by J. D. Horn
Now Francis lived for Marjorie’s visits, hoping and praying that after a few minutes of exchanging pleasantries, Marjorie’s head would tilt back, and her mouth would open to announce Little Feather’s arrival. Francis knew it was wrong. The Bible made it clear a good Christian shouldn’t ever make an attempt to speak with the dead. But she hadn’t made the attempt to speak with them. No, they had chosen to speak to her through Marjorie. Perhaps it was Marjorie’s weak grasp on reality that allowed the spirits to use her?
Marjorie placed the cake on the counter, and found her away to the drawer where Francis kept the knives. Francis took a seat at the table, contemplating the degree of comfort this strange woman seemed to feel in her house. Undoubtedly in Majorie’s mind, this was already her home, and Francis her mother-in-law. Francis folded her hands, resting them on the table. “Just a small piece for me, dear.”
TWELVE
Ruby’s new life didn’t come with a guide, so experimentation had been necessary, learning all the rules of this new existence by trial and error. Early on she found that if she could capture her prey’s gaze, she could mesmerize them, compel them to act against their own best interest—even elicit the invitation that allowed her to enter their home. As she grew stronger, she learned how to control someone nearby, even if the subject couldn’t see her. But still her control only lasted while she was in direct contact with them. One taste of her blood, though, and that made everything different. Once she was in them, she could feel them, control them, like puppets.
With animals, control came even easier, and in the first days of her new life, she’d taken no little pleasure in forcing them to behave in ways their natural instincts should have prohibited. She thought of the tiny red fox whose heart had beaten oh so fast as she compelled it to stand and face down the headlights of an oncoming car. It had been both a whim and an exercise of a godlike power over the beast that she let it flee mere moments before the car’s tires crushed it. It was a disappointment that the beast forgot its mortal terror almost as soon as the danger passed. Such a pardon should have merited worship, but the fox slinked off into the night, forgetting its deliverance along with its fear. Now, Ruby rarely wasted her time with animals.
Ruby passed through the deserted Cooper house’s kitchen, with its sagging floor, and opened the door leading to the cellar. “Mama’s coming,” she called as she began to descend the steps, the floorboards creaking, even under her light step.
The space was windowless, and the house’s filtered green light failed to make it any farther into the cellar than to illuminate the top two stairs. It didn’t matter, though. Ruby no longer needed light to see, as the thing she’d been joined with had no need for eyes. It had come from a place where light had never existed, summoned from an eternal darkness by means of magic, a magic Ruby had once believed only to be a bit of theatre put on by tired charlatans vying to appear more outré in their perversions than the average Hollywood freak. The tireless movement of the force within her, the thing that shared her body and was privy to her every thought, stood as a mute witness to just how wrong she’d been in this supposition. She stepped from the last warped stair onto the cellar’s dirt floor, and turned.
Wooden shelves lined the cellar’s southern wall. A petrified potato, wrapped in newsprint, and so hard and black that Ruby had at first mistaken it as a stone, testified to the shelves’ original use as storage for seed potatoes. Now these shelves were empty, except for a hacksaw and the head of a hobo that Ruby herself had placed there. Ruby smiled and wiggled a finger at it as its eyes followed her movements.
She had taken the man, infected him with her own blood, took his mortal life, so that he could be born again. Then she forced him to dismantle himself piece by piece, whittling himself down to where he could neither feed, fight, nor flee. She had taken over the task herself only when it had become a true impossibility for the hobo to carry on by himself.
The head had lasted weeks now in its current state, and she suspected survival could go on indefinitely. She could only imagine the pain of feeling the hunger, but being incapable of feeding. She was no fool. She realized that if she could so easily control the people she’d turned, there might just be someone out there who could handle her the same way. She’d good and done made up her mind never to set foot near California again just in case.
She reached out and tousled the head’s dirty blond curls. She had found this bum’s unwashed face the most pleasing of all those she’d taken, his features reminding her somewhat of Dylan. This vague and watered-down resemblance was why she’d chosen to keep him around. What had started out as an experiment had turned into a kind of pet.
Its mouth opened, and Ruby snatched her hand back out of the way of the snapping of its long canines. Ruby laughed and flicked its nose with her thumb and middle finger. “Is that any way to treat your mama?” Ruby smiled, thinking how much her pet must hate her. She took extreme satisfaction in the outcome of this particular experiment, having learned how far this form of existence could be stretched. The head on the shelf: she would grant it peace, one day, once she’d grown tired of toying with it. She’d burn it in the woodstove in the living room, or maybe leave it outside, unprotected, so the rays of the sun could find it. It struck her that she hadn’t considered the effect a bullet between its eyes might have. Perhaps she’d do a bit of target practice before putting it out to burn.
Ruby had never felt so in control of anything in her life.
The hobo hadn’t been her only project, only her most extreme to date. For weeks now, she’d been experimenting on the penniless nomads unlucky enough to disembark near Conroy, so that she could learn the strength and weaknesses of her kind, not only as a means of self-preservation, but as a way of devising a perfect punishment. These strangers, she reasoned, were the best source of test subjects for the same reasons they made the best supper.
Like some kind of fairy-tale injunction, three exposures to her blood were required to bring about the change. It took different lengths of time, she’d learned, for different people to wake. Some took days, others mere hours. Her own rising, she had come to realize, had been affected by what those who’d infected her had done to slow her change; Ruby’s hand trailed up to her breast where the last of the sigils they’d carved had only just begun to fade.
Fire, she’d learned, kindled or brought by the sun, was possibly the only way to completely destroy her kind. Outside of fire, most injuries would heal themselves, though some were permanent. Destroying the heart ruined the body, rendering it immobile, incapable of rising and seeking prey. Still, even in a broken body, a strong enough will might be able to draw the prey to it. The body might not rise, but it could still find means to feed. Ruby wondered how many times her kind had been left in this state—conscious, but crippled—calling out with a seductive will to passersby.
She wondered about her near embalming. Would the act of embalming have brought her true death? Would draining her blood have removed the being who’d become one with her, or did the connection between them run deeper? She would have to experiment with one she had changed and find out. She’d promised Merle she would change him, and she intended to keep her promise. Things would soon be different around here, and she’d no longer need to skulk in the shadows, taking whatever fate delivered to her. Soon, she could pick and choose. The boy should prove a satisfactory subject when the time came.
In the meantime, she had two new pets.
She’d fed the Sleiger boys once. Just as she had commanded, they sat silent in the corner, their backs against the cellar wall. They’d be sensitive to direct sunlight now, and might need an invitation before entering someone’s house. An observant witness might take note of an occasional blue fleck glinting in their eyes, but for the most part they’d be able to carry out tasks for her.
“So tell me,” she said crossing to stand before them. “What do you boys know about explosives?”
THIRTEEN
“Ripped him clean open, She
riff. Gizzard to gonads,” Whitey Vaughn said, and spat tobacco out onto the parched earth next to the sheet-covered lump. A trail of juice dripped down his chin, and he pulled a dirty handkerchief from the pocket of his overalls to dab at the sticky brown spittle.
When Bell first got the call from Whitey, he’d assumed the farmer had lost more livestock. More than a few animals in the area had suffered strange injuries over the last couple of months. Most of the wounds weren’t deadly, at least not at first. Then, a couple of weeks back, Whitey had found one of his calves with its throat ripped out. A few days later, a chicken farmer had awakened to a coop full of nothing but blood and feathers. Now this . . .
“My boy found him on his way back out to the milk barn,” Whitey said. “I probably walked right past him this morning, but I missed him in the dark.”
Sheriff Bell nodded at the farmer, then squatted down and threw back the bloodstained sheet that covered Dowd Johnson’s body. He grimaced and turned away. “I’ll need to speak to your son.”
“Course, but he’s still out in the fields. Got a late start, what with . . .” The old man gestured to the battered body. “Who do you reckon did this?”
Bell stood and gave the old man a stern look. “Looks more like the work of a ‘what’ than a ‘who,’ wouldn’t you say?”
“No, sir,” Whitey replied and spat to the side. “Sure, that’s what I thought when I found the calf, but take a closer look at the bits that are missing.”
The sheriff reached down and tugged the sheet completely off the body. As he did so, he noticed that a patch, a red circle with a white cross in its center, had been sewn on the once-white fabric. Bell recognized it instantly. He didn’t participate as an active member of the Klan, but he was not without sympathy toward its cause. The sheriff felt the farmer’s eyes on him. “You keep quiet about this,” he said, tapping his index finger on the patch, “you hear?”
“Course, Sheriff.” The farmer looked past Bell at Dowd’s gutted remains. “They took his heart, see?”
Bell looked over the bridge of his nose at the body. Even though the corpse had been covered, the sun overhead was doing a fine job of baking it. The rank scent wafting up from beneath the sheet was as repulsive to him as it was attractive to the swarm of flies that were rushing in to sample the meat. He forced himself to focus on the job at hand. “Still looks like the work of a wild animal to me.”
“Ever do any butchering, Sheriff?”
Bell answered Whitey’s question with one of his own, “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Well, sir, I can tell you that this here”—he pointed to the body—“didn’t happen on my land. Butcherin’ is messy work. There ain’t enough blood around the body for the killing to have happened here.”
“So the animal killed him a bit off, then dragged the body over here.”
“That would have left a trail. Now my eyes ain’t what they used to be, but I don’t see no trail.”
It was Bell’s turn to point to the body. “Look. He wasn’t slit open, he was ripped open. I’m telling you, Whitey, this was the work of an animal.”
“Think so? Take a look in his mouth.”
Bell squatted down once more and pulled out the new-fangled ballpoint pen his wife had given him for their anniversary. He inserted the tip of it between Dowd’s lips and opened them to find Dowd’s manhood looking back at him instead of the man’s tongue. In spite of himself, Bell rocked back and sucked in air. He wondered if this might have been the work of Frank Mason and Bayard Bloom. Had Dowd done crossed the Judge?
He bit the inside of his cheek and shook his head in answer to his own question. It was too messy for Frank and not quite artistic enough in its brutality for Bayard, who probably would have considered this display too obvious. Besides, the Judge always gave Bell a heads-up before ordering any of his extracurricular executions. It gave him time to round up a suitable scapegoat. Of course, the Judge had been absent lately.
“His mouth was hanging open when I got here, which is how I knew what was in there,” the farmer said, answering a question Bell hadn’t yet thought to pose.
“And you left it in there like that?”
“What was I s’posed to do with it? ’Sides, I figured you’d’ve insisted an animal had done the killing, ’less you saw this for yerself.”
“Yeah,” the sheriff said. He stood and flung the pen off into the weeds—gift or no gift, he no longer wanted it anywhere near him. “You figured right.”
“It had started falling out, so I used a stick to push it back in,” Whitey said. “Weren’t no easy job getting his yap closed, but I wanted it to stay put.”
Bell stared at the farmer, not sure what to say.
“Trying to do my civic duty, Sheriff,” Whitey said and nodded. “That’s all.”
“Sheriff Bell,” Fred Rigby, his deputy, called out from over near the tree line. His voice broke like he’d just that moment hit puberty. “We got something over here, too.”
The sheriff took his time getting to the deputy. Just past noon, and he was already sweating like a bald donkey’s ass. Of course, the worst heat of the day had yet to come. I’m getting too old for this, Bell thought silently, even though he wasn’t sure if he meant the heat or the job or the sight of Dowd Johnson’s bloody giblets baking in the red clay field. He drew up near Rigby, who was kneeling on the ground and heaving.
“Ah, pull it together, boy,” the sheriff said, circling around in the direction opposite of his assistant’s breakfast. There, right where the grass and weeds gave way to a line of scraggly pines, lay a decapitated head, hairy side up.
“It’s a head,” Rigby coughed out, using the sleeve of his uniform to wipe his mouth.
“Yep. I can see that,” Bell replied. “Roll it on over so we can see whose.” The deputy shot a look up at the sheriff, his lip quivering. “For God’s sake, you pansy.” Bell leaned over to grab the head by its hair, but thought better of it. Standing up straight, he rolled it over with the sole of his shoe. Rigby fell over backward and scurried away like a crab from the upturned face. He made it to his feet, but then stood frozen, staring down into the head’s open eyes. “If you are through with pissing yourself,” Bell said, recognizing Bob McKee’s face, “you can start beating the bush to see if you can find the rest of ole Bob here.”
Bell decided he could make his own life a whole heck of a lot easier if he called Frank Mason to confirm this wasn’t some of his or his buddy Bayard’s handiwork. He turned back to the farmer, who had followed him to the tree line. “Mind if I use your telephone?”
FOURTEEN
“It’s for you,” Nola called to Frank from behind the bar. “Looks like folks think this is your office.”
Truth was, Frank had come to feel more at home in this windowless, whitewashed concrete block bunker of a bar than he did anywhere else. No signs, no windows, three and a half miles down a dead-end dirt road, the bar was hidden well enough that the fine upstanding people of Conroy wouldn’t call upon the Judge to shut down the only watering hole in this damned dry county. Everyone in the know called the bar “Nola’s Place,” but Nola herself didn’t own it. She only ran it. Nope, this fine establishment belonged to Judge Lowell himself. Only a handful of people knew that, though, Frank being one of them.
Frank fingered the dart he was holding, annoyed at the interruption of his practice. “Give it to him,” he said, nodding toward Bayard, who was sitting at the bar making love to a glass of sour mash bourbon.
Frank and Bayard had grown up together, but you’d never guess it. Even though he was barely thirty, Bayard looked like an old man now—all that remained of his coppery hair was a few unsightly tufts over his ears. He always looked tired; the puffy bags that bulged beneath his eyes forced them into a tight squint and enhanced Bayard’s resemblance to a pig even more than the flesh that lapped over his belt buckle. Frank felt disgust for the way his short, balding partner hung over his stool in every direction. Seeming to feel the w
eight of Frank’s eyes, Bayard turned to face him and peered at him down his purple-veined nose with bloodshot blue eyes.
Nola shook her head. “Sorry, sugar, they’re asking for you.”
“Who is it?” Frank asked, but her only response was to raise her eyebrows and thrust the receiver in his direction. Nola was well past her prime. Probably old enough to be his mother. But she was still well put together, and she was all woman. Ratted bleached blonde hair tumbled around her shoulders—her cuffs and collar didn’t match at all, but Frank didn’t mind—and smudgy bright red lipstick stained the cigarette dangling from her lips.
Frank didn’t have a taste for Sunday school teachers, so Nola and her hardened look suited him just fine. Besides, her age made it possible for him to have her anytime he wanted without a rubber, and that was real nice. Today, though, he was thinking it might be nicer to give her something other than that cigarette to rub her lipstick off on. He felt himself stiffening at the thought.
Nola whisked the cigarette from between her lips and flicked ashes into an already-full tray. “Come on, don’t keep your boyfriend waiting,” she said. Nola had gotten real cocky with him since he’d finally started slipping it to her, but he didn’t really mind that either. He liked some fire in his women.
He threw the dart he’d been holding, landing it dead in the bull’s-eye. Quick. Clean. Efficient. Just the way he liked to deliver. He ran a hand through his thick black hair and headed for the bar. As he took the receiver from Nola, he grasped her hand around it, forcing her to look into his eyes. He held on until he saw the flash he wanted to see, the spark that told him Nola wanted exactly what he had to offer. Then he loosened his grip, and she let the receiver slide into his fingers.