The Devil’s Due
Michael McBride
OCTOBER 30
DEVIL’S NIGHT
PINE SPRINGS, COLORADO
Church bells tolled in the distance.
Dong…dong…dong…
The forlorn sound echoed through the still valley. The stores along Main Street were shuttered and dark. No neon signs glared through windows, nor did streetlights illuminate the deserted business district. Even the gravel lot behind the roadhouse was conspicuously empty. A stranger passing through might take the town for abandoned, were the two-lane highway from I-70 not closed and traffic detoured down through Silverthorne to prevent the arrival of any outsiders. One would have no reason to suspect that the residents of this sleepy village were actually sitting inside their dark homes, praying for Devil’s Night to pass without event.
The Martin Ranch was a full mile down County Road 29 from Main, but Thom could still hear the bleating of the goat tethered in the center of town. His cattle were silent in the winter shelter. It had taken him a full three days to round them up from the pastures and herd them into the hay-lined structure. Their lowing had kept him from sleeping the last two nights, but even they knew better than to make a sound tonight.
Dong…dong…dong…
The final toll reverberated through the house. Thom clutched Tammy’s hand in the resultant silence and prayed the bell hadn’t awakened the children. The day would come when they were forced to learn the town’s secret, but today was not that day. They were too young to understand. Sometimes he wasn’t sure if anyone really did.
The wind howled and snowflakes tapped against the picture window. The curtains were so thick they admitted only the most ambitious rays of moonlight, leaving the living room in darkness so deep that his wife was little more than a silhouette kneeling beside him on the floor. He could feel her trembling against him, and he focused his resolve to remain strong, if only for her benefit.
“What if this is the year—?”
Thom squeezed his wife’s hand to silence her. He’d meant for the gesture to be reassuring, but he’d used too much strength. She knew better. The last thing they wanted was for it to hear—
The bleating of the goat abruptly stopped.
Thom watched the curtains for the slightest hint of a shadow passing across them from the other side. He didn’t dare blink and risk missing it. He pulled Tammy to his chest and wrapped his arms around her. She shuddered against him but managed to stay quiet. Her tears were warm against his shoulder.
A querulous bleat.
Thom tensed. His heartbeat throbbed in his temples.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Silence.
The goat screamed. The sound was shrill, almost humanlike.
Tammy clapped her hands over her ears and cried out.
Thom gently released his wife and picked up his rifle from the floor beside him.
The awful shriek became frenetic before suddenly ceasing.
This was the moment Thom feared more than any other. It haunted his dreams and awakened him in a cold sweat. He shouldered his rifle and sighted down the curtains. Rose to his knees and braced the weapon on the back of the couch. His hands were shaking too badly to trust his aim.
Time passed in maddeningly slow increments metered by the wailing wind and the scraping of pine branches against the siding.
He pitied the poor soul for whom it came, but better anyone else than him. He hated himself for wishing such suffering upon another family, but he didn’t know what he would do if—
A high-pitched moo, followed by the crack of breaking wood.
The cows sensed it.
Dear God, it was coming their way.
Tammy whimpered.
Thom stood on trembling legs and walked sideways across the room, never once allowing his aim to stray from the window as he worked his way toward the front door, which he’d barricaded with his desk and darn near everything else that wasn’t bolted down.
He paused and listened.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
His own breathing was too loud. He could barely hear the wind rattling through the trees, let alone any sound from the other side of the door.
The cow again mooed and kicked at the wall of the shelter. His first instinct was to rush out back and put a bullet into its skull before it summoned—
Thud.
The front door rattled against the deadbolts. The legs of the desk screeched on the tile floor.
“No, no, no,” he whispered.
A scratching sound, like the tines of a rake.
Tammy screamed.
Thom hurled aside everything he’d stacked on the desk and overturned it in his hurry to get to the door. Pressed his eye to the peephole. He couldn’t see a blasted thing through the blowing snow.
Tammy’s cries degenerated into pitiful sobs.
Thom was shaking so badly he could barely make his fingers work to turn the locks. He threw open the door and sighted the rifle through the storm and across his yard.
It was already gone.
Its footprints had faded to mere dimples in the snow, nearly erased by the wind. They’d be long gone before he was able to follow them very far. He marked their general direction and turned back toward the house—
The rifle fell from his grasp and clattered to the porch.
There was a bloody handprint on the door.
—
“Hurry up with the water!” Thom shouted. “And turn off that infernal light!”
He pulled his sweater over his head and scrubbed at the handprint, which was already beginning to freeze.
A bright light materialized from the storm, as he knew it would.
“They’re coming!”
He threw his sweater to the floor and grabbed the bucket from his wife. Thrust his hand into the cold water and grabbed the rag.
“Don’t spill any on the porch,” Tammy said. “If they see the ice, they’ll know—”
“We’ve got bigger problems than ice.” The claw marks on the door were distinct and unmistakable. The wood underneath the dark finish stood out in stark contrast. “I need brown paint.”
“Where am I supposed to find—?”
“I don’t know! Get me something, damn it! Anything!”
The light dissolved into the headlights of two trucks, driving side by side down the narrow road in front of his house. They must have followed its trail from the goat’s carcass, but surely the storm had concealed its prints by now and they were just blindly searching in the direction it had gone.
“Will a marker work?” Tammy called from the kitchen.
“Bring it here!”
Thom used his shirt to wipe the last of the smeared blood from the door, then fell to his knees in a desperate attempt to clean up all of the water he’d spilled in the foyer.
The headlights flickered as they passed the hedgerow lining the gravel road at the front of his property.
“Here,” Tammy said, and thrust the marker into his face.
He uncapped it. Jumped to his feet. Colored over the lighter wood.
It wouldn’t hold up to close inspection, but from a distance—
The spotlight on the side of the closer of the two trucks swiveled and raced across the front of his house. Thom ducked inside but not nearly fast enough.
The truck turned into his driveway and sped toward his house.
“Mom?” Danny said from the top of the stairs. “What’s with all the noise?”
“Nothing, sweetie,” Tammy said, but the tremor in her voice gave lie to her words.
“Keep the kids upstairs,” Thom said. “I’ll handle this.”
“Thomas…”
“For God’s sake, Tammy. Just do what I say for once.”
She turned her back on him and hurried up the stairs. He discreetly slid the bucket aside with his foot and stepped out onto the porch, deliberately messing up as many of the dimpled footprints as possible.
The red F-150
slewed to a halt halfway into his yard. The man in the passenger seat swiveled the spotlight to hit him directly in the face. Thom raised his hand to shield his eyes and prayed his expression didn’t give him away.
Thumpthump. Thumpthump.
The second truck, a gold Chevy crew cab with a light bar on the roof, parked sideways across the mouth of his driveway.
A shadow emerged from the driver’s side of the F-150 and passed through the headlights. Thom didn’t need to see the man’s face to recognize Ed Stanton, the mayor of Pine Springs.
Thom resisted the urge to close the door behind him, which would only draw attention to it.
The old man stopped at the bottom of the porch stairs and cocked his head first one way, then the other.
“I think maybe you should take a ride with us, Thom.”
“If you need help tracking it, I can get my truck—”
“I’m pretty sure we’ve already found what we’re looking for.”
Stanton ascended the steps one at a time, almost leisurely, until he was standing mere feet from Thom, who hoped he hadn’t left anything incriminating within clear view through the front door.
The passenger door opened, sending the spotlight racing off into the darkness. Dan Wallace, chief of police, dropped down into the snow and shot the collar of his brown jacket against the cold. He leaned against the side of the truck and rested his right hand on the butt of his holstered sidearm.
Stanton nodded and clapped Thom on the shoulder.
“Looks like it’s been a rough night for you.” The mayor glanced at Thom’s chest. “Cut yourself shaving?”
Thom looked down and saw the reddish smudges on his shirt.
“You don’t understand.”
“No one understands better than I do,” Stanton snapped. All pretense of civility vanished from his expression. He jabbed Thom in the chest with his bony index finger when he spoke. “Don’t think for a second that I don’t.”
The stairs creaked behind Thom as Tammy descended from the second floor.
Stanton removed his snowcap and held it to his chest.
“Evening, Tamara. I’m sure you must have your hands full right about now, but we’re going to need to borrow Thom here for a little while. Don’t you worry, though. I’ll leave the Roberts brothers out here in case you need some company.”
Thom glanced at the crew cab blocking his drive. Ryan and Todd Roberts owned the only slaughterhouse within two hundred miles, an inheritance from their father, much like their seats on the town council.
Tammy opened her mouth to object but bit her lip when Thom gave her a subtle wave. She nodded mutely and without a word ascended the stairs once more.
Stanton looked sideways at Thom before stepping into the foyer uninvited and running his fingers across the surface of the door. He rubbed his brown fingertips together and smirked.
Thom grabbed his jacket from behind the door and used the opportunity to get Stanton out of his house.
The old man smiled and threw his arm over Thom’s shoulder.
“Now, what do you say we take that ride?”
—
“You’re sweating, Thom,” Chief Wallace said.
“The heater’s blowing right in my face,” Thom said, although he knew he wasn’t fooling anyone.
They sat shoulder-to-shoulder in the cab of the mayor’s truck, with Thom right in the middle, as they slowly worked their way into town. The roads were slick, and the blowing snow clogged the vehicle’s brights. Lights had begun to appear in the windows of the houses they passed. He imagined that he saw in the faces that peeked out from behind the drawn blinds a mixture of relief and pity, and hated them for it.
The truck turned right and slid halfway across Main before regaining traction. The plows and sand trucks would be out around dawn, when life would resume as usual for everyone else. Thom and his family would be treated as pariahs for twenty-four hours, after which the home-cooked meals and condolences would begin trickling in.
The sign at the edge of town read:
Welcome to Pine Springs
A Family Community
Elevation: 8560
They passed the police station, the post office, and the grain-and-feed store and slid up against the curb in front of Stanton Park, named after the mayor’s great-grandfather, Zebulon Stanton, who founded the town in 1867, before Colorado was even a state. Thom’s ancestors had arrived with them, and not a day went by that he didn’t silently curse them for it.
The men beside him opened their doors without a word and hopped down to the icy road. Thom stared off into the dark park for several seconds before reluctantly following.
The Tastee Freeze kiosk was shuttered for the winter and nearly buried under the accumulation. Majestic elms stood naked and shivering among the blue spruces. The gazebo in the center of the park was shrouded with snow. Slivers of light parted the curtains of the houses surrounding them as the owners tried to identify the poor bastard being led to the gazebo.
“You can make this stop anytime you want!” Thom shouted.
The curtains snapped closed as his voice echoed off into the night.
“You’ve been on the other side of this, Thom,” Chief Wallace said. “Just do your duty so we can all get back to bed.”
“Screw you, Dan.”
“Everybody gets one. Say that again and you’ll spend the next twenty-four hours in a cell instead of with your family.”
Thom wasn’t a violent man by anyone’s definition of the word, and yet he’d never wanted to kill anyone so badly in his life, at least until he turned and Stanton thrust a cloth sack and a pair of work gloves into his chest.
“The sooner you’re done, the sooner we can return to our nice warm houses.”
Thom snatched them from the mayor’s grasp and faced the gazebo. He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. The wind stole the cloud from his lips and whisked it away with the snow. He climbed the steps into the wooden structure on numb legs.
The carnage was worse than he’d imagined. The entire interior of the structure was spattered with frozen blood, icicles of which clung to the roof above him. The frayed rope was still tied to the rusted iron ring bolted to the middle of the floor. He could see only darkness through the gaps between the wooden slats. Were it not for the hooves and the random swatches of fur scattered among the bones, it would have been impossible to tell that the carcass had ever belonged to a goat. The cranium had been shattered to get to the brain, and the snout had been snapped in half to retrieve the tongue. What wasn’t disarticulated was broken. All that remained of the muscles were the tendons knotted in the joints.
The speed and efficiency with which the animal had been slaughtered and consumed were staggering, bearing witness to which was undoubtedly the whole point of this exercise. Physically seeing the condition of the remains was meant to impress on him the gravity of his predicament, and it worked like a charm.
Thom pried a long bone from the frozen mess, shoved it into the bag, and tried not to think about how the scoring on the bones reminded him of teeth marks.
—
No one spoke a single word on the way back to his house. Thom sat in the middle with the frozen remains thawing in the sack and soaking into his jeans. He felt like he was going to throw up.
Ryan Roberts backed his crew cab out of the driveway long enough for Stanton to pull in, then blocked it once more. His brother Todd tromped around the side of Thom’s house from the back acreage, his rifle slung over his shoulder, when the mayor’s truck parked at the foot of the porch.
“Make the time you have left count,” the chief said. He opened his door and climbed out into the night.
Thom was halfway out the door when Stanton reached across the seat and grabbed him by the jacket.
“Don’t even think about doing anything stupid, Thom. You know the consequences if you do.”
Thom jerked his arm from the old man’s grasp and slipped out of the truck.
Wallace
climbed back in behind him and closed the door with a sound that resonated throughout the valley like a gunshot. The Ford’s taillights stained the snow crimson as it grumbled back toward the road.
Thom dropped the sack right there in the snow and staggered up the stairs.
“Try to get some sleep,” Todd said, and vanished once more around the side of the house.
Tammy threw open the door and rushed to him. They collapsed to their knees in a desperate embrace. Thom’s shoulders shook as he broke down and sobbed into her neck.
OCTOBER 31
ALL HALLOWS’ EVE
“We have to tell her,” Tammy said.
“We’ve already been over this.”
Thom parted the blinds just far enough that he could see Todd’s silhouette passing through the trees, the barrel of his rifle protruding from his shoulder and his breath trailing him in a cloud. He let the blinds close and faced his wife.
“She deserves to know,” Tammy said.
“Not yet. There’s still time—”
“To do what, Thom? Huh? What do you propose we do?”
“I have a plan.”
“You have a plan.”
“I have everything under control. I can fix this, Tammy.”
“Don’t you think that every single family that’s been in this position over the last hundred and fifty years has tried to do just that? How many of them have succeeded?”
“Just because no one ever has doesn’t mean that we can’t.”
“You’ve had sixteen years to prepare for this day. Tell me this plan of yours will work.”
“I think so.”
“You think. That’s great.”
“I don’t see you doing anything.”
She slapped him squarely across the face. He stared at her dumbly for a moment. She raised her hand again, but this time he caught her by the wrist and pulled her to him. She pounded her fists against his chest until her anger fled her and she hugged him so tightly that he could barely breathe.
“I’ll take care of this,” he whispered. “I promise.”
He turned around at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Jessie stood on the landing, her oversized T-shirt hanging to mid-thigh. Her dark hair was mussed and her eyes were half closed by sleep.
“What’s going on down here?”
Halloween Carnival, Volume 3 Page 4