Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth)

by Michael Langlois

  “Let’s wait for Henry before we take a look.”

  “That was my plan.” He put it back in his lap and resumed forcing his chair over the bumpy trail.

  Anne wasn’t so matter of fact about the whole fox thing. “Are you kidding me? Just now, while we were fighting a pack of honest-to-god monsters, you got a delivery from a cute woodland animal? And you’re just now mentioning it? And you’re both like, oh, did you get a fox delivery during that monster attack? Sure did, bro! High five! What the hell is wrong with you two?”

  I shrugged. “To be fair, this isn’t any weirder than the dead squirrel deliveries we’ve been getting. And I’m pretty sure neither one of us used the word bro.”

  “Everybody is crazy but me.”

  “Every crazy person says that.”

  She glared at me. “You should be so glad that I’m out of bullets.”

  “They say that, too.”

  By the time we got to the truck, the majority of the muscle and tendon damage to my back was healed, so I was able to lift Chuck into the cab. Leon stared at my back without comment from his wheelchair, but I could tell what he was thinking. If he felt any bitterness, he didn’t show it.

  We raced north up I-85 to the hospital. I put in a call to Henry while I drove to tell him what had happened. He cut me off and told me to tell him the rest when he arrived at the hospital. I tried to tell him that he didn’t need to come out, but he hung up on me.

  When we burst into the emergency room, everyone turned to stare. I imagine that a bloody man in tattered clothes holding up another bloody man clutching one arm, accompanied by a bloody woman and a bloody guy in a wheelchair is quite the sight, no matter how much time you spend in the ER.

  Things got busy as hospital staff arrived with gurneys and questions. We claimed it was an animal attack in the woods, which was pretty close to the truth, and everyone was examined, injured or not.

  Leon and I were inspected and released, my wounds having closed up during the drive and Leon not having been wounded in the first place. Anne, who had claimed to be fine back at the graveyard, needed a dozen stitches to close a claw wound on her left side, near her hip.

  Chuck was in worse shape. We didn’t know yet how badly he was hurt, but got concerned when they wheeled in an IV rack with a blood bag hanging from it.

  They sent us away to emergency room purgatory to wait in hard plastic chairs next to people clutching bloody towels or coughing uncontrollably. After an hour, an ER nurse walked up to us and hugged Leon. She was a heavyset woman in her early fifties, and she looked tired.

  “Leon, honey, are you all right? After all you’ve been through, I nearly had a heart attack when I saw you come in. You want me to call your momma and tell her you’re here?”

  “No thanks, Aunt Emily, I’m fine. This is Abe. He’s staying with us at Uncle Henry’s for a while.”

  She seemed to take in the state of my clothes for the first time. “My lord, do you need to see a doctor?”

  “I’m good. It’s just my clothes that are a mess.”

  “If you say so. I’m Emily, pleased to meet you. I’m Leon’s aunt on his momma’s side.”

  “Pleased to meet you, too, ma’am.”

  “That pretty little girl will be done with her stitches in just a few more minutes. The other one, now, he’s been chewed up pretty bad. They gave him blood and antibiotics, and he’s going to need to rest for the next couple of days. If he gets a fever, you bring him back and we’ll take a look.”

  Leon looked as relieved as I felt. “That’s good news, Aunt Emily. We’ll take good care of them.”

  “I know you will.” Emily hesitated a moment and glanced at me. I guess I seemed okay, because she went ahead with what she wanted to say. “Leon, baby, I need to tell you something. Little Paulie came in last night all beat up.”

  Leon looked shocked. “Is he okay? Who did it?”

  “Them hoods who are always dealing behind Carlotta’s feed store, who do you think? I don’t know if he got it in his head to run them off or what, but if Carlotta hadn’t heard all the commotion and called the Sheriff, I think it would have gone past a beating. As it is, they tore him up pretty good. We sent him home, but I want you to call him and make sure he stays away from those men. He has no business getting mixed up with their kind. He’s a good boy.”

  “I will. Thanks, Aunt Emily.”

  Emily hugged Leon again and went back to her rounds. Leon just sat there next to me, his face like stone and his hands clenched on the arms of his wheelchair.

  “Worried about your friend?”

  “Cousin. Paulie’s my cousin. And that dumb shit knows better than to go messing around behind the feed store where the dealers hang out. Time was my Aunt would come to me to have a word with anybody who messed with my family. Now she wants me to get on the phone and tell Paulie to back down. I mean, shit. What else am I good for, right?”

  “If he’ll listen to you, then you could end up saving his life.”

  “I’d rather have a talk with the guys that put him in here.”

  I shrugged and leaned back in my chair. “That’s what friends are for.”

  Thirty minutes later, Henry found us in the emergency room. He handed me the fresh t-shirt he thought to bring because he’s a genius. I shrugged it on, promptly ruining it. Still, it was better than walking around in bloody tatters. I filled him in while we waited for the others to be released.

  Henry listened patiently with that far-away look that I remembered from countless briefings back in the day. When I was done, he said, “Those creatures were definitely feeding on the dead in that graveyard, but they don’t sound like any ghoul that I’ve heard of. For one thing, ghouls are said to be human-like in appearance, and two, they’re solitary creatures. They don’t live in packs. But now that I have a description, I’ll go back through my books and see if anything catches my eye.”

  “Any idea why they stopped attacking?”

  Henry shrugged. “Well, if I don’t know what they are, I surely can’t tell you how they act. And before you ask, yes, I think this is why a foot from that cemetery ended up on my front porch. Someone clearly wanted us to find that nest.”

  “Which makes me wonder. Was it the nest or us that they wanted eliminated?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  Eventually Anne and Chuck came out to meet us. Anne lifted up the bottom of her shirt to show me her new stitches. “Can you believe this? I’m going to have a scar, right over my hip, for the rest of my life. I’m actually scarred for life.”

  I frowned. “You’d rather have had your guts yanked out? You were lucky to get off with just stitches.”

  “I’d be even luckier if I hadn’t gotten clawed at all. I’m never going to be able to wear a bikini again, Abe. Never.”

  “What? Great, now I’m angry, too! How about you, Chuck?”

  “Yeah, that sucks.”

  “No, I mean how are you? The nurse said you had some pretty bad bites.”

  “All the way to the bone. The doc kept asking me what did it. They said they’ve seen bites from pretty much everything that lives in this part of the country, and they’ve never seen this. I kept saying bear, and they kept giving me the hairy eyeball. In the end they gave up, but they shot me full of antibiotics and wrote me a prescription. Apparently animal bites are prone to infection. Other than that, just some stitches and pulled muscles.”

  “Close call,” I said. “When that thing got you on the ground, I figured you were a goner.”

  “Me, too. Oh, and Anne? If it makes you feel any better, I’m never wearing a bikini again, either.”

  Anne punched him in his good arm. “Shut up, Chuck.”

  8

  When we got back to the house everyone gathered around Henry in his recliner. We told him about the attack in the graveyard while he scratched down notes and asked the occasional question. Afterwards, Leon handed over the pale leather tube. Henry examined it with hands sixty years youn
ger than the rest of him, turning it this way and that with nimble fingers.

  The tube was the size of a rolled up sheet of paper and fastened shut with a twist of coarse vine. He gently untied it and saved the vine in his shirt pocket to examine later.

  He unrolled the leather sheet, revealing a single barbed thorn about two inches long. The base of it was a smoothly rounded ball that was very faintly transparent, like a drop of dark amber. The thorn that grew out of it was shiny and black and wickedly sharp.

  The inside of the sheet had words burned into it, as if marked with a thin, hot piece of metal. Henry read the words aloud in his deep and resonant voice.

  Sow the seed in flesh to reap the future. Sow the future in the earth to be made whole.

  Leon leaned forward in his wheelchair and took the sheet out of his hand. “What does that mean, made whole?”

  “It means,” said Henry after a long pause, “that whoever sent this knows too goddamn much about you. Come with me out to the workshop, I think you need to see something.”

  I’d always liked Henry’s property. The house sat well back from the narrow country road that ran past it, and was surrounded by trees and low grass as far as you could see. Now, in early fall, you could hear the restless susurrus of the wind that pushed through the red and gold leaves above us and the sharp crunch of the fallen ones under your feet.

  It was only a few dozen yards to the shed, but halfway there you had to pass the spot where Leon’s best friend Carlos had died, neck crushed by a creature that Piotr had sent to kill us. The ground there looked no different, but a sadness clung to it, a bitter reminder every time I took this path.

  Inside the shed, we gathered around one of the tables while Henry hunted through storage boxes that filled the shelves on one wall. He eventually came back with a metal lockbox, the kind of thing you’d use to hold money at a garage sale.

  Inside was a battered journal with a pale leather cover, bulging with extra pieces of paper stuck between its worn pages and held closed with a rubber band that was clearly much newer than the journal itself. Next to it was a familiar looking sheet of pale leather.

  Henry pulled the leather out of the box and unfolded it on the table, smoothing it out with his hands. It was larger than the one Leon had been given, and the creases in it showed that it had once been wrapped around something square on the bottom and round on the top. The journal was the right size to match the square creases, but it wasn’t clear what had made the round impression.

  We crowded close to read the words burned into it.

  The messenger grants sight. The altar grants voice. Sacrifice grants justice.

  Henry took the journal out of the box and opened it gently. The pages were crammed with spidery looking symbols that seemed to writhe on the page everywhere except where you were looking. Between the pages were loose sheets of note paper covered in Polish handwriting.

  “This is the book that taught Piotr to construct his blood ritual. I believe it came with some sort of translator that allowed him to read it, and that both items were wrapped up in this sheet of leather, just like our mysterious seed.”

  At the mention of a translator, I remembered the grotesque hemispherical creature that Piotr had ripped from his chest moments before he died. I could easily imagine that thing crouched on the top of the book, patiently waiting inside its leather shroud.

  Henry spread the new leather sheet out next to the old and placed the seed on top of it. The handwriting, if you could call it that, was identical.

  “So. Here we have two similar packages, each bearing unnatural contents, each delivered to a specific person, and each, based on the testing I did on the first one, wrapped in human skin.” He looked directly at Leon. “And the last person who used a package like this nearly destroyed the world.”

  “Because,” said Leon, “that’s what he wanted. He wanted to get revenge on the world that had taken his family from him, so that’s what he got. I want something else, and maybe that’s what I got. It’s a seed, which last time I checked, was all about new beginnings and growing things, not tearing them down.”

  “This isn’t about granting wishes, boy. These gifts are being sent for a reason, and probably not one that you’re going to like.”

  “Bullshit. You have no idea why Piotr got the package he did, or what it was even supposed to do. We only know what he chose to do with it. For all we know, it took him so long to perform the ritual because he was adapting it to his own purposes.”

  “Leon ...”

  “You told me about Belmont, Uncle Henry. About how the ritual released a ton of supernatural energy, enough to overcome the damping effect that people give off, right? Well, now that magic is coming back, you can’t just decide that it’s all bad. It’s no different than any other resource, it can be used for good or ill, our choice. Why not healing? Almost every magical tradition in the world has some form of healing ritual or substance in it. Hell, half the books you got in here talk about remedies for one thing or another.”

  I spoke up. “Piotr didn’t get a recipe for chocolate cake and then suddenly figure out how to summon the Devourer. Henry and I spent months looking through this book after we took it from Piotr in Warsaw, back in 1944. Look at this.”

  I flipped through the worn pages until I came to a drawing of the four altar pieces nestled in the stomach of a goat. “Here’s how to summon the altar pieces, remember those?” I flipped again. “Here’s a picture of the worms, and on this page, sketches of the Mother infecting her victims.” I dropped the book back into the box. “Piotr used the package exactly as it was intended. The question is, why did whoever gave it to him want the ritual performed? And how long must it have taken to find someone with the ability to pull it off, not to mention insane enough to want to kill the world?”

  “The point,” said Leon, “is that it was the answer to his prayers. The ritual is exactly what he wanted, and it was delivered to him personally. Well I have prayers, too. And this was delivered to me on a goddamn battlefield full of unholy creatures by something natural and beautiful.”

  I picked up the seed, put it in the lockbox, and closed the lid. “You have no idea what will happen to you if you use this thing.”

  Leon slammed his fist down onto the table, making everything rattle and jump. “Who cares what happens to me? My life is over, motherfucker! I can’t do shit anymore. What, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life in this chair trying to prove that I can still go get the fucking mail? You saw what happened today. I was useless. Worse than that, I was a liability. The world is changing, I’m right in the middle of it, and for the first time in my life I’m completely worthless. I might as well be dead. So it doesn’t really matter what happens to me, does it?”

  “What happens if you die, but it doesn’t stop there? The ritual that Piotr got was designed to kill him, remember? And then kill everybody else. Your death might just be the first step.” I took a breath and tried to calm down. “I know how much you want this ...”

  “Hey, fuck you, Abe. You have no idea.” He stabbed a finger at me. “You’re fucking immortal! And you’re telling me you know how much I want to be able to walk again? Hey, how’s your back? Feeling fine, right? You don’t know shit.”

  Anne held up her hands. “That’s enough. We don’t have to decide anything right now. Let’s just take a day or two to think things through, okay? The seed’s not going anywhere. Leon?”

  Leon and I glared at each other in the silence that followed. Then Leon spun his chair around and headed towards the door. “Whatever. But this is my life we’re talking about. Remember that.”

  We watched him leave, and then Henry locked the box and put it on a high shelf, hidden behind some other boxes.

  “Magic, huh?” said Chuck. “You mean like wands and ... this?” He waggled his fingers in the air.

  Anne gave him a look. “Please tell me you’re not going to say something skeptical after fighting supernatural killers full of worms and losin
g an entire town to a god from beyond time and space.”

  Chuck put his hands in his pockets. “It’s cool. If that was magic, then fine. Just wanted to know.”

  “Magic is as good a name for it as any other,” said Henry, “but it’s not new, and it’s certainly not unnatural. It’s a specific type of energy that groups of humans tend to suppress, and with our numbers doubling and redoubling the last couple of centuries, we’ve managed to get rid of it almost entirely. It’s as normal as sunshine, we just haven’t had any sunny days for a while.”

  “It’s all the same to me, man. I don’t care if it’s bears or boogeymen or what, but as soon as it tries to eat me, I’m killing it. No offense.”

  Henry clapped him on the shoulder. “None taken, son. Feel free to shoot anything that tries to eat me, too.”

  9

  I sat in the dark behind the shed until well after midnight, waiting. It was cold and damp and boring, but I learned how to be patient lying on my stomach in the freezing mud of Eastern Europe. This was a walk in the park.

  My hiding spot was behind the workshop, out of sight of the house, so my first indication that Leon had arrived was the creak of the door. I hoped that he would change his mind and leave, but when I heard the crash, I knew that wasn’t happening.

  Inside, I found Leon on the floor surrounded by boxes and scattered books, his wheelchair a couple of feet away. He was at the foot of the shelves where Henry had stashed the lockbox.

  I squatted down next to him. “Need any help?”

  “Nope.” He showed me the box. The son of a bitch had managed to climb ten feet using only his hands. He was determined, I’d give him that.

  I watched as he popped the lid and pulled out the leather tube. He opened it, looked at both sides before tossing it aside, then pawed through the box. After a few seconds, he slammed it down on the concrete.

  “Looking for this?” I pulled the seed out of my pocket. It gleamed in the harsh light of the bare bulbs overhead.

  “You need to give me that, Abe. Right now.”