Four Summoner’s Tales

by Kelley Armstrong, Christopher Golden, David Liss

  They had all agreed before, but this was the moment when it felt to Zeke that a bargain had truly been struck. The air around them turned cold, and when a gust of wind rustled the branches of the trees in the cemetery, he shivered.

  I’m here, bud, he thought. And I’m not running.

  It had almost been a prayer, and he wondered if Savannah could hear it, or if she felt the love he had for her.

  Enoch moved to the center of their ragged human circle, ignoring those who wept or who had gone so pale that Zeke feared they might faint. The little man—hoodoo conjuror, Skyler had called him—glanced around the circle and then reached into his pocket, taking out a small metal tin, which he opened to reveal the glitter of metal and then passed on to Zeke.

  “These are pins. Take one and pass them along until everyone has one.”

  Zeke did as he’d been told, giving the tin to Lester before looking at Enoch. “What now?”

  “Now you stick yourself with the pin,” Enoch said, his eyes a stormy gray. “Don’t be gentle. When you’re bleeding well enough, you can toss the pins aside, and then write the name of the one you’ve lost on the pipe in your own blood. It’s got to be the name you called them, the name in your heart, not the name they were born with.”

  “Blood ritual,” Arturo Sanchez muttered. “Blasphemy.”

  “What did you expect, Artie?” someone said.

  Zeke glared at Sanchez. “Blasphemy is murdering twenty-three people, not loving them so hard you’ll do anything to have them back.”

  Zeke tucked the pipe into his pocket and then thrust the pin into the index finger of his right hand, jabbing hard and giving the pin a little jerk to make sure the tiny wound would not seal itself up too quickly. When he’d dropped the pin, he took out the pipe with his left hand and scrawled small, crude letters onto the bone in bright crimson, turning it in his hand so that her name encircled the pipe and so that he could fit all of the letters.

  Savannah.

  He had a dozen nicknames for her, but her name was beautiful. In his heart, that was who she’d always been.

  “I will show you the notes to play, the notes they’ll hear,” Enoch said. “I’ll play my own tool, and the notes will weave together and call to them, and they will rise.”

  Zeke closed his eyes, feeling the trickle of his own blood along his fingers. Hope and horror were at war within him and he could not allow either to triumph, because either would defeat him. He thought of Anarosa and how beautiful she’d looked the first time she’d held Savannah in her arms. Anarosa had left this world behind, but it might just have been that the daughter they had both cherished was not yet out of reach. Holding the pipe with two fingers so his blood would dry, Zeke listened to Enoch go on.

  “It’ll take ’em eight or nine days to heal . . . to come back to themselves,” the hoodoo man said. “They won’t know you at first, but in time they’ll start to recognize their surroundings and your faces. Till then, they’ll follow your commands completely, as long as you play that pipe.”

  The words chilled Zeke. The dead of October the twelfth would be like puppets until they began the final stage of transition from dead to living.

  “What is it you’re going to ask us to do, exactly?” Harry Boyd demanded. “How the hell is my son supposed to help you get your revenge?”

  Enoch shot him an angry glance. “Not only my revenge, but his own, Mr. Boyd. And I’ll explain my price in due time. For the moment, just ask yourself this—is any price too dear?”

  Boyd didn’t look satisfied, and neither was Zeke, but they were in no position to argue—not if they wanted what Enoch had to offer.

  “Now,” Enoch said, “be careful not to smear the blood but put the pipes to your lips. Here are the notes you need to play.”

  The little man’s fingers moved smoothly over the pipe, covering and uncovering holes. The tune was simple but it took Zeke more than ten minutes to master it, and others took even longer, muttering in frustration as they fumbled with the pipes. As Zeke played the tune over and over, perfecting it, Harry Boyd’s question echoed inside his mind, followed by one of his own.

  Enoch stood by Mrs. Hawkins, showing her the notes more slowly until she seemed to have the tune.

  “It can’t really be this simple, bringing them back,” Mrs. Hawkins said.

  “There is nothing simple about it,” Enoch replied. “Now, all of you—play.”

  One by one, the pipers began. The music was strange and discordant and haunting, lifted up by the strangely chilly breeze and spread throughout the cemetery. The branches of the trees trembled, and when Zeke shifted his stance, the scrape of gravel underfoot was impossibly loud.

  “What’s to stop us from not keeping up our end of the deal?” he asked, raising his voice to be heard over the pipers.

  Lester stood next to him, already playing, and he shot Zeke a glance that seemed to take him to task, not for the question but for its timing. Zeke knew he ought to have waited, that only an idiot would telegraph a double-cross before they had what they wanted. But he wasn’t going to gamble with Savannah’s second chance.

  Enoch did not reply. Instead he produced another pipe, this one from inside his jacket and twice the length of the others and streaked with dried bloodstains; turned to look at Vickers and his dead wife; and played.

  Half a dozen notes, and Martha Vickers dropped abruptly to the ground. Her hat fell off and tumbled off along the gravel path in the breeze. The pipers all halted their haunting music as her husband cried out in anguish and knelt beside her, her hat forgotten as he cradled her head in his lap and turned a rage-filled gaze upon not Enoch, but Zeke.

  “Always the smart one, Prater. Always the one who can’t just go along, you arrogant son of a bitch,” he snarled. “This here . . . this is a miracle. You don’t question it. And whatever we have to do in return, it’s goddamned worth it.”

  Vickers twisted around to glare at Enoch.

  “Now give her back, you bastard. Give her back to me!”

  Enoch turned a questioning gaze upon Zeke, as if to say, Is that enough for you? Zeke nodded his assent. He would ask no more questions. A fist of anguish clenched around his heart. They had come too far along this damning path to turn away now. Enoch had them at his mercy, for no one would refuse him now. Not when they had seen the consequences. Whatever darkness might be hiding inside it, he would accept the miracle . . . and whatever it cost him.

  “Play,” Enoch said, and the chorus of pipes began again.

  This time, Zeke played with them, and so did Vickers.

  Martha, who lay on the gravel path beside him, was the first to rise.

  She staggered to her feet and studied her husband for a moment, and then dusted herself off as if vaguely embarrassed . . . as if she had done nothing more than trip, rather than die again and be resurrected in front of them all in the space of a minute.

  Big Tim Hawkins was next. He’d been buried only a dozen feet from the path in a plot that the Hawkins family had been using for years. His father had been laid there a decade ago and there were spots for Tim’s mother and siblings and their spouses. A family grave.

  The hands that punched up through the soil were huge and fish-belly white, nails torn and one finger broken from smashing through the top of the coffin and digging his way up through the dirt. Zeke shuddered at the sight, and at the thought of the inhuman strength required for such a feat. Whatever power Enoch had called upon, it had instilled within October’s dead more than just a renewed spark of life.

  There were screams and Mrs. Hawkins nearly fainted, one hand on her pregnant belly as Aaron Monteforte caught her.

  “Play, damn you!” Enoch cried shrilly before going back to his own pipe, his notes different from the others, weaving in and out of the discord and creating an unnerving sort of order.

  They played, and some of the dead rose. Some, but not all.

  Five minutes passed, no more. Zeke could not look at their faces but he knew them. Ben
Trevino was there, standing near his mother like a sleepwalker as she wept and kept playing the same ugly, maddening notes. The funeral home had done an excellent job with the bullet hole in his neck.

  Enoch stopped, lowering his pipe.

  “That’s enough,” he said.

  “But . . . ,” Lester said, looking around. “Where are the others? I count nine.”

  Enoch slipped his pipe inside his brown wool coat. “The others are buried in metal coffins. They’re going to need your help. Mr. Vickers has shovels in the back of his truck.”

  Arturo Sanchez made the sign of the cross.

  “Dig them up,” Enoch said, his stormy eyes alight with golden sparks as whatever magic he’d wielded began to burn off.

  As he turned, Zeke strode up and grabbed his arm. “The cost, damn it. What’s the price?”

  Enoch glanced at the lumbering, shuffling dead who were even now being embraced by the living who had summoned them.

  “Tomorrow night I’m going across the border,” Enoch said. “There’s a compound, a house where the cartel lieutenant who oversees all their local business lives and works. The drugs. The murder. His name is Carlos Aguilar, and I intend to kill him and everyone who tries to stop me. Your people—he gave the orders to the men who killed them—your people, they’ll come with me and help me do this, and so will you.”

  Mrs. Hawkins began to shake her head, covering her mouth as she cried.

  Zeke thought of Savannah facing down cartel enforcers with guns, hardened killers. He steeled himself, knowing the bargain had been struck, the gift Enoch offered and the consequences of refusing.

  “You need us to control them,” Zeke said. “Pull their strings.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Prater. And you’ll be happy to know that no more harm will come to them. Right now they’re dead, more or less. They’re . . . recovering. Another bullet hole or a knife wound will add to their recovery time, but it won’t hurt them.”

  “What about us?” Linda Trevino asked, horrified.

  Enoch’s gaze was hard as flint. “I suppose you’ll just have to be careful.”

  Zeke went to get a shovel.

  5

  Late the next morning, Zeke stood on the scattering of hay and dusty horse shit that carpeted the floor of his stable, wondering if he had run out of tears. His eyes burned and he knew it was partly from the lack of sleep—he’d surprised himself by dropping off for a couple of hours just as the sun came up—but he thought the sandpaper feeling came from the unfulfilled need to cry. He felt empty in so many ways; the inability to summon tears was just one more.

  “Come on, bud,” he rasped. “Say hello to Jester. He missed you.”

  His voice cracked on that last bit, but Savannah didn’t notice. She stood in front of the stall where her horse, Jester, snorted and chuffed and turned his back to her. From the moment Zeke had led Savannah into the stable, playing the ugly tune on his pipe—which still had the coppery scent of his blood on it—Jester had done his best to stay as close to the back wall of the stall as possible.

  Zeke clutched the pipe in his hand, forcing himself to loosen his grip, afraid he might break it or rub off some vital part of its magic.

  Ain’t magic, he thought. It’s a curse.

  What could it be but a curse that let him see his daughter like this? Savannah still wore the rose-hued dress she’d been buried in, a lovely thing she had persuaded him to buy her for the fall dance at her school and that had garnered far more attention from the boys than he would have liked. The funeral director had gently implied that the color might be too red, that it might trouble him to see such a red on her, there in her casket at the wake, but Zeke had insisted, remembering the smile on her face when she’d worn it.

  Now it seemed obscene. A party dress on a corpse.

  He stared at her pale skin and noticed the way the warm breeze through the barn stirred her limp, dead hair, and bile burned up the back of his throat. He turned away, dropping to his knees as his stomach revolted and he vomited in the sawdust and hay. On his knees, trying to breathe, waiting for his stomach to calm, he thought for sure he would weep then, but still his eyes were dry.

  After a few seconds, he rose shakily to his feet and looked at her.

  There were bruise-dark circles under her eyes and she had the tallow complexion of old candle wax. Her blue eyes had paled, faded like their color had been nothing but paint, left in the sun too long. In the warm, late-morning light coming through the open doors at the far end of the stable, the shadows around her had acquired a gold hue. In that golden darkness it would almost have been possible to believe she was merely ill, were it not for those eyes, staring into a null middle distance, as if she could still see back into the land of the dead.

  “Come on, honey,” he breathed. “Do it for Daddy. Say hello to Jester. You love your Jessie-boy, don’t you? He’s right here.”

  It felt to Zeke as if something at the core of him was collapsing inward, a little black hole growing in his gut. An invisible fist clenched at his heart.

  “Hey. I’m here, bud.”

  Something darted along the left side of his peripheral vision and he turned to see a furry orange tail vanishing into an empty stall. Tony was a marmalade cat who had been born in the stable. His mother had been a stray who had taken up residence there, and Zeke had never tried to drive her away because he believed that every stable and barn needed at least one cat to catch the mice who would invariably find their way in. The rest of the litter had been given away, but Savannah had kept the orange marmalade and named him after Tony the Tiger, the mascot of her favorite cereal.

  The memory struck him hard—seven-year-old Savannah sitting on the floor of the stable, holding Tony and stroking him and giving him his name. She’d put a little bow in her hair that morning that nearly matched the color of Tony’s fur, her way of making the moment into a sort of ceremony. The image led to a rush of others. Zeke closed his eyes and let them come, a sad smile on his face as he recalled nine-year-old Savannah’s first ride on horseback, and the squeals of delight a year later when he brought Jester home and told her the new horse was hers and hers alone.

  Mine forever? she’d asked.

  He could still hear the little-girl voice in his head.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered, though not in prayer.

  Or maybe it is a prayer, he thought. Maybe it always is.

  “Come on, Savannah,” he said, slapping his hands together and moving to stand only a foot away from her, face-to-face. “Come on, bud!”

  His hands were empty. Frowning, he turned to search for the pipe. When he’d thrown up, he must have tossed it aside. No, no. Where the fuck are you? he thought as he scanned the floor until he located it. He’d worried that he might have broken it, but the pipe seemed intact. He stared at it, turning it over in his hands.

  The night before, he had begun to experiment with the tune that Enoch had taught them. Lester had suggested that they work together, that he bring his son, Josh, over to Zeke’s ranch and they practice how to influence their children with Enoch’s pipes. Zeke had refused. What they were doing was both a miracle and an obscenity, and either way it was too intimate to share.

  His hands and arms and back still hurt from digging up Savannah’s grave. His muscles had burned as he’d thrown himself into the work, numbing his mind and heart so he would not let horror stop him, knowing she must have awakened down there in the cold ground along with the others. But he hadn’t really believed it until he had used the shovel to smash the casket’s lock and then pried open the lid and seen her moving, milky eyes staring blindly through the webbing of thread that had been used to sew her eyes shut. The thread had torn loose, her ripped eyelids almost instantly healing. A corpse, to be sure—she already looked so much better than she had last night—but a corpse resurrected.

  Zeke had screamed, then, but not in fear or horror. He’d screamed out the pain and grief of her death and dragged her up into his arms and sat ther
e cradling her inside her grave, whispering to her, promising her that he would do anything to bring her back to him, all the way back to him. She had been the light in his life, the sun around which his heart and soul revolved.

  He would do anything.

  Once he had more or less mastered the notes Enoch had taught them to play, he had put her into his truck and brought her home, cleaning her hands and face and feet but not willing to change her clothes. Eventually he would take off her dress and put her in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and boots, but not yet, because he didn’t want to see the wounds on her chest and back where the bullets had entered and left her body. They’d have been sewn up, but he didn’t want to see. Enoch said the wounds would heal, and so he wanted to give her a little more time.

  “Time,” he whispered now, standing in the stable. Zeke took a breath. Time was really the only thing of value in the world—time to live, time to be with the ones you loved.

  Stuffing the pipe into his pocket, he turned away from Savannah’s catatonia and went to the vacant horse stall into which he’d seen the cat disappear. Zeke unlatched the door and dragged it open. Tony had curled into a pad of hay in one corner and jumped up as he entered. As Zeke approached, the mouser tried to bolt past him, but Zeke had been wrangling cats in the ranch’s old buildings since he could walk and snatched Tony up before he could escape.

  The cat struggled, but Zeke carried him out of the stall and over to Savannah. He knew that he was supposed to use the pipe. Enoch had made it clear to all of them that it would be days before any of the dead could think clearly enough to direct their own actions. Their brains were not working properly. The ritual Enoch had taught them made it possible for others to give them direction, as if the notes the pipers played turned on some kind of motor inside them and the words of the pipers were their navigation.