Only osmosis hadn’t worked yet.
He laid the hammer down and dusted his hands off. He owed himself an extra helping of fried chicken, that’s for sure. He smiled at the thought. It was good to be done a job, bad or not. To see something through to the end gave a man a sense of purpose.
There was a loud screech of rubber against concrete, fighting for control.
He knew it what was coming before it even happened.
“Shit,” Ivan said. “Not again.”
The pickup came hurtling through the flimsy plywood barrier.
The dust settled.
Wendy Joe stepped out of the driver’s side.
Ivan started cursing.
“Goddamn it, Wendy Joe! Isn’t there some civic regulation that says you need a driver’s license before trying to make one of these things move?”
What got out of the other side of the truck was even harder to believe than the second collision through his hardware store window.
It looked a little like Clavis Petrie. Only Clavis looked a little like he’d fallen feet first into a wood chipper, and got his hand and foot mixed up getting out of it.
“We need lights,” the Clavis-thing said. “Lots of lights.”
Even Clavis’s voice seemed funny, like he was trying to pretend he was a woman.
“Get us lights,” Wendy Joe ordered.
Ivan balked at that.
“The hell I will. We got to call the police. Get them over here, if they got any cars left. On second thought, they better walk.”
Wendy Joe pointed a pistol looked the size of a small howitzer at Ivan’s skull.
“I said we need lights.”
“You wouldn’t shoot me.”
BLAM!
“Damn it,” Barrand swore.
It would’ve been better if she had shot him, but Wendy Joe was meaner than that. She’d shot his cash register which was worse even than the broken window or a bullet to the heart.
“That hurt,” he said. “You shot me in my money.”
“It was supposed to hurt. The next one I’ll sink into what passes for your guts. We need lights.”
Ivan knew when he was beat.
“Floodlights? Spotlights? Florescent tubes? Just what the hell kind of light do you want?”
Wendy Joe looked at Momma Clavis.
“Do you got any Christmas lights?” Momma Clavis asked.
Ivan did a slow double take. The Clavis-thing grinned and shrugged. The shrug, with foot and hand upraised, was the worst Ivan ever saw.
“It being Easter and all,” the Clavis-thing explained. “A little resurrection light show wouldn’t hurt one bit.”
* 2 *
Maddy Harker awoke in the hellish stick arms of her dead husband Vic, the Tatterdemon.
“Lean on me, Maddy my girl.”
“I’d sooner lean on a hornet’s nest.”
She didn’t have much say in it. The bullet nearly sucked the life out of her, and she was losing ground fast. She was dying. He hoisted her closer, cradling her with a strange rough tenderness.
“I’m gonna fix things, Maddy. Just you wait and see.”
“You ain’t a fixer, Vic. You’re a breaker. You might as well get used to that.”
It nearly ended there.
The Tatterdemon’s arms stiffened, like he was getting set to rip her into a half-dozen pieces.
Maddy didn’t mind one bit.
The fact was, she was ready to die.
“That was always the trouble with us, Maddy,” the Tatterdemon told her. “You never gave me any credit.”
Was he right?
She was pretty hard on him most the time. Could it be any better, now that he was dead?
He loosened his grip.
She nearly laughed. It took death and resurrection for Vic to finally figure out how to lay his temper down without it going off.
Who said men can’t change?
He laid her gently in the dirt.
She stared up, like a child staring at an angry father.
“I suppose you’re going to bury me, like the rest.”
“You’re not anything like the rest. You never were,” the Tatterdemon said, shaking his head slowly. “I’ve got other plans for you.”
Maddy snorted. She didn’t mean to snort, she just couldn’t help it.
“Shit, Vic. You’re talking sweet. It must mean you’re set to hurt me again.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Wanting doesn’t have a thing to do with it. It’s just your nature, is all. You were born this way – made this way and grown this way. Hell, I don’t know. I just know you always hurt me, then you’d talk sweet, and sooner or later you’d hurt me again.”
She looked away.
“I should have killed you years ago,” she finished up.
“No!” he said, as he hit her. “I love you, Maddy. Can’t you get that through your head?”
She smirked.
“If I don’t, are you going to knock it in there? Or maybe you’ll just plant it.”
He hit her again.
He could hit a lot harder since his resurrection.
She grimaced, squinted and shook it off.
“Much more love like this, a body could die.”
The Tatterdemon shook his head.
“You ain’t gonna die,” he told her. “Not ever. Not after I get done with you.”
He pushed the nub of his stick arm into her open wound.
Here it comes, Maddy thought. He’s going to turn me into one of those goddamn scarecrows.
She felt her flesh rip and pop open like a parted seam.
“This’ll hurt,” he warned her.
“That’s nothing new.”
He ripped the straw from his chest and jammed it into Maddy’s, almost as if he were trying to build a bird nest around her heart. Then he touched her wound. She saw a soft, rotting yellow sunflower flash as the wound closed about the straw.
“Like wattle in bricks,” the Tatterdemon said with a ghost of a smile. “Like mixing sand in cement.”
Maddy opened up her eyes and looked.
“Oh my Christ,” was all that she could say.
The wands of dry straw sprouted from her wound like a tangled colony of sea anemone, wriggling in the sunlight like blind dry tentacles.
“This ain’t burying,” the Tatterdemon said. “This is something different.”
“Goddamn it, Vic. Why this? Why didn’t you just bury me? Why make me into something different?”
“That’d change you, Maddy,” the Tatterdemon said. “I don’t ever want you to change.”
Sweet words, but they sounded like a curse.
She was changing, no matter how hard he wished.
She felt the change in every breath she took. Her skin itched like she was the queen of lousy. Her mouth tasted of hay and regret.
“Get the deputy,” Vic ordered Marvin. “We’ll bury him out back with the rest of them.”
Marvin shambled off to do Vic’s bidding.
Maddy just lay there.
There was nothing left to do.
He’d changed her.
He’d made her his.
He’d won.
There was no hope left.
Damn it.
Marvin came lurching back, empty handed.
“Where’s the cop?” the Tatterdemon asked. “I told you to bring him to me.”
Marvin held his palms empty up, in a grotesque parody of a shrug.
“What’s that mean? Where’s he gone? The cop. The little deputy. What’d you do with him?”
Another shrug.
Vic stared around wildly.
“Find him, damn it,” he called to his army of followers.
He turned back to Marvin.
“Find him, you cocksucking mail puppet. Find the little fucker.”
Maddy lay there wondering just where the hell Earl had got to.
She’d find out soon enough.
* 3 *
/>
The ants go marching, one by one . . .
“Hurrah,” Earl finished weakly.
He lay flat out in the dark heart of the field, singing to himself and listening to the breeze whistling through the grass. He’d been lying on the ground for exactly three minutes and twenty two seconds. It seemed like days. He’d inadvertently flattened his face against an over-boiling anthill, and for the time was content to stay here.
Only the ants had a different idea. Earl’s breath stirred their angry midst, as they scurried out to deal with the offending nocturnal trespasser. Several of them crawled across his right cheek, it being the cheek closest to the ground. He felt the merciless tickle of others crawling down his shirt, but he refused to move.
His left leg bent in the wrong direction. It had bent that way since Vic the walking compost heap had thrown him through the window.
Defenestration.
That’s what they called it in the forensic handbook.
Death by going through a window.
There was a word for anything, wasn’t there? Earl wondered what the word was for those things back there.
The scarecrow zombies?
He heard a whisper born from somewhere deep in the back of his brain, low and wet and dirty – Tatterdemon.
He shivered.
He watched the ants scrambling back and forth out of the anthill. You guys don’t have names, do you? It’s not like those Disney movies. You just go and get. You don’t ask why. You’ve got no memory besides the stink trail you leave to know where you came from.
Any room down there for me, he wondered.
He leaned over.
He leaned closer.
He peeked down the ant hole, like a kid.
“Is there room for me down there?” he whispered.
I’m probably going to get my eye bit, was what he thought.
But when he saw what was down there, staring back at him from the ant hole, he stopped thinking about anything.
Fuck.
He saw a human eyeball, staring right back up at him.
And then the eyeball blinked.
CHAPTER 32
Roland to the Rescue
* 1 *
Earl stared down the ant hole, like a short, pudgy Alice, staring at the biggest, ugliest eyeball he’d ever seen.
The eyeball blinked again.
Was it his reflection?
The ants started moving.
Christ, they’ve spotted me.
They’re getting set to attack.
Only they weren’t attacking. It was more like they were on maneuver. Like one of those marching parades. The ants were making writing on the ground. They were making words.
I-M-N-O-T-A-R-E-F-L-E-C-T-I-O-N
What the hell?
Since when can ants spell?
But they were gone that quickly, rearranging themselves like the magic sand in an Etch-a-Sketch.
I-M-A-N-E-Y-E
Fuck.
It’s the eye – talking to me through the ants.
I-A-M-W-A-I-T-I-N-G
For a moment Earl forgot all about the scarecrows.
“Spell supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” he whispered, trying to test the eye’s IQ.
L-O-O-K-A-T-M-E
Earl looked back down into the ant hole.
The eye had pulled back far enough to see that it was a face that Earl knew all too well.
It was a face that had haunted his nightmares since before puberty.
The face of the man his father had helped to lynch.
* 2 *
Ivan Barrand had paid an awful lot of money for his new, bright, shiny silver Chevrolet pickup truck. There were big black letters on the side, announcing that Barrand’s Hardware was the place for all your hard-to-find hardware needs.
Hard to find hardware, that was Ivan’s idea.
He was proud of it. The fellow who’d cut the decal for the sign thought it sounded pretty dumb, but what the hell did he know? Ivan believed in appearance – and it appeared to him that riding around in his brand new company truck with a smorgasbord zombie and a crazy black woman carrying a large pistol was the last way in which he wanted to be seen.
Not that he’d had much choice in the matter.
The cash register was bad enough, but then Wendy Joe threatened to shoot Ivan’s brand new truck if he didn’t cooperate. The way he saw it, he didn’t have much choice in the matter, seeing as he didn’t figure his insurance covered random acts of pure police brutality.
“Come on, Wendy Joe,” the Clavis-thing hollered. “Open her up. We got to get there as soon as we can.”
The two of them had stripped his back room of all the outdoor lighting and Christmas bulbs he had. Not a bad thing, considering how much Ivan hated marking old stock down. Both the terms "clearance" and "blowout sale" were foul words in Ivan’s dictionary.
Not just the lights, too. They also took nails, staples, hammers, and two brand new aluminum ladders. And they took needles, clearing the whole sewing section of both thread and sewing needles.
“Got to have needles, if you’re making magic,” the Clavis-thing assured him.
They barreled down the road.
The Clavis-thing touched Ivan’s shoulder every now and then.
Ivan damn near shit himself at the touch
“Why don’t you and me climb in the back for a while?” the Clavis-thing asked. “Get your bolts tightened and your hat boxed. You won’t even notice the time go by.”
Ivan shuddered at the thought.
Just being in the same vehicle as these two was unbearable.
“Come on, Ivan. Don’t try telling me you ain’t ever hankered after some strange meat.” The thing stroked its crotch with the big toe of its left hand. “Believe you me, meat don’t get any stranger than this.”
“If that thing doesn’t stop,” Ivan warned Wendy Joe. “I’m going to scream.”
“Stop it, Momma.”
Ivan looked at her.
“That thing’s your momma?”
Momma Clavis kept on wheedling.
“I’ll give you an A for effort, Momma,” Wendy Joe said. “But I don’t need to hear Ivan scream.”
“Oh you’ll scream, Ivan,” Momma Clavis assured Ivan. “A lot more than Emma Potter ever made you scream.”
Wendy Joe whirled, nearly turning the truck off the road.
“What did you just say?”
Strange things were happening all over the place.
* 3 *
Earl’s ankle throbbed like a bawling bastard.
The ankle felt like it was broken in two. He wanted to move his leg. He wanted to find out how far he could bend it without screaming. But mostly he wanted to get his face the hell out of this field of screams and away from that blue-eyed ghost that was staring up at him from out of the ant hole.
The face in the ant hole kept talking, using the ants like a keyboard on legs. He was moving them incredibly fast, blinking from sentence to sentence.
H-A-T-E-F-U-C-K-Y-O-U-D-I-E-S-O-O-N-S-T-R-A-W-K-I-L-L-Y-O-U-R-O-P-E-D-R-A-G-Y-O-U-D-O-W-N-F-I-E-L-D-M-A-D-D-Y-W-I-T-C-H-B-R-O-O-M-S-T-R-A-W-K-I-L-L-D-I-E-F-U-C-K-D-I-R-T
Words and phrases and letters spinning like a crazy-assed wheel of fortune, and somehow Earl could read it all. He was going to die, and that eye-thing knew it. But he still couldn’t move – not without those straw bastards finding his hiding spot.
It was better to lay here and play dead. He could wait for the morning. Monsters went into their coffins in the morning, didn’t they?
The ants crawled down his pants.
He could feel them, and a lot more of them who weren’t even there, yet.
They felt seriously pissed.
Like he’d woke them up.
Ants sleep at night, don’t they?
Yeah right Earl, and scarecrow zombies go beddy-bye when the sun climbs out.
The words kept spilling out. Earl tried to look away without moving his head. He closed his eyes but they starte
d biting on his eyelids until he opened them again – helplessly watching those fucked-up ants spilling and spelling the mad dirt things hatred for him and his father.
The face in the ant hole twisted and bloated and moved like it was made of mud, grease, and horseshit. Earl could see ants and maggots and mildew squirming beneath its skin, the face looming closer nearly pushing up from the dirt, its tongue sticking out like a rope.
Earl lay there, not moving.
He tasted his breath coming back in his face, mixed with the kiss of the dirt.
He heard the wind, whispering through the grass.
He prayed it was just wind.
Something that felt like a snake crawled over his leg. He damn near jumped out of his skin and then told himself to lay still. He wondered if the snake was poisonous. He wished it would bite his fat ass and put him out of his misery. He felt the ground-thing’s tongue curling up through the ant hole, impossibly long, curving and curling around his throat like a noose, getting tighter.
“Get up, Earl,” a voice whispered closely.
Earl’s eyes shot open in panic.
He’d been found.
The tongue noose got tighter.
The ants kept scrolling faster and faster. He could hear their words now. It sounded just like a woman screaming. Earl saw himself lying there on the ant hole, stretched out all blue and tattery like a drawing on a neon Ouija Etch-a-Sketch.
Get up, he told himself.
Don’t let this ghost, this fucking history book on two legs choke you out. Get up and fight. Make like Godzilla.
Stomp those ants and scarecrows like a Tokyo tap dance.
The lines of reality were getting awful blurry out here. He couldn’t tell just how long he’d been out here.
Ten minutes?
Fifteen?
An hour?
The ants were all over him, writing their six-legged hieroglyphics all over his skin like he was some kind of back-from-the-dead police mummy. He felt like he was trying to scream in his mind.
He tried to count the ants by feel.
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