Half-Made Girls

by Sam Witt

  The black phone rang. Joe stared at it. He didn’t work for the Long Man anymore; all that remained was his making it formal. But it seemed like a bad idea to piss the Man off by ignoring his call.

  Joe lifted the receiver.

  “They are here.” The Long Man’s voice sounded thin, worn out. “They will remain here tonight. You can come for them in the morning.”

  Joe’s tongue felt thick and clumsy in his mouth. He had to try twice to get the words out. “What happened?”

  “Stevie is fine. Alasdair is wounded, but he will recover.”

  Joe pinched the bridge of his nose, tried to push the tears back. Was this price he was to pay for bringing his baby into the war against the dark? Was he going to lose his children in the battle he’d brought to their doorstep? “What happened to Elsa?”

  “I have the situation well in hand.” The Long Man paused. Joe heard him drinking. “It’s best if you stay put until the morning.”

  “What are you doing to my daughter?” Paranoia stuck its needles into Joe’s brain. He tried not to think of those arched rooms lining the entryway, or the kinds of spirits that might lurk in the Lodge and try to inject themselves into Elsa. He had to get them out of there. “Let me talk to Stevie.”

  “Do. Not. Come.” The voice was powerful, commanding. It smashed against Joe and drained the strength from his arms and legs. All he wanted to do was lie down and wait for morning.

  But there was his daughter to think about, and his wife and son, in this monster’s house. “I’m coming.”

  “The gates are closed until sunrise. Stay put. That is an order.”

  Joe decided that was as good a time as any to quit. “Fuck your orders. I don’t work for you, not anymore. I’m coming for my family.”

  “We will discuss the terms of your employment tomorrow morning. There is no need for you to complicate matters here tonight.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “The dogs will stop you. It would be a waste to add your death to an already tragic day.”

  Joe ground his teeth and ran his fingers over the pistols and the brace of bullets bordering them. “If anything happens to them —”

  But the phone was dead, the line filled with a rustling static.

  Joe slammed the receiver down, scooped up the pistol case and headed downstairs. He detoured into the kitchen for a fresh bottle of Gentleman Jack, then flopped down in his old recliner. Joe sat and drank and watched the black sky, waiting for the first rays of dawn to slice their way through the night.

  CHAPTER 43

  THE LONG MAN replaced the handset on its tarnished cradle. His eyes blazed in the shadowed corner of the Lodge, and Stevie could feel his anger like a cold, dry wind. He turned to Stevie. “Will your husband do what I have asked?”

  She shrugged. Stevie knew Joe would hate not being with his family, but she also knew he wasn’t going to push the Long Man. “He’s a stubborn man, but I reckon he’ll probably stay out of this since you asked so nicely.”

  The Long Man snorted and turned his attention back to the circle he’d been drawing around Elsa. With a few strokes from a stick of charcoal, he sealed the circle around the three of them. The air shuddered, and an almost inaudible hum tickled Stevie’s ears, raising the hair on the backs of her arms. “Then let us begin,” the Long Man whispered, and bent over Stevie’s little girl.

  Stevie watched the Long Man’s fingers pry Elsa’s jaws apart and slip a pair of rubber blocks between her back molars to hold it open. Elsa was limp and quiet, but Stevie knew she wouldn’t stay that way once the work got under way. The spirits inside her little girl would fight to stay within their host. Stevie just hoped she and the Long Man didn’t kill her daughter trying to get the spirits’ hooks out of Elsa’s soul.

  The Long Man peered into Elsa’s mouth and tapped his fingers against her throat. Stevie held her breath as the Long Man reached his thumb and forefinger into her daughter’s mouth. “Be ready to do your part,” the Long Man said to Stevie and began pulling the first broken spirit out of Elsa.

  The fireplace flared with green light as the flames roared in a wind Stevie could not feel. The Long Man’s shadow stretched across the room, and Stevie shivered as her eyes played tricks on her. For just a moment she was sure his shoulders brushed the high ceiling.

  She clutched the crystal sphere tight to her chest as the Long Man drew a clotted shadow from Elsa’s gaping mouth. It danced in his grip, its pulsing, muscular body seeming to grow longer and thicker by the moment.

  Elsa bucked, tiny hands beating at the Long Man’s wrists. A grinding groan rattled out from the little girl, a sound of pain and fear that fogged Stevie’s eyes with tears. Her little girl was trapped in her own body, buried under the weight of the dead. What if the Long Man was wrong? What if this was killing Elsa, tearing her spirit apart as he tried to help?

  That moment of doubt almost made Stevie miss her chance. The Long Man fished the spirit out of Elsa and held it in the air, so its thrashing body dangled almost to the floor. He held it with both hands, but still it nearly escaped his grasp. Its tail thrashed wildly, then darted back toward Elsa’s mouth, straining to burrow back into its lost home.

  Stevie thrust the crystal toward the spirit and let the old words flow from her mouth. She smelled swamp water and smoke, felt cold water rising up to her ankles. Stevie felt the spirit in her grasp, her words like an extension of her tongue wrapped around the midnight black serpent. Every syllable drew it nearer and filled Stevie’s mouth with the taste of ashes and dirt, the flavors of the grave.

  The spirit touched the sphere, and it grew dark. Stevie drew the broken ghost into the depths of the crystal with words she had promised Joe she would never use again. They felt right in her mouth, like a tooth that had been replaced after missing for years. A shiver of power ran through Stevie. She felt young again, strong again.

  “Please,” the spirit begged, its voice a tortured scream inside Stevie’s head. “It burns. We had no choice, they are devouring the dead, we had to escape.”

  Stevie could feel the spirit’s pain as a delicious pressure between her hands. This thing, this parasite that had once been another woman’s spirit before it invaded Elsa, shrieked at Stevie to stop, begged for release, but the Bog Witch’s daughter relished its final moments of anguished freedom. It had harmed her daughter. For that there was no penalty that would be harsh enough, no torture too extreme.

  A cold shadow spread behind Stevie, a darkness that hung from her shoulders like a cloak. “That’s my girl,” it whispered, “ya done good, just like I done when ya was a babe and they came fer us.”

  The dark memory of angry townsfolk rowing their john boats across the bog, torches blazing and nooses at the ready, filled her heart with a cold strength. Stevie bore down on the spirit, her words slashing its hooks free from this world and banishing it to the sterile, maddening crystal confines between her hands. The screaming rose to a fever pitch, a panicked string of bleated promises and threats, the last words of a woman dying in pain, again. Stevie smiled. She spat sharp, burning words onto the crystal. The screaming died.

  The sphere was heavy and black in her hand, the spirit locked deep inside. Stevie let out a long, shuddering sigh and dropped the ebony sphere into the Long Man’s outstretched hand.

  He peered into its depths for a moment, rotating it this way and that, as if examining Stevie’s handiwork.

  Stevie bristled. “You do your part. I’ll worry about mine.”

  The Long Man nodded and placed the sphere in the empty space in the rack. He tossed another sphere to Stevie, then turned his attention back to Elsa. “We will have to be faster. Dawn is coming.”

  Stevie watched him snatch the next spirit out of Elsa, drawing it out between his hands like a magician snaking an impossibly long scarf from his pocket. Stevie didn’t wait for the spirit to be fully exposed. She touched the sphere to it where the black body extended past the Long Man’s hands and let the words roll off her ton
gue.

  They worked together like that for hours, filling the spheres as a team. Stevie’s words painted the walls of the sitting room with overlapping black symbols that shuddered and crawled like broken spiders, scarring the world with their dark strength. She held nothing back, let the old ways blossom inside her as they had when she was younger, as her mother had shown her. Stevie was the Bog Witch, and the swamp was here, now.

  The Long Man tilted Elsa’s head back and put his ear near her mouth. He tapped on her throat, waited, tapped again. His spider-leg fingers palpated Elsa’s stomach. “Almost done.”

  Stevie counted the black crystals on the rack over the fireplace. Just three left. She closed her eyes, and their screams of terror and pain echoed in her thoughts, tingled against her skin like the touch of an autumn night’s breeze.

  The first light of dawn was creeping into the Lodge when the Long Man reached into Elsa’s mouth once more and fished out a slender, wriggling scrap of a spirit. It seemed too frail, too small to be any real threat. Stevie touched it with the crystal sphere, and it snapped taut in the Long Man’s hands, like she’d jolted it with electricity. A single, quick tug, and it was free and vanished into the crystal before Stevie had really felt its passing.

  The Long Man plucked the rubber blocks from between Elsa’s teeth. He sighed and sat back on his heels. For a moment, he looked ancient, a withered mummy crouched on his haunches. Then he drew in a shuddering breath and was once again powerful, in control. “There.”

  Elsa took a deep, peaceful breath. The dark circles were gone from under her eyes, and she seemed at rest. Stevie allowed herself a single tear of relief, which she wiped away with the back of her hand. It was over.

  The Long Man motioned for Stevie to bring him the last sphere.

  She took a few steps and placed the black ball in his hand. “Thank you,” she said.

  He waved her thanks away and twirled the ball on the tips of his fingers. “Joe would never forgive me if I let anything happen to his family. He may still not forgive me. At least he obeyed and did not interrupt us.”

  The light from the sun was brighter now, streaming in through windows that punched through the high walls of the sitting room. In the daylight, the Long Man seemed shrunken, almost fragile.

  “There are rooms,” he began, but his words died on his lips. He tilted his head like a dog trying to track down a particularly annoying sound. “No. Impossible.”

  He snapped upright and staggered toward the fireplace, stretching his arm to put the crystal sphere in the last slot on the rack.

  Stevie rushed to his side. Her skin crawled to be so close to the Long Man, but her hands were reaching out for him before she could stop them. He needed her help. Despite everything else she was, Stevie was still a healer. She slipped under his arm to try and hold him up, but the Long Man stumbled away from her.

  His arm swung in a clumsy slash across the rack, sending the balls tumbling. They slammed onto the mantle, then rolled onto the wooden floor where they banged divots into the boards. The balls had enormous weight and did not bounce.

  But they did crack. Stevie could see the hair-fine imperfections spreading across the faces of the spheres, filling the air with the sound of fracturing crystal.

  Elsa lifted her head. “Mama?”

  Outside, the dogs howled, then screamed in pain. Alasdair’s voice joined them, a savage roar that filled Stevie’s guts with ice.

  The Long Man struggled to rise, but he couldn’t get his hands under him. His limbs flopped and crooked like a bug with a broken back. “We’re under attack. Take the girl,” he gasped. “Run.”

  The Lodge’s main doors exploded inward and tumbled down the entry hall like playing cards before a hurricane. One of them slammed into the arched doorway of the sitting room; the other hurtled straight at Stevie.

  She threw herself to the side, landing hard on her hip. The door sailed past and smashed into the wall above the bar, shattering bottles and filling the room with the scent of aging liquor and wormwood. A smell that was washed away at once by the foul perfume of batshit and putrefaction that flowed into the room on the wind.

  Stevie could feel the presences outside the house, a trio of power that filled the air with crackling jolts of black rage. “Baby, get behind me.”

  Elsa scuttled across the room, her arms and legs stiff and clumsy. Stevie grabbed the girl when she got into arm’s reach and shoved her back.

  They came in through the door together. One floating, one walking, one slithering across the boards like a snake. “Get out of our way,” the floating girl said and gestured at Stevie with an arm that ended in a blooming ring of gesturing fingers.

  The Long Man hauled himself up to his feet. “Get out of my home.”

  Stevie expected something to happen, for a blast of lighting to incinerate these intruders where they were, for flames to erupt from the floor and devour them. She did not expect for the girls to laugh. She did not expect for the floating girl to drift to the Long Man and close her grasping bracelet of hands around his face.

  The girl lifted him off the floor with ease. “You have no idea how long we’ve waited for this,” she said.

  Stevie shouted a wordless protest and flung her hands out in front of her. Words her mother had taught her, ugly hexes to break bones and squeeze a man’s soul down to a screaming huddle, gushed out of her.

  The floating girl flinched, as if Stevie had slapped her. She lost her grip on the Long Man, who scrambled away into a corner. Blood splashed off the slithering girl and hung in the air. But the walking girl caught the blasphemous words in hands with only thumbs and index fingers and spat them back from a mouth with no lower jaw. The girl’s dangling tongue lashed the air, and Stevie recoiled, feeling her own power thrown back at her.

  The attack dropped Stevie to her knees, and the half-made girls moved toward her as one. The slithering girl hooked an arm around Stevie’s waist and drew her close, licking the side of Stevie’s face with a bloodied tongue.

  The floating girl reached past Stevie for Elsa.

  The girl screamed and pulled away from her mother. “Get away from me,” she howled.

  “Come with us, girl.” The floating girl moved closer to Elsa, hands outstretched. Stevie struggled against the other two half-made girls, but her mouth was held closed by the powerful hands of the walking girl, and the slithering girl held her hands. Stevie was powerless.

  Elsa was not.

  She moaned and raised her hands over her head. In response, the cracking crystal spheres floated from the dented wooden floor, dripping darkness as they rose. “Please, leave us alone,” Elsa begged.

  The floating girl laughed, a maniacal shrieking that dug at Elsa’s ears. “Go ahead, bitch, let’s see what you’ve got.”

  Elsa flung her arms wide, and Stevie wanted to scream for her daughter to run, to get away. Instead, Elsa called out to the fragmented souls that had been inside her. One by one, the crystal prisons shattered and the broken ghosts flowed back into the air like plumes of black smoke.

  The air was filled with the screaming of spirits and the laughter of the half-made girls. Stevie’s head rang with the noise. The Long Man was saying something, she could see his lips moving and his hands reaching for her, but she couldn’t make out his words over the cacophony.

  The horde of spirits darted toward the half-made girls, flowing like black water at their faces. Elsa howled as the strain of directing the dead burned her spirit.

  Then the ghosts spun away from the girls and whirled into the air, forming a tight ball of seething, eldritch power. Elsa clenched her fists and ground her teeth, trying to pull the splinters of the dead back under her control.

  But they fled from her and spiraled down, a quivering line of darkness that slipped into an old blue cooler someone had left sitting by the wrecked bar. Elsa sagged against the wall, all her strength gone. Her eyes fluttered, then closed.

  Stevie struggled against the half-made girls, but they we
re too strong for her. They pinned her to the ground, and she could only watch as the floating girl lifted Elsa over her shoulder with one hand and took the cooler with the other. “We’re done here.”

  The girl with the finger-and-thumb hands squeezed Stevie’s throat until black sparklers shot through her vision. Her tongue lashed Stevie’s cheek, flickered along the inside of her ear. “Tell your man,” she whispered, the words dripping like venom in Stevie’s thoughts, “that your life is our gift to him.”

  Stevie went limp, and the world slipped away from her. When she opened her eyes again, the half-made girls were gone. Elsa was gone, as well.

  Stevie cried out in denial and staggered across the room. The Long Man was slumped on the floor next to the fireplace, his hands folded in his lap. Stevie knelt in front of him. “Where are they? Where did they take my baby?”

  The Long Man let out a long, pained sigh. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

  His eyes, old and deep and wracked with pain that chilled Stevie’s blood, watered and locked with Stevie’s gaze. “We’re all dead now.”

  CHAPTER 44

  JOE GUNNED THE engine, and the old truck roared through the shattered gate and up the long drive to the Black Lodge. He flicked his gaze from side to side, watching the trees for signs of danger, trying to catch sight of the big black dogs who now guarded the place. The woods were quiet, though, and he saw no sign of life. No birds or squirrels or even field mice stirred in the deep, dark woods.