, the other to the right. Joe grunted at the sudden blast of pain. Blood spurted from his now-open wound and stained the couch’s embroidery. When the pain subsided, Joe could feel his nerve-damaged fingers again. The Night Marshal flexed his hand, but the Long Man did not release his grip. “Despite the protections your position affords you, Jonah, you are still just a man.” The Long Man looked into Joe’s eyes. He squeezed his hands tighter around his arm. “So are the people doing this. The people who’ve threatened me and mine.” “I’m not so sure. Whatever is behind this has real power. It knows things.” “Knowing won’t stop me from shooting it.” The Long Man sighed and wrested Joe’s arm up, hard. He levered Joe off the couch and onto his knees and twisted Joe’s arm until his face was pressed into the deep pile of the carpet. “Could you kill me, Jonah?” Joe’s lungs worked like bellows, pumping air in and out in panicked gasps. His heart pounded against his ribs, and sparks of light streaked across his vision. It felt like someone had torn his shoulder apart, filled the empty socket with broken glass, then rammed the pieces back together. “No. I don’t think I could kill you.” The Long Man helped Joe back to his feet. He reached out and smoothed the
wrinkles from the front of Joe’s shirt. “Then what makes you think you can kill whoever’s behind this?” “You trying to scare me off this thing?” “On the contrary. I’m trying to keep you focused on this thing.” The Long Man held out his open hand to reveal Joe’s badge, straightened and gleaming. He leaned forward and pinned the badge to Joe’s chest. “But you need to understand that if you sound the horns of war, I may not be able to protect you from what answers the call.” “I don’t remember asking you for protection.” “What about your family? Do you want protection for them?” Joe clenched his fists and ground his teeth. “My family has no part in this.” “Everyone connected to you has some role in this. Your actions will determine how those roles will be played.” “That’s bullsh*t.” “We shall see. I’ve advised you as best I could.” The Long Man put an arm around Joe’s shoulder and turned him back toward the entryway. “Leave the Kirshnir Marg here, where I can keep an eye on it. You can leave the body here, as well. Just put it on the drive, the dogs will see to it.” “He deserved better than that,” Joe stopped at the door. “In the end, he tried to do what was right. I’m not going to feed him to your overgrown lapdogs.” “Maybe you’ve learned more than I thought,” the Long Man said. “Leave him on the drive, I’ll see to it that he gets the burial you think he deserves.” The Long Man led Joe to the front door and watched as he walked to his truck and moved the body from the pickup’s bed to the asphalt. “There is good and right still in the world,” the Long Man said. “But you have many enemies, Night Marshal. Some in places you may not even suspect.” “I’m pretty good at telling who my enemies are.” Joe swung up into the cab and leaned his head through the open driver-side window. “Pretty much everyone who knows how to sling a spell falls into that category.” “Think about what I said. Before it’s too late.” The door to the Lodge closed, and Joe felt a piss shiver of fear race up his spine. He wondered what the Long Man had meant, and feared he wouldn’t figure it out until it was far too late to do him any good.
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through Walter’s seemingly endless list of contacts as he wrestled the J oe thumbed old truck over ridges and down through valleys. So many of the names he saw were familiar, he didn’t know where to begin. He dug back through memories of the drinks he’d shared with the sheriff before their relationship had soured, trying to remember all the mundane, bullsh*t crimes he’d heard Dan whining about. Drunk driving accidents where there was more smeared on the side of the road than they could scrape into a body bag. Men who got high and tried to beat the demons out of their wives and children. Douche bags and their shotgun duels over the honor of skan*y girlfriends. Small-town life in Missouri. But this list of names showed Joe something else. Meth had woven a stranglehold web through Pitchfork County, snaring men and women and kids. He let his subconscious mull over the list of names as he drove, tying it together with what little he’d bothered to hear when Dan was talking. The Vogel Farm bubbled up through Joe’s memories, a place Dan had bitched about for years. “Some days,” Dan had whined over a foaming mug of sweating beer, “I want to go out to the Vogel’s with a captive bolt gun and put all those tweakers out of my misery.” To hear Dan talk, the place was infested with meth freaks who gathered around Bill Vogel like he was the messiah. Bill’s name was in Walter’s phone. Joe figured he could go in, bust a few skulls, get what he needed from Bill and be gone. Maybe even scare a few meth heads straight in the process, get back in Dan’s good graces. “Let’s have us a chat, Bill.” Joe guided the truck along the old farm roads that stitched Pitchfork into a quilt of
valleys and fields. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was coming for him and for his family. The half-made girl’s threats were more frightening than Joe wanted to admit, especially after his sitdown with the Long Man. Joe wanted to get this over with, and if he had to slap around a few dipsh*t meth addicts to wrap things up, he felt pretty good about that. Despite what the Long Man had said, Joe knew all too well that the scumbags who sucked blood from Pitchfork’s underbelly responded to violence with great respect. Bill Vogel was as good a place to start practicing that theory as any. To call the Vogel place a farm was giving it more credit than it deserved. The rutted road that led up to the front of the farmhouse was lined with rusting pickup trucks and peeling cars mounted on cinder blocks. A gaggle of losers sat on the sagging front porch. A couple of them perked up as Joe got closer and ran into the house. The others stood, forming a loose barrier in front of the door. Joe stopped the truck in front of the porch and hopped out of the cab with his shotgun in hand. A girl with hair the color of a dirty carrot stabbed a bony finger at him. “This is private property, mister.” “f*ck you, miss,” Joe said. He shouldered past the girl and almost made it to the front door before a bad idea bloomed in her boyfriend’s thick skull. The tweaker put his hand on Joe’s shoulder and pulled. “Hey, man.” Joe didn’t waste any words. Rage exploded with such ferocity he felt like it would boil right out of his forehead in a cloud of brimstone. He turned into the man’s pull and added a little spin of his own. Then he jacked the shotgun’s stock up under the addict’s chin so hard he knocked three of the man’s teeth clean out of his head. “Don’t f*cking bleed on me,” Joe snapped and kicked the stunned junkie off the porch. The girl looked at Joe like she couldn’t decide if she wanted to kill him or f*ck him, an animal hunger flickering behind the veil of drugs she’d drawn over her own eyes. Joe gave her a little shove, and she fell flat on her ass next to her bleeding boyfriend, eyes burning holes in Joe’s back as he walked away. The rest of the junkies watched the whole scene with dull eyes, as if their poisoned brains couldn’t make sense of what they were seeing. The door was closed, but Joe could still smell the pissy chemical stink of an active meth lab. He hoped they’d let him finish his questions before they blew the farmhouse
into orbit. He kicked the door open to get their attention. “Hey, assholes. Where’s Bill?” Survival instincts and meth jitters sent a pack of filthy tweakers darting from the squalid living room like a school of clown fish hauling ass away from a barracuda. Four little kids sat in the corner, clustered around a portable Nintendo contraption. One of them looked up at Joe, snot running out of his nose and crusting on his lip, then went back to his game. A cold splash of despair dropped the temperature on Joe’s rage. He’d have to be more careful than he’d originally planned, or one of these kids would end up hurt or worse. A greasy biker with the biggest belly Joe had ever seen on a meth addict struggled to get up from the floor, but his riding chaps had come unbuckled and were tangling up his legs. “Hi there, big guy.” Joe tapped the shotgun’s barrels on top of the biker’s graying mane. “Where’s Bill?” “I don’t know no f*ckin’ Bill.” The fat man slapped at the shotgun. Joe popped a knee into the biker’s face, smashing his nose flat and splattering red in every direction. The biker was so stunned all he could do was lie on his back and choke on his own blood. Joe nudged him with the shotgun to get his attention. “I don’t like it when people touch my toys. Where’s Bill?” “I don’ know,” he blubbered. “I swear man, I don’ know no Bill.” “The cook, fat f*ck.” Joe kicked the guy’s crusty glass pipe and it rolled under the couch. “The guy who brings the meth?” “Ain’ no guy. Sally brings the sh*t down to us.” “Where the f*ck is she?” Tension built in Joe’s shoulders. This place was everything that was wrong with Pitchfork. Desperate, hungry people looking for some way to ease the pain of their pathetic lives, some quick fix to push back the darkness that threatened to snuff them out. When the darkness ate them hollow, they’d graduate from meth to baleful prayers, sacrificing their shriveled souls to any god who might offer them hope. When hope ran dry, they’d take hate. If they had to suffer, then f*ck it, everyone else would suffer, too. “Leave him alone,” a rail-thin woman begged from the doorway into the kitchen. She hugged the wall so only a crescent-moon sliver of her face and one bony hand were showing. “My man never hurt nobody.”
Joe didn’t have time for this sh*t. He needed answers. He stomped across the room and tangled his fingers in a handful of the woman’s scraggly black hair. He yanked her out of the kitchen and into the living room, ignoring her screeching protests. “This one yours, fat boy?” “I don’t know where Sally is, man. Somewhere upstairs, maybe?” Joe tilted the shotgun so its barrels were pointed at the woman’s pockmarked cheek. “Why don’t you get your pants on straight and fetch her down here for me, big guy?” The woman was crying tears that stained her cheeks blotchy red. “Don’t shoot me, mister. Not in front of my kids.” Two of the Nintendo club waved at the woman, then went back to their game. “Something tells me you aren’t much of a mama to those boys.” “f*ck you,” she shot back. The fat man got his chaps on and scuttled past Joe. “Hurry back,” Joe hollered after him. “My trigger finger’s getting twitchy.” The woman stiffened in Joe’s grip. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Please, man, I’m just tryin’ to get right, okay? I don’t want no trouble.” One of the boys watched Joe with wide, red-rimmed eyes. Joe didn’t want to look at the kid, wanted to ignore him and finish what he’d come to do. He had bigger things to worry about than some little sh*ts who were going to grow up and cause trouble that Joe would be too old and tired to deal with. But he couldn’t look away from the brat and those quiet, damning eyes. “I don’t want the blood of your brood of punks on my hands today, so here’s what you’re going to do,” Joe whispered into her ear. “Take all those kids and march them the f*ck out of here before things get messy. Do not say a word. Don’t yell or make a scene. Just take the kids and get the f*ck out.” Joe pressed the shotgun’s barrels tight against her face. “Nod if you understand me.” She nodded. Joe eased his fingers out of her wiry hair and gave her a little shove. “f*ck you, man,” she shouted and ran for the door. “My man’ll kill you for touchin’ me.” The kids chased after their mother, but their legs were stiff from sitting for who knew how many hours, and they moved like broken puppets. She stood in front of the fly-specked screen door, motioning for her brats to get a move on. The kid with the portable video game kept it clutched to his chest, like it was the most valuable treasure
in his crappy little world. They were almost to the door when everything went to sh*t. “Hey,” someone said, and Joe turned away from the kids and back toward the kitchen door. An aged jerky strip of a man stood in the doorway, a pistol in each hand. “You lookin’ for somethin’?” “Sally.” “Oh. That’s bad luck, man.” “Yeah?” Joe tensed and pointed his shotgun toward the idiot. “Let’s just settle down before somebody ends up with a hole where it doesn’t belong.” “Cool.” The tweaker’s arm popped up, and Joe dove for cover behind the filthy couch. A pistol roared from the kitchen, and Joe felt the buzz of the bullet over his head. Still standing in the front door, the black-haired addict fell hard, a chunk of her head missing from the outside corner of her left eye to back past her ear. Freed from the cage of her skull, her brain swelled and oozed out into the smoky air. A second shot whined past Joe’s head, and the Night Marshal flattened himself against the bug-infested carpet. The kids were still in the house, tangled up with each other and the ate-up woman’s corpse, pushing at one another in their panic. More shots tore through the air and one of the kids screamed as a bullet cleaved his hand in half. Joe watched another shot shatter the Nintendo into a million plastic splinters and punch the boy holding it right in the throat. The bullet shredded the boy’s neck apart, and his head flopped back between his shoulders, eyes staring at nothing. Joe popped around the end of the couch and unloaded both barrels into the kitchen. The hail of lead transformed the jerky man’s left arm into raw hamburger and sprayed a constellation of bloody holes across his belly. The injured man screeched and hopped around the kitchen, firing his right-hand pistol wild three more times before the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. The kids were screaming, flailing around in their panic, splashing blood all over the place. Joe couldn’t tell at a glance who was hurt and who was covered in someone else’s gore. Joe’s hate turned to ice in his chest. He didn’t know if there was enough whiskey in the world to burn away the memory of the last few seconds. He’d have time to regret the whole mess later, but he had to finish what he’d come to do, first.
The Night Marshal charged the kitchen, shotgun clenched in his right first. The jerky man threw his empty pistol at Joe, who batted it out of the air with his left hand. Joe drove the shotgun’s stock up into the man’s solar plexus. The junkie fell to his knees, gasping for breath and crying. His jaws chattered, clattering his mouth full of cracked teeth together as shock set in. Blood ran out of his mutilated arm and pooled around his knees. “I didn’t want to, man. You gotta believe me.” Joe grabbed the man by the front of his filthy wifebeater and hauled him back to his feet. “Who dealt with Walter?” Tears ran from the man’s jaundiced eyes, the only water his greasy face had seen in a month. “I don’t know Walt. Sally fixes me up, man. I didn’t want no hassle for her while she was cookin’ up a new batch for us.” Joe tossed the man aside, heard him scream as he fell onto his shredded arm. Past the kitchen Joe could see a little utility room on one side and a stairwell on the other. He headed for the stairs. The Night Marshal paused to slam more shells into the shotgun. “Sally? If you’re up there, we need to talk, girl. Nobody else needs to get hurt.” Joe crept up the stairs, shotgun out in front of him like a talisman against evil. He had no idea what was waiting for him upstairs. Might be a bunch of tweakers pissing their pants while they hid. Might be an army of methed-up psychos with machetes and machine guns. Only one way to find out. He moved slow and low, back pressed tight to the left wall of the stairway. If anyone popped up at the top of the stairs and started blazing away, Joe wanted to give them as small a target as possible. Maybe he’d get lucky, for once, and not catch a bullet. No one tried to shoot him. He reached the top of the stairs and found himself on a slim landing lined with four open doorways. The air was thick with a chemical haze, whether from someone cooking or a bunch of someone’s smoking meth, Joe didn’t have the experience to tell. He kept low and darted toward the first door. The floor was lined with filthy, naked mattresses. Filthy, naked bodies, writhed against one another atop the mattresses. Splintered fingernails picked at oozing ulcers, blistered lips worked at sallow flesh. Everything was speckled with drops of blood and crusting puddles of pus. Pale-blue lighter flames hovered under glowing glass pipes. Joe really hoped Sally wasn’t in there, because he wanted no part of picking
those freaks apart to find her. He ducked past the first doorway and peeked into the second. The room was filled with an admirable assortment of acetone-streaked pressure cookers, propane burners, and enough glassware to populate every high school chemistry lab in Missouri. The windows were open and big box fans spewed vapor from the tops of bubbling flasks out into the air, but the stench in the room still made Joe want to hold his breath forever. Looking through the maze of equipment, he could see that Bill or Sally or some other asshole had torn a hole in the wall between this room and the next one to turn two bedrooms into one big cookout. What Joe didn’t see was anyone doing the cooking. He left the lab and headed to the last door. Joe hugged the wall next to the door and called through it. “Sally, you in there?” “Yeah,” he heard a young woman’s voice answer. “Next batch ain’ ready yet.” There was a bubbling noise coming from inside the room. Joe stole a quick glance inside. Someone had blacked out the windows, and the only light came from a red LED in the far corner. The bubbling noise started again, accompanied by a faint groant. “Not here for your meth, Sally. You know Walter?” “Sure,” Sally drawled from inside the room. Her voice was thick and languid, tired, loose. “He brings the pseudo.” “What else was he bringing?” Joe couldn’t shake the feeling of doom that had stuck with him since he’d left the Lodge. The inside of his skull was painted with dead kids with shark-bite throats and skinny tweakers with arms made of tattooed hamburger. He’d be reliving this day for years. She giggled, and the bubbling sound intensified. It sounded thick, organic. “Something special. But he didn’t come. Ah, f*ck.” Something inside the room tore. It sounded like a sheet of construction paper being cut with dull scissors, a rhythmic, raspy noise that made Joe’s skin crawl. “I’m coming in, Sally.” “Better not.” Sally giggled again. “Bill’s feeling kind of, you know, frisky.” Joe slipped through the open door and swung the shotgun left to right. Nothing rushed him. Nothing moved. Downstairs, the kids had been reduced to quiet whimpering. The man with the hamburger arm had stopped making any noise at all. “Who was Walt bringing his sh*t to, Sally?” “Mmm,” she hummed deep in her throat. The bubbling intensified. She raised her
voice. “Me and Bill. We cook it up, give it to the family.” Joe rubbed his thumb around the rim of his badge, whispering a short prayer as he did so. Light, silver and clean, cut through the darkness like a scalpel through a slab of rancid butter. He moved deeper into the room, closer to Sally. She had eyes the color of the morning sky, so blue they made Joe’s heart ache. Her pupils were shrunk down to pinpricks, but she only had two of them. She stared into the light without blinking. “Hey, man, that’s not cool.” “Walter was bringing something else. The Kirshnir Marg. Little statue things, did you ever see—” Something heavy slammed into Joe’s neck, just at the base of his skull. It shattered and gouged bloody furrows down the middle of his back. His vision swam, gray and blurry, and he landed on his knees. Liquid fire poured down his back, gnawing away at his cuts. Jagged fingernails dug bloody crescents in Joe’s scalp as someone grabbed his hair. Whoever it was jerked his head back and forth, a terrier with a rat. Joe threw himself backward, slamming his weight against the legs of his tormentor. A mass of wires and hose tangled around his shoulders and head. A high-pitched burbling screech came from behind him. Joe grabbed a handful of the mess around his shoulders and jerked it forward. Something hot and sticky spilled down the back of his neck. “You’re hurting him,” Sally said, her emotionless voice falling strange on Joe’s ears. The hand let go of Joe’s hair, and the Night Marshal got himself back onto his feet. A tall man was staggering around, jittering hands trying to push a hose back into a bloody hole in the side of his chest. “You must be Bill,” Joe said and scrubbed a hand down over his stubbly chin. Bill pushed the tube in, but it went in too deep and before he could back it out, Joe saw bloody sludge spurt into the translucent rubber. “Nng,” Bill moaned. He couldn’t speak, because his lower jaw and tongue had been replaced with a collection of flexible plastic tubes and coiled wires that disappeared down the gaping hole of his throat. Other pipes ran out of him, ending in plastic bags filled with murky fluids or looping out of sight behind him. Sally crawled over to Bill, but she was clumsy from drugs and whatever panic
could penetrate her numbed brain. “I think you done killed him.” Bill slumped down on his dingy bed. His hands were loose in his lap, catching the blood that fell from the torn holes where Joe had ripped out the tubes and wires. His left eye went wide as he glared at Joe, and three burning pupils flared in the dim room. “There was an accident,” Sally said. She sat next to Bill and patted his head. “Explosion. Bill was gonna die. Walter said he could get us help.” “Who? Who was he working with?” Sally gestured toward the lab. “Cookin’ meth’s dangerous, you know? We got propane and acetone and all kinds of sh*t in there.” “Just tell me who he was working with. I’ll go get them. They can help him again.” Joe didn’t care if they could patch Bill back together or not, but he hoped Sally would be dumb enough to tell him who they were working with. It’d make his job a lot simpler. “You done this. They said you would. Said you didn’t give a sh*t about any of us.” “That’s not true. What they’re doing is wrong. It’s evil. I’m trying to help.” “Help? sh*t. They fixed Bill when we was sure he was gonna die. Now you gone and killed him.” Joe’s neck ached from the glassware Bill had smashed against it. He was so tired. He pulled on the supernatural strength that was his by right, but it was like trying to suck ice cream through a straw. His forehead itched with a sudden phantom pain, and he turned his attention back to the tweakers. “Help me stop them, before it’s too late.” “Already too late. They was right about you, I guess.” Sally kissed Bill on the side of his bloody face. “It’ll only hurt for a little bit, baby.” Bill nodded. “Help me put an end to this. No one else needs to get hurt.” Joe felt everything sliding away from him. He needed Sally to talk to him, but he didn’t have any way to make it happen. She was so far gone now she had nothing left to fear. Joe had taken away the only person she’d ever really cared about. “Ain’ nobody gonna help you, Marshal. Not now.” There was a small hiss and a pop. Sally’s left hand flashed through the air, and something shot at Joe’s head. He ducked low, letting the little butane torch fly past. Joe watched the brilliant blue
flame twirl through the air, sailing through the rough door someone had hacked through the wall between Bill’s bedroom and his meth lab. “f*ck you,” Sally whispered as something in the lab caught fire. Orange flames flared red and began to spread. “f*ck me,” Joe agreed. The Night Marshal ran.
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tevie approached her children with slow, careful steps. The floor was littered with S mutilated bat carcasses, torn wings, rib cages yawning open liked hungry jaws. Stevie felt a heavy, damp pressure on her skin, as if all of the blood spilled in this room still hung in the air. She brushed the skins and bones and blood-soaked sheets away from Alasdair with the edge of her foot. Al took long, slow breaths, his ribs expanding, spreading open the wounds that dotted his sides and back, to reveal their rich, red interiors. His muscles jumped under his skin like a dreaming dog’s, and his breaths took on a ragged, growling edge. She squatted an arm’s length from Al and stretched her hand toward her son. She brushed his ankle, and his skin was cold and sticky under her fingertips. Stevie pushed against her boy, jostling his legs in the hopes it would wake him. He didn’t stir. Weight settled into Stevie’s chest, crushing her breaths, slowing her blood. She crawled to Elsa and wrapped her arms around the little girl. Stevie untangled her children and stood with Elsa held tight to her chest. “Mama,” Elsa said and buried her face against Stevie’s shoulder. “It’s okay, let me get you out of here, get you some fresh air.” Stevie walked as she whispered to her daughter. She was almost to the bedroom door when it slammed in her face. Al groaned behind her, a thick, animal sound heavy with fatigue. Stevie closed her fist around the door knob and gave it a twist, but the door wouldn’t budge. “Al,” she raised her voice. “Get up.”
Elsa stirred against her mother. Her tiny hands shoved against Stevie’s chest, and she kicked. “Let me go.” Stevie hugged her daughter tighter and backed away from the door. She leaned against the foot of Joe’s big bed and turned Elsa so she could see her face. The little girl’s brows were furrowed, but her eyes were still clamped shut with welling tears in their corners. “Let me go,” the little girl begged, but there were other voices within and below her own. A humming hive of insect noises. The sound poured like ice down Stevie’s spine. “Mom?” Al crawled to the edge of the bed. Moving caused fresh blood to leak from his wounds, and red tears trickled down his arms and thighs. He wrapped his bleeding arms around his mother and sister, curled up onto the bed around them. “What’s happening? The torn bat wings fluttered up from the floor in shredded pairs, hovering around the huddled family like blood-dripping harlequin masks. “They need room,” Elsa gasped the words and they were hers alone. “There isn’t room for us all in here. Help me make room.” Stevie slapped Elsa’s cheeks. “Let go,” she commanded, her voice heavy with the authority she’d inherited from the Bog Witch. “Release her, spirits, and return to your rightful places.” Elsa’s jaw fell open and dozens of voices rose out of her like echoes from the depths of a well. We The bat-wing masks fluttered in the air and loomed ever closer. Shall The discarded and dripping sheets shredded into bloody strands that wound themselves into cords and cracked the air like whips. Not Bones worked free from bat carcasses and spun around the perimeter of the room like a wall of churning needles. Stevie pressed her index and middle fingers onto Elsa’s tongue, pulled her hanging jaw open, and peered down the little girl’s throat. She could see the shadows churning deep inside her daughter. Countless restless spirits had taken root within Elsa, and they were not willing to leave. The sheer number of greedy ghosts threatened to displace the
little girl’s spirit. Without a body to anchor her, she would fall away and fade from the Earth long before her proper time. “You will leave my daughter of your own will,” Stevie pushed Al back to make room and laid Elsa down on the bed with her head pointing to the east. “Or you shall be torn loose and cast asunder.” The disembodied wings swooped in closer to Stevie, clinging to her face and hands. She pulled them away, and Al helped her. He plucked the bloody scraps from her and tore them into bloody clumps that he threw to the floor. We shall not. Their words were a rebuke of Stevie’s power, a denial of her birthright. She would not stand for their rebellion. She was the Bog Witch, the daughter of the night, get of the mad Goat King, and her power would not be denied by the restless dead. Stevie straddled Elsa and held her hands before the girl’s mouth and nose. Old words, an exorcism ancient when the church was still little more than a man and his rabble-rousing friends, rumbled in her chest like grinding rocks and pulled the first of the tormented ghosts out of Elsa. The spirit rose from the little girl’s mouth in a gout of black smoke. Stevie seized it with hooked fingers. It was like grabbing the business end of a running belt sander. Stevie’s fingertips stung as the surface layer of her skin was stripped away. She unleashed a word of subduing that cracked the corners of her mouth into a bloody grin, and the spirit throbbed and went limp in her clutches. Stevie reeled it out of Elsa like a knotted black thread, slow and careful. This is what she had always been meant to do. It was her birthright to command the dead. Stevie bent her will to the task and felt her power rising to the challenge. The smoke stretched between Elsa and Stevie, growing thinner as the last of it was pulled from the girl. With a quick flick of her wrist, Stevie had the thing free of Elsa and wrapped into a tight ball of shadows writhing between her palms. Elsa coughed and hitched under her mother. Blood sprayed Stevie’s face, a hot mist that clung to her eyes and tasted like tears on her lips. Another cough, and more of Elsa’s blood misted into the air. We will kill her. The spirits’ words throbbed through the room like the voice of thunder. If you drive us out, she will join our number and fall to ruin with us.
Stevie crushed the ball of smoke between her palms, forcing it down and in until it was no bigger than a marble. Her eyes were hot with unspilled tears. For all her power, the spirits inside her daughter had more tricks than she had believed. “You’re already killing her,” she choked. “There isn’t room in there for all of you and her. Just leave her in peace.” There is no peace. The shadows hunger. We are their prey. Elsa’s body convulsed, and blood bubbled up into her mouth and trickled over her lips. Stevie turned the girl’s head to the side to keep her from choking on her own blood. Elsa’s skin was pale, her pulse a trip hammer beat pushing at the side of her neck. Stevie could feel the spirits inside her daughter, tearing at her, stretching her soul. She could pull them out of her daughter, but they would kill Elsa before the task was complete. Her shoulders slumped, and her clenched fists shook with fear and rage. “Tell me what you want.” Stevie shouted to be heard over the growing tide of murmuring voices. Her ears rang with the throng of confused voices that filled Joe’s bedroom. It was like standing in a crowd of the fearful and blind, each person crying out, all trying to find that one person they knew, that one warm body they could cling to. “What can I do to save my daughter?” Help us. Hide us from the Haunter in the Darkness. Shield us from the half-made girls and their terrible hunger. “Tell me how. Show me the way to save you. Don’t kill my baby.” Stevie’s voice cracked and sounded all the louder in the sudden silence. The whirling wall of bones fell to the floor. The sheets wound themselves into a tight ball and hovered in the center of the room. The masks gathered around it. The Long Man knows. Go to him. Stevie shook her head. “I can’t. You don’t understand what he is.” Then the girl dies. Elsa gagged on her own blood. Thick, red tears leaked from her eyes. The black phone rang, a shrill, insistent braying from the far side of Joe’s oversized bed. “There has to be another way. Please. Don’t make me do this.” The masks blackened and turned to ash. Mold spores boiled across the surface of the blood-stained sheets, and the tight ball decayed before Stevie’s eyes.
The phone rang. Stevie crawled off Elsa and crossed the bed. Her hand refused to reach for the phone. The black handset was forbidden. It had never rung when Joe was gone. The phone rang. “Please. Anything else. There has to be another way.” Black streaks grew up the sides of Elsa’s neck, and her lips pulled back from her blood-stained teeth. Stevie lifted the receiver.
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ire blew through the meth lab like a cannon shot. Jugs of acetone ignited with dull F thumps that splattered burning fuel in all directions. Overheated oxygen tanks popped their regulators and burst through the house’s thin walls, throwing stunned and burning junkies into crumpled piles. By the time Joe was halfway to the stairs, the mattress room was vomiting a steady stream of meth heads, half of them covered in blood while the others screamed and beat at the flames gnawing at their bodies. They screeched and shoved at each other, all of them trying to get to safety but only managing to block the stairs with their struggles while red-streaked clouds of toxic black smoke roiled across the ceiling. Joe didn’t have time to calm the meth heads and get them moving down the stairs before the fire killed them all. He pointed the shotgun at the ceiling over their heads and jerked the left trigger, filling the air with thunder and bringing down a rain of moldy plaster. “f*cking move,” he shouted. The threat of violence got the meth heads stumbling away from Joe and down the stairs. The Night Marshal helped them along with shouted threats and shoves that kept the panicked herd moving in the right direction. Joe stumbled onto the first floor behind the junkies and caught a lungful of bad air. The fire had chewed through the ceiling and dumped a blazing tangle of lab equipment and pressurized tanks of liquid fertilizer onto the ground floor. The sight of those tanks sucked the wind from Joe’s sails and dried his mouth. He had to get out of there before the anhydrous ammonia overheated and turned the house and an acre around it into a smoking crater. Joe scrambled away from the living room and the screaming junkies
trying to beat the fire off their clothes or get around the wreckage to reach the front door. Terrified tweakers blocked every exit Joe could see. They were clogging the broken kitchen windows, wedging themselves tight in the frames and cutting themselves to bloody ribbons on the shards of glass. The kitchen continued to fill as the crowd from upstairs hit into the burning bottleneck in the living room and doubled back in search of another escape route. Smoke boiled out of the living room and filled the top half of the kitchen with a seething black cloud. Joe threw himself over the kitchen table, rolling and kicking the junkies out of his way as he came down on the other side. He hoped his guess was right and bulled his way into the utility room he’d spotted earlier. It was little more than a hall crowded by a rusting washing machine and disassembled dryer, both victims of meth head fiddling. But at the end of that crowded little room Joe saw the door he’d been hoping to find. He squeezed past the dead appliances, kicked it open, and took a deep breath of clean air. He was out. Almost. “Hi, Sunshine. Been lookin’ for you, baby,” the woman on the back porch said with an alligator smile filled with cracked and rotting teeth. She slammed the heel of her cowboy boot into Joe’s gut hard enough to double him over, then brought both her hands up under his chin to send him staggering backward. Joe’s feet tangled, and he landed on his ass inside the house. His lungs gulped for air, but got choking smoke instead. His eyes watered, and he crawled away from his attacker, pushing past the dryer, going deeper into the utility room. He needed some distance, room to work his shotgun. The screams inside were fading away as meth heads escaped or succumbed to smoke or flames. A pointy-toed kick to the ribs flipped Joe onto his side. The woman crouched down next to him and waved a curved knife in his face. She smacked him on the side of the head with its deer-antler handle before he could defend himself. “Where’s the sh*t you took from Walter?” Joe shook his head and managed to get a clean breath from the air coming in through the back door. He was trapped on the floor between the maniac with the knife and the washing machine. “I don’t have your pseudo.” The girl pressed the tip of the knife against Joe’s chin. “I do love my crystal, but
that is not what I’m after, and you know it.” Joe’s shotgun dug into his back where he’d fallen and pinned it underneath him. He searched the girl’s wide, wild eyes and found the three pupils he was looking for. “I don’t have it.” The knife nicked Joe’s chin. “Where is it?” Joe’s head throbbed as the smoke choked his brain. How had this woman known where to find him, and how did she know what he’d taken from Walter? “Somewhere safe.” The screaming had died down, giving way to the piercing wail of a lost child. The meth heads were dead or fled, leaving the rug rat behind to fend for himself. Joe imagined one of the little boys looking for his mom or dad, splattered with the blood of his dead friend, choking on chemical smoke. He ground his teeth and clenched his fists. “Easy, cowboy. Tell me where the sh*t is, and I’ll get the kid out of here. Scout’s honor.” “Even if I tell you where it is, you’ll never be able to get your hands on it. It’s gone, better to forget about it.” She wiggled the knife in front of his left eye. “I don’t think you get it. They’re offering big money and a place at the table for the lucky girl who brings that sh*t back home. I’m gonna be that girl if I have to skin you alive to get what I want.” “Why not just take me, instead? I’m what they’re really after, right?” The woman grinned and poked the tip of her tongue through a gap in her blackened teeth. “You’ll get yours, but you don’t mean sh*t to them right now.” Heat from the growling fire sucked the spit from Joe’s mouth, and thickening clouds of corrosive smoke scratched the back of his throat. He coughed, loud and hacking, bending hard at the waist. For a split second, the cough brought Joe inside the woman’s reach, and the knife was behind him. He didn’t have time to wait for another chance. Joe threw his weight into the woman, knocking her off her feet. She swung her knife, and Joe smashed his left shoulder into her arm, pinning it against the far wall of the utility room. The woman punched up at Joe with her free hand, but there wasn’t room between them to make the blows count. The kid choked and gagged, then went right back to wailing.
Joe grabbed the shotgun strap and yanked the weapon around with his right hand. He jammed the barrels into the woman’s throat. She froze. “Drop it.” She stared at him, her devil’s eye unblinking and brimming with tears of frustrated rage, but she released the knife. “My turn to ask questions.” “Blow me. Got nothin’ to say to you.” Joe ground his shoulder against her forearm until she winced. “Who are they?” A racking cough interrupted the kid’s wail, and when he went back to screaming it was little more than an exhausted whine. Joe heard the stuttering whistle of the anhydrous tanks’ pressure release valves spurting poison steam. “That kid doesn’t sound like he’s doing too good.” The smoke gathered around them, raking at Joe’s eyes and throat. “Who wants the sh*t I took from Walter?” He couldn’t take his eyes off her extra pupils. She was his best lead, a direct tie to the people behind the half-made girls. All he had to do was sweat her a little longer. Kids were tough. The boy could wait. “You better get that kid out of here. Be a shame if he died while you were busy threatening a girl.” On cue, the kid coughed and wheezed in a strangled breath. He was fading fast. “Last chance,” Joe pressed the shotgun hard against the woman’s throat. Her smile never faltered. “I don’t hear him crying anymore, Marshal.” Joe dropped the shotgun and let it hang from its sling. Before she could react, he jerked forward and smashed his elbow into her forehead. Her eyes snapped shut like he’d flipped a switch. Without looking back, Joe scuttled from the utility room on all fours. The smoke was so low there wasn’t more than two feet of clean air left near the floor. He could grab the kid, drag the woman outside. Have his cake and eat a tasty slice, too. If he could find the boy. Joe circled the kitchen, but the brat wasn’t there. The release valves on the anhydrous tanks were letting out solid teakettle shrieks now. Joe crawled into the living room and started working his way around the edge. The fire in the center of the room shrank his skin against his skull, and he was sure he could
feel his brain sizzling. Without oxygen his brain’s gears were slipping, his thoughts falling back on themselves. By the time he found the kid, it took him an extra second to remember what he was supposed to do. The boy didn’t weigh more than thirty pounds, but Joe had to stop several times while dragging him over the filthy carpet and through the kitchen. Every time he stopped, every time he lay down to catch his breath, Joe was sure he was living his last moment, that the fertilizer would explode and scatter his scorched bones across the crystal farm’s back acreage. “C’mon, kid,” he panted and lugged the kid into the utility room. The woman was gone. Joe was too tired to care. The kid stirred at the first taste of clean air the greedy fire sucked in through the back door. Joe hauled them both through the open door and onto the splintered planks of the back porch. An explosion tore the roof off the house, and Joe flattened himself on top of the boy. Propane. Bad news, but they weren’t dead yet. Joe staggered to his feet and grabbed the kid by one arm and one leg. He half ran, half fell down the porch steps, slinging the kid over his shoulders as he went. The shriek of the pressure release valves sounded like death’s alarm clock in Joe’s ears. His choices were simple: run or die. He ran. The explosion threw Joe forward, a giant’s hand shoving him off his feet and sending him tumbling across the weedy ground. The blue sky vanished beneath a veil of red smoke, and the world caught fire.
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hick fingers of black and red smoke raked at the blue sky, casting long shadows T across the land around the burning farm. Joe lay flat on his back and watched the smoke crawl overhead while he stretched his jaw and waited for the pressure in his ears to balance out so he could hear something other than the ringing in his head. A face thrust itself into Joe’s vision, and it took a moment to realize it was the kid from the fire. The boy’s eyes were wide and white in the mask of soot that covered the rest of his face. He was moving his mouth and pointing at something, but Joe didn’t have the energy to figure it out. The kid was insistent, grabbing Joe’s arm and digging in his heels, trying to pull the Night Marshal. Joe shook the kid off, but knew he’d better figure out what was going on. He sat up and blinked, trying to make sense of what he saw. Someone was coming. They leapt through a puddle of fire, and Joe saw a flash of silver. It was the woman with the knife, come back to finish him off. She homed in on him like a guided missile, unerring even through the thick smoke, as if she had some sixth sense pointing her nose straight at the Night Marshal. “sh*t,” Joe said. He couldn’t hear himself or the kid, but the boy was back to tugging on his arm. He stood up and realized his shotgun was gone, along with the sling that had kept it attached to him. Joe still had the knife he’d taken from Frank Blackbriar back at the bar; by some miracle it was still tucked into his belt and hadn’t skewered him. He slid it free and held it with the tip jutting down from his clenched fist. He wasn’t much of a knife fighter, but Joe supposed it was better to have some weapon than to face the maniac unarmed.
The kid tugged at Joe’s arm again, and the Night Marshal gave him a gentle shove. The girl with the knife was a twenty feet away and coming on strong, her arms and legs pumping as she ran through fires. “Get out of here, kid.” Joe felt his legs wobbling. His balance was off, something was wrong with his ears. He didn’t like his chances in this fight. The kid threw himself against Joe’s knees, driving the Night Marshal off his feet. Joe cursed and tried to kick the kid away, but he was already on his back. He saw the girl coming at him, leaping into the air with the knife clenched in both hands above her head. Joe didn’t want his last sight to be of the meth freak who wanted to kill him. He closed his eyes and thought of Stevie, of Elsa and Alasdair. He remembered the way Stevie’s hands felt on his scalp and shoulders, the sting of the needle and tug of the thread passing through his flesh as she stitched him closed. He felt Elsa’s slight weight in his arms and Al’s firm handshake. Something wet and heavy hit Joe’s abdomen and splattered onto his face and chest. He’d been stabbed before. This didn’t feel like a knife wound. Joe opened his eyes and lifted his head to find a pair of severed legs laying across his own. He looked a bit farther down and saw the maniac’s staring eyes and grisly slash of a mouth poking out from under a the top half of a charred and ruptured propane tank. Joe flopped back and looked up at the sky. Sometimes he could almost believe someone up there was looking out for him. “Mister,” the kid’s voice managed to cut through the ringing at last. Joe turned his head and found the kid squatting in the scorched weeds next to his head. Joe started and gave the boy a push. “Damn, kid, you trying to give me a heart attack?” “Can you take me to see my daddy?” The kid sat on his haunches, hugging his knees. He didn’t have a shirt and reminded Joe of a baby bird kicked out of the nest too soon. Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. “Are you going to cry?” Joe sat up and watched the kid’s eyes filling up with tears. “Don’t. Knock that sh*t off.” The kid nodded and scrubbed his eyes with his hands before the tears could spill down his cheeks. Joe nodded back and got to his feet, yawning wide to relieve the pressure in his
ears. Something popped inside his head, and the ringing subsided. He took a look at the maniac and shook his head. One of the propane tanks had exploded and taken off like a rocket. It had come down just as the unlucky girl hit midleap and cut her clean in half. Joe walked over and took the horn-handled knife out of her bloody fingers. He stuffed it into his belt along with the knife he’d taken from Frank and walked back over to the kid. “Who’s your old man?” Joe asked. “Gary Warren.” The kid looked up at Joe with a mixture of hope and fear stamped on his face. Joe looked back at the farmhouse, or where the farmhouse had been. Now all that was left was a shallow crater surrounded by flattened debris, burning weeds, blackened bodies, and screaming meth heads. Joe wondered how many were still in the house when it went up, how many others had been killed by explosions or flying shrapnel. “Never heard of him.” “Tall guy, bushy hair.” The kid mimed a poufy cloud of hair around his own buzz cut. “Only three fingers on one hand.” Joe watched the road for any sign of the sheriff or fire department. Nothing so far. “No idea.” “You gotta know him. Ya’ll got the same knife.” The kid pointed at Joe’s waist. “Only the special folks got them knives.” “Yeah?” Joe tapped the antler handles and nodded toward the bisected woman. “The idiots I took them from didn’t seem too special.” “They are. Only people who go up to the place with the sticker bushes can get them. Only them’s invited.” The kid dug a clot of wax out of his ear with his filthy index finger. “Know what I’m sayin’?” Joe tapped the knives on his belt. The Pryor boy had tried to kill Joe with a knife like this. Frank had tried to do the same back at the bar. And now this maniac. “Where’d you say the knives come from?” “That place with the sticker bushes all over. Hard to drive up to, with them scrapin’ up the sides of the road.” He licked the nugget of wax off his fingertip and made a face like he’d gnawed a rotten lemon. “I mean, you been there, right?” Joe nodded. He knew exactly where the kid was talking about and wanted to kick himself for not putting it together at the bar. Might have saved a bunch of lives. “The
Blackbriar place.” The kid’s eyes widened, and he clapped his hands together. “Yep, that’s it. Daddy’s up there today, left me down here with his girlfriend.” “I’m not taking you up there.” Joe poked around in the brush for his shotgun. He needed to get out of here before the law showed up and he had to spend the rest of the day explaining just how the house had gotten blown up, but he was not leaving without that gun. He was pretty sure he’d need it soon. “Why not?” The kid got up and poked around in the bushes, too, mimicking Joe. “What’re we looking for?” “My shotgun.” Joe stopped, gave the kid a hard look. “Do not f*cking touch it.” “I got a shotgun.” “Sure.” Joe found his gun hidden amid a smoldering clump of narrowleaf plantains and fished it out. “My daddy’s got a bunch of shotguns.” The kid was right behind Joe. He reached around and picked up one of the plantain weeds. The kid formed a quick noose with the weed’s stem and jerked the blossoming head against it, shooting the plantain’s seeds into a small spot of fire. “Mama had a baby and its head popped off.” The kid grinned. “Why’d you kill those people back there?” He followed Joe across the blasted acreage. Joe walked back toward the house and crossed his fingers in the hope that his old truck hadn’t been blown up by the exploding meth lab. “They were bad people.” “Why?” The kid followed Joe past a cluster of cowering meth heads who were poking and prodding at one another’s wounds as if trying to figure out who was hurt the worst. The boy didn’t even bother looking at the spectacle. “They’re doing some very bad things. That makes them bad people.” Joe picked his way through the worst of the wreckage around the crater and was relieved to find his truck more or less unscathed where he’d left it. That truck had more lives than a cat. “I knew some of ‘em. They’d give me Snickers sometimes.” The kid chewed at the inside of his lip. “Guess most of ‘em are dead now. But they was my daddy’s friends.” “You say your dad had a knife like this?” Joe leaned against his truck and kept an eye on the scattered addicts. They were watching him with wary eyes, but no one
seemed like they had the gumption to get up to any shenanigans. The boy nodded and sat in the gravel in front of Joe. He plucked up little rocks and threw them at his own toes. “They give him one after he helped ‘em down at that church.” Joe felt a twinge of guilt in his gut. Here he was pumping this kid for information, a kid he was going to turn into an orphan sometime later that afternoon if everything went right. “Down at Red Oak?” The kid nodded and gave a little shiver. “My daddy drove her down there. She was tired and sick. They made her well again. He told me all about it.” Joe crouched down to bring his eyes closer to the boy’s face. “Did you see that girl?” The kid shook his head and hummed a weird little tune that sent spider legs of fear crawling up the back of Joe’s neck. “Nah, just heard about it. They said we’d make her better, and she’d help us out.” “That’s wrong.” Joe gripped the kid’s shoulder and held it tight. “That girl is going to wreck everything if I don’t stop her.” The kid shrugged. “Why?” “She’s like a mosquito.” The boy pursed his lips and gave Joe a skeptical glance. “Ain’ afraid of no skeeter.” “She’s like a mosquito with a mile-long sucker, and she’ll stick it right in this county’s heart and suck it dry.” Joe snorted the ashes out of his nose. It was more complex than that, as near as he could figure from the dead words Elsa had whispered to him. The half-made girls changed the world, made it more to their master’s liking at the expense of everyone and everything else around them. They were evil genies just waiting for some rubes to rub their lamps and make some wishes. Joe shuddered to think of the kind of stupid sh*t a bunch of meth addicts would want and what cost it would carry for the rest of the county. If he didn’t stop them, he had a feeling all of Pitchfork County would look like the wreckage of the farm in a matter of days. “Daddy says that she’s here to help out. Gonna put things back the way they used to be in the olden days.” Joe let the kid go and stood up, both his knees cracking like rifle shots. “That’s one way to look at it. I gotta go, kid.”
“You won’t take me up to see my daddy? Jenny was supposed to take me up there, but…” The kid looked around at the wreckage and gave a little hitch of his shoulders. “Pretty sure she’s dead. You could take me. Maybe we could see that girl, and she’d make everything all better.” Joe unlocked the truck and yanked the door open. He took a last look at the kid and chewed the inside of his lower lip. He wanted to tell the boy to run and get as far from Pitchfork County as he could. He wanted to shake the kid and tell him that his daddy was an evil asshole who was willing to kill everyone he knew to make his own life a little bit better. He wanted to tell the boy he was sorry, but that he was going up to the Blackbriar place to put a slug through the old man’s forehead. “That girl’s a monster, son.” Joe tried to put together some sort of warning that would make sense to the boy. “What your daddy did makes her stronger. Let her bring some more of her friends over to play.” The boy grinned up at Joe. “That’s what they said. Said they were gonna have a big ol’ party and all her family was comin’ over to play. Said it was gonna be a new world, real soon.”
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he Blackbriar place wasn’t a farm or a meth lab, just a big old house owned by a T once-rich family that had fallen hard into the pit of poverty that had swallowed all of Pitchfork County. In the early days, back when Pitchfork County was still empty except for the hardy men of Iron Valley, the Blackbriar clan had run three iron mines and a lone silver mine. The profits they’d first wrenched from the earth and later wrung from the sweat and blood of their workers had built them a home with room for generations of Blackbriars. But the mines ran dry, and the patriarch, old Hawer Blackbriar, caught the cancer. The combination had sucked the coins out of the family’s account in less than a generation. Once upon a time, a long strip of blacktop had run from the county road all the way up the big hill to the Blackbriar place, their own private road. Now that smooth lane was pocked with craters, and the asphalt had shrunk down to a few scabs of faded black amid a stream of gray gravel. Blackberry bushes, nearly ten feet tall, crowded the road, the rich juice of their berries staining the edges of the road like spilled wine. Joe’s old truck crouched in the shadows of a turnout just down from Blackbriar Road. The Night Marshal leaned on the wheel and nursed the last of a bottle of Jack he’d picked up from the Whistle Stop on the way out. The whiskey quieted the tremors in his hands, but did nothing to quench the dark fires of fear and rage burning in his gut. The cab stank of Walter’s blood, and Joe’s clothes and hair were heavy with the perfume of gunpowder and ashes. Every breath drew the stench deeper inside him, filled his lungs with tiny, reeking bits of those he’d killed and those he’d watched scream themselves to death as fire cooked them down to piles of greasy bones.
He was just doing his job, but Joe couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d taken a bad step, slipped off the path somewhere and all of this misery and ruin had taken root in that one bad moment. “f*ck it,” he said, and got out of the truck. The shotgun’s sling rode easy around his shoulder, and the weight of the gun was reassuring against his hip. An old canvas satchel went over the opposite shoulder, stuffed with shotgun shells and vials of holy water and a trio of punching knives with silvered edges. There were even a few old scrolls with Bible verses he’d scrawled in his own hand, weapons that would give spirits he couldn’t shoot pause. He had his whole devil-hunting arsenal in that bag. Joe didn’t bother locking the truck, just threw the keys under the front seat, shut the door, and started walking. The hill up to the Blackbriar place was steeper and taller than he remembered. While he wasn’t foolish enough to stroll up the main road, that seemed more appealing with every step Joe took. The blackberry bushes had spread through the brush all over the hill, and sticker branches clutched at his face and arms, scoring bloody scratches in his flesh with every step. Joe ignored the pain. He felt he’d earned it. The walk caked his throat with dust and pollen, his breaths came harsh and shallow. Joe didn’t figure he had much voice left, but that was all right. The shotgun would do most of the talking. “You reckon this is the best idea?” The voice was thin as an autumn breeze, but strong enough to stop Joe in his tracks. Joe brushed his forehead against his shoulder to wipe away the sweat and dust and took a seat at the base of a runty hickory tree. He dug the booze out of his satchel and took a swallow so long and deep it brought tears to his eyes. “I don’t even think this is in the top hundred of my best ideas,” Joe said. “But it’s not like I’ve been offered a lot of choices.” “Choices are made, not offered.” The voice gained a little strength and a lot of peevishness. “Pour out a little for your old man.” Joe dug his thumb into the moist earth and poured a shot of whiskey into the hole, covered it up by sweeping dirt over it with the side of his hand. He raised his bottle in a vague toast and took a drink. “Figured you’d passed on a while back.” “Did. But you never really get out of Pitchfork. Place has a pull.” Joe grunted and took another drink. He wanted the whiskey to drive the old man
away so he could get on with his chore. “Might as well keep walkin’. I’ll follow along.” The hill got steeper, and Joe’s heart pounded against his ribs like a wild animal stuck in a trap. He wasn’t as young as he’d once been; even the Long Man couldn’t keep a bad heart or weak lungs from taking a man down if it was his time. “Why now?” he asked his father. “After all these years of nothing, why come back and stick your nose into my business today?” “Didn’t seem like you needed my help before today. You kept a pretty strong hand on the reins after I passed.” Joe stopped and looked into the shadow of a blackberry bush, hoping to catch a glimpse of the old man. A rabbit watched him from the underbrush, gray ears twitching. “You think I need your help now?” “I’ve got no help to offer. Just words.” A sudden wind ruffled the hair on Joe’s neck and tugged at his collar. “They know you’re comin’.” “Yeah. Figured as much.” Joe trudged on for a few more minutes, and the slope gave way to a gentler rise. The underbrush thinned, and through the grasping branches of dead trees Joe caught a glimpse of the Blackbriar place framed in fading red light from the setting sun. It was huge, four stories, at least a dozen bedrooms, no telling what else it held. “Any last words of advice?” “It doesn’t have to —” The shrill chirp of Walter’s phone cut through the quiet like a buzz saw. Joe fumbled around for it, finally dug it out of his pocket. He didn’t recognize the number, didn’t have time to worry about it now. He shut off the phone and crammed it into his pocket. He stopped in the shade of an old oak tree and watched the house. It was quiet, no voices from inside it, no radio playing, no TV blaring. Just a cold, heavy quiet. Joe put his hand on his shotgun and stepped onto the lawn. “See you soon, Daddy.”
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lsa’s slight body felt like it was packed with lead, and Stevie struggled under her E weight. Draping Elsa over her shoulder was the only way she could hang onto her baby girl. The incessant, bug-like chatter of the spirits leaking out of Elsa’s open mouth didn’t help matters; the swarm of voices distracted Stevie and made her feel weak and helpless. She staggered to her old car while Al ran ahead of her and fumbled with the keys to the car. He struggled to get the doors open, and Stevie sighed impatiently, the Long Man’s last words stinging her ears. “My doors close at sundown, Stevie.” The Rambler was cobbled together from so many spare parts and junkyard relics it was only a distant relative of its namesake. The station wagon was three different colors if you didn’t count the lacework of rust along its side panels, and its windows were scarred by gravel dings, but Stevie kept the engine ready to roll. She’d had the car since she turned sixteen, a gift from one of her mother’s wandering lovers, and treated it like she’d never have another to call her own. Al hustled past his mother to lift the hatchback. “Sorry,” he mumbled as he watched his baby sister’s limp body laid into the back of the old car. “You want me to sit back here with her?” Stevie pulled the hatchback closed. “No. Sit up front with me. Tell me what happened.” Al didn’t have time to close his door before Stevie spun the Rambler around in a tight circle and pointed it toward the strip of gravel that passed for a road in front of the big house. The heavy wagon bounced up onto the road, and the big V-8 roared as
Stevie’s foot sank the accelerator to the floor. “Bats,” Al shivered on the bench seat next to his mother. He rubbed at the flaking scabs on his arms and tried to ignore the deep ache in his back from the injury he’d suffered at the Pryor Place. He could still feel it under his skin, chewing, digging, burrowing. “There were so many bats.” Stevie didn’t speak. She could see the pain in Al’s eyes, the haunted distance she’d seen in his father over the years. There were some experiences that couldn’t be shared or questioned. “I couldn’t kill them all. They just kept coming, there was nothing —” He caught his breath and blinked tears away. The next words were shaky and uncertain, as if Al couldn’t make sense of what he’d seen. “Elsa opened the door. She was screaming. So many voices. The shadows came alive, but the bats were still eating me alive. Then her mask broke.” Al watched the sun sinking off to the west, its ruddy light spilling like blood through the clouds. “They went into her. I’ve never seen so many. She screamed and screamed.” “It’s not your fault,” Stevie whispered, but she didn’t have the strength to make the words sound true. Elsa was special, her precious baby girl, and no one could protect her. “They took advantage of her, used her to get what they wanted.” “She sent me after you. That’s when they came after us. Because I tried to help you.” The accusation in Al’s voice hit Stevie like a lash. Her eyes stung with unshed tears. She didn’t dare look at her son. “You should have stayed with her.” The words were out before Stevie could bite them back, and she couldn’t form the sentence that would take them back. They didn’t speak to each other for the rest of the trip. Guilt and anger and weary resignation made the air in the car too thin to support apologies. Stevie ignored the big dogs pacing the Rambler as she drove up to the Lodge. She’d never seen them before, but there was plenty of strangeness she had seen. She’d been to the Lodge twice before, both times as Joe’s guest. The first time she came so the Long Man could study her, and she remembered his penetrating gaze holding her in place like an entomology pin through a butterfly’s wing. The second time Joe had asked her along to study the Long Man, and she remembered the cold, bottomless pit of his soul. She didn’t trust him, but she believed he could help her daughter.
He met them in the big circle drive in front of the Lodge, pale arms crossed over his slender chest. He opened Stevie’s door and helped her from the Rambler with a gentle hand that chilled her arm from the tips of her fingers to her shoulder. “Bring her in. We’ll see what we can do.” The giant dogs swirled around Al, sniffing at his palms and legs, rubbing themselves against him with such force they almost dumped him over. Al opened the door and took his sister from the back of the car, straining to lift her impossible weight. Stevie put her hand on his shoulder at the door to the Lodge. He looked down at his mother and tried to give her a reassuring smile, but the muscles in his jaw were too tight. “You’re changing,” she said and dragged Elsa from his grasp. The Long Man ushered Stevie and Elsa into the house, but barred the door with one outstretched hand when Al tried to follow. “This is no place for the likes of you,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “You’ll be more comfortable out here.” The door closed, and Al hunkered down with the black beasts milling about him. They lapped the blood from his skin with their great, pink tongues, and he scratched at the backs of their enormous heads. As the horizon swallowed the sun, Al raised a long, mournful howl to the coming night.
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atching the house for movement, Joe went over his three step plan. Get into the W house. Find evidence of Left-Hand Path bullsh*t. Kill the tainted. The bald hilltop offered Joe no cover as he made his way up to the Blackbriar place. As soon as he stepped onto the weed-strewn yard, he felt the pressure of a crosshairs over his heart. He ducked his head low and hustled toward the hulking house, hoping he still had the advantage of surprise. He kept trying to reassure himself that he still had a chance, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the big old house was watching him, waiting for him to draw within striking range. Joe made it to the back corner of the house and flattened himself against the weathered river stone wall. His hands shook as he fished the old silver flask out of his satchel, and he managed to splash himself with half a shot of Jack as he pressed his lips to the thin neck. He took one drink to calm his nerves, then another to wash away the fear. The liquor flowed into his hollow places, filled up the gaps in his confidence with borrowed courage. Up close, the house was impressive not for its size but for its decay. Thick fingers of mold pried at the mortar between the stones of the walls, and the wood trim had sprouted strings of bloated mushrooms. Joe tried to peer into one of the ground floor windows, but the inside of the glass was streaked with something brown and stickylooking that blocked his sight. The whole place was a monument to neglect and entropy. Joe crept up onto the back porch, careful to test each step for rotting wood. The last thing he needed was to fall through the porch. Bad enough he’d come alone; making himself a sitting duck would just be the last nail in his coffin. He paused with his hand
on the back door’s tarnished brass knob, eyes closed, breath slipping in and out of his lungs. He’d have to be fast and quiet and efficient. He eased his eyes and the door open at the same time. A thick, aggressive stench burrowed into Joe’s nostrils and mouth, smearing his sinuses and throat with the choking stink of putrefaction. The mud room was shadowed, the only light coming through the open door and a stained window, but Joe could see motes of something glittering in the faint light. He tried not to think of what he was breathing and stole into the house. He closed the door behind him and crept forward. Every step disturbed layers of crusted filth, cracked open pockets of dust or spores that gushed into the air with murmured sighs. The place looked like no one had lived here in years, as if the Blackbriars had walked out of this house one day and never returned. He almost wished that were true, but he could feel it wasn’t. His badge throbbed against his chest, and the oozing taint of profane power caressed his skin. There was a darkness here, something he’d let fester too long that now needed lancing. Joe stepped from the mudroom and into a long, crowded pantry. The walls were lined with once-sturdy shelves that now bowed in the middle, worn down by the weight of countless murky Mason jars and swollen canned goods. The labels from the cans had faded to yellow-brown and shed into drifts on the floor like dying leaves. There was enough food in the pantry to feed dozens of people for weeks, if it hadn’t been left to go bad. The smell was stronger in the kitchen, an almost physical presence that pushed back against Joe. His stomach roiled, and his eyes watered; his legs wanted to carry him from the house and back down the hill. There was something wrong here, something infectious, something that wanted to spread. Something that moved. Heavy footfalls came from beyond the doorway to Joe’s left. The Night Marshal moved next to the doorway, sliding his feet to avoid giving away his position with thudding steps. He tucked tight against the peeling wallpaper and held his breath as the steps drew nearer. The man who stepped into the kitchen wore old, stained overalls that strained to hold in his drooping bulk. He walked with his head back, nose in the air, slurping breaths bubbled in and out of his lungs in thick, slimy snorts. Joe waited for the man to walk past him before moving off the wall. He shoved the shotgun’s barrels against the
rolls of fat on the back of the man’s neck. “Hey,” Joe said. “Nice place you’ve got here. Mind showing me around?” Joe’s pulse thundered in his ears. His breaths came sharp and shallow as a jolt of adrenaline shot down his spine. This was it, the kickoff. He just had to keep the ball rolling, stay on top of the situation. The enormous man nodded his big head, and Joe felt rolls of neck fat scrape against the shotgun’s barrels. When he spoke, Joe felt the words rumble in the air like thunder. “Anything you say, boss.” “Who else is home?” Beads of sweat ran down Joe’s forehead and into his eyes. “How many?” It took Joe a moment to realize the grinding noise he heard was the fat man’s laugh. “Lots.” Joe licked his lips. He didn’t want to turn this into a shooting war with a whole house full of lardass lunatics. “Show me.” The big man raised his hands to shoulder height and shuffle-stepped around in a slow circle, with Joe mirroring his steps. “You oughta leave. Better for everybody that way.” Joe nudged him in the back of the head with the shotgun. “Show me.” They walked through the house together, the big man making little shushing noises as he walked through the gloom-filled rooms. Squat lanterns shed dirty yellow light, showing Joe the lumpen outlines of old furniture and shadowed humps of garbage piles scattered around. They passed through a ramshackle sitting room and into a long hall with doors on either side. “Gramma gonna be real pissed if you interrupt. Last chance.” The big man stopped walking, and in the sudden quiet, Joe heard a new sound. Voices scratched at the Night Marshal’s ears with high-pitched squeals that suggested words he couldn’t quite understand. The air felt thick in his lungs, a sticky, choking miasma. His forehead burned, like an ember pressed into the space above and between his eyes. Vertigo stole Joe’s legs out from under him, and he reached a hand out to the wall to keep from falling. His fingers pushed through crumbling drywall and into something moist and gritty that stung his skin. Joe’s shotgun crashed into his chest, shoved by the big man. The blow knocked Joe off his feet and sent the shotgun swinging wild on its sling. The Night Marshal couldn’t get his bearings, the screeching words were unraveling his senses.
A heavy boot caught Joe in the thigh with enough force to knock him a yard back down the hallway. Pain radiated from his leg, throbbing in time with the flickering pulse of his badge over his heart. As bad as it was, the agony drove the alien words from Joe’s head and cleared his thoughts. The big man let loose another wet gravel chuckle and kicked Joe in the shoulder, flipping the Night Marshal over onto his stomach. Joe crawled away from his attacker, fumbling with his shotgun. His left arm and right leg were wooden, blasted numb by the powerful kicks. “Gramma’s songs aren’t for you,” the giant grumbled. “Never shoulda come here. Shoulda left us be.” Joe didn’t think he could take another kick. He scrambled down the hall on his hands and knees, struggling to keep ahead of the behemoth. The pain was fading, but the voices were crawling back through his ears to pluck at his thoughts. “I’ll go,” Joe gasped and raised his shaking left hand to ward off another attack. He shifted onto his knees and leaned back against the kitchen doorway, bracing himself upright. The big man paused and scratched the side of his head. Weak light fell across his face, revealing chubby cheeks, narrow pig’s eyes, and the flaring spade of a bat’s nose that dominated the center of his face. Snot drooled from his gaping nostrils and ran down into his slack-jawed mouth. “You’ll go?” Joe raised his shotgun and squeezed both triggers. Silver fire and green smoke roared from the weapon’s twin barrels, and the big man lost fifty pounds of flab and bone as the shot tore through his gut. The cultist’s hands struggled to hold in the unspooling tangle of organs that spilled from the crater in his stomach, but couldn’t stop the gushing curtain of blood from pouring out of the smoking hole. His knees gave out, and he flopped to the side, mouth gawping open, eyes fluttering. Joe’s ears rang from the shotgun’s thunder, but the dark voices were banished from his head. “Changed my mind,” Joe said and stepped around the smoking corpse. He knew he didn’t have much time. The noise would attract the rest of the cultists, and he wouldn’t stay deaf and numb to their enchantments forever. He needed to hit them now, hard and fast, before they could react. He ran down the hall, looking into each of the open doorways he passed. He paused at the first room on the left, some sort of ritual chamber that had been
used for years, maybe decades. The floor was inscribed with a rough collection of concentric circles that radiated out from a triangle of points. A blackened, gnarled bonsai tree crouched at the tip of the triangle. The two base points were occupied by a pail of crystal-blue water and a hole hacked through the floorboards and into the earth beneath. The room made Joe’s eyes water, and the burning spot on his forehead flared with an intense new level of pain. The Night Marshal staggered back from the room, scrubbing the back of his right hand against his forehead. There was power here, the kind of power that could destroy the whole county if he didn’t do something about. Joe continued his search for the cultists and walked to the end of the hall before he found what he was looking for. The room beyond the doorway was gone, just a narrow ledge of the floor remained around its perimeter. The ceiling was missing as well, and Joe could see attic rafters three stories overhead. The smell here was beyond anything Joe had ever experienced, an overpowering fog of ammonia and rot and swamp gas that almost kept him from pushing ahead. Joe peered over the floor’s crumbling edge. Sick green flames flickered at the bottom of a deep pit, illuminating the distant, scrawny figure of a naked old woman with flowing silver hair. Her head was thrown back, swollen black eyes staring at something no one else could see as her mouth chewed on depraved words that split her lips and left blood drooling from the corners of her mouth. Seeing her again after all these years rocked Joe back on his heels like a hammer blow to the forehead. Alma Pryor, alive and raising hell today because he’d been too weak, too forgiving to put a bullet through her brain all those years ago. Filth-smeared bodies writhed on the floor around her, a living carpet of intertwined limbs and flopping meat. What drew Joe ahead was what else he saw down there: a pig’s carcass bobbing in a vat of blood, two half-made girls bathing with it, pouring blood from their cupped hands over the pig’s snout. They were all so intent on their work, so invested in their actions, that none of them seemed to have noticed the shotgun blast. Joe could feel the old hag’s screeching at the edges of his deafness, it must have blotted out everything else for those in the pit. Joe found a rickety stairway around the edge of the room and took the stairs three at
a time, throwing himself forward despite the throbbing agony in his leg. Every time he landed, pain dug its knives into the muscles in his thigh, threatening to spill him onto his face, but Joe kept on. He racked another pair of shells into the shotgun as he went. This was his shot. He could end it all. Right here, right now. He just had to get down the stairs and pull the triggers. The old woman’s high-pitched, droning chant filled the air. Even deafened by the shotgun’s blast, Joe could feel the pressure in his ears. He didn’t know what she was up to, but he knew he had to stop it. He followed the staircase as it spiraled down into the earth, orbiting the perimeter of the room, watching as the darkness unfolded before him. The rest of the cultists wriggled on the floor, slathering themselves with greasy, black filth, licking one another’s faces and bodies. They were blind to the world around them, bound up in whatever spell the old woman was spinning, feeding the energy of their religious fervor to her. Meth pipes, flaring with blue butane flames, dotted the black floor like a constellation in hell. Joe watched the cultists take deep, lung-scouring drags as they worshiped their dark and bloody god. The first half-made girl noticed Joe at last and raised her stump to him, wriggling the wreath of fingers that now surrounded it. Her lips moved, but Joe couldn’t hear the words. He had a feeling it was some variation of, “You’re too late,” and hoped she was wrong. He hit the dirt floor, running, and leveled his shotgun at Alma. Her body was rigid with the power she channeled, but she was blind to the world around her. Blood ran from her mouth and drooled from the tip of her pointy chin, smeared across the leathery flaps of her breasts. Joe rushed across the space between them, aware of the half-made girls slopping their way out of the vat to cut him off. The blood clung to them like a living thing, slowing them, giving Joe the edge he needed. Six feet away, he pulled the triggers and sprayed death and fire at the old woman. The shot tore into the second half-made girl, instead. A last-second lunge had carried her into the line of fire and into the hail of lead pellets that chewed bloody chunks out of her deformed body. Joe roared and let the shotgun fall from his hands, trusting the sling to keep it nearby. He shoved his right hand into his satchel and prayed he could find what he was looking for before it was too late. The first half-made girl slammed a punch into his shoulder, knocking him off
balance. He stumbled into a knot of cultists, and their groping and writhing tipped him off his feet. His head smacked into the moist, muddy floor. The half-made girl he’d shot landed on his chest, splattering him with blood from the injuries he’d caused. Joe shoved at her with his left hand, still desperately digging in his satchel with his right, but she was too strong for him. She slapped his hand away and ripped his shirt open. She pushed her bony fingertips into his ribs, grinding them against the bones, digging into him. Joe felt his skin part, opening to embrace the monster on his chest. Her nails scraped against his ribs, and she began to pull. His right hand found what he needed, and his fingers slipped around and through the cold metal. Joe stabbed the half-made girl’s arm, driving a broad push knife into her malleable flesh again and again. Blood splattered between them, Joe’s mingling with the girl’s as they struggled to kill one another. Flesh parted and bones snapped, and then she was gone, swirling away from him, clutching her ruined arm against the malformed flesh of her chest as she withdrew into the shadows bordering the pit. Joe struggled to his feet, crawling over the cultists until he could find clear ground. The first half-made girl stood behind the old woman, whispering words into her that the old woman repeated. The air writhed with their combined power, and Joe could feel it pressing down against him. Whatever they were doing down here, the ritual was almost complete. The Night Marshal limped toward the blood-filled vat, ignoring the half-made girl and the old woman. He didn’t think he’d survive another tangle with one of those freaks. But maybe he wouldn’t have to, maybe he could ruin whatever they were trying to do with a little something of his own. The half-made girl’s face contorted as she spat something Joe couldn’t hear over the ringing in his ears. He pulled the flask from his satchel and popped the top with his thumb. The hard perfume of whiskey cut through sh*t and the blood around him, as comforting in that moment as a ray of sunshine. Joe took a swig of whiskey then shot his hand out over the vat and upended the flask. This was his holy water, the sacrament that kept him moving when every other blessing had lost its edge. Maybe dumping it into their witches’ broth would derail the fun and games. Spells were finicky like that. The half-made girl struck like lightning, darting from the old woman’s side to knock the flask out of Joe’s hand. Joe took advantage of the moment and sprinted away from the vat. The half-made girl caught up to him as he ran and locked her hand on the back
of Joe’s neck, but not before he reached his goal. He threw his left arm around the old woman’s throat and lifted her off her feet and into his chest. Joe held her close and pressed the tip of the punch dagger’s blade to her throat. “Let me go,” Joe growled and felt the half-made girl’s hand lift from his neck. Alma Pryor didn’t weigh anything, she was as light as Elsa as Joe turned to face the half-made girls. He jiggled the knife, and a blood-red bead burst from his hostage’s brittle skin. The old woman never stopped chanting, even as her skin split and blood spilled. “Back the f*ck up,” Joe said and stepped back. Joe eyeballed the half-made girls and the cultists, who were starting to figure out something had gone wrong. They scratched at their bloated bellies and rubbed muck from their eyes as they disentangled their sweaty bodies. Joe grimaced at the sight of the tainted flesh before him, the bat noses, vestigial flaps of translucent skin between elbows and waists, wide, bulging eyes, and elongated ears tufted with fur. Whatever they were doing, they’d been at it for years, maybe longer. There twenty or thirty of them, too many for Joe to deal with on his own. He moved toward the steps, keeping his human shield in front of him. Joe was willing to sacrifice himself, but if survival was an option he’d take it. He’d use the old woman as a shield to get him upstairs, then slice her throat and run for the truck. The cult would be stopped, and he’d be alive to round up the rest of them when he was better prepared. The half-made girls watched him go, hate burning in their eyes, but they seemed reluctant to follow him and remained next to the vat as he made his way toward the steps. The old woman didn’t struggle, but she kept right on chanting until Joe squeezed her throat hard enough to stop the words. He was exhausted from the awkwardness of holding the old woman, but he was almost home free. He topped the stairs and retraced his route through the house, heading down the hall, through the kitchen and the pantry, and at last stumbled through the mudroom and kicked open the back door. He stood on the porch and steeled himself for what had to be done. He drew his arm back and leaned in close to Alma’s ear. “You lose, bitch.” Lights stabbed from the darkness, blinding the Night Marshal. He blinked against the glare, and by the time he could see what was happening it was too late. A stinging pain rifled through his head, punching straight through from the base of his spine to his
forehead. He felt a cold metal circle press against the side of his head and heard a familiar voice say, “Let her go, Joe.” Rough hands locked around his wrists. He held tight to the crone, strained to swing the knife and finish the job. He couldn’t let her walk away again. They bent his arms away from her, though, and she slipped from his grasp. His captors wrenched Joe’s arms back behind him, forcing him up onto his tip toes, leaning forward. “Don’t do this, Dan.” The lights were still blazing in his eyes, car lights, truck lights. Dozens of them encircled the house. “Something bad is going down here. It needs to be stopped.” “Something bad went down earlier today, didn’t it?” Dan kept the gun pressed against Joe’s head. “Bunch of people burned alive, bunch of dead kids with them? A whole f*cking farm blown straight to sh*t. Ringing any bells?” “I didn’t—” “You did, though.” Dan leaned in close and whispered. “You did today, and yesterday, and the day before that, and how many other goddamned days did you decide what had to be done no matter what it cost or who it hurt?” “It’s my job. No one has to like it.” “They don’t.” Dan’s voice stank of fear and whiskey, scents all too familiar to Joe. “They f*cking hate it.” “Tough sh*t. Why don’t you put that pea shooter down and let me get back to work.” “There’s no more work for you here,” Dan said, grinding the barrel into the side of Joe’s head to emphasize his point. “You’re done.” Dan kicked Joe’s legs out from under him. The Night Marshal fell onto his knees, arms wrenched in their sockets. “Last chance, Sheriff. Do what you know is right.” Dan sighed, and Joe felt the barrel of the pistol mashed tight against the back of his skull. “This is what they want. The whole goddamned county is full of people who are more afraid of you than whatever the hell this old bitch is doing down in her cellar. They had a choice of monsters, and they didn’t pick you.” “They don’t know,” Joe started, but the click of the pistol’s hammer drawing back shut him off. “This is your last chance. Walk down the hill. Get in your sh*tty truck. Collect your
family.” The weight of the pistol pressed Joe’s head down to the porch’s boards. Someone tore Joe’s badge from where it was pinned to his shirt. Dan’s voice was heavy with a bone-deep weariness that chilled Joe. “And get the f*ck out of my county.”
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an kept the gun pressed to the back of Joe’s head while his deputies stripped away D the Night Marshal’s weapon. He felt Joe tense as the shotgun was taken and pressed the pistol down harder. When one of the deputies tore Joe’s badge off his shirt, Dan thought the Night Marshal was going to come right out of his skin. “Don’t give me a reason.” “You’re going to have a reason before this is over.” Joe growled the words through gritted teeth. His stomach churned and grumbled, his back ached from the awkward posture he was forced into. The pain was nothing compared to his anger and embarrassment at falling into this trap. Someone patted Joe down, slapping his sides and checking the waistband of his pants and tops of his boots for weapons. “Clean.” Dan nudged Joe with the pistol. “Get up. Easy.” They let Joe go, and his arms flopped down, tingling from the strain placed on them and lack of circulation. It took him most of a minute to get his feet under him and his knees up off the warped, moldy boards of the back porch. The whole time he could feel the ring of steel pressed against his head, an itching, burning reminder of the fleeting, frail nature of life. How many times had he been on the other end of the equation, the one squeezing the trigger? Dan pushed Joe’s head to the side, steering him toward the porch’s steps. “That’s right. One foot after the other. Don’t do anything sudden, or the crows’ll be eating your brains out of the grass come morning.” Joe grunted and let himself be led across the hill. He looked away from the blazing lights, focused on the blackness on the edges of the hill. The gun’s barrel bit into the
side of his head as Dan’s foot found an old gopher hole. For one moment, Joe was sure that his skull was about to be blown open. “You want to watch where you’re walking, asshole? You kill me because you’re too f*cking stupid to walk, and I’ll haunt you until the end of days.” Dan didn’t say a word, but he pulled the gun a bit away from Joe’s head and took a handful of deep, steadying breaths before he started walking again. At the edge of the hill, away from the headlights and out of sight from the people behind them, Dan said, “All right. Get out of here.” Joe nodded, felt his hair brush against the barrel of Dan’s pistol. “Hey, Dan?” “Yeah?” “You remember what I said at Red Oak?” “I don’t—” Joe ducked under the pistol and spun around to face Dan, driving his fist up into the sheriff’s solar plexus. Dan doubled over and gagged on the pain, pistol flopping uselessly in his right hand. Joe wrested the weapon away so hard Dan’s knuckles cracked like a pan of popcorn over a campfire. Dan stared up at Joe, eyes watering, wind rushing in and out of his nostrils as he struggled to get his breath back. His own pistol stared back at him, a blind black eye rimmed in steel. “Go ahead,” he rasped. “I know you want to.” Joe’s finger was heavy on the trigger. Dan had betrayed him, sold the Night Marshal out for spook promises of something better. For a moment, Joe stared over the sheriff’s head at the yellow glow of headlights up the hill. Those people thought they wanted him gone. Thought they knew what they were getting into with those half-made girls and the crazy old women who called them. He should just kill the sheriff, get in his truck, gather up his family, and get the f*ck out of Dodge before another day could dawn on this cursed place. Just one little squeeze, and he would end one life and start another. It would be so easy. Joe tapped the tip of Dan’s nose with the pistol, then raised the barrel toward the sky. “Guess we know who’s faster.” With practiced ease, Joe popped the clip from the pistol and ejected the bullets from the metal sleeve with quick flicks of his thumb. Dan watched the bullets disappear into the darkness, eyes wide. “Why?” Joe whipped his arm away from the Blackbriar place and sent the empty clip
winging into the darkness down the hill. “You’re a dumbass, but I don’t think you’ve been dabbling in black magic. Have you?” “No.” Dan gulped a relieved breath. “Things have changed. You have to understand —” Joe threw the pistol. It hit Dan in the middle of his face, then landed on the grass at his feet. The sheriff staggered back, holding his bleeding nose with both hands. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, but he couldn’t get the words out. Joe felt a mixture of pity and disgust well up in his chest. He was too tired and too angry to keep on like this. “Joe, I—” “Get the f*ck out of my sight.” Joe shook his head, turned, and walked down the hill. He heard Dan running, fat feet tromping through the grass and underbrush. Heading back up to the Blackbriar place and whatever craziness they were up to. “Why are we always cursed with such goddamned cowards for sheriffs?” The old man’s voice scraped at Joe’s ears like gravel under a tractor’s tires. Joe went down the hill, slow and cautious. It had been hell climbing up when there was still some sun in the sky, going down it in the black of night was close to suicide. “Because this whole county is cursed with bad men and broken women. Keep waiting for a sinkhole to open up and suck all the rot straight down to hell.” The old man laughed at that, a sound that raised goosebumps on the backs of Joe’s arms. “Not for you to judge, Son.” Joe didn’t take the bait; he wasn’t in the mood to discuss the finer points of the Night Marshal’s responsibilities with his dead father just then. Instead, he concentrated on picking his way down the hill, using the distraction to keep the bad thoughts out of his head. “Not like you could have stopped this.” Where his badge had once rested, Joe’s chest felt chilled straight through, as if his heart was open to the night air. “People tell me you could have.” “Since when did you give a sh*t what people had to say?” A green branch sprang loose and smacked Joe across the forehead as he tried to push his way past a looming maple. Joe touched his head, and his fingertips came away smeared moist with blood. “f*ck. I don’t care. But I wonder.”
Something settled on Joe’s shoulder, a falling leaf, maybe. Or a dead man’s hand. He didn’t look to find out which. “One of us still has a pulse, so I guess whatever you’re doing worked better than what I done. Maybe you can still turn this around.” Then the slight weight on his shoulder was gone, and Joe knew he was alone. The hill tried to kill him a few more times as he walked down it, rolling rotted logs down after his steps, putting ankle-breaking mole tunnels in his path. Joe made his way around it all, but every near-miss made him wonder if it was worth the effort. By the time he reached his truck, he’d made up his mind. If the bat f*ckers wanted Pitchfork, they could have it. He was done. Let the Long Man find another sucker to ride herd over addicts who couldn’t smell danger when it was sh*tting on their foreheads. He slipped behind the wheel of the truck and cranked the engine to life. It was still hours to daylight. He’d go home, gather up his family and whatever they could carry, then get out on the highway. By dawn, this sh*thole would be behind them all. It was someone else’s problem now. Joe was too tired, too goddamned angry for this job. The truck rumbled its agreement and lurched out onto the old road, heading for home.
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tevie followed the Long Man through the Lodge’s shadowed entry hall, Elsa draped S over her shoulder. From the arched doorways on either side, Stevie could hear anguished whines, gristly popping noises, sibilant murmurs. The noises tugged at her curiosity, urged her to look through those gaping arches, just get a gander at all the eldritch delights that awaited her. Instead, she kept her eyes locked on the Long Man’s heels and followed as close behind him as she dared. Stevie didn’t know what lurked beyond the Lodge’s yawning doorways, but she recognized the oily touch of malignant spirits and refused to give them a foothold in her mind. Just being in this place put her perilously near to the line she’d sworn never to cross. The Long Man swept his arm across an ornate coffee table, casting a stack of enormous books onto the floor in a jumble of torn pages and bent spines. He repositioned the table near the fire place and tapped its polished wooden surface. “Here,” he said. “Please.” Stevie knelt next to the low table and eased Elsa from her shoulder. The girl convulsed as she touched the coffee table, jackknifing her head up to her knees. Inky vapors leaked from Elsa’s nostrils and drooled from her mouth to form a slow-moving cloud in front of her face. Stevie reached to wave it away, but the Long Man’s fingers closed around her wrist. “That’s enough for now. Let me see what I can do.” She nodded and let the Long Man help her up. He took her place next to Elsa and Stevie drifted away, shuffling in an aimless orbit around the room. She stopped at the bar against the far wall and caressed a decanter of amber liquor. The memory of her
husband’s fingers touched her back, their rough tips brushing against the smooth surface of her palm. She imagined him lifting the bottle to his mouth and thought of taking a swig, if only to feel her husband’s lips against her own. Stevie left the decanter and shuffled along the wall back toward the fireplace. Sometimes she envied Joe’s vices, his ability to dive into a bottle and blot out the pain, the memory of what he’d done. Times like this, she wished she could drink away her fears, but the risk was far too great. Stevie’s skeletons were unquiet things, lurking in the shadows, waiting for her to lose control so they could come clattering after her. The Long Man stood, and his shadow stretched out to block Stevie from the fire. She felt the cold of places she’d never seen, the cold of places men were never meant to walk. “I believe we can save her.” Stevie sagged against the wall, the words of relief tinged with a hidden threat. She waited for the Long Man to tell her the price of her daughter’s life. “What do you need me to do?” “She’s infested. There’s no other word for it. The spirits within her are vermin. Broken creatures wounded by something they fear too much to articulate. They’re terrified to leave their host and willingly seek an eternal rest.” The Long Man reached onto the mantle and withdrew a small crystalline sphere from a rack that held twelve others just like it. “Something drove them to this dire place, and they will not leave without a struggle.” Something growled in the hallway, a guttural, choking sound that set Stevie’s hackles on end. The house was filled with presences, forces that threatened and cajoled Stevie with whispers she could only half hear. She shut them out and turned her eyes to the Long Man. “Just tell me what I have to do.” “I can extract these creatures from your daughter without harming her, but it will require all of my concentration.” The Long Man licked his lips, and an icy gleam flared in his left eye. “I will need you to bind them into these vessels for me.” A cold stone settled on the hope in Stevie’s heart, trapping her breath in her throat. This was the magic she’d left behind, the old powers she’d strove so hard to bury and forget. A hot tear welled at the corner of her eye and ran down her cheek. Joe would hate this. Binding spirits was what he’d killed the Bog Witch for, it was Left-Hand Path sorcery of the darkest sort. She had promised her husband, swore to him, to never again draw on that forbidden power.
“Free them,” she whispered. “Set them loose and let them do as they will.” “They aren’t ghosts. They’re fragments, parasites. If we let them free, they’ll come back to Elsa at once. They’re bound to her, becoming part of her, even after such a short time.” Stevie took slow steps back to the bar. She poured the liquor into a shot glass, smelled it, felt its fumes burning the back of her throat. “Joe will kill me.” “There’s no reason for him to know. Elsa’s mind is down deep in her own dreams. There’s only you and I in this room to know what you’ve done to save your daughter.” The Long Man flicked his fingers, and the shot glass appeared in his hand. He threw the whiskey down his throat. “Decide. The night is dwindling, and we have much work to do by dawn if we are to save her life.” Stevie’s mouth was dry. She wanted a drink. It wasn’t as simple as the Long Man said. Joe would smell the Left-Hand Path on her, the brimstone would cling to her skin and hair like another man’s cologne. If she broke her promise, Joe would know. If she didn’t, Elsa would die. She reached up to her throat and undid the necklace she’d worn since the day her mother died. The little silver cross felt slight, a splinter, a fragment of something much larger that the years had worn down to nothing. A battered blue cooler sat on the floor next to the bar, a commonplace object that looked alien in these surroundings. Stevie laid her necklace on top of it and rolled her shoulders as if relieved of a burden she’d forgotten she’d been carrying. “He’ll hate us both for this.” “How much more will he hate us if we let her die?” Stevie closed her eyes and let a single tear fall. A cold wind blew across the back of her neck. She smelled the rich, rotting perfume of the swamp. She breathed in deep and pretended she didn’t hear her mother laughing. The Bog Witch’s daughter took the crystal sphere from the Long Man’s hand and gazed into its depths with shadowed eyes. “You’re sure?” He didn’t look at her when he asked the question, but his voice seemed eager, hurried. “Do your part.” Stevie’s fingers played over the ball, feeling its cold skin, the way it settled into her palm like the hand of an old friend dug up at last. “I know how to do mine.”
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was already on his way across his porch before he realized the Rambler was J oe missing from its usual parking spot. He looked at the stars and moon, figured it was well on toward morning, and wondered where the hell his wife had gotten off to. Joe peeked through the windows from the porch, but the gossamer curtains Stevie had strung up in the front room made it look like there was a convention of ghosts in there. He grumbled and pushed his key into the lock. The door swung open before he could turn the key, and the nostril-scorching stench of bat guano slapped Joe in the face. “Motherf*ckers,” he growled and slipped into the front room. A wheelbarrow load of batsh*t dominated the floor. Oily black stains led away from it, crawling up the walls to the ceiling. Joe froze and held his breath, listening for intruders. When he heard only silence, he reached out and flicked the light switch next to the door. Nothing happened. Joe crossed the floor, careful not to step in the sh*t, and he heard something crunch underfoot. Glass. The assholes had broken all of the light bulbs. “Poor winners,” Joe said and made his way into the kitchen. Broken glass shone in the moonlight while dried blood stained the table and floor deep black. Joe stepped around the blood and swept the glass out of his path with the side of his boot. He looked out the kitchen window and saw the corpse of the freak from the Pryor place, scorched coveralls coated in a sheen of melted fat in the moonlight. “Knew I should’ve cut off your f*cking head when I had the chance.” Joe followed the trail of blood out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He felt his chest
tighten as the dribs and drabs of blood turned into a steady line, then into wide splashes. By the time he got to his bedroom door, Joe felt as if someone had wrapped his heart in barbed wire. The door was closed and painted with blood, the wood gouged by thick claws. “They’re not dead until you see the bodies,” he tried to reassure himself. Joe stood in front of his bedroom door, hands clenching into fists, then relaxing, then clenching. He had to open the door, he had to see. But he wasn’t ready. Had he quit his crusade against the darkness too late to save his family? He pushed the door open and blinked once, long and slow. When his eyes opened, Joe’s breath hitched in his chest. The room was splattered with more blood and batsh*t. The sheets were gone from his bed, thrown into one corner where they lay wadded up like the world’s biggest, bloodiest bandage. Joe stepped around the pile of guano and looked down as something crunched underfoot. Bat wings. The floor was carpeted with tattered scraps of leathery skin and hollow bone. The Night Marshal sat on the edge of his bed near the nightstand and rested his head in his hands. His family was gone. He didn’t know where. Didn’t know if they were alive or dead. Joe opened the nightstand’s drawer, pulled out the flat black case his father had kept there. It was the first time he’d laid hands on the box in his life, and his hands shook a little when he lifted it. He needed a drink. Joe flipped back the case’s lid and ran his fingers over the pistols inside. They were a matched pair of weathered revolvers, their hexagonal barrels engraved with so many wards and blessings they hummed at his touch. The old man swore these weapons were made by Colt’s own gun wizards, but they bore no identifying marks. They each held seven bullets, and while Joe had never fired them, he’d seen the guns take down a possessed bear. They were true relics and had killed more black magicians and demons than Joe could count. If he had to go looking for Stevie and the kids, at least he’d have weapons, even if those weapons did have a haunted history Joe wished he could forget. Joe couldn’t help but wonder if even these guns would be any use to him. Whatever he was up against, whatever had called up the half-made girls and set the bats loose, seemed ready for him and his ways. While Joe had been out at the Pryor place busting up a meth lab full of bat-worshipers, the shadows were busy coming after his family. When he’d found their hideout, he’d walked right into their ambush. Joe felt beaten and stupid. He scratched at his forehead, the burning itch had stuck with him like a case of
poison oak. He wasn’t firing on all cylinders, and he couldn’t figure out why. The black phone rang. Joe stared at it. He didn’t work for the Long Man anymore; all that remained was his making it formal. But it seemed like a bad idea to piss the Man off by ignoring his call. Joe lifted the receiver. “They are here.” The Long Man’s voice sounded thin, worn out. “They will remain here tonight. You can come for them in the morning.” Joe’s tongue felt thick and clumsy in his mouth. He had to try twice to get the words out. “What happened?” “Stevie is fine. Alasdair is wounded, but he will recover.” Joe pinched the bridge of his nose, tried to push the tears back. Was this price he was to pay for bringing his baby into the war against the dark? Was he going to lose his children in the battle he’d brought to their doorstep? “What happened to Elsa?” “I have the situation well in hand.” The Long Man paused. Joe heard him drinking. “It’s best if you stay put until the morning.” “What are you doing to my daughter?” Paranoia stuck its needles into Joe’s brain. He tried not to think of those arched rooms lining the entryway, or the kinds of spirits that might lurk in the Lodge and try to inject themselves into Elsa. He had to get them out of there. “Let me talk to Stevie.” “Do. Not. Come.” The voice was powerful, commanding. It smashed against Joe and drained the strength from his arms and legs. All he wanted to do was lie down and wait for morning. But there was his daughter to think about, and his wife and son, in this monster’s house. “I’m coming.” “The gates are closed until sunrise. Stay put. That is an order.” Joe decided that was as good a time as any to quit. “f*ck your orders. I don’t work for you, not anymore. I’m coming for my family.” “We will discuss the terms of your employment tomorrow morning. There is no need for you to complicate matters here tonight.” “I’m coming.” “The dogs will stop you. It would be a waste to add your death to an already tragic day.” Joe ground his teeth and ran his fingers over the pistols and the brace of bullets
bordering them. “If anything happens to them–” But the phone was dead, the line filled with a rustling static. Joe slammed the receiver down, scooped up the pistol case and headed downstairs. He detoured into the kitchen for a fresh bottle of Gentleman Jack, then flopped down in his old recliner. Joe sat and drank and watched the black sky, waiting for the first rays of dawn to slice their way through the night.
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he Long Man replaced the handset on its tarnished cradle. His eyes blazed in the T shadowed corner of the Lodge, and Stevie could feel his anger like a cold, dry wind. He turned to Stevie. “Will your husband do what I have asked?” She shrugged. Stevie knew Joe would hate not being with his family, but she also knew he wasn’t going to push the Long Man. “He’s a stubborn man, but I reckon he’ll probably stay out of this since you asked so nicely.” The Long Man snorted and turned his attention back to the circle he’d been drawing around Elsa. With a few strokes from a stick of charcoal, he sealed the circle around the three of them. The air shuddered, and an almost inaudible hum tickled Stevie’s ears, raising the hair on the backs of her arms. “Then let us begin,” the Long Man whispered, and bent over Stevie’s little girl. Stevie watched the Long Man’s fingers pry Elsa’s jaws apart and slip a pair of rubber blocks between her back molars to hold it open. Elsa was limp and quiet, but Stevie knew she wouldn’t stay that way once the work got under way. The spirits inside her little girl would fight to stay within their host. Stevie just hoped she and the Long Man didn’t kill her daughter trying to get the spirits’ hooks out of Elsa’s soul. The Long Man peered into Elsa’s mouth and tapped his fingers against her throat. Stevie held her breath as the Long Man reached his thumb and forefinger into her daughter’s mouth. “Be ready to do your part,” the Long Man said to Stevie and began pulling the first broken spirit out of Elsa. The fireplace flared with green light as the flames roared in a wind Stevie could not feel. The Long Man’s shadow stretched across the room, and Stevie shivered as her
eyes played tricks on her. For just a moment she was sure his shoulders brushed the high ceiling. She clutched the crystal sphere tight to her chest as the Long Man drew a clotted shadow from Elsa’s gaping mouth. It danced in his grip, its pulsing, muscular body seeming to grow longer and thicker by the moment. Elsa bucked, tiny hands beating at the Long Man’s wrists. A grinding groan rattled out from the little girl, a sound of pain and fear that fogged Stevie’s eyes with tears. Her little girl was trapped in her own body, buried under the weight of the dead. What if the Long Man was wrong? What if this was killing Elsa, tearing her spirit apart as he tried to help? That moment of doubt almost made Stevie miss her chance. The Long Man fished the spirit out of Elsa and held it in the air, so its thrashing body dangled almost to the floor. He held it with both hands, but still it nearly escaped his grasp. Its tail thrashed wildly, then darted back toward Elsa’s mouth, straining to burrow back into its lost home. Stevie thrust the crystal toward the spirit and let the old words flow from her mouth. She smelled swamp water and smoke, felt cold water rising up to her ankles. Stevie felt the spirit in her grasp, her words like an extension of her tongue wrapped around the midnight black serpent. Every syllable drew it nearer and filled Stevie’s mouth with the taste of ashes and dirt, the flavors of the grave. The spirit touched the sphere, and it grew dark. Stevie drew the broken ghost into the depths of the crystal with words she had promised Joe she would never use again. They felt right in her mouth, like a tooth that had been replaced after missing for years. A shiver of power ran through Stevie. She felt young again, strong again. “Please,” the spirit begged, its voice a tortured scream inside Stevie’s head. “It burns. We had no choice, they are devouring the dead, we had to escape.” Stevie could feel the spirit’s pain as a delicious pressure between her hands. This thing, this parasite that had once been another woman’s spirit before it invaded Elsa, shrieked at Stevie to stop, begged for release, but the Bog Witch’s daughter relished its final moments of anguished freedom. It had harmed her daughter. For that there was no penalty that would be harsh enough, no torture too extreme. A cold shadow spread behind Stevie, a darkness that hung from her shoulders like a cloak. “That’s my girl,” it whispered, “ya done good, just like I done when ya was a
babe and they came fer us.” The dark memory of angry townsfolk rowing their john boats across the bog, torches blazing and nooses at the ready, filled her heart with a cold strength. Stevie bore down on the spirit, her words slashing its hooks free from this world and banishing it to the sterile, maddening crystal confines between her hands. The screaming rose to a fever pitch, a panicked string of bleated promises and threats, the last words of a woman dying in pain, again. Stevie smiled. She spat sharp, burning words onto the crystal. The screaming died. The sphere was heavy and black in her hand, the spirit locked deep inside. Stevie let out a long, shuddering sigh and dropped the ebony sphere into the Long Man’s outstretched hand. He peered into its depths for a moment, rotating it this way and that, as if examining Stevie’s handiwork. Stevie bristled. “You do your part. I’ll worry about mine.” The Long Man nodded and placed the sphere in the empty space in the rack. He tossed another sphere to Stevie, then turned his attention back to Elsa. “We will have to be faster. Dawn is coming.” Stevie watched him snatch the next spirit out of Elsa, drawing it out between his hands like a magician snaking an impossibly long scarf from his pocket. Stevie didn’t wait for the spirit to be fully exposed. She touched the sphere to it where the black body extended past the Long Man’s hands and let the words roll off her tongue. They worked together like that for hours, filling the spheres as a team. Stevie’s words painted the walls of the sitting room with overlapping black symbols that shuddered and crawled like broken spiders, scarring the world with their dark strength. She held nothing back, let the old ways blossom inside her as they had when she was younger, as her mother had shown her. Stevie was the Bog Witch, and the swamp was here, now. The Long Man tilted Elsa’s head back and put his ear near her mouth. He tapped on her throat, waited, tapped again. His spider-leg fingers palpated Elsa’s stomach. “Almost done.” Stevie counted the black crystals on the rack over the fireplace. Just three left. She closed her eyes, and their screams of terror and pain echoed in her thoughts, tingled against her skin like the touch of an autumn night’s breeze.
The first light of dawn was creeping into the Lodge when the Long Man reached into Elsa’s mouth once more and fished out a slender, wriggling scrap of a spirit. It seemed too frail, too small to be any real threat. Stevie touched it with the crystal sphere, and it snapped taut in the Long Man’s hands, like she’d jolted it with electricity. A single, quick tug, and it was free and vanished into the crystal before Stevie had really felt its passing. The Long Man plucked the rubber blocks from between Elsa’s teeth. He sighed and sat back on his heels. For a moment, he looked ancient, a withered mummy crouched on his haunches. Then he drew in a shuddering breath and was once again powerful, in control. “There.” Elsa took a deep, peaceful breath. The dark circles were gone from under her eyes, and she seemed at rest. Stevie allowed herself a single tear of relief, which she wiped away with the back of her hand. It was over. The Long Man motioned for Stevie to bring him the last sphere. She took a few steps and placed the black ball in his hand. “Thank you,” she said. He waved her thanks away and twirled the ball on the tips of his fingers. “Joe would never forgive me if I let anything happen to his family. He may still not forgive me. At least he obeyed and did not interrupt us.” The light from the sun was brighter now, streaming in through windows that punched through the high walls of the sitting room. In the daylight, the Long Man seemed shrunken, almost fragile. “There are rooms,” he began, but his words died on his lips. He tilted his head like a dog trying to track down a particularly annoying sound. “No. Impossible.” He snapped upright and staggered toward the fireplace, stretching his arm to put the crystal sphere in the last slot on the rack. Stevie rushed to his side. Her skin crawled to be so close to the Long Man, but her hands were reaching out for him before she could stop them. He needed her help. Despite everything else she was, Stevie was still a healer. She slipped under his arm to try and hold him up, but the Long Man stumbled away from her. His arm swung in a clumsy slash across the rack, sending the balls tumbling. They slammed onto the mantle, then rolled onto the wooden floor where they banged divots into the boards. The balls had enormous weight and did not bounce. But they did crack. Stevie could see the hair-fine imperfections spreading across
the faces of the spheres, filling the air with the sound of fracturing crystal. Elsa lifted her head. “Mama?” Outside, the dogs howled, then screamed in pain. Alasdair’s voice joined them, a savage roar that filled Stevie’s guts with ice. The Long Man struggled to rise, but he couldn’t get his hands under him. His limbs flopped and crooked like a bug with a broken back. “We’re under attack. Take the girl,” he gasped. “Run.” The Lodge’s main doors exploded inward and tumbled down the entry hall like playing cards before a hurricane. One of them slammed into the arched doorway of the sitting room; the other hurtled straight at Stevie. She threw herself to the side, landing hard on her hip. The door sailed past and smashed into the wall above the bar, shattering bottles and filling the room with the scent of aging liquor and wormwood. A smell that was washed away at once by the foul perfume of batsh*t and putrefaction that flowed into the room on the wind. Stevie could feel the presences outside the house, a trio of power that filled the air with crackling jolts of black rage. “Baby, get behind me.” Elsa scuttled across the room, her arms and legs stiff and clumsy. Stevie grabbed the girl when she got into arm’s reach and shoved her back. They came in through the door together. One floating, one walking, one slithering across the boards like a snake. “Get out of our way,” the floating girl said and gestured at Stevie with an arm that ended in a blooming ring of grasping fingers. The Long Man hauled himself up to his feet. “Get out of my home.” Stevie expected something to happen, for a blast of lighting to incinerate these intruders where they were, for flames to erupt from the floor and devour them. She did not expect for the girls to laugh. She did not expect for the floating girl to drift to the Long Man and close her grasping bracelet of hands around his face. The girl lifted him off the floor with ease. “You have no idea how long we’ve waited for this,” she said. Stevie shouted a wordless protest and flung her hands out in front of her. Words her mother had taught her, ugly hexes to break bones and squeeze a man’s soul down to a screaming huddle, gushed out of her. The floating girl flinched, as if Stevie had slapped her. She lost her grip on the Long Man, who scrambled away into a corner. Blood splashed off the slithering girl and hung
in the air. But the walking girl caught the blasphemous words in hands with only thumbs and index fingers and spat them back from a mouth with no lower jaw. The girl’s dangling tongue lashed the air, and Stevie recoiled, feeling her own power thrown back at her. The attack dropped Stevie to her knees, and the half-made girls moved toward her as one. The slithering girl hooked an arm around Stevie’s waist and drew her close, licking the side of Stevie’s face with a bloodied tongue. The floating girl reached past Stevie for Elsa. The girl screamed and pulled away from her mother. “Get away from me,” she howled. “Come with us, girl.” The floating girl moved closer to Elsa, hands outstretched. Stevie struggled against the other two half-made girls, but her mouth was held closed by the powerful hands of the walking girl, and the slithering girl held her hands. Stevie was powerless. Elsa was not. She moaned and raised her hands over her head. In response, the cracking crystal spheres floated from the dented wooden floor, dripping darkness as they rose. “Please, leave us alone,” Elsa begged. The floating girl laughed, a maniacal shrieking that dug at Elsa’s ears. “Go ahead, bitch, let’s see what you’ve got.” Elsa flung her arms wide, and Stevie wanted to scream for her daughter to run, to get away. Instead, Elsa called out to the fragmented souls that had been inside her. One by one, the crystal prisons shattered and the broken ghosts flowed back into the air like plumes of black smoke. The air was filled with the screaming of spirits and the laughter of the half-made girls. Stevie’s head rang with the noise. The Long Man was saying something, she could see his lips moving and his hands reaching for her, but she couldn’t make out his words over the cacophony. The horde of spirits darted toward the half-made girls, flowing like black water at their faces. Elsa howled as the strain of directing the dead burned her spirit. Then the ghosts spun away from the girls and whirled into the air, forming a tight ball of seething, eldritch power. Elsa clenched her fists and ground her teeth, trying to pull the splinters of the dead back under her control.
But they fled from her and spiraled down, a quivering line of darkness that slipped into an old blue cooler someone had left sitting by the wrecked bar. Elsa sagged against the wall, all her strength gone. Her eyes fluttered, then closed. Stevie struggled against the half-made girls, but they were too strong for her. They pinned her to the ground, and she could only watch as the floating girl lifted Elsa over her shoulder with one hand and took the cooler with the other. “We’re done here.” The girl with the finger-and-thumb hands squeezed Stevie’s throat until black sparklers shot through her vision. Her tongue lashed Stevie’s cheek, flickered along the inside of her ear. “Tell your man,” she whispered, the words dripping like venom in Stevie’s thoughts, “that your life is our gift to him.” Stevie went limp, and the world slipped away from her. When she opened her eyes again, the half-made girls were gone. Elsa was gone, as well. Stevie cried out in denial and staggered across the room. The Long Man was slumped on the floor next to the fireplace, his hands folded in his lap. Stevie knelt in front of him. “Where are they? Where did they take my baby?” The Long Man let out a long, pained sigh. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” His eyes, old and deep and wracked with pain that chilled Stevie’s blood, watered and locked with Stevie’s gaze. “We’re all dead now.”
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J oe gunned the engine, and the old truck roared through the shattered gate and up the long drive to the Black Lodge. He flicked his gaze from side to side, watching the trees for signs of danger, trying to catch sight of the big black dogs who now guarded the place. The woods were quiet, though, and he saw no sign of life. No birds or squirrels or even field mice stirred in the deep, dark woods. He felt like hammered sh*t. A leaden weariness had settled into his bones during the night. The Jack had coated the inside of his head with sandpaper that was busy grinding the grooves off his brain. The tremors in his fingers let him know his body wasn’t satisfied with the booze he’d allowed it last night, and the burning ache in the pit of his stomach warned him he’d better fix that situation before things got out of hand. He couldn’t shake the image of the Long Man’s bar and its bottles of delicious poison. He swallowed a mouthful of bitter spit and turned the last corner to the Lodge. He found the dogs. Their heads were nailed above the main entrance, their bodies slit open and scattered across the asphalt driveway. One of them had been hacked open, its gutless corpse was splayed open across the hood of Stevie’s Rambler. Joe took the pistols from the case and shoved them through the back of his belt as he exited the truck. The fit was uncomfortable, but he didn’t have a holster. He put it on the list of things to take care of after he figured out whether his family was still alive. He wound his way through the bodies. The dogs were much bigger cracked open and spread wide, and their black blood was a sticky maze on the asphalt. Joe threaded through the labyrinth of offal and stopped at the doorway, peering into the gloom.
The doors were gone, leaving behind jagged, pale splinters of ancient wood jutting out from the hinges that had once held them. At the far end of the entryway, Joe could see the flickering light of a fire and hear quiet sobbing. He hesitated at the threshold, weak and exhausted. He didn’t want to know what had happened, didn’t want to find out what new tragedy had landed on his family like an avalanche. The sobs pulled him forward, set his feet one in front of the other. They belonged to Stevie, he could feel it more than hear it, a raw, ragged emotion that burrowed its way out of her heart and into his ears. He followed her sorrow down the hall, one plodding step at a time, until he came to the sitting room. Alasdair growled at Joe’s approach. The boy hunkered near the shattered bar, bestial snout lowered, feral eyes catching the glow from the flickering fireplace. Joe stopped in the doorway, letting his son recognize him, doing his best to appear unthreatening. He felt about as dangerous as a wet kitten; it wasn’t much of an act. The young man slunk back into the shadows, but his green, glowing eyes never left Joe. The Long Man reclined in his gnarled chair, hands loose and trembling in his lap, eyes closed and swollen. Stevie crouched next to the Long Man, her talented hands moving over him, finding his hurts, leaching away the sting and pain. Her hair hung down on either side of her face like golden curtains. Her shoulders hitched with painful sobs. A dark, sharp rage burnt the weariness out of Joe’s muscles. He cleared his throat. “Stevie. Al. Let’s go. We’re done here.” Stevie turned toward Joe, one eye glaring at him through the veil of her hair. “You’re too late. We can’t leave. Not now.” She sobbed again, a sound half-mad with fear and anger and despair. The Long Man stirred, his shadow fluttering out behind him. “There’s nowhere to go. No place will be safe.” Joe stormed toward the tortured chair and whipped a pistol clear of his waist band. He leveled the heavy hexagonal barrel at the Long Man’s forehead. “I’m done. I quit. We’re going.” Stevie exploded up from kneeling, shoving Joe’s gun hand away. “You want to kill him? Now? When it won’t do us any good, now you want to quit?” His wife’s touch curdled Joe’s blood. The old curse wrapped fingers of iron around
his spine and yanked him to attention. His finger was heavy on the trigger, and for one red second Joe saw Stevie on the floor, blood and brains fanned out around her head like a halo from hell. Alasdair growled and padded out of the shadows on all fours. His scimitar teeth gleamed white through curling lips as he stared at his father. Joe eyed his son, lowered the gun. “What the hell happened here?” The Long Man coughed up blood and licked his crimson-stained lips. “I was wrong. We misjudged what was happening.” Stevie sighed and pulled her hair back from her face. Her eyes were ringed with bruises of exhaustion. “They took Elsa.” The pistol’s grip creaked in Joe’s fist. “Who?” Alasdair licked his muzzle with a long, black tongue. “Your girlfriends,” he growled. “The half-made girls.” Joe raised the pistol again, held it trembling toward the Long Man’s face. “How could you let this happen? They came here for protection.” The Long Man doubled over in a coughing fit. When he looked up at Joe, one of his eyes was filled with a bloody red stain. “They were not here for you. They came to Pitchfork because of me. They took something.” Joe’s finger hugged the trigger. One tiny bit of pressure would break his oath to this man, his lifetime of duty would end. The Long Man looked weak, defeated. Joe was certain one shot would kill the old man. He wanted it, more than almost anything in the world. But not more than he wanted his daughter back. The gun went back into Joe’s waistband. He walked past Alasdair to the trashed bar. The young man sniffed at Joe as he passed, but he didn’t growl. He sat on his haunches and panted, watching Joe dig for an unbroken bottle. Joe raised the bottle and spun off the cap. He took a long swallow and closed his eyes as the liquid fire found all the hollow places in his gut. He threw the cap into the fire, took another drink. His hand stopped shaking, and he felt the first tingles of a buzz tickle at the edges of his brain. For that moment, he didn’t feel like killing anyone. He watched the Long Man cough again, waited for him to settle back into his chair. “You’re going to help me get my girl back.” Stevie’s laughter was cold and metallic. “Look at him. He can’t help himself sit up.
If he lives through the day it’ll be a miracle.” The Long Man nodded. “She is partly correct. Whoever brought the half-made girls here did it to hurt me, to rob me of my power, to disrupt the balance of Pitchfork County. I can offer advice, but little else now that their plan is nearly complete.” Joe felt the truth in the words, felt it in the aches and pains that had taken root in his own body. The vitality, the raw force of life he’d come to associate with the office of the Night Marshal, was gone. “Then you better start filling in the blanks, old man, before I decide I really don’t have a use for you anymore.” Stevie drew herself up and stalked to Joe. She planted her feet and stared up into his shadowed face. “You have to stop.” The air crackled with churning flashes of rage and regret, whipped into a furor by the Bog Witch’s curse that weighed heavy on both their hearts. Joe wanted to reach out to his wife, but he knew his hand was as likely to strike as to comfort when it got like this. He clenched his fists and lashed out with his words, instead. “Stop what?” Stevie’s eyes darkened and a spectral wind tugged at her hair. “This. Trying to kill your way out of every problem.” “The whole county wants to kill me. I might as well return the favor.” Stevie took the bottle from Joe, careful not to touch his fingers, wary of igniting their curse. She allowed herself a long drink, let it slosh around in her belly. Handed the bottle back to him. “That’s what your father understood, but you never did. He was a shepherd, he helped people stay on the right path.” Joe filled his mouth, smelled the fumes percolating through is sinuses into his brain. Swallowed and tried to keep his voice level. “And what am I?” Stevie looked away from Joe, folded her hands in front of her. Joe could feel something else, something he hadn’t felt in Stevie for years. It made his stomach hurt, his brain ache. “You’re a wolf, Joe. You don’t care if anyone stays on the path; you just kill whoever steps off it.” Joe drank from the bottle until he felt the soothing poison settling in his head, then he drank for another handful of seconds before he lowered the bottle. “Did you step off the path?” The Long Man staggered to his feet. He leaned against his chair. “Elsa was going to die. Your wife did what any mother would do. Without Stevie’s power, your daughter
would not be missing. She would be dead.” Joe felt the itch of the pistols against the small of his back. His hand hungered for their grips. This is what he’d given his life over to, this was the code he’d lived by since the dark work had killed his father. Stevie stared up into his face, and he recognized the shadows there not as weariness, but as strength. She was tired, but only from holding in the gifts her mother had left her. Stevie was overflowing with the stink of darkness. She represented the kind of nightmare that blossomed when the taint wasn’t cut from the body of the herd. “You can’t banish every shadow, Joe. You can’t kill us all.” Joe took another drink. “This is what I am. This is what it takes to keep the world safe.” Stevie took Joe’s chin in her hands, held his eyes with hers. He trembled at her touch, at the twisting rage of their curse, at the way she made him feel, the strength of conflicting emotions so great he feared it would tear them both apart. “Are we safer now?” She released him, pried the bottle from Joe’s hand, and let it fall to the floor. “My mother’s dead, she’s been dead for years. She killed your father. You killed her. Let it go. We can work together. We can get our daughter back.” Joe took his wife’s hands in his own. He shook with the effort of not crushing the delicate bones of her fingers. The curse burned within him. “At what cost?” “What cost could be too great?” Stevie tore away from Joe and motioned for Alasdair. She moved to the door. “We’ll be outside.” The Long Man settled back into his chair. “Come sit with me, my boy.” Joe swung an unbroken chair over near the Long Man and flopped into it. The alcohol burned in his stomach like a pleasant fire. His brain felt smooth and dull. He didn’t want to think about anything, didn’t want to consider the choice he had to make. He just wanted to sit and listen. Let someone else decide what needed to be done and who needed to do it. The Long Man peered at Joe over trembling, steepled fingers. Joe wondered if he could take the old man, if he really could kill him in this moment of weakness. “I will not ask you what happened to you, Joe, but you need to know that something did happen.” The Long Man took a long, shuddering breath. “Something in you has changed.”
Joe waved the Long Man’s words away. “Just tell me how to get my daughter back.” The Long Man sighed and shrugged. “They took my power, your daughter, and the Kirshnir Marg at dawn. They will bring your daughter and the idols somewhere safe, somewhere they are strong.” Joe leaned back in his chair, dug the pistols out. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to shoot you. These things are uncomfortable to sit on.” “You will not be able to take them head on. You need to find a way to weaken them, to even the odds.” The Long Man watched Joe, then continued. “You will need allies. As my star has fallen, so, too, will the powers of your office falter. You are not as strong as you once were.” Joe laughed. “There’s no one left in this town I can trust. The f*cking sheriff turned on me.” “Your son. Your wife. There are others in Pitchfork whose interests intersect with your own, despite that you have angered them. They are far from powerless. Use them.” At the mention of Stevie, Joe felt his stomach tighten. “You turned her back to the shadows, didn’t you? Nevermind, don’t answer that. How can I ever trust her, now?” “I do not know the answer to that. But you must find a way to mend the bridges you have burnt down. Your wife is right. You cannot do this on your own.” “Great. Any other pearls of wisdom for me?” “You do not have much time. Their triumvirate is complete. They will do what they came to do, and they will do it soon. I would wager before the next dawn.” “Then I guess I better get to work.” “What will you do?” Joe walked to the doorway, stopped, turned back. “I’m going to get my daughter back. Somehow. Then I’m going to kill those f*cking bitches and everyone who worked with them.” “And then?” “I’m going to come back here, and we’re going to find out just how much I’ve changed.”
45
tevie watched Al clear the dead dog off the Rambler’s hood. Her hands were tight S around the wheel, knuckles tenting the backs of her hands into white mounds. This was it, what she’d feared the whole time she’d been married, the moment she’d been terrified would come to pass for as long as she’d known Joe and understood his role in Pitchfork County. She was a witch who’d walked the Left-Hand Path. In the eyes of the Night Marshal, the penalty for that offense was death. Stevie had never known Joe to shirk from fulfilling his duty. But she didn’t know what would happen when she was faced with her own death. Yesterday, she would have knelt and waited for the bullet to come. Today, she doubted she could bow her head. Stevie was a different woman now, maybe the woman she was always meant to be. She didn’t want to hurt her husband, but she wasn’t sure she was going to have a choice. Al threw himself into the car, leaned back against the passenger seat, and closed his eyes. Stevie squeezed his hand. “It’s gonna be all right.” Joe stepped out of the Lodge’s shadowed doorway and stepped around the scattered dog corpses to get to his truck. He didn’t look at Stevie, didn’t wave or throw her the finger, or put a bullet through her forehead. Stevie took that as a good sign. She sucked in a deep breath, then let herself out of the Rambler. She walked toward Joe, but he still didn’t pay her any attention. He had the truck’s driver-side door open and was fiddling with something inside, all his attention focused
on something in his lap. Stevie kept walking, skirting around the front of the truck with her hands loose and away from her sides. She didn’t know what Joe was thinking, what the Long Man might have told him, and she didn’t want to spook him just then. She was five feet away from him, her hip next to the truck’s front bumper when he spoke. His voice was thick and slow and tired. “Why don’t you just stay right there.” Stevie froze. “I just want to talk.” “Seems like that’s all anyone’s good for today.” Joe slammed the truck’s door closed, and Stevie’s breath caught in her throat. Her husband had one of the big pistols clenched in his right hand. “Go on, I’m listening.” “I didn’t have no — any choice.” Joe looked at his wife, seeing her as if for the first time. Stevie didn’t look away. She knew what Joe was taking in, and she didn’t try to hide it. Pale skin that seemed more like fine china than flesh. New streaks of vivid silver woven through the golden tangles of her hair. Dark shadows had sprung up around her eyes overnight, and no amount of morning sunshine would ever drive them away. She wondered if he could hear the echoes that she did, the screams of tortured souls separated from their host and locked away in crystalline prisons. She wondered if he could see the black stain spreading across her soul, the darkness she had embraced to save her daughter. “People keep telling me that. I keep saying it. Maybe it’s true.” Joe raised the barrel of the pistol, touched it to his temple. Scratched at the side of his head with its sight. “Maybe none of us have any choices. We’re just thrown down here like f*cking dice to rattle around until we come up snake eyes.” Stevie struggled to find the words. Her tongue was clumsy, tripping on her feelings and tangling in her thoughts, but Stevie let the words roll out without trying to pretty them up. “I reckon you and I been headin’ this way for all our lives. But it ain’ just chance that threw us together, and it ain’ blind luck that’s kept us that way either. I ain’ had a lot of choices in my life, Joe. I didn’t choose to be the Bog Queen’s get. I didn’t choose to fall in love with the man who’d kill my mama. But I did choose to stick with it, to love you as best I could. I chose to give you babies. I chose to raise ‘em with you.” Joe kept the gun raised, resting his hand on his shoulder with the barrel aimed at the sky. Stevie tried to hold his eyes, but he looked away from her, watching something back over her head. “Maybe those weren’t your best choices. Maybe they weren’t mine
either. Maybe I should have chosen differently out there in the swamp and put you down alongside your mother. It would have been easier twenty years ago.” Stevie threw her shoulders back and raised her chin, letting the tears roll down her cheeks. “That’s how you feel? Then go ahead. I got nothin’ to live for but you and my babies. I lost one of them today. I reckon if you draw down on me, I’m gonna lose the other when Al tries to keep you from killin’ me.” That got Joe’s attention. She locked eyes with her husband and held onto his gaze for all she was worth. Stevie wasn’t sure how much time she had left, how many breaths would pass her lips, but she wanted them all to count. “I walked the Left-Hand Path last night, and there ain’ no mistakin’ that. But nobody got hurt except them what wronged my family. I didn’t conjure up no swamp haunts to smite the meek folk. I sure as hell didn’t draw spirits from their graves to do my biddin’. I saved my baby girl, or at least I tried.” “That’s a lot of words just to admit you broke the Night Law.” Stevie’s heart sank. Her hopes that her husband had changed, that the night had worked on him as it had on her, that his eyes were opened to the truth that there were no absolutes, that everything was open to change. That anyone who did not adapt to the world around them would be killed by it. She brushed the tears from her eyes with the backs of her hands. “Get it over with then. Just promise me you won’t stop lookin’ for Elsa. Promise you’ll save our baby after you’ve killed me for what I done.” Stevie closed her eyes and waited for the end. She felt the cool morning wind blowing down across the ridge to dry the tears on her cheeks. She felt warm rays of sunshine on her face. Pine and cedar and the cool scent of morning dew filled her nostrils, driving out the stink of blood and death. Birds sang their morning songs, and Stevie believed they were just for her, the last sounds she would ever hear before the thunderclap that would crack open her skull and empty her brains onto the asphalt behind her. She heard Joe’s truck rumble to life and opened her eyes with a start. He hung his left arm out of the truck and motioned her over. Stevie walked to the truck’s window on legs stiff with unresolved tension. The sudden reprieve, the belief she might not die in the next few minutes, made it hard to think. She stopped next to the truck, a foot from Joe. “I don’t understand.” Joe had both hands on the wheel; Stevie was relieved there was no gun in his fist.
But his face was long and drawn, etched with lines she had never seen, as if Joe had aged years overnight. The usual flecks of gray shot through his black hair like ash through charred wood were joined by long wings of gray spreading from his temples back to his neck. “I can’t lose any more today. I can’t.” Stevie wanted to reach through the window, take Joe’s face in her hands and hold him until the pain went away. But she could feel the magic in the air, the churning currents that would turn everything ugly if she pressed her luck by touching him. Instead, she stood with her hands folded behind her, leaning forward on the tips of her toes, belly flat against the truck’s door. “You won’t lose me. I ain’ goin’ anywhere.” His sigh was long and painful, like a knotted chain dragged out of his lungs. “I need you to take Alasdair and get in the wind until this is over.” Stevie’s eyes glittered with anger. “You want me to just leave you?” “For now. Yes, I want you to get out of town until I’ve handled this.” The cool morning wind turned cold and whipped at Stevie’s hair. The darkness around her eyes deepened. “You need me here.” “This isn’t the time or place.” “This is the only time and place we got, now.” Stevie stepped back from the truck and tucked her thumbs into the front pockets of her weathered jeans. “What’s your plan?” “I’m going to do what the Long Man said. Talk to some people. Find out what they know, see if they can help.” Stevie scoffed, and the wind spun a wobbling dust devil around her feet. “Who’re you gonna trust, Joe, when you won’t trust your own wife to help you with this?” “It’s too dangerous. I can’t bring you and Al into this mess.” Stevie laughed. She touched the hollow of her throat, fingers twitching with agitation when they didn’t find her old cross there. She doubted she’d ever see it again. “Would you have turned away my mama’s aid in this darkest of times?” She watched Joe chew at the inside of his lip. He dropped his eyes. She reached in and rubbed his shoulder, a firm, grounding touch. “You need our help, even if you don’t want it. We’re already so deep into this mess there’s no gettin’ back out. Let me help you find our baby.” Joe didn’t say anything. His eyes were troubled, his hands trembling on the wheel. Then he nodded.
Stevie patted his shoulder again and walked away, shaking with relief. “Stevie,” he called. She stopped, turned back, and shielded her eyes from the morning sun slashing down over the top of the Lodge. “When this is over,” he paused and she could feel him trying to put the words together, stringing them together one at a time in his thoughts before he let them pass his lips. “When this is over, there has to be a reckoning.” Stevie nodded. “I understand.” “For now, we need to figure out who we can trust. Who can help us fix this before we’re all dead.” Stevie grinned. “I know just the old men. But you aren’t going to like it.” She climbed back into the Rambler and fired up the old, faithful engine. She motioned for Joe to follow, and for the first time in their marriage, it felt right to be the one in the lead.
46
J oe struggled to keep up with Stevie as she threaded her way through the back roads of Pitchfork County. The Rambler was always disappearing out of sight around corners or vanishing over the tops of ridge lines, forcing Joe to push the old truck harder than was comfortable. By the time the Rambler bounced up the gravel road to the yarb doctor’s shack, Joe’s nerves were shot. Stevie was leaning back against the Rambler’s hood, shadowed eyes sparkling in the midmorning sun. “Get lost?” Joe snorted and shook his head. “That’s one way to kill us all, I guess. Why do you always have to drive like a maniac.” The front door of the old shack creaked open. Zeke emerged, blinking his yellowed eyes against the light. “Ya mind keepin’ it down out here? Old men need our sleep.” Stevie slid around the hood of the Rambler and threw her arms around the old man’s shoulders, holding him tight and burying her face in the tobacco-stained bush of his beard. She eased back, holding him at arm’s length. “Don’t tell me you don’t have breakfast ready for us?” Zeke swatted Stevie’s arms away and hitched out the front of his crusty bib overalls to show off the xylophone bars of his ribs. “Don’t eat much these days. Got yer tea on, though.” Stevie followed the old man into his crumbling shack, and Joe followed her. He could feel Alasdair staring holes in them from the Rambler. Whatever else had happened last night, Alasdair held no trust for Joe, it seemed. The three of them gathered in the shack’s main room, where Joe had watched the
possessed girl writhing in her bonds the day before. The chair seemed to rock gently even when empty, a reminder of the evils it had held. Joe sat on the far side of the room from it and its chains, eyes wary. He wasn’t sure how badly his strength had eroded since the attack on the Long Man and didn’t want to put it to the test. Zeke poured each of them copper mugs of steaming sassafras tea, then pulled up a stool opposite Joe, next to Stevie. “Well, little miss, much as I ‘preciate yer company, I reckon this ain’ a social call. Owls been quiet all night, and them squirrels won’t shut the hell up about yer trouble fer nothin’.” Stevie nodded and sipped her tea. Standing against the wall, she blended into the shadows and seemed somehow larger, more imposing. “There’s a darkness in the county. Something I can’t explain. We need your help.” Zeke chuckled and licked tea from his mustache. “I’m an old man who knows the words to cast out them demons what settle in the weak and unwilling. I ain’ a witch. I sure as hell ain’ a Night Marshal. Not sure what ya need from the likes of me.” Joe cleared his throat to speak, but Stevie cut him off. “You know this county, you know its people. You can help us talk to them, figure out what’s going on before it’s too late.” The old man’s eyes never left Joe’s. “Might be it’s a little late to come around askin’ fer that kind of help. Might be ya shoulda been talkin’ to me and the rest afore all the sh*t started rainin’ down ‘round yer ears, yeah?” Joe felt the old anger rise up like a cobra about to strike but choked it back. He wasn’t here to stir up more trouble. He was here to ask for help. He glanced at Stevie, and she nodded. She’d kicked it off, but he was going to have to carry the ball the rest of the way if he wanted this old man’s help. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes. But I thought I was doing right, thought I was doing things different than my father because what he’d done didn’t end so well.” Zeke’s watery eyes didn’t blink as he held Joe’s gaze. The old man seemed to be looking for something, peering into Joe for an answer to a question he didn’t want to ask. “Must be bad if’n ya come all this way with yer hat in hand.” Joe raked a hand back through his hair, reminded again of his lost hat. “It’s bad. Worst I’ve ever seen or heard tell. They’ve turned the sheriff. Killed a couple dozen people that I know of. Tried to kill me more times than I care to count. There’s a sickness. And it’s spreading.”
The old man poured tea into his cup, topped off Stevie and Joe. He took a sip from his cup and smacked his lips over the scattered pegs of his remaining teeth. “But they done somethin’ else, yeah? Spirits are whisperin’ up and down the holler about yer baby girl. Like to kept me up all night with their jawin’.” Joe shook his head. “If you knew, then why ask?” “Because I wonder about ya. About whether what ya do is fer you or fer Pitchfork and its people.” Zeke sipped more tea and rubbed his shrunken belly. “Because if ya’d come here askin’ me fer a personal favor, might be I’d be less willin’ to help.” Joe looked down into the pinkish tea in his cup, into the rainbow swirl of sassafras oil floating in the copper mug. “I’m not going to lie. I want my girl back. But these people are going to bring the whole county down if someone doesn’t stop them. Whatever’s behind this, I don’t think its plan ends here either.” “So get on with yer big ol’ bangstick and put ‘em down.” Zeke laughed. The racket of his rattling humor sent a trio of crows flitting from the rafters. “That’s how ya do it, yeah? There’s only three of them girls, just go knock on their door and blast ‘em. Why come botherin’ me about it?” Stevie crouched down between the men and held her mug out for a refill. She waited for Zeke to start pouring, then said, “Seeing more than the usual number of patients these days? More girls come in here with the demons? More boys with strange dreams and blood on their hands they can’t explain?” Zeke tugged at his beard and looked away from Stevie to put the tea pot back on its little warmer. “Might be. That’s my business.” “All right then.” Stevie drained her cup and handed it back to the yarb doctor. She stood up and brushed the dust off the knees of her jeans. “Thank you for your hospitality, Zeke. We’ll be headin’ on, I reckon.” Joe sighed and stood as well. He needed these people to help him, but couldn’t find the words to convince them that it was in their best interest to cooperate until this problem was cleared up. He felt drawn thin, exhausted, too tired to think straight. His forehead itched like he had an ant bite festering between his eyes. He reached out to shake the old man’s hand, but Zeke was staring after Stevie as she let herself out of his little house. The yarb doctor took the Night Marshal’s hand and squeezed it tighter than Joe thought the old man’s skeletal fingers could manage. “I don’t trust ya to do what’s right,
push comes to shove, ya know that.” Joe nodded and returned the old man’s grip. “You and I haven’t seen eye to eye, I get that. But things have changed.” Zeke grimaced. “Don’t give two sh*ts about things.” “ I’ve changed. Believe that.” The old man’s grip tightened. “Oh, I want to, sir. Believe ya me, I want to. But should I?” “Only if you think this county’s worth saving. I’m not going to stop fighting to save it, but without your help, I reckon it’s a losing battle.” “Oh, yeah.” Zeke chuckled and shook Joe’s hand. “We do this, yer gonna listen to the old man, yeah? No more blowin’ holes in people what pissed ya off. Yeah?” “Can’t promise not to shoot people if they got it coming.” Joe wrapped his other hand around Zeke’s grip. “But I can swear to you that I’ll try and find other ways to fix things where I can.” The yarb doctor nodded and pulled himself up off his stool with Joe’s help. “Right, then. Grab my cane there, yeah? We’ll go have a jabber with some of the workers, see if we find the bottom of this pile of sh*t.” Joe took the gnarled wooden cane from its resting spot in the corner, trying to pretend he didn’t feel the zing of power that surged through it at his touch. There were carvings all up and down its length, strange figures and symbols, beasts and men cavorting in tiny scenes that made his eyes water when he looked at them. Zeke took the cane out of Joe’s hands and leaned on it. “Remember what ya swore in my home, Night Marshal.” Joe nodded and headed out into the bright morning air. “I’ll remember.” Zeke joined him and tapped Joe’s toe with his cane. “Good. Because yer not the only one who knows how to kill a man.” Joe stared after the yarb doctor, who hobbled over to the old truck and hauled himself up into the cab. Zeke poked his head out of the passenger-side window. “Come on then, afore yer wife gets the idea I’m gonna ride with her. My heart’s not up to that mess.” Joe laughed and made his way to the truck. Despite the yarb doctor’s dire warning, Joe’s mood was lifting. There was hope, just a glimmer of a chance, but it was something.
The Night Marshal started the truck and prayed he could reach that little slice of hope before it was too late for all of them.
47
hree pale boys stood on a small bench behind Preacher Walker’s chair, oiled hands T gliding over his naked, hunched shoulders. They massaged the knots from his muscles, teasing the tension from the meat of his back, pushing fragrant oils into his pores. The old man sighed and opened his eyes to take in his visitors. He clamped an old, rust-pitted pair of forceps onto the flab a few inches above the deep crater of his navel. “Can one of you lend me a hand?” Stevie left Joe’s side before he could stop her and crouched at the preacher’s right knee, taking the forceps in her left hand. The fat old man pulled her wrist back to lift a section of his belly into a thick peak. Joe raised an eyebrow to the yarb doctor, who gave a short, sharp shake of his head as if reluctant to pass judgment on what they were watching. Preacher Walker had his own ways, methods and practices passed down to him along the chain of men who had served the Red Oak before him. Joe and Zeke stood near the study’s sole door, both eager to get out of the small room as soon as possible. The ceiling, a massive tangle of pale roots, felt too low, and the moist, earthen walls felt much too close. The air was thick with the odor of turned earth and mulched leaves, causing Joe to pluck at his collar and rub his nose. The preacher held the ivory handle of an heirloom straight razor and flicked its blade between his index and middle finger. He pressed the sharpened edge against his flesh. “Hold it still, please.” The old man hummed, his voice a deep bass throb that filled his little home. A trio of high, sweet voices rose from the throats of the little boys, who went on rubbing his
broad shoulders while weaving an angelic harmony with their mouths. The razor hissed, its silver edge parting the old man’s deep-brown flesh to reveal the curded layers of lumpy yellow fat within. His humming gave way to full-throated singing, wordless and powerful, as he carved away the triangular flap of flesh. Stevie flinched when the gobbet of meat popped free of the preacher’s body and spritzed hot droplets of blood across her face and neck. Her eyes stung with the blood. Its smell overpowered her senses. For a brief moment, she was surrounded by hissing shadows that smelled of dirt and burgeoning life. She blinked the blood away and was back in the preacher’s room, holding a hunk of the old man’s fat in the forceps’ teeth. One of the boys slid around the preacher and took the forceps from Stevie, his hands steady and sure as he lowered the fatty slab into a wooden bowl that sat on a low pedestal to the preacher’s left. Then he returned to his position behind the humming man. The preacher settled back in his creaking rocking chair and hooked his fingers into the corners of his wound. He spread the bloody edges and shivered, an ecstatic smile hooking up the corners of his mouth. He seemed withdrawn, sunken into himself, but his words were loud and firm. “The sacrament of the Red Oak,” he explained to his visitors. He held nothing back, showing them the heart of his worship, the nature of his religion. The boys reached up and plucked the tip of an alabaster tap root from the tangle of the ceiling. Two of them untangled the pale fiber free of the other roots, while the third eased its questing tip into the preacher’s gaping wound. The trio worked in unison, their delicate, precise motions like the clockwork of synchronized machines. They stopped only when the wound was packed with coils of moist, thirsty wood. Then they disappeared into the shadows behind the preacher and took the wooden bowl with them. Stevie stared as the white flesh of the tap root flushed pink, then deep red as the old tree sucked at the life juices of its preacher. She flinched when Walker’s heavy hand fell on her shoulder. “There, child, in this church the act of communion must go both ways. As we feed upon the fruits of the old tree, so too does it require sustenance of us.” He finished his sentence with a little gasp and patted the jiggling mound of his belly. “I have plenty to spare, as you can see.”
Stevie brushed her hands on the thighs of her faded jeans and cleared her throat. “Preacher, we’re tryin’ to figure out —” Walker waved his hand, and his rumbling voice cut Stevie off. “Of course I know. My church was defiled by this mess. What is your husband going to do about that?” Stevie put on her best smile, though she could feel Joe’s anger simmering behind her. “He aims to put a stop to it.” “No.” Preacher Walker leaned forward, winced at the tug in his gut from the taproot buried there, and leaned back. “No ‘ands’ or ‘buts’ or ‘maybes’. Your husband has harassed the members of my flock and myself for years. He has thought often of taking fire to the Red Oak and threatened me and mine when the mood arose. Now that he is caught out in a time of need, he comes to me and asks for my help?” Joe struggled to keep his groans under control. The Red Oak congregation had a long and bloody history in Pitchfork, from good old-fashioned witch burnings to homegrown pogroms against rival religions. Even Joe’s father had ridden them hard. Left to their own devices, the members of this religion tended to wind themselves up and lash out at any convenient targets. “This concerns us all, and no one man can fix what’s wrong.” Stevie licked her lips and brushed the hair back from her eyes. She drew herself up and tried to present the strength and confidence her mother had always shown. “If you refuse to help, then who knows what misfortunes may fall upon your people?” Stevie blinked once, slowly, and let her power unfurl into the close air of the cramped room Shadows flickered against the walls. The kerosene lamps guttered, burning with yellow, sooty flames. The temperature fell, and the colors seemed to fade from the light. Preacher Walker’s eyes fluttered and his hands clasped his wounded belly so tightly blood began to ooze up around his fingers. A thick, scarlet rivulet ran down the slope of his gut and disappeared into the valley of his navel. His eyes closed, but his mouth fell open and a groaning croak worked its way out of him like a bubble of bog gas rising up from the swamp. The taproot stretched and swelled. Stevie couldn’t tear her eyes away from it as it screwed its way deeper into the preacher. His jaw snapped closed, then fell open again. A thick, clear sap clung to his eyelashes as they parted to reveal dark, wet plugs of earth. Something spoke through Walker with a voice that shook the floor and sent trickles of rich earth drizzling down
through the maze of roots in the ceiling. “My earth is defiled. Interlopers have fouled the holy. Drive them out.” Stevie could feel the weight of the words on her soul, a terrible burden that pushed her power back. The preacher was gone, and she knew the God in his place watched her and waited. She knew this was the real power here, the one that could make bargains that would bind them all. “If we help you, will you help us?” The preacher’s eyes fluttered again and thick, muddy tears flowed from their corners. He gasped and coughed. A centipede scuttled from his left nostril to disappear around the side of his face. “We will assist you, but there are conditions.” Joe grumbled. “I’ll do what I can within the Law, but don’t push it.” Preacher Walker smiled and licked stray crumbs of dirt from his lips. “Ah, our Night Marshal has found his voice. First, you must come with me to minister to my flock. I worry about their safety in this time of troubles.” With a grunt, Joe twirled his finger impatiently. “Fine. What’s next?” The preacher nodded and steepled his fingers over the swell of his gut. “Second, you will not question me or mine as regards our religion. If I help you in this, then you must leave me and mine in peace. What we do is within the Law. Leave it be.” Joe ground his teeth. He stared at the shadowed space behind the preacher and tried to ignore the quiet, almost dainty, chewing noises he heard coming from back there. “Someone needs to keep an eye on you.” The yarb doctor leaned forward. “I’ll monitor the Red Oak’s people.” The preacher laughed, a jolly rumbling that made Stevie want to choke the fat man to death. “If you agree to my third request, then you will not need the hillbilly to be your spy.” The preacher grinned, and his teeth were too, too white between the dark skin of his lips. “You will attend our moonlight services at least once each month.” Joe’s skin crawled, and his balls tried to jump up into his belly. “You know I can’t do that.” “Then get out of my home and put an end to this mess.” The preacher probed at the edges of his wound, gently caressing the gaping, curled edge with the ball of his thumb. “I have other pressing matters to attend to.” “We’ll go.” Stevie stepped back from the preacher and took Joe’s hand. She felt the surge of anger from her mother’s curse and used it in place of bravery. “We’ll go to
your services together.” The yarb man’s eyes grew wide with alarm. He reached for Stevie, but stopped short when he felt the air around her throbbing with a cold power. He turned his attention to the preacher. “They done agreed. Shake on it and seal yer deal.” The preacher struggled to his feet, standing with a great groan; he held his wound with one hand and pushed against his heavy chair with the other. He dug his left index finger into the bloody triangle and twisted it, around and around. When he pulled his hand from his flesh, the crimson tap root was wrapped around his hand so many times it looked like the preacher was wearing a dripping mitten. He extended the hand. “Shake on it?” Joe shook his hand free of Stevie’s grasp and reached past her to clasp the preacher’s sweaty hand. “No tricks.” The preacher shook Joe’s hand and grinned as blood dripped onto the floor between them. “Me? Never.” Stevie placed her hand on top of Joe’s. Zeke threw his own old, gnarled fingers into the mix and let out a tobacco-scented sigh. “Let’s get on with this, yeah? We got time to wipe each other’s asses once we put this mess to bed.” Joe felt it again, that faint glimmer of hope. He did his best to hang onto it. Maybe this mismatched gang of fools could pull this off. Maybe. The earth creaked. Joe could hear the faint slither of roots worming through the dirt all around them. Or maybe not.
48
lsa remembered being in the Long Man’s house. She remembered the spirits being E torn from inside her and locked away into crystalline spheres. The Long Man had saved her life, Elsa knew, but whatever he’d done hadn’t quite fixed her up. She felt hollow and fragile, like the spirits had stretched her skin a few sizes and now it was too loose to fit right on her bones. Whenever she moved, it felt like her arms and legs were wobbly and weak. The feeling scared her, so Elsa just stayed put. She didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten there. She remembered something had gone wrong, but she couldn’t pin it down. Her memory was shot full of foggy holes that swallowed up her thoughts. Elsa let herself drift, hoping time would speed along to the point where someone would come and get her out of this mess. She knew her daddy was looking for her, searching high and low for a way to help his little girl. Her mama, too, though there was something about that, something that tickled at the back of Elsa’s thoughts and warned her that her mama had changed, somehow. That maybe her mama was dangerous now. Thoughts of Stevie, no matter how strange and shadowy, raised Elsa’s moods. Her mama was strong, in ways that no one really understood, not even Elsa. She could almost hear mama’s voice, faint but beckoning. There were no words at first, just a drifting tone that teased Elsa’s ears. Before long, though, the wordless crooning formed itself into syllables. Nonsense at first, like her mama was a baby again, babbling out whatever tickled her fancy. Then, “Elsa.” She strained to hear more, but there were no more words. “Mama?”
Elsa reached out into the darkness, straining her senses, searching for her mother’s familiar presence. She felt something, a faint graze across her mental fingertips. It was warm and wet. Elsa recoiled from its touch. This wasn’t her mama. Fleshy bracelets fell around her wrists and held tight as clamps. “Ah, here you are.” The words were mushy and slurred, strange and threatening. Elsa licked her lips. “Who are you?” Her wrists were released, and she crumpled to the floor. Flickers of light lit the darkness, spreading through the inky air to reveal a dimly-lit room with walls of stone and a floor of polished wood. A hunched shadow lurked at the edges of the light, glittering eyes fixed on Elsa. “You gave us a little bit of a scare. Feeling better?” Elsa squinted at the shadows. There was a woman’s silhouette, black against a pale, guttering candle’s light. “Yes’m. A little. I guess.” The shadow moved closer. Elsa smelled sweat and perfume and the rich, coppery scent of fresh blood. She wrinkled her nose and the shadow moved closer still. “You and I are much alike.” Elsa nodded, but didn’t mean it. She wasn’t like anyone else. Not even anyone in her own family, and they were as close to her as anyone could get. “You don’t believe me?” The figure stepped away from the candle, giving Elsa a glimpse of a too-long face and hands that seemed too big and too small at the same time. Elsa scrambled back, crabbing across the cold stone floor. “Mama says ain’ no one else like me in all the world.” The woman flickered and vanished. Something pinched the back of Elsa’s neck so hard she saw stars for a moment. “You’re special, then? A precious little chunk of heaven fallen to Earth to light our way?” Elsa was lifted off her feet by the back of her neck, dangling from the woman’s grasp like a kitten in its mother’s mouth. Or a mouse dangling from the pitiless talons of a hawk. “Please, I didn’t mean nothin’.” The woman shook Elsa so hard her knees knocked together. “We’ve heard it all before. You all think you’re special. Unique little sparks of light here to warm the rest of us with your precious flame. But you’re just tools. Keys to doors you can’t even imagine.”
Elsa’s thoughts raced. If she had a mask, Elsa could maybe call up one of her spirit friends, someone who knew how to fight, who was strong and would help her escape. But she had no mask. Something long and hot and wet lapped against the side of Elsa’s face, dragging a thick line of moisture along her cheek. When the voice came again, the speaker was so close that her words fell on Elsa’s skin like the heat of a furnace, drying the sticky moisture into a stiff scab. “I can hear them out there. All clamoring and screaming to get back into you. How does that sound?” Elsa’s breath came in harsh, jagged pants. She didn’t know what would happen if all those spooks came back, but she reckoned it would be very bad for her. She might lose her marbles, maybe. Or something in her head might break for real. “No’m.” The hand clamped to the back of Elsa’s neck hoisted her even farther off the ground. She was hauled out of the stone room into a larger, circular chamber where the walls were rough and natural, like the old cavern where Elsa’s mama gathered the blind crickets for her charms. This room stank, like cat pee and rot, a stench with a physical presence that threatened to choke the air from Elsa’s lungs. She gasped, and the woman holding her laughed. The walls glowed with a purple phosphorescence, a ghostly witch light that rose from the bloated crowns of dozens of mushrooms. By the light, Elsa could see a low stone table against the far wall. It seemed to have been fashioned from the living stone of the wall itself and was twice as wide and three times as long as Elsa was tall. Before she could take in any more, Elsa was slammed down onto the stone table. Her lips split, and her nose began to bleed. Rough hands spun her over onto her back, and Elsa wished she was blind again. The woman holding her was beautiful and terrible. Her slender, muscular body was wrapped in layers of plain white cotton that hung loose around her body. The upper half of her face was a mask of icy perfection, blue eyes and a straight, thin nose that seemed to cut through the air. Her upper lip was full and wide, curled up into a smile that revealed a neat row of white, even teeth. But below that, the woman’s face was gone. She had no lower jaw, and the skin of her throat and chest was peeled away to reveal a deep, red V that ran down between her breasts. Her tongue thrashed in the air like a beheaded snake, whipping back and forth, flinging droplets of bloody spit every which way.
Elsa wanted to scream, but her throat seized up and her terror squeezed out in a thin, high-pitched hiss. The woman grabbed Elsa’s chin in her strange hands, the index fingers three times as thick and twice as long as they should be, thumbs shaped like paddles and carrying an extra joint. Her voice came from deep within her chest, a spectral echo that rang in Elsa’s head as much as in her ears. “Don’t you worry, little girl. We went to great pains to prepare you for your part. You will remain hollow, empty, waiting to be filled.” She spat a word at Elsa, something dark and malignant, and Elsa could no longer move. Her body was limp and useless as a wadded-up rag after a full sink of dirty dishes. She could only lie still and whimper, her nostrils invaded by the chemical tang of bat guano while her mind was submerged beneath a wave of gibbering madness. From the corner of her eye, Elsa could see the half-made girl lift a little blue cooler and set it on the table between Elsa’s legs. She flipped the lid open with her claw-like hands and rooted around inside it. Then she pulled something dark and sleek from the cooler and held it up in the purple light. It reminded Elsa of a fancy chess piece she’d seen on TV one time. Something with wizards and dragons. But those were made of pewter, and this looked to be carved from a piece of night itself. “The last one got away,” the half-made girl whispered. “Then that horrid little man undid all her work. Perverted our great art and stuck the fruits of our labor into a herd of pigs. Ruined everything.” The half-made girl traced the little chunk of darkness along the top of Elsa’s thighs, drawing a straight line from her hip bones to her knees. First the left, then the right. It tingled, like the time Elsa put her hand right up next to the big old TV. “You’re luckier than the last one, you know. That beggar preacher didn’t save him. That poor man’s soul went into those pigs and right over the cliff with them.” She stopped moving her hand. Elsa felt something sharp pressing through her dress and into the flesh just inside her right hip. “But that won’t happen this time. You’re perfect.” The pain was sudden and brilliant. It turned Elsa’s world white with agony. It burrowed into her flesh, spiraling down through her hip and rooting up through her belly. Searching, seeking. The dark power was heedless in its flight through her body, and Elsa’s left pinky finger broke in three places. One of her ribs cracked, the pain a
cool, sharp distraction from the agony burrowing into her flesh. The pain was raw, an insatiable hunger that raced through her whole body. Then, with a screech that made her teeth grind, it was gone. She panted on the stone table, eyes bleary with bloody tears. Elsa felt like she’d stuck her tongue in a light socket; all her muscles were tight and loose at the same time, and her bones felt bruised straight through. “Please, don’t hurt me no more, ma’am.” The crab-claw hand patted her on the forehead and smoothed the hair back from Elsa’s brow. “There, that wasn’t so bad. And look what we did.” The half-made girl lifted Elsa’s head so she could see down the length of her body. A black light throbbed from the carved spike stuck into the flesh of her hip, blood sizzling around the wound. Elsa felt faint. “We’ll be done soon.” The woman dug into the cooler and retrieved another sliver of darkness. “Just twelve more to go.” Elsa sobbed as the torture began in earnest.
49
reacher Walker’s bone-white Hummer blasted along the ridge road, spewing a P hailstorm of rocks and a thundercloud of rising dust from beneath its oversized tires. A chunk of soapstone smacked into Joe’s windshield, leaving behind a stark-white splatter as it ricocheted down into the valley below. Zeke flinched at the sharp crack of the rock against the glass in front of his face. “That fat ol’ f*ck is gonna get me killed dead.” Joe shook his head. “If he’s after anyone’s head, it’d be mine.” Squinting at Joe with one eye, Zeke waggled one bony finger. “Me’n Walker go back afore your daddy came around. We ain’ never seen eye to eye about nothin’. If he could get his nasty ol’ tree to chunk a rock at my noggin, he’d do it in a blink.” Walker’s driver slowed and swung the Hummer onto a little strip of dirt pretending to be a road. Joe checked his rearview to make sure Stevie saw him turn and saw his wife tight on his tail. He’d put her in back not just because Walker was leading them, but because he wanted to keep her from tearing a blue-ass streak across the winding ridge roads. Nobody could drive like Stevie. He could see the irritation in her face and grinned at her in the rearview. Zeke frowned at Joe. “You keep taunting’ that girl, she’ gonna make you into a toad. Or a catfish.” The humor was lost on Joe. Seeing Stevie this way, knowing what she’d done and how it had changed her, he didn’t see much that was funny about her use of dark magic. He shoved the thought aside and put his mind to the unpleasant task of keeping the promise he’d made to Walker. “He knows my baby girl’s out there somewhere, right?”
Zeke scratched his beard and glared at the Hummer. “Oh, that ol’ bastard knows. He just don’ care.” They’d been on the road almost an hour, winding their way along ridge lines and down into valleys, working their way into the poorest part of Pitchfork County. This was Walker’s territory, where the desperate and ignorant lived in self-imposed exile from the rest of Pitchfork’s people. Here, the answer to a needy man’s midnight pleas was as close as a prayer, and the old red God had all the answers. Joe almost never came down here. No one did. “Why’d you let me agree to this stupid sh*t?” Zeke laughed, coughed, then slapped his knee. “I hate the mean ol’ f*cker, but we need him. Think he knows he needs us, too. This ain’ something’ fer one man to be dickin’ around with.” The Hummer jounced around another hard left, and Joe followed the behemoth into a trailer park. The dirt road branched off, vanishing into a maze of rusting trailers perched on cinder blocks. A handful of mangy dogs glared at the Hummer for disturbing their naps. A couple lifted their heads and bayed like they’d caught scent of a raccoon, but the rest just kept their noses between their paws and tried to ignore the strange cars. “Whooee. What self-respectin’ man could live like this?” Zeke let himself out of the truck and spit a yellow glob of tobacco juice onto the dirt between his feet. Joe swung down from the truck, tucking a pistol into the back of his waistband as he stepped onto the dirt. He thought of Zeke’s ratty little shack and said, “You’ve got a lot of room to talk, old man.” Zeke eyeballed Walker as the preacher waddled toward Joe’s truck. “These people ain’ gotta pot to piss in. I just go down and leak into the crick. Like God intended.” Walker leaned on his cane. “You do not do anything the way God intended.” Then to Joe, “Let’s go and see to my people. They have not heard the word of God since that wretched girl defiled my church.” Joe rolled his eyes at the back of Walker’s black head, but followed the old man. He motioned for Zeke and the rest to come along, but Al didn’t get out of the Rambler. He watched Joe with the hooded eyes of a big mountain wolf stalking a limping deer. Joe didn’t care for that one little bit. Other than their state of decay and ingrained squalor, the trailers were all different. Some were white streaked with rust, others were blue streaked with rust, still more were a rust-streaked yellow. By the time they’d walked past the third set of trailers, Joe
decided maybe they weren’t that different at all. He figured a tornado coming through the region would only improve property values. Stevie pinched his elbow at that last thought and shook her head, biting back her own laughter. The setting sun flashed in Joe’s eyes, and its golden glow reeled him back twenty years, before the curse, when he could touch Stevie without wanting to strangle her. The wind blew dust into his eyes, and he wiped it away with an irritated swipe of his hand. Preacher Walker reached the first trailer and tapped on its flimsy aluminum door with the head of his cane. When no one answered, he tapped again. “Brother Alan, I’ve come to pray with you.” Joe slipped up alongside the trailer and cupped his hands against a fly-specked window. The interior was dark, but enough sunlight slipped through the grimy glass to show him a sagging couch, a ratty recliner, and a dog-chewed coffee table covered with a mound of cigarette butts and a crooked pyramid of dented Busch cans. “Nobody home, Preacher.” Walker grumbled and hobbled down the steps. For an old, fat guy with a giant hole in his gut and a hip that looked just about shot, he seemed pretty spry. Joe and Zeke followed him from trailer to trailer, peeking in windows while he banged his cane against the doors. No one answered. Meanwhile, Stevie crouched down in the middle of the crossroads and drew a neat circle in the dirt around her feet with her left ring finger. She muttered a handful of old words and pressed her palm flat against the cracked earth. The dust shuddered at her touch, and its groaning voice whispered of the life around her. A dozen dogs, two old men, one man who was not only a man, a youth. That was all she got, no sign of the people from the trailers, no children playing in the scattered thickets of dogwood trees or hiding in the rutted, shallow valleys on the back of the trailer park. No one. “Joe,” she called out. “There’s no one here. They’re gone.” Walker grunted with frustration. “Miss, look around. How many cars and trucks do you see?” He was right; every trailer had a car or truck or banged up four-wheeler parked in front of it. Stevie doubted they all had spare cars. But, still, “The earth doesn’t lie, Preacher. There’s no one here.” The preacher scowled, but didn’t argue. Instead he turned toward another trailer,
Joe and Zeke trailing behind him. Joe shot his wife a miserable glance, but she shrugged. It wouldn’t hurt to check a few more of the aluminum sh*tboxes. Walker didn’t bother knocking at the next trailer. He turned the knob and shoved the door open. It skidded a few inches across a threadbare carpet, then stopped with a mushy squelch. He grunted and threw his weight against it, bowing the door out of shape in the middle, but it didn’t open any farther. Joe sighed and put his hand on the preacher’s shoulder. “There’s something on the other side. You’re not going to get it open like that.” There was enough room for Joe to squeeze into the trailer, but only just. He felt the bent door scraping across chest and hips as he forced his way through the tight gap. The trailer was dim, and his hand went for his badge. He concentrated on the symbol of his office, but its light was thin and watery. He tried not to think about whether it was his faith that had weakened or the Long Man’s power. Time to use the old-fashioned lights. He reached back to the wall next to the door and found the greasy switch. He flipped it, and dull yellow light flickered from the fixture overhead. This room was much like the last he’d peered into. Old furniture with blown springs and holes in the upholstery patched with duct tape squatted against the walls. There was a little box of a television with a pair of crooked wire rabbit ears sprouting out the top and a screen filled with ghostly images struggling to fight through walls of static. The rest of the world might be all flat screens and cable, but long stretches of Pitchfork County were still tube televisions and over-the-air programming. Nobody was going to string cable way out here and the ridge line did an admirable job of blocking satellite signals down in the valley. But no cable was the least of the worries here. Joe smelled the dead man through the funk of spilled beer and cigarette ash. He looked back to the door and found what he expected - a bloating corpse crumpled against the door. He sighed and got a little closer for a better look at the poor dead bastard in his tighty whiteys. “Dead guy,” he called back through the crack of the door. “A day or so, looks like.” What he didn’t mention was the man’s face. Someone had gone to work on it with something sharp. His lips were sliced into dozens of vertical ribbons, like a fringed curtain hanging over the yellow stumps of his meth-rotted teeth. His nose was shattered and splayed open, reformed into an ornate, almost floral pattern that revealed an interior lined with bristles of black hair and caked with dried snot.
Above that, someone had broken the man’s head open, smashing one big hole in his face that encompassed most of his forehead and both his eye sockets. They’d grouped both of his eyes in that hole, so they stared up at Joe, blind with the milky white veil of death. There was a third eye, or something supposed to represent one, a pale orb the color of bone. Joe didn’t know what it was; a knuckle, maybe a vertebral knob, something like that. Didn’t matter. The poor f*cker was dead, and the message was clear. This place belonged to the half-made girls and the batf*ckers who followed them. Outside, Stevie screamed, and the old men kicked up a fuss, too. Joe jumped in surprise and shoved his face against the gap between the door and its frame. There were kids out there, a crowd of them, moving toward Stevie with clumsy, rolling steps. More were spilling out from the gaps between the trailers, a horde of slack-jawed, pint-sized shamblers. “Get in the car,” Joe shouted. “Get the f*ck out of there.” He yanked at the door, but the body was still in the way. He could hear the children out there, chanting together, a singsong, schoolyard sound that gripped his ears with hands of ice. The words they were saying were old, terribly old, and they made Joe want to scream just to blot them out. He shoved his face against the gap again and could see the children’s faces, their mouths drooling blood, their eyes wide and unblinking. “Get in the cars,” Joe shouted again, but he knew his words were swallowed up by the chorus of broken children. Joe grabbed the body and dragged it away from the door by its feet. The head bounced and flopped from side to side, eyes rolling in the gaping hole in its face. With the body out of the way, he went back to the door and yanked on it. It was jammed. The preacher had smashed the door out of true, and it was hung up on the frame. Outside, Joe could see the children moving toward Stevie. Al was out of the Rambler, running toward his mother. One of the kids got too close to him, and Al’s hand flashed out, knocking the kid back three feet and onto his ass. Blood streamed out of the kid’s forehead, sheeting his eyes and cheeks with startling red. Joe hauled on the door for all he was worth, both hands locked on its frame, muscles bulging in his forearms and shoulders as he threw his weight back again and again. The door bent, but wouldn’t open. “Give me a hand, you fat f*ck,” Joe shouted. That got the preacher’s attention. He turned back to the door and slammed his bulk against it. Joe flew back as the bigger man’s mass smashed the door right off its hinges.
He ended up flat on his back on top of the dead guy, hands still locked around the mangled door’s edge. “Goddamn,” he groaned. Zeke pushed Stevie and Al into the trailer and limped in behind them. “Joe, we got a problem.” “No sh*t.” Joe got up off the floor and slid the door to the side. He joined Zeke at the doorway while Preacher Walker and Stevie muttered in quiet conversation next to the couch. There were a few dozen kids out there, from toddlers on up to teenagers a little younger than Al. They were all barking the same horrible words, a rhythmic chant that split their lips and chipped their teeth and was doing god knew what to their throats. Throwing around old words was a good way to end up dead if you didn’t know what you were doing. The kids didn’t look like they cared; their faces were blank masks of pale flesh streaked with blood that flowed over their chins and down their necks. “They’re not alive,” Stevie said. “I mean, there’s something in them that’s alive, but they aren’t alive.” The mob of kids was ten feet from the door. “We have to get this door back up.” Joe grabbed the aluminum door and rammed it into the bent frame. It sort of stuck there, leaving big gaps in some spaces and jamming tight in others. “Couch,” Joe commanded with a snap of his fingers. Preacher Walker grabbed the couch with one hand and swung it around, upending it and slamming it up against the door. Joe raised an eyebrow at the display of strength. “The red God provides,” the Preacher responded. The kids hit the door, but not very hard. They were determined but clumsy and weak. Joe could see them through the gap around the couch, sort of piling up against the door in a tangle of loose bodies and floppy limbs. “How long are these things going to keep at it?” Stevie shrugged. “I can’t feel whatever’s behind them. It’s just a blank. Could be a few minutes. Could be days.” “Great.” Joe didn’t wait to discuss the matter with the room. He drew his pistol and rammed it against the nearest kid’s forehead. Looking into the little boy’s eyes, Joe saw the triple pupils burning in the kid’s left eye. He drew the hammer back and squeezed the trigger.
The boy’s head opened like a dropped watermelon, spraying thick black blood and curdled clots of brain back through the pile-up. The bullet tunneled through a little kid’s face, then tore a girl’s arm clean off. The little boy’s cratered head wobbled on his shoulders as the other kids jostled for position. Joe watched, mouth dry, as something stirred inside the hollowed shell. It wrenched and shoved this way and that inside the broken skull, digging up through the last of the sloshing brains. Then it raised its head and opened its fanged mouth and let out a shrill shriek. One by one, the children opened their mouths and Joe watched as other, uglier heads wormed their way out into the light, a chorus of screeches that deafened them all. Bats. Hundreds of them. Joe clenched his pistol and groaned. His head throbbed with a brewing headache. He didn’t see a way out of this mess. “Well. f*ck.”
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he dogs were screaming and running in circles outside the trailer Joe was hiding in. T Bats covered the animals, carving open their hides with curved fangs, burrowing into their flesh. The dogs were doomed, but the animal instinct for survival wouldn’t let them lie down and accept their fate. Joe swapped his pistol for a broken chair leg and smashed the bats down as they tried to force their way through the gaps in the trailer’s door. He felt a strange weakness worming through his muscles, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that there were eyes on him. “Get me a sheet, blanket, something. Gotta plug these holes.” Stevie grabbed the filthy vinyl table cloth off the trailer’s tiny dining table and rushed into the kitchen to grab a handful of dingy steak knives. She unfurled the table cloth as she hurried to Joe and he took the left corners from her. Together, they threw the vinyl sheet up across the gap between the frame and the bent door. Stevie slammed the steak knives through the corners of the table cloth and through the trailer’s aluminum walls. She bent the handles over at right angles, pinning the cloth in place. She grinned at Joe as their makeshift barrier bulged with bats. “That’ll show ‘em.” Joe grinned back at his wife. It felt good to be working with her, comfortable in a way he’d never imagined possible. He turned to Walker and Zeke. “What are you old farts going to do while my wife handles all the real work around here?” But the old men were already hunkered over the table, leaning on their canes on opposite sides of the flimsy surface. “Reckon you oughter take a gander at this,” Zeke grumbled. Joe left the door under Stevie’s protection; the bats were filling up the barrier, but
they hadn’t figured out how to get into the trailer just yet. He could afford a few minutes to look at whatever was getting up the old man’s ass. The top of the table was covered with needle-fine, engraved lines that formed patterns that Joe had to drag his eyes away from before his head filled with bad thoughts. Just that brief glance was enough to start a throbbing ache behind his left eye; Joe had no idea how the old men could stand to study the damned thing. Every time he looked at the design on the table he felt it sinking hooks into his attention, pulling him along a path that would lead only to madness. The air felt too thin in the little trailer, and he found himself swallowing to get his ears to pop. The designs were like those he’d glimpsed in the Blackbriar place, but there were strange differences as well. “What am I looking at?” Walker rapped his cane on the edge of the table, but was careful to keep its silver head from touching the designs. “A blueprint.” Zeke grunted and spat on the floor. “More like a plan.” Joe unfocused his eyes and took in the bigger picture without being drawn into the trap of the details. His skin crawled when he realized he was looking at a map of Pitchfork County, the two spots where they’d found the half-made girls marked with spiraling, looping sigils. There was a third symbol, to the northwest of the two he recognized. He pointed to it, but kept his finger well clear of the table. Those designs looked like they had teeth. “Where is that?” Walker and Zeke exchanged glances. “Onondaga.” Joe’s stomach sank. “The caverns?” “We’ve got a problem,” Stevie called from the door. The vinyl table cloth no longer bulged; in fact, Joe didn’t see any bats caught against it at all. “Where are the bats?” Stevie shrugged. “That’s the problem.” Joe walked over and took a look out the grimy window. The dogs were dead or dying, bloated bodies humping and rolling from the life devouring their guts, but there were no bats in the air. No bats tried to worm their way in through the trailer’s front door, either. “That’s not good.” Zeke and Walker were arguing about something at the table. Joe tried to ignore them, to focus on the sounds he could almost hear. The bats weren’t in sight, but he could still hear them somewhere nearby, rustling, crawling. Swarming.
“Get out of the trailer,” Joe shouted. “Get out of here, now.” Stevie didn’t ask any questions. She yanked the knives out of the wall and tossed the tablecloth out of the way. Then she threw her weight against the ragged couch and sent it crashing to the floor next to the kitchen table. Without the couch to hold it in place, the bent door flopped out of the doorway, but the way out still wasn’t clear. Stevie yelped with surprise and jumped back. The lower half of the exit was packed with children’s heads, teeth gnashing at the air. Their eye sockets were empty caverns rimmed with blood, blown out when the bats gnawed their way into the world. Walker slammed his cane against the floor. “We have to bring this table with us, we cannot just leave it here. The information it holds is too valuable.” Joe eyed the dead man in the middle of the floor. He’d been a heavy guy, but his gut was ponderous now, swelling with each passing second. Joe peered into the crater where the man’s forehead used to be. Red eyes glared at him from the gory gloom. He grabbed the dining room table, careful not to look at its engraved surface or touch the designs, and charged toward the doorway. The eyeless heads moaned and chewed at the air. As he closed in on them, Joe could see their teeth were long and sharp, like the needle fangs of the devil bats. He didn’t want to think about the kind of damage teeth like that would do if they got hold of him. Joe slammed the flimsy table into the barrier of heads, roaring with disgust as he sent the gnawing faces rolling out into the road. He kept smashing the table into the remaining heads, batting them far from the door. Behind him, he could hear something stretching, straining. About to burst. “Stevie, get something ready for bats.” He smashed the last of the heads out of the way and carried the table out over the mound of corpses beyond the door. He kicked at the bodies, trying to clear a path, but it was like shoving mud with his toes. For every one he shifted, two more sank into its place. “Everyone out.” Stevie was the first through the doorway. She ran a wide circle around the vehicles, dragging the toe of her sneaker in the dirt. “Get in the cars,” she said and worked her fingers through intricate patterns. Her hair floated on currents of static electricity, and the shadows around her eyes were so thick Joe couldn’t see through them. Al helped Zeke and Walker out the door, lending his strong arm for support on the
inside while Joe did the same from the outside. Joe could see his son’s eyes bulging with fear at the thought of the bats catching him. He hoped the boy could get past it someday, but right now he was half-mad with fright. The old men limped toward the Hummer and the truck, and Joe kept an eye on the trailer. “Hobble your asses a little faster unless you want to be bat chow.” Stevie saw them coming and shouted, “Don’t break the circle.” There was a hollow thud from inside the trailer, the sound of something wet and sticky bursting. Red splashed over the grimy windows, and a gout of it spurted out from the doorway, unfurling like a great, bloody tongue. Half the spew caught Al as he was leaving the trailer, soaking him to the bone with gore. He tripped over the corpses and fell, his hand inches from one of the gnashing heads. Screeches poured out of the trailer, the cries of a million bats swarming, ready to hunt. The nightmare ruckus kicked Al into gear. He scrambled toward the cars, a billowing cloud of hungry bats pouring out of the trailer after him. Stevie was muttering something, eyes rolled up in their sockets, tongue darting and flicking in the air like a serpent’s. Walker grabbed Al by the arm and hoisted the boy into the circle, pulling him up and over the mystical barrier with the ease of a mother lifting a child. The bats were too close, less than a yard away. Joe closed his eyes and waited for the fangs. The ground bounced, and Joe choked as the invisible hand of a pressure wave squeezed the air out of his lungs. A wall of wind erupted from Stevie’s circle and roared outward, kicking up gravel and dirt before it. It smashed bats apart, shredding them with raw force. It destroyed the trailers, as well, splitting them open and scattering their contents with a tornado’s strength. Corpses sailed through the air, clumsy cartwheels that ended with liquid thuds. Walker and Zeke both eyed Stevie with equal parts suspicion and respect. Joe found himself looking at his wife in much the same way. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m handy like that.” Stevie grinned at Joe, her mouth lopsided and quivering. Blood leaked from her left ear, and red tears ran from the corners of her eyes. Stevie staggered, caught herself on
Al’s shoulder for a moment, then passed out.
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tevie drove slower as they left the trailer park than she had on the way in. Her S fainting spell hadn’t lasted long, but Joe watched the Rambler for any signs his wife might be having trouble. He’d never seen anything like that before, the casual way she’d bent the world to her will made his skin crawl. It made him proud. He couldn’t reconcile the two feelings. Zeke pointed out ahead of the Rambler, at something across the road. “What’s up there? My eyes ain’ what they oughter be.” Joe slowed the truck, then stopped it twenty yards behind Stevie’s Rambler, which sat in the road in front of a pair of patrol cars. “Sheriff’s deputy,” Joe muttered. “This’ll be fun.” He tucked both pistols in the back of his belt and eased out of the truck. He watched the two deputies leaning against their cars and spoke to Zeke out of the side of his mouth. “Keep your head down.” “Don’t gotta tell me twice,” Zeke said. One of the deputies was tapping on Stevie’s window when Joe reached the Rambler. Joe showed his empty hands, and the deputy gave him a curt nod. The officer leaned back from the car, all his attention on the Night Marshal. “Joe,” he started as he unsnapped his holster. “Some people want to talk to you.” Joe gave the young man a tight smile. “Dan have a change of heart? Send you boys to round me up and finish what he couldn’t?” The deputy grinned. “Not just us. You’re a popular sort of guy these days, Joe.” “Yeah,” Joe ran his tongue over his teeth, wishing for the taste of whiskey. “I’m
really feeling the love out here.” The other deputy fumbled with the snaps on his holster. Joe raised an eyebrow. “One of you might get a shot off before I return the favor, but not both. Why don’t you two get in your cars and drive the f*ck out of here before we see who dies today?” “We don’t want everyone, okay?” The first deputy’s hand was on the butt of his weapon. “Just you. You come with us, we let everyone else go.” “Get your cars out of the road.” Joe’s hand found the pistol and whipped it free of his belt. The big barrel was pointed at the deputy so fast he didn’t even know it was happening until it was over. “Now.” The deputy swallowed so hard Joe could hear it from twenty feet away. “Okay, Joe. Okay.” The second deputy didn’t wait for his partner to give the order, he jumped back in his car and hightailed it down the road. Working for the half-made girls hadn’t made the deputies any braver. “What’re you waiting for? Get going.” The deputy backed up to his car, hands over his head. “When they come for you and your family, remember we offered you a choice.” Joe laughed. “They took my girl. Tried to kill us all not a half hour back. Take your choice and shove it up your ass.” The deputy nodded and opened his car door. “Still.” “Get the f*ck out of here.” The deputy sat in his car, staring at Joe for a long second, deciding on his next move. Joe kept the pistol aimed at the kid’s head, finger trembling on the trigger. “Didn’t have to go down like this.” The deputy took his hat off, dropped it on the seat next to him. “People are scared. Been scared a long time.” Joe let the pistol drop to his hip again, the barrel suddenly too heavy to hold. “I’m not exactly feeling all fat and happy, myself, these days.” “I guess you know how we all felt, then.” The deputy slammed his door and fired up the cruiser’s engine. He spun the car in reverse, pointed its nose down the road, and stepped on the gas. Joe watched the deputy drive away, then crouched to look into Stevie’s window. She rolled it down, and he was struck again by how strong, how vibrant his wife looked. Despite her white skin and dark eyes, she radiated a vital strength Joe hadn’t
seen in years. He felt sick, ashamed, for how he’d made her hide her true self. He’d just have to deal with his hurt feelings and get on with it. Things had changed. “Change of plans,” he said. “Head for the old deer camp” Stevie nodded. She held Joe’s eyes with her own. “What he said, it’s not true.” Joe sighed and reached into the car. He cupped the back of Stevie’s head in his hand, just for a moment, just until the darkness welled up through the magic between them and he felt his face turn to stone and his eyes go dark. She retreated from him, breath caught in her throat. “It is, I guess. In a way. Somewhere along the way I turned into a scary bastard.” Joe stood up and patted the top of the Rambler. “Let’s get moving, I’ve got a bad feeling about this roadblock showing up just now.” “Drive safe,” Stevie called as she stepped on the gas and sent the Rambler racing down the road. Joe hauled himself up into his truck and hoped Zeke wouldn’t notice the tremble in his fingers.
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J oe hadn’t been to the deer camp in years. His father had loved to hunt, but Joe never seemed to find the time to put bullets through defenseless animals. There were always too many monsters to deal with, human and otherwise. He peeked in through the cracked glass window in the front door and worked the key into the lock. There was rust around the edges of the keyhole, but it only took a little muscle to get the door open. “Welcome to your new home, friends and neighbors.” Walker limped up onto the short front porch and sniffed at the dark interior. “This is a dump.” Joe ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know if you noticed, but those sheriff’s deputies back there didn’t seem very friendly. They’re looking for us, preacher. Probably all of us.” “They would not dare harm me. They have no idea of our confederation.” Joe stabbed a finger toward the still-spotless white Hummer. “They didn’t, but they do now. You think they were too blind to see that big ol’ showboat of yours following my truck?” Walker grumbled and stomped into the cabin, leaning on his cane. Zeke followed the preacher, grinning at Joe as he passed. “Nice place ya got here. Looks like it’ll do us fine.” Joe swatted the old man on the back of the head as he passed, then walked to the Hummer. They’d stowed the table in the vehicle’s enormous cargo bay before leaving the trailer park. He wanted the two experts to get a chance to look at it in a more relaxed atmosphere.
The rear hatch popped open as Joe approached it. He pushed it up and slid the table out of the back. Then he paused and looked back at Preacher Walker’s driver. The man sat behind the wheel, bald head facing forward, hands on the wheel precisely at ten and two. He looked like he was ready to drive at a moment’s notice, like he was always ready to drive at a moment’s notice. Joe decided he had more important things to worry about just then than whatever hoodoo Walker had spun his driver from, but it was something he would keep in mind. Joe was wrestling with the table, trying to get a good grip on it, when Stevie showed up and grabbed two of the legs. “Thanks,” Joe said, and grabbed the other two. Stevie lifted her side and started walking backward, pulling Joe along. “I’m fine, you know.” “You didn’t look fine.” “It’s like,” Stevie paused to get up onto the porch. She tilted the table sideways so they could fit it through the doorway, “pulling a muscle if you try to lift too much weight. I’ll be sore for a while, but it’s nothing that won’t pass.” Joe grunted, but he wasn’t ready to agree with his wife just yet. “I appreciate what you did back there, but a little restraint wouldn’t kill you.” Stevie grinned and helped Joe flip the table up onto its feet. “It might’ve, back there. Didn’t have time to figure out how much oomph to put behind it.” Joe rolled his eyes at his wife, then turned to the old men. “All right, boys, time for you to earn your keep and tell us what the hell is going on out there.” Walker limped over and tapped the old propane lantern that hung from the rafters over the table. “I doubt that has any gas,” Stevie said. The lantern came on with an audible pop, though the flame had a faint gold tinge to its pure white light. Walker flashed a broad shark’s smile and bent his attention to the table. Joe motioned to Stevie from the cabin’s little kitchen, giving the old men space to argue over the arcane mess. Stevie leaned against the counter and waited for Joe to speak. “Elsa,” he stopped, gathered himself, started again. “Do you feel anything out there? At all?” Stevie’s hand curled protectively across her stomach. “She’s out there, but that’s all
I can get. There’s something between us. Blocking me.” Joe rifled through the cabinets, came up with a bottle of whiskey. He had the bottle halfway to his lips before Stevie’s fingers brushed the back of his hand. “You need that?” She tipped her head toward the bottle. Joe put the bottle on the counter, laid the cap back on the neck. “I reckon I can go without for a bit longer.” But his fingers were shaking. He felt a tingle of rage down deep in his gut that had nothing to do with the curse laid on the two of them. It was the anger he’d seen often enough in bars and on front porches, the rage of a drunk confronted with his own weakness. He couldn’t hold his wife’s gaze. He felt small. Ashamed. Stevie left the kitchen. Joe stared out the window at the untamed forest. His fondest childhood memories of this place were always of the smell of brisk morning air, tramping around in the fallen leaves and early snow, rifle across his shoulder. He could taste the gamey, savory heft of fresh-killed, roasted venison. Then other smells intruded. Blood splashed and dried on his skin until he felt like he’d never be clean. The chemical burn of batsh*t. The rich, final stench of a gut shot. Joe stared at the bottle, willing it to vanish, hoping he could keep his hands off it. “Joe?” Zeke’s voice was low and cautious. “Yer gonna wanna see this.” Glad for the distraction, Joe followed the old man to the table. The gold-white light made it easier to look at its surface, as if the pure, clean radiance stole some of its malevolent energy. “It is a map,” Walker stated, tracing its edges with a finger-pointing gesture. “And also a bible. And a set of instructions.” Joe sighed. “I’m not sure if you jackasses remember, but some scary bitches stole my daughter this morning, and I’d like to hurry it up and get to the point where I can go and get her back.” “Zip yer lip; might learn somethin’.” Zeke pointed at the outline of the map. “This part, looks like ’twas carved earlier than the rest. Newer carvin’ slops over it here and again.” Walker took up the explanation. “I can’t read the writing they’ve hacked, but these symbols are obvious. They mark where the girls were brought over.” Joe nodded. Each of the symbols was a big snarl of overlapping spirals and tiny etched figures, all surrounded by concentric rings. Where the rings overlapped, there
was a fourth symbol. One big circle held three smaller spirals in a tight triangle. Glancing at it sent a stab of pain rocketing through Joe’s forehead. For a moment, Joe was looking down on the scene, watching from somewhere outside of his body. He stumbled back from the table, left hand clutching his face. A voice echoed in the back of his skull, taunting, “ I I I see you you you. ” Zeke helped Joe catch his balance. “Yer oughtn’t look right at it. Reckon ya oughter know better, idjit.” Joe shuddered and took a deep breath. He wanted to scrub the inside of his skull with steel wool and lye. There was a pull, a feeling of falling toward the table, deep in his gut. He stabbed his finger at the center of the table, where a wide circle filled with eldritch runes dominated. “What the f*ck is that?” Walker rapped his thick knuckles near the center of the table. “That would be number four. These symbols all align with that larger circle, as if these others were feeding into it. It looks more impressive than the first three.” Impressive was a massive understatement. Joe could feel that central circle tugging at his eyes. The other symbols marked some of the worst atrocities he’d seen in a life spent hunting darkness. His spit dried to dust when he tried to imagine what was going to slither out of the big one. “Great.” Zeke clucked his tongue. “There’s more. Yer not gonna like it.” Walker stabbed his finger at the first three symbols. “Some of this is written in Enochian as near as I can tell.” Joe raised his hand. “You’re trying to tell me angels wrote this sh*t?” Walker frowned. “Enochian is the language of creation; angels are not the only creatures who know how to call things into being. I do not have the time or tools I’d need to translate all of this, but the bits I can make out refer to seeds spreading on the wind.” Zeke raised an eyebrow. “And a burnin’. A cleansin’.” The preacher continued. “I do not think those girls are an end in themselves, Joe. They are just the tip of the spear of what is happening in Pitchfork. They are harbingers of something bigger.” Joe’s forehead itched. He remembered Elsa’s words in the church. She’d called the first girl a seed. The three of them had been spread around Pitchfork, and now that they’d sprouted, whatever pulled their strings was coming for the harvest.
Joe wished he had his shotgun. “If whatever put them here shows up, there’s going to be a world of hurt coming down.” “For anyone not in on the deal,” Zeke agreed. “Which is, ya know, all of us and then some.” Joe racked his brain, pulling back the details he remembered from the church and the springs, from the Pryor house and the Blackbriar place. “Red Oak. Chickinee. Onandaga. They’re all holy places, right?” He paced the floor, pieces of the plan falling into place. “I think I know how we can stop this.” Joe sketched out his plan, leaving out a few critical pieces he knew neither of the old men was going to like, and one that Stevie would like even less. He was just guessing that it would work, but it felt right. When it came to the Left-Hand Path, and how to fight it, sometimes the only things he knew he could trust were his guts. Walker leaned on his cane. “That all seems simple enough, but you know as soon as we put that plan in motion those monsters will be all over us.” “Not if they’ve got something else to worry about.” Joe nodded toward the fourth circle. “Whatever they’re gonna do, it’ll be there, right?” Walker shrugged. “That would make sense, based on what we have here, but these people are insane.” A hearty laugh escaped Joe at that. “Preacher, anyone who begs for a god’s attention is f*cking crazy. They’re just a different kind of crazy from you.” Joe waved off Walker’s protest. “I think this plan is the only fighting chance we have against these assholes.” Zeke tugged at his beard. “I reckon we’re short one person for yer plan.” Joe shook his head and pressed his knuckles into the small of his back. “You and Walker can take down two of them. That’ll be enough.” Stevie piped up, stepping away from the wall. “I’ll do it.” “No.” Joe’s voice was flat and cold. “My family’s shed enough blood for one day.” Stevie smiled at her husband and the lantern flickered. A cold wind tugged at her hair and washed over the men in the room. “I wasn’t asking. She’s my daughter, too. I’ll take the third.” Joe sighed. He hated to admit it, but Stevie was right. With her help, they had a chance to pull this off. Without her, everything was a long-odds crap shoot. “Let’s get
some sleep. Tomorrow’s going to come early.”
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og curled up from the cold ground, hugging the earth like a wet blanket. Stevie stood F at the kitchen window and listened to the others going about their morning rituals. Zeke groaned from the main room, his old joints popping and creaking as he rolled out of his cot. Walker’s footsteps shook the little cabin as he paced the floor, reciting prayers in his low, rumbling voice. “Almost time.” Stevie could feel Joe behind her, a pressure on her skin and soul. He spoke quietly, but his words felt too loud in the quiet of the kitchen. She turned and leaned back against the counter, arms crossed over her belly. Stevie hadn’t slept more than a couple of restless hours, thoughts ticking over like an idling engine. Here, at the end, she had so many things to tell Joe and no words to say them. She smiled and pressed her fingertips over her heart. “I love you.” Joe leaned in, his body tense against her, pressing her against the counter. Stevie held onto him, pulled his face down to hers. His kiss was sharp and bitter, with too many ferocious teeth. Stevie held on, fighting the tide of rage and hate, smothering it with a love so fierce not even the Bog Witch could kill it. They shoved away from each other, hearts hammering in their ears, and Stevie watched Joe wipe a drop of blood from his lips. “Hold that thought,” he said through a crooked grin. Stevie reached out to Joe once more, her fingers running through the hair at the back of his skull. She pinched and tugged, and he jumped back like he’d been bit. Stevie raised the little hairs up between her fingertips.
Joe laughed and watched her light a candle. She dripped a blob of wax onto his hairs and rolled it into a little bead. “In case I need to come looking’ for ya,” she explained. There were no words to say. She and Joe had their parts to play, they knew what had to happen. They stayed together in the kitchen and watched Zeke and Walker leave for their parts of the plan. Then Joe gave her one last hug and went out that door himself. Stevie tried to imagine the three men coming back later in the day. But in her memories of the future, that door stayed open, black and empty. Al was still sleeping when Stevie left the cabin. She kissed him on the cheek and brushed the long hair from his eyes and prayed she’d come back to see him again. She drove the Rambler down out of the hills to the soggy bottom of Pitchfork County, down old roads that she’d ignored for most of her adult life. Stevie headed for home.
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he old truck grumbled down the road from the deer camp, and Joe grumbled right T along with it. His head ached, and his dry throat was raw with the need for whiskey. “Let’s just get this done,” he muttered to himself, and guided the truck over roads that had become too familiar over the past couple of days. The pieces were falling into place, and the picture they formed wasn’t encouraging. Until the half-made girls had kidnapped Elsa, Joe wasn’t sure what they were up to. By taking his daughter, they’d confirmed his fears. He stopped at the big house and hopped out of the still-running truck. He knew where this had to end, but there was no sense in going unprepared. Joe went down to the basem*nt and gathered up the supplies he needed, loading them one by one into an old backpack. He handled it with care, doing his best not to jostle anything inside. He needed to get things there in one piece. Looking at the wreckage of his own home, Joe tried to imagine the family living there again. He couldn’t make the picture fit in his head. He kept seeing Al howling, blood running out of countless wounds. Elsa screaming as ghosts poured down her throat while Stevie struggled to save her children. It was a nightmarish cascade of images that he couldn’t put aside. How could he ask them to come back here, to this house where they’d been hunted and hurt, where the horrors he’d made had come calling? Joe shook his head and left the house with the door wide open. He didn’t think he was ever coming back. He took a quick detour down to Stevie’s place to gather up one last item, which he wrapped in a scrap of canvas and tucked into his backpack. “No more putting this off, I
guess.” Joe let his mind wander as he drove down a road he’d thought he’d never travel again. Old wounds ached with the memories of his last visit. His forehead burned like someone had dribbled acid between his eyes. The truck sputtered and stalled in front of the ruins of the Pryor place. His burning had been thorough this time. The flames had left nothing except a few thick sticks of charcoal and heaps of ashes. Joe scooped his backpack off the seat next to him and headed for the place this had all begun. He scrubbed at his forehead with his palm, but the pain had its hooks in too deep to be shaken off. Looking at the ruins, Joe found himself battling more bitter memories. The pressure of the shotgun against his son’s chest. The sound of Alasdair’s screams as the bats chewed their way into his body. A flickering gut shot of scenes, all the blood and pain and death that had come since that day. Joe dug his half-empty bottle of Gentleman Jack out of the backpack. He wasn’t sure why he’d brought it. He wasn’t sure how much of what had happened was the result of his hangover, of him being too tired and wrung out and wasted to figure out what was going on. What if he hadn’t stopped for a drink when looking for the key to free Al? What if he’d gone up to the Lodge instead of drinking through the night? Would any of this have happened? Would Elsa still be safe with her mama? He unscrewed the bottle’s cap and lifted it to his lips. The glass was cold and unyielding. The smell tickled his nostrils. He could taste alcohol fumes on the back of his tongue. All he had to do was tilt his head back and let it pour down his throat. Joe opened the truck’s door and upended the bottle, gnawed the inside of his lip as he listened to the whiskey splashing onto the gravel. His throat ached for the stuff, and it wasn’t until the last of it was gone that he could breathe again. Twice he’d made terrible mistakes here. Joe didn’t think he could survive a third f*ckup. He pushed the door open and stomped down into the shallow puddle of amber poison. Every step stank of whiskey and smoke. Joe relished the smell, knowing it might be the last time it ever filled his nose. Joe stood on the scorched earth where the porch had once been. The spit dried in his mouth and tasted like ashes. It was still dark, but a strange light flickered to life above the old well. The gazing ball hovered above the pit, spilling a rainbow of sick,
oily light. The three rocking chairs bowed toward weird light, leaning so far forward they should have fallen into the ashes. But they just hung there like three old ladies hunched up on the front of their seats. By the greasy light of the seer’s ball, Joe could see someone had been to the well. They’d cleared out a path to the hole, smoothed the ash so that rough, gray dunes flanked the walkway. Where the light fell across the ground, strange symbols flickered in the dust. They tugged at Joe’s eyes, urged him to follow them down into the darkness. “Figures,” Joe spat. Nothing could be easy. Joe followed the trail that led down into the crater that had once been a basem*nt. The glowing globe hung overhead, throbbing with an ominous, tooth-rattling hum. Its light caressed his forehead, and pain sizzled along his nerve endings like bacon grease on a hot skillet. He didn’t want to go down in the well. Didn’t want to deal with whatever was down there. And that light was really pissing him off. “Honey,” the Night Marshal said and sighted down the pistol’s hexagonal barrel. “I’m home.” The gun roared and split the air with a lance of silver fire tipped by burning lead. The bullet slammed into the sphere with a sound like a cannonball smashing into a swimming pool, a thunderous, liquid splash that shook the air with a shockwave that blew Joe’s hair back and rocked him onto his heels. The light splattered in all directions, sizzling where it hit the ground, casting strange shadows and flickers where it fell down the well’s throat. The smears of dirty light wriggled on the surface, then burrowed down into the earth, out of sight. Joe stopped at the ring of cracked and blackened stones surrounding the well’s hungry mouth. Someone had laid out the welcome mat, driving thick iron spikes into the earth and hanging a crude rope ladder over the hole’s edge. Like they were expecting him. Waiting for him. Joe wondered how many were down there. He crouched down near the well and listened to the autumn morning wind moaning across its open mouth. There was a sound, just at the edge of his hearing, a scratching, digging clatter. Joe opened the backpack and dug his father’s old holsters out. He slung the rig over his shoulder and fastened it around his waist. One pistol went snug under
his left arm, the other strapped to his right thigh. The pistols were loaded, and a baker’s dozen of bullets rested in loops on the rig. Joe hoped that would be enough to do the job. He also hoped he was wrong. He really hoped those three f*cked-up girls were not the harbingers for something even bigger and more f*cked up than themselves. He prayed that the people of Pitchfork hadn’t found a new god for themselves, a bigger and meaner bully than the Long Man, hadn’t traded Joe’s rough hand for the crushing grip of something far, far worse. Most of all, Joe hoped to hell they weren’t going to kill his little girl in a demented attempt to use her gifts to conjure up their new master. He walked back to the well and stared down into the blackness. Joe wondered what Al had felt down there. He wondered why he’d been dumb enough to think some gasoline and explosives could have solved this problem. Sometimes, the only way to fix things is to get your hands dirty. Joe grabbed hold of the ladder, and dropped down into the dark. “Ready or not, motherf*ckers,” Joe whispered, “here I come.”
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he Rambler idled outside the big old house where Stevie’d grown up. The old T home’s windows were empty black sockets dripping with Spanish moss and kudzu, lit by the Morse code flashing of dozens of lightning bugs. Green eyes gleamed in the glare of her headlights, raccoons and squirrels waiting for her to leave them in peace. She killed the Rambler’s engine and shut off the headlights. Spook lights emerged from the early morning gloom, amorphous green smears of light floating above the curdled ground fog. Stevie followed the lights around the bend behind the house, down to the edge of the bog from which her mother had taken her power. An old oak, its black bark black infested with creeping moss, leaned out over the brackish water. Stevie ran her hands down the grimy trunk until her fingertips found a now-rusty nail she’d driven into the tree at the shore line. A thin chain ran into the water from the nail, and Stevie hooked her fingers around it. It glistened wet silver in the early morning moonlight as she hauled it up out of the water. The end of the chain was wrapped around an old co*ke bottle, the glass clotted with clusters of yellow algae. The bottle was corked with a thick plug of wax to keep the swamp at bay. Stevie shook it and smiled at the rattle. Holding it up to the light, she could just make out the gnarly chunks of yellowed bone through the bottom of the bottle. “Hi there, Mama.” The plug came out of the bottle with a little coaxing from Stevie’s pocket knife, and the teeth rattled out into the palm of her left hand. Stevie bit the inside of her lip until she tasted blood, then spat red onto the teeth. She closed her fist around all that remained of the Bog Witch and said the old words to call her mother from the other
side. The bog boiled and gave up glowing globs of gas that burst in the air with a rich, rotten stink. “What have ya done, daughter mine?” The words bubbled up out of the swamp with the gas, putrid and foul. “Bindin’ yer own mama like some common haint?” Stevie licked her lips and held tight to her mother’s teeth, though they pricked at her palm. “I need you to behave, Mama, and I don’t have time for any foolishness.” The black bog grew still, then seethed like hot tar. Stevie watched as her mother’s face appeared in the water, a fluid vision of darkness. “I feel yer need, Daughter, but yer too late by half. I cain’t help that man of yers even if I wanted, which you know damn well I don’t.” Her mother’s face twisted and deformed, revealing the injury Joe dealt her at their last meeting. The gaping crater where her eye used to be, the grimy curds of her brain dripping from the wound. “Hide him, Mama. Hide him and the others from those damned girls.” Laughter rose from the bog in slimy bubbles. “I cain’t hide him from what he’s part of, girl. The master of them girls done got his hooks into yer man, deep.” Stevie crouched down on the bank of the bog and trailed her fingers through the water. Despite all they’d been through, she couldn’t shake the love she held for her mother. Despite their differences, Stevie knew the Bog Witch had tried to protect her, even at the end. “Tell me.” The bog’s waters rippled and flowed up Stevie’s fingers, coiled around her wrist. “That man has two masters. That ol’ bastard up at the Lodge and some new terror that’s still crawling betwixt worlds.” Cold settled into Stevie, soaking down through her skin and into her bones. “No.” “Think, girl. Goddamn. How you think them bitches knew where to find yer girl? Or that you was goin’ to that nasty ol’ trailer park? What happened to yer man at that whor*’s bar, and how did they know he would be there?” Stevie sank down on her haunches and pulled her hand out of the water. “Help him get free, then.” Water rose in a geyser from the bottom of the bog, jetting high into the air. “No.” Stevie clenched her hand around the teeth until they cut into her palm. She let the blood dribble off her fingers into the water. “I command you to help him.”
A shriek of raw madness splashed up out of the water, scattering glowing orbs in all directions. “Never.” Stevie’s heart ached. She imagined Joe, heading into a fight where his enemy already knew his every move. She thought of those girls, lying in wait, and her husband walking right into their trap. Then she had another thought, and her breath caught in her lungs. Stevie jammed the teeth back in the bottle and ignored her mother’s screeching protest. She’d held on to this connection to a dead woman for years, creeping down to the bog whenever she could to seek wisdom from her mother. It had always been a comfort for her, but now it left her feeling cold and sick. Stevie filled the bottle with the thick bog water that tied her to this place. She melted the wax back into the bottle’s neck with her little lighter, let it cool in place. She reeled the silver chain in and wrapped it around the bottle, then snapped the last link free of the tree. She weighed the bottle and all it represented in her palm, then slipped it into her little work bag. She’d need it sooner rather than later. Joe wasn’t the only one in danger. The nightmares knew all their plans. She raced toward the cave, pushing the Rambler to its limits, praying she still had time.
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n ammoniac reek wafted up the well’s shaft, bringing with it a moist heat that left A Joe dripping with sweat after a few minutes of climbing. The rope ladder soaked up the moisture on his hands and coated them with itching fibers. By the time he reached the well’s bottom, Joe regretted dumping out the last of his booze, which he knew meant it had been a good idea. It was too easy to imagine himself down in the darkness, boots mired in batsh*t and mushroom pulp, drinking half a bottle of Jack before he could stop himself. He released the ladder and waited, letting his eyes adjust to the dim-purple glow of phosphorescent fungus that clung to the walls around him. He could make out what looked like the mouth of a tunnel leading away from the bottom of the well, but little else. Al was right, his eyes were going to sh*t. When his vision did come into focus, Joe could see what he’d been smelling: a nasty mound of bat waste that spread out around him for ten feet in every direction. Seeing their guano made Joe wonder where the bats were and how soon they’d be back. He eased the safety strap off the pistol on his right thigh and let his palm rest on the weapon’s grip. The revolver wouldn’t be as useful against the bats as his shotgun, but it was something. He knew there was more to worry about down here than just a flock of bats with a taste for man flesh. The walls at the bottom of the well were covered with scarred graffiti, glyphs and sigils scattered among rough sketches of dripping penises and gaping vagin*s. Spiderscratched words wrapped around everything, the frenetic, jagged ramblings of paranoid
addicts rendered in charcoal lines. It looked like a bathroom at Hogwarts after a weeklong meth binge. The whole mess hurt Joe’s head and made his spine throb. What bothered him wasn’t the combination of the mundane and the eldritch, it was the frantic, terrified scribbling. There was fear here, fear of the order Joe had spent his adult life creating. Fear of the world beyond Pitchfork County’s supernatural borders. Fear of a world that cared little for the weak and not at all for the poor. This was a burst of blind panic, a screamed prayer to any god that would listen. Worse than the prayers was the sense of community Joe felt within them. The words wove in and out, forming sentences from scraps written in different hands, tying everything together into a single cry for help. He didn’t want to read these prayers to a god he’d come to kill, but Joe couldn’t stop himself. Because he felt comfort there, too, a sense of belonging. While he read the words, Joe’s forehead didn’t even hurt anymore. In desperation, the people of Pitchfork had bound themselves together. There was a family here, even if it was born of nightmares. The Night Marshal wondered if he should have heard these prayers when they were whispers, if he could have heard them if he hadn’t been busy drowning his own worries and fears in bottle after bottle of whiskey. Maybe he could have set things to right if he’d seen the pain his people were in, been able to help them instead of waiting for them to step out of line. “You gonna write on our welcome wall, Joe?” The Night Marshal turned from the mass of words and symbols to a shadowy mob of figures standing in the mouth of the tunnel leading away from the bottom of the well. He could see a four or five heads in the vague light, but there might be three times that many behind them for all Joe could tell. He recognized the voice, one of Schrader’s deputies, but couldn’t put a name to it. Probably had never bothered to learn the name. “That what you call this chickenscratch bullsh*t?” The deputy grinned; Joe could see his teeth gleam in the mushrooms’ light. “Nobody tells us what we can or can’t write on that wall. You hear the call, you come on down and write whatever moves you. That’s freedom.” Joe stalled for time, letting his words out in a slow, even cadence. “You call living in these tunnels full of batsh*t freedom?” “Better’n livin’ under the sun and worryin’ about some asshole coming around and
shooting up your granny because she magicked up a birthin’ fix.” Murmurs of assent rose from the rest of the crowd. Joe wanted to believe that he’d only killed when it was called for, when it couldn’t be avoided. He didn’t remember kicking in the doors of people who didn’t have it coming. But after all those years of drinking, he had to admit there were a lot of things he didn’t remember so clear these days. These people were scared of something, maybe it was him. “Not like I had a lot of choice in what went on, you know.” Joe scratched at the stubble on his chin with his left hand. “I had my job, just like you had yours. People broke your laws, you didn’t hear me telling you how to handle it, did you?” The deputy laughed at that, because Joe had busted their balls more than once for their lackadaisical approach to law enforcement. “Sure, Joe. Always stayed on your side of the line. Nice f*ckin’ memory ya got there.” “Water under the bridge.” Joe’s palm felt warm on his pistol’s grip. He took a step toward the tunnel. He didn’t have time to sit around and jaw with these meatheads all day. Very soon now, his people would be starting in on their own business, and he needed to get his distraction going if he didn’t want their whole plan to end in blood and tears. “Why don’t you get the hell out of my way so I can get my girl and go home? We can have ourselves a nice chat over a cup of coffee once the sun’s full up.” The deputies didn’t take a step, but Joe could see the barrel of a rifle swing down off a shoulder. Joe hoped they all had rifles. Might make this next part easier. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Whyn’t you scribble your piece on the wall there and get on the right side of this fight afore it’s too late?” Joe looked over his shoulder at the wall and took a step forward. Closer to the deputies, he could see their tics and fidgeting. If it wasn’t for the batsh*t, Joe knew he’d be able to smell the heavy chemical stink of a meth on all of them. “I’m already on the right side. The side that doesn’t take little girls down into the dark to sacrifice to their f*cked-up god.” “Ya motherf*cker,” the deputy started, but Joe cut his sentence off by taking a rushing step forward and slamming his pistol up under the man’s chin. His forehead itched like crazy, and he could feel a black rage roaring inside him. It was time to get down to business, to put his doubts aside and get his baby girl back from the monsters. Whatever might have happened before, however heavy his hand had become, these people had done wrong. They had this coming.
The man’s rifle swung toward Joe, but it was too awkward for close quarters fighting. Joe didn’t give him a chance to figure it out. He pulled the trigger and painted the ceiling with the inside of the deputy’s head. The rest of the pack began to holler, unsure of who had fired or who was dead. Joe jammed his pistol into the ear of the man next to him and pulled the trigger again. The tunnel lit up with a pure white light that jumped out of the side of the man’s skull and blasted into the neck of another deputy. A mist of blood and brains and smoke filled the tunnel in a choking cloud. Joe caught a hard punch to the ribs on his left side and swung his elbow up to where he hoped his attacker’s face would be. The impact jarred his arm all the way up to the shoulder and sent crazy tingles of pain jetting down to the nerves in his fingers. Blows rained down on his shoulders and the back of his skull, bruising punches that forced his head down and rattled his teeth in their sockets. But the pack was crammed in too tight to get full force behind their blows. To his advantage, Joe wasn’t using his fists, but bullets. A deputy made the mistake of trying to worm his rifle into Joe’s gut, but he was too slow and too clumsy to get the job done. Joe felt the sight scrape along his ribs and reacted by punching his pistol into the man’s ribs and blasting a shot through his heart. The bullet burrowed up through the man and plowed out of the back of his neck on a fountain of scorched blood and silver fire. A knife flashed through the purple light, and its tip gouged the skin of Joe’s left bicep. His blood ran black in the dim light, and the knife came around for a second slash that opened a six-inch groove along the outside edge of his forearm. The pain was liquid fire that sucked the wind from Joe’s lungs. The wild punches wore Joe down, rocking his head from side to side. He couldn’t get his bearings, couldn’t catch his breath as the remaining men threw hooking blows into his ribs and kidneys. Before the Long Man’s fall, Joe would have pushed through the pain, trusted in his ability to endure the punishment and heal from his wounds when the battle was over. With that strength flagging, Joe felt his legs going out. He fired his pistol and heard someone yelp in pain, but it wasn’t enough to drive his attackers off. They could smell his weakness, and it filled them with a hunger for violence. Someone grabbed Joe’s gun hand and pried his fingers off the pistol. Someone else kicked at his knees until they
buckled and the Night Marshal crumpled to the cold stone. But the Night Marshal was far from done fighting. Joe swung his left fist up, driving a punch into the balls of a man next to him. The man crouched in pain, and Joe grabbed his belt and hauled himself onto his feet. More punches battered his ribs. A lucky shot snapped Joe’s head back hard enough to fill his eye with stars. His balance was going, his thoughts too scrambled to keep himself upright. He was tired, ready to quit. But his little girl was down here, somewhere. The thought of her being taken by these animals filled Joe with a righteous rage, a furious strength that kept him from going down. Wild animal instinct kept Joe in the fight. He lashed out with his left hand to scrape a man’s eyes out of his head with raking fingers. Joe raised his right foot and drove his heavy, hobnailed boot down in a vicious stomp that tore a kneecap off the man holding his right hand. That one fell screaming, and Joe swung his freed hand to the holster on his left side. A deputy lunged for Joe, hand outstretched toward the rising pistol. The gun roared and punched through the center of the attacker’s palm. Fire followed the smoking lead, which burrowed up through the man’s forearm, snapping both bones before smacking hard into his elbow. With a warbling whine, the bullet ricocheted off the ball of bone and spun in toward the man’s chest. The tumbling bullet carved through his sternum and sent shards of hot metal and splinters of bone through his lungs and heart. The gun barked again, and a bullet punched through a cheek, blowing a fist-sized crater through the back of a man’s head and sending both of his eyes slopping out of their sockets. His attackers fell back, screaming and stumbling over one another in the cramped tunnel. Joe took advantage of his enemies’ retreat to scoop his dropped pistol from the limestone floor. He raised both weapons and kept firing, punching smoking holes through heads and spines, dropping foes with every shot. When the hammers clicked on empty chambers, Joe was alone. Surrounded by cooling bodies, Joe threw his head back and drew in deep, ragged breaths. He shook as the heat of his rage leaked out of his pores, dripping off him in fat, slick beads of sweat. His forehead itched and his brain was wreathed in fog. The violence, the slaughter, felt right. It felt just. Joe knew that meant something was wrong. He knew this wasn’t right, but he
couldn’t deny the way it made him feel. Like this was what he was really born to do, that laying waste to those who stepped over the line was all he should do. It wasn’t right, but he couldn’t convince himself it was wrong. “f*ck it,” he grunted. He reloaded the pistols with the thirteen bullets from his belt. “Should’ve brought more ammo.” Joe headed down the tunnel, deeper into the earth. He had a little girl to rescue. And a whole sh*tload of assholes to kill.
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lsa raised her head when she saw Sheriff Dan enter her cell. He was one of the E police, and her mama always said the police were there to help you when you were in trouble. Elsa hoped the sheriff was here to chase off the nasty woman who had done such terrible things to her. Elsa’s hopes were raised even higher when she saw that Dan had her daddy’s shotgun. Maybe her daddy had sent the sheriff to get her out of this mess. “Sheriff Dan,” she croaked, her voice raw from all the screaming she’d done during the past hours. She wanted the sheriff to know that the woman in her cell was a monster. But the sheriff didn’t look at her. Maybe he hadn’t heard. “Sheriff.” The monster pressed one blood-stained fingertip to Elsa’s lips. Elsa whimpered as the monster’s finger pressed down hard, grinding her lips against her teeth. The half-made girl’s tongue lashed the air as she formed impossible words that seemed to come from the air above her head. “Is he here?” Dan nodded and hefted the shotgun in his right hand. “He’s comin’, all right. I hope your boss has a better plan than just lettin’ him kill all my deputies.” The woman flickered away, and Elsa cried out in warning. The half-made girl appeared next to the sheriff and struck him with the back of one misshapen hand so hard the skin over his cheek split wide open. “Do not question your betters,” the half-made girl hissed. The air popped and crackled with the force of her words. Blood spilled down the side of his face, a red sheet that soaked into the collar of his shirt. Sheriff Dan didn’t seem to notice. Elsa met the sheriff’s eyes and saw a strange flicker of darkness inside him. All
hopes of being rescued by the sheriff drained out of her. He was one of the police, but he was with the monsters. He didn’t take orders from the Good Guys, but from the Bad Guys. Bitter tears coursed down Elsa’s cheek. The sheriff looked away. The monster shared some words Elsa couldn’t hear with the sheriff. She didn’t care anymore, anyway. Whatever they were saying wouldn’t be good for her. Elsa bit her lip and choked back her tears. No one was coming to save her. If she wanted to get out of this mess alive, she’d have to rescue herself. Elsa knew she wasn’t just a little girl. She could call spirits and let them live inside her. If she wanted, she could even bend those spirits to her will. The torture she’d endured had done something to her head. She could think differently now, see things that had been hidden from her before. Most spirits belonged to dead people. But everyone had a spirit. It felt like a dirty thing to do, but Elsa didn’t know what other choice she had. Elsa opened her eyes and looked at Dan. He nodded to the monster, but his eyes kept flicking back to Elsa. He looked sad and afraid. “Watch her,” the monster girl said and floated out of the cell. “If anything happens to her …” Dan nodded and looked at the floor. The half-made girl drifted away, disappearing down the hall. Elsa furrowed her brow in concentration and reached out to the man’s spirit. Look at me. Sheriff Dan’s eyes drifted back to Elsa. For a moment, she could see herself through his eyes. Her wounds were terrible; she was more bloody than not. She smiled at him. She didn’t want him to be afraid of her. She wanted him to trust her. It would make things easier. He smiled back, but it was a weak and sad expression. Elsa didn’t think he meant it, though he wanted to. Elsa felt like she might puke up her belly. She felt dirty for what she was doing, soiled by her own actions. But her little test had worked. If she wanted to get out of this mess, there was no more time for playing around. She reached out for the sheriff and felt his spirit stretch out between them. Most of his spirit was still inside him, but there was a piece of it inside her, now. Elsa could feel it, like a little drop of oil floating on the waters of her mind.
He rubbed a hand over his face and looked away from Elsa. Elsa didn’t want to do this. It felt wrong. Maybe it would change her, make her different than she was before. Her mama had told her over and over again that her powers worked both ways; whatever she did to others would come back to her. Elsa didn’t want to do wrong. But she didn’t want to stay here either. She had to get away. “Sheriff,” she whispered, “I need your help.” Elsa prayed her plan would work. She held tight to the piece of him inside of her and pushed her need into it. She took her fear of the cell and her desire to be free and wrapped them around that piece of the sheriff. It made her sick to do it, but she was so afraid. “Save me,” she whispered. Sheriff Dan recoiled from the words like someone had slapped him. His eyes rolled wild in their sockets like a frightened rabbit’s, and he bit his lip so hard blood ran down his chin. He shook from head to toe, then stared at Elsa with flat, empty eyes. He started for her cell, hands stretched out in front of him like the talons of a diving raptor.
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l woke to the sound of whining dogs. He opened his eyes to pre-dawn darkness and A tried to remember where he was. There was no one else at the deer camp; he was alone. Something scratched feverishly at the door. His parents were gone. His sister was gone. A dollop of panic splashed into his empty stomach and got him moving. Something was wrong. “Jesus, all right. I’m coming.” He unlatched and opened the door, shivering as the cold morning mist lapped against his skin. He wrapped his arms around his naked torso and stomped from foot to foot to knock off the chill. A pack of enormous black hounds milled outside the door. Heads so big they wouldn’t have looked out of place on horses turned toward Al, then swiveled to stare out into the morning darkness. “It’s a little early for the Lassie sh*t.” Al left the door open and turned to get some clothes. The dogs followed him into the cabin, flowing around him like a flood of shadows. They bumped into the furniture, knocking chairs back and scooting the table across the floor. Al could see they were wounded, swollen and cut, the only survivors of what had happened at the Lodge. “Let me get dressed.” Al scooped a flannel shirt off the arm of the couch and shrugged into it. He watched the giant hounds move around, feeling at once relieved and disturbed by their presence. After what happened at the Lodge, he’d never thought he’d see their kind again. Now that they were here, Al wondered how many of them there were and who they really served.
He buttoned his shirt and shoved his feet into his boots. Being close to the pack made his skin crawl and his hair tingle at the roots. “Is it Joe?” The biggest of the dogs shook its head hard enough for its ears to flap, then let out a long, low moan, a baying that matched Al’s anxious state of mind. He wanted to go with the dogs, shed his skin and get down on all fours and run with them into the darkness. Letting the animal loose, becoming a demon, it would all be so much easier than trying to be a man. The dog plowed its big head into Al’s thigh, pushing up against him so hard Al almost lost his footing. He scrubbed the hound’s head with his nails, digging into the thick black fur to scratch its scalp. The dog shoved him, and Al flopped back onto the couch. He tied his shoes and buckled the belt on his jeans. Al helped himself up onto his feet with one hand buried in the dog’s fur. It walked with him to the door and leaned heavily against his legs. “If it’s not Joe, then it must be Mom.” The biggest dog raised its snout and chuffed in agreement. Its deep, amber eyes glowed with a warm light. Al followed the pack outside and locked the door behind. The dogs raised their noses into the wind, and Al did the same. He caught a whiff of honeysuckle and sage, sandalwood and roses. The alpha chuffed and pushed its nose into Al’s hand. “Okay, Benji. Lead on.” The dog snapped its jaws and caught Al’s hand in its mouth, a secure grip on his fingers. It looked up at him with big brown eyes that flickered with primal flames. Then it released his hand and ran. Al ran with them, free and fast, part of the pack.
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found the knife that had cut him. It was a crude, curved blade mounted on a J oe handle made from a deer’s antler, still clutched in a dead deputy’s hand. Joe had two just like it tucked in his belt, trophies from the assholes who’d tried to stop him. He kicked the knife out of the dead man’s hand, and it sparked off the stone. The deputies. The meth heads. Who else was in on this bullsh*t? How many had turned to the LeftHand Path out of fear and desperation? How many had turned because of him and how he’d done his job? Joe’s forehead itched as the guilt burned in his brain. He shook his head. He couldn’t let himself get caught up in feeling bad for these assholes. Whatever had come before, they’d chosen the dark road. He was chasing them where they led. The tunnel hooked downward and to the left, a gradual, sloping spiral. Joe limped along, rubbing at the maddening itch in the center of his forehead. With the fight over, his head felt thick and foggy, brain slopping around in his skull like a lonely chunk of bacon in a crock of old beans. His arm throbbed, a nagging pain that flared with every step. A week ago, Joe would have walked through that fight and come out the other side with nothing to show from it but a pink welt and a couple of bruises. Now, he had a concussion and a pair of cuts that needed a swarm of stitches. With the Long Man weakened, Joe was weakened. The half-made girls had cut him off at the knees. Joe dug the antler-handled knife out of his belt and used it to slice his left sleeve off at the shoulder. His foggy head made him clumsy, but Joe managed to get his cuts wrapped up without killing the circulation in his arm. The lips of his wounds rubbed
against the shirt, but the bleeding slowed. He’d worry about stitches if he ever got out of this hole. When he got out of this hole, he corrected himself. The tunnel narrowed, and its roof sank down until he was scooting along in a crouch that made his back ache and his thighs burn. He crept along like that for what felt like hours, leaning against the wall to take some of the pressure off his legs, crawling when he couldn’t stand the pain any longer. The cave was cool when his cheek brushed against the limestone. His shirt was damp with smashed mushrooms that left him smeared with wavering purple light. Joe heard the next problem before he saw it. Raised voices and a metallic clatter. He crawled forward until the tunnel’s left wall dropped away and the path became a foot-wide ledge that spiraled down into a wide bowl of a cavern. A mob of naked men and women were scattered across the cavern’s floor. Most of them were sprawled out along the walls, meth pipes glowing cherry red over wavering flames as they breathed in self-destructive escape. Others hunched in the middle of the floor, burning crystal shards the size of a man’s hand in sputtering sassafras fires and crowding around to soak up the clouds of meth. Those that weren’t busy getting high were fighting or f*cking or both, voices hoarse from screaming. Even at this distance, Joe could see the changes working on the people of Pitchfork. Pointed ears sloped back from balding heads, convoluted nostrils sniffed the air. In the shadows he saw something flicker past with long flaps of skin stretched between halfseen ankles and wrists. The bad thing was in their blood. Joe wondered if it had always been there. He sat down on the rim of the bowl, staring down at the mob of townspeople he’d thought he was saving. He felt sick and weak, the strength of his convictions leaking out as he watched the idiots chasing oblivion. They weren’t villains. Hell, they weren’t even very good cultists. They were just poor people whose luck had run so dry they were willing to do anything, try anything, to escape the cold glare of reality. Down here, they didn’t have to worry about tomorrow. They were all equal down here, all spinning out their days through a haze of meth. This is where all of Pitchfork was headed, if he didn’t put a stop to this. Joe’s eyes were drawn from the squalor to a handful of men and women gathered around an enormous shrine of antlers and sharpened steel blades that loomed at the far
end of the cavern. Their naked flesh was stained black with soot and filth, but even at this distance Joe could see the streams of blood running down their shoulders and arms. They shouted and shoved one another, jostling back and forth until one of the women was ejected from the scrum and thrust at the statue. She fell forward, arms outstretched to keep herself from slamming into the jagged statue. Her hands plunged through gaps in the statue, and ribbons of flesh curled up her forearms as blades and horns bit into her. The shrine shifted, jagged bone spears and wide steel blades rising up like great wings on either side of it. The woman screamed, but kept jamming her arm deeper into the tangled mass of steel and horn. Her voice rose in an ululating spiral, scratching at Joe’s ears and throbbing in his skull like a whining drill. She bent at the waist, curled her legs, then sprang forward. The shrine’s wings scythed around her, whistling through the air. “I got it,” she wailed. “Pull me.” But the others shied away from her and shook their heads, afraid to approach the slicing wings. “You f*ckers,” she screamed. “I’m keeping it all.” The others raised their voices in protest, yelling obscenities at the trapped woman. She leaned back until her ass was almost on the floor, putting all her weight on her trapped arms. The shrine released her by inches, scraping away more skin as she sagged away from its bulk. She groaned, and the sound built to a raw-throated shriek as her arms were dragged free of the statue at last. She raised her bloody hands over her head, streamers of tattered skin dangling from her elbows. She clutched a baseball-sized chunk of cloudy crystal in her fists, stained with her blood. One of the men darted forward, and she smashed his face with the chunk of bloody meth. Joe scrubbed his hand over his face. His head ached, and his muscles felt too loose on his bones. Old reflexes flared up. He wanted to stand at the lip of the cavern and rain hell down on these people who’d given up on their humanity. He wanted to punch bullets through their skulls and hearts. He’d done his best to save these ungrateful f*cks from their own terrible decisions for years, and this is what they did. They’d given up on their lives and called up some mad deity who gave them an altar of pain and meth and a deep goddamned hole to wallow in while they pulverized their brains.
Joe’s rage spread through his skull, soaking into his brain like spilled blood. There was something else in his skull, too. A trespasser who’d set up shop days before, when Joe’d woken up inside a pig. This close to it, watching its followers grovel before the shrine of blood and blades, he recognized it and knew he was utterly f*cked. He was no longer sure which thoughts were his own, and which were crammed into the dark spaces of his mind by the dark god watching him. The monster the half-made girls were meant to summon had been lurking inside Joe for days now. It had hidden in his anger and booze, lurking in the darkness of the Long Man’s shadow, watching and listening. With the last of the whiskey burnt out of his system, Joe could feel the f*cker’s hooks. It knew his plan. It knew everything he’d said or done for the past days, peeked through a window it’d opened right inside his head. But you could look through both sides of that window. Joe could feel the eye watching him. And if he concentrated on it, even a little, he could sense the eye’s owner. It wasn’t here yet; it was still somewhere out past the bloodstained horizon, but it was coming closer. The shadow in his head spread its wings before the heat of his rage. It loved it, soaked up the hate and confusion, basked in Joe’s visions of fire and lead. He felt its approval, and the haze started to lift from his brain, his wounds buzzed with the familiar crawling sensation of healing too fast for flesh. His forehead burned. The three-lobed eye was coming closer. He could feel it somewhere beyond the cavern below him. He understood its plan now. It needed a host to bridge the gap between the world it called home and this one. It needed someone with the gift to house a spirit of such magnitude. It needed Elsa. And it needed a bad man to guard her while it spread its control far and wide. Joe’s grip tightened on his pistol, and the darkness inside him flowed into his arms, poured like black ice down his spine. He felt stronger, younger. He was tired of being weak. He could be strong forever, all he had to do was what came natural. Go down there, put bullets into the freaks, show them the face of the new boss. He’d enforced the Long Man’s will on Pitchfork for years. Maybe it was time to let someone else call the shots for a while. Give these assholes what they thought they
wanted. He would rule Pitchfork. All it would cost him was everything he’d ever loved or believed in. “No,” he croaked. Joe threw off the shadow’s touch and heard it laugh as it flashed away, leaving him weak and wounded once more. The woman with the chunk of crystal meth howled from the floor of the cavern. She held the burning chunk under her nose and breathed in scalding smoke. Her eyes bulged in their sockets and shifted upward. She nodded as if listening to a voice no one else could hear. She thrust a bloody hand in Joe’s direction. “Bring him,” she shrieked, “bring him to the Haunter.” The meth freaks stirred along the walls, rose from their blazing crystalline fires on stiff legs. They jittered and hopped as the drugs burned in their veins and bound their nerves into sparking knots. Joe kept the feeling of Elsa in his head, the memory of her location sharp and hot in the middle of his brain even now that the shadow was gone. “I’m comin’, baby. Hang on.” The mob roared. Joe ran.
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an was sick. There was something wrong in his head, or something wrong had D started turning right, he couldn't tell which. His thoughts were cloudy and scattered; there were too many different things in his head all fighting for attention. He never should have let that girl in his car. The little girl in the cell watched Dan with big eyes staring out of a pale, pale face. She was so small, so hurt. But there was something about her, something that scared Dan more than the half-made girls, more than the madness that had taken root in the back of his head. All he’d wanted to do was what was right. But somewhere along the way, that had taken a wrong turn, and now he was so far from the righteous path he didn’t know if he’d ever set foot on it again. “Sheriff,” the little girl croaked through cracked lips. “I need your help.” Dan tried to ignore the girl. He didn’t want to help her. He wanted to follow the command he’d been given. Just stand outside the cell, watch the girl, make sure she didn’t go anywhere until the monsters came back. It was an easy job. That was what he should do if he didn’t want the monstrous girls to flay him alive. “Save me,” she pleaded Dan found himself moving toward the cell on stiff legs, arms sticking out in front of him like a horror show zombie. His hands gripped the bars of the cell, knuckles white and jutting against the skin. “Please,” he whispered, “I can’t do this.” The poor girl couldn’t even move. She lay there on a cot stained with her own blood and stared at Dan. Strange, carved spikes pierced her body at every joint, and
one stuck up from the left side of her chest. “They’re gonna do somethin’ terrible to me, Sheriff. Please.” Dan pressed his forehead to the bars. He couldn’t think. He was afraid of the halfmade girls, afraid of the Night Marshal, afraid of what would happen if he helped this poor little girl, afraid of what would happen if he didn’t. Conflicting thoughts spun in his head like a swarm of bats rising out of the cavern of madness opening in his brain. He drew his head back, slammed it into the bars so hard all the noise in his skull went quiet. Just for a moment. In that split second, he was back in the cruiser, back with the half-made girl whispering to him, telling him terrible stories about what would happen to her, what the Night Marshal would do to her. The memory curdled in his belly like a quart of sour milk. He felt weak. Sick. “It’s okay, Sheriff.” The girl smiled at him. “Everybody gets scared sometimes. I’m scared, too.” Dan reared back, slammed his head into the bars again. The grip on his thoughts loosened, slimy fingers peeling back from the curves and whorls of his brain. Dan knew he wasn’t a hero. He was just a sheriff in a sh*tty little county, scared of the choices he’d made, scared of the people who pushed him around and made him do stupid things. Scared that his life was going to end with him as the villain of his own story. Dan was tired of being scared. “Mistakes,” he whispered. “I never should have listened to that girl.” She’d done something to him in the car, planted a seed that had grown into madness. She hadn’t made him brave, she’d just made him scared of something different. Dan looked at the little girl. Helping her was the right thing to do. He’d get her out of the cell. Get her out of this f*cking cave. That was the right thing to do. He found the key to the cell on the wall on the far side of the cavern. Dan lifted it off the hook and carried it back over to bars. His hands shook so hard the key fell through his fingers before he could slot it into the lock. It was the first time in days he’d done something of his own volition, and he was having a hard time remembering how to tell his body to act. He knelt down to pick up the key and caught the girl’s eye. He thought he might be too scared of the half-made girls to do this. “You can do it,” the little girl said through a weak smile. “Just pick it up.”
Dan’s hand closed around the key. It was so much easier when someone else told him what to do. “Good. Stand up.” The hand on the gears in his brain wasn’t his, but that was all right. She was soft, gentle. He could just let her do the driving. He stood up, key clenched in his right fist. “Go on,” she smiled. “You know what to do.” And he did. Dan felt the thoughts lining up neat as dominoes. Put the key in the lock. Turn the key. Open the cell door. “Thank you,” she whispered, and tears fell from her big eyes. “Thank you so much.” Dan didn’t have the emotion left in him to smile back. He was doing what was right, even if he was still doing what he was told. It was going to be all right. He lifted the little girl from the cell and cradled her in his arms. The carved spikes embedded in her flesh flared with light as he carried her away. She whimpered, but curled into him and hugged him tight. This was the right thing to do. He would take this girl out of this hole. It would kill him, he knew that. The bad girls would never let him do this without making him pay for his disobedience. But that was okay. He could do this one right thing. It would be good to end his life doing something that wasn’t rotten and broken. He would take this girl back to the surface, back to the light. And God help anyone who tried to stop him.
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thin carpet of smoke drifted across the cavern floor, flowing around the stirring A mob. The screeching woman kept her finger aimed at Joe, blood dripping from her shredded forearms as she pivoted on the spot to follow his progress. Joe had no illusions about his chances in a straight-up fight against a mob of drugaddled cultists. There were a hundred or more angry folks with knives down at the bottom of the cavern’s bowl, wired out of their minds on meth they’d claimed from the razor-edged belly of their god. If they caught him, Joe knew they’d slice him to pieces and eat him screaming. But he didn’t plan on getting caught. He dug deep for the last of his strength, putting it all into a run he prayed would get him past the mob before it had a chance to rouse itself and get in his way. Joe ran, leaning into the wall as the path shrank and descended into the cavern. His legs were wobbly, his balance shaky, but he couldn’t stop. Giving up meant death, not just for Joe, but for his entire family. He had no illusions about what would happen to Elsa or about what the cultists would do to Stevie and Al when the smoke cleared. He was the only chance his people had. The mob was still gathering when Joe hit the cavern floor. The screaming woman kept her finger locked on Joe’s trajectory, but the other cultists were slow and sloppy. They tripped over and shoved into each other, moving toward Joe in a disorganized mob that was as much a danger to itself as to him. Tweaked out on meth and driven by burning fury, they lashed out without thought or concern for who they were cutting. Blood flashed in the air, splashing from curved blades, dripping from grimy skin.
A young guy with rotten teeth and yellow eyes burst from the pack and threw himself at Joe with a quavering cry. He carved his knife through the air, a clumsy swipe that missed Joe by a yard and sent the man into an off-balance stumble. Joe didn’t break stride, just pointed his drawn pistol at his attacker and squeezed the trigger. The bullet blasted across the back of the man’s neck, blowing away bone and muscle so the cultist’s chin collapsed forward onto his chest and the air behind him turned red. Joe was yards away from the cavern’s sole exit, moving as fast as his weary legs would carry him. A girl with a pair of knives and a bad case of meth mouth screeched toward Joe. The pistol roared, and the girl spun back, the left side of her face flopping off her skull, a swelling mound of brain oozing out in search of fresh air. Her deformed, scalloped nose gushed blood, and her eyes snapped shut. Another yard, and Joe could hear the cultists gaining on him. He turned on one heel and fired a shot into the crowd. The silver bullet plowed into an old man’s hip, blasting it out of the socket and sending him tumbling back into the crowd. A second shot punched through a skinny man’s chest, driving through his heart and exiting from his back with enough force to drop the woman behind him. She fell into the onrushing mob, holding the space where her jaw used to be as her tongue flopped between her fingers and her throat ran red. That gave the crowd pause. Those in the front stumbled in their haste to avoid a bullet in the face. Those in the back didn’t get the message and stampeded into the rest of the posse. A moment later, and they were falling all over each other, legs tangled, knives slicing. Joe didn’t wait to see how they’d get themselves apart. He ran for the cave exit, guns clenched in his pumping fists. The tunnel out of the cave was narrow and winding. Joe raced along the treacherous limestone, shoulders brushing against the walls. For once he was glad he had no hat, the stubby stalactites spearing down from the ceiling would have snatched it off his head in no time. He could feel Elsa and, at the first branch, he followed that feeling. The crowd was in the tunnel now, but the narrow opening would slow them, keep them from coming at him all at once. Joe fired blind behind him. The bullet whined off the stone walls, and
cultists screamed and cursed. Joe grinned despite the throbbing pain and numbing exhaustion at war in his body. “Think twice, assholes.” The light in the tunnel faded as Joe ran. The little patches of glowing mushrooms were spaced farther and farther apart. Then they shrank, and the already dim light weakened to a dull glow. The tunnel faded into a gray blur, and Joe smacked his shoulder on a stone outcropping he didn’t see in the gathering gloom. His feet spun out from under him. For one second Joe thought he’d tripped over something, lost his footing. Then he realized there was no footing to be had. He fell into the blackness and landed hard enough to chase the wind out of his chest. Joe hunkered in the dark, curled in on himself, belly heaving as he struggled to coax some breath back into his lungs. He could hear the cultists coming, their angry cries rising above the humming in his ears. Joe didn’t think he had what it took to get out of this one on his own. He closed his eyes and fell into his own thoughts. There was a glimmer of power down there, the barest trace of the strength he’d once known. The Long Man was weak, but he wasn’t dead. Joe grabbed that power with all his concentration and pulled on it. His breath came back in a whooping gulp. He jackknifed up and scrambled onto his knees. He could feel the Long Man’s strength, the dregs of it anyway, pulling him back from the brink. He could do this. All he had to do was get up, find his way down to Elsa. He could do this. “Marshal,” the singsong voice drifted down to Joe. He looked up and could make out a slightly darker shadow in the gray gloom. “Took a wrong turn?” Joe eased back until his shoulders came up against a wall. He realized, too late, he’d dropped his left-hand pistol. “Come on down and find out, motherf*cker.” A hand hooked around Joe’s throat and cinched up tight. “Already here, dumbass.” Joe’s breath was locked up in his chest, turning to poison as his heart thundered in his ears. He couldn’t see how many there were, but he could feel rough hands on his arms and legs, knocking him off his feet and onto the ground. Kicks pummeled his ribs and guts; the hand was gone from around Joe’s neck, but he couldn’t breathe with the beating he was taking. They were piling on, crushing him under their stinking flesh, smashing him flat against the limestone floor. Joe couldn’t get the leverage to swing a punch or kick, so he
squeezed the trigger. The pistol roared, and someone shrieked, a trilling death cry that did nothing to get the others off him. Hot, sour breath poured onto his face. It was too black to see, but Joe could feel the three-pupiled eye staring at him. “Hello hello hello, Joe.” The Night Marshal turned his head to the side, but a pair of hands yanked his head back straight so hard he saw stars sparkle in the darkness. “You you you can end this.” “f*ck you.” Joe snarled at his tormentor through gritted teeth. Every breath he took was tainted by a nauseating stink. The chemical tang of batsh*t mingled with the ripe perfume of rot. Someone pulled Joe’s leg out straight and rested his ankle on top of a domed stalagmite. “Don’t do it.” Joe growled. “Get off me now, and I’ll think about letting some of you motherf*ckers walk out of here in one piece.” Tittering laughs mocked Joe’s threat. He heard someone grunt, and the thin bones in his calf snapped. Joe felt them rip through his skin, jutting into the cool subterranean air, a pair of exposed nerves. Before he could take another breath, jagged pain raced up from his leg and exploded behind his eyes with the force of a shotgun blast. “You you you fight.” The voice thrummed in Joe’s ears. “But you you you can make it it it stop.” Joe drew in a breath against the pain and shouted his denial, a wordless roar that distracted him from the blinding pain from his shattered leg. They swung his leg out and rested his knee on a rounded lump of stone. A foot pressed down on the middle of his thigh, bowing the bone enough to hook Joe’s breath. The pain was there, two seconds away, waiting to pounce. The bat god was back in his head, its three pupils blazing with black light in the darkness of Joe’s thoughts. Where the Long Man’s strength was dim and remote, more remembered than real, this was something else. A live wire, a shot of raw power, just waiting for Joe to grab it. All he had to do was reach out for it, embrace its primal strength. Serve a new master. “No,” he growled. “I ain’ turnin’. Not now. Not after all I been through to stay true.” Joe held onto the words, leaning against the strength of his convictions, bracing for the pain. But in the back of his mind, he remembered waking inside the pig. He remembered the burning, itching mark on his forehead. That infernal, nagging pain and his blinding
rages should have tipped him off. He’d been fighting this for days now, and didn’t know how much longer he could keep at it. He’d been tricked, manipulated into coming down here in the dark where he could be destroyed. His femur cracked, the sound a physical force that crushed Joe. He puked, choking on stomach acid. The pain was beyond anything he could imagine. His tormentor lifted off Joe’s leg, then stomped down on it hard, grinding the raw, broken edges of the thick bone together. Joe tried to scream, sprayed puke, choked again. The whisperer was still with him. “There is nothing nothing nothing but pain. Not if you you you keep on. You you you have felt my my my strength within your soul. The two of us us us could not be stopped. ” Joe reached for the Long Man’s power, the gift of the Night Marshal’s office, but the dark thing held him back, blocked him from reaching it. Someone had Joe’s right index finger. They torqued it right, then wrenched it back to the left, shattering it in two places and raking the splintered chunks back and forth. Joe bit his lip and tasted blood. “This this this,” the voice hissed rancid breath into Joe’s nostrils, “is what they they they want. They will always hate you you you for your strength and authority.” Joe’s throat ached from screaming, from the burn of vomiting. He wanted whiskey. A slug of it. A high ball glass full. A whole f*cking bottle. He just wanted the pain to stop. But he’d spent his life fighting monsters. He’d die fighting them, if it came to that. Die spitting in the motherf*cker’s face. “Just like I’ll always hate you sick f*cks.” Joe panted against the pain. A blade dug into the flesh below Joe’s eye. He could feel it splitting his cheek, then rising, biting into the fragile tissue of his eyelid. The point was sharp and cold against his eyeball. One little push, and he’d never see out of the left side of his head again. The knife dug and sizzling fireworks danced in the darkness of Joe’s sight. Joe’s father had died fighting for this sh*tty county. The love of Joe’s life had been warped out of true and used as a weapon against him, all because he’d tried to do what was right. He’d sacrificed so much; he could never turn his back on what he’d done, on what he believed was right. He couldn’t accept that his family’s struggle was all for nothing. The knife flicked through his eyeball. There was no pain, just a sudden warmth and
an emptiness in Joe’s head. His eyelid fluttered and hung up on the sticky shell of his ruined eye. He was going to die here. They would torture him, slice him to ribbons, use him up until all that remained was a smear on the cold stone floor. He’d die screaming. He’d die ugly. But he’d die a man. He wouldn’t turn to the Left-Hand Path. “Such a waste waste waste,” the voice hissed. A cold hand tugged at Joe’s ruined eye, and it slithered free of his face. Someone pulled Joe’s left arm out straight, straddled it. More hands grabbed Joe’s wrist and spun it. The bones in his forearm gave way with two wet snaps. Joe howled. The pain chewed at him, burrowed into his skull where he couldn’t get away from it. “God of my father,” Joe croaked, gagging on the pain. They snapped his hand back the other way, wrenching the broken bones counterclockwise until their splintered ends knifed through his muscles and split his skin. Fingers plucked at the wounds, prying them apart, stroking the broken bones and shredded muscle. “My my my pets,” the voice whispered. Leather wings flapped in the darkness. Joe felt something sharp and cold touch his forearm. Then fur, wet and bristly. A bat. A gentle, insistent prodding. Heat pushing against the edges of one of his wounds, shoveling its way under his skin. “Though darkness be all around, the sword of my Lord shall clear my path.” Joe clung to the echo of the words, looking for strength in them. “There is no god god god before me,” the voice whispered, “no salvation save through me me me.” Joe ground his teeth and struggled to breathe, to transcend the pain. He tried to ignore the snapshots that flared to life in the darkness of his thoughts. Walter, screaming as the bats ate him from the inside. Al begging Joe to let him loose, to not let him be eaten. Dead breath gusted against Joe’s empty eye socket. “Take my my my hand. Walk with me me me from this torture.” Images shuffled in the blackness behind Joe’s eyes. Meth heads hunkered in a sh*tty house, sneering at Joe as he tried to save their lives. Dead towns filled with sh*t-stupid addicts and petty criminals, praying to evil even as Joe tried to keep it from their doors.
The bat shoved its whole head into Joe’s arm. He could feel it plowing through the broken shards of bone, biting, tearing hunks out of his muscles and chewing them, sucking them down. Another bat latched onto Joe’s arm. Another. Another. Wings flapped in the darkness, a whole colony of the f*ckers come to feast. Joe spat, hoping it would strike whoever was whispering in his face. “I’ll see you in hell.” “Yes yes yes,” the voice was a sigh, a disgusted exhalation. “You you you will.” A fingertip hooked inside Joe’s right nostril, digging in until his nose felt stretched and raw. Pressure built, and Joe felt the trickle of blood running out of his nose. Skin tore, his face was on fire. The bats chewed their way into Joe. “You won’t be alone alone alone,” the voice whispered. “I’ll bring your whor* and your demon.” A long, wet tongue slithered up Joe’s cheek, swirled its tip in the bloody crater of his empty eye socket. “But I’m keeping the little little little one.” A throaty chuckle. “Such fun fun fun we’ll have.” He could feel Stevie out there, rushing toward an ambush. Elsa, desperate for rescue, near death. Al, falling to a darkness he’d spent his whole life struggling against. Joe saw their deaths, vivid and more real than his own pain. The weight of his failure crushed the last of his strength from him, left him hollow and cold. He’d fought the fight he thought was good and just. He’d done his best. And it hadn’t been enough. Despite all he’d done, Joe’d ended up at the bottom a hole, with all the assholes he’d tried to save tearing him apart, punishing him for trying to protect them from their own stupidity. Joe realized the truth. In the end, none of it mattered. All he had to hold onto was the tattered remnants of his family, the ones who loved him even when he was the worst monster they’d ever met. He couldn’t let them die. “Stop,” he whispered. The finger jerked out of his nose, tearing the tender flesh, smearing his lips with
blood. The tittering laughter died, and he could feel the cultists backing away from him. The heat of the mob faded, leaving Joe to shiver on the cold stone floor, huddled against the pain of his aches and the weary sorrow of defeat. He’d been so stupid, so blind. Serving a master who came up lame when push came to shove. Doing a job that no one wanted done. Trying to save something that had been rotten and dead for longer than Joe had been alive. One leash felt much like any other. Joe wanted to be on the winning side, for once, not just the right side. “What did you you you say?” The voice was right there, right in his face. Rich with death, promising an end to the pain, a new kind of life. “You want these pieces of sh*t? I’m sick of it all. You can have them.” Joe shuddered as years of responsibility dropped away, shed like a too-small shell. “I’ll be your f*cking hand. I’ll be your goddamned whip.” The eye widened in Joe’s mind, the darkness of its three pupils spilling out like a flood of ink. Joe screamed as the dark god filled him to overflowing. He could hear another voice screaming along with him. The Long Man, still part of Joe, felt it all. Joe grinned, the pain suddenly a welcome punishment for his own shortcomings and for the failure of the master who’d let Joe’s whole life come apart at the seams. “Let it burn,” Joe croaked through cracked and bleeding lips. After years of struggle, a lifetime of trying to live up to an ideal he’d never quite achieved, Joe closed his eyes and let himself rest.
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eke’s trick hip was clicking like a jammed turn signal. Each step he took reminded Z him of his long years and the continued pain of living. Click. Step. Click. Step. He just wanted to sit down on a comfortable stump, smoke his pipe, and wait for the end to catch up to him. God knew he’d been racing ahead of it for long enough. But there were other folks relying on Zeke. He couldn’t let them down. He didn’t agree with all the things Joe had done over the years, but Zeke knew the Night Marshal was doing his best now to make amends for his wrongs. Zeke would do his part, no matter how much his hip ached. It was the least he could do for a man struggling to save his little corner of the world. “Ain’ gotta go much further now, old man,” he whispered to himself as he limped up a steep hill. He leaned against the spindly pine trees as he passed them, pulling himself up the hill with his arms as much as pushing with his wobbling legs. The sun hadn’t made it over the horizon yet, but Zeke didn’t need sight to find his way through these woods. They were as much a part of him as his bad hip or his clouded eyes. He’d grown up on these hills, and the forest held no secrets for him. But it did have some surprises. The ground shuddered beneath Zeke’s boots, a rippling that flowed down from the top of the hill and jarred his cane out of his hand. He groped at a nearby tree for balance, but the wave of earth rolled back up the hill before the yarb doctor could steady himself. His bad hip buckled, and Zeke crashed to the ground so hard his back teeth clacked together. Gnarled roots and moss-covered stones bit into his knees, and Zeke toppled onto
his side, groaning. He struggled to get up, to crawl to safety. His hip hurt so bad it made his whole leg useless; it trailed behind him as he crawled toward a bent pine tree. The wind moaned over the top of the hill, driving a billowing carpet of ground fog ahead of it. The cloud flowed over Zeke, blinding and chilling him to the bone. He kept crawling, dragging his bum leg, trusting his instincts to guide him to safety. He just needed to get to a tree, haul himself back up onto his feet. Zeke could smell the springs; he was close. There was something else out there, close, too. He could feel it coming for him, stirring in the earth. His hand brushed against a fine layer of pine needles. “Gotcha,” Zeke whispered. He shuffled forward a bit and got his hands on the tree’s trunk. He hauled himself up, raising one hand, grabbing a limb, then the other, and another. The tree wasn’t big, but it was sturdy enough for Zeke’s needs. His hip felt like someone had poured a fistful of ground glass into the socket and lit it on fire. The pain set his teeth to chattering whenever he tried to put any weight on his left leg. Zeke started a slow, rhythmic chant and rubbed the knuckles of his left fist into his hip. He could feel the land answering his plea, a slow infusion of strength and comfort that soothed him and got his old bones moving again. Zeke knew he’d pay later for what he’d taken from the earth, but he wasn’t even sure there was going to be a later to worry about. He limped along, slower than if he’d had his cane, but he reckoned he’d still get where he needed to be on time. The sun was a hint of pale pink on the horizon, little more than a suggestion of the day to come. “I’m gonna make it.” “No,” the voice rattled from within the rippling fog, “you end here.” Zeke turned toward the threat and almost lost his footing again. The ground rumbled, and the fog roiled, churning as something rushed through it. The yarb doctor didn’t wait to see what was bursting up out of the ground cover. He lurched from tree to tree, making his way up the hill on his one good leg. His breath came in ragged gasps, hard and cold in his lungs. He knew he was close to the top of the hill, but he could sense the monster behind him was even closer. He needed to give himself time. Zeke leaned against a gnarled pine and pressed his lips to its scaly bark. He whispered to it, asked one last favor for an ancient man who had spent his life trying to
make things better for the people of Pitchfork. The pressure of the earth’s magic pressed hard against the yarb doctor’s chest, exacting its price for convincing the trees and earth to do their part. Zeke grunted against the pain, trading months of his life for a chance to avoid death in the next few minutes. Magic was dangerous stuff at his age; reach too far, pull too deep, and the cost would kill him on the spot. The ground erupted behind him, and Zeke hugged the tree for support. “Old man,” the half-made girl snarled, “that’s far enough.” Zeke put his back to the tree and tried to stand tall. The half-made girl was a few yards away, a broken, distorted mess rising from the earth on a stalk of bloody flesh and exposed bone. She looked like walking roadkill, more exposed flesh and fractured skeleton than girl. “Come and get me, then.” Zeke prayed the earth would answer his plea. “Let’s see what you got.” The girl’s jaw gawped wide to pour out a scream that Zeke could feel like a dagger of ice digging into his bowels. Her body screwed itself down, compressing as her scream went on and on. Then she unwound, and the half-made girl roared through the air, mangled arms reaching for Zeke. Thick roots tore up from the soil, their glistening white tips punching through her body. They looped around her broken bones, hooked into the pink slits of her torn flesh, and wrapped around her throat like living nooses. The girl’s voice was strangled to silence and she hit the ground so hard she dug a furrow in the rich, black soil. “Far enough,” Zeke grumbled and spat on the ground near the snarling half-made girl. He turned and limped away, dragging his bum leg up the hill. He was out of trees to cling to and had to lower himself back onto his one good knee and his scarred hands. It wasn’t far now, maybe thirty feet. The ground felt good under his hands, and there were no more rocks to dig at his knees. He prayed for the strength to continue, for the faith that had gotten him this far. Whatever the Long Man and the Night Marshal might think, Zeke believed there was a God up there. Not a kindly old man with a swaying beard and a warm hug, but a demanding, vengeful spirit that wanted the best from its followers. The kind of God that farmers and miners could believe in, the sort of father that pushed his children to get
sh*t done and only ask for help when they were too spent, too exhausted to go on alone. Heaven wasn’t for everyone; you had to earn it. Zeke had done his best to get through those pearly gates, he wasn’t about to stop trying now. The revenant trapped beneath the trees shrieked in desperate anger, a hellish cry that filled Zeke with cold dread. He pushed the fear away and kept crawling, dragging himself up the hill one handful of damp earth at a time. The top of the hill was a naked hump of glossy black marble pushed up through the deep emerald grass. Zeke’s breath gushed out in a relieved sigh when he saw that ancient rock, and he crawled the last few yards in a rush. He crawled up onto the marble slab and lay on his belly, head dangling over the edge. A hundred feet below, Chickinee Springs spread out through Fallen Star Hollow. Its waters were black in the darkness, shot through with tinges of red from the rising sun. Zeke maneuvered around until he was sitting on the ledge above the springs. A cool wind dried the sweat on his brow and tugged at his beard. He sighed and pulled his short-bladed knife from the doe-skin scabbard on his belt. He’d carved hoodoo charms with this knife, used it to strip bark from sassafras trees for his tea, even cut switches from the old willow tree when his parents decided he needed a little corporal punishment. Holding it was a reminder of his lifetime in Pitchfork County, of the chores and duties and jobs and pain that had rested on his shoulders for his whole adult life. “Father,” Zeke began the blessing that would cleanse the springs of their foul taint. “Take this sacrifice and bless it with yer grace. As ya bled for me, so I bleed fer thee. I ask for yer presence, not for myself, but for those I protect. Shepherd, in this time of need, drink of the blood of yer servant and shield yer flock from the darkness.” Zeke slashed the knife across his palm and held his hand aloft, cupped so the blood collected within it. The pain in his hand was intense, far out of proportion to his actual injury, a burning that sucked the air out of his lungs. The pain of sacrifice. It was almost over. Thunder roared behind him, and the stone under him cracked and bounced, nearly shaking Zeke off. “No,” he whispered. He needed more time, just a little more time. She blasted free from the face of the bluff below Zeke’s feet, a bloody, earthcrusted horror that wormed through the air like a broken kite. Torn roots dangled from where they’d impaled her, and rivulets of dirt and gravel spilled from her raised arms. She spiraled up before Zeke, a black aurora of tangled hair flaring out around her head.
Her body rippled in the wind, loose and boneless in places, awkward and stiff in others. She reached for Zeke with arms that seemed far too long. He could see new wounds on her, places where the trees had bitten into her skin and rubbed her down to naked muscle. Her strength was still awesome to behold, as if the pain filled her with unwholesome energy. “So close,” she growled, “but still so far to go.” Then her fingers closed around Zeke’s injured hand, and she augered her way through the air above his head. Her grip wrenched his arm around and wrested him away from the top of the hill. His blood burned in his hand as the prayer of sacrifice took root and began working its magic. He had to get away from her, get his blood into the water. But she was having none of it. Her mangled body swirled around Zeke, and her free hand raked at him with ragged fingernails. Zeke groaned as she shredded the parchment-thin skin over his ribs with one vicious swipe after another. “Your time is over,” she whispered into his ear, her lips brushing against his skin. “All those people you thought you saved, all the fools who came crawling to you for help? They’re ours now. We give them what they really want.” Zeke struggled in her grip, but she was so strong it was like being wrapped in chains. She turned him until their eyes were inches apart. She stank of rotten earth and old blood, and her eyes burned with the fires of madness. Her arm turned, and Zeke’s wrist splintered. Her thin arm rotated as if it had no bones in it at all, while Zeke’s skeleton popped and cracked and came apart inside his forearm. “Father,” he gasped as the sacrificial blood spilled out of his mangled hand. “All I have I give to thee.” The half-made girl spun, turning her whole body around the axis of Zeke’s shattered arm. “He can’t hear you.” Zeke’s elbow separated with a sickening lurch, and his shoulder followed a second later. The ball and socket went their separate ways, and his old, stiff ligaments shredded with muffled cracks. The pain was beyond anything he’d ever experienced. It split his mind open and exposed his nerves to a roaring, burning wind of agony. The girl laughed and revolved again, again, again. Zeke screamed and fell face down, the empty socket where his arm had once been engulfed in a roaring ball of fiery
pain. His heart pumped, and he felt his life jetting out of the gaping hole, spraying onto the earth. Something wet and hot slammed into his ribs, cracking half of them on his left side and knocking him a yard up the hill. Zeke lay on his back, watching the half-made girl wind toward him. She slithered toward him, a sinuous cord of hate and evil wriggling over the ground. He shoved with his good leg, driving himself up the hill as best he could. His remaining hand dug into the earth, dragging him back in an awkward crab crawl. “Nowhere to go, old man.” She laughed and reared up above Zeke, his severed arm raised above her head. She swung it down and around in a brutal swipe that smashed into his bad hip and drove him farther up the hill. She hit him again, slamming the fleshy club into his ribs so hard he thought she’d stopped his heart. She bit a mouthful from the ragged stump of his arm, gnawing on it like a kid with a chicken leg. “How many demons you think you’ve chased out of this sh*thole county of yours?” Zeke gagged on the pain, shook his head. “I reckon one too few.” “One hundred and seventeen.” She took another bite of his arm, swallowed it like a gator gulping down a bass. “They wanted you to know something.” The girl roared toward him, blood spewing from her broken body. Her hand locked around Zeke’s throat. She rose into the air with him, spitting words into his face. “They’re all waiting for you.” She kissed him gently on the lips and breathed the taste of his own flesh and blood into Zeke’s mouth. “Waiting for the day you fall. Today’s the day.” Zeke forced words past the grip on his throat. “There ain’ no demons where I’m headed.” Despite the pain, despite the suffering, Zeke believed that was true. He could still feel the touch of his God, scalding hot in his blood, proof that his blessing was still there. His blood was holy, cleansing. He was going home. “We’ll see,” she whispered and flicked her tongue across the tip of his nose. “Tell my sisters things are going well.” Zeke smiled and spat in the girl’s face. She screeched and spun, whipping Zeke around in a tight circle. The half-made girl released her grip on Zeke’s throat, and he flew, sailing out past
the edge of the hill, arcing over the water of Chickinee Springs.
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J oe’s left eye felt like someone had scooped it out of his skull, rolled it in a patch of poison ivy, then stuffed it back into his head. The itching woke him, burrowing down through the dense fog of unconsciousness to drag him back into the painful waking world. He opened his eyes and stared up at the stalactites clinging from the ceiling. Joe knew there was no light here, but he could still see, though everything was cast in shades of black and gray. Joe heard something shuffling in the darkness and lifted his head a bit to look around. A teenage girl was crouched a few feet off, watching him with wide eyes, chewing on her fingertips. Joe could smell the cat-piss perfume of the longtime meth abuser and wondered how long she’d been working on turning her brains into pudding. He found he didn’t have any f*cks to give about her situation. “Do what you will,” he muttered. Remembering the abuse he’d endured, Joe didn’t get up right away. He lay on the floor and took stock of his body. He wiggled his toes, then clenched his teeth and flexed his legs. He expected a blast of pain from broken bones grinding against one another, but there was nothing. He bent at the knees, lifted his feet off the floor and stared at his hobnailed boots, clicked his heels together. He seemed to be in working order below the waist. Joe remembered the exquisite torture of his hands and arm. He touched his fingertips to his palms, one at a time. All seemed accounted for. He raised his hands, brought them up where he could see them. There were thick hash marks of scar tissue on his left arm, and he seemed to have a couple of extra knuckles on one of his index
fingers, but other than that, they were his hands and they worked. Joe closed his right eye. He could still see out of the itchy left one, despite that he distinctly remembered losing it. “Guess the new boss really did fix everything.” “Good good good,” the girl said. She stood, stiff and awkward, as if she wasn’t quite sure how her arms and legs worked. “Come.” The girl padded out of the pit on bare, scabbed feet. Joe struggled up to follow her. He looked up as he left the room and could see how far he’d fallen. Maybe twenty feet. He almost wished the fall had killed him. Because he could feel the new boss in his head, a throbbing presence like a tooth threatening to go bad. That presence filled Joe with a deep sense of disgust, a constant reminder of his fear and weakness. He shoved his self-loathing down and concentrated on the new strength flowing through him. He was revolted by the choice he’d made, but he was still alive. That was a start. “Where are we going?” The girl stopped and tilted her head off to one side like a dog trying to identify a noise only it could hear. “The time time time is almost at hand. We must retrieve your girl girl girl.” Joe kept walking after the girl, despite the uneasiness he felt at her words. But, even at the thought of Elsa, Joe’s emotions were blunted, stunted by the new power in his head. He could feel the panic, but it was distant, an idea rather than an emotion itself. He was different now. So were his priorities. Somewhere way down deep, the old Joe was grinding his teeth in frustration. Even further down from there, the Long Man gnashed his teeth in torment. The girl dug in the pockets of her grimy jeans, came out with a tiny glass pipe and a crystal the size of her thumbnail. She waved a shiny silver Zippo’s flame under the pipe’s bowl and sucked on the stem, shuddering as the amphetamines poured into her lungs. Joe licked his lips, wanting a big slug of Jack to wash away the last of his worries. The girl turned sly eyes toward Joe, smirked at his need, then led him deeper into the cavernous maze. She navigated a handful of intersections and switchbacks, and Joe found himself having to stick close to her back to avoid being left behind. When she stopped, he bumped into her, and she giggled as the two of them struggled to keep from falling. “Watch your your your step,” she snickered.
“You you you go alone from here. Follow the path, bring the girl to the cathedral.” The girl lit up her pipe and smiled at Joe through a leaking mouthful of poison smoke. Then she turned and padded away on legs that seemed to bend in too many directions, disappearing into the blackness. The tunnel bored deeper into the earth, a long descent that tested even Joe’s new strength. By the time it leveled off, his thighs were burning, and his calves felt stretched thin. He paused and knelt to rub some of the aches away, drawing deep from the stores of new strength he’d received from the new boss. Even knowing the source of that power didn’t sour its pleasure. Joe knew he’d been made for this kind of service and found it didn’t matter that much whom he served. “Back it up,” he heard a familiar voice call from up ahead. “I don’t want any trouble for you, Joe.” Joe stood, and his hand drifted to his holsters. Someone had slipped the pistols back into their homes while he’d lain on the floor of the pit. Joe couldn’t remember how many bullets he had left, and cursed himself for not checking before he needed the weapons. “I got you covered.” Dan stood fifteen feet away, holding Elsa in one hand and Joe’s shotgun in the other. The ancient weapon’s enormous barrels were aimed at Joe’s gut, a pair of black throats ready to breathe fire and lead. Joe lifted his hands high. “All right, Dan. I see you got the drop on me. Whyn’t you let Elsa down, and you can go on past.” “I’m taking her outta here. She’s coming with me.” The sheriff took a halting step forward, one foot, then the other. “It’s the way it has to be.” “I’m her father,” Joe said, not backing down. “Give her to me before this goes sideways and you get hurt.” Dan’s sharp bark of laughter caused Elsa to stir. She snuggled in closer to him, burying her face into the crook of his neck as she hugged him tight. “I’ve seen what this shotgun can do. You don’t get the hell out of my way, I’ll cut you in half.” Dan was closer now. Joe could see the sweat pouring off the sheriff’s face, the way one of his eyes rolled wild in the socket while the other eye stared dead ahead. Tremors ratcheted up and down Dan’s spine, and his legs didn’t coordinate. It was like there were two men trapped in one skin, and they couldn’t agree on what they should do.
Joe sympathized with that. But he had his orders. He had to dance to the new boss’s tune, now. “You don’t know what you’re doing. Let me take Elsa before you get hurt.” Joe could see where this was going, knew where this would end. The sheriff shoved the shotgun at Joe’s face. They were within ten feet of one another now. If he pulled the triggers, Dan couldn’t miss. “Not this time. I gotta do this. Can’t let you stop me.” “Remember what I told you at the church,” Joe lowered his hands. “You do not want to find out which of us is faster today.” Tears glistened on Dan’s cheeks. His left eye rolled up into his skull, and Joe could see the blood vessels burst across the blank white orb. “I need this. Get out of my way. Please.” Joe sighed and rubbed his chin. “Why couldn’t you come to your senses a few days ago?” “They got you,” Dan whispered. “I can feel it. They got you.” Elsa turned toward Joe. “Daddy? Can we go home?” “Not yet, baby.” Joe’s heart ached, a memory of sorrow echoing in its black chambers. “Daddy needs your help one more time.” Dan took another step. “Last chance.” Joe nodded and didn’t budge. “For you, too. Put down the shotgun.” Dan shook his head. Joe offered his right hand. “Pullin’ that trigger’ll be the last thing you ever do, Dan. I promise you that.” Dan roared and turned his head away from Joe. Elsa screamed. Silver fire erupted in the cavern, throwing Joe’s shadow out behind him like a flock of startled bats. Dan screamed and fell onto his ass, blood pumping from the hole in the left side of his chest. Joe looked down at the smoking pistol in his hand, then at the sheriff, at the wreckage of a man trying, too late, to do the right thing. “Ah, Dan. I’m so goddamn sorry. You picked a sh*tty time to find your spine.” Dan’s jaw quivered as he worked to form the words he needed to say. “She’s your
daughter. You know what happens if you take her back down there?” Joe knelt and pried Dan’s remaining arm from around Elsa. For a dead man, the sheriff still had some strength left in him. Elsa wept as her father scooped her up. “Better’n you.” “I tried to help,” Dan wouldn’t look at Joe. He stared off down the tunnel as if watching for something only he could see. “I did.” “Yeah.” Joe wanted a drink more than ever. “You helped them girls walk right out of your jail. You helped them meth head motherf*ckers try and frog-march me right on outta town. You helped hell come to Pitchfork.” Dan sobbed. “No slack even now?” Joe shook his head, took aim with his pistol. “Especially not now.” Thunder rolled through the cavern. Dan’s head flopped back, brains sloshing out, and the sheriff was no more. Elsa pressed her face close to Joe’s neck. “I’m scared.” Joe hugged his daughter tight. “Me, too.” He walked past the dead sheriff, pausing only long enough to pick up his shotgun, and made his way through the makeshift cells. Elsa shivered. “Will you take me home, Daddy?” Joe kissed his little girl on the cheek, tasted her tears. “I can’t.”
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lsa’s thin arms wrapped tight around Joe’s neck. He tried to ignore the carved spikes E sticking out of his little girl. Their grotesque, pulsing glow throbbed in time with her tiny heart and banged against his chest through the thin cage of her ribs. Her breath puffed against his cheek, feathery and hot and too, too fast. Joe didn’t need directions to the cathedral - he could feel it tugging at his guts, guiding him as certain as a compass pointing north. The tunnel from the cell wound down, a loose loop at the top, tightening as Joe descended. Side paths led away from the spiral, stretching off into the darkness. Joe passed them, ignoring the voices that echoed from deep within them. Voices raised in songs of praise, in hymns of repentance, in shuddering wails of unspeakable agony or ecstasy. They were the voices of men and women transformed, men and women who had found their god at last and had devoted themselves to a worship that consumed them utterly. Joe envied them. Elsa shifted in Joe’s grip, let out a weak gasp. “Daddy, please don’t do this. Let’s go home.” He’d never wanted to do anything more than take his little girl home. But seeing those jagged spikes, the Kirshnir Marg, embedded in her frail body confirmed his suspicions. There was a storm coming, and running from it wouldn’t save her from the lightning it was going to throw. The only way out of this was through. Joe just prayed his theory about this was right. He stepped out of the descending spiral at last and into a wide and long cavern, the ceiling arching high overhead. Columns of quartz marched down the center of the
chamber, forming a wide aisle. Light throbbed within them, waxing and waning in sympathy with the spikes embedded in Elsa’s flesh. At the end of the aisle, a shimmering stone formation hunkered on a natural dais that looked like a lump of melted wax. It called to Joe with an almost physical sensation. He imagined turning tail and running with his daughter, but the thought was burnt out of his mind as fast as it could form. The new boss had plans for Joe and his daughter; it wasn’t letting go of them now that they were at the heart of its power. As he walked among the crystals, Joe could see shapes within them. They stretched thirty feet to the cavern’s ceiling, long and slender and rolling in slow gyrations like drowsing serpents. Joe’s eyes burned when he tried to make out the details of the creatures. They blurred and shifted, slithering out of his thoughts before he could make sense of them. “So old,” Elsa whispered. “Seems like they been here forever. Waitin’ on me.” Joe stroked his daughter’s hair, smoothing it flat. He could feel the new boss in his head, a blind, growing presence. But the Long Man was down there at the bottom of his mind as well, like the memory of an old wound. He pushed the Long Man away, out of his thoughts, and walked to the stone dais. The rock formation was smooth and warm, radiating a moist heat that Joe felt from a yard away. He paused in front of the altar and felt the new boss growing in his mind. It was close now, near enough for Joe to hear its wings rustling, its ancient jaws creaking open as it reached between worlds. This was it. Joe knew if he put his little girl on that stone there would be no turning back. Everything would change. All the years of fighting the shadows, and he was going to have to let the real darkness have its way with him and his kin. “Put me me me down,” Elsa said, her voice stronger, older than it had any right to be. The words ached like a fish hook in Joe’s belly. It was his little girl’s voice, but as he pulled Elsa away from his chest and laid her down in a shallow depression within the stone, there was nothing of his little girl in her face. She watched him with old eyes and moved not at all as he arranged her limbs on the stone. The spikes in Elsa’s flesh throbbed with a black light, and Joe smoothed the wrinkles from her brow with the palm of his hand. She watched him, and Joe could feel something changing within her. Her eyes faded, the pale blue color washing out to foggy
white as her gift kicked in. “Daddy,” she whispered, her voice thin and high, pushing past the alien presence forcing its way into her frail flesh, “it hurts.” The new boss was coming. Joe could hear its labored breathing in the silence of the cavern. It was pushing its way from wherever it called home into Pitchfork County, forcing its way through the ether and into Elsa. With every passing moment, Elsa became more substantial, more impressive. She didn’t get any bigger, but seemed to take up more space, growing in potency as the dark god infested her flesh. “It’ll be all right, baby.” Joe raked the fingers of his left hand through his hair. He hoped that was true. The Night Marshal kissed his daughter on the forehead and waited for his new master to tell him what came next.
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tevie didn’t have time to watch where she was going, but trusted in her gifts to get S her down to the cavern’s heartstone. She knelt and blew across the back of her fingertips until a spark of silver light flared to life. With a gentle puff of breath, she sent it floating in front of her. “Show me the way,” she whispered. The ghost light carved through Onondaga’s velvet-black belly, limning the path ahead of her. Stevie tried to ignore the spirits crowding around her, their indignant voices questioning her right to be on sacred Osage land. Their impotent rage splashed over her with every step she took, a spectral burden that added its weight to the pack of other worries she was trying to ignore. The half-made girls and their followers had defiled this place. Stevie wanted to fix that, but she didn’t have time to explain that to the angered ghosts. Joe had laid the plan out nice and simple for everyone. He’d go in first to get the bad guys’ attention on him. Then everyone else would do their part and clean up the messes the half-made girls had made. But Stevie knew now that their enemies knew that plan. She feared they would be stopped, and braced herself for the fight she knew was coming. The cave seemed to go on forever. Winding tunnels branched off in all directions, and at every intersection the ghost light dithered back and forth for long seconds before deciding on the correct path. Stevie chewed her lip at every delay, certain something had gone wrong and her husband and child were in terrible danger. She pushed at a breakneck pace until the tunnel opened up and the walkway became a thin sliver of stone running alongside a deep chasm that plunged far beyond the illumination shed by
her ghost light. One careful step after another, Stevie worked her way out onto the ledge. She leaned back against the cavern wall and pressed her palms flat against the limestone. Stevie moved her feet two inches at a time, sliding the right one, then the left one. She didn’t dare look down or see how far she had left to go. “Come on,” she whispered to herself, “Joe’s waitin’ on ya.” “Not anymore.” The voice was a purring laugh worming its way through Stevie’s thoughts. “You were too slow. They’re ours now.” Stevie’s ghost light wobbled in the air, and the path under her feet swam in a swarming tide of shadows. She raised her eyes to the end of the ledge and saw a monster floating there, naked tongue thrashing the air. “Get on outta my way, girl.” Stevie inched another step along the ledge. “I ain’ got time for ya.” But the half-made girl didn’t move. Her blue eyes blazed with an unholy light that challenged Stevie to come closer. “There’s nothing for you here. Turn around. Go home. Find the child you have left to you. Mourn your fallen.” The taunting words hit home, became a throbbing ache of loss in Stevie’s heart. She ground her teeth and took another step. Not much farther now. She just had to keep going. The girl’s deformed hands pinched together in front of her. “Don’t make me kill you. You’ve already suffered so much.” Stevie took another sidling step. “If you’re still there when I get to that side, I’m gonna skin ya for talking to me like that.” Laughter echoed from a hundred voices, the overlapping sound like the scraping of locust wings in Stevie’s mind. “You’re a fighter. But why fight for a man who gave up on himself?” Another short little step. Beads of sweat dripped from Stevie’s nose and chin, shimmering silver in the ghost light before falling out of sight. “Joe ain’ never gave up on nothin’.” But in the back of Stevie’s mind, she could see Joe slouched in his big old recliner, bottle of Jack dangling from his numb fingers, drinking his way down into a darkness that scared her more than any ghost she’d ever run across. “You know that’s not true,” the half-made girl whispered. “He’s been trying to give up for years. We just gave him the excuse he needed to finally let go.”
Another sliding step, and Stevie could see the girl’s gaping face clearly now. The raw, empty wound where the jaw should be pained the mother in Stevie. She imagined someone doing that to her own daughter and decided she’d just kill whoever’d do such a thing. “Might as well scoot, girl. I don’t want to hurt ya no more’ns already been done, but I ain’ stoppin’.” The girl slid forward, hovering over the edge of the ledge now. Her black hair crackled in the air, snapping like a screen door caught in a thunderstorm. “I see your thoughts, Stevie. No one did this to me. I did this for my father. To prove my love.” Stevie took a longer step. She didn’t trust herself out here much longer; her knees were knocking from the stress of creeping along, and her back ached like someone had beaten her with a switch. “No daddy wants his little girl hurt. No daddy worth havin’, anyways.” The girl’s tongue drifted past Stevie’s face, curling in the air, taunting. “Is that what you think?” Stevie was close to the girl now. They were almost face to face, standing right at the end of the ledge. “It’s what I know.” The girl moved so fast Stevie didn’t have a chance to react. The mutant hand looped around Stevie’s throat and hauled her off her feet, dragging her deeper into the cavern. “You know nothing. Sacrifice is love. Pain is proof.” The grip around her throat had pinched off Stevie’s air. She couldn’t breath, could feel her heart thudding in her head as her brain gobbled up whatever oxygen it could find. She hooked her fingers around the half-made girl’s hand, but all she managed to do was scratch up her own throat. “Let go.” The half-made girl licked a long, greasy line up the side of Stevie’s face. “Your husband knows the truth of what I say. He has offered up his own daughter to prove his loyalty to my father.” Her lips formed a refusal of the half-made girl’s claim, but Stevie couldn’t find the air to make her denial heard. The girl lifted Stevie, raised her into the air until her toes could just scrape the limestone beneath them. “In the darkness, your man switched sides. He saw the futility of your fight. He saw how stupid it was to suffer for the losers and misfits and degenerate idiots of this world.” Stevie could feel her hands going numb, but still she pulled at the girl’s hand,
struggled for air. “He gave her to us, Stevie.” The half-made girl’s face was inches from Stevie, her beautiful blue eyes burrowing into Stevie’s thoughts. “I feel your doubt in there. You can see it; I know you can. Because what your man did was right. His loyalty will be rewarded, but your rebellion will bring only sorrow.” The girl squeezed, and Stevie felt the last of her strength being crushed. Much more, and her throat would give way and it would be over. But Stevie could feel something else. Spirits, old and new, gathering in the darkness around the edges of the ghost light. They didn’t like Stevie’s trespass, but they liked the half-made girl a hell of a lot less. “There’s no help for you here,” the half-made girl’s gaping throat poured foul breath over Stevie. It was like standing next to a burning pile of rotting innards and breathing in the thick, black smoke. But Stevie couldn’t quit. She hooked her fingers in the air and focused on making the signs, opening a ragged stitch in the fabric between the worlds of the living and the dead. It was hard work, but it was what she was born for. She felt her hand slip into a cold, dark space, and the way was open. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. The Osage came screaming through the hole, boiling into the world like a jet of steam from an overheated tea kettle. Their war cries were as piercing as an eagle’s hunting shriek and as bone-rattling as winter thunder. Stevie’s wordless command guided them, pouring their outrage down the half-made girl’s flopping gullet, filling the monster with centuries of anger. Ancient fingers pried Stevie loose from the half-made girl, who shook and seized in the air as the spirits raged inside her. Stevie didn’t wait to see what was going to happen. She doubted the spirits could kill the monster, but they could distract it. Stevie ran down the tunnel, racing after the ghost light. As she ran, Stevie found herself haunted by the half-made girl’s words. Had Joe turned? She tried to imagine a world without her husband or daughter in it. That wasn’t a place she wanted to be. She wandered after the ghost light, no longer running, but walking, thinking. Thinking about Joe with a drink in his hand, drinking himself away. Joe lording his authority over the poor and the weak and the stupid, shotgun in one hand, lash in the other. She imagined him drinking away his life, serving a master who never made him think, who never asked Joe to stand up and make a hard choice. Joe
giving into the darkness that had haunted him since his father’s death, his rage free to run. Stevie’s heart broke, because she could see Joe there, giving up because the fight wasn’t one he felt was worth winning. It wasn’t that he was a bad man, just a man forced into a role that had never really fit him the way it ought. He had tried hard, struggled to be a better man, to be the kind of guardian who could keep Pitchfork safe. But, in the end, maybe it was too much to ask. Because even the best shepherd can’t save a sheep determined to throw itself down the wolf’s throat. Tears flowed down Stevie’s face as she walked. She loved Joe so much she’d been willing to put them both through hell, but now she wondered about that choice. What was love if all it brought was pain? The half-made girl, who tore off her own face in the name of love, maybe wasn’t as different from Stevie as she’d first thought. The heartstone came into view without fanfare, an enormous, gnarled mound of stalagmites that had grown together over the millennia to form a strange, ribbed dome. Blood was sloshed over it, a thick stain that ran from its crown down its sides and into a crusted moat around its base. Stevie’s heart lurched in her throat at the scope of the sacrifice, at the profane statement it made. Stevie closed her eyes and saw it happen. The girl standing atop the dome while cultists danced naked and ecstatic around the heartstone. The girl with her deformed hands and beautiful face, crying out with a love so powerful it tormented her with the need to prove itself. Hooking her spatulate thumb over her lower jaw and pulling, pulling, pulling with a strength born of the need to sacrifice. The girl sang even as her jaw came loose and her skin ripped down from the corners of her mouth. She sang even as the bloody rents ran down her throat like crimson lightning bolts and her jaw lay flopping on her chest like a speared fish. Two other half-made girls dumped a vat of steaming blood over the girl, baptizing her, transforming her. The echo of that sacrifice rang in the chamber still, echoing that final moment when the girl tore her flesh free of her body and let it fall atop the dome as blood gushed out of her. That love had done awesome, terrible things. Even as she died, the girl was born anew, remade in the form of something darker, greater than herself. In the face of that, Stevie felt the strength run out of her. Was that kind of madness something you could fight against? Was that what Joe had seen and decided it was better to give in than to rise against it?
“Yes,” the girl hissed in Stevie’s thoughts. She wobbled in from the darkness, her skin burst open from the rage of the spirits Stevie had dumped into her. One of the girl’s hands was gone, mutant thumb and forefinger reduced to naked stumps of splintered bone and dangling yellow tendons. “That is what real love does. It sacrifices. It hurts. It consumes.” Stevie backed away from the half-made girl and toward the heartstone. She couldn’t get away from the words in her head, though, the thought that this girl had a point, as demented as it might be. She and Joe had lived for years with the pain of a love that threatened to destroy them both. Together, they’d fought through it, scraped and hammered and bucked until they were both so tired and just plumb wore out that Stevie didn’t know how they found it in themselves to go on. “Let go,” the girl’s voice was quiet, almost normal. “Give in to what is coming, and you will know what it means to be free at last.” Stevie shoved her hand into her work bag, wrapped her fingers around the old co*ke bottle. She could feel her mother’s rage trembling in it, and the cold water that was her connection to Pitchfork County. “Love don’t make ya free,” she said, smiling at the half-made girl. “It ain’ about givin’ until it hurts or bleedin’ to prove it. Love goes both ways, and the hurt and the pain and the miracle of it all does, too.” Stevie lifted the bottle out of her bag. “Love ain’ about tearin’ skin off your bones to show you care. It’s about bein’ willin’ to lay it all down, not because the one ya love wants it, but because it needs doin’.” “We’ll break you all,” the half-made girl’s voice was boiling with rage, so heavy with venom it gave Stevie a headache. “I will show you how to love your new master.” “Child,” Stevie said, raising the co*ke bottle up to her eye, “there ain’ nothin’ you can teach me about love that I ain’ already learnt.” Stevie could feel the power in the co*ke bottle. This was her offering, a sacrifice of her past. Stevie spun and reared her arm back to throw it against the heartstone, trusting that her love for this land, for her dead mother, would be more than enough to chase off the haunted taint the damned girl had spilled onto it. A band of unyielding pain hooked around Stevie’s arm before she could complete the throw. Her fingers spasmed open, and the bottle slipped from her grasp. She heard it land hard on the limestone cavern floor, but didn’t care. Pain had taken hold of her,
robbed her of her thoughts. The half-made girl’s good hand was looped around Stevie’s wrist, grinding the bones together and holding the witch close. “If I can’t teach you about love,” she whispered in Stevie’s thoughts, “then I’ll teach you about pain.” The girl squeezed her finger and thumb together, and Stevie’s wrist bones popped and cracked to pieces. Zigzag lightning bolts of exquisite pain raced through Stevie’s nerves, lighting her brain up like a fireworks display in hell.
66
lsa no longer cried out. Her clouded eyes stayed locked on Joe as her lips trembled E and fat tears rolled down the sides of her face and into her tangled hair. Joe watched as his baby lay there suffering and knew that he’d done this to her. There were monsters in the mix, but in the end it was his own hand that had delivered Elsa to the darkness. He’d had a plan, he knew that, but it seemed so long ago and far away that he couldn’t put its pieces together. Worst of all, was the fact that he could feel his girl’s pain, but it no longer bothered him. Whatever part of him was meant to care was burnt out by the onrushing presence of the new boss. As it pushed its way through the darkness and into this world, it was doing something to Joe’s soul. Swearing to the Long Man hadn’t been like this. Joe had gone after his father died, walked the long road up to the Black Lodge with the old man’s shredded body cradled in his arms. He’d come into the shadowed house as an empty shell, a new-made man with baby fat still clinging to his cheeks and blood soaking into his boots. Swearing the words, taking the oath to protect the people of Pitchfork from the same evil that had taken his father had felt right and just. He’d been filled with a zealous strength and righteous sense of purpose that left him ready to take on any asshole who got in his way. The Long Man had scooped out a little space in Joe’s soul and filled it with a shard of himself, a portion of his being and power. But swearing to the new boss left Joe wrung out and used up. Strong as hell, pretty sure he could take on the whole county in a fair fight, but weary all the way down to his bones. There was no greater purpose here, no sense of relief in finding the spot where you belonged. Joe watched what was happening now with the same resigned attention
of a bait dog being thrown into the ring. What was going to happen would happen, no matter what he did, so there wasn’t much sense getting all riled up about it. Joe knew there’d been some other plan, some scheme to raise a ruckus so his people could do their part, then he’d spring his own little ambush on the new boss. With his daughter on the slab and his brain being squashed by the intrusive, burning mind, Joe just couldn’t see the point in all that business. He was too wiped out for any of it. The air above the ancient altar shimmered with a hazy purple light. There was a sucking, a sudden drop in pressure as the new boss scratched a tiny little pinprick through the wall of reality. There was a blackness there, a complete lack of light, that tugged at Joe’s guts. This was the real deal, oblivion staring at him through a crack in the world. “In the end,” it whispered, “you all come to me.” The bats answered the call of darkness. They swarmed into the cave like a living tornado, whirling between the serpent-filled quartz columns, their countless wings pounding the air into submission. Stinking sh*t stained the floor as they came, a liquid shadow that formed a river of filth flowing up to the very edge of the dais. The bats circled the altar, sweeping through gyres around one another, filling the air with their screeches. Elsa’s hand groped blindly for Joe. He took her tiny fingers in his own and her eyes snapped back to blue. “Daddy,” she whispered, “I can’t hold it back, not for much longer. It’s so big.” Joe wanted to squeeze her little hand, but he couldn’t muster the energy to comfort her. He didn’t know how he could have believed this frail little girl could stand against the darkness. What kind of a sh*tty father was he to put her in harm’s way? “You let it come on, then, baby. This ain’t a fight for you.” Elsa looked at her father, her blue eyes probing him, trying to make sense of his words. “Daddy, we fight the bad things. That’s what we do.” “Let it go, baby girl. The world has rolled on. No sense trying to haul it back.” He tried to shake his hand loose from his daughter’s grip, but she wasn’t letting go. Elsa’s thin fingers clung around his hand, and he had to peel them off, one by one. “You listen to your old man now, girl. You let it come on.” It killed some part of him to take away her hope, but Joe couldn’t see his way to any other choice. Better to let her go quietly, to slip off for the final sleep, than to have her keep fighting and getting tore up in a battle she could never win. Elsa turned her head
away from him and folded her hands over her stomach. Joe’s hand strayed to his backpack, his fingers feeling for what he’d taken from Stevie’s house. It was still there, but he didn’t see much point in messing with it now. Fervent, mad singing joined with the bats’ screams, a worshipful cacophony that echoed through the cavern. The cultists came into the chamber, making the pilgrimage to see the birth of their god. They belly-crawled across the cold stone floor to pay homage to the nightmare they’d begged to be their king. They made Joe’s stomach hurt with a mixture of disgust and grief. He watched them creeping forward on their bellies, and he saw the sad and pathetic reality of their lives. Worse, he saw the truth of his own. Pitchfork was full of the broken and weak, the weary and hopeless. But they hadn’t always been that way. Not so many generations back, the people of Pitchfork were pioneers and explorers, the kind of brave men and women who spawned legends. They’d mined these hills and tamed the wilderness to make lives for themselves. They’d held the darkness to the caves and valleys through sheer grit and hardheadedness. Then time had moved on, and the world outside Pitchfork left those brave men and women behind. In the years since the railroads and highways had detoured around Pitchfork, the best and the brightest the county had to offer left to chase their fortunes in the wider world. Those who stayed behind lost hope. Depression ate away at their sense of self and stripped them of their drive to find something better. The world had fed these people sh*t for so long they’d started to like the taste. Joe watched them abase themselves and knew he’d been wrong to hate these people. He’d hounded them for the only hope they had, that something greater than themselves would come and lift them up out of the ruins. They’d been wrong to worship at the black altars and wrong to make compacts with the darkness, but the gods of light hadn’t exactly been fair to them. He felt useless and stupid, sick with himself that he could only see the truth now, at the end, when it was too late to take it all back and do it right. Overhead, the tear in the world widened into a quivering, fire-dripping slit. A voice poured through the hole, adding its wordless cries to the operatic wailing of its worshipers. The sound had weight, a power that drove Joe to his knees. Tears ran from his eyes, and he felt as if the whole world had fallen on his shoulders.
It was so much more than he’d imagined. How could he have ever thought to stand against this nightmare? Even this tiny piece of it, this ephemeral wisp of its true magnitude, was an overpowering totem to darkness. It was not a monster, but an absolute. A fact that the universe was, and always would be, ruled by those who took without pity or remorse. The world belonged to those who consumed it. Elsa’s voice cut through the din and buried itself in Joe’s ear. “I can’t hardly hang on no more, Daddy. Will you hold my hand?” Her words stirred that part of him Joe had thought cold and dead. He tried to reach out to her, but his muscles wouldn’t listen. His hand jiggled on the end of his wrist, but his arm hung useless and weak at his side like someone had cut the nerves at the shoulder. “Leave her her her,” the voice thundered. Joe felt something pop in his left eye and tears squirted down his cheek. He tasted blood on his lips and a spark of rage flared deep in the center of his chest. Joe didn’t want to be like those poor f*ckers crawling across the ground, with their lips pressed to the limestone and their throats raw from screaming their strange prayers. It was easier to be the one who followed orders, simpler to obey. But it wasn’t who Joe wanted to be. It wasn’t what any man deserved to be. Years of kowtowing to the Long Man had given way to this new boss, one who wanted to not just tell him what to do, but force him to do it. And that was just a mite too far for Joe to bow. The clean, pure fire of anger helped Joe remember his plan. It was time to do what he’d come to do. Joe felt the blackest, most hateful thoughts he could muster erupt in his skull. He saw the most depraved visions of a Pitchfork under the new boss’s thumb run wild, clouding his mind with fantasies that repelled and fascinated him. He could see, with the power of the new boss within him, how to make it all real, how to keep people where they needed to be and out of mischief. He could see what it would be like to be king. A king without a family, a king who served at the pleasure of something foul and dark. A king who’d forsworn everything to gain nothing. And Joe didn’t think he could live like that. He growled and shoved his hand into his backpack. He felt the new boss closing
around his muscles, trying to stop him, but he was ready for it this time and pushed back, bending the power he’d been given to his own ends. The new boss screamed in Joe’s head, but it was learning that this new relationship worked both ways and what was once given didn’t get taken back quite so easily. Joe pulled out the mask he’d taken from Stevie’s house and lowered it onto Elsa’s face. It was the cruel black mask, the one that had started Elsa down the path that ended here. It settled on his little girl’s face with a quiet sucking, as if pulled into place by her need. There was a thrum in the air, like a chord being struck on a guitar string made from God’s hair, and Joe’s ears popped. The power flowing through the tear was no longer coming under its own steam, it was yanked screeching into the world before it was ready. Elsa’s body stiffened. Her eyes snapped open, staring sightless up through the mask’s eyeholes. Behind the mask, she was the one to be feared, the mistress of spirits. “Come to me,” she whispered, “come on, and let’s see what you got, you nasty old monster.” There was a roar in Joe’s head, a sound like a tidal wave crashing over a tornado, the sound of a great beast let loose in a room far too small to hold it. The new boss screamed and thrashed and fought. This was what it wanted, to come to Pitchfork. The beast had wanted to use Elsa, to possess her as its host while it acclimated to the new reality. But Elsa wasn’t going to give it that chance. Without the mask, she was an open conduit, a great big hose for spirits to pour through. With the mask, she was the master. She called the shots, and the spirits came when and how she wanted them. A massive wing burst through the burning hole and slashed across the cavern. It smashed through stalactites and sent them plummeting into the huddled knots of cultists. The stone spears punctured bodies and pulped guts and heads and legs, pinning the faithful to the floor. Their blood ran red across the limestone, collected in pools into which the greedy bats hurled themselves. A second wing tore its way into the world, crashing into the ceiling and sending even more stalactites plunging through its followers. Its head followed the wing, a nightmare of a gnarled bat’s face dripping with pink slime that burned sizzling holes in
the limestone floor where it fell. Quivering tentacles drooped from below its convoluted spade of a nose, hanging like a curtain of flesh before the fanged gash of its mouth. Its single, bulging eye emerged from its forehead like a ripening boil. The lids opened, and tears poured out, steaming in the cool cave air. The three pupils in its center pulsed and dilated as they fixed Joe with a hateful stare. It was like standing before an avalanche. Joe’s mouth went dry at the crushing enormity of his enemy. Each pupil was bigger than his head. Its wings were too wide to fit into the cavern without bending. Its body creaked through the opening. Looking at it made Joe’s head swim; he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. Its body undulated in a hundred different directions, like a nest of copperheads. Black holes opened in its body, and pink tongues licked the air from within them. It was scaled and hairy, straight and crooked, an amalgam of nightmares and dreams. Joe wasn’t sure if any of the others had finished their work, but he didn’t have time to f*ck around waiting for a sign. The bat god was coming, and whether that was its plan or not, it would be ready to start kicking some ass very soon. Elsa had surprised it, weakened it by hauling it into this world before it was quite ready, and he had to take advantage of the moment before it passed. The shotgun slipped off Joe’s shoulder and into his hand. He whipped it up, not giving the new boss time to figure out what he was up to. Joe could feel the monster’s confusion, the swirling mass of hate and rage that it called a mind. He swung the shotgun up and aimed it at the bulging eye. It screamed at him, a sound that pierced his head like an iron rod fired from a cannon. Joe pulled both of the shotgun’s triggers. Twin lances of silver fire and smoking lead soared through the air. They punctured two of the pupils, sending a scalding cascade of vitreous fluid splashing down around Joe. The new boss threw its head back, spraying saliva into the air. Its screeching took on a new, hideous pitch that made Joe want to drive nails into his own ears to make it stop. It was the sound of death, the mindless howl of a mortally wounded beast. The new boss thrashed its wings against the sides of the cavern, breaking open jagged cracks that raced across the walls and ceiling. But the monster didn’t fall.
Its head swiveled back to Joe and the big, blazing eye was whole, untouched. Joe realized his error, too late. It wasn’t screaming. It was laughing.
67
he big white Hummer roared over the back roads of Pitchfork County, blasting over T bumps and kicking up gravel rooster tails from its rear tires. The driver watched the road with unblinking eyes, his hands relaxed at ten and two, like he was taking a leisurely Sunday morning drive and not driving hell-for-leather down a rutted road that was little more than a trail. He swerved to the left to avoid a squirrel, then snapped the big car back to the right as smooth as could be. Walker didn’t worry about his driver’s ability to keep the vehicle on the road. The driver drove as he always had, flawlessly. The old preacher prayed his old prayers, whispering the words to himself. He didn’t want to die today. He wanted to go back to what he’d been doing before all this madness had dropped on him. He wanted to worship his God in peace, lead his flock through the rituals of the faithful. It had been a good life. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it was over. Walker sighed and leaned back in the comfortable custom seat he’d had made for the Hummer. It fit him perfectly, though he’d need to change it in another year when his ass grew too fat. He latched onto that thought, on surviving long enough to need to replace that seat, on all the rich rewards he’d earned for his good works. His God would surely be pleased by his actions today. “But will he forgive me for missing this in the first place?” Walker tapped his plump lips with his index finger and pondered the question. What would the Red Oak feel about the desecration it had suffered? While the Night Marshal had instigated this disaster, Walker was the shepherd, and it was his job to keep the holy root safe. He
wasn’t sure that success today would be enough to cleanse him of his failure. The Hummer lurched to a halt in front of Walker’s church, wheels kicking up fallen leaves and chunks of gravel. The driver stayed behind the wheel, eyes fixed to the road. That driver had held the reins of wagons, the wooden wheel of a Model T, and too many other vehicles to count before he’d sat in the captain’s seat of the Hummer. As long as there’d been a pastor for Red Oak, the driver had been there to carry him about his appointed rounds. Walker wondered where the man had come from, wondered if he’d ever find out. “That’s a worry for another day,” the old preacher grunted as he pushed the Hummer’s door open and eased himself down onto the gravel. He was fat, but he was still strong and nimbler than anyone gave him credit for. The opulence of his figure hid a strong, resilient man, a fact that Walker was more than happy to let others discover to their chagrin. His boys spilled out of the church, white robes gliding over the damp earth, darkening where their hems soaked up the morning dew. They did not speak, but flowed around him, lending him their support and innocent courage. Their presence eased his worries and calmed his troubled mind. Walker loved his boys. The preacher rested his heavy hand on a boy’s shoulder. “Thank you, my children.” At the door to the church, Walker’s gut lurched. The wound ached, a bad tooth throb that froze him in his tracks. He clutched his hand to the wound, and a wet warmth oozed through his fingers. Then something wriggled inside his gut. “She’s here,” Walker whispered. The boys raised their voices, a choir of innocence that eased Walker’s pain and chased the chill from his bones. The boys were filled with God’s spirit, and they always knew the perfect way to help him along his often troubled path. Walker hurried them up to the altar. “Come along, children, our time is short.” Walker hoisted his bulk up the steps to the altar, pausing at the top to gaze up at the red-stained cross that hung from the ceiling. The gnawing ache in his gut was back, despite the soothing song of his choir and the warm strength of the cross. Walker limped to the altar and put his hands on its polished surface, framing the stain left by the halfmade girl between his outstretched fingers. “Our Father,” he began, but pain blossomed in his gut and sliced his words off clean as a razor’s swipe. The preacher leaned on the altar, and the old wood groaned
under his weight. His boys gathered around him to lend their strength, but Walker knew it wasn’t enough. He could feel her coming. The door opened, silent and slow, revealing a chunk of blackness that flowed up the church’s central aisle like an unrolling carpet. She floated into the sanctuary, stumps sizzling with black lightning that chewed chunks from the floor as she approached the altar. The wind that blew in around her was colder than winter’s breath, the kiss of the void. “Hello, preacher.” Walker raised his eyes to the girl and struggled to catch his breath. The closer she got, the deeper the pain gnawed into his guts. The blood wasn’t leaking from the sacrificial wound now, it was running in streams as thick as his fat thumb. “There is no place for you here,” he grunted through the pain. “What does it feel like?” She grinned as she floated closer, filling the air with the scent of ozone and scorched wood. “To be cut off from your God? I can’t even ‘magine how that must hurt.” Walker tried to ignore the girl. He knew the words to the prayer. A simple consecration ritual and some spilled blood would be all that it would take to reclaim this place for his God. His blood was already smeared across the altar and splattering onto the floor all around him, he just had to say the words. But the words wouldn’t come. Whenever he tried to speak pain crawled deeper into his belly. Blood stung the back of his throat, and every breath felt like it might be his last. He was losing this fight before it even started. “My God is with me, always.” But Walker no longer believed that. There was an emptiness in him, a hollowness that echoed the sacrificial wound he’d carved into his fat. The Red Oak was somewhere, but it wasn’t within Walker. Not anymore. He’d failed, and it had withdrawn from him until he could prove he was worthy of its gifts. Walker hoped he’d live long enough to earn his way back into the good graces of his God. The boys shifted nervously around Walker. They drew back from the approaching girl and raised their voices in wordless praise. They sang with the righteousness of the innocent, but the girl did not flinch in the face of their faith. She reached out with her wreath of hands and a dozen fingers crooked in different directions. One of the boys cried out and stumbled past the altar, head bowed. He knelt before the monstrous girl, muscles trembling in protest, brown eyes welling with
terrified tears. “My god enjoys a different song,” she purred. The boy’s lovely voice rose to fill the church, a pure, high tone that silenced the others. It rose high, higher still, and yet higher, before it broke. His voice shattered into a thousand tortured notes, became the discordant jangle of breaking glass and screeching bats. Walker opened his mouth to say the prayer, but the words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t take his eyes off the boy, who was changing, withering. The boy’s hair came loose and floated into the air, borne aloft by his terrified, splintered song. His bald scalp shriveled against his skull, revealing a swollen, pulsing network of veins that writhed like blue worms. Walker staggered from behind the altar, pounding his hands against his thighs, trying to force the words to come. “Father, hear me,” he began. The boy’s head turned, craning to the left until his spine crackled like cellophane and his body was forced to follow. He stared up at Walker with an old man’s face atop a throttled, wrinkled neck. The little boy’s eyes rolled back until they showed only white, then rolled farther still until they were blank, black marbles that squirmed with life of their own. “Father,” Walker struggled to find his strength. Years of faith abandoned him in the face of madness. He wasn’t strong enough to save his boy. His weakness tortured him. The boy’s left eye unfolded, stretching out to reveal a bat’s membranous wing, the leathery limb dripping with blood as it thrust itself from the boy’s head. “Where’s your God now?” The monstrous girl asked as she floated to Walker. She reached out and cradled the preacher’s head in her many hands as he watched bats tear their way out of the boy’s eyes. Through it all, the child kept singing his strange, damned song. “Has he fled?” She squeezed Walker’s head in her hands, pressing on it from all sides. “Or was he never here at all?” She laughed and slammed Walker’s head down onto the altar. His forehead split open and added more of his rich, red blood to the rusty stain left by the half-made girl. “Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, a daddy got very, very mad with his children. So he drowned them all.” “Not all,” Walker gasped. “Not the righteous.” Bats tore the boy’s head apart. His neck ended in a tattered flower of mangled flesh,
from which bats crawled by the dozens. They flicked blood from their wings and took flight, befouling the church with their cries and drizzling sh*t. “He did let one old man and his family live. What fun is it to be a god if there’s no one to see it?” The girl floated higher, and the bats swarmed around her, flying in erratic orbits around her body, jagged teeth flashing in the candlelight. “You know this story. They sailed for forty days and forty nights, and then found themselves a little patch of land to call their own.” “Do not mock the Lord and his works.” The girl tutted at Walker and waggled her many fingers in his direction. “You don’t know the whole story. While your hero floated on the endless ocean, waitin’ for his God to take mercy on his soul, things woke in the depths beneath him.” “And even when the waters receded and carried the great leviathans away beyond your world, they waited and watched and lusted. Your God kept them at bay, kept you all to himself.” Walker struggled to stand, leaning against the altar. The boys gathered close to him, pressing him tight against the old wood, supporting him. “But all things pass, even gods. They grow old and weak. They kill their children to prove their power. But, in the end …” The girl released Walker and raised her hands high. She twirled in the air, hair whipping around her head, bats swarming around her like bees to their queen. “In the end, here we f*ckin’ are, and where’s your God now?”
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massive talon swooped toward Joe, looping over the dais and crashing down at his A face. He threw himself to the side, leaping clear of the attack. The claw dug into the cave’s floor, throwing up chunks of limestone that pelted Joe’s backpack like a volley of fastballs. The other leg tore its way into the world, and Joe only just avoided its raking attack by throwing himself prone. He slid a few yards across the floor and came to rest behind one of the glowing stone pillars. He ducked behind it and slung the shotgun back onto his shoulder, drew one of his pistols. A knot of cultists took one look at Joe and ran the other way with their tails between their legs. The thing was weakened and confused by Elsa’s hold on it. Despite its overwhelming presence, the new boss had made a terrible mistake binding itself to that particular little girl. She wasn’t the hapless anchor it was looking for, but a determined fighter who was going to make it pay for what it had done to her and her family. One of the new boss’s freakish claws hovered over Elsa, frozen with indecision. Joe could see its dilemma. The girl was weakening it, but if it killed her its connection to this world would be severed. Its confusion filled him with hope. Joe wasn’t sure he could kill it with just bullets. It was too big, a Godzilla-sized bat with a face bearded by whipping tentacles and a body that swarmed like a school of darting fishes, for even Joe’s ensorcelled guns to put a final end to it. But he could give Elsa time to work on it and, between the two of them, maybe they could finish this fight. Maybe.
The grotesque head turned away as if it could feel Joe’s thoughts, bulging eye sweeping from side to side as it tried to find him. Its breath washed across the cavern, a hot mist that stank of burning copper and sun-baked carcasses. Joe gagged against the stench and swung one of the pistols out around the stone column. He squeezed the trigger three times and each shot found its way into the thing’s eye. It shook its head, spewing saliva and boiling tears in all directions. Joe could feel its pain, feel the power it had given him ebb for one moment before surging back. It felt pain, but it was still strong. He could sense it healing, like an itch on the top of his brain. He’d have to do a lot of damage, very fast, if he wanted to kill it before it could put itself back together. Joe raised the pistol again, took a bead on the beast’s throat, and squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell on air. He cursed and holstered the empty pistol, reaching for its brother as he hustled to new cover ahead of the raging god at his back. The alien god’s screams of unholy rage burrowed into Joe’s skull. The new boss sent a withering ball of hate down the connection between the two of them. The pain was too much. It knocked his legs out from under him before he could reach another stalactite, and he landed hard on his knees, left hand clamped to his forehead. One of the cultists lunged from the shadows and wrapped scabbed arms around Joe’s shoulders. The Night Marshal struggled against this new attack, but he was dizzy, confused. He never saw the new boss moving in for the kill. It lunged and whipped the leading edge of its wing at Joe’s head. A thick spike hooked the skin just above Joe’s ear, tearing his scalp open in a wide swath. His legs went wobbly, and he spun to the left, arms windmilling. Joe hit the ground hard, one knee banging off the stone floor before he toppled onto his shoulder and his head smacked the stone. The world swam around him, a dizzy spiral that receded as his eyes fluttered and everything started to turn black.
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eke hit the water so hard his skin split across his shoulders. A curtain of blood Z flowed from the wound like yards of unspooled cloth, drifting up around him as his body sank. The water was dark and cool; it embraced Zeke, and he knew his pain was almost at an end. He wished he could have done more, that he could have helped Joe when the boy needed it most. Ah, well, he thought, regrets are for the living. He saw the light coming for him. It fell from the sky like a star, a golden lance that warmed his face long before it reached him. He recognized it, felt the pure love of the God he’d never really understood. This God was dark and vengeful, but his wrath was reserved for the faithless and evil. Zeke had expected reproach at his failure, but he felt only acceptance and a humbling love. A smile cracked across his lips, and Zeke let his eyes close. He was going home soon, and that was a great comfort despite the way he’d let Joe down. “Not yet,” the girl’s voice cracked in Zeke’s head like a shattering bell. Her shredded arms hooked around him and hauled him up and out of the water with inhuman strength. They floated there in an ungainly embrace, and she sneered at Zeke. “We’re not done playing.” She crushed Zeke to her, holding him so his head hung over her shoulder like a baby’s. His ribs cracked, and he tasted blood. But the light was still coming, falling from the sky toward the half-made girl’s unsuspecting laugh. Zeke coughed against the constricting grasp. He turned his head and whispered to the girl.
She shrieked and held him at arm’s length, eyes burning holes in him. “What did you say?” “You lose,” Zeke chuckled through a mouthful of his own blood. The light touched Zeke at last, surrounding his body in a corona of celestial fire. Dawn arrived with a thunderclap that shook the trees and echoed across the spring’s valley. The half-made girl tumbled back from the light, hair alight, skin scorched bright red by the heat. Blood spilled from Zeke’s wounded body, glowing with a pure, golden light. The drops of light sizzled where they hit the spring, and waves whipped the surface into a silver froth. The half-made girl screamed overhead as her taint was cleansed from the spring. She came apart, bones burning white hot and sizzling away into sulfurous steam as her flesh peeled off in long strips that floated toward the rising sun before charring black and disintegrating into ash. Zeke closed his eyes and fell, the light leaving his body as he landed in the center of the spring. The half-made girl’s screams tapered away to silence. The wind carried her away, scattering her remains far and wide, leaving nothing to mark her passing.
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ultists lifted Joe from where he’d fallen. They hoisted him into the air and draped C his arms and legs over their shoulders so he hung face down. The floor scrolled beneath the Night Marshal, red drops of his blood staining the stone. He wanted to hate them for what they’d done, what they were going to do, but it wasn’t in him anymore. Everyone had picked a side, and all they had left was to tally up the score and celebrate the win. He just wished it wasn’t Alma Pryor leading the procession, a reminder of what his weakness had cost him. Her, he found he could still hate. They carried Joe back to the dais and put him down before Elsa. They forced him to kneel under the baleful eye of their god, who towered over the proceedings. The holes Joe had punched through its infernal hide were gone, sealed up by whatever dark power had spawned the thing. Its dangling tentacles curled with anticipation and Joe could feel its amusem*nt in his head. “Hold him him him,” its voice thundered and the cultists yanked Joe’s arms out. They lowered him to the ground, but held his arms straight back from his shoulders, pulling until he could feel tendons and ligaments creaking. Alma smirked at him, wicked eyes wet with joy as she presented her foe to the god she served. It lowered its head, craning it down on a winding, serpentine neck until the drooping curtain of its wriggling tentacles brushed against his face. Joe could smell the eons of chaos and decay rolling out of whatever passed for the dark god’s guts. This close to it, he could see the flesh wasn’t solid, but a rotting lacework, layers of threads and holes, all overlapped and wound together like a million cobwebs. Through the gaps, Joe could hear the whisper of eternity, the voices of dead millennia urging him to
submit, to bow down before the inevitable and accept his fate. “I I I offered you you you this world,” the words rumbled out through the air and battered against Joe’s ears. “And yet still you you you fight. Now, I I I will rip my gifts from your your your flesh.” Joe looked up into the madness of the glowering three-lobed eye. He could feel its hate, its growing power. He could feel something else, as well, far back in his skull. The Long Man’s presence grew stronger, a sudden flare accompanied by a high keening sound that trailed off like rolling thunder. The dark god threw back its head and roared, a haunting cry of pain and loss. Burning gashes appeared across its body, the tenuous threads of its spectral body shredding away to reveal a primal, chaotic energy that leaked from it like boiling blood. Joe knew what it meant. One of the half-made girls was dead, and the new god’s hold on Pitchfork was weakened. There was still a chance. “No,” the eldritch entity howled, “there is no hope for you you you. I will devour you you you and yours yours yours. I I I will consume your your your lives and dreams. I I I will sh*t out all that was you you you.” Its head streaked toward Joe, a massive blur of pink flesh and ivory teeth, opened wide to consume him in one gulping bite. Alma Pryor shrieked and tried to leap clear, nimble for an old woman, but not nimble enough. The side of her god’s head clipped the cult leader on the hip and shoulder, sent her tumbling back into the cavern’s wall. She hit the stone with a crackling thud and slid to the floor, eyes rolled back to show their milky whites. Joe curled one of his arms, dragging a trio of cultists off their feet. The new boss wanted its strength back, but Joe wasn’t letting it go. He threw the idiots in one direction and himself in the other. The fangs tore through the cultists, splitting two of them open like soggy piñatas and flinging the other one across the cavern in a bloody pinwheel of arms and legs. He slipped loose of the others, who stood, awestruck, as their god raged and threw itself among them. Joe ran, and the cultists died, their bodies splattered across the stone as the new boss crashed through them in pursuit of its quarry.
The cultists screamed before the wrath of their god, sprinting down shadowed tunnels and dropping into web-covered holes, fleeing from a god who slaughtered them in its blind rage. Joe dodged around stalagmites and doubled back through the remnants of the cultists, splashed through puddles of blood and skidded over spilled brains and loose guts as he tried to stay out of the gargantuan bat’s path. The cultists hadn’t taken his pistols. Joe reckoned the weapons were terrifying things to those who followed the Left-Hand Path, emblazoned as they were with enough runes and sigils to scare off all but the most powerful haint. One of them even had bullets left in it. He skidded to a halt behind one of the snake pillars and looked down at the cylinder. Five bullets left. The bat head crashed into the ground nearby, the impact bounced Joe’s feet off the stone and nearly set him on his ass. Joe stepped back and pumped three bullets into the bloody head, just in front of a scalloped ear. The silver flame from the pistol was brighter now, and the bullets hit like falling stars. They left craters the size of Joe’s fist on entry and tore even bigger holes through its jaw where they exited. Better yet, the wounds didn’t heal at once. Joe could see down into the holes he’d made to a pulsing pink brain smeared with steaming, red-black blood. He might just live through this mess. Joe ran from the new boss as it shook its head and screeched in startled rage. The bat god was hurt, but Joe knew he needed to put some more bullets into it before it could recover from what he’d already done. He slipped around another of the snake columns, and the monster drew back to take a run at him. Whatever else it might be willing to destroy, it wasn’t ready to smash into any of the glowing crystals and the mammoth snakes they held. Joe used them for cover, tucking up hard against one to catch his breath. There were two bullets left in his pistol. Joe prayed it would be enough.
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he devil girl was right, at least in part. Walker could feel it in his bones. He’d T served his God faithfully for decades, but there was nothing in him now. He’d failed to protect his church, and the darkness had come for him at last. But still his faith would not die. It flickered in him, flames fanned by all the good he’d done and the evil he’d seen. His God was real, but Walker had failed the Red Oak and lost its protection. He pulled his boys closer to him, and they huddled against his bulk. He took the oldest boy, Aaron, by the hand and looked into his eyes. Aaron had been with Walker for his whole life, ever since his mother died and left him to Walker’s care. He was young, but not so young as the others. In a few more years, he might even pass for a man. “Aaron,” Walker said and slid the boy’s hand under his shirt. “I can go no further. The road ahead is dark, but yours is the hand that must guide the flock.” Walker expected the boy to shrink from the duty, to deny the charge Walker had laid upon him. He was wrong. “Your time has come, preacher. You and your precious boys and all the rest who stand against us.” The bats exploded away from the girl and flooded toward Walker and his boys like an arrow made of fur and skin and teeth. Aaron looked up into Walker’s face, and the preacher could see an old, righteous fire kindled in his eyes. That look was almost enough to ease the sudden, mindshattering pain.
The boy thrust his hand into Walker’s wound, digging his fingers in to follow the swollen, bloody root that was proof of his God’s love. The bats latched onto the younger boys, who threw their bodies on top of Aaron, shielding him from fangs. They sang as their flesh was shredded, sweet and pure and innocent even as the darkness drank their blood. The girl laughed, and lightning echoed her voice, striking the trees around the church with such force the wood tore itself apart. “Lord Father,” Aaron began, his voice rising in strength with every word. “I stand at the foot of your cross and am bathed in the blood of your faithful.” Walker held the boy tight, doing his best to protect him from the bats. He heard Aaaron’s words just as he had said them so long ago. He could feel the root inside him, unwinding, being drawn forth from his body and with it, his life. “I hold in my hands proof of your undying covenant and your eternal love for your children.” The half-made girl’s laughter stopped. She soared to where the bats dug at the flesh of the children. “No,” she screamed, beating at Walker’s back and shoulders, “your God is not here.” “Not yet,” Walker gasped and grabbed the girl. He wrapped his heavy hands around her neck and squeezed, putting the last of his fading strength into holding the half-made girl, keeping her attention. He was dead, but that didn’t mean he had to fail. Aaron slipped from between Walker and the girl, standing untouched amidst the swarming bats. Blood had soaked through his white robes and splashed against his dark skin. His hair was matted against his skull, wet with Walker’s life. “Cleanse me, Father,” Aaron roared and pulled the writhing root from inside Walker. It wrapped itself around his right arm, clinging to him as his prayers gained strength. “And let your love take root within my heart.” The girl beat at Walker, smashing her wreath of hands into his face, digging one of his eyes from its socket and shredding his cheek with her nails. Walker reveled in the pain. It was purifying, a baptism of agony that prepared him for his final reward. He had failed, but in his last moments he knew he had earned redemption. Aaron extracted the last of the root from within Walker, and the preacher gasped in ecstatic agony. Blood geysered from his sacrificial wound and splashed across the
altar. The old red wood drank up the life of its fallen pastor, and the foul blood of the half-made girl burned away with an electric sizzle. The boy laid his hands on the altar and bowed his head. “Lord, may all your angels and spirits intercede on the behalf of your faithful servant and cleanse this place of all evil.” The half-made girl screamed and tore free of Walker’s dead grasp. Her hair burned with golden fire, and she bobbed and wove in the air, swerving drunkenly through the church. An angry roar rumbled from beneath the church, the voice an ancient God who had held this place holy for long eons. The voice of a God returned with a vengeance. The girl fled before that voice, but even as she neared the door, her flesh unraveled. Unmoored from this world, her skin shredded into glimmering, oily ribbons of midnight black that floated away from her and caught fire in the air. Before she reached the door, the girl was no more. All that remained to mark her passage were the bloody, rotting fingers she’d stolen.
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he remaining cultists shook off their confusion and scattered like leaves before a T tornado. It was one thing to want a god to answer their prayers, but it was something else to have it trampling them underfoot and threatening to kill them all with a cave-in. Even Alma, for all her experience in the ways of darkness, could do little but stare in awe as the thing she’d prayed to raged out of control. Joe took advantage of the chaos, hurling himself through the rushing crowd, trying to get the right angle for another shot. He could feel the Long Man inside, not quite as deep now, screaming for Joe to just shoot the f*cking thing already. “Shut the hell up,” Joe growled. He had to concentrate, get this just right, or he’d waste too many shots. He had to get every bullet right in the monster bat’s brain if he wanted to finish it. He wasn’t even sure the shots he had remaining would get the job done, but he still had one surprise left. Joe hid in the scrambling cultists, running through their milling mass toward the edge of the cavern. He could see a crack in the wall running up from the floor to a high ledge. From there, he might be able to see the top of its head, might be able to drill some more holes through its skull and let the light in. He ran at the crack full-tilt and threw himself up as high as he could jump. The fissure was wide and rough, with plenty of room for him to jam his hands in and get a good foothold with the toe of one boot, as well. Joe worked his way up along the crevice, moving as quick as he could without losing his grip, which wasn’t nearly as fast as he would have liked. The dark god reeled drunkenly above it all, mad eye darting to and fro as it tried to
find its prey. Whatever damage Joe had done was sticking; it wasn’t healing from those wounds, and its brain wasn’t firing on all cylinders. It kept scything from side to side, whipping its head around to stare at Elsa as if it couldn’t understand how this insignificant animal had such a hold on it. “Come on, you stupid co*cksucker,” Joe growled and crawled up onto the ledge. He needed the monster to come closer, needed to see the target. “Come and get it.” He waved his hand overhead and shouted a wordless challenge. That got the new boss’s attention. It swerved back toward Joe, lunging on its crooked wings and lashing its head at him like a cracking whip. The second half-made girl’s death went off in Joe’s head like an artillery shell. The Long Man surged, pushing back against the power of the new boss, clearing out space in Joe’s soul to reassert himself. The new boss felt it, too, and tried to dart away at the last second. Its left wing crumpled under it, and it squealed in surprise as its strength was further eroded. The pistol came up, seeming to move of its own accord, and Joe squeezed the trigger. The bullet roared out, a streak of white fire that boiled the air around it. The lance of light punched straight through one of the holes Joe had blown in the top of its head and blasted out the back of its neck. It belched flame and smoke, and its tongue curled and blackened between cracked fangs. The new boss quivered, a seizure of pain rolling through its massive body. “Choke on it,” Joe crowed and took careful aim. The hole in the new boss’s skull was enormous: an ugly, flesh crater filled with bulging brains and oozing black blood. Joe couldn’t miss. He squeezed the trigger, but the hammer never fell. Bats, a screeching horde of the hell-spawned mutants, fell on his hand and arm. One of them rammed its nose under the hammer, jamming the works with its skull. The bats kept coming, pouring over Joe like a tide of fangs, ripping into him until his body ran red with spilled blood and he felt as raw as if he’d been rolled naked down a hill of broken glass. He sagged to his knees, cursing his own stupidity for forgetting about the bats. It was a mistake he was sure would cost him his life.
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tevie couldn’t breathe, and her brain was stewing in bad blood. Little by little, she S was losing herself, drifting away from the world and toward oblivion. Her power was there, but just out of reach. She was too dazed and injured to focus long enough to bring it into play. Stronger than she’d ever been, Stevie was going to die because she couldn’t take a breath. The buzzing in her ears changed, became a mournful howling that seemed to echo through the whole of the cavern. “You failed, Witch,” the half-made girl hissed. “All that work, all that spilled blood and dead bodies, and your old man still fell short when push came to shove.” Stevie struggled. She knew the precious co*ke bottle was right by her feet, sitting on top of the duffel, she just had to get it onto the heartstone. Even if the half-made girl killed her right after, that would be enough. Stevie could die knowing she’d done her part. Stevie let herself go limp, stifling the urge to fight. “That’s right,” The half-made girl hissed. “It’s over. Let it go.” Stevie let her shoulders sag and her head loll on her neck. It was too easy to play dead, now that she was so close. She wondered if she’d have enough of herself left to come back from playing possum. The half-made girl gave her one last shake, yanking Stevie left then right. She smoothed Stevie’s hair with the back of one hand and laid her down on the cold stone floor. “So much easier this way.” The girl laughed then, throwing her head back and howling with mad glee. She
drifted away from Stevie, euphoric at her victory, insane with pleasure at what she’d done. Stevie took a slow breath, fighting her instinct to gulp air. Her brain lurched into gear at the fresh oxygen, but Stevie lay still. Her heart no longer pounded in her ears, but Stevie could still hear the howling, like a pack of wild dogs. Hope flickered in Stevie. Not wild dogs. Black dogs. Alasdair was coming. She cracked one eye open and saw the half-made girl had turned away, still laughing. It was now or never. Stevie rolled to the side, and her hand landed right on the co*ke bottle. The half-made girl roared with rage. Stevie could feel her rushing presence like an oncoming storm front. She didn’t dare look back. Stevie swung her arm up and over, an awkward sidearm throw from the ground. The half-made girl soared over Stevie’s head, shrieking, deformed hands stretched out ahead of her, trying to catch the bottle. A sleek, feral form hurled itself into the half-made girl and buried its fangs in the back of her neck, bearing her down to the ground. The bottle hit the heartstone and shattered, spraying bog water down the ancient stone’s side. Stevie heard the chanting of a thousand Osage men and women and a single heavy drum beat that shook the cavern. The water caught fire and raced down the stone, cleansing it with a purifying flame that had no color and smelled of campfires and lonely nights. The links of silver chain popped apart and flared on the surface of the heartstone like a swarm of fireflies. The half-made girl struggled, trying to get out from beneath Alasdair, but she had no chance. Her flesh crisped like fried chicken, then cracked. Gray smoke leaked out, and the crunchy shell that had been her body crinkled and cracked apart. Flakes drifted into the darkness, floating away like charred leaves from an autumn bonfire. Alasdair left the greasy stain on the floor and padded on all fours to Stevie’s side. He lowered his great, fanged snout, and licked the tears from her cheeks.
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he Long Man screamed in Joe’s head. “Get the f*ck up, Marshal. Finish your T goddamned job.” Joe felt another surge of strength accompany the command. The last of the half-made girls was dead; Joe could feel it. The plan was working, the new boss was slipping. The Night Marshal reared up under the weight of the bats. They clung to him and dug their fangs into his arms, but Joe ignored the pain. He was close, so close, to ending this mess. He struggled out of his backpack, trying to shed the weight of some of the bats on his back. There was something else in his bag of tricks, one last surprise. He staggered to the lip of the ledge and stared down, backpack in one hand and pistol in the other. The bats weighed on his shoulders, a cloak of teeth and pain. The monster swung its head toward him, the huge eye burning with raw hatred. Joe tensed, waiting for its attack. He was twenty feet above the hard stone floor, all out of places to run. The new boss roared its challenge and came up like a freight train with fangs. Joe knew he’d never get a shot off before it crushed him against the side of the cavern, so he didn’t try. He took a single step forward and fell, hurling his backpack down into the bloody crater he’d blasted through the top of the monster’s skull. The dark god’s enormous head plowed into the stone just above Joe. Its snout shattered and rained blood, shards of limestone shot into its gaping eye. Joe hit the ground hard, but the bats still clinging to him took the brunt of the fall. Their frail bones snapped apart and dug like tiny needles into his back. He rolled and struggled up to his feet, stumbling toward the dais.
He saw his shotgun resting on the floor and rushed toward it, grabbing the ancient weapon and getting back up on his feet in one smooth motion. He felt alive, burning with the power of opposing forces struggling to control him. Their power filled Joe with strength, but neither side could seize the reins of his body while the other remained. For this moment, he had all their strength and none of their liabilities. He was a free man for as long as they battled within his mind. Joe could feel the last pieces of his desperate plan falling into place. He made it to his daughter before the abominable bat regained its senses. He hoisted the shotgun up onto his shoulder and leaned over his baby girl. “Daddy?” Elsa asked, her voice hollow and echoing within the mask. “Can I rest yet?” Joe shook his head. “Not just yet, little bit.” Elsa looked at him with something like wonder in her eyes, but there was fear there, too. “I’m sorry, Daddy. I done somethin’ bad. I’m holding that thing against its will, like a Left-Hand Path witch.” Joe nodded, and decades of conditioning himself to hate sorcery turned evil surged inside him like a knot of barbed wire in his guts. Things are always black and white until your back is against the wall. He’d been through hell, and now that he was almost out the other side of it he found his strict interpretation of the Night Law broadening. “Sometimes, ya gotta do bad to do good. You hang onto it, for just a little longer.” Elsa’s stared at her father, but she didn’t refuse. “I’ll try.” The dark god staggered toward them, slowed by its injuries, its bristling back scraping the ceiling, crumpled wings elbowing along, scattering its dazed followers who’d been too slow or stupid to get into cover as they tried to decide what to do with themselves. Joe walked toward it, shotgun over his shoulder. The new boss stared at Joe. “You you you—” Joe swung the shotgun up and drew a bead on the raging god. The weapon sighed in his hands, and Joe felt the weight of its history grounding him. It was an artifact of righteous vengeance, a weapon that had held many forms through the eons. The old man had once told Joe it had started life as a simple sling and stone in the hands of a shepherd. He drew on the Long Man’s strength, sucking it down through his soul and into the
gun. He pulled on the new boss’s power, as well, turning it back on itself. Runes glowed fire-engine red along the gun’s barrels, ancient wards against the primal evil flaring to life. In the confines of his skull, Joe could feel the new boss trying to escape, to rip back the power it had given to him and dive back into its own reality. Try as it might, the mad god couldn’t get loose. Elsa had the devil by its tail. It was trapped by the link it had forged between them. She held onto it even though she knew holding spirits against their will was wrong, even if they were monsters. She held onto it to save her father. Joe held on, too, clinging to that piece of the new boss that was hooked into his soul. For the first time in years, Joe prayed. His words were not a formula meant to wring small favors from an uncaring, distant deity, but a plea for justice. “God of my fathers, deliver this evil unto my hands that I might strike it down.” Raw, furious power roared out of the shotgun, a focused cone of golden fire that plowed through the roof of the new boss’s gaping maw. The burning battering ram blasted its front fangs down its throat and careened up through its palate, disappearing into the enormous brain in a cloud of sparking smoke. The great bat swayed, tremors rippling up its body as the holy flame burned through its brain. The damage was tremendous, but Joe could already see the edges of the wound healing, new fangs dropping down and shoving old, broken teeth out of their sockets. Long seconds passed, and Joe worried he’d missed his mark, that the old god might laugh last. His prayer hadn’t been answered, after all. He turned and ran back toward the dais. Time to get the hell out of there. Blood leaked out from around the edges of Elsa’s mask, the strain of her battle with the new boss sweating blood from her pores. She stared sightless past her father, eyes rolled up to show bloodshot whites that tracked the monster’s every move. Joe lunged, reaching for his daughter, rushing to get her away from the dark god before it was too late. He moved faster than even he’d thought possible, warring powers fueling his race for survival. The new boss was faster. It swept one wing forward, and the barbed talon on its leading edge harpooned Joe’s shoulder, lifting him off his feet and hurling him onto the
dais. Joe slid across the milky stone and smashed into the altar, blood spraying from his wound. Something was torn up inside him. He could feel a froth of bubbles rising up the back of his throat with every breath. He tried to get up, but couldn’t rise farther than his hands and knees. The new boss stomped forward, and a wicked grin peeled its lips back to reveal a snoutful of blackened, splintered teeth peeking out through a mass of grasping tentacles. Smoke leaked out between those teeth, Joe’s last shot still burning in the roof of its mouth. Joe used his good arm to drag himself up onto the altar, doing his best to protect Elsa one, final time. “Time to rest, baby girl,” Joe whispered. He covered his daughter with his body and waited for the end. The dark god opened its mouth, preparing to lunge, and Joe closed his eyes. The last flickers of golden fire reached Joe’s backpack where it had lodged in the monster’s brain. The leather blackened and parted, and the flames licked against the three sticks of dynamite Joe had brought with him from home. The new boss’s skull blew apart, steaming globs of burning brain and jagged hunks of ivory sailing into the cavern’s shadowed recesses. Its mammoth body swayed and fell, crashing down, smashing apart a handful of crystalline columns and crushing dozens of the cultists who were too slow or too dazed to escape. The corpse lay smoking on the stone floor, its body coming apart, disintegrating into a foul sludge. Cyclopean serpents lashed out from the shattered columns, shrieking as they came apart, their flesh shredded by the harsh demands of the world they’d been exposed to before the stars were right for their appearance in this place. Joe clung to the altar, covering Elsa with his body as the burning shrapnel of a dead god rained down around them. He felt his little girl’s breath on his cheek. “Did I do good, Daddy?” Joe’s words left him in a hoarse whisper. “Yeah, little bit. You done real good.”
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J oe woke with blood bubbling in the back of his throat. The combined power of the Long Man and the remnants of the new boss kept him from the grave despite his injuries, but Joe wasn’t sure how long that would last. He could feel the two entities at war in his soul. The parts they had lodged within Joe were too evenly matched for either to be victorious over the other. For the moment, at least, Joe had access to their combined power. His insane plan had worked. He watched the surviving cultists crawling out of their hidey holes and shuffling out of the darkened tunnels. More than he’d thought had survived the battle and the explosion of their depraved god. Some of the bat god’s most devout followers slinked away, taking their pointed ears and shovel noses and disappearing into the deepest abyssal reaches of the caverns they called home. Joe hoped he never had to see them again, but knew his luck was never that good. Many of the less-deformed stumbled away, heading back to the surface. With their god dead, their madness receded, and they were left confused, disoriented, and afraid. A pack of more-or-less normal meth heads walked up and stood before the dais, jittering from foot to foot, picking at their scabs, grinding their teeth. The cultists stared at Joe, then at the charred ashes that were all that was left of their god, then back to Joe. They seemed unsure if they should worship him or try to kill him, and Joe wasn’t sure anything he said or did would make them jump one way or the other. They were just followers, men and women swept up in something bigger than themselves, idiots who’d latched onto whatever dismal version of hope they could find. Joe got tired of their cow-eyed staring in short order.
“Go home,” he said, then raised his voice to make sure they all heard him. “Get the f*ck out. Think on what happened here.” One of the cultists, some kind of leader by the number of antler knives he had shoved in his belt and the string of bat skulls around his neck, approached Joe. “So, we’re good? I mean, you ain’ gonna show up on our doorsteps with that shotgun?” Joe stared at the man and sighed. Part of him wanted to kill every one of these f*ckers before they could get up to any future mischief, but another part of him wanted to help them find their way back to the path of the righteous. “You reckon you stupid f*ckers can find your way out of here without calling up anymore dark gods?” “I’ll kill ye,” a screeching voice sliced through the air. “I’ll carve out yer heart and stew it in a bowl made o’ yer skull.” Alma Pryor, blood streaking her face, hurled herself at Joe, an antler-handled knife in each hand, murder in her eyes. Joe didn’t have the strength to do anything but watch as death came for him. He was too tired to fight anymore. This whole sh*tty mess would end the way it started, with the actions of one crazy old woman. A streak of silver flashed through the air. Alma stumbled, blades falling from her nerveless hands. She dropped to one knee, hands clasped around the knife blade sprouting from her throat. Blood bubbled out between her fingers and her mouth flapped open, closed, open, closed, like a landed catfish. She flopped onto her face and lay still. The cultist tossed one of his knives over in his left hand, shoved it back into his belt, shrugged. “Them Pryors,” he began, but Joe cut him off with a head shake. “You hear of them or anyone else getting up to any stupid sh*t, maybe you should come talk to me.” Joe did his best to keep his tone neutral. He was trying something new here, and every word he spoke felt like a trap he could fall into. “Maybe we can figure out a better way to get what folks around here need without opening any gates to hell.” “Maybe so,” the man said through meth-rotted teeth. He picked a scab off the side of his nose. Shrugged. “I guess … Yeah, we’ll be going.” Joe watched them leave, too tired to head up to the surface just yet. Some of them, he knew, were going to be fine. They’d get over this round of bullsh*t and go back to their sad lives, maybe figure out a way to make things a little better for themselves and
their neighbors. Others would never forget the call of the darkness. Joe reckoned there’d be a high tide for suicides in Pitchfork, maybe an even higher tide for murders and assorted craziness in the coming months. And a few — well, Joe didn’t plan on putting his shotgun away. Some people always needed a little rough justice to remind them of where the line was drawn. Joe looked down at Elsa. Her mask was gone, crumbled to dust caught in the tangles of her hair. She looked so much smaller than she’d been when he brought her down here, the bones of her face stark against her skin. The spikes stuck in her were dark now, the light washed out of them. Stevie could fix this, he was sure of that. “You’re gonna be all right, little bit.” The power he’d stolen from the new boss burned as it tried to patch him back together. He could feel the Long Man’s confusion, as well, the uncertainty about what had happened, what was going to happen. There was something missing, too, something that had been so long a part of him Joe hadn’t realized he’d been able to feel it was until it was gone. Later, when he could no longer taste his own blood in the back of his throat, Joe picked Elsa up with his good arm and carried her out of the cave and into the light.
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tevie and Al waited for Joe at the mouth of the well, sitting tense in the Rambler as S the sun hauled itself into the morning sky. Stevie held her son’s hand, clinging to it as if she could protect the last of her family through the strength of her grip alone. She’d let go of her daughter and husband, and now, as far as she knew, they were both dead. “He’s fine,” Alasdair said. “The dogs would know if he was dead.” The black hounds raised their heads as if they could hear Al’s low voice, then lowered them back to their paws. They watched the well, but didn’t seem concerned about whatever was happening down there. Stevie wanted to believe, but she couldn’t push her worries away. On their way out to the old Pryor place, following the black dogs who Al swore would find Joe no matter where he’d gone, something had changed. Stevie felt it like the drop in air pressure before a storm, but she didn’t know what it meant. The world was different now, and she wished she knew how. So she waited, and she watched, and she hoped. The dogs roused themselves when the first of the cultists clambered up out of the well. They growled when the meth addicts, scorched and battered and splattered with blood and gore from a dead god, staggered away from the hole in the ground. As the wounded departed, the dogs watched them go, but didn’t give chase. They went back to waiting and watching. The cultists gave the Rambler and its canine honor guard a wide berth, and Stevie couldn’t find it in herself to approach them. She could see the pain and horror in their bulging eyes and knew there was nothing they could tell her. She’d have to wait for her
answers. The exodus went on until the sun was high overhead, a pale white disk hidden behind a flimsy veil of scattered clouds. The flood slowed to a trickle, until only a handful of shirtless, filth-streaked men stood around the well, bare feet scuffing at the ashes on the ground. Something stirred in the well, and the men went into action. A trio grabbed the rope that ran down into the ground and pulled on it, backing away from the well, hauling its cargo into the light. Stevie watched as the rest of the men gathered around the mouth of the well and helped someone up and out of the hole. They shied away from the man as soon as he was on his own feet, as if unsure of what he might do to them. Stevie’s lips trembled as Joe straightened up and raised his face to the sun. He was pale and gaunt, eyes sunken back into the sockets of his skull, which pushed hard at the back of his face. He was covered in blood and streaked with soot. But he was alive, and he held Elsa in his arms. She rolled down the Rambler’s window, letting a cool autumn breeze tug at her hair and dry the tears she shed as Joe walked to her. Stevie reached her unbroken arm through the Rambler’s window, and Joe eased their daughter through. Stevie cried when she saw Elsa, but her little girl gave her mama a kiss and told her she was going to be fine. “You done here?” Stevie whispered to her husband. Joe nodded and leaned in close. Something stirred between them, but it wasn’t the hate she’d learned to fear. She brushed her lips against his, then drew back and grinned. “It’s gone,” Stevie whispered. “It’s really gone.” She closed her eyes as Joe brushed her cheek with his fingertips. “Yeah.” Stevie frowned at the wistful look in Joe’s eyes. “I know we need to talk.” Joe waved her concerns away. “I’ve been wrong. About you. About what you do. But there’s something else. I have to go up to the Lodge.” “Now?” Joe nodded and patted the side of the Rambler. “I think it has to be now.” Stevie watched as her husband left her again, left his family, and hauled himself behind the wheel of his old pickup and drove away.
The black dogs howled as Joe drove out of sight, their voices quavering and plaintive. The sound trailed down Stevie’s back like a dead man’s hand, turned the knobs of her spine into chunks of black ice under her skin. Al shifted next to her. “We have to go after him. He’s gonna get himself killed.” Stevie shook her head. There was something different about Joe now, something stretched and frayed. He’d changed down in that hole, become a man so different that even the curse her mama had put on him couldn’t keep hold of his soul. “We can’t go,” Elsa murmured, half asleep. “He’s gone to his reckoning, and ain’ nobody else can follow where he’s walking.” Stevie kissed the top of her daughter’s head, smoothed the little girls tangled hair down her back with the palm of her hand. “I know, baby. But he’ll come back.” She blinked away tears. “He knows how to find his way home.”
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y the time he got to the Lodge, the sun was full up, a copper ball of late autumn B warmth that Joe knew would soon fade to winter’s chill. For that moment, though, it shone on him, and he was glad he didn’t have a hat, that he could feel the sun’s kiss against the top of his head. The Lodge’s doors were still open, hanging loose on their hinges. The black dogs were back, but facing toward the house this time, as if holding something within its walls. Joe left his guns behind, pistols crossed over the shotgun on the truck’s bench seat. He didn’t think he’d need them for this. He was mostly healed from his time underground, just an oozy scab on his back and a bone-deep exhaustion to remind him of what’d happened down in the cave. The power he’d taken, both sides of it, worked wonders. He found the Long Man sitting in his crooked chair, hands clasped in his lap. “The prodigal returns.” “Don’t see any cows roasting.” Joe poured himself a drink from the bar, sniffed it. He wrinkled his nose and put the glass down so hard the dark liquor splashed out over its rim. “Guess you aren’t real happy to see me up here this morning.” “You do not look particularly agreeable, Jonah.” The Long Man looked old, all the strength poured out of him. Hollow. “I suppose you are not willing to listen to any offers I might put on the table.” “I reckon not.” Joe stood over the Long Man, looking down at the emaciated figure who had so long held the reins of his life and ruled over Pitchfork.
“You think now is the time, do you?” Joe looked around the room, at how sparse and empty it seemed. “You knew, didn’t you?” “If you think I am going to sit here and explain everything to you, then you are mistaken.” “Then let me explain it to you.” Joe moved around behind the Long Man, put his hands on the old man’s shoulders. “You didn’t come here to make things better.” The Long Man grunted. “I suppose that depends on your definition of better.” “People fought the darkness a long time before you got here, you old bastard. They didn’t need any Night Marshal to keep them walking on the right path.” Joe licked his lips. He’d put it all together down in the cave, watching the meth heads flay themselves alive for the fleeting pleasure of getting high. Thinking about the people who’d settled in Pitchfork, about how far they’d fallen. Thinking about how they’d sold themselves to the lowest bidder, because they didn’t know what else to do. “You didn’t come here to protect them. You came here to ruin them.” The Long Man chuckled and coughed. Joe pinned his shoulders to the chair, keeping the old man from doubling up. “I mean, people who get used to doing things their own way, living their own lives,” Joe spat. “That’s not much use to f*ckers like yourself, is it?” “Animals, Jonah. They are animals. They need a shepherd.” “But you’re no shepherd. You’re the f*cking coyote.” Jonah shifted his hands, closed his fingers around the old man’s throat. “Sitting up here in your big house, sucking the life out of those people, draining the hope and belief from one generation after another. Gobbling it up like a goddamned vampire while you tried to turn yourself into a god.” The Long Man’s eyes bulged, swelling out of their sockets until Joe could see the pink muscles that kept them from spilling down his cheeks. “Shh. Time for you to just listen.” Joe squeezed, and the old man’s trachea creaked in his fists like an empty water bottle. He could feel the Long Man’s fear in his head, whipping around like a decapitated snake in his thoughts. Joe let his guard down, let the remnants of the new boss gush out of his head and down through his arms. “But then a new god came along and f*cked up your sweet deal.” The old man wrenched his head around to stare at the Night Marshal, veins standing
out like black worms on his face. Joe knew the choking wasn’t killing the old f*ck. It was the power he had stolen from the new boss pouring into the Long Man like lava. “These people deserve better. They deserve someone to keep the wolves from their door and the black spirits from their shadows.” The Long Man was near to death. A little more pressure, and Joe’s thumbs would crush the old thing’s windpipes. A little more hate, and the power of the new boss would burn the Long Man’s insides to ash. “So that’s what you’re gonna be from here on out.” Joe took his hands off the Long Man, stepped back. “You’re going to be the kind of protector you always claimed to be.” The Long Man watched Joe as if he were a wild animal loose in his house. “You and me, we’re going to turn Pitchfork around. Between the two of us, I figure we can undo all the damage we’ve done the past twenty years or so.” The Long Man didn’t look at Joe. The Night Marshal turned and walked away. At the door to the sitting room, he stopped. “And if you get any ideas about f*cking with me, I’m going to come back up here and squeeze your throat until your head comes off.” He left the Long Man to think about the new order and drove away. The black dogs howled after Joe, their voices raised against the coming night.
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he old truck rumbled up the drive, grunting and gasping as Joe wrestled its wheel. T He fought it the last quarter mile, listening to the gentle swipe of tree limbs across the top of the cab and the angry scrape of blackberry bushes along its flanks. It seemed to Joe that the world was conspiring to keep him from home, but for the first time in a long time, he felt up to the fight. Something was off in his head, a fullness that hadn’t faded the way he’d expected. The new boss was gone, but there were still pieces of it, little splinters, jammed into the nooks and crannies of his memories. He could ignore them, mostly, but he reckoned it was something he’d have to deal with sooner rather than later. There was hardly enough room in his skull for his own thoughts, much less for the rattling of a dead god’s ghost as well as the Long Man’s presence. The truck died in front of its home, black tendrils of smoke leaking out from under the hood and drifting into the morning sky. Joe watched them go and almost wished he could follow. He’d made a choice this morning and now he was going to have to live up to it. He wasn’t sure he could. The front door opened, and Stevie limped out and leaned against the porch rail, watching. Waiting. Ready. Joe’d never seen anything so beautiful in his life. He pushed the truck’s door open and almost fell out of the cab he was so tired. His hobnailed boots crunched on the gravel in an uneven rhythm, as he made his way to the house. There was something wrenched in his back, muscles that hadn’t recovered just yet, and his left leg hitched up
at the end of each step. Stevie smiled at him from the porch. “You look like sh*t.” Joe tipped the memory of his lost hat. “Glad to hear it shows on the outside.” He approached his wife with caution, moving toward her, waiting for the old curse to slice through his guts like a knife made of hate. He could see the same in Stevie’s distant eyes, the way she kept her arms crossed over her stomach to protect herself from bitter disappointment. There’d been so many, many years of uncertainty and fear of one another. It seemed too much to hope for that the wall of rage and bad hoodoo between them had finally crumbled away to nothing. He hooked one thumb into a belt loop of her jeans and tugged Stevie up against him. They stood close, just looking. “Something in my eye,” Joe said and brushed his hand across his face. He rested his chin on the top of Stevie’s head and wrapped his arms tight around her back. The last fireflies of the year blinked in the shadows behind his wife. She squeezed him back just as tight. “You really broke it.” “That curse belonged to a different man.” They stayed that way for long minutes, before Joe let go of her and eased back a step. “What you did,” he started, and Stevie watched him with big, wet eyes. He blew out an exasperated sigh and ground his palms into his eyes. “Before,” and he waved his hand, a dismissive gesture toward the world that existed three days ago, “you knew what I’d have to do.” Stevie didn’t say a word, just watched Joe with her good hand supporting the wrist she’d broken down at Onondaga’s heart. He could feel the air thicken between them and see the shadows darken around her eyes. “I’m not going to kill you,” he said. “But I would have. If I’d come in found you playing with spirits alongside the Long Man last night, I wouldn’t have even thought about it. Both barrels, clean up the mess after.” Stevie brushed a hair out of her eyes. “And now?” “I’m not that man anymore.” Joe chewed a hangnail off his thumb, spat the little dead chunk of himself off the side of the porch. “I used to hate this place. Hate the people. Hate all the f*cking infernal bullsh*t that kept it running. But I just … I don’t know. It’s harder to hate now.”
“What changed?” “When that goddamned bat was coming for me, stomping all over the assholes who tried to bring it here,” Joe struggled with the words. “It wanted what it wanted; it didn’t care about the screaming meat under its feet. They called it here to help them, to save them. “That’s what people need to be saved from. Gods who want everything their way, big men who throw their weight around to make everyone jump. Pitchfork doesn’t need any of that bullsh*t.” He could feel her eyes on him, watching him, measuring him. She could see it, he could tell from the way she looked at him. “What did you do?” “Changed the rules.” He shrugged, unable to find the words to explain how much he’d changed, and how much work he had ahead of him. Stevie shivered, hugged herself tight. “What now?” He could feel the warring powers he’d tricked, still trapped inside him. They both wanted him dead, now, and he’d have to see if he was strong enough to hold them off and use their dark powers for good. Joe laughed, a sarcastic bark tinged with an unexpected note of hope. “Let’s find out.”
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t took Elsa weeks of rest and attention from her mother to shed all the spikes the halfImade girl had stuck into her flesh. Eventually, the crystals cracked and flaked away, leaving behind little bloody divots. Before the fall had given way to winter, she was back to her old self, gallumphing along on her hands and feet, chasing Alasdair around the house and down to the creek. He scooped his little sister up onto his shoulders and walked along the gravelstrewn shore. “You think we’ll find any crawdads?” Elsa tugged at Al’s hair and kicked her heels against his chest. “Yup. Six of ‘em.” “Just six? Hardly worth the walk. And that water’s going to be cold.” They made their way down to a bend in the creek, a curve that the current had carved into a deeper pool where life blossomed. Al lowered Elsa and she shambled up to the creek’s edge. The current was lazy and the water was clear and smooth as a mirror. Elsa looked at her reflection. She felt older, old really, but she still looked like a little kid. She smiled, and it felt like a strange mask on her face. Elsa’s nose wrinkled. There was something in the air, a whiff of methane and sulfur. She saw a trio of black dogs amble out of the forest on the far side of the creek, heads dipping to acknowledge Alasdair. He liked having them around. She didn’t. She scowled at them and they curled their lips in return, like they didn’t care much for her, either. “Stupid dogs,” she mumbled. “They’re afeared of you,” a familiar voice whispered in her ear. “I know, Granny,” Elsa whispered back, keeping her voice so low even her
brother’s acute hearing wouldn’t be able to pick up the words. “But you’re not scairt.” The old ghost’s hand brushed through Elsa’s hair, stirring the golden strands like an unseen wind. Elsa shrugged. She could feel the crawdads, gathered up near the shore under a big old rock. She thrust her hand into the chilly water, leaning down so she could reach into their hiding place. The crawdads tried to scatter away from her touch, but Elsa felt the weak workings of their minds and squeezed until they stopped struggling and swam right into her hand. She was learning a lot of new tricks these days. “Got you,” she shouted and yanked them all into the air. Across the creek, the dogs growled. Al let his own growl rumble in the back of his throat and the black hounds backed off, slinking back into the woods. “You’re getting better at that,” he said. “Yeah,” Elsa grinned. A cloud scudded across the sun, throwing a shadow over the creek. “I’m I’m I’m stronger now.” “What?” “Huh?” Elsa brought the crawdads to her brother and dumped them into the little creel hanging off his belt. “What did you say?” “You’re silly.” Elsa hugged her brother around the waist. “I didn’t say anything.” In the forest, the black dogs growled. Waiting. Watching.
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sh*t THE AUTHOR SAYS
riting can be a long and lonely sort of thing, so I like to take a few minutes at the W end of each book to have a little chat with you, gentle reader. These little bits and bobs thrown in at the end of the book aren’t run by my fearless editor, so any errors you see are mine and mine alone. I scribble ‘em down as soon as I finish the book to get my fresh thoughts down as I put the whole shebang in a box and slap a bow on it. I grew up not far from St. Louis, and a childhood in the Midwest shaped me (and my writing) in all sorts of strange and wonderful ways. I grew up in a time and place where religion and superstition were kissing cousins. I also grew up under the shadow of the atom bomb and spent far too many hours during my school years crouched under a desk with my hands over the back of my head, waiting for the nuclear strike drill to end. And who did they think they were kidding with that? Throw all those aspects of my younger self into a blender, and you get Pitchfork County. It’s a place both familiar and strange, a twisted up slice of Americana served with a heaping helping of horror, dark fantasy, and nihilism. But, under all the darkness, there’s a ray of light struggling to peak through. Pitchfork County can be bleak, but as long as the Night Marshal is still drawing breath, the fight isn’t over yet. I hope you’ve enjoyed the first story from this war against the coming darkness and are ready for more. In fact, if you did enjoy Half-Made Girls, then why not throw a review up on the book site of your choice? Believe it or not, reader reviews help out authors a great deal and can brighten even the darkest days. And thank you again for reading Half-Made Girls. It means a lot to me that you’ve
spent some of your time and money with my work. I plan on entertaining you with many, many more stories, so do stay in touch, all right?
—SAM
ALSO BY SAM WITT Ghost Hunters: A Pitchfork County Tale Night-Blooded Boys: A Pitchfork County Novel Witch Hunt: A Pitchfork County Tale
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam Witt writes dark thrillers infused with the supernatural. Informed by a rural Midwestern childhood and a big city adulthood, he combines downhome folklore and legends with a hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners writing style. His Pitchfork County series follows the dark and twisting lives of a family intent on using their own cursed abilities to protect the place they call home from all manner of threats, from mad gods to meth cults. For more information about current and future projects, as well as other cool stuff from Sam, check out his website here: http://www.samwitt.com Stay in touch: @samrwitt samwittwrites www.samwitt.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All books, including Half-Made Girls, are products of teamwork. I’ve been lucky to have the greatest team in the world working on this book, and everything you liked about Half-Made Girls is because of them. Here are the folks to thank: My alpha readers, who read the worst bits so you didn’t have to. My serial fans, who helped me sharpen the edges and smooth out the curves. Jason Whited, @saltyscribe, who edited the hell out of my drafts. KPGS, who designed the kick-ass cover. Without these people, Half-Made Girls wouldn’t be half the book you just read.
