by Sam Witt
“This concerns us all, and no one man can fix what’s wrong.” Stevie licked her lips and brushed the hair back from her eyes. She drew herself up and tried to present the strength and confidence her mother had always shown. “If you refuse to help, then who knows what misfortunes may fall upon your people?”
Stevie blinked once, slowly, and let her power unfurl into the close air of the cramped room Shadows flickered against the walls. The kerosene lamps guttered, burning with yellow, sooty flames. The temperature fell, and the colors seemed to fade from the light.
Preacher Walker’s eyes fluttered and his hands clasped his wounded belly so tightly blood began to ooze up around his fingers. A thick, scarlet rivulet ran down the slope of his gut and disappeared into the valley of his navel. His eyes closed, but his mouth fell open and a groaning croak worked its way out of him like a bubble of bog gas rising up from the swamp. The taproot stretched and swelled. Stevie couldn’t tear her eyes away from it as it screwed its way deeper into the preacher.
His jaw snapped closed, then fell open again. A thick, clear sap clung to his eyelashes as they parted to reveal dark, wet plugs of earth. Something spoke through Walker with a voice that shook the floor and sent trickles of rich earth drizzling down through the maze of roots in the ceiling. “My earth is defiled. Interlopers have fouled the holy. Drive them out.”
Stevie could feel the weight of the words on her soul, a terrible burden that pushed her power back. The preacher was gone, and she knew the God in his place watched her and waited. She knew this was the real power here, the one that could make bargains that would bind them all. “If we help you, will you help us?”
The preacher’s eyes fluttered again and thick, muddy tears flowed from their corners. He gasped and coughed. A centipede scuttled from his left nostril to disappear around the side of his face. “We will assist you, but there are conditions.”
Joe grumbled. “I’ll do what I can within the Law, but don’t push it.”
Preacher Walker smiled and licked stray crumbs of dirt from his lips. “Ah, our Night Marshal has found his voice. First, you must come with me to minister to my flock. I worry about their safety in this time of troubles.”
With a grunt, Joe twirled his finger impatiently. “Fine. What’s next?”
The preacher nodded and steepled his fingers over the swell of his gut. “Second, you will not question me or mine as regards our religion. If I help you in this, then you must leave me and mine in peace. What we do is within the Law. Leave it be.”
Joe ground his teeth. He stared at the shadowed space behind the preacher and tried to ignore the quiet, almost dainty, chewing noises he heard coming from back there. “Someone needs to keep an eye on you.”
The yarb doctor leaned forward. “I’ll monitor the Red Oak’s people.”
The preacher laughed, a jolly rumbling that made Stevie want to choke the fat man to death.
“If you agree to my third request, then you will not need the hillbilly to be your spy.” The preacher grinned, and his teeth were too, too white between the dark skin of his lips. “You will attend our moonlight services at least once each month.”
Joe’s skin crawled, and his balls tried to jump up into his belly. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Then get out of my home and put an end to this mess.” The preacher probed at the edges of his wound, gently caressing the gaping, curled edge with the ball of his thumb. “I have other pressing matters to attend to.”
“We’ll go.” Stevie stepped back from the preacher and took Joe’s hand. She felt the surge of anger from her mother’s curse and used it in place of bravery. “We’ll go to your services together.”
The yarb man’s eyes grew wide with alarm. He reached for Stevie, but stopped short when he felt the air around her throbbing with a cold power. He turned his attention to the preacher. “They done agreed. Shake on it and seal yer deal.”
The preacher struggled to his feet, standing with a great groan; he held his wound with one hand and pushed against his heavy chair with the other. He dug his left index finger into the bloody triangle and twisted it, around and around. When he pulled his hand from his flesh, the crimson tap root was wrapped around his hand so many times it looked like the preacher was wearing a dripping mitten. He extended the hand. “Shake on it?”
Joe shook his hand free of Stevie’s grasp and reached past her to clasp the preacher’s sweaty hand. “No tricks.”
The preacher shook Joe’s hand and grinned as blood dripped between. “Me? Never.”
Stevie placed her hand on top of Joe’s. Zeke threw his own old, gnarled fingers into the mix and let out a tobacco-scented sigh. “Let’s get on with this, yeah? We got time to wipe each other’s asses once we put this mess to bed.”
Joe felt it again, that faint glimmer of hope. He did his best to hang onto it. Maybe this mismatched gang of fools could pull this off. Maybe.
The earth creaked. Joe could hear the faint slither of roots worming through the dirt all around them.
Or maybe not.
CHAPTER 48
ELSA REMEMBERED BEING in the Long Man’s house. She remembered the spirits being torn from inside her and locked away into crystalline spheres. The Long Man had saved her life, Elsa knew, but whatever he’d done hadn’t quite fixed her up. She felt hollow and fragile, like the spirits had stretched her skin a few sizes and now it was too loose to fit right on her bones. Whenever she moved, it felt like her arms and legs were wobbly and weak. The feeling scared her, so Elsa just stayed put.
She didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten there. She remembered something had gone wrong, but she couldn’t pin it down. Her memory was shot full of foggy holes that swallowed up her thoughts.
Elsa let herself drift, hoping time would speed along to the point where someone would come and get her out of this mess. She knew her daddy was looking for her, searching high and low for a way to help his little girl. Her mama, too, though there was something about that, something that tickled at the back of Elsa’s thoughts and warned her that her mama had changed, somehow. That maybe her mama was dangerous now.
Thoughts of Stevie, no matter how strange and shadowy, raised Elsa’s moods. Her mama was strong, in ways that no one really understood, not even Elsa. She could almost hear mama’s voice, faint but beckoning.
There were no words at first, just a drifting tone that teased Elsa’s ears. Before long, though, the wordless crooning formed itself into syllables. Nonsense at first, like her mama was a baby again, babbling out whatever tickled her fancy.
Then, “Elsa.”
She strained to hear more, but there were no more words. “Mama?”
Elsa reached out into the darkness, straining her senses, searching for her mother’s familiar presence. She felt something, a faint graze across her mental fingertips. It was warm and wet. Elsa recoiled from its touch. This wasn’t her mama.
Fleshy bracelets fell around her wrists and held tight as clamps. “Ah, here you are.”
The words were mushy and slurred, strange and threatening. Elsa licked her lips. “Who are you?”
Her wrists were released, and she crumpled to the floor. Flickers of light lit the darkness, spreading through the inky air to reveal a dimly-lit room with walls of stone and a floor of polished wood.
A hunched shadow lurked at the edges of the light, glittering eyes fixed on Elsa. “You gave us a little bit of a scare. Feeling better?”
Elsa squinted at the shadows. There was a woman’s silhouette, black against a pale, guttering candle’s light. “Yes’m. A little. I guess.”
The shadow moved closer. Elsa smelled sweat and perfume and the rich, coppery scent of fresh blood. She wrinkled her nose and the shadow moved closer still. “You and I are much alike.”
Elsa nodded, but didn’t mean it. She wasn’t like anyone else. Not even anyone in her own family, and they were as close to her as anyone could get.
“You don’t believe me?” The figure steppe
d away from the candle, giving Elsa a glimpse of a too-long face and hands that seemed too big and too small at the same time.
Elsa scrambled back, crabbing across the cold stone floor. “Mama says ain’ no one else like me in all the world.”
The woman flickered and vanished. Something pinched the back of Elsa’s neck so hard she saw stars for a moment. “You’re special, then? A precious little chunk of heaven fallen to Earth to light our way?”
Elsa was lifted off her feet by the back of her neck, dangling from the woman’s grasp like a kitten in its mother’s mouth. Or a mouse dangling from the pitiless talons of a hawk. “Please, I didn’t mean nothin’.”
The woman shook Elsa so hard her knees knocked together. “We’ve heard it all before. You all think you’re special. Unique little sparks of light here to warm the rest of us with your precious flame. But you’re just tools. Keys to doors you can’t even imagine.”
Elsa’s thoughts raced. If she had a mask, Elsa could maybe call up one of her spirit friends, someone who knew how to fight, who was strong and would help her escape. But she had no mask.
Something long and hot and wet lapped against the side of Elsa’s face, dragging a thick line of moisture along her cheek. When the voice came again, the speaker was so close that her words fell on Elsa’s skin like the heat of a furnace, drying the sticky moisture into a stiff scab. “I can hear them out there. All clamoring and screaming to get back into you. How does that sound?”
Elsa’s breath came in harsh, jagged pants. She didn’t know what would happen if all those spooks came back, but she reckoned it would be very bad for her. She might lose her marbles, maybe. Or something in her head might break for real. “No’m.”
The hand clamped to the back of Elsa’s neck hoisted her even farther off the ground. She was hauled out of the stone room into a larger, circular chamber where the walls were rough and natural, like the old cavern where Elsa’s mama gathered the blind crickets for her charms. This room stank, like cat pee and rot, a stench with a physical presence that threatened to choke the air from Elsa’s lungs. She gasped, and the woman holding her laughed.
The walls glowed with a purple phosphorescence, a ghostly witch light that rose from the bloated crowns of dozens of mushrooms. By the light, Elsa could see a low stone table against the far wall. It seemed to have been fashioned from the living stone of the wall itself and was twice as wide and three times as long as Elsa was tall. Before she could take in any more, Elsa was slammed down onto the stone table. Her lips split, and her nose began to bleed. Rough hands spun her over onto her back, and Elsa wished she was blind again.
The woman holding her was beautiful and terrible. Her slender, muscular body was wrapped in layers of plain white cotton that hung loose around her body. The upper half of her face was a mask of icy perfection, blue eyes and a straight, thin nose that seemed to cut through the air. Her upper lip was full and wide, curled up into a smile that revealed a neat row of white, even teeth.
But below that, the woman’s face was gone. She had no lower jaw, and the skin of her throat and chest was peeled away to reveal a deep, red V that ran down between her breasts. Her tongue thrashed in the air like a beheaded snake, whipping back and forth, flinging droplets of bloody spit every which way.
Elsa wanted to scream, but her throat seized up and her terror squeezed out in a thin, high-pitched hiss.
The woman grabbed Elsa’s chin in her strange hands, the index fingers three times as thick and twice as long as they should be, thumbs shaped like paddles and carrying an extra joint. Her voice came from deep within her chest, a spectral echo that rang in Elsa’s head as much as in her ears. “Don’t you worry, little girl. We went to great pains to prepare you for your part. You will remain hollow, empty, waiting to be filled.”
She spat a word at Elsa, something dark and malignant, and Elsa could no longer move. Her body was limp and useless as a wadded-up rag after a full sink of dirty dishes. She could only lie still and whimper, her nostrils invaded by the chemical tang of bat guano while her mind was submerged beneath a wave of gibbering madness.
From the corner of her eye, Elsa could see the half-made girl lift a little blue cooler and set it on the table between Elsa’s legs. She flipped the lid open with her claw-like hands and rooted around inside it. Then she pulled something dark and sleek from the cooler and held it up in the purple light.
It reminded Elsa of a fancy chess piece she’d seen on TV one time. Something with wizards and dragons. But those were made of pewter, and this looked to be carved from a piece of night itself.
“The last one got away,” the half-made girl whispered. “Then that horrid little man undid all her work. Perverted our great art and stuck the fruits of our labor into a herd of pigs. Ruined everything.”
The half-made girl traced the little chunk of darkness along the top of Elsa’s thighs, drawing a straight line from her hip bones to her knees. First the left, then the right. It tingled, like the time Elsa put her hand right up next to the big old TV. “You’re luckier than the last one, you know. That beggar preacher didn’t save him. That poor man’s soul went into those pigs and right over the cliff with them.”
She stopped moving her hand. Elsa felt something sharp pressing through her dress and into the flesh just inside her right hip. “But that won’t happen this time. You’re perfect.”
The pain was sudden and brilliant. It turned Elsa’s world white with agony. It burrowed into her flesh, spiraling down through her hip and rooting up through her belly. Searching, seeking. The dark power was heedless in its flight through her body, and Elsa’s left pinky finger broke in three places. One of her ribs cracked, the pain a cool, sharp distraction from the agony burrowing into her flesh.
The pain was raw, an insatiable hunger that raced through her whole body. Then, with a screech that made her teeth grind, it was gone.
She panted on the stone table, eyes bleary with bloody tears. Elsa felt like she’d stuck her tongue in a light socket; all her muscles were tight and loose at the same time, and her bones felt bruised straight through. “Please, don’t hurt me no more, ma’am.”
The crab-claw hand patted her on the forehead and smoothed the hair back from Elsa’s brow. “There, that wasn’t so bad. And look what we did.”
The half-made girl lifted Elsa’s head so she could see down the length of her body. A black light throbbed from the carved spike stuck into the flesh of her hip, blood sizzling around the wound. Elsa felt faint.
“We’ll be done soon.” The woman dug into the cooler and retrieved another sliver of darkness. “Just twelve more to go.”
Elsa sobbed as the torture began in earnest.
CHAPTER 49
PREACHER WALKER’S BONE-white Hummer blasted along the ridge road, spewing a hailstorm of rocks and a thundercloud of rising dust from beneath its oversized tires. A chunk of soapstone smacked into Joe’s windshield, leaving behind a stark-white splatter as it ricocheted down into the valley below.
Zeke flinched at the sharp crack of the rock against the glass in front of his face. “That fat ol’ fuck is gonna get me killed dead.”
Joe shook his head. “If he’s after anyone’s head, it’d be mine.”
Squinting at Joe with one eye, Zeke waggled one bony finger. “Me’n Walker go back afore your daddy came around. We ain’ never seen eye to eye about nothin’. If he could get his nasty ol’ tree to chunk a rock at my noggin, he’d do it in a blink.”
Walker’s driver slowed and swung the Hummer onto a little strip of dirt pretending to be a road. Joe checked his rearview to make sure Stevie saw him turn and saw his wife tight on his tail. He’d put her in back not just because Walker was leading them, but because he wanted to keep her from tearing a blue-ass streak across the winding ridge roads. Nobody could drive like Stevie. He could see the irritation in her face and grinned at her in the rearview.
Zeke frowned at Joe. “You keep taunting’ that girl, she’ gonna make you into a toad. Or
a catfish.”
The humor was lost on Joe. Seeing Stevie this way, knowing what she’d done and how it had changed her, he didn’t see much that was funny about her use of dark magic. He shoved the thought aside and put his mind to the unpleasant task of keeping the promise he’d made to Walker. “He knows my baby girl’s out there somewhere, right?”
Zeke scratched at his beard and glared at Hummer. “Oh, that ol’ bastard knows. He just don’ care.”
They’d been on the road almost an hour, winding their way along ridge lines and down into valleys, working their way into the poorest part of Pitchfork County. This was Walker’s territory, where the desperate and ignorant lived in self-imposed exile from the rest of Pitchfork’s people. Here, the answer to a needy man’s midnight pleas was as close as a prayer, and the old red God had all the answers. Joe almost never came down here. No one did. “Why’d you let me agree to this stupid shit?”
Zeke laughed, coughed, then slapped his knee. “I hate the mean ol’ fucker, but we need him. Think he knows he needs us, too. This ain’ something’ fer one man to be dickin’ around with.”
The Hummer jounced around another hard left, and Joe followed the behemoth into a trailer park. The dirt road branched off, vanishing into a maze of rusting trailers perched on cinder blocks. A handful of mangy dogs glared at the Hummer for disturbing their naps. A couple lifted their heads and bayed like they’d caught scent of a raccoon, but the rest just kept their noses between their paws and tried to ignore the strange cars.
“Whooee. What self-respectin’ man could live like this?” Zeke let himself out of the truck and spit a yellow glob of tobacco juice onto the dirt between his feet.
Joe swung down from the truck, tucking a pistol into the back of his waistband as he stepped onto the dirt. He thought of Zeke’s ratty little shack and said, “You’ve got a lot of room to talk, old man.”
Zeke eyeballed Walker as the preacher waddled toward Joe’s truck. “These people ain’ gotta pot to piss in. I just go down and leak into the crick. Like God intended.”