by Sam Witt
The kid grinned.
“Why’d you kill those people back there?” He followed Joe across the blasted acreage.
Joe walked back toward the house and crossed his fingers in the hope that his old truck hadn’t been blown up by the exploding meth lab. “They were bad people.”
“Why?” The kid followed Joe past a cluster of cowering meth heads who were poking and prodding at one another’s wounds as if trying to figure out who was hurt the worst. The boy didn’t even bother looking at the spectacle.
“They’re doing some very bad things. That makes them bad people.”
Joe picked his way through the worst of the wreckage around the crater and was relieved to find his truck more or less unscathed where he’d left it. That truck had more lives than a cat.
“I knew some of ‘em. They’d give me Snickers sometimes.” The kid chewed at the inside of his lip. “Guess most of ‘em are dead now. But they was my daddy’s friends.”
“You say your dad had a knife like this?” Joe leaned against his truck and kept an eye on the scattered addicts. They were watching him with wary eyes, but no one seemed like they had the gumption to get up to any shenanigans.
The boy nodded and sat in the gravel in front of Joe. He plucked up little rocks and threw them at his own toes. “They give him one after he helped ‘em down at that church.”
Joe felt a twinge of guilt in his gut. Here he was pumping this kid for information, a kid he was going to turn into an orphan sometime later that afternoon if everything went right. “Down at Red Oak?”
The kid nodded and gave a little shiver. “My daddy drove her down there. She was tired and sick. They made her well again. He told me all about it.”
Joe crouched down to bring his eyes closer to the boy’s face. “Did you see that girl?”
The kid shook his head and hummed a weird little tune that sent spider legs of fear crawling up the back of Joe’s neck. “Nah, just heard about it. They said we’d make her better, and she’d help us out.”
“That’s wrong.” Joe gripped the kid’s shoulder and held it tight. “That girl is going to wreck everything if I don’t stop her.”
The kid shrugged. “Why?”
“She’s like a mosquito.”
The boy pursed his lips and gave Joe a skeptical glance. “Ain’ afraid of no skeeter.”
“She’s like a mosquito with a mile-long sucker, and she’ll stick it right in this county’s heart and suck it dry.” Joe snorted the ashes out of his nose. It was more complex than that, as near as he could figure from the dead words Elsa had whispered to him. The half-made girls changed the world, made it more to their master’s liking at the expense of everyone and everything else around them. They were evil genies just waiting for some rubes to rub their lamps and make some wishes. Joe shuddered to think of the kind of stupid shit a bunch of meth addicts would want and what cost it would carry for the rest of the county. If he didn’t stop them, he had a feeling all of Pitchfork County would look like the wreckage of the farm in a matter of days.
“Daddy says that she’s here to help out. Gonna put things back the way they used to be in the olden days.”
Joe let the kid go and stood up, both his knees cracking like rifle shots. “That’s one way to look at it. I gotta go, kid.”
“You won’t take me up to see my daddy? Jenny was supposed to take me up there, but…” The kid looked around at the wreckage and gave a little hitch of his shoulders. “Pretty sure she’s dead. You could take me. Maybe we could see that girl, and she’d make everything all better.”
Joe unlocked the truck and yanked the door open. He took a last look at the kid and chewed the inside of his lower lip. He wanted to tell the boy to run and get as far from Pitchfork County as he could. He wanted to shake the kid and tell him that his daddy was an evil asshole who was willing to kill everyone he knew to make his own life a little bit better. He wanted to tell the boy he was sorry, but that he was going up to the Blackbriar place to put a slug through the old man’s forehead.
“That girl’s a monster, son.” Joe tried to put together some sort of warning that would make sense to the boy. “What your daddy did makes her stronger. Let her bring some more of her friends over to play.”
The boy grinned up at Joe. “That’s what they said. Said they were gonna have a big ol’ party and all her family was comin’ over to play. Said it was gonna be a new world, real soon.”
CHAPTER 37
THE BLACKBRIAR PLACE wasn’t a farm or a meth lab, just a big old house owned by a once-rich family that had fallen hard into the pit of poverty that had swallowed all of Pitchfork County.
In the early days, back when Pitchfork County was still empty except for the hardy men of Iron Valley, the Blackbriar clan had run three iron mines and a and a lone silver mine. The profits they’d first wrenched from the earth and later wrung from the sweat and blood of their workers had built them a home with room for generations of Blackbriars. But the mines ran dry, and the patriarch, old Hawer Blackbriar, caught the cancer. The combination had sucked the coins out of the family’s account in less than a generation.
Once upon a time, a long strip of blacktop had run from the county road all the way up the big hill to the Blackbriar place, their own private road. Now that smooth lane was pocked with craters, and the asphalt had shrunk down to a few scabs of faded black amid a stream of gray gravel. Blackberry bushes, nearly ten feet tall, crowded the road, the rich juice of their berries staining the edges of the road like spilled wine.
Joe’s old truck crouched in the shadows of a turnout just down from Blackbriar Road. The Night Marshal leaned on the wheel and nursed the last of a bottle of Jack he’d picked up from the Whistle Stop on the way out. The whiskey quieted the tremors in his hands, but did nothing to quench the dark fires of fear and rage burning in his gut. The cab stank of Walter’s blood, and Joe’s clothes and hair were heavy with the perfume of gunpowder and ashes. Every breath drew the stench deeper inside him, filled his lungs with tiny, reeking bits of those he’d killed and those he’d watched scream themselves to death as fire cooked them down to piles of greasy bones.
He was just doing his job, but Joe couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d taken a bad step, slipped off the path somewhere and all of this misery and ruin had taken root in that one bad moment.
“Fuck it,” he said, and got out of the truck.
The shotgun’s sling rode easy around his shoulder, and the weight of the gun was reassuring against his hip. An old canvas satchel went over the opposite shoulder, stuffed with shotgun shells and vials of holy water and a trio of punching knives with silvered edges. There were even a few old scrolls with Bible verses he’d scrawled in his own hand, weapons that would give spirits he couldn’t shoot pause. He had his whole devil-hunting arsenal in that bag. Joe didn’t bother locking the truck, just threw the keys under the front seat, shut the door, and started walking.
The hill up to the Blackbriar place was steeper and taller than he remembered. While he wasn’t foolish enough to stroll up the main road, that seemed more appealing with every step Joe took. The blackberry bushes had spread through the brush all over the hill, and sticker branches clutched at his face and arms, scoring bloody scratches in his flesh with every step. Joe ignored the pain. He felt he’d earned it.
The walk caked his throat with dust and pollen, his breaths came harsh and shallow. Joe didn’t figure he had much voice left, but that was all right. The shotgun would do most of the talking.
“You reckon this is the best idea?” The voice was thin as an autumn breeze, but strong enough to stop Joe in his tracks.
Joe brushed his forehead against his shoulder to wipe away the sweat and dust and took a seat at the base of a runty hickory tree. He dug the booze out of his satchel and took a swallow so long and deep it brought tears to his eyes. “I don’t even think this is in the top hundred of my best ideas,” Joe said. “But it’s not like I’ve been offered a lot of choices.”
Joe dug his thumb into the moist earth and poured a shot of whiskey into the hole, covered it up by sweeping dirt over it with the side of his hand. He raised his bottle in a vague toast and took a drink. “Figured you’d passed on a while back.”
“Did. But you never really get out of Pitchfork. Place has a pull.”
Joe grunted and took another drink. He wanted the whiskey to drive the old man away so he could get on with his chore.
“Might as well keep walkin’. I’ll follow along.”
The hill got steeper, and Joe’s heart pounded against his ribs like a wild animal stuck in a trap. He wasn’t as young as he’d once been; even the Long Man couldn’t keep a bad heart or weak lungs from taking a man down if it was his time.
“Why now?” he asked his father. “After all these years of nothing, why come back and stick your nose into my business today?”
“Didn’t seem like you needed my help before today. You kept a pretty strong hand on the reins after I passed.”
Joe stopped and looked into the shadow of a blackberry bush, hoping to catch a glimpse of the old man. A rabbit watched him from the underbrush, gray ears twitching.
“You think I need your help now?”
“I’ve got no help to offer. Just words.” A sudden wind ruffled the hair on Joe’s neck and tugged at his collar. “They know you’re comin’.”
“Yeah. Figured as much.” Joe trudged on for a few more minutes, and the slope gave way to a gentler rise. The underbrush thinned, and through the grasping branches of dead trees Joe caught a glimpse of the Blackbriar place framed in fading red light from the setting sun. It was huge, four stories, at least a dozen bedrooms, no telling what else it held. “Any last words of advice?”
“It doesn’t have to —”
The shrill chirp of Walter’s phone cut through the quiet like a buzz saw. Joe fumbled around for it, finally dug it out of his pocket. He didn’t recognize the number, didn’t have time to worry about it now. He shut off the phone and crammed it into his pocket.
He stopped in the shade of an old oak tree and watched the house. It was quiet, no voices from inside it, no radio playing, no TV blaring. Just a cold, heavy quiet. Joe put his hand on his shotgun and stepped onto the lawn. “See you soon, Daddy.”
CHAPTER 38
ELSA’S SLIGHT BODY felt like it was packed with lead, and Stevie struggled under her weight. Draping Elsa over her shoulder was the only way she could hang onto her baby girl. The incessant, bug-like chatter of the spirits leaking out of Elsa’s open mouth didn’t help matters; the swarm of voices distracted Stevie and made her feel weak and helpless. She staggered to her old car while Al ran ahead of her and fumbled with the keys to the car. He struggled to get the doors open, and Stevie sighed impatiently, the Long Man’s last words stinging her ears.
“My doors close at sundown, Stevie.”
The Rambler was cobbled together from so many spare parts and junkyard relics it was only a distant relative of its namesake. The station wagon was three different colors if you didn’t count the lacework of rust along its side panels, and its windows were scarred by gravel dings, but Stevie kept the engine ready to roll. She’d had the car since she turned sixteen, a gift from one of her mother’s wandering lovers, and treated it like she’d never have another to call her own.
Al hustled past his mother to lift the hatchback. “Sorry,” he mumbled as he watched his baby sister’s limp body laid into the back of the old car. “You want me to sit back here with her?”
Stevie pulled the hatchback closed. “No. Sit up front with me. Tell me what happened.”
Al didn’t have time to close his door before Stevie spun the Rambler around in a tight circle and pointed it toward the strip of gravel that passed for a road in front of the big house. The heavy wagon bounced up onto the road, and the big V-8 roared as Stevie’s foot sank the accelerator to the floor.
“Bats,” Al shivered on the bench seat next to his mother. He rubbed at the flaking scabs on his arms and tried to ignore the deep ache in his back from the injury he’d suffered at the Pryor Place. He could still feel it under his skin, chewing, digging, burrowing. “There were so many bats.”
Stevie didn’t speak. She could see the pain in Al’s eyes, the haunted distance she’d seen in his father over the years. There were some experiences that couldn’t be shared or questioned.
“I couldn’t kill them all. They just kept coming, there was nothing —”
He caught his breath and blinked tears away. The next words were shaky and uncertain, as if Al couldn’t make sense of what he’d seen.
“Elsa opened the door. She was screaming. So many voices. The shadows came alive, but the bats were still eating me alive. Then her mask broke.”
Al watched the sun sinking off to the west, its ruddy light spilling like blood through the clouds. “They went into her. I’ve never seen so many. She screamed and screamed.”
“It’s not your fault,” Stevie whispered, but she didn’t have the strength to make the words sound true. Elsa was special, her precious baby girl, and no one could protect her. “They took advantage of her, used her to get what they wanted.”
“She sent me after you. That’s when they came after us. Because I tried to help you.”
The accusation in Al’s voice hit Stevie like a lash. Her eyes stung with unshed tears. She didn’t dare look at her son.
“You should have stayed with her.” The words were out before Stevie could bite them back, and she couldn’t form the sentence that would take them back.
They didn’t speak to each other for the rest of the trip. Guilt and anger and weary resignation made the air in the car too thin to support apologies.
Stevie ignored the big dogs pacing the Rambler as she drove up to the Lodge. She’d never seen them before, but there was plenty of strangeness she had seen. She’d been to the Lodge twice before, both times as Joe’s guest. The first time she came so the Long Man could study her, and she remembered his penetrating gaze holding her in place like an entomology pin through a butterfly’s wing. The second time Joe had asked her along to study the Long Man, and she remembered the cold, bottomless pit of his soul. She didn’t trust him, but she believed he could help her daughter.
He met them in the big circle drive in front of the Lodge, pale arms crossed over his slender chest. He opened Stevie’s door and helped her from the Rambler with a gentle hand that chilled her arm from the tips of her fingers to her shoulder. “Bring her in. We’ll see what we can do.”
The giant dogs swirled around Al, sniffing at his palms and legs, rubbing themselves against him with such force they almost dumped him over. Al opened the door and took his sister from the back of the car, straining to lift her impossible weight.
Stevie put her hand on his shoulder at the door to the Lodge. He looked down at his mother and tried to give her a reassuring smile, but the muscles in his jaw were too tight.
“You’re changing,” she said and dragged Elsa from his grasp.
The Long Man ushered Stevie and Elsa into the house, but barred the door with one outstretched hand when Al tried to follow. “This is no place for the likes of you,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “You’ll be more comfortable out here.”
The door closed, and Al hunkered down with the black beasts milling about him. They lapped the blood from his skin with their great, pink tongues, and he scratched at the backs of their enormous heads. As the horizon swallowed the sun, Al raised a long, mournful howl to the coming night.
CHAPTER 39
WATCHING THE HOUSE for movement, Joe went over his three step plan. Get into the house. Find evidence of Left-Hand Path bullshit. Kill the tainted.
The bald hilltop offered Joe no cover as he made his way up to the Blackbriar place. As soon as he stepped onto the weed-strewn yard, he felt the pressure of a cro
sshairs over his heart. He ducked his head low and hustled toward the hulking house, hoping he still had the advantage of surprise. He kept trying to reassure himself that he still had a chance, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that the big old house was watching him, waiting for him to draw within striking range.
Joe made it to the back corner of the house and flattened himself against the weathered river stone wall. His hands shook as he fished the old silver flask out of his satchel, and he managed to splash himself with half a shot of Jack as he pressed his lips to the thin neck. He took one drink to calm his nerves, then another to wash away the fear. The liquor flowed into his hollow places, filled up the gaps in his confidence with borrowed courage.
Up close, the house was impressive not for its size but for its decay. Thick fingers of mold pried at the mortar between the stones of the walls, and the wood trim had sprouted strings of bloated mushrooms. Joe tried to peer into one of the ground floor windows, but the inside of the glass was streaked with something brown and sticky-looking that blocked his sight. The whole place was a monument to neglect and entropy.
Joe crept up onto the back porch, careful to test each step for rotting wood. The last thing he needed was to fall through the porch. Bad enough he’d come alone; making himself a sitting duck would just be the last nail in his coffin. He paused with his hand on the back door’s tarnished brass knob, eyes closed, breath slipping in and out of his lungs. He’d have to be fast and quiet and efficient. He eased his eyes and the door open at the same time.
A thick, aggressive stench burrowed into Joe’s nostrils and mouth, smearing his sinuses and throat with the choking stink of putrefaction. The mud room was shadowed, the only light coming through the open door and a stained window, but Joe could see motes of something glittering in the faint light. He tried not to think of what he was breathing and stole into the house. He closed the door behind him and crept forward.