“Think on it some more. We might be seeing her soon.”
Wilfred was about ask if the voice was still talking about Emma, or some other woman. And what did it mean they’d be seeing her soon?
The sound of a distant explosion incinerated any question marks Wilfred might have left behind.
Besides, he was dead.
Dead and dreaming that hell was breaking loose in his own town.
* 2 *
Momma Clavis lobbed the last of her homemade Molotov cocktails and wondered how come twelve-year-old scotch burned the best. The booze had been hiding in the cellar of the church, underneath a work bench. Some rags and a plastic butane lighter were all that she’d needed after that.
Right now she wished she’d saved a bit of the good stuff for herself. If she wasn’t going to get laid before the forces of evil laid her bones back down to rest, then it might have been nice to have one good toot. The lights on the church drew the revenant scarecrows to her, like she’d hoped. Her smattering of conjure kept them at bay and she kept whittling them down, as best she could.
She wanted to get back to her sewing.
She needed to take care of the witch, but maybe the witch had other ideas.
One of the scarecrows broke through the door of the church. Either they were getting stronger, or her spells were getting weaker. The one at the door was a red-headed bastard, with eyes like burning coals.
The red-headed scarecrow was all that was left of Helliard, but Momma Clavis didn’t know him from Adam. She threw a prayer book at him. She burned her fingers when she picked it up. The prayer book bounced nicely and made a fine wizardly puff of brimstone where it hit the bastard, but nothing else.
She was running out of tricks.
She saw a two-by-four, laying in one of the pews. She tried to grab the two-by-four, but it was miserably hard going having only one hand to work with. There was a hammer next to the two-by-fours.
She settled for that.
She waved it like a tomahawk in the redhead’s direction.
“Come on, you Judas-haired bastard. I’m waiting for you.”
The redhead disappeared in a rattle of firecracker thunder. Great gouts of sap and slime shot out from its suddenly ruptured carcass. Then all at once there was Wendy Joe, standing in the doorway waving a gun as big as all creation, looking like a cross between Rambo and Whoopie Goldberg.
“It’s payday you zombie sons of bitches! Payday at the O.K. Corral, and Wendy Joe Joel has come to play rough.”
* 3 *
Maddy floated deep down into the dirt.
Her spirit slowly sank, nudged by a thousand beats of thousands of cilia, ganglia and tentacles. Even the dirt nudged her as she nudged past it. She felt herself sliding down through a grimy, bubble-wrap universe, down into the dirt. Down with the slugs, way past the slugs, reaching through the fibers of grass, through the roots, through the pores of the dirt. She heard the woman’s voice, only now it wasn’t her mother anymore. It was more like an echo of her mother, coming from someone else’s mouth.
But oh what a distance she was trying to reach.
Three hundred years beyond time and space in an unimaginable long distance call to hell. Like a pearl diver, Maddy kicked her spirit downwards, plumbing the depths of the field.
She reached, reached, and finally found.
Her hand wrapped about something old and dry and wooden, something made of wood and straw.
Something, like a broom.
CHAPTER 44
The Alamo Death Roll
* 1 *
The cold woman sat up and pushed herself out of the freezer.
She stood in the darkness of the cellar, her body icy blue white like the ice flakes that form upon the eyelashes of dead Arctic seals.
Her ribs glinted in the shadows like an icicled xylophone.
She wanted out of that box.
She lifted one leg over her enameled prison.
She put her weight upon it, trying to lever herself up and out of the freezer.
The leg broke off and fell to the floor with a meaty crack.
* 2 *
Wendy Joe blew the head off a scarecrow swinging a wooden garden rake.
Two shots were all she gave it. She aimed for the stomach, but took it in the head.
She’d learned to shoot real slowly, really fast. She’d brought a lot of bullets, but it wasn’t hardly half enough. The scarecrow-things were coming from everywhere.
She blew away what looked to be the mayor. She wondered if there’d be a new election. She took off the leg of something that looked a hundred years old. She blew a dog up and got off a lucky potshot at a psychopathic scarecrowed weasel.
The scarecrow-things came in every size and shape.
“Are you almost done, Momma?”
Momma Clavis kept on stitching. She’d gone back to it, just as soon as Wendy Joe had arrived.
“Momma, are you almost done?”
“I’ll be done a lot quicker if you stop pestering me and keep to your shooting.”
A St. Bernard twice as ugly as Cujo came loping in, bits of moss and dog shit breaking off his paws with each gallop. Wendy Joe blew the dog’s head off. One of his ears fell by her feet. The dog kept moving towards her -- headless, tail wagging, and a wet, gurgling growl bubbling up from the sludgy remains of its shot-out throat.
That was the worst of it.
They were like zombies, they just kept coming.
“Momma.”
“Keep shooting!”
The M-16 clicked empty.
Wendy Joe heard the Alamo death roll rattling deep within her soul.
The carcass of the dog, and a couple of scarecrows stumbled closer.
“Momma.”
She fumbled in her pockets for ammo.
She had another clip, didn’t she?
The dog got closer.
“Momma.”
There was no answer.
This is it, she thought.
It’s time to die.
My fuck, she swore to herself. I am not ready for this.
I’ve wasted so much time waiting on Wilfred.
The dog was nearly on top of her when it paused, as if sensing an unseen deposit of zombified Milk-Bones.
“Hey, bowser. Toro. Toro,” a voice crackled like crinkled up cellophane. “Look over here, would you?”
With as much as she’d witnessed tonight, Wendy Joe still couldn’t believe her eyes. There, halfway down the aisle, was the crackling blue ghost of a skinny old man in a great, blue-white wedding gown, waving his bridal bouquet like a matador’s cape.
* 3 *
Ivan Barrand wandered through the restless night, fearful of the flames and shouts and gunfire that echoed from back in the church, fearful of the night’s cool promise, echoing like the scuttle of a thousand-yard centipede.
The night was alive with terror.
He saw a great deer, its gut torn open and laid bare to the mossy bone, walking like one of those creaking dinosaurs from the old Ray Harryhausen movies. He saw people being dragged from their homes and shredded as they screamed for absent mercy.
And through it all rode the Tatterdemon.
A great tottering monument of terror and destruction mounted atop a pale-as-dead-grass palomino, looking like nothing more than a scarecrow made out of canned and processed lunch meat.
Ivan Barrand wasn’t sure how he knew to call it a Tatterdemon.
It was like he heard a whisper in the back of his brain, a dry nagging tickle that refused to go away. He watched in horror as the Tatterdemon took each body and plunged it beneath the earth. It was a little like watching some great pile driver at work.
Slam – slam – slam.
He watched in rapt horror as each planted body emerged from the dirt like flotsam bobbing on a high rolling tide. It’s the end of the world, Ivan Barrand thought. God has finally got pissed off over all our sinning and has sent the legions to scourge the earth clean.
Hel
l.
Yes, hell.
That’s what awaited Ivan if he didn’t smarten up. He had to make amends. He had to balance his account book.
What to do?
Where could he go?
The hardware store? What would he do there? Take one final inventory? File one last end of the world insurance claim?
He needed to set his soul right.
He needed to feel forgiven so that he might fly up to heaven on a wave of cleansing repentance. He had to see Wilfred to tell him what he’d done and what he’d forced Emma to do.
He had to beg forgiveness and make himself ready to die.
Where to find him?
The police station?
No.
He hadn’t wronged the man in any legal sense. He hadn’t broken any laws nor committed any crimes.
It would be better to greet him on home ground.
He turned the corner and headed down the street towards Wilfred’s house, where the cold woman was waiting.
Patiently.
CHAPTER 45
Straw King Triumphant
* 1 *
The Tatterdemon rode through the town upon Marvin’s new horse’s back.
“Now you’re really carrying the male,” the Tatterdemon joked.
The Tatterdemon imagined that he looked like a scarecrow of a medieval king, leading his troops to victory. Hell, he was a king. He was the Straw King, triumphant over a town full of peasants. And here he was granting them immortality. Handing out the boon of the straw like there was no tomorrow.
And maybe there wasn’t.
His legions were growing like mold on a dusty slice of damp bread. Victory swung like the beating of a metronome.
He planted.
They grew.
They harvested.
He planted.
He was the Straw King.
He was the Tatterdemon.
The town that made so many jokes about him was his for the taking.
He felt a chill deep inside the pocket where his heart had once grown.
He felt a woman’s hand, clutching at something wooden.
Clutching a broom.
Damn it.
Fear touched his spirit like an icy hand.
The wind brought a voice to his ears. The voice of the witch telling him don’t you worry about the girl. She’s nothing but straw. You take the town, I’ll take the girl.
You can have her, he thought.
“Take the town,” he yelled. “Take all who walk and breathe and give them to the ground. Give them to me.”
Like an army of hungry ants, the slow horde shambled and lurched and stole deeper into the town of Crossfall.
* 2 *
Fell reveled in his new-found freedom, deep within Wilfred’s body. It had been so long since he could touch and feel and breathe. He thought of all he could do. He thought of how good it would be to drink and eat and feel the sun upon his face. Just to talk, to feel words tumbling from his mouth brought sweet joy.
He thought of loving a woman. It had been so long since he’d even touched one. He shook his head to clear it of useless distraction.
“Damnation and hellfire,” he cursed. “Get behind me tempter.”
He had work to do.
God’s work, and there was no time to waste in self-indulgence.
He untwisted the riot gun. The thing was useless to him. He threw it from the car window.
“Put not your trust in the tools of man, Sheriff Potter.”
But Potter was dead.
Now there was only Abraham Fell, part preacher, part lawman, a good and godly warrior ready for battle.
“Glory be,” he whispered.
He looked around.
Where was he?
In some kind of cage? No, it was some kind of conveyance. A wagon, maybe, but where were the horses? He searched Wilfred’s mind like a thief rummaging in a dead man’s suitcase. He found what he was looking for.
Wilfred’s dying thought, emblazoned like a slogan painted on the walls of hell.
ALL I HAVE TO DO IS TURN THE FUCKING KEY.
“Key? What key, Wilfred Potter?”
He closed his eyes and tried to remember.
“And I shall give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven – Matthew, fifteenth chapter, nineteenth verse.”
He smiled.
Ah yes, the key.
He found the key, embedded in the panel before him.
Like Excalibur, he only had to remove it. He lifted the key out and waited for a rush of miraculous winged cherubim to move his conveyance forward.
Nothing happened. He stared at the key. What was he doing wrong?
Then it came to him.
“Turn the key. You must turn the key, Fell, you fool.”
He jittered the key back into place. Then he wriggled it, nearly snapping it in two when he twisted it in the wrong direction.
Then finally he turned it properly.
Potter spoke to him from the darkness of death.
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
Fell smiled in amazement.
He hadn’t expected Potter to be able to talk to him from beyond like that.
“Welcome Potter,” Fell said. “How do I make this move?”
“Put your foot on the gas. Put the pedal to the metal. Floor that sucker, and keep a tight grip on the wheel.”
Fell put his foot on the pedal.
Nothing happened.
“The other pedal. That’s the brake. You want the accelerator.”
Ah yes. The go fast pedal.
He pushed it.
Hard.
VROOM.
“Glory!”
VROOM, VROOOM.
“Start her up before you flood it.”
After a couple of more tries Fell got it right.
He stomped the gas pedal and roared off into the darkness, hay trailing out behind the car like rice at a wedding, like a long string of dusty entrails, the vehicle roaring like the chariot of the archangel Michael.
“Glory, glory, glory be!”
The car rolled like a wheel of vengeance, roaring on towards the besieged town.
* 3 *
Rolling like a restless tide, the army of scarecrows headed deeper into the town. They crawled out of the darkness and the shadows like a horde of pillaging nightmares, killing as they went.
The Tatterdemon rode before them, urging his mailman gelding on even faster.
“Take them all,” he yelled.
There was something coming behind him, screaming down the road like a hellhound, sirens wailing and a red bubble whirling like a neon torch. A madman in the car leaned his head out of the driver’s window, his mouth open like a crazy wind-struck St. Bernard, shouting and howling with glee.
“Glory be! Great glory be!”
The car rammed through the scarecrow army like a bowling ball. It headed through them and straight into town. Preacher Fell spared a quick glance backward. He saw the horses rearing and following him back into the town.
“Glory be.”
He’d come to the rescue, and now he was leading the charge.
* 4 *
Maddy slid down into the dirt and the darkness like a bit of straw caught in a whirlpool, following her instincts and the stream of channeled power, down to the broom and the burning mad old witch.
Bluedaddy rode at her side like a trusted hound. Being a spirit or a delusion he didn’t seem to be troubled by traveling through dirt.
“There she is, Maddy. There’s the old bitch herself. Thessaly Cross. Your mother, sort off.”
Maddy stared into the darkness. She saw Thessaly standing in the fire, deep beneath in the belly of the earth, burning eternally like a tiny chunk of hell.
Thessaly’s eyes seared and branded her.
Maddy knew exactly what that hell-bitch wanted.
&nbs
p; She wanted Maddy.
She wanted Maddy’s body to ride in. Well tough shit to her. Maddy wasn’t done with yet, not by a hell of a long shot, yet her straw was afraid of the burning witch and afraid of her fire.
She thought about Vic -- the Tatterdemon. All the shit he’d put her through. Her anger boiled like a forgotten kettle. She was ready for a fight. Thessaly moved closer and Maddy was ready.
“Bring it on, cinderlips,” Maddy taunted.
PART FOUR
REQUIESCAT
CHAPTER 46
Just Getting Started
* 1 *
“Bring it on, cinderlips.”
Maddy was pissed, tired, and ready for a scrap. She pushed forward through the dirt, eager to tackle the old buried witch. It was a little like moving through water, only a whole lot dryer. Once you got used to that, traveling underground was dead easy, except when you were fighting a witch.
Thessaly hit her with a wave of power like a plow wind ripping through grass. Heat and blood smashed against her. Maddy rocked back from the force, but her strawborn strength gave her the power to resist.
“Come get it, granny. I’ll shove your broomstick so far up your ass that you won’t have to buy toothpicks for the rest of your life.”
She pushed closer. Her hands ached to rip through the witch’s flesh, but Thessaly only laughed.
“You come to me armored in straw,” Thessaly said. “The straw feeds you, the straw gives you strength, the straw keeps you alive -- but the straw is mine.”
What she said was the truth.
Thessaly waved her hand, easily rebuffing Maddy.
Maddy felt herself ripped from the earth’s depths and pushed outward and upward like a bit of straw in a steady blowing hurricane. In an instant she was back above, freed from her bondage yet helpless and absolutely pissed.
She didn’t like the feeling of helplessness the witch gave her. She thought she had fry-panned that feeling to death when she had first murdered Vic, but look where that got her.
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