by Gene Lazuta
Her hair was blond, long, and luxurious. Her eyes were black, even in the pale moonlight. And her dress was strange, to say the least. A flowing white gown that billowed when she stepped so that, in the dark, she seemed to float over the ground draped itself sensuously over her fine shoulders, intimating at the loveliness of her body and painting out glimpses of her catlike line. When he saw her, Luther felt almost instantly warm…almost horny.
At a time like this? he thought, shaking his head.What the Hell’s wrong with me?
But there wasn’t any doubt about it: the lady in white was a siren. All she needed to do was say his name and Luther just knew that he’d throw himself at her feet.
Blinking, he took a deep breath and felt the feeling pass when the woman disappeared amid the stones.
But his relief was short-lived because, as he rose to follow the couple to the cemetery’s edge, he noticed a new and eerie glow pulsating up in a silver haze from where he knew the group had gathered. His hand resting uncomfortably on the frozen stone of the monument behind which he had hidden, he felt a liquid sensation of dread moisten his guts as that light grew to a true blaze that illuminated the figures around the grave.
His hammer dropped to the ground with a thud.
He stood straight up and lifted his hands to his mouth.
And the faces of the grave robbers turned his way, clear in the shining silver light, and vivid for the first time. Their eyes were locked on his. Their teeth were wet as they displayed grins of triumph. And…
“Holy shit!” he cried, turning to run…
Directly into the person standing behind him.
12.
“The cemetery!” Sheriff Conway shouted, slamming down the phone and looking up at Cooper with an expression of rage and terror. “Goddamn it, I shoulda known!”
“The cemetery?” Cooper exclaimed. “You gotta be kidding!”
In a flash, Conway moved around the room, waving his arms and explaining, “They’re diggin’ him up, boys,” as he unlocked a cabinet and started handing out long guns to the men as they moved past in an impromptu line.
“Get a coupla trucks, fast! We gotta stop ‘em ‘fore they turn it loose again!”
“Who?” Cooper shouted, pressing through the excited crowd and feeling instantly absurd. “Who’re you talking about?”
“Norris!” Conway hissed, jutting his face so close that the detective could feel the heat of his breath. “Now, get a coat and cover yourself.”
“No!” Cooper said, stubbornly planting his feet and crossing his arms over his chest. “Tell me, or I stay put.”
Conway’s eyes seethed as his lips quivered and men moved around him. The door opened and men ran into the night, and a truck engine roared somewhere close.
“It’s Woodie’s father,” Conway said, low and hard. “They’re gonna break the charm.”
Cooper shook his head, saying, “That don’t do it, Sheriff.”
“Listen,” Conway explained, “I was a young man. I didn’t know shit about nothin’, or about almost nothin’, anyway. Old Man Dunning was sheriff back then. I was just his boy. He let ‘em do it. They couldn’ta done it without his okay. Mrs. Norris threatened lawsuits up the ass, but Dunning convinced her that a lawsuit wouldn’t fix a house that burned down with one of her kids in it, like what might happen if she raised any more fuss. So’s her and her new man shut up and left. Like, that day. Never came back.”
Cooper ground his teeth.
“They buried him the magic way,” Conway said. “The first Norris was buried by his son, someplace nobody could ever find. Matthew Norris was lost in the woods, and nobody ever found him either. Robert Norris was the first one that folks could get their hands on, and they weren’t gonna let that chance go by.”
“What the hell did they do?” Cooper whispered.
“Nothin’ that no dead body would mind.” Conway shrugged, lifting a tweed jacket that had belonged to Emil off a chair and handing it over as a man called for them to hurry.
“They just buried him like a Vyrmin’s supposed to be buried to keep the land safe. They cut off his head and laid it at his feet, and turned his body so that it was on its chest. Then they nailed his hands, palm down, to the box, and covered him with wolfsbane leaves.”
“My God,” Cooper mumbled, absently accepting the coat that sheriff offered. “You people are…”
“Scared?” Conway asked, eyes narrow.
Cooper shook his head. The scars on his stomach burned. His mind went quiet.
Crazy, he wanted to say, but didn’t.
Instead, he allowed Conway to lead him out to his Ford, and listened as an anonymous man in a pickup truck shrieked, “Yeeee-haaaaaa! Let’s go git ‘em boys!”
And the sheriff said, “I wish I had me some silver bullets,” as he started the car.
What in the hell have I gotten myself into? Cooper thought as the car started to move. What in the righteous Hell did I get myself wrapped up in this time?
13.
There was an ancient apple tree near the grave, and its naked branches hung low, squirming with unnatural light. Luther didn’t even struggle as he was led to a spot near where the girl was standing, hanging her head in despair and apparently unaware of the presence of her intended rescuer.
The light around the grave was bright and phosphorescent. It pulsated in a misty, bone-chilling haze that seemed to seep right through Luther’s flesh to make him tremble. A ring of people in big down overcoats and heavy hiking boots stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the hole, while two more dug, first with shovels and then, after loud pronouncements of impatience, with their hands, like dogs. At the head of the grave was the woman—that gorgeous lady in white with whom Luther had been so taken—standing next to the skinny, long-haired man, whose mouth hung open and who swayed as if at any instant he would tumble forward, headfirst into the freshly dug ditch before which he stood.
Luther froze.
The light, that queer, silver glow, was radiating out from the thin man’s open left eye, falling like a searchlight beam on the hole before oozing up to illuminate the faces of the people so expectantly poised with their shovels and…
Chains.
They were horrible, these people. And as Luther’s gaze moved unwillingly from one face to the next, he gasped with revolted fascination. They seemed to be from another planet, or another time: heavy, sloping brows, beady animal eyes, large canine teeth, and dark hair and skin, all behind thick dripping clouds of frozen breath, grotesquely combined to make them look retarded—it was the only word he could think of…developmentally stunted, twisted, distorted…like Neanderthals, some of them, so deformed as to be closer to some species of ape, or prehistoric tribe, or…God…some circus sideshow-throwback-to-an-ignorant-time-when-people-who-weren’t-quite-normal-were-displayed-like-animlas-to-be-jeered-at-because-“normal”-people-were-afraid and…
His amazement numbed him through. He felt soft inside, like he could just melt. He felt alien, lost, and trivial. He watched as a tongue licked heavy lips before a voice, thick with spit and ire, grunted out its approval.
The captive girl raised her head and looked him straight in the face from across the hole, her eyes screaming silently, “Do something!”
And Luther did.
He began to cry.
Then he threw all his weight into the man—or thing—holding him, giving him just the slightest of spaces through which to run as his mind fixed itself on the idea of dragging this out for another minute, two minutes, three—any number that brought him closer to the twenty he thought it would take for the sheriff to come, because the sheriff was coming, but he needed twenty minutes.
And, with unbelievable quickness, the man who had been holding him turned, snatched out with his hand, and grabbed Luther’s hair, yanking him backward so that his feet left the ground and something snapped in his neck and made a pain shoot down his left arm.
A clattering of steel snaked through the branches overhead as
someone threw a length of chain up and over a stout limb. The girl screamed as the man holding her began pulling at her clothes. In the hole the sound of digging had transformed itself into the sound of scraping, and soon shovels were thumping in a rain of muddy blows on an echoing coffin lid. Eyes gleamed in the dark. Figures emerged and danced beneath the hazy moon. Luther’s arm wouldn’t move, and when he tried to lift his head, bones ground together in his neck. Painfully he slid to his knees, seeing out of the corner of his eye a hand explode up from the hole holding an ivory-colored something that he instinctively knew was a skull.
And all hell broke loose.
The entire group burst into a chorus of howls and gibbering, insane exclamations as some jumped down into the hole and others tore at their jackets. Some were dancing now, really dancing in whirling, snakelike tornados of beating feet and screaming mouths. A flash of white that Luther sensed was the woman at the head of the grave suddenly shot into the air, circled the ground, and then retuned in the wink of an eye. There was singing. There was barking. There was the sound of cloth being torn and…
The girl clawed, cried and beat at two huge men who were stripping off her blouse and bra as they lifted her, like a sacrificial lamb, over their heads toward where the chain hung from the tree, gleaming in the silver light, which had grown to an absolute rage.
A knife flashed.
A foot flew and kicked the side of Luther’s head.
He rolled on the ground, bones grinding away beneath his jaw, his legs fluttering uselessly in the mud.
The girl struggled hysterically.
Big black legs blocked his view of her for a moment before moving away to reveal a scene of such horror that, despite his neck, which he knew was broken, he overrode the paralysis of his damaged nerves and willed himself to move, willed himself…
To close his eyes.
He’d seen the girl, dangling over the hole. They’d stripped her naked and, with the knife, cut two holes in her side into which they had forced the hook at the chain’s end, securing it around a rib before slashing her wrists and hoisting her up so that she spun and struggled, her arms and legs twitching and her head convulsively turning as she screamed, and bled, and spun around and around and…
Bones flew out of the hole.
Luther saw them…his eyes were open again.
Bones flew up in a grotesque spray, and monsters laughed, and feet stamped, and chunks of rotting casket landed with wet sounds…
And there was the face of a horse.
And then someone lifted Luther’s body and hurled him into the grave.
14.
By the time they got there, it was over. At least for Luther. They ran in like the cavalry, waving the rifles the sheriff had just given them and calling out their approach enthusiastically, as if overjoyed at their opportunity to act. As they came, things scattered before them in the dark. Big things, little things, things with tiny yellow eyes that had come up from the Valley for some reason in a great mass, as if drawn to this place. Badgers, raccoons, opossums, cats, and dogs…lots and lots of dogs. They shot blackly from the dark, across the path of the charging men, rustling leaves and disappearing like phantoms.
There was no light: not in the caretaker’s shack, not on the grounds. So it was almost a half hour before their searching turned up anything unusual in the dark. After their initial charge, they had to stop, regroup, go back to the truck, and get flashlights. When they started again, their mood was somewhat muted. When they finally stumbled on the violated grave, their mood fell into a solid gloom.
Silence overtook even the most boisterous of the new deputies as Sheriff Conway pushed his way to the front of the crowd and aimed his flashlight square on the face of the girl’s now-still body, hanging limply over the new-dug hole.
“It’s Lefty Zimmer’s daughter, Linda,” he said to Detective Cooper, who, clutching the too-big mackinaw that Conway had provided for him back at the jailhouse, was standing directly to his right.
The girl’s face was a frozen mask of agony; blood ran from her nose, mouth, and hands, the rib from which she hung had been pulled up through her torn skin so that little white licks of cartilage clearly gleamed through a fibrous mass of muscle that ended in a terrible curve of bloody steel.
The flashlight’s beam moved from her to the ground, where huge black eyes stared up blankly from the bottom of the grave, dripping blood lay in sticky puddles on a long, chestnut-brown snout.
“And that’s Linda Zimmer’s horse, Ginger,” Conway said, fixing the light on the horse’s face.
The horse’s remains were positioned so that its nose faced the foot of the grave. Its legs were bent to embrace the curled body of a man who lay with his upper portion embedded in the shattered wood of a casket lid, and whole legs were weirdly twisted into a kind of cockeyed X. Blood dripped over the entire macabre arrangement, and large clumps of seeping mud had pulled themselves from the gnarled, root-and-rock embedded walls and piled themselves in wet, lumpy mounds inside the empty casket.
Slowly the flashlight beam moved up, and over the remains of a rectangular tombstone where it lay flat in the snow after having been toppled over and trod upon by many booted feet.
Through the ice and mud, etched into the stone, the words, ROBERT NORRIS, SR. were still visible. And the sheriff’s light lingered on them as he said, “It was a shot in the dark, the way they buried him, and I think they all knew it. But they did it anyway. They did it to keep the wolves away. As long as his body stayed the way they put it, the wolves weren’t supposed to be able to come back here. The land was stained for them.”
He paused and lifted his eyes to Cooper’s, revealing a terrible aura of fear and defeat.
“But tonight the wolves took it back. That’s what this has been all about. They came here and they took the Valley back. They dug him up, killed an animal whose spirit was tamed, and soaked the ground with a lamb’s blood. A lamb from the Flock named Linda Zimmer. They took the land back, and now they’re here to stay, unless we can do something about it.”
“No,” Cooper said simply, feeling a weirdly pleasant tingle prickle the sensitive flesh of his new scar. “It’s not that way.”
Conway moved the flashlight’s beam to the detective’s face, making the younger man squint and raise a hand as he said, “You can’t believe in any of this, Sheriff. You just can’t or it’ll blow you away.”
Cooper couldn’t see the sheriff’s face in the glare of his beam, but he could feel the man’s emotions radiating like heat through the misty cold air.
“It’s drugs,” Cooper continued, adamantly, gaining strength from the sound of his own voice, and the sudden feeling of being alone that not being able to see the other men gave him. “You read my report. You saw what Woodie Norris was involved in up north. He was a hard core addict, and so where the people he hung around with. He’s my friend, but he’s still sick. And the people doing these things…they’re crazy. Get it? Crazy! Not witches! We have to understand them if we’re going to predict what they’ll do next, second-guess them, and gain control. But if we let ourselves believe any of this, then we’re no better than they are, and we’ll never…”
“I saw it, Mr. Cooper,” the sheriff interrupted, and there was a tone in his voice so completely authoritative that Cooper let his own statement die on his lips. “While you were out chasin’ that thing that killed Emil, I saw the Man in the Woods…and something else. Something horrible. So I don’t need you tellin’ me about belief, ‘cause I do believe! I believe with all my heart. If I didn’t admit that I believed, then I’d have to admit that I was crazy…”
“That’s my point.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.”
The light fell from Cooper’s face and he saw that, in the gloom, the sheriff’s eyes were glistening with tears.
“You stepped outta the circle left foot first,” Conway said, very softly. “And you screamed at the wolfsbane kiss. If I had any sense, I’d shoot you dead, right
here on this spot, and save us both a lot of trouble. But it’s my fault you came here in the first place. I called you. So I can’t do it…at least not yet.
“But from here on out, you better remember how close to dying you came right this minute. And you came very close, Mr. Cooper. If I didn’t believe I could beat this thing, you’d be dead already. So don’t make no more points. And don’t let yourself think you got exclusive rights to reality. What you’re gonna have to accept is that you don’t know everything about everything. If you don’t accept that, you’re gonna die. It’s that simple.”
“A bite isn’t going to turn me into a werewolf,” Cooper insisted. “This isn’t a fucking movie.”
“The bite won’t turn you into anything,” Conway agreed. “It’ll just bring out what’s already inside you. You stepped outta the circle left foot first. That means you don’t favor the side that’s right. You burned at the wolfsbane touch, and that means that you got the poison in ya. You saw a Vyrmin change when she put on the belt, but still you won’t believe. And that means that your eyes are closed.”
“It means I didn’t see anyone change into anything!”
“That’s ‘cause the body hadn’t been dug up yet.”
“Jesus! Sheriff, you can’t really expect me to…”
“The change was stopped by the charm on the land.”
“Sheriff…”
“They killed the charm,” Conway said, snapping off his flashlight and dropping his arm so that his words hung independently in the dark. “Now that Robert Norris’ body’s gone, you’ll see your changes, I promise. Before the full moon sets, you’ll see more than you ever thought possible. And I’m sorry for that. I really am. But there’s nothing we can do about it now. The Blood Prince will come…and it’s you that’s gonna call him here.”
II
THE KILLIBROOK