Roland’s blood chilled to a crawl. He jammed the dirt into his ears and tried not to listen, but the voices crawled inside like dead sparrows dragging their songs through a long spring night.
* 3 *
Wilfred was dying, trapped in the squad car, the riot gun pretzeled about him like he was a bowed up birthday gift. He tried to breathe, but the sharp things broken inside him tore at every inhalation. His existence centered on perfect pain. His body, no longer made of flesh and blood, reconstructed itself out of molecules of screaming agony. Every scrape, every cut, every torn ligament and popped rib chose this place and time to stage its own personal bitch session with Wilfred’s battered pain centers.
And even that was going away. He wanted to call out to it. He wanted to say, wait pain, stay with me. Let me feel this agony. Let me feel something. Let me feel anything. At least it took his mind off Emma. He hadn’t thought of her in some time now. The fact was, for the moment he just didn’t give a fuck.
He liked that.
Maybe it was proper.
He was armed, if you counted the bent shotgun. He was in his uniform, if you didn’t mind tatters. And he was even in one of his police department’s two squad cars, even though he’d driven his own car straight through the town hardware store.
No doubt about it.
This was the right way for an officer of the law to die.
He relaxed, and in relaxing he saw everything.
He saw Ivan Barrand and the look in that man’s eyes when he spoke of Emma.
Shit.
That look had been longing and love.
Damn it.
He’d been blind not to see it. Emma had fallen or been blackmailed into sleeping with Ivan.
Then, out of guilt, she’d hung herself.
He felt a million pounds lighter, just knowing why. Only it didn’t matter now. None of that horseshit really mattered. He’d lived a good life, if you squinted hard enough.
Death was nothing but the capstone over a life of quiet compromise.
It was better to die this way, than to vanish face down in a bowl of mush in the Shining Decline Retirement Home.
Hell.
What would he have done with Emma, anyway? He wished he could leave some note explaining his actions. He didn’t want to die with the town thinking him to be Crossfall’s answer to Norman Bates.
To hell with it.
There was nothing to worry about. The way things were working out, there wouldn’t be much of a town left.
Not after those goddamn scarecrow monsters got through with things.
Besides, he’d probably be dead.
Beyond all care.
Wonder if he could’ve stopped these things? If anything could. The army? The air force? A band of plucky teenagers lead by Oral Roberts in an intercontinental transdenominational hymn sing?
Maybe they couldn’t be stopped. Maybe this was just a grisly form of evolution. Man had gone as far down the road of life as he could. The only thing left to do was to quietly let go of the reins.
He tried to picture a scarecrow sitting as Prime Minister in the House of Parliament in Ottawa.
Hell, it wouldn’t be that much different after all. By tomorrow, Crossfall would be back in business. There’d be a bunch of scarecrows sitting down at Benson’s, sucking on steaming cups of liquid fertilizer.
Not much different at all.
He tried to reach the push buttons on his radio, while he was thinking all this. He didn’t know why he was bothering to, seeing as he was so resigned and all. Maybe his hand just hadn’t got the declaration of surrender yet.
He kept reaching.
A rancid bead of sweat jittered over his upper lip.
He longed to wipe it from his face, but his arms wouldn’t cooperate.
His mouth was drier than dehydrated cotton. He thought of how often Emma scolded him for not drinking enough water. He thought of all the beer and whiskey he’d pissed away, the taste of Coca Cola on a hot summer afternoon, scraping the crap out of his throat.
Damn it.
He just had to turn the key, and steer the car back into town.
He’d drive headfirst into the liquor store, for starters.
He tried harder than he’d tried anything in his life before this, trying to turn the key but it was no good. He couldn’t even reach the dash. His strength had left him like air from a leaky tire. He was a big man, and it was somehow worse to die like this, fumbling like a baby for a damn brass key.
Finally he gave up.
He closed his eyes and waited for what came next.
How would it go? He hadn’t seen any bright tunnels, yet. No long staircase, up or down. No angels with shiny gold retirement pocket watches.
Maybe I’ll just die, he thought. Maybe there’s nothing else.
Maybe I’ll come back as one of them.
That thought opened his eyes, as much as the voice whispering behind his ear, too low and gruff to be any kind of angel.
“Wake up Wilfred Potter,” the voice said. “You’re not dead yet.”
And he wasn’t.
Not hardly.
CHAPTER 41
Momma’s Home Cooking
* 1 *
Needles were needed in magic.
Merlin knew that, Nebuchadnezzar knew that, and Momma Clavis knew that, just as certain as shit grows flies. Now that the church was properly illuminated and the area was cleared of everything living, now was the time for needle and thread.
In the old times, Momma Clavis would have shoved nine silver needles into a boar’s heart, and let it roast slowly by the fireplace. When it had roasted for nine whole days, roasted down jerk dry, the witch would have perished, but this was new days, and a boar’s heart was hard to come by. Besides, this witch was too old and powerful for a little conjure to be able to cure. No sir, if Momma Clavis wanted to kill this witch she was going to have to roll up her sleeves and do some work.
She began at the right side of the door frame, stitching the needle through the wood of the floor boards, hard and careful, hard enough so that it’d go deep enough to penetrate the floor’s inner grain. She had to be careful enough so it wouldn’t snap. She pushed it up through for her first stitch. Then she tied it off with a magic knot, and set to work on her second stitch.
She worked her way around the church, stitch by stitch, knot by knot. It was hard work, made harder by the fact she had only one honest hand to work with. She should have taught Wendy Joe better about sewing, she guessed.
She kept on working.
She heard a voice talking to her, from under the earth.
“Is that you talking, old lady?” Momma Clavis said. “Old witchy lady laying way down in the dirt? You think to hurt the town my daughter lives in? You think to hurt my walking memory? Think again woman. I’m making powerful magic. I’ll sew your heart into a cage so tight you ain’t ever getting free until God rings his doomsday bell and calls all us witches home to hell.
She spoke in rhyme as best she could, because rhyming was good for conjuring.
She kept working, stitch by stitch, knot by knot, as the long night dragged on.
The dead were coming.
And soon.
* 2 *
“Yahoo!”
Wendy Joe kicked in the door to Earl’s basement apartment feeling just like a real police officer.
Search warrants?
We don’t need no stinking warrants.
There was no time to waste. She started with Earl’s front closet trying to be systematic and neat. Then she started ransacking. Fuck neatness. She’d seen the movies. You were supposed to overturn furniture, empty drawers, slice pillows and tear open padded chairs.
Fifteen minutes later, she found what she wanted.
Earl had bragged about it once, over an extra beer at last year’s Christmas party. He’d tried to pass it off as a joke later. Wilfred pretended not to hear any of this, but Wendy Joe was listening carefully.
It turned
out Earl wasn’t talking through his poop hole. It turned out he was talking stone cold fact. Earl had himself an honest-to-Sam-Colt collection. Some folks collected postage stamps. Some folks collected matchboxes. Some folks kept the hearts of small children in jars upon their desks.
Earl Toad collected firepower.
And this here M-16 was all the firepower Wendy Joe figured she needed.
Earl had bought it somewhere across the border. He’d smuggled it back in his trunk. That was back before those fuckhead terrorists drove those airplanes into the New York towers. Border crossing guards weren’t as careful back then and damn few customs agents bothered searching police car trunks.
She hefted it.
It was heavy, but not so bad. She wasn’t sure how it worked, but she could figure it out easily enough.
She waved it in the air, making tiny budda-budda-budda sounds.
When the first explosion went off she damn near pulled the trigger for real.
CHAPTER 42
Wilfred Lets Go
* 1 *
The voice kept talking, as low and pleasant as a buzzsaw lullaby, grating in the back of Wilfred’s brain.
“Thessaly was right. I hadn’t accused her for any real reason other than her refusal to sell some of the finest pasture land I’d ever seen.”
Wilfred figured he was dreaming. He just wished his dream made more sense. Where in the hell were Charlie’s Angels and why weren’t they dancing naked around his soul?
“Let me show you how it started.”
A picture went on in Wilfred’s brain. He could see it, just as clear as thin air. It was like watching television, only he was part of the show. He saw the preacher standing in the field. He saw the woman lying in the hole with the rocks pressing down on top of her. He saw the grass wind rising up, and the resulting massacre.
“She was a witch, but I don’t think she’d have made any of this happen had I not pushed her to it,” the voice admitted.
Wilfred saw the broom rising from the heart of the field like a periscope. He saw someone who looked a lot like himself tearing his hands free from the clinging roots and grabbing the broom and pushing himself forward. He felt the broom shaft slamming through his beating heart.
Then there were three of them, Fell and Thessaly and Wilfred all wrapped up into one sense of consciousness buried deep in Wilfred’s death-dream vision. It was too damn hard to think about.
Wilfred longed for Charlie’s Angels.
Hell.
Even a shot at converting k.d. lang would be better than this craziness.
What kind of last thoughts were these?
He gave up. He told himself to just forget about the voice, the crazy visions, and then he died.
His heart gave up its unsteady tom-tom beat.
His body lay there, nothing more than an empty shell, a vehicle, just waiting to be used, until the voice climbed inside and hotwired Wilfred’s soul.
* 2 *
Maddy lay in the darkness, listening to the sound of fading hoofbeats.
She tried to breathe calmly. She felt like Pauline Pureheart tied to the tracks and not a Dudley Do-Right to be found.
Well fuck it, Underdog. The only good things ever happened in her life were things she did for herself. There was never any Prince Charming around when you needed him. All of the knights in shining armor were buried in some anonymous scrap yard, beneath a thousand rusting repossessed Ladas.
If there was to be a rescue, she’d have to do it herself.
She tried to uproot herself. It hurt, real bad. It was like sitting on a wad of her hair with her own weight holding her down.
This is what flies feel like on flypaper, she decided.
“Who’d have thought I’d live to be so damn stuck up.”
Now I’m talking to myself. What next? Maybe a giggling fit or possibly a slip into total freefall insanity?
Fuck it.
There was no time for that.
Maybe there’d be time for going crazy tomorrow, when she didn’t have so much to do. Right now, the straw was taking her over. She felt it crawling beneath her skin, trying to push through. Her veins felt dry and tattery. Her skin felt like old newspaper. She felt like she needed a head to toe exfoliation, and maybe a shave after that.
Where the hell was the hot wax when you really needed it?
By the time Vic got back, she’d be nothing but a pile of hay.
Not Vic.
Tatterdemon, as if the name made any difference. Face it -- if Charles Manson called himself Papa Bouncing Gigglefree, and wore a John Wayne Gacy clown suit to his evil, twisted butchery would he have been any less terrifying?
Fuck Vic anyway.
She needed to think about escape. She felt the straw wriggle in agreement. It wanted free, too. Maybe she could control it. The straw was part of her, wasn’t it? She reached out and down, focused all her concentration.
Take me free, she thought. Take me somewhere far and free.
From the earth came ants by the hundred.
They crawled over her like she was a thousand year picnic. Not just ants. There were mites and worms and slugs. Tiny one-celled organisms worked her over -- rotifers, amoeba, and things beneath naming.
She felt the dry tobacco-paper tang of a grasshopper nibbling her lower lip. She felt the knifelike oar legs of scuttling beetles. She felt all of them, breaking her down bit by bit and carrying her like a billion tiny pallbearers, down into the darkness where life begins and ends.
We all start here.
We all start down in the dirt and the darkness and the womb of wombs. In the root cellar of her memory, Maddy heard the slow, heavy words of the woman who called herself mother.
“You ain’t really one of us, Maddy. You never have been. We just had you passed to us, like a charge. Like a legacy.”
Maddy remembered all the many ways her mother explained her birth. She had been born under a cabbage leaf or crawled from under a mossy rock. The crows had left her. The stork had shat her.
There were so many stories, but never the honest truth.
“Where do I come from, Momma?”
“Part Cross and part Fell. The two of them went into the making of you a long time ago. You crawled out of the woods a long time ago. You took a long time growing, a year for every decade passed.”
Maddy heard the chuckling of Bluedaddy somewhere off in the darkness., low and wet, like dirty creek water running over a bloodstained boulder.
She felt something, heard a voice, a woman’s voice.
Her mother’s voice.
“Part Cross, part Fell,” her mother’s memory said. “You were born of dark stock; darker than the heart of midnight. We found you in the forest a long time ago.”
Born in a hell-field, looking for a manger.
CHAPTER 43
The Spirit of Your Ancestor, Once Removed
* 1 *
Wilfred woke up feeling a little funny. Maybe it was because his heart didn’t seem to be beating. It might have been because his lungs weren’t doing their usual push-in-push-out routine.
Something had changed.
His mouth felt like he’d been chewing sawdust. He tried to move, but it was like someone had poured starch and molasses in his muscles. He heard the voice, low and gravelly, right next to his ear.
It sounded an awful lot like his grandfather.
He tried to look up.
No good.
His neck was stiff, like someone shoved a tire iron down his spine.
I’m dead, he thought. I remember letting go. I remember it all falling away from me. Only I don’t remember making any 911 call. I don’t remember any Roy Rogers riding to the rescue.
He was dead.
“Right as rain,” the voice said. “You been dead for a while, but that don’t mean you’ve left us. Death is just another way of looking at things. You kind of fall back and recede, almost like you were becoming a permanent spectator.”
“Who the hell are yo
u?” Wilfred asked. “God?”
The voice chuckled.
That felt weird, like somebody whispering real fast and wet behind your ear.
“I’m just a bad servant, is all. God is here, though. He’s all around us, all the time. He is in the wind and trees and water and dirt. Especially the dirt.”
“Holy smokes. I’ve been possessed by Billy Graham.”
“Not hardly. My name was Abraham Fell, and I guess you could say I’m the spirit of your ancestor, once removed.”
“My grandfather?”
“Your great-great-great grandfather. He and your triple great grandmother made love in a field a long time ago, a field where a man died for the wrong reasons. And from the dirt this man’s soul looked up and kind of liked what he saw.”
“Hell. If I’m channeling the soul of an undead Peeping Tom, I’m reaching for the remote.”
“I’m just a man is all,” Abraham Fell said. “Or I was, anyway. Your triple great grandmother was as pretty as a candle flame. I just touched her a little, is all, just enough to say 'how do you do?' Can you blame me? Even the dead need a little warmth.”
“So I’m the great great grandson of a bastard?”
“No, you’re legitimate. The seed belonged to your triple great grandfather. I just came along for the ride, was all.”
“So you’re a kind of voyeuristic hitchhiker? I don’t know if I appreciate that.”
“Try not to think about it. It was a long time ago. My body has been nailed to this dirt for many years, because my seed still walks this earth, waiting for that hellborn mother to whisper her dark secrets to her. I can’t rest, so I’ve just lain here, all these years until now. You came along and offered me a ride just like your triple great grandmother.”
“Lucky me.”
“It’s a bad thing, what you did to your wife. She can’t move on, trapped like she is. She’s worse than me. You should have buried her proper. You should have let her spirit go back to the dirt and the sky.”
“I know. I’ve been thinking about that for a while.”
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