“Ain’t there now.”
“Then I don’t know, John.”
The girl stepped around Cotton. Clutching the sponge so tightly that water ran from it and pattered on the tiles.
“It’s okay,” Avery told her, never taking his eyes from Billy Cotton. “I’m taking you out of here. My name’s John. What’s yours?”
Tears shimmered in her eyes, spilled down her cheeks, as if the girl herself were being wrung now. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said in a voice so very small.
“John,” Cotton said.
“It doesn’t matter, honey, you don’t need a name to come with me. My wife, her name is Teia. Isn’t that a pretty name?”
The girl nodded.
“Just give me your hand.”
She wiped her eyes. Shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.
Avery was sweating now, the sweat dripping. “Sure,” he said. “Sure you can, why not?”
“I’m supposed to be here. I have to be here. I said I would be.”
“It’s okay, child,” Cotton said suddenly. “You can go.”
She turned her face up to his. “I can?”
“Sure you can,” the old preacher said, never taking his eyes from John Avery. “Sure.”
“See?” Avery said, gun slippery with sweat. He let go and held it one-handed, wiped the other on his jeans. Then reached out. “Now. Give me your hand.”
The girl looked up at Cotton in the manner of a caged animal turned out, and at that moment John Avery stepped forward and seized her hand. The girl screeched, yanking her hand away, but not before John Avery felt something like a static shock. He saw, at his feet, the long grass of the front lawn, sprouting suddenly between the bathroom tiles, whispering as it grew, grew, and grew, rushing up around him. He cried out as he was swallowed by it.
The girl pulled her arms into her shirt and backed away. “I’m sorry,” she said, almost a whimper. “I’m so sorry—”
The barrel of the gun dipped toward the tiles.
Avery gagged, senses clogged with earth and blood.
Cotton went for the gun.
The girl screamed.
LOOK AND SEE
The flames licked behind the grate of the stove. The water in the pot roiled. Miranda finished the words and reached into her shirt pocket and took out the constable’s eye. She held it over the pot. She spoke to the ruined cabin, to the ghosts of ghosts. She spoke as she understood. “I’ve sent devils to hell. I’ve dug graves for the bodies never buried and called things that crawled right out of the ground. I took the poison of a moccasin. I took the worst of the river and the worst of men. I took it all and I’m alive. You show me that boy. You show me what I want to see.”
She dropped the constable’s eye in the water.
Look and see.
THE CONSTABLE, SCREAMING
Riddle was squeezing Teia’s throat and was about to put the tip of the shears into the flesh beneath her jaw when someone slid a white-hot ice pick into his empty orbit. He screamed and staggered away from the prostrate Teia, tearing at his eye patch, and when he ripped it free he tore with it the veil of darkness that had shrouded his sight these last nine years.
He screamed and screamed, oh, how he did.
Teia slumped against the frame of the shed, drawing heavy, wheezing breaths.
The constable flailed like a man lit afire.
“It burns! Jesus, it burns—”
Teia had no understanding of what she saw.
The boy saw, too. He saw the wetness spreading at the constable’s crotch.
The man’s mouth open, spittle flying.
Teia crawled, past the fat constable hunched over and wailing. She crawled for the burlap sack set in a heap on her husband’s worktable.
WHAT MIRANDA SAW
The air cracked as if lashed by a whip, and Miranda smelled sulfur, and she saw. She hung like a spider in the hollow of Charlie Riddle’s eye and saw. She saw the present, the past, moments ago and memories long gone. She was choking a woman—John Avery’s wife—but the woman’s face was Miranda’s. She was hitting the boy, her brother, with an empty bottle. Striking him: the knee, the calf, the arm. Taunting him with sharp shears. His eyes wide with terror. All of this beneath the blackened panes of John Avery’s greenhouse that pitched and wheeled as the constable screamed. She watched with horror as the whole of Charlie Riddle’s sins unfolded. She saw men and women on motorcycles, guns. Blood and death in the dim light of an empty building. A skinny girl on a houseboat, the woman possessed, like Avery’s wife, of Miranda’s face. Staring back at herself from the pillow, no expression, and suddenly the face was not Miranda’s but her mother’s, Cora Crabtree’s, contorted in a kind of horrible, imagined ecstasy, then Cora’s face—Daisy, her name is Daisy—stove in and gone and Miranda, like Riddle, screaming. She saw the railing of his boat, Charlie Riddle looking down into the dim, darkening water as the dead girl sank, weighted with cinder blocks tied on by rubber straps. And there, in the water’s depths, she saw her mother, younger than Miranda had ever seen her in pictures, wearing a dress that billowed around her as she sank, her eyes wide, and all around her were flowers, black-eyed Susans handpicked and bobbing to the surface.
GO
Teia drew the gut-hook machete from the sack and gripped it with both hands. She reared up and brought it down hard where the constable’s neck met his right shoulder, and the blade cut into him with the softest of sounds. It struck bone, the shock of it traveling through Teia’s hands and up her arms. He cried out, more in surprise than pain, then fell to his knees, clutching and slapping at his shoulder as if stung. She pulled the machete free—this time a shucking sound—and stepped back and raised it above her head, a thin ribbon of blood trailing after it, and struck again, and now she was screaming, and the boy beneath Avery’s table was scrabbling and yanking at the silver cuff, and this was surely the maddest moment of her life, as she brought the talonlike blade down one last time, into Charlie Riddle’s head, and the constable’s skull cracked beneath it—a hard sound, like smashing a walnut. He pitched facedown in the gravel, in the little sprigs of clover that grew between the rocks. And Teia, still gripping the machete stuck in the fat man’s head, was dragged with it, until she let go.
From Sabbath House came a single gun-crack.
She heard it, but it took several breaths—she made little gasping sounds—to realize what she had heard.
John.
His name a bell rung inside her head.
She stumbled out of the greenhouse, shook away the darkness that threatened to spread over her eyes and mind like a stain. She wove her way through knee-high grass toward the manse. Halfway to the porch, she saw her man walk out between the briar-wrapped columns. He came down the front steps and stood at the edge of the high lawn, looking around as if disoriented. When he saw her, he lifted a hand, and for an instant the cold fingers that had closed over her heart in the greenhouse loosened their grip. But then Avery shook his head and spoke, his lips making the shape of a word. A blood bubble popped between his lips, but the word upon them was clear: “Go.”
After he had said this, he dropped like an armload of wood into the tall grass.
Teia ran to him, fell beside him, but she did not pitch forward as Avery had. Because I am not dead. She rolled him over, cradled his head, and saw the hole in the denim shirt he wore, just below his sternum. How had she not seen that right away? Was she blind? She said his name over and over, softly at first, then rising in pitch, but his eyes were already glassy and still. He was gone.
* * *
Billy Cotton limped naked onto the porch, Cook’s pistol in hand. The old man stood gazing down at Avery’s wife wailing over the dwarf’s corpse. Cotton watched all of this play out like a drama he had no part in. His expression piteous and sad. He started down the steps, thinking that he might somehow minister to her. She was, after all, the last of his flock. Had endured such hardship in his name. But when she saw him, gun
in hand, she scuttled backward, pushing away over the ground, as if forcing herself to abandon her man. She turned onto hands and knees and crawled, then got to her feet and ran, and in a blink of an eye she was in the Plymouth. Cotton imagined what he must look like to her: a naked old man, arms outstretched, gun in one hand. Staggering like a monster.
The car spun its wheels in the grass, tearing up the earth, and shot forward through the compound gates. It turned right on the county road and fled.
Cotton walked as far as the greenhouse, where he stood listening to the Plymouth’s fading roar, the cicadas singing out from the trees. The cough of the gas-powered generator behind the greenhouse, a series of stutters, and it died. In the near-silence that followed, he heard another noise from inside the greenhouse, a whimpering, the clank of metal against metal.
Curious, Avery’s gun almost forgotten in his hand, he walked through the door.
LAST BREATH
Fading now, the constable’s sight. Her own heart slowing in tandem with his. Her brother’s face yet before her, wide-eyed, spattered with blood. Beneath a table in a place with blackened glass and harsh light. And a forest of Avery’s green plants. Darkness.
Miranda opened her eyes to the smoldering ruin of Iskra’s house.
The fire in the stove had died.
A wind swelled through the bones of the cabin, blew ash and smoke and cinders, and Miranda felt the house shudder, and she remembered the fairy tales Iskra had told her when she was little, stories of a witch whose house grew chicken legs and roamed the forest, never to settle in the same place twice. The house hid the witch, she said. It protected her.
The wind died.
The girl appeared as a vapor up the slope, near the stump and ax.
“You have to hurry,” she called.
“I’m coming,” Miranda said.
A breeze rattled the cans in Littlefish’s garden, scattering the vision.
Brother, Miranda thought, I am coming.
THE BOY, NOT ALONE
After the woman ran away, Littlefish summoned the courage to look at the dead man, who lay not three feet away on the packed hard rocks. Shirttail half untucked, bulk spilling out the sides, the man appeared to the boy like a great felled pig. And that was how the woman, with the Father Hen’s blade, had treated him: like a creature with better uses on the other side of living. Littlefish smelled something bad—and not his own stink of fish and piss and fear.
Dying, the fat man had shit his pants.
Littlefish tugged at the handcuff that held him to the wall. The flesh around his wrist was raw where the metal had already bitten. There were no tools within reach of his free hand. His arm and leg hurt where the fat man had struck him with the bottle. His shoulder burned. Each breath drew pain.
Outside, he heard voices, a woman screaming.
The roar of an engine, too, bigger than the steady drone that had been sputtering for a while now, just beyond the wall where he was chained.
He closed his eyes and sat back and tried not to think about how stupid he had been. To leave without Sister. He wondered where his friend was, was she safe or dead? If dead, would he die, too?
The low drone cut out.
The pie-pan lights overhead flickered.
The entire greenhouse plunged into darkness.
Briefly, the boy yanked at his restraints, one last try, but the steel only bit deeper into his wrist.
A single shaft of light cut through the darkness.
“Who’s there?” a voice said.
A voice that nearly stopped the boy’s heart with terror.
He saw a naked man silhouetted among the plants. The boy could only see him from the waist down; the tabletop blocked his view.
“Charlie?” the man said. He squatted beside the corpse, put his hand on the handle of the machete buried in the fat man’s skull. In his other hand: a gun. Littlefish knew about guns. Sister had taught him never to touch the shotgun Baba kept in the closet. The boy tried to make himself as small as he could against the wall, but the chain of his handcuff clinked against the pipe.
The naked man dropped his head and crouched to look beneath the table.
The Father Hen’s eyes were black pits. He sat down on the rocks, a grunt of pain. He peered at the boy for a while. He leaned over and gripped the machete in the dead man’s skull. Yanked it free. The sound was wet, like a ripe summer melon splitting.
The boy heard gravel rustle, and now the girl stood in the long shaft of light, her shape like a cut-out paper doll. He felt a knot of fear inside his chest turn loose at the sight of her, then tighten again when the Father Hen spoke to her.
“Look and see, child, what is delivered unto us.”
The girl hunkered low and stared at Littlefish, and her eyes were wide and terrified for the boy. “We gotta hurry,” she said. She hesitated, then took the old man’s hand and tried to pull him, gently, to his feet. “Bad people are coming. There’s a black cloud over this place.”
Still, the Father Hen resisted, pulling her closer.
“It’s providence,” he said, voice soft and full of wonder.
“No,” the girl said, pulling away. “He ain’t got no part in this. He ain’t a part of what I saw.”
“But he is, child. He is a part of me.”
“I never saw nothing looked like him. Just you, just me. That’s the way.”
Littlefish heard the words and understood only one thing—
he is a part of me
—a thing he had long suspicioned, waking from his awful dreams. Dreams he and this monster had shared. A truth. The only truth he had ever dreaded knowing, and now that he knew it, he felt it had punched a hole through the hull of his heart.
The girl pleaded, “It’s time to go!”
She is trying to protect me, the boy thought.
“All together now,” the Father said. “Better like this. Better—”
Fast as a cottonmouth moccasin, the girl leaped on the Father Hen’s back. She raised her hand high above her head and brought it down along his cheek and the Father Hen threw her off, staggering into the tall green trees, where he fell. His machete flew from his hand. The girl lay on the ground, breath knocked out of her.
Out of the trees came a high-pitched and garbled scream.
“WHAT DID YOU DO?”
The trees parted and the old man shambled out, holding his cheek, blood gushing from beneath his hand. He caught the girl’s arm and jerked her up like an unruly mutt. “Who are you?” he demanded. His voice thick and wet. He squeezed her wrist and her hand opened and out fell a bloody broadhead. He clamped his other hand around the girl’s throat, and a flap of his cheek fell away like the slit belly of a fish. “I THOUGHT I KNEW YOU!” he roared.
Littlefish yanked at the pipe in the wall.
The girl sputtered and clawed at the hand.
The boy rocked on his back, ignoring the pain in his side and shoulder, and put his feet flat on the bottom of the table above and kicked hard, and the whole thing pitched forward and struck the Father Hen in a clatter of tools.
He let the girl go.
Littlefish reached out with his free hand and splayed his fingers at her as if to beg something for which there were no words, but she did not see him where she had fallen retching on the greenhouse floor.
The Father Hen shoved the table aside with a crash and fell on his knees and fought clumsily through the boy’s thrashing legs. He seized Littlefish’s head by the ears and slammed his skull into the brick foundation of the greenhouse.
The first blow made the boy see stars.
The Father Hen made grunting noises, something between hurt and laughter.
The second blow made Littlefish see nothing at all.
TO THE RIVER, TO THE END
The Evinrude cranked on the first try and Miranda went full-throttle down the bayou from Iskra’s cabin to the river. The wind blew her hair stiffly behind her, so caked with mud and grime it might have been a crown of twigs. The
rain-rushing currents had opened a whirling vortex where the bayou met the Prosper. She eased off the throttle, went slowly around it, beneath the overhang of the trees. A fallen branch was swept into the torrent, and Miranda watched it spin round and round until she could not see it and this was her life, she thought, her entire world become this inescapable end of nature.
She docked at the Landing and went in to fetch Hiram’s bow, a fresh quiver of arrows, and a spare shooting glove. She rummaged a box of matches from old stock in the store downstairs, then filled the last gas canister she owned at the dock and set it in the boat.
Then, one last time, she made for Sabbath House.
LENA
Cotton carried the drugged girl in his arms through the dimming woods, the ampule brought to him in Cook’s head now emptied into her veins. He cradled her as Mary had cradled Christ taken down from the cross. He strode naked through the pine thicket and came out into the clearing at the base of the burned-out church, the insects singing madly. He carried the girl to the iron door of the crypt, which he had left propped open. Deep into the cave they went, where the walls were made of hand-shaped bricks and bats teemed in the shadows above. The air was cool, dank. His bare feet slapped stone, each step an echo.
He followed the tunnel down into the large round vault, where overhead the foundations of the church were visible among the roots. Between the two caskets on the cold stone floor, the boy lay on his side, fully awake and trembling with terror, arms handcuffed behind his back, a length of rope running from the cuffs to his ankles, which were tied. Bits of pine needles and leaves were still lodged in his hair where Cotton had dragged him through the woods by his feet.
The preacher laid the girl beside him.
Billy Cotton gazed at the bones of his wife. He did not see skull or crumbling jaw or crooked teeth, the dark orbits empty, but rather the young woman she had been when he had first known her, he already long past the age of Christ, she not yet twenty-five. He had hitched his way out of the Texas oil fields and into a truck stop along the neon-lit borders of Texarkana. You, he thought, that pretty waitress who brought me eggs. Remembering now how he sat ashamed in a dirty button-down shirt and road-filthy jeans, stewed in his own body’s stink, Tony Lama boots pulling apart at the soles, the whole of his insides wrung out from clawing his way across the land. A man without a home, a ragamuffin. A vagabond. A criminal. Washed up in a booth with no coin to buy coffee, no cash to buy food. There in that oasis he had met a messenger of God named Lena Bowen.
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