by Sam Witt
He’d even left, for a while. Headed out in the summer of ‘86 in the old pickup, with nothing but his hat on his head, his shirt on his back, and an empty wallet shoved into the back pocket of his well-worn jeans. That trip had ended with his best friend’s death and Joe back in Pitchfork trying to make amends. A few years after that he’d left again, spent a decade wandering the back roads of America before a steady diet of walking nightmares and booze had driven his life off the rails. Then his father had tracked Joe down and shamed him into coming back home to help out with the family business of killing monsters.
That was more than a decade in the past. Before the old man died. Before Joe knew about Alasdair. When he’d still thought he could be free of the county and its curse.
Now, the burden of protecting the place fell on his shoulders. In the end, Pitchfork always called its own back home. It was a bad place that needed bad men to keep its evil from seeping out into the rest of the world like an infection. For now, Joe was that bad man and would be until the job killed him. He tried not to think about whom the badge would go to once he was in the ground. Maybe no one would be fit for the job, and all the madness Pitchfork held would spill over its borders and drown the rest of the world. Sometimes it felt like that, as if Joe was all that stood between the world of men and a rising tide of monsters.
Joe’s thoughts throbbed around his memory of the church girl, his hangover aching like a bad tooth. Maybe he could swing by the big house, pick up a six pack to take the edge off what he’d just seen before he took Elsa home to her mom. Maybe snag another sixer from the Whistle Stop on his way over to talk to Preacher Walker about the bullshit that had gone down in Red Oak while the minister sat on his fat ass in his big house on the hill. Just thinking about those visits made Joe’s throat yearn for a shot of whiskey.
Elsa mumbled in her sleep and curled up tight against the passenger door, tugging her blanket up to her chin. Her ghost mask cracked, bit by bit, as Joe drove home. Gray flakes of dry clay tumbled into her lap like falling snow, drifting into the ratty old blanket’s creases. Joe wondered what it was like, sharing your meat and bones with strangers. He wondered if it was right to let Elsa share like that, if he was going straight to hell for letting his little girl help him with the job he’d fallen into when his daddy died.
He downshifted, slowing the truck to navigate the precarious mining track an asshole politician had decided to label as a highway in order to steal some federal money for maintenance that never happened. The truck’s engine whined, and the transmission grumbled, but Joe ignored their protests. The truck ran as much on his willpower as it did on gasoline and motor oil. It would do its job for as long as Joe had to do his, and wouldn't be any happier about it.
“Not like I have a choice,” Joe grumbled.
“Everyone has choices,” a chill voice said.
Joe started at the words, and the truck’s wheels slipped near the steep downhill side of the road before he could get it back under control. Gravel spit and pinged against the truck’s undercarriage, and for one heart-stopping moment Joe stared down over the edge of the road to the steep, treacherous slope below. He eased the truck back toward the center of the road and let out a long, slow sigh.
Elsa’s mask was crumbled to dust, the twine straps tangled in the golden curls of her hair. An old man’s ghost floated in the space between Joe and his daughter, squinting through round owl’s-eye glasses and adjusting fancy clothes that would have looked right at home on the streets of St. Louis fifty years ago.
“Some of us have less choice than others,” Joe replied and put his attention back on the road where it belonged. Sometimes Elsa’s ghosts hung around for a few minutes after her mask broke to chat. It annoyed the piss out of Joe. “My daddy didn’t offer me much alternative when the Bog Witch stuck that hawthorn branch through his heart. He named me, and on came the star.”
Joe tugged at the tattered lapel of his heavy duster, showing the spirit the silver pentacle-in-a-circle of the Night Marshal’s badge.
“Pass it on.” The spirit shrugged. “No one can make you do this job.”
“You know what will happen if there’s no Night Marshal to keep an eye on the goings-on here in Pitchfork?”
The spirit chuckled to itself, a sound like a stream flowing into a hole in the ground.
“I do not, Marshal. But I wonder – do you know what would happen if there were no Night Marshal to ride herd over the good folk of Pitchfork County?”
“Madness. Chaos. Rains of blood and frogs. Rivers running back on themselves. Dogs chewing off their tails and cats stuffing their bellies with thistles until they burst?” Joe shrugged at the spirit. “Just a guess.”
“Girls nailed to crosses? Witches and witch-hunters bound together by curses? Daughters possessed by impish spirits?” The old man's ghost had a smirk on its lips and a mischievous twinkle in its eye. Joe wanted to punch a hole right through that smug face.
“I believe you and I are done speaking, spirit.” Joe forked his fingers at the old man and hissed an ancient word between them, the syllables of which burnt his tongue and set his teeth to tingling. “By my warrant and sign, be on with ye.”
Joe rolled down his window, and the spirit vanished into the morning air with a puff of honeysuckle perfume and the faintest of sighs.
Elsa stirred, rubbed her eyes with balled fists. She yawned and fussed with the straps in her hair until they were untangled and lying flat in her lap. Her tiny hands brushed the clay from the folds of her blanket and onto the truck’s dusty floor.
“You all right, little bit?” Joe patted his daughter on the leg and forced a smile to crease the weathered skin of his face.
“I’m fine, Daddy.” A lazy smile, warmer and more sincere by miles than Joe’s, lit up her face. “Did I help you?”
“You did, my dear, just as you always do.”
Joe didn’t say anything else, because he was still mulling over the words his daughter had whispered to him inside the church. The words had come in the tongue of the dead, which was always tricky to decipher, but what she said made Joe wonder just how deep his troubles were getting.
“You want I should get old Billy to make you some more of them special bullets?”
“Not yet, honey.” Joe didn’t want his little girl trucking with another spirit just yet. He didn’t know what it cost her to call up the dead and let them ride around in her skin.
“I’ll ask him anyway.” Elsa looked out her window. “You might need them when you go looking for the people who worked on that girl.”
“You remember that?” The curdled dregs of last night’s booze sloshed in Joe’s stomach. He didn’t like the idea of Elsa remembering what happened with the spirits. As long as she was a passive flesh vessel for the spirits who could give him the answers he needed, Joe could keep on doing what needed to be done. But if Elsa remembered the spirits, if she remembered the crime scenes and grisly images Joe saw all too often…
“Scraps and shreds and pieces. What he said to you, mostly. About, you know, the church girl.”
“Does it scare you?” Because it sure as hell scared Joe. It was hard for him to digest the spirit’s words. It had to be harder for a little girl barely ten years old.
“I don’t think so.” She sucked on her bottom lip and cleared the curls of hair from in front of her eyes with an exasperated puff of breath. “Why’d they leave her like that? It seems mean to not finish what they started.”
Joe guided the truck into the mouth of the long, winding drive that led down to the homestead. The length of the road was flanked on either side by white ash trees, transplanted and kept healthy by Stevie and their boy, Alasdair. Blackberry bushes, thick and dense, grew in and around the trees, forming a tangled, thorned wall that smelled sweet and sticky. The bushes scraped against the side of the truck, reminding Joe he needed to get out there with some clippers to trim them back. Stevie wanted the cruel bushes gone, but Elsa and Joe loved the rich, ripe berries t
hat lurked among the heavy thorns in the spring and summer, and so the blackberries stayed.
“It wasn’t very nice, that is for certain,” Joe said. “But I don’t think they meant to leave her like that. I think someone stopped them before they could get done with whatever it is they were up to.”
“Oh,” Elsa nodded to herself, as if that made sense. “Then whoever stopped them was mean. They should have let the other ones finish with the girl, so she could have…“
Elsa gestured at her face and her feet, wiggled her fingers.
Joe didn’t say anything to that. Elsa didn’t always understand how others viewed the world or why Joe had to do the things he did. Joe didn’t know how to explain to her that he was going to kill everyone involved with that poor girl. He had a sinking feeling that he’d have to put a bullet through the girl’s head, as well. Joe couldn’t let anyone finish what they’d started with her, and he damn sure couldn’t leave her half-made the way she was now. That was just asking for trouble.
But, first, he needed to figure out who’d hung her on that cross and what they were trying to accomplish.
“Don’t be sad, Daddy.” Elsa patted him on the shoulder, a gesture far too comradely and world weary for her tender years. “We’ll get to the bottom of this mess. We always do.”
What he’d seen in the church that morning had upset Joe’s head and stomach more than the hangover. He needed something to calm his nerves and focus his thoughts. He drove on past the rambling, cobbled-together big house and steered the truck along a deeply rutted trail that led to a clearing nestled up against a narrow spot in the Black River.
Stevie’s house was one step up from a tar paper shack, held together with spit and good wishes. She’d moved down there when the curse got to be too much for them to handle, not long after Elsa had come along. He could see her at the sink, watching him through the window, and it took everything he had to keep from storming out of the truck and into that house. His fists clenched on the wheel, and he tried not to think what would happen if he did go into that house.
“Baby girl, can you go in and ask your mom for some of her morning herbs?” Stevie had put her healing skills to use when it became clear Joe’s drinking wasn’t going to slow down. The bitter elixir helped Joe cope with his demons, even if the concoction couldn’t exorcise them.
“Sure, Daddy.” Elsa cracked the door and leapt down onto the long grass. The morning air had a cold bite, but Joe’s daughter let her warm blanket fall from her shoulders without a backward glance. Half the time, Joe wasn’t sure the girl wasn’t a spirit, herself. He watched her run through the rising sun’s light, beads of chill dew spraying like fairy dust into the air around her shins.
Alone with his thoughts, Joe wondered if he was up to the challenge of the church girl. Someone new was in Pitchfork, someone with the power and know-how to build themselves a young woman out of cast-offs and sorcery. That was serious work, the kind of witchery Pitchfork hadn’t seen for a century or more. Worse, whoever was doing it hadn’t finished the job, then decided to leave their mess up on a cross for the whole world to see.
It didn’t make sense, but it wasn't Joe's job to make sense of it.
His job was to find whoever was shitting in his county and put an end to them.
Or die trying.
CHAPTER 3
NO ONE VOLUNTEERED to take the girl off the cross.
No amount of cursing or cajoling would get any of the deputies to set foot inside Red Oak. Dan had to do it himself.
“Chickenshit asshole motherfuckers,” the sheriff’s curses puffed out of his mouth on cold little clouds as he climbed the stairs to the pulpit. Outside, the sun was rising, its rays of warmth and light stabbing down through the treetops. He envied his deputies, who stood outside in the clean air while he breathed in black smoke and stinking incense. Being the boss was a serious pain in the ass.
“Just get her down and get out,” he told himself, but his words sound weak and scared, even to his own ears.
Dan walked around the choir benches and opened the little door that led to the baptistery. The sheriff stood in front of the open door, palms sweating, but he did not enter.
His parents had taken him to Red Oak Baptist Church every Sunday morning and Wednesday night from the time Dan was born until his twelfth birthday. Dan had been a loyal member of the small congregation, bellowing out hymns and shouting amens with as much fervor as any of the adults.
Just before his thirteenth birthday, Dan heard the call. Jesus banged on the door to Dan’s heart, and he wasn’t going to stop until the young man let him inside. When Preacher Walker, old when Dan was a boy and ancient as the very hills now, had called for the faithful to heed God’s will to be saved, Dan had strutted to the front of the church with his chest out and his thumbs hooked into his belt loops. Jesus had spoken to him. Dan was one of the Chosen.
Dan said the words, invited Jesus into his life, but he was never baptized. Thirty years ago, he’d frozen at the tight staircase to the baptistery, just as he was frozen now. His breath came fast and hard, lungs working like a locomotive’s engine. No matter how many years passed, Dan knew there would always be a little bit of that terrified boy lodged inside him.
The space beyond the door seemed much smaller than Dan remembered, a constricting passage that led up into shadows. The stairs were oak, worn smooth and dark from generations of feet marching up to salvation, almost black with age. There was a smell, like animals in a pen or tarnished pennies in a Mason jar, that caught in his nose and drove spikes of fear into his brain.
“C’mon, Dan. You’re not a kid. You’re the sheriff of Pitchfork County.” He whispered the words to himself, and they helped, even though the sounds they made were flat and dead in the cold air.
Dan lurched into the tight stairwell. He took one step, then two, breathless and panicked. Something waited for him in the baptistery, the old and thirsty God that had laid its hand upon every man, woman, or child who had ever been dunked into those waters. It knew Dan, remembered his fear from across the chasm of years. Dan could feel its desire, its raw need, to touch him in some special, secret way.
The sheriff took the last few steps at a stumbling run. He stubbed his toes and barked his shins on each wooden plank, but stood at last at the top of the stairs. Dan looked down into the cramped copper well, dry and empty now, and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be submerged within its waters. The thought filled him with a nameless dread, a suffocating terror that reminded him in a rush why he’d stopped coming to church. If that’s what God’s touch felt like, the sheriff knew he was bound for hell. Whatever waited to claim his soul in that little tub terrified him. Not for the first time, Dan wondered if he was really cut out for life in Pitchfork.
A foot-wide, tiled ledge ran around the top of the baptistery to a cramped storage room. Dan squeezed his belly through the door and reached for the wooden wheel mounted against the back wall. A pair of thick, cobwebbed chains ran up from the wheel into holes in the ceiling; Dan loosened the wheel with slow turns, and heavy iron links rattled in the ceiling above his head.
The weight on the wheel dropped away, and the chains grew slack. Satisfied the crucifix was safely down, Dan headed back to the baptistery and its shadowed stairwell.
“Let’s just get this over with,” he muttered.
He was stepping over the empty pool when the church shook and a metallic snap rang through the sanctuary. Dan jumped at the sound, avoiding a nasty spill into the dry tank by a hair, and rushed down the stairs to the pulpit.
The crucifix was down, but it wasn’t resting on the altar. The girl on the cross knelt beneath its weight. She’d torn her savaged legs free of the barbed wire and was working her arms against the sharp metal tines, struggling to get them loose. She was frantic, a wounded animal willing to rip its own limbs off to be free of a snare.
Dan groped for his revolver with a fear-numbed hand. The girl stared at him, her wide eyes boring into his, he
r lipless mouth open and gulping air beneath the oozing slits of her nostrils. The pain in her eyes was a bottomless pit that threatened to drag the sheriff down into its depths.
He felt the weight of his pistol in his hand. It shook in his grip.
“Do it,” the girl gasped. Blood dripped from fresh barbed wire wounds. It ran down her arms, trickled down from her throat, and streams of it leaked out from under the hem of her tattered dress. “Don’t let him be the one to kill me.”
Dan stared at the girl over the shaking barrel of his pistol. “Stop it,” he said, his voice was weak and wavering.
“Don’t let me go like that,” the girl begged. “Don’t let him do me like he done all them others.”
The girl opened new wounds as she struggled to tear herself loose from the cross. Dan watched as a puncture in her bicep became a ragged tear, a bloody lightning bolt ripped through her skin.
“Stop. Let me cut you loose from there.” Dan put his revolver away and raised one hand, trying to soothe the girl. Her suffering raked at his conscience, made him feel like he’d failed her. “Just hush, now, and we’ll get you some help.”
“Can’t help me,” the girl sighed. “Please, mister, just get me out of here before he comes back and puts me down like he did those others.”
“No one’s going to do any such thing to you,” Dan said. “Tell me who he is, I’ll have my boys go and round him up right now.”
The girl gave her head a hopeless little shake and let out a frustrated moan.
Dan tried to ignore the echo of that moan, the hungry sound that came from the baptistery.
“It weren’t supposed to be like this,” the girl said. “Hurts something fierce. I figured I wouldn’t hardly even feel it.”
Dan pulled the wire cutters from his belt, showed them to the girl.
“Just stay like that, all right? I’m not going to hurt you, just need to get you loose.”