by Brian Hodge
“Melody,” he whispered through his teeth, not moving his mouth, the way you sound when you don’t want to move anything at all. “What’s that at the window?”
The trailer’s bedroom had only one. She flicked her gaze toward it and tried to put it together, something sensible out of the pieces that, on their own, may have been familiar, but not like this. Her breath locked in her throat when she saw the face tilt to one side, its ragged beard scraping the glass like wire bristles. Hands were clutching the window, four of them, one high on each side and two more below. Pinpoints of moonlight glinted as it blinked.
She followed where its baleful gaze seemed directed, not at her but at her side. Miles. It was looking at Miles. The shadows on its face deepened as it scowled and its brow furrowed with wrath, and then there was a grimace full of teeth, twice as many teeth as she’d ever seen in even the broadest smile, and the nails of one hand screeched along the glass. The hand withdrew and she was sure it turned into a fist then, and she knew what was going to happen next. Because women knew the worst kinds of things.
Before it could go any farther, she threw both arms around Miles, pulling him tight to what on any other girl might have been called a bosom. No, she said to the window, a word without sound, a silent word and pleading eyes. No. It’s not like that. Don’t.
After a moment the oversized face relaxed, the shadows lightening and the grimace disappearing and the eyes content to stare. It pressed a hand to the glass, then all of it was gone, the face rising up and away, rising, and that was the most impossible thing of all, because the window was, what, seven feet off the ground. Which meant that this visitor was stooping.
Her father, whatever he was now, had been stooping.
You could never throw on clothes fast enough when you really needed to. Melody made do with as little as she could get away with and let a blanket cover the rest. Then she was out the door, the frosty ground cold on the soles of her feet, sprinting around behind the trailer and finding nothing, hearing only the crash of hurried footsteps. She followed the ruckus of them to a lonely eastern stretch of the wall, got there only in time to see something slipping over the top, a leg, one freakishly long leg, there, then gone.
As a galaxy of stars spun slowly overhead, she stared after this interloper as though it would return, but things like that never came back for a better look. They did what they did, then let the night swallow them whole.
And to find out what it had done, what it had truly come for, all she had to do was follow the voices and lanterns’ glows to the heart of the village. Miles was there already, because he said that’s where he thought he would find her, except he hadn’t, and there was such relief on his face that she thought maybe there was a chance she could love him, because when he looked at her she could tell that the last thing he was seeing was just a body.
With a gliding sense of disbelief, she walked around and around the Thieves Pole, Miles at her side, no trouble keeping up, because most of her energy went to trying to comprehend. Just trying to fathom the sight. She had trouble enough keeping her jaw closed.
It was all a blood-slick tangle of arms and legs, some clothed, some bare, others so soaked and mangled she honestly couldn’t tell. She found it impossible to discern how many there were until she counted the heads jutting from the stack in different places. Seven. Seven men, skewered one by one over the Thieves Pole, like fish that had been speared and left to accumulate along the shaft.
Except the Thieves Pole was eight feet high if it was an inch, meaning that whatever had done this was … well, tall enough to have to stoop when looking into trailer windows. And climb over their wall without much bother.
Hunsicker? He was there. He was on the bottom, had been the first to go.
Turning her attention to the living, she glanced from face to face, friends and neighbors every one, their features distorted in the whirling light of the lanterns, dumbfounded, sick, and horrified.
I guess you’ve got your limits after all, she told them from her heart’s deepest chamber. And if you’ve got a problem with this, you already know what to do. Just turn your heads and pretend you don’t see a thing. You’re so good at it.
The only ones whose faces were harder to read were young and female, girls like her. At some point in her orbit around the Thieves Pole, Miles dogging her steps, she found herself next to Jenna Harkin, huddling inside a worn, old parka that had lost half its goose down. Melody stopped, finally, and their shoulders knocked, and Melody wiggled her fingers at her side until Jenna clasped her hand.
“It’s right they’re there,” Jenna said, just loud enough for Melody to hear, and no one else. “They were thieves too. Same as anybody who took something while another person’s back was turned.”
But by the time she spat at the corpses, she didn’t seem to care who saw.
Later, when the crowd began to break up and people started talking about ladders and the best way to lift the bodies off the pole, Melody told Miles to go on back to the trailer, their trailer—right, he could consider it theirs if he wanted to—and that she would be following soon enough. But first there was something she needed to do.
And bless his heart, she felt his eyes watching her back until she turned a corner and knew she was lost from sight.
Along the northern stretch of wall, she climbed the steps to the watchtower where her grandfather sat waiting. She didn’t come without guilt, tons of it, because she’d caused him more grief lately than a grandfather should have to bear. But she couldn’t think about that now. He smiled at her and fed a few hunks of wood into the stove and held his hands to the crackles and sparks before leaving the iron door open. A fire was nice to watch sometimes.
“You up here all eagle-eyed and everything, and you didn’t see a thing?” she said. “You expect me to believe that?”
“The mind plays tricks sometimes. Makes you think you see a thing that just can’t be. So you have to write it off. You start raising the alarm about every little thing like that, people think you’ve gone soft in the head.”
She gazed toward the woods, where she imagined something with her father’s face and her father’s heart, only immensely tall, was striding among the trees beyond the reach of anyone fool enough to try and track him. Maybe later she would puzzle over how it had all come to be, but there was magic in the night, and women knew things, and for now it was enough to remember what they all said, every chance that suited them:
Out of the death of the old arises the new.
Even when all you had was a dying man and another one dead already, and enough bones to make something …
Miraculous. Yes—miraculous. That about covered it.
She was sorry she’d ever doubted. Sorry, too, for the price she’d paid, but maybe there was a plan in that, as well. So for now her greatest hope was that someday Jeremy, whatever he was to become in this world, would thank her for doing him the greatest favor of his life.
But it would be a long, unsettled wait until she knew.
This world … For the first time she realized she’d spent so much time mourning a world that had ended ages ago, hoping to resurrect it, that she’d never paid attention to what it was becoming. Or returning to again, now that it was unfettered. Where were the centaurs, she might have asked instead. Where were the gorgons, the furies, the giants and the gods?
Now that she knew, it seemed this had all the makings of a more interesting world by far than what would never be again.
“You finally saw her down there, didn’t you?” Melody said. “Right? That’s why you didn’t ring the bell? Because you knew if Tara was the one bringing something like that, it had to be for a good reason.”
“You always were too clever for your own good sometimes.”
To see his face caught between the light of the moon and the light of the fire, you’d never know he was old enough to remember the World Ago. But if it was true, like the old stories said, that there were sights that struck men dead or turne
d them to stone, then maybe, too, there were sights that gave them back their youth, if only for a night.
“Is there going to come a day,” she said with a quaver, “that I’ll climb up to look for you and you won’t be here, and nobody else will know where you are either?”
“You’ll know,” he said, and she couldn’t argue with that. “I can’t promise you there won’t be, if you want the honest truth.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll tell you right now: I’ll miss you something fierce.”
“You could come along too. Something tells me you’ve already got more family out there than in here.”
It was a tempting thought, and sent her pacing about the watchtower’s platform for many moments, until she stopped at the railing and looked out over the comings and goings and scurryings. Somebody had to stay behind and start putting the proper fear into these people. Somebody had to be the go-between.
Maybe they would even come to love her for it, the men especially, and if they started down the wrong paths again, she would be the ruin of them.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 by Brian Hodge
Art copyright © 2016 by Mark Smith