by Sam Witt
Joe held his tongue. Stevie didn’t need to know how close Joe had come to killing the boy. Some secrets are better left to lie.
“And this problem with Elsa…” a lone tear tumbled down her cheek, and she swept it away with her hand, cutting the sentence off with the same gesture.
“What happened?” Joe was relieved that what he’d been fighting hadn’t come into his daughter, but something had hurt her. He had to figure out what, so he could fix it.
“She was working, and she fell,” Stevie tried to put her thoughts together, but the fragments of memory wouldn’t line up straight for her. “There was a noise that wasn’t a noise, like a television with the sound all the way down. And the mask, it was dark. Almost black.”
“Where is it now?”
Stevie didn’t say a word, just turned and walked out the front door. Joe followed her down the driveway that led to her house. She moved like a ghost, her black dress hiding her long legs, her pale feet flashing in the moonlight as she walked. Her golden hair caught the moonlight in its curling waves, held it, wore it like a bow.
She stopped, pushed a wayward lock of hair back over her ear and half-turned to Joe. Her eyes were wet with tears that she refused to let fall, but her voice was calm and steady when she spoke.
“Things could have been different, couldn’t they?”
“I think so. I hope so.” Joe cleared his throat. He loved Stevie in a way that threatened to tear his heart out of his chest and set it afire. He hated her with a pure, cool fury that threatened to slice her clean through. His conflicting emotions warred within him, locked in place by the death curse her mother had loosed on them the day Joe killed her. “I loved you so much, Stevie.”
She nodded, remembering. She lowered her eyes, giving Joe the privacy to remember, too.
His father, the Night Marshal then, screaming as the Bog Witch bled him dry. The bone hooks crawling over the old man’s face, lacerating, digging deep to the bone. Joe fighting his way through the brackish water, struggling to reach the only man he’d ever admired, the only man whose approval ever meant a damn to him. Seeing it then, in his father’s eyes, that disappointment that robbed him of his strength and stole away his will to fight. He’d let the old man down again.
“You beat her.” Stevie whispered the words, as if afraid her ancient, dead mother would hear them and strike her down for such impudence.
“Did I?” Joe pushed the rest of the memory away, shoving away the vivid images of his flayed father and the scorched crater he’d left in the Bog Witch’s face. Her curse had flowed out of her like the stink of sour milk, binding Joe and Stevie together, tying their love to the hate she felt for him. They could never have one without the other, not so long as they both lived. “It doesn’t feel like it.”
Stevie led him the rest of the way to the shack, slowing so he had to step with care to avoid running into her. He wanted to touch her, to feel his wife’s hair flowing across his fingers, to feel the soft curve of her cheek under his palm. His fingers yearned to squeeze around Stevie’s throat until her eyes bulged from their sockets and her tongue jutted black and dead from between purple lips.
“Wait here,” Stevie said. She disappeared into the little house, and Joe wondered how it felt from her side of things. Did she dream of poisoning him, of watching him beg for death while one of her potions melted his guts like candle wax? Did she wonder what it would feel like to slit his belly open and bury her hands in his entrails? Did she miss him?
She came back to him with the mask. It was thick and misshapen, a crude lump compared to Elsa’s usual artistry. Stevie pushed the lumpen clay at him, and he took it with dread.
The mask was dark and heavy as wrought iron. Its mouth was a jagged slash that sneered at Joe from beneath a sloppy gouge of a nose. The triangle of close-set eyes filled Joe with dark hate.
“You fucker,” he snarled and clenched the mask until his fingers ached. Joe could almost hear its laughter.
He stormed back to the house, grinding the gravel beneath his hobnailed boots. Stevie called his name, but to Joe it was no more than the buzz of a mosquito in his ears. He blew into Elsa’s room like a spring gale.
The Night Marshal stood over his daughter’s still body and held the mask overhead.
“Let her go,” he shouted, and slammed the mask to the hardwood floor. It landed with a muted clang and did not bounce. Joe raised his foot and brought it down on the center of the mask, driving all his weight down into it.
His heel struck the mask and bounced off. Joe fell to one side, sliding down Elsa’s dresser to the floor.
He reached for the mask, but Stevie beat him to it. She lifted the dark lump to her chest and held it close.
“You recognize this?”
Joe nodded.
“Let my baby go,” Stevie whispered and shoved the fingers of her right hand into the mask’s eyes. “You can’t have her.”
She folded her hands, and a white light jumped from her to the mask with a whip crack. The mask flew from her fingers and bounced across the floor.
Elsa blinked and sat up, yawning.
“Did I do good, Daddy?” She grinned and reached for Joe, arms wide.
“You did great, baby.” Joe hauled himself up and pulled Elsa up into her arms. “But you scared us a little.”
She wriggled in his arms, making herself comfortable. “It was scary,” she said. “But just a little.”
“It’s gone, now.” Joe kissed the top of Elsa’s head.
“We’ll see,” Elsa whispered, stroking the back of her father’s hand. “I reckon we’ll just have to see.”
CHAPTER 20
JOE DRANK. HE sat in the big chair in the family room and cracked the top on a Budweiser and stared out the picture window overlooking the long road down to Stevie’s house. He was so beat, the act of lifting the beer to his mouth almost wasn’t worth the effort. Almost.
The beer, pale and watery as it was, flowed over Joe’s taste buds and soaked into his parched throat. His nerves jumped at the trickle of alcohol, twitching awake and yearning for more. He finished the first beer in two swallows and leaned forward to place the empty can on the coffee table.
“You should take a shower.” Stevie. Still nearby, instead of down in the little house where she belonged, away from him where he couldn’t hurt her. “Let me look at you, see how many stitches you’ll need this time.”
“In a minute.” Joe didn’t look at his wife. The fury of battle was gone, leaving behind a raw ache that felt like his muscles had been torn off, flipped over, and then stitched on upside down. His stomach was a clenched fist, growling for something more nourishing than alcohol. He finished his second beer and stacked it on top of the first. Joe reached down into the cooler resting to the left of his chair and fished another beer out of the melting ice.
Stevie was at his side before he could pop the top. She pulled the cold, wet can from his fingers, careful not to touch his skin. She popped the tab and handed the open beer to him, then lifted another one from the open cooler.
“You hate beer.” Joe guzzled half of his drink, not daring to look at his wife. She was too close, within easy reach.
“Suffer not a witch?” Stevie snapped her own beer open and took a gulp that even Joe could respect. “I can see it in your eyes.”
Joe opened his mouth, but his feelings were too conflicted, too complex to fit into a smart-ass comeback. He remembered the beating he got for watching Doug Henning do his fake magic on a friend’s television. Remembered helping the old man bury a devil cat at Broken Pole Crossing while it hissed curses at them both. That last look as Joe lifted the old man’s shotgun and blew the Bog Witch straight back to hell. Memories that haunted him, made him wonder if he could ever fill the shoes his father left behind; or if those were shoes that should be filled. The old man had been hell on Joe, but the people of Pitchfork had trusted him and came to him with their problems. They feared Joe, and rightly avoided drawing his suspicion. It wa
s a difference that troubled Joe, a difference he tried to wash away from his thoughts with another drink of beer.
“Your father. My mother. I know.” Stevie sat down on the couch to Joe’s right and leaned back. She ran the cool bottom edge of the beer can across her forehead. Took another long pull. “Elsa wants us all to move up here. With you.”
“No.” Joe finished his beer, dunked his hand for another. “There’s room for them down with you. It’s safer.”
“It’s not.” Stevie looked out the window at her house, which no longer seemed quite so cozy. Darkness had crawled through its window. “That got to Elsa under my roof, Joe. How much more dangerous does it have to get before you let us live with you?”
“You want to die? That it?” The third empty can joined the tower growing in front of him. He took another beer despite Stevie’s disapproving scowl. He could tell the alcohol was in his system, but only because he no longer felt quite so many of his cuts and bruises. He wasn’t drunk. Not yet. “That’s who I am, Stevie. A witch hunter.”
“You’re the Night Marshal. You don’t hunt witches, you hunt the evil of the Left-Hand Path.”
“I am the sword against the darkness, the shield against iniquity.” Joe cracked another beer. “Same old bullshit.”
Stevie lunged off the couch so fast her beer sloshed out of the can and misted the air behind her.
“Then why don’t you just do it?” Stevie crouched over her husband and shoved her face so close to his he could feel her breath on his lips. “You’re the bad man, the executioner; is that right? Then let’s stop pretending and get it over with.”
She let the can fall from her hand to the floor. Beer fizzed from it and splashed over their feet. Stevie took his left hand in both of hers and lifted it between them. His fingers dangled, nerveless and useless from the knife wound in his arm.
Joe tensed. His instincts screamed for him to lash out. His upbringing combined with the spell the Bog Witch had laid upon his heart had crumpled Joe’s soul into a ball of misery.
“You haven’t broken the Law.” Joe pushed Stevie back and drained the last of his beer. “Not where I could see.”
“You’re a good man, Joe. I’m your wife. They’re your children.” Stevie braved the darkness and brushed Joe’s forehead with a quick kiss before dropping his hand and stepping back. “We won’t break the Law. You won’t ever have to put us down like you did those men tonight.”
Joe shoved himself up from the chair with his good arm, and Stevie gave a quick jump back out of reach. He smiled at her, eyes cold and flat. “Even you don’t believe it, Stevie. You know what my father always said? All magic turns. All witches burn.”
He left her there with his empty beer cans and her tears. Afraid to stay with her. Afraid to comfort her. Afraid to be the husband she deserved.
Joe hauled himself to the bathroom, pausing in the kitchen long enough to snatch a bottle of whiskey from his stash on top of the refrigerator. He shed his clothes at the bathroom door, peeling them away from the sticky wounds on his back.
Two hard swallows of whiskey, the kind that burned going down and wedged themselves in the center of his chest, eased the pain a little. He sat on the toilet and took another swallow, splashed the bowl with equal parts piss and blood.
The Night Marshal cranked up the shower and held his head under the still-cold water. His scalp throbbed, and the water ran red from his injuries and the blood from the Pryors that had soaked into his skin. His forehead itched, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something wrong, something lurking at the edges of his thoughts. He stared down at his feet and watched streams of black and red pour down his legs and swirl together in the tub. He drank while the water grew hot, then drank until it went cold and every pelting drop raised new goosebumps across his flesh. He stood shivering in the cold water, drinking to warm himself, drinking to numb the pain, drinking to forget.
Stevie shut off the water and took the bottle from his hand. “That’s enough.”
Joe stared at her with bleary eyes and stumbled out of the shower, nearly falling when his toes clipped the edge of the tub. He walked naked out of the bathroom into his bedroom. He flopped down on top of the covers and let the chill night air lick the water from his skin. The room swam around him, and his eyes were too heavy to hold open. The alcohol haze closed around Joe’s brain like a coal-black fist, and drowned him in a fitful, twitching sleep.
He woke deep in the night, hauled up from his blackout by a series of sharp bites along the side of his neck. Too drunk to fight, he stared into the darkness until Stevie’s face floated out of the shadows. She was bent over him, a curved needle in one hand, her other hand holding Joe’s head flat against his pillow.
“Shhhh,” she whispered, “it’s only stitches.”
Joe drifted on the pain, the tender torture that was the only way his wife dared to touch him for more than a moment. While she healed his battered flesh, Stevie could fight the Bog Witch’s curse with her own gifts, trading one kind of pain for another. Joe let himself fall back into the lake of alcohol sloshing in the bottom of his skull. Without Stevie’s skills, he would heal, but it would take days longer. Joe let her work.
He dreamed of bats, hungry mouths and bottomless, sucking gullets.
The sun had only begun to rise when the black phone on the nightstand rang.
“Hello?” Joe was talking into the phone before he realized he’d picked it up, almost before he was awake. Years of conditioning made him respond without thought - the black phone rings, the Night Marshal answers.
“You should get yourself down to Chickinee Springs, my friend.” The voice on the other end of the line was smooth and mellow, but it commanded respect, demanded obedience.
“It’s awful fucking early for this shit.” Joe’s skull throbbed, an insistent pressure that threatened to crack open his head and let his brains ooze out onto the sheets.
“Get down to the Springs, Jonah.”
“What now?” Joe was out of bed, careful not to pull the stitches Stevie had sewn into him during the night.
“They left you another one.” There was a soft chuckle on the end of the phone, a sound that echoed with depths of chilling insanity.
“Another what?” Joe didn’t want to know the answer to his question. He wanted to crawl back under the covers and spend a few weeks healing.
“Another girl, Joe. Another fucked-up, broken girl.”
CHAPTER 21
THE OLD TRUCK did not want to make the trip to Chickinee Springs. It groaned and rattled as Joe forced it up and over the low Houngan’s Pass through the St. Francois Mountains’ western leg. It backfired and shuddered when he wound it down the far side of each mountain. It skidded and barked its tires around a hard left into Fallen Star Hollow. The truck let out a wheezing, smoky gasp when Joe pulled it over to the side of the road and killed its engine.
On the drive over, Joe had dredged his memories for every scrap of information he knew about the burbling source of Gold Dust Creek. The people of Pitchfork County regarded its waters as sacred, and hundreds of them had been dunked in the springs’ wide, shallow basin in the years before Red Oak installed its own baptistery. It was a calm, peaceful place where hikers came to relax and the local witches and yarb doctors gathered under the moonlight to fill vials of its pure water for use in their work. It was one of the most peaceful places Joe had ever visited, and he was pissed that someone had tainted it.
Joe’s heart lurched at the sight of the police cruisers down near the edge of the springs. He tried not to think of the oil and gas and antifreeze and transmission fluid leaking out of the aging cars and dribbling down into those clean waters. He reached for his hat out of instinct, then remembered he’d lost it the day before. The early morning sun hadn’t quite crawled down into the hollow yet, but it was still bright enough to make his eyes burn.
“I’ve got to get a hat.” Joe grabbed his shotgun from the rack in the truck’s rear window and slung
the weapon’s strap over his shoulder. He called out to the officers gathered around the spring, “Good morning.”
They watched him walk down from where he’d parked, talking to one another out of the sides of their mouths, eyes narrowed to belligerent slits. Joe didn’t have time to adjust their attitudes just then, but he made a promise to himself to straighten them out later. Just then, he was more concerned about the black spike jutting up out of the spring.
“What’s this?” He asked the sheriff.
“No idea.” The sheriff didn’t bother to stifle his yawn or look at Joe. “Let me know what you think after you’ve had a look. I’ll be in my car.”
Joe watched the sheriff and his deputies saunter away and slither inside their rattletrap vehicles. He envied the hats he saw the men pull down over their eyes as they settled in behind the wheels of their cars. “Gotta get a hat,” he said.
It wasn’t just the stale alcohol and curdled bile that made Joe’s stomach churn. Thick clouds of blood swirled in the water’s depths, spilling out from around the wrought iron spike as if the spring itself were mortally wounded. The rising blood formed thick streams on the surface that ran out of the spring and into the creek, splashing red onto its banks and the larger river rocks jutting up from its bed.
Joe reached out over the bloody water and grabbed the spike with his right hand. The black iron was cold and rough, pitted with rust and scabbed with patches of venomous-looking verdigris. Joe pulled, but the spike didn’t so much as wiggle in his hand. It was stuck fast; he wasn’t going to get it loose alone. He walked over to the sheriff’s patrol car and smacked the rolled-up window with the knuckles of his right hand.
The sheriff removed his sunglasses and placed them on the dash with exaggerated care. He adjusted his hat and pressed the button to lower the window. He yawned and turned to face Joe. “You look like buzzard shit.”
“Get a couple of your boys to help me drag this shit out of the spring.” Joe jabbed a thumb over his shoulder toward the spike. “And get your fucking cars back from the water before you have a miniature Exxon Valdez on your hands.”