by Lee Goldberg
"I am going to ask you again, and this time you will only give me the information I requested," Matt said. "Is that clear?"
Hoggins nodded.
"Did you kill the pig belonging to Ezekiel Vetch?"
"Yes," Hoggins said. "I did that. I killed her."
It was clear that there was an explanation trying to burst its way out of his mouth. Matt held up a hand and Hoggins fell silent.
"Ezekiel Vetch," Matt said. "Is it true that your pig broke into this man's henhouse and killed his chickens?"
"He can't prove anything," Vetch said. "He's just blaming me for his own problems."
"I see," Matt said. "I believe Alwyn Hoggins had a way to discover the truth of the matter." He hefted his axe, then leveled the head at the corpse of the pig. "Are you willing to undertake the experiment?"
"Who knows what that lying sack of shit has planted inside my poor Sweetpie's stomach," Vetch said. "He might have been cramming her full of feathers before I got here. In fact, I'm pretty sure that –"
"Enough!" Matt roared, and Vetch reared back as if the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz had just let out another blast of flame and smoke. Good thing they don't know who's really behind the curtain, Matt thought. "Alwyn Hoggins, how many chickens did you lose today?"
"The number's hard to say," Hoggins said, a smile of victory cracking the drying blood that covered his face. "There were the eight this monster killed and the three it ran off, of course. But my chickens are delicate creatures, they are. A trauma like this could leave them unfit for laying the rest of their lives and I'll be putting out for their feed and getting nothing in return."
"So you lost eleven, right?" Matt said.
For a moment Hoggins looked like he was going to continue his objection. But he cast a quick glance at the axe and swallowed hard. "As far as I can tell today, yes, eleven."
"And how many chickens was that pig worth?"
Both men started to talk at once. Matt raised his axe and they fell silent.
"Mary Elizabeth Gilhoolie, sister of Vern, leader of all the Gilhoolies and the Hogginses as well, tell me the truth on pain of punishment," Matt roared, doing his best to capture the cadences in all the barbarian movies he'd ever seen. "How many chickens are equal to the value of the pig this man called Sweetpie?"
"No more than twenty," Mouse said.
"The girl don't know what she's talking about," Vetch said. "The sow was in the prime of her life, could have turned out another three litters easy."
"She was older than I am," Mouse said.
"You're confusing her with my old sow, also named Sweetpie," Vetch said. "Named this one for her, since I've always been sentimental that way and –"
Matt didn't bother to speak this time. He raised the axe and Vetch fell silent.
"Twenty chickens," Mouse said again. This time there were no complaints.
"This is my judgment," Matt said. "Since Alwyn Hoggins killed a pig worth twenty chickens, and his loss from the pig's attack was only eleven chickens, then Ezekiel Vetch must pay him nine chickens, or the equivalent in whatever means of barter shall be mutually agreed upon by both parties. In return, Hoggins may keep the pig carcass to do with as he pleases. "
Both blood-drenched men stared at him silently. They seemed to be waiting for him to do or say something else. Matt considered throwing in an "amen," but it didn't seem appropriate for the occasion. Finally something popped into his head from an old movie he couldn't identify. "So it shall be written, so it shall be done."
He waved the axe in the air, then turned and walked away, trusting the two men would not go back to trying to kill each other.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Grange turned out to be a grand old barn nestled in the middle of a stand of pines. It seemed like a strange place for such a structure to Matt, but everything else had seemed so bizarre since he got to Heaven it barely even caught his notice. Especially once he'd stepped through the wide doors and discovered just how beautiful a barn could look. There were brightly colored tapestries hanging from the walls and rugs on the floor. The ceiling was open to the roof, revealing an exquisite structure of wooden beams, all painted in a pattern of birds and wildflowers. Oil lamps hung from these beams, casting the vast room in warm, golden light.
Mouse led Matt into the Grange a few minutes before six, and the room was already filled with people. It seemed as if everyone he'd met out on Main Street was here, along with quite a few others.
Three long tables were set up in a U-shape right in the middle of the floor. The two sides were long enough to easily seat a hundred people around each of them. The bottom of the U was much shorter, with only seven seats. Or, Matt thought as he took a second look, six seats and a throne. Unlike the rest of the bare wood chairs, the one in the middle was thickly padded and stood at least a foot higher than the others.
"What a surprise that Orfamay Vetch has got such a nice seat," Matt muttered to Mouse as they came in.
"It's her due as leader of the Vetch family," Mouse said. "Vern's is just as good as head of the Gilhoolies."
Matt looked around, but didn't see another throne anywhere in the room. Maybe they take turns, he thought.
"It's getting late," Mouse said. "We'd better sit down."
Matt hesitated, not sure which side to choose. Mouse grabbed his hand and led him to the short table.
"Can't we just find a quite spot on one side?" Matt said.
"You're funny," Mouse said. "I didn't expect that."
"I didn't expect any of this, so we're even," Matt said.
As they came around one side of the short table, Orfamay Vetch rounded the other. Matt stopped to let her get past him to the grand seat. But she stopped short and pulled out one of the wooden chairs next to the throne, then sat in it without ceremony. Matt turned back to Mouse, confused.
She gestured to the throne.
"That's not for me," he said.
"You set us free," Mouse said. "It's yours."
Like the rest of the town, apparently. Matt had tried to get Mouse to tell him how things had been while Joan was alive, how long she'd been there and what she'd done to them. But somehow the girl always managed to change the subject, telling him little anecdotes about the town and the people who lived in it. If he pressed, she started talking about how happy everyone was that he'd come. Finally she'd led him to Orfamay's house. It was another shack with no electricity and no running water, but he'd been able to use the pump outside to wash off the pig blood that had been splashed on him, and when he pulled his head out from under the water he could see Mouse disappearing down the road. He hadn't known how he was going to pass the hours until six that evening, but as soon as he sat down on Orfamay's soft sofa his eyes closed and he fell into a deep sleep, waking only when Mouse came back to take him to the Grange for the supper. When he did awake, he was pleased and only a little disturbed to discover that the damage he'd suffered when he lost his bike was almost all healed. In the months since his resurrection he'd noticed that his recuperative powers were much stronger than they had been before his death, but this was the first time he'd really put it to the test. So there were some benefits to dying, apparently.
Matt glanced up and saw that almost everyone in the room had taken their seats, and the tables were now filled. He couldn't be any more certain than he'd been when they'd all lined up to meet him on Main Street, but judging from the very strong gene pools that dominated here, it seemed that one side of the room was filled with Vetches and Runcibles, the other with Gilhoolies and Hogginses. They were all standing behind their chairs, like schoolchildren waiting for permission to be seated.
As Matt reluctantly headed toward his appointed seat, a giant broke away from one of the long tables and loped over to him. He was almost seven feet tall, with arms the size of tree trunks. The only thing about him that wasn't huge was his face, which seemed squashed and tiny on his pumpkin-sized head. Squashed and tiny and, oddly, almost identical to Orfamay's.
The giant Vetch – because a Vetch he must have been – reached the throne at the same time as Matt, even though he'd been coming from at least three times as far away – and drew it back from the table for him. Matt cast a questioning look at Mouse, who encouraged him with a nod, then sat down and let himself be slid up to the table.
Only then was there a scraping of wood on wood as everybody else in the barn took their seats. And another, as they all turned their chairs to look at the short table. To look at him.
Matt wanted to ask Mouse what they were expecting from him, but she was seated two seats away. To his immediate left was a sallow kid, maybe all of twenty, with sandy hair, a sunken chest and no chin. He looked like an Easter Peep that had been missed in the egg hunt and left out in the sun and sprinklers for days. Next to him was an empty chair, and then Mouse, who gazed up at him with worshipful eyes.
The Peep caught Matt's gaze and immediately misunderstood it. "Yeah, I'm Vern Gilhoolie," he said with the kind of pride at the sound of his name that most would reserve for the birth of their first child. "You did good with that Joan bitch. Wish I'd thought of trying it your way. We would have been out of the shit faster and wouldn't have needed to bother you."
"Nice to meet you," Matt lied, wondering how it was possible the same womb produced these two siblings.
"You want anything, you just come to me," Vern said. "If you can't find me, you can ask any Gilhoolie. Any Hoggins, too. They all do what I tell 'em, and I'll tell 'em to treat you right."
"That's good to know," Matt said. "What I really want is a ride back to the highway as soon as possible. Can one of your people help me with that?"
"The highway?" Vern said.
Before Matt could press him further, there was a hacking sound on his right that sounded like another one of Ezekiel Vetch's pigs being slaughtered. He turned to see that Orfamay had stood up and was clearing her throat for attention. The giant was sitting next to her, and even with her standing and him sitting she barely came up to his earlobe. There might have been someone sitting on the other side of the giant, but Matt was as likely to see him or her as he was to see a satellite orbiting the dark side of the moon.
Orfamay cleared her throat again, and the room settled into silence. Matt took a moment to look around and confirmed what he had thought – the two tables were divided by clan.
"You all know why we're here tonight," Orfamay started. "So I'm not going to try to make any fancy speeches about how we were delivered from evil by the arrival of this young man. You lived through it, you suffered the same pain we all did, now it's over. The bitch queen is dead. I sent Percy and Ranulph out to the house to confirm it, and there's no one there besides a rotting pile of goo on the ground."
The crowd erupted in cheers and applause. Orfamay let it go for a few seconds, then cleared her throat again. Somehow that awful sound cut through the celebration, and everybody settled back down.
"You're happy about this, and you've got the right to be," Orfamay continued. "You know how it was with Joan, you're glad it's over. But you know what it was like before Joan was here, and that wasn't any better. We've got a chance to start over a third time now, but that doesn't mean it's all posies and kittens yet. There are costs to everything. Before the food comes and we all make fools of ourselves on meat and shine, let's hear what we're going to be paying this time."
Matt didn't know what that meant, but there was an ominous tone that made him want to get out of Heaven even faster. He was trying to figure out if there was a way to slip out unobserved from his place of honor when he realized that Orfamay had stopped speaking and was now staring directly at him.
"Me?" he whispered to her. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"You've got to tell these people how it's going to work around here," Orfamay whispered back. "You owe them that much."
She sat down, never taking her eyes off him. Matt felt the gaze of hundreds of people burning into him.
"I can't even begin to imagine what all of you went through while Joan was here," he said, searching for words as he went. "I mean, I can begin – and I've got to leave it there. Because what I saw was pretty horrible. If I'd come across anything like that a year ago, I think I would have dropped dead of a heart attack."
There was a spatter of appreciative laughter from the crowd.
"The fact that you were all able to survive this horror tells me how strong you must be," Matt said. "I'm sure it won't be long until everything goes back to normal around here. So, um, welcome back to the real world. I think you're going to like it."
Now there was applause from the two tables. But it died away quickly when Orfamay cleared her throat again.
"You've got the pretty words," she said. "But we're still not hearing what you expect from this town?"
"I don't expect anything," Matt said. "There is one thing I'd really like, and that's a ride back to the –"
His words were cut off by a scream coming from outside the barn door. And this was no sow choking on the blood from the slit in its throat. This came from a woman, and it was filled with pain and fear.
No one moved. They didn't even swivel their heads away from Matthew.
"Didn't you hear that?" Matt said. "There's a woman out there. She's hurt."
Still, no one moved. Matt tried to push away from the table, but the throne must have weighed half a ton. It wouldn't budge.
Matt grabbed the edge of the table and was about to flip it over to free himself when there was a blur of pink motion and a pale form tumbled onto the floor in front of him. Before he could make sense of what was happening, a grizzled man in denim overalls without a shirt stalked in and grabbed the thing he had just hurled through the door.
It was a girl. She couldn't have been more than seventeen years old, as lovely a young woman as Matt had ever seen. Her hair was blonde and her eyes blue. She had a narrow waist and small breasts that ended in pale nipples; her pubic hair was so pale as to be practically invisible.
Matt could see this all because, aside from the bruise she wore on her right cheek, the girl was naked.
And there was blood running down her legs.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The girl didn't let out a sound as the overalled man lifted her from the floor by the back of her neck, the way he would a kitten.
"What's the meaning of this, Arno?" Orfamay barked at him.
"My daughter is roont!" the man howled. "A filthy whore, good for nothing but to suck the cocks of Gilhoolies until her teeth drop out. And it's all his fault!"
Arno turned and lowered a finger toward the door, where two men who might have been his brothers were dragging a young man in by his arms. Matt thought he might have been as lovely as the girl at one point, although his face was so bruised and bloodied under his curling blonde hair it was no longer possible to tell. He was naked as well. His pubic hair was wet with sex and there was a dot of blood on his flaccid penis.
Matt heard Mouse let out a gasp. He turned and saw that she had gone pale. Her brother's thin lips tightened until they nearly vanished, and if he'd had a chin it would have quivered in rage. He wasn't positive, but Matt thought he knew who was supposed to have been sitting in the empty seat between them.
Arno gave a sign and his twins let the boy drop to the ground. He curled himself into a ball, as if taking this as the preamble to a stomping. Another stomping, if Matt could judge from the bruises across his chest and thighs.
"I stepped out to let my weasel free, and I heard noises coming from the hayshed," Arno said. "Thought there might be a bobcat in there. So I flung open the door, ready to bash in its brains, and I found this vermin on top of my poor sister's girl Tally. My poor, sainted sister who went to her grave begging me to keep her daughter from roonation."
"What does the girl say?" Orfamay rasped angrily.
"Said she was walking to the supper and this pig of a Gilhoolie came up to her and started talking all sweet to her," Arno said. "She told him she didn't want anything t
o do with him, but he shoved her into the hayshed and slammed the door. Then he ripped her clothes off and forced himself into her."
An angry murmur came from the Vetch side of the room. Arno's foot lifted, ready to stomp down on the boy. But one look at Orfamay's face brought it down again.
"He raped my sister's girl," Arno said.
"He didn't!" Mouse was on her feet, about to run to the naked boy. "You all know Cal wouldn't do that!" Vern grabbed her arm and pulled her back down into her seat. There was now an angry buzz coming from the Gilhoolie side of the room.
"I said, what does the girl say," Orfamay said. "I want to hear it from her lips."
Arno gave the girl a shake so hard Matt could hear her teeth rattle. "Tell her, girl. Tell them all about your shame."
The girl stared down at the ground. Arno let her drop to her knees. Matt could see bright red stripes across her back.
"Go ahead, whore, tell Miss Orfamay what she wants to hear," one of Arno's brothers said, his hands clutching into fists. "Less you want more of what for."
The girl tried to look at the boy on the ground, but Arno grabbed her head and forced her eyes up at Orfamay. "You know what happens to sluts here, girl," Arno said. "And their families. You wouldn't bring that down on everyone you love. You wouldn't blacken the name of your sainted mother like that. You go on and tell Miss Orfamay the truth."
The girl's lips moved, but no sound came out.
"Speak up!" Orfamay commanded.
The girl took a deep breath that nearly turned into a sob. "He raped me," she said. "He forced me to do it."
"That's a lie!" Mouse shouted.
"Hush, girl," Orfamay said, but even her ferocious tone couldn't stop Mouse. She pulled free of Vern and leaped over the table, scooting between the legs of one of Arno's brothers to cradle the boy's head in her arms.
"You heard the girl," Arno said. "You know the truth. You know what has to happen. We want justice."
"She's lying!" Mouse screamed, tears streaking down her face. "She made him do it, flashing her titties and batting her eyes at him. She wanted him from day one and he wouldn't touch that dirty Vetch skin. So she made him do it!"