by Sam Witt
The drive over to the Ranson place took longer than Joe would’ve liked, and by the time he arrived he was regretting his decision to leave home without his first cup of coffee. His stomach growled, reminding Joe that it wasn’t just caffeine he skipped. “There better be something good here,” he grumbled and flung open the truck’s door.
Like Preacher Walker before him, Aaron rode around in luxury. The church’s bone-white Hummer was parked in the mansion’s circle drive, square in front of the door. Joe felt like scratching the paint as he walked past it, just to remind the kid of the price Walker had paid for his indulgences. Joe didn’t believe preachers should live in luxury, not while their flocks suffered in abject poverty as they did in Pitchfork.
The mansion’s door was wide open, and the Hummer’s driver stood next to it. He motioned for Joe to enter and nodded as the Night Marshal passed him. The big, bald man had never spoken, as far as Joe knew, and it didn’t look like he was going to start today.
Inside, the mansion was still and cool. Aaron was sitting in a chair someone had pulled into the entryway, leaning forward with his hands clasped under his chin and his elbows on his knees. He was staring at a red stain on the marble-tiled floor before him.
Joe cleared his throat to get the kid’s attention. Aaron blinked his eyes, sat up, and nodded to Joe.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. His eyes were red, and there was a faint tremor shaking his hands. “I hope you can tell me something about this.”
Above the stain, a silken bundle hung from the chandelier. It was thin and malformed, with a red-stained hole at the end nearest the floor. Joe crouched down and slid his fingers into the hole. Dry teeth scraped against his skin, and the leathery roughness of a tongue brushed against his fingertips.
He found what he was looking for and gripped it with his nails. This stele was crammed even farther down this victim’s throat, and Joe had to brace his other hand against the body to lever it free. The cone popped loose with a wet slurp, and a gout of bloody sludge followed it. Joe jumped back to avoid the gore, but he wasn’t quick enough to avoid having the toes of his boots splashed. “Goddammit,” he muttered. He’d liked those boots and knew all too well how difficult it was to get blood out of leather.
Aaron made a disapproving noise from where he sat, and Joe turned to face him. The Night Marshal showed the bloody stele to the young preacher. Blood dripped from its tip, splashing onto the tile. “You recognize this?”
The young preacher’s face paled, and he shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like any of this.”
Joe nodded and pulled a handful of old rags from his satchel. He wiped down the stele with one of the rags and then wrapped it up with the others before stuffing it back into the satchel. “I don’t reckon many folks around here have. I’ll take this back to my place and see if I can figure anything out. Thanks for letting me know about this. The sheriff,” Joe paused to think of how he wanted to express his relationship with law enforcement these days, “she’s not real thrilled with me poking around crime scenes. Best if I get gone.”
The silk-shrouded body twisted in the faint wind from the open door, drooling arcs of thick blood onto the floor. Joe didn’t reckon there was anything else for him to find here, so he tipped his hat to the pastor and headed for the door. Maybe he could get Trevor to take a look at this stele as well; maybe there was something new that would help him find the killer. Failing that, maybe the killer would get brave and come after the stele as it’d promised. Joe felt more comfortable with his chances in a stand-up fight than he did digging around inside dead bodies for clues. “You can go ahead and call the law now,” Joe said from the doorway. “The sheriff’ll clean all this up.”
Aaron stared at Joe with watery, hurt eyes. “That’s it?”
Joe shrugged. He had what he needed from this crime scene, didn’t see much point in sticking around. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”
The young pastor scrubbed his cheeks with the palms of his hands as if trying to warm his face. He gestured toward the body dangling from the chandelier. “You swore an oath to watch over these people. Don’t you even want to know who this is?”
Joe looked away, his own face warming at the boy’s stinging rebuke. He didn’t know how to explain that it didn’t matter. One death was pretty much like any other, and the important part of his job was finding the killer, not mourning the dead. So far, the asshole spider freak murdering folks in his county had offed a piece of trailer trash, somebody’s little girl, and now one of Pitchfork’s dwindling number of rich folks. If Joe took the time to think about these murders, if he let the deaths weigh on his conscience, he’d never solve anything. He wrapped all of these thoughts up into a hard little ball and tossed it at the preacher. “It doesn’t even matter who this is.”
A sudden fire burnt in the boy’s eyes. Aaron was barely a teenager, but Joe saw something much older, much more dangerous, in his face just then. “All lives matter. This may be just a corpse to you, just an old woman one of your monsters killed, but she mattered. You didn’t even ask why I was here.”
Joe let out a frustrated side. “Look, kid, I get it—”
The words that tumbled from the boy’s mouth had the weight of an avalanche behind them. They sounded as if they came from a deep, dark hole in the earth, and Joe knew at once that he had the attention of the Red Oak, one of Pitchfork’s greater powers. “Mary Ranson was one of mine. She and her family’s generosity will be gravely missed by my shepherd and his flock. This is not just some defiled body to be poked and prodded in your quest for vengeance. Her life mattered, and her death matters even more.”
The Red Oak’s presence fled from Aaron as fast as it had come. A shiver raced up Joe’s spine at the tears of dirt spilling from the young man’s eyes.
“You’re right,” Joe said, a sudden spike of adrenaline jolting him into motion. The Red Oak’s words tipped a chain of thoughts into motion, and they tumbled through his head like falling dominoes. “It does matter who this was, and the others mattered, too.”
Because there was something Joe remembered, now. Something he’d seen while reading his father’s old journals. He left the Ranson estate at a run and threw himself into his old pickup. He needed to get back home. He needed to get back to those journals. He needed to find out if he was right, but he prayed that he wasn’t.
16
The meeting with Aaron in the Ranson house had opened Joe’s eyes. He thought these were crimes perpetrated by some monster he needed to catch. But looking at the victims, or more specifically the victims’ families, might put him one step ahead of Itsike. If he was right, he’d at least know who was on the hit list.
Joe parked the old pickup in front of the house and jumped out before the engine had a chance to die. He stormed up the front steps, threw open the door, and headed for the basement with the front door slamming behind him.
“Hey!” Stevie called from the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”
Joe didn’t stop in his rush to the basement but called back over his shoulder, “I’ve got an idea, but I kind of hope I’m wrong.”
The old journals he’d been flipping through were still scattered across the workbench, open to random pages, their bent and scarred covers overlapping. He adjusted the overhead light and flipped through the handwritten books in search of an item he’d seen the night before.
The journals were labeled with year and volume, but checking their spines did little to help Joe find what he was looking for. His father wrote things down as they came to him; he hadn’t organized them in any other way. Joe forced himself to slow down, to take one book at a time and flip through it page by page.
After an hour of searching, he finally found the chart he was looking for. His father had put together a chronological list of families who’d come to Pitchfork, tracing their lines as far back as the early trappers who’d come West in the late 1700s. The list was exhaustive, but Joe wasn’t interested in all the families, just a sm
all number of them.
The ones his father had marked as the founders of Pitchfork’s earliest town: Ironton.
There were seven families, all of whom had done quite well for themselves from the moment their town had sprung into being. Despite their early prosperity, things weren’t looking up for those families right now.
“Find something?” Stevie’s long fingers settled on Joe’s shoulders. Her touch caused him to jump with surprise, but he relaxed as she worked the knots from his muscles. “You ran down here like a cat with its tail on fire.”
Joe nodded and tapped the open journal. “The old man kept this list of all of the founding fathers of Ironton, which is pretty much the same thing as the founding families of Pitchfork County.”
“Let me guess,” Stevie offered, “those are the families your spider’s been hunting.”
“Sure looks that way.” Joe ran his finger down the list of names, stopping at the surname of the first murder victim. “Here’s Jimmy Ginlet. He was the last of his line; the only one left other than him is his granny, and she’s gotta be at the end of her rope, too.”
Stevie moved to Joe’s side and leaned over to get a better look at the journal. “Kathy Yodlee was the second one, right? Her family’s on the list.”
“Yeah, and I was over at Mary Ranson’s place this morning. Same spider shit, so I reckon my theory is proving out.” Joe dogeared the journal and pocketed it. “This thing moves fast, so we’re going to have to figure out who we cover first.”
Stevie frowned at Joe. “Why not get the sheriff involved? You’ve been trying to get on her good side, so why not turn over the names so she can get ahead of this thing?”
Joe scratched at the scruff on his chin and thought about Stevie’s suggestion. In the end, though, he had to reject it. “I don’t trust her. Not just because she’s such a bitch these days, but because she’s under the Long Man’s thumb, and he’s definitely not playing for my team. If I tell Laralaine, I don’t know what she’s going to do. For all I know, she and the old monster want this shit to go down.”
“You really think he’s willing to let something else come in and stomp around in his territory?”
“I don’t know what to think about him anymore.” Joe hated to admit it, but despite the oath he’d sworn as Night Marshal, and the link that had bee forged between him and the Long Man, he’d never felt more distant from the Black Lodge. The Long Man was getting stronger, and he was using that strength to hurt Joe. Like all oaths, the ties that bound them together worked both ways, which meant they couldn’t get away from each other unless both of them forswore their vows or either of them died. But that didn’t mean the Long Man wasn’t going to do everything he could to limit the help he had to give to Joe. “To get rid of me, he might do just about anything.”
Stevie blew out a sigh. “All right, so that leaves just us. I might really get some help from the Conclave, but the last time they worked with me most of them ended up beat to hell. Not all of them are going to be up for another challenge. How many families haven’t lost someone to this asshole?”
Joe didn’t have to look at the book; the list of families was burnt into his head. “Woodhawks.”
“Al can go there,” Stevie suggested. “He’s good friends with Trevor, so he shouldn’t have any trouble with that.”
Joe nodded. “That’ll work. Wish I’d figured this out the last time I was at their place. Then we’ll have to deal with the Hackthorn family.”
Stevie snorted. “There isn’t a Hackthorn family. All that’s left of them is Mildred. I’ll take Elsa out to her place and keep and eye on her.”
“That just leaves two more families. And, honestly, one of them can go fuck themselves. Goddamned Blackbriars.”
“Leave them for last. I don’t like the idea of hanging anyone out to dry, but they haven’t exactly earned a rescue from the cavalry.”
“Here’s hoping the spiders get to them before I do.” Joe didn’t trust any of the Blackbriars, and the idea of rescuing them from a problem that they most likely had a hand in creating made his stomach hurt. “That just leaves the Ehrmans.”
“Zeke?” Stevie seemed as surprised by that as Joe had been.
“Yep. Wanna bet he’s sitting on some kind of ancestral loot?”
Stevie shook her head. “No bets from me. It’d be just like him to live like a junkyard rat and be rich as hell.”
“You know this plan splits us all up, right? If we have to sit on people waiting for the spiders to come, were going to be awfully goddamn vulnerable.”
“So we don’t sit on them at their houses. Bring ’em here.”
“That might work,” Joe said, thinking about it. “But that means I’m going have to convince Zeke to come down out of the hills, and he’s going to hate the hell out of that.”
“You’ll just have to sweet-talk him,” Stevie snickered. “Tell him I’ll bake him a pie or some shit. Just get him down here before something else goes wrong. He’s still bitching about that arm, and if he loses the other one, he’s never going to shut up.”
“In all fairness, losing an arm is kind of the shits.” Joe tried to think of a way to get Zeke to come in for his own safety. The old man was stubborn as hell and wasn’t going to be much fun. But he liked the idea of the last family coming into his house even less. “You sure about bringing the Blackbriars in?”
Stevie leaned back and brushed the hair away from her forehead. The Blackbriars had nearly killed her husband, and damn near wiped out half the county in the process. But despite their crimes, they were Pitchfork’s people, and that made them her people, too. “I don’t like it, but I’m sure about it. We’ll just have to keep an eye on them and make sure they know we aren’t fucking around. If they push it, then out they go into the cold. Maybe they’ll come to their senses after the spider eats one or two of them.”
“All right, we need to get moving on this. Let’s round ’em up, and bring ’em in. The longer they’re out there, the more likely it is the spider beats us to them.”
“What do you think this is all about?”
Joe thought about it for a moment then said, “Old mistakes that we’re going to have to make right. Same as always.”
He followed Stevie out of the basement, wondering if they were going to be fast enough. Wondering if they were going to be able to stop this before it was was far too late.
17
Stevie steered the Rambler down the rutted lane leading to Mildred’s isolated home. She was embarrassed to realize she’d never visited the older witch’s home and was shocked by just how far out in the weeds Mildred lived. It was a wonder anyone ever saw the ancient witch, considering it took Stevie most of two hours to get to the place and Mildred didn’t have a car as far as anyone knew.
Elsa piped up from the seat next to her mother, giggling as she said, “Maybe she gets around on her broom.”
Stevie ruffled her daughter’s hair, “Now you’re just being silly. Witches don’t have brooms.”
Though she tried to keep her tone light, Stevie was more than a little concerned about the way her daughter picked thoughts out of her head. She was going to have to keep an eye on that because Elsa was a bit young to handle that kind of power.
“No, I’m not,” Elsa groused. She changed the subject by pointing at the trees lining the gravel driveway ahead of them. “What’s wrong with those trees?”
Something clung to the tree limbs, forming bulging sacks that drooped between the leaves. They squirmed as if with a life of their own, and Stevie grimaced. “Looks like bagworms,” she said. “Mildred should’ve been keeping these away with her witchcraft.”
But that didn’t sit right with Stevie. There wouldn’t be any bagworms with snow still on the ground. As they drove on, she could see the deformities were enormous webs woven through the tree limbs to capture birds as they swooped in to pluck off bits of old fruit and the frozen carcasses of bugs that still clung to the trees. The apple trees were weighed dow
n with the bodies of crows and starlings, all of which were dead or dying. Those still living flapped their wings in a vain attempt to escape but accomplished nothing more than wrapping themselves tighter and tighter in the sticky silk.
Elsa whispered, “Spiders.”
Stevie stomped on the gas and wrestled with the Rambler’s wheel to keep the car from fishtailing on the gravel. She was too late; the spiders were already here. She cursed herself for being too slow to save Mildred.
By the time the house was in sight, the spiderwebs completely blocked the Rambler’s path. They crisscrossed between the trees, strung so tightly they pulled their tops toward one another, forming a grisly silken arch laden with the corpses and skeletons of dead birds.
With a cry of disgust, Stevie rolled down the window and shoved her arm outside. She spat an ancient word of command and forked her fingers at the webs ahead of her.
The air shook with blistering power, and a churning wall of scorching wind rolled down the driveway toward the house. The webs flared orange as the heat devoured the silk and all it contained. Unseen fire elementals cleared a path to the house with frightening efficiency.
Stevie rolled up the window and eased the Rambler forward, turning on the windshield wipers to drive away the fine ash falling around her.
Elsa bounced in the seat next to her mother, eyes bright with excitement. “Can you teach me that?”
Stevie parked in front of Mildred’s home and threw the Rambler’s door open. “When you’re older,” she said.
She tried not to think about whether or not the promise was true because she wasn’t sure that Elsa would ever be able to handle witchcraft. The girl’s powers had gone in a different direction, and Stevie hadn’t really had a chance to think about what that meant. She didn’t have time to think about it now, either. She was too focused on finding out whether or not Mildred was still alive.
Stevie stomped toward the house, guiding the fire elementals ahead of her to keep the path clear. Though they whined and struggled against the bonds she had wrapped around them, the fiery spirits did as they were told. She tried not to look down at the countless sparks and popping flares of fire that marked the locations were spiders were burnt to a crisp. The sounds were bad enough; she didn’t know if she could hold her nerve if she could see just how many spiders were surrounding them. Stevie wasn’t afraid of very many things, but arachnids of all types topped the list of critters she did not enjoy being around. By the time they reached the front door, the air was full of pungent smoke that marked the passing of countless eight-legged pests.