“Now you’re fucked, Rolly,” she’d tell him. “Now you’re fucked for sure.”
That’s what she called him, Little Rolly-polly, because she could knock him over and he kept getting back up.
A regular fucking weeble.
A weeble who wobbled but never fought back.
How could he fight her? He loved her. She couldn’t help herself. She’d been made that way, not born. The only problem was they never figured out who made her as mean as she was. Sometimes it was her father’s fault, sometimes her mother's, sometimes the teachers' at school and sometimes it was Roland's.
It never was Carmen’s fault.
Roland touched the scar on his stomach.
Her goodbye note.
He’d left her the night she’d taken the knife to him and could still feel the cool burning as the blade tore through the skin of his stomach. He could still feel his skin opening up, cut by someone who said she loved him.
It wasn’t her fault.
Roland had paid a buddy to stitch him up. Then he’d hit the road and had never looked back. Sometimes he wondered how things were back in Chicago but he never went back to find out.
He’d worked his way north, running a freight haulage between Maine to Nova Scotia.
He liked it in Nova Scotia best of all.
He liked the idea of keeping a whole country between him and Carmen.
He shook it off and forced a grin.
Why not grin?
He was happier than most men knew how to be.
He didn’t know there were darker things ahead of him, darker than he ever dreamed.
* 2 *
Maddy woke on the first bounce, on the living room floor where Vic dropped her.
I’ve been dreaming, she thought. I’ve been dreaming, and I sleepwalked.
“Are you awake yet? Hell, I thought I’d killed you.”
She stared up towards the thing that was talking.
“Not that it’d be much of a loss, but it would sure spoil my fun for a while.”
The talking thing licked its cracked lips with a tongue the color of unwatered dirt. Then the talking thing smiled. Maddy recognized the talking thing. It was Vic.
“Is that really you, Vic?”
“Well I sure ain’t the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“What are you doing back from the dead?”
“Whatever the hell I want to,” Vic said. “I’m in control. I’m the rider and you’re just the goddamn horse.”
Zigger barked.
Vic went to the window to have a look.
“Please,” a voice whispered beside Maddy. The voice was coming from Helliard, lying right there beside her. Helliard sounded half dead, and looked worse.
“Kill me,” he begged.
“I wouldn’t think of it,” she answered, rooting through his pockets.
“The gun’s over there,” Vic said. “And it won’t do you any good.”
Shit.
“I ain’t looking for his gun,” she lied. “He stole some money. I want it back.”
“Money won’t do much for you either.”
“It was your money, Vic. Remember? What’s mine is yours.”
“It won’t do me much good, either,” Vic admitted. “But go ahead and hurry up.
She grabbed Helliard’s wallet, and palmed his lighter underneath it.
You never know.
It might come in handy.
She shoved both wallet and lighter into her pants, trying to keep the lighter hid, feeling like she was trying to hide a watermelon in her pocket.
“I know I don’t need the money,” she alibied. “It’s just the principle of the thing.”
Only Vic wasn’t listening.
He was too busy staring out at the yard.
“Oh look,” Vic said. “It’s old mailman Marvin.” Vic turned and smiled, one eye wobbling like a loose snake from his eye pit. “You best go greet the man. Invite him in for a spell.”
And then Vic grinned.
“A long dark spell.”
* 3 *
An hour after loading his mail truck, Marvin Pusser stood outside Maddy and Vic’s farmhouse feeling scared, crazy and mad – all at the same time. His palms were clammy with fear and anticipation. He wiped them obsessively on his trouser legs.
This was crazy.
He ought to turn around and go on home. He might not get away with it this time. Hell, he’d nearly been jailed back in Cape Breton. In Crossfall, he might not be as lucky. He ought to know better.
Then that other voice started talking low and smooth and knowing, like a slick southern gambler in a John Wayne western.
“Things’ll be fine,” the voice told him. “No one’s going to know. You got all your bets covered.”
That was true.
Maddy wouldn’t talk. She’d be too afraid of Vic to talk. So Vic would never find out.
Wouldn’t he?
Shit.
Before another doubt could rise he saw Maddy standing at the door and calling to him.
“Marvin? Could you come in for a moment?”
Her voice was trembling, like she was horny or scared or maybe both. He’d heard of women going this way. Knowing what was coming, and welcoming it.
Hell.
This had to be a trick.
“Vic’s not here,” she assured him.
He squared his bag upon his shoulders.
He was going in.
She waved again.
Then she unbuttoned her blouse.
Marvin thought he’d died and gone to mailbox heaven.
* 4 *
“Damnation!”
Wendy Joe cursed her fingernail. She’d peeled the nail back and broke it, right across the grain, while prying the molding from the wall, and a thin crescent of blood half-mooned within the cuticle.
Never mind. Blood would be good for the calling. She laid the molding on the floor and stomped the front of it to flatten the nails.
She was scared.
She’d never killed anyone. She’d never been out of control, like last night. She had never been ridden like that, taken over and used by a spirit.
She broke the wood over her knee, making one long and one short piece of it.
She laid the molding on the floor, in the shape of a cross. She stroked the cross with the blood from her broken fingernail. Then she sprinkled a little rosemary from her desk drawer spice rack on the blood.
She relaxed and let herself go down and deep into the bottom of her mind, looking for the road. Everyone’s got one road, deep in their mind. Maybe it’s the road they grew up on. Maybe it’s the road to school. Maybe it’s the road they got their first kiss on.
Everyone’s got a road.
Wendy Joe’s road looked a little like a long, rambling country road, but as she went deeper, the hints of jungle crept out. She’d never seen a real jungle, except for movies and in the memories of her umpteen-great grandmothers passed down through her mother, so many greats and grands ago.
These were the stains that memory left, like wallpaper throwing ghost-shadows through a coat of old paint. The memories, handed down through story and dream – the memories that colored your thinking and turned in every step you took.
These were the bones of memory.
These were the things that stuck.
Wendy Joe walked the uncoiling road, following every twist. Damn baller, her mother called it.
Damn baller.
The road and the snake.
She walked farther and in the shadows she caught glimpses of the scuttling of doubt; like crickets and cockroaches crawling through the undergrowth. The niggle of worry and the whimper of fear gnawing away at her own sense of self-assurance.
She ignored them all with a tilt of her head and a cut of her glance that sent all shadow and doubt scurrying beneath her feet. She would not turn back. Not even the signposts of common sense and caution held any power over her now.
She walked down a long wooden
stair, oblivious to the gaps of terror that yawned between each delicately suspended tread.
Deeper.
Now she stood in the basement of her mind, surrounded by the walls of memory, fantasy, and need. She knelt down and found a trapdoor at her feet. She opened the trapdoor and she found a hole. She clambered into the hole beneath and dug in the darkness, doubt and dirt.
And somewhere down there in the shadows of memory; beneath the hole and beneath the dirt – Wendy Joe found her Momma.
CHAPTER 22
Never Forget the Dead
* 1 *
Wendy Joe’s Momma didn’t look too pretty after all these years of neglect. Her arms had run down to lean out like long black-licorice sticks. Her face was as wrinkled as a hundred-year prune. Her eyes glinted like burnt apple seeds. Only her teeth seemed constant – both long and white and hungry looking.
“It’s about time you called,” Momma said. “The dead get thin and old, if you don’t take the time to remember them.”
“I been busy, Momma.”
“I’ve been watching,” the memory of Momma said. “You’ve been busy chasing a white policeman.”
“I haven’t been chasing him.”
“Honey, you been panting after him like a dehydrated hound dog.”
That was Momma. The same as always, just as irritating as a flea on a mosquito bite but Wendy Joe needed her bad.
“Momma I need your help,” she said.
“Do you need a love potion? I know a dandy.”
“It ain’t that. It’s something worse.”
“What’s wrong child?”
“Something’s been riding me. Making me do things I don’t want to do.”
Like cutting the throat of a harmless, self-crucifying town kook, she thought.
“How much conjuring you been doing?” Momma asked
Wendy Joe looked away, but Momma kept at her.
“I warned you, didn’t I?”
“Yes Momma you warned me.”
How on earth can she do it, Wendy Joe wondered. Even at over a hundred years old, her Momma still could make her feel like a knee-high child.
“You go opening a door too often, there’s no telling what’ll step inside,” Momma said. “There are a lot of things waiting out there for someone to open a door. There’s things we can’t see or hear crawling around us all the time like thousand-foot germs. You open a door often enough and something’s coming in for sure.”
“So what can we do?”
“We?”
“Momma, I need your help.”
“I can’t help from where I’m at,” Momma said. “You got to bring me over.”
Wendy Joe knew what that meant. Momma needed someone to ride on, if she was going to be of any help in this situation. She needed a host, someone dead and not dead, and Wendy Joe didn’t like the idea one bit.
She also didn’t see what choice she had.
“How do I do it?”
“We are going to need some fresh blood,” Momma said.
Wendy Joe held her arm out.
“Let me get a knife.”
“Not yours,” Momma said. “We need someone else. We need someone for bait.”
She smiled a bear trap of a smile.
“We are going to trap us a thousand-foot germ.”
Wendy Joe stared thoughtfully at the duct taped filing cabinet.
“You say we need blood?” she asked.
Momma nodded.
“Well, it is a damn good thing that I’ve got a whole filing cabinet of the stuff handy,” Wendy Joe said.
* 2 *
“Mail’s coming,” Vic said. “On a Monday, no less. Old mailman Marvin must be feeling particularly dedicated.”
Maddy looked out towards the yard. Sure enough, there was Marvin Pusser, heading for their mailbox and looking kind of guilty-nervous. Maddy supposed she couldn’t blame him. Getting paint-canned by a woman was bound to wear at a man’s confidence.
“Invite him in,” Vic commanded.
She stared dazedly about.
“But I’m not dressed,” she said.
Vic pinched her.
Damn.
She didn’t think he could do that with those stumps of his, but they seemed to form themselves into tiny, stubby pliers.
“Invite him in,” Vic repeated.
She stumbled to the doorway and opened it carefully. She stood blinking on the front porch. Should she run? Her legs wouldn’t carry her. She touched the stolen Zippo hidden in her jeans.
Like a magic charm the lighter gave her strength to call Marvin’s name.
“Oh Marvin? Mr. Pusser?” she called out, feeling sick to her stomach. “Could you come in for a moment?”
He looked confused.
Was she laying it on too thick?
She waved to reassure him.
“Tell him I’m not here,” Vic commanded.
It wasn’t much of a lie, considering whatever the hell Vic had become.
Marvin stood there, hesitantly, still trying to decide what to do.
“Show him your tits,” Vic prompted. “That’ll bring the little horndog running.”
She didn’t want to. Not to a stranger, and certainly not to Marvin Pusser.
“I ain’t going to,” she said.
It was stupid. Here she was, staring at the zombified remains of her murdered husband, and she was worried over a little modesty. Vic pinched her again, harder. He was getting pretty good with those goddamn stick ends, considering how new they must feel to him.
So she opened her blouse and gave Marvin a good look.
It was easier than facing the thing that used to be her husband.
Marvin scuttled like a fat blue beetle, not believing his good luck.
He opened his arms and took Maddy in a fat clumsy embrace. He kissed her breasts like they were an offering from God. Maddy felt Vic’s eyes burning at the sight of the two of them. She heard Bluedaddy chortling from the shadows.
She felt dirtier than seven kinds of mud.
“Hell,” she whispered softly.
It took Marvin a full minute to look in her eyes.
He flinched at the bruises and welts that Vic and Helliard had left behind.
“Damn it. Did Vic do this?” he asked, in voice mixed with fear and indignation, forgetting that he’d originally come here to rape her.
She almost laughed.
It was funny, hearing the protective chivalry in the fat little pervert’s voice.
Then she heard the sound of a shot ringing from inside the house.
Marvin stared up like a porcupine in the headlights of an oncoming semi.
What now?
* 3 *
Wendy Joe held a silver needle and a spool of strong black thread.
She’d found the needle and thread in her desk drawer, beside the spices. She couldn’t remember where the needle and thread came from. She hadn’t put it there, but when she saw it she knew it was for her.
“There’s magic in needles,” Momma said. “That’s why men never learn to sew. That’s why the Romans tore the Christ boy’s clothes as he hung there on his shaming cross. That’s why a good witch always keeps herself a fine pin cushion close at hand.”
Wendy Joe stared at the duct-taped filing cabinet – its face turned to the wall like a disobedient child. She knew what was in there. She knew how it got in there and why she put it there.
It wasn’t her doing. No sir, somebody else was pulling her puppet threads. Somebody was riding her.
Was she being ridden now?
Was what she thinking her own idea?
Who knew?
She wished she didn’t remember spreading the drop sheet and laying Clavis Petrie’s body on it. She wished she didn’t remember the knife and the screwdriver, and the pry bar. She wished she didn’t remember the filing cabinet.
Hell.
Maybe it was her idea.
Maybe there had never been a rider.
Maybe she was just plain
nuts.
She shifted the cabinet around. It was heavy, like Clavis had gained weight in his dying. Like his blood and spirit had soaked down into the floorboards and the earth beneath the floor and taken root somehow.
Like it wanted to stay stuck.
She unfolded the big orange drop sheet she’d tucked behind the cabinet. The tools and drop sheet were police property. So was the filing cabinet. She’d have to clean or replace all of it. She peeled off the duct tape and slid each drawer open. They slid slowly – all wet and heavy like morgue drawers in an old detective movie.
Then, like a seamstress stitching dresses in the dark, Wendy Joe pulled each piece out, laid them out, and set to work reassembling the body.
Mama needed a home.
Wendy Joe was going to fix this right.
CHAPTER 23
A Stitch in Time
* 1 *
Helliard lay on the floor, staring at Duane’s rotting body, wondering just how the hell he had ever thought that thing was still alive. He looked at Duane’s body now and he could see the bits of bone showing through the trough that the shotgun had plowed. He saw the maggots and flies swizzling and gnawing. The haystack boogerman was by the window watching poor Mad Again lure another victim in.
How long had this game been going on – her, luring them in and that thing finishing them off? It was like one of them monster movies, only this was real. He could hear the haystack boogerman, just as close as death. He could see its legs, looming over him like a pair of dirty stilts. He could hear its slow wet shuffling, all meat and grass and mud, with bugs and worms pushing through it, the stick bones showing through the dirty tears in the haystack’s dirty denim jeans.
He watched it shift from peg to peg.
It looked a little unstable.
Maybe he could knock it over.
Then what?
Was he going to talk it to death?
Face it.
He only had one chance.
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