Nonetheless, there could be no doubt: it was Ephraim. Sure as the evening was strange. A bigger, more menacing Ephraim, perhaps—turned inside out and then loose on the world—but Ephraim, as everyone present had came to know him, in recent days, all the same. Gazing down on them now, as a wrathful captain assailing a mutinous crew (soon to be walking the plank, every one of them), sheerly imposing. Omniscient. Indomitable.
Any collective awakenings withered. Pangs of conscience were forced into recession. Moments of clarity soured to fear.
In spite of which, Fannie was prompted to sympathy.
Even before she began to sense Jonathan moving around in the shadows behind her, she’d already lifted her hands to Ephraim, intent on coaxing him down alone—as only she could: beckoning gently.
But Ephraim responded as never before: with a snarling lunge down a third of the staircase. He reared up, fixing a closer gaze on her.
A startled commotion went up from the crowd.
Gasping, Fannie took one step back, feeling suddenly vulnerable. All of the earthly compassion had left her cousin’s eyes. He was absent, ruthless, full of lascivious intent, and focused on her, apparently.
She couldn’t contend with such force on her own: not without Ephraim’s recognition.
On that, her mind returned to Jonathan: back in the mound of toppled speakers, behind her, under the overhang, out of view—what the hell was he doing back there?
She turned for him.
Plugging a power strip into a generator box, he signaled: keep going!
The receiver was working, apparently. Only the speaker cord had been ripped from its socket. The system had been reconnected by Jonathan: down on his knees at the tape deck, waiting for the leader to roll …
She understood.
Outside, Officer Kutay was quietly passing the western wall of the barn from a distance of twenty yards to approach, more directly, the crumbling southern side, when he heard, or, with dis-belief, could have sworn he was hearing the opening notes of a tune that ran all the way back to his father’s tool shed (long afternoons with an AM radio, stripping and sanding and polishing woodwork), from out of the cracks in the building’s sideboards, drifting, with flickering creases of torchlight: what sounded like / had to be George Jones, no matter how seemingly, madly im-possible …
Back to back with the chain saw massacre Fatty had heard while approaching the barn, and given the state of Beaumont’s cruiser, and everything Kutay had seen being done to it, Possum’s voice sounded almost too rational. Fatty had trouble believing his ears.
Back up the overgrown lane, a half mile through the corn, his cruiser was stuck in a ditch—the product of trying to drive without headlights. From there, he had crept down the rest of the path with his .45 drawn, moving straight for the chain saws. Once at the edge of the clearing, he’d come into view of the gathering, just as expected, and, much less predictably, Rudolf’s cruiser. The sight of it upside down, being beaten, had prompted Fatty to call for backup. His call had then been confirmed by the dispatcher.
“Wait for us, Nelson. Sheriff’s orders.”
Whereby, Kutay had turned down his radio.
Intent on complying with Highman’s order, he’d held his position.
He certainly wasn’t about to go in there alone. No way.
It was only when, after a couple of minutes, a booming explosion had filled the barn, stopping everyone dead in their tracks outside, soon to be followed by weighted silence, then by a massive stampede through the door—that Officer Kutay suddenly found himself overlooking an empty yard and, whether in fear of losing his quarry or simply out of curiosity, crossed the field to investigate: over the creek on a wooden bridge, around the cluttered, fire-lit clearing, through scattered garments along the periphery, into the shadows, behind the barn …
And that’s where he’d heard “A Good Year for the Roses.”
Which brought him right up to the moment, confirmed.
In a wavering crouch, with the gun in one hand and the pork rind gut sagging over his belt, he made his way up the barn’s embankment. He probed for a crack in the building’s sideboards. At first, there was something obstructing his view: a stack of paneling maybe—old insulation or boarding stacked up on the inside. He edged his way down the wall to where shimmering light spilled out of the vertical cracks. He peered through one of them. Slowly, his eyes adjusted. He started to take in the scene. To begin with, all he could see was a line of heads, turned away: a motionless throng, and the flickering glare of what must have been torchlight … Then he began to notice their costumes: somebody dressed as Christ on a signpost. Someone in drag. Someone else in a gas mask … And all of them poised apprehensively, seeming to cower, almost.
They looked out of their minds.
Kutay shifted a few yards down to his right. He peered through a higher crack. This time he saw something moving above them, descending a staircase slowly, its overblown shadow at large on the opposite wall. It was big and dark. Yet he still couldn’t make out the details. It looked like a burned animal. Again, he shifted his stance for a better angle. He peered through a crack in the wood that was only a couple of feet off the ground. And now he saw it, though what in the name of Jesus, he couldn’t begin to wonder. It looked like a charred and decomposing shit monster out of a toxic spill …
While descending the stairs, it appeared to be weakened. Or maybe just swaying in time with the music. Then, more than weakened, it seemed to be sick. Or wounded. Or poisoned, perhaps. Or drunk … It brought to mind something that Fatty had seen on the TV: a program on Indian snake charmers—out of a basket each serpent had risen, entranced by the plaintive wail of a flute—or in this case, the “Possum,” George: crooning in sanguine perfection, into the chorus:
It’s been a good year for the roses
Many blooms still linger there
The lawn could stand another mowing
Funny, I don’t even care …
And when you turn to walk away
As the door behind you closes
The only thing I know to say:
It’s been a good year for the roses …
The figure dropped below Fatty’s line of visibility, obscured by the crowd. Fatty, unconsciously mouthing the words to the song, continued to probe the wall. He discovered what looked like the hole from a .22 slug. He looked in. There it was again: dragging its hindquarters over the floor in starts: an abomination of chance. It was gurgling, gasping. The life force appeared to be draining right out of it. It seemed to be dying—and sorrowful, wilting, out of its element, stricken to an excess of vulnerability. The girl at center floor—the only one dressed in standard Dutchie garb—with her arms outstretched in protective assurance, appeared to be holding it under her sway—as toward her it staggered, its energy dwindling with every passing step in advance: the Blue Ball Devil. It had to be. That was no costume.
Kutay could smell it now.
It sank to its haunches before the girl—again, out of sight.
Fatty cursed. He moved to the right. His heart was racing …
Where was backup?
He looked though a penny-sized, hollowed-out knot in the sideboards. Now he could see the floor: in the middle of which, the girl stood sobbing, leaning gently over The Devil—itself in prostrate, inert submission—as all around them, the crowd began to blink and stir, as though from a nightmare—proof that music could soothe the soul, it appeared. But then Fatty began to look closer: something was twirling just over the crowd—something he couldn’t distinguish at first. Squinting, he strained for a clearer look …
… bloodied and quivering, oozing, inverted and swollen to threshold retention of fluids …
Kutay staggered back from the wall, reeling down the incline. He managed to catch himself. Gagging, he gripped his pistol. “Rudolf!” he cried out. An avalanche rolled through his focus. He lifted his barrel and shot through the sideboards. He fired again. And again. And again …
The fir
st slug ripped into Isaac Hoeker’s prostrate body, lodging into his spine.
The second blew harmlessly over the crowd.
The third shot actually grazed The Devil …
And the fourth tore straight through Fannie Gwendolyn Hostler’s shoulder, dropping her instantly.
Jonathan was already halfway across the room by the time she had hit the floor. He dove to her side in a scrambling panic. Gasping, he scooped up her motionless body. Her shoulder was bleeding, opening up in a patch of crimson beneath her blouse. Her eyes were closed, but her lips were trembling. She was alive, it appeared. And suffering.
Around them, the crowd was stampeding in terror. A throng of bodies jammed the doorway.
Jonathan cried for an end to it all. His voice was lost in the pandemonium. Something was blocking the torchlight above. He looked up.
Ephraim was standing over him: staring intently down on Fannie. A definite look of recognition, of worry, flared in his gaze for a moment. As quickly, on sniffing her body, that look gave way to an air of devastation. Jonathan watched as the last he would ever see of his oldest friend disappeared. In the place of whom, something more horribly pitiless rose to its full, unbridled stature …
It tore through the wall of the barn, with a splintering racket of boards, in a single leap.
Halfway across the field now, running in blind terror, Fatty could hear it: directly behind him, closing fast. He scarcely managed to turn his head before it was severed, leaving his body. End over end, the earth and heavens jumbled. The spinning slammed to a halt.
He was staring up from a clump of thickets. Behind him, the creek was trickling gently. The side of his face was perched on a stone. There was some kind of horrible noise from above.
In his fading moments, he watched his headless corpse being mauled to shreds and trampled.
Back in the barn, “A Good Year for the Roses” faded.
Finally, the sirens were coming.
Owen was just north of Intercourse, trailing a Holtwood patrol car on Harvester Drive, when an APB went out on a place called the Schlabach Farm on Eby Hess Road. The sheriff had summoned all units to respond. There was trouble, apparently—serious trouble, as Owen deduced by the dispatcher’s tone. But on following up, he found that the township police had sealed off the gravel drive leading into the fields of the property in question. No one was being allowed to pass, and the cops weren’t remarking on the situation. In spite of the livid demands of the Holtwood crew, which was soon to be followed by Sprawl Mart patrols, then a black bumper squadron and no less than thirty “concerned”—meaning armed—citizens, Sheriff Highman’s officers staunchly, aggressively refused to impart any details.
Finally, one onlooker, fed up with arguing, stomped to his vehicle, claiming that he knew a “back way” in, if the cops wouldn’t help him.
As most of the crowd, including Owen, was prompted thereby to follow his lead—down Eby Hess Road to Old 18, then right for a quarter of a mile, then right again—onto a darkened gravel path on the opposite end of the property in question—it wasn’t until they spilled through a gap in the corn and down a bumpy slope and across a field toward a crumbling barn, encircled by flashing cruisers and cops, that a damage report was made available.
Which, evidently, ran as follows:
Thus far, according to Officer Christopher Keiffer’s unofficial assessment—offered up only to keep the incoming motorcade at bay for the moment—one Lamepeter officer, name undisclosed, was dead by cause of decapitation. An unidentified Amish girl had been killed by gunfire. Another young man, also Amish and shot, was in an ambulance, paralyzed. A second officer—one whose identity wasn’t to be disclosed, at present—had been discovered in a “highly compromising” position inside of the barn. That officer’s cruiser, presumably, lay overturned in a heap of devastation. A second cruiser was said to be lodged in a ditch somewhere, back up through the field. A third vehicle, a ’72 Hornet, was also marooned in a pile of itself. Thousands of dollars’ worth of “suspected robbery” goods lay scattered about—from bottles and clothing to furniture, tools and recliners and boxes of fishing lures—everything, probably down to the final item, reported stolen from barns and garages throughout The Basin that month—collected, at last, in a sprawling array …
Keiffer went on to explain how, upon their arrival, the township police had found only two conscious individuals present: an unidentified young Amish man, and a young Amish woman, wounded by gunfire. Neither had spoken a word as of yet. The police were still trying to pry them apart.
Several juvenile suspects, four in total, had been caught fleeing the scene—yet every one of them seemed to have been in the clutches of some kind of drug-induced madness. Filthy, jabbering, wide-eyed and unrestrained, they were bound for a season in the psych ward. The cornfields were said to be crawling with similar, equally crazed young men and women. Two more, both in masquerade, had just been stopped on Ronkers Lane, and from them, only one person’s name had been spoken with any clarity:
Ephraim.
With that, the crowd surrounding Keiffer, who would later take a pranging for making a statement—had heard enough. The Sprawl Mart patrol was already familiar with that name. Half of the black bumper squadron on hand had been searching for someone named Ephraim all night. The last order Officer Kutay, now deceased, had received was to check on the home of one Abraham Hostler for a young man in breach of house arrest named Ephraim Bontrager. Three of the city cops in attendance had orders to find and catch him, as well …
Suddenly, a name had been thrown to the mob, and, at once, that name became an objective—so much so, that the moment a Stepford detective pulled up in a silver Land Rover, everyone crowded around his vehicle, shouting demands, thumping the hood.
Alarmed, the detective rolled down his window. There, on his passenger’s seat, in open view, was a portable tracking box.
A couple of officers slowly emerged from the barn, looking notably pale and unsettled. Instead of dispersing the crowd that had grown to encircle the nameless Stepford detective, they joined it with heated demands for involvement. Everyone wanted in on the kill.
Dragging the box from the passenger’s seat, the detective placed it on top of his hood. He activated the power. It glowed to life. A digital grid appeared. The program was loading. A moment passed … Then came a tiny electronic blip.
Adjusting a dial, the detective looked up. He pointed west: “He’s over there.”
Unlike what a good many district members, and Plain Folk in general, had grown to believe, Jonas Tulk knew The Devil was vulnerable. A fleeting eternity might have elapsed since he’d shot it, but that wouldn’t alter the fact: at a time when the compound had been much smaller—a twenty-cage facility—and far less secure, when the dogs had provided their only alarm, and the doors had been poorly (uselessly) fortified, Jonas alone, armed only with a .22 rifle, caught totally unawares (sleeping) and firing into the dark, no less—had crippled the beast in a single shot. He remembered it yowling off into the night—alive, but wounded: as quick to be driven away as it had appeared.
It was flesh and bone.
Tonight, after so many years, he was better prepared. Tonight, there would be no surprises. The compound was fully equipped at present. Now there were floodlights, reinforced doors, security cameras, alarms and a phone. Jonas himself, wide awake, stood armed with a sawed-off shotgun in hand and a .357 revolver tucked into his belt. Every electrical light in the building, both inside and out, was glaring intensely. All four cameras were working. As well as the alarms. And all of the doors were locked … Cleon and Bontrager may not have been there, and James and Ezekiel were roaming The Basin, but Jonas felt ready to hold down the compound alone. In fact, he preferred it this way.
From the ground floor’s office, a cubicle packed with camera screens, he could survey the property. Nothing would enter—or pass—undetected. All systems were go.
And none too soon.
All through the evening,
he’d waited with tortured impatience. At one point, he’d almost jumped the gun, when, from out of nowhere, a figure had crossed the highest screen of his monitor: a vaguely familiar woman’s image in tattered white—partly obscured by darkness, stumbling east on the road …
The experience had left him on edge. But maybe, he decided, that was where he belonged. Ghostly apparitions wouldn’t contend with the flesh and blood of The Devil. Tulk knew enough to expect a direct attack. It would probably storm the doors. As well, it would probably appear after midnight, when most of the roads were beginning to clear. The Devil had always relied on instinct more than intelligence—even though, recently, something had entered the compound through one of its ceiling hatches.
Those hatches were blocked now.
The only way into the building was via the main entrance, directly ahead.
In one of the cages, a Labrador puppy lifted its head from the slumbering cluster. It stared at the wall for a moment. Ever so gently, it thumped its tail on the mesh. Then again. It sat up.
Two cages over, a collie stirred from sleep with a growl.
Tulk stood in silence, gazing around at the angular, sheet metal walls of the building as though in the gut of an English whale.
The Labrador barked. The others around it began to sit up. They stared at the wall.
It was quiet again.
Jonas walked to the office and looked at the camera monitors. No sign of movement.
He returned to the floor.
He drew a corncob pipe from his pocket.
Maybe this would steady his nerves. He lit the bowl.
The alarm went off.
Every dog in the building sat up.
Jonas ran back to the office.
A light was flashing and buzzing under the monitors. He looked at the screens. There was nothing. No movement, no glitch in transmission. Unless the fence had been climbed already, it looked untouched. Except … (as it nearly eluded him)—maybe for: what was that jag in the pattern out there?—in the northeastern corner?
He flipped to manual. Zooming, he saw it: a gash in the wire.
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