by Sam Witt
“Almost time.” Stevie could feel Joe behind her, a pressure on her skin and soul. He spoke quietly, but his words felt too loud in the quiet of the kitchen.
She turned and leaned back against the counter, arms crossed over her belly. Stevie hadn’t slept more than a couple of restless hours, thoughts ticking over like an idling engine. Here, at the end, she had so many things to tell Joe and no words to say them. She smiled and pressed her fingertips over her heart. “I love you.”
Joe leaned in, his body tense against her, pressing her against the counter. Stevie held onto him, pulled his face down to hers. His kiss was sharp and bitter, with too many ferocious teeth. Stevie held on, fighting the tide of rage and hate, smothering it with a love so fierce not even the Bog Witch could kill it.
They shoved away from each other, hearts hammering in their ears, and Stevie watched Joe wipe a drop of blood from his lips. “Hold that thought,” he said through a crooked grin.
Stevie reached out to Joe once more, her fingers running through the hair at the back of his skull. She pinched and tugged, and he jumped back like he’d been bit. Stevie raised the little hairs up between her fingertips.
Joe laughed and watched her light a candle. She dripped a blob of wax onto his hairs and rolled it into a little bead. “In case I need to come looking’ for ya,” she explained.
There were no words to say. She and Joe had their parts to play, they knew what had to happen. They stayed together in the kitchen and watched Zeke and Walker leave for their parts of the plan.
Then Joe gave her one last hug and went out that door himself. Stevie tried to imagine the three men coming back later in the day. But in her memories of the future, that door stayed open, black and empty.
Al was still sleeping when Stevie left the cabin. She kissed him on the cheek and brushed the long hair from his eyes and prayed she’d come back to see him again.
She drove the Rambler down out of the hills to the soggy bottom of Pitchfork County, down old roads that she’d ignored for most of her adult life.
Stevie headed for home.
CHAPTER 54
THE OLD TRUCK grumbled down the road from the deer camp, and Joe grumbled right along with it. His head ached, and his dry throat was raw with the need for whiskey. “Let’s just get this done,” he muttered to himself, and guided the truck over roads that had become too familiar over the past couple of days.
The pieces were falling into place, and the picture they formed wasn’t encouraging. Until the half-made girls had kidnapped Elsa, Joe wasn’t sure what they were up to. By taking his daughter, they’d confirmed his fears.
He stopped at the big house and hopped out of the still-running truck. He knew where this had to end, but there was no sense in going unprepared.
Joe went down to the basement and gathered up the supplies he needed, loading them one by one into an old backpack. He handled it with care, doing his best not to jostle anything inside. He needed to get things there in one piece.
Looking at the wreckage of his own home, Joe tried to imagine the family living there again. He couldn’t make the picture fit in his head. He kept seeing Al howling, blood running out of countless wounds. Elsa screaming as ghosts poured down her throat while Stevie struggled to save her children. It was a nightmarish cascade of images that he couldn’t put aside. How could he ask them to come back here, to this house where they’d been hunted and hurt, where the horrors he’d made had come calling? Joe shook his head and left the house with the door wide open. He didn’t think he was ever coming back.
He took a quick detour down to Stevie’s place to gather up one last item, which he wrapped in a scrap of canvas and tucked into his backpack. “No more putting this off, I guess.”
Joe let his mind wander as he drove down a road he’d thought he’d never travel again. Old wounds ached with the memories of his last visit. His forehead burned like someone had dribbled acid between his eyes.
The truck sputtered and stalled in front of the ruins of the Pryor place. His burning had been thorough this time. The flames had left nothing except a few thick sticks of charcoal and heaps of ashes. Joe scooped his backpack off the seat next to him and headed for the place this had all begun. He scrubbed at his forehead with his palm, but the pain had its hooks in too deep to be shaken off.
Looking at the ruins, Joe found himself battling more bitter memories. The pressure of the shotgun against his son’s chest. The sound of Alasdair’s screams as the bats chewed their way into his body. A flickering gut shot of scenes, all the blood and pain and death that had come since that day.
Joe dug his half-empty bottle of Gentleman Jack out of the backpack. He wasn’t sure why he’d brought it. He wasn’t sure how much of what had happened was the result of his hangover, of him being too tired and wrung out and wasted to figure out what was going on. What if he hadn’t stopped for a drink when looking for the key to free Al? What if he’d gone up to the Lodge instead of drinking through the night? Would any of this have happened? Would Elsa still be safe with her mama?
He unscrewed the bottle’s cap and lifted it to his lips. The glass was cold and unyielding. The smell tickled his nostrils. He could taste alcohol fumes on the back of his tongue. All he had to do was tilt his head back and let it pour down his throat.
Joe opened the truck’s door and upended the bottle, gnawed the inside of his lip as he listened to the whiskey splashing onto the gravel. His throat ached for the stuff, and it wasn’t until the last of it was gone that he could breathe again.
Twice he’d made terrible mistakes here. Joe didn’t think he could survive a third fuckup.
He pushed the door open and stomped down into the shallow puddle of amber poison. Every step stank of whiskey and smoke. Joe relished the smell, knowing it might be the last time it ever filled his nose.
Joe stood on the scorched earth where the porch had once been. The spit dried in his mouth and tasted like ashes. It was still dark, but a strange light flickered to life above the old well. The gazing ball hovered above the pit, spilling a rainbow of sick, oily light. The three rocking chairs bowed toward weird light, leaning so far forward they should have fallen into the ashes. But they just hung there like three old ladies hunched up on the front of their seats.
By the greasy light of the seer’s ball, Joe could see someone had been to the well. They’d cleared out a path to the hole, smoothed the ash so that rough, gray dunes flanked the walkway. Where the light fell across the ground, strange symbols flickered in the dust. They tugged at Joe’s eyes, urged him to follow them down into the darkness.
“Figures,” Joe spat.
Nothing could be easy.
Joe followed the trail that led down into the crater that had once been a basement. The glowing globe hung overhead, throbbing with an ominous, tooth-rattling hum. Its light caressed his forehead, and pain sizzled along his nerve endings like bacon grease on a hot skillet.
He didn’t want to go down in the well. Didn’t want to deal with whatever was down there. And that light was really pissing him off.
“Honey,” the Night Marshal said and sighted down the pistol’s hexagonal barrel. “I’m home.”
The gun roared and split the air with a lance of silver fire tipped by burning lead. The bullet slammed into the sphere with a sound like a cannonball smashing into a swimming pool, a thunderous, liquid splash that shook the air with a shockwave that blew Joe’s hair back and rocked him onto his heels.
The light splattered in all directions, sizzling where it hit the ground, casting strange shadows and flickers where it fell down the well’s throat. The smears of dirty light wriggled on the surface, then burrowed down into the earth, out of sight.
Joe stopped at the ring of cracked and blackened stones surrounding the well’s hungry mouth. Someone had laid out the welcome mat, driving thick iron spikes into the earth and hanging a crude rope ladder over the hole’s edge. Like they were expecting him. Waiting for him.
Joe wondered ho
w many were down there.
He crouched down near the well and listened to the autumn morning wind moaning across its open mouth. There was a sound, just at the edge of his hearing, a scratching, digging clatter. Joe opened the backpack and dug his father’s old holsters out. He slung the rig over his shoulder and fastened it around his waist. One pistol went snug under his left arm, the other strapped to his right thigh. The pistols were loaded, and a baker’s dozen of bullets rested in loops on the rig. Joe hoped that would be enough to do the job.
He also hoped he was wrong. He really hoped those three fucked-up girls were not the harbingers for something even bigger and more fucked up than themselves. He prayed that the people of Pitchfork hadn’t found a new god for themselves, a bigger and meaner bully than the Long Man, hadn’t traded Joe’s rough hand for the crushing grip of something far, far worse.
Most of all, Joe hoped to hell they weren’t going to kill his little girl in a demented attempt to use her gifts to conjure up their new master.
He walked back to the well and stared down into the blackness. Joe wondered what Al had felt down there. He wondered why he’d been dumb enough to think some gasoline and explosives could have solved this problem. Sometimes, the only way to fix things is to get your hands dirty.
Joe grabbed hold of the ladder, and dropped down into the dark.
“Ready or not, motherfuckers,” Joe whispered, “here I come.”
CHAPTER 55
THE RAMBLER IDLED outside the big old house where Stevie’d grown up. The old home’s windows were empty black sockets dripping with Spanish moss and kudzu, lit by the Morse code flashing of dozens of lightning bugs. Green eyes gleamed in the glare of her headlights, raccoons and squirrels waiting for her to leave them in peace.
She killed the Rambler’s engine and shut off the headlights. Spook lights emerged from the early morning gloom, amorphous green smears of light floating above the curdled ground fog. Stevie followed the lights around the bend behind the house, down to the edge of the bog from which her mother had taken her power.
An old oak, its black bark black infested with creeping moss, leaned out over the brackish water. Stevie ran her hands down the grimy trunk until her fingertips found a now-rusty nail she’d driven into the tree at the shore line. A thin chain ran into the water from the nail, and Stevie hooked her fingers around it. It glistened wet silver in the early morning moonlight as she hauled it up out of the water.
The end of the chain was wrapped around an old Coke bottle, the glass clotted with clusters of yellow algae. The bottle was corked with a thick plug of wax to keep the swamp at bay. Stevie shook it and smiled at the rattle. Holding it up to the light, she could just make out the gnarly chunks of yellowed bone through the bottom of the bottle. “Hi there, Mama.”
The plug came out of the bottle with a little coaxing from Stevie’s pocket knife, and the teeth rattled out into the palm of her left hand. Stevie bit the inside of her lip until she tasted blood, then spat red onto the teeth. She closed her fist around all that remained of the Bog Witch and said the old words to call her mother from the other side.
The bog boiled and gave up glowing globs of gas that burst in the air with a rich, rotten stink.
“What have ya done, daughter mine?” The words bubbled up out of the swamp with the gas, putrid and foul. “Bindin’ yer own mama like some common haint?”
Stevie licked her lips and held tight to her mother’s teeth, though they pricked at her palm. “I need you to behave, Mama, and I don’t have time for any foolishness.”
The black bog grew still, then seethed like hot tar. Stevie watched as her mother’s face appeared in the water, a fluid vision of darkness. “I feel yer need, Daughter, but yer too late by half. I cain’t help that man of yers even if I wanted, which you know damn well I don’t.”
Her mother’s face twisted and deformed, revealing the injury Joe dealt her at their last meeting. The gaping crater where her eye used to be, the grimy curds of her brain dripping from the wound. “Hide him, Mama. Hide him and the others from those damned girls.”
Laughter rose from the bog in slimy bubbles. “I cain’t hide him from what he’s part of, girl. The master of them girls done got his hooks into yer man, deep.”
Stevie crouched down on the bank of the bog and trailed her fingers through the water. Despite all they’d been through, she couldn’t shake the love she held for her mother. Despite their differences, Stevie knew the Bog Witch had tried to protect her, even at the end. “Tell me.”
The bog’s waters rippled and flowed up Stevie’s fingers, coiled around her wrist. “That man has two masters. That ol’ bastard up at the Lodge and some new terror that’s still crawling betwixt worlds.”
Cold settled into Stevie, soaking down through her skin and into her bones. “No.”
“Think, girl. Goddamn. How you think them bitches knew where to find yer girl? Or that you was goin’ to that nasty ol’ trailer park? What happened to yer man at that whore’s bar, and how did they know he would be there?”
Stevie sank down on her haunches and pulled her hand out of the water. “Help him get free, then.”
Water rose in a geyser from the bottom of the bog, jetting high into the air. “No.”
Stevie clenched her hand around the teeth until they cut into her palm. She let the blood dribble off her fingers into the water. “I command you to help him.”
A shriek of raw madness splashed up out of the water, scattering glowing orbs in all directions. “Never.”
Stevie’s heart ached. She imagined Joe, heading into a fight where his enemy already knew his every move. She thought of those girls, lying in wait, and her husband walking right into their trap.
Then she had another thought, and her breath caught in her lungs.
Stevie jammed the teeth back in the bottle and ignored her mother’s screeching protest. She’d held on to this connection to a dead woman for years, creeping down to the bog whenever she could to seek wisdom from her mother. It had always been a comfort for her, but now it left her feeling cold and sick.
Stevie filled the bottle with the thick bog water that tied her to this place. She melted the wax back into the bottle’s neck with her little lighter, let it cool in place. She reeled the silver chain in and wrapped it around the bottle, then snapped the last link free of the tree. She weighed the bottle and all it represented in her palm, then slipped it into her little work bag. She’d need it sooner rather than later.
Joe wasn’t the only one in danger. The nightmares knew all their plans. She raced toward the cave, pushing the Rambler to its limits, praying she still had time.
CHAPTER 56
AN AMMONIAC REEK wafted up the well’s shaft, bringing with it a moist heat that left Joe dripping with sweat after a few minutes of climbing. The rope ladder soaked up the moisture on his hands and coated them with itching fibers. By the time he reached the well’s bottom, Joe regretted dumping out the last of his booze, which he knew meant it had been a good idea. It was too easy to imagine himself down in the darkness, boots mired in batshit and mushroom pulp, drinking half a bottle of Jack before he could stop himself.
He released the ladder and waited, letting his eyes adjust to the dim-purple glow of phosphorescent fungus that clung to the walls around him. He could make out what looked like the mouth of a tunnel leading away from the bottom of the well, but little else. Al was right, his eyes were going to shit.
When his vision did come into focus, Joe could see what he’d been smelling: a nasty mound of bat waste that spread out around him for ten feet in every direction. Seeing their guano made Joe wonder where the bats were and how soon they’d be back. He eased the safety strap off the pistol on his right thigh and let his palm rest on the weapon’s grip. The revolver wouldn’t be as useful against the bats as his shotgun, but it was something.
He knew there was more to worry about down here than just a flock of bats with a taste for man flesh.
The walls at the b
ottom of the well were covered with scarred graffiti, glyphs and sigils scattered among rough sketches of dripping penises and gaping vaginas. Spider-scratched words wrapped around everything, the frenetic, jagged ramblings of paranoid addicts rendered in charcoal lines. It looked like a bathroom at Hogwarts after a weeklong meth binge. The whole mess hurt Joe’s head and made his spine throb.
What bothered him wasn’t the combination of the mundane and the eldritch, it was the frantic, terrified scribbling. There was fear here, fear of the order Joe had spent his adult life creating. Fear of the world beyond Pitchfork County’s supernatural borders. Fear of a world that cared little for the weak and not at all for the poor. This was a burst of blind panic, a screamed prayer to any god that would listen.
Worse than the prayers was the sense of community Joe felt within them. The words wove in and out, forming sentences from scraps written in different hands, tying everything together into a single cry for help. He didn’t want to read these prayers to a god he’d come to kill, but Joe couldn’t stop himself. Because he felt comfort there, too, a sense of belonging. While he read the words, Joe’s forehead didn’t even hurt anymore. In desperation, the people of Pitchfork had bound themselves together. There was a family here, even if it was born of nightmares.
The Night Marshal wondered if he should have heard these prayers when they were whispers, if he could have heard them if he hadn’t been busy drowning his own worries and fears in bottle after bottle of whiskey. Maybe he could have set things to right if he’d seen the pain his people were in, been able to help them instead of waiting for them to step out of line.
“You gonna write on our welcome wall, Joe?”
The Night Marshal turned from the mass of words and symbols to a shadowy mob of figures standing in the mouth of the tunnel leading away from the bottom of the well. He could see a four or five heads in the vague light, but there might be three times that many behind them for all Joe could tell.