Grim Harvest

by Patrick C. Greene

  Halfway down the steps, the figure, a pure black shadow, passed the stairway’s enclosing wall—and stopped.

  The only sound was their faltering breath, as they beheld the silhouette of a burly figure in a pilgrim-style hat.

  A beam of light blasted into the window behind them—a high-powered flashlight.

  They had never been so relieved to get caught.

  DeShaun tried the window again, further relieved when it opened easily. He stuck both hands out and called, “Don’t shoot!”

  “Who’s there!?” shouted Deputy Yoshida.

  “It’s me, DeShaun! Stuart’s with me! That’s all!”

  “Open the damned window, boys. All the way!”

  DeShaun made a quick check of the stairway as he complied. The burly shadow man was gone.

  Yoshida stepped to the window and checked the room with his flashlight. “Just you boys?”

  “Yeah,” DeShaun said.

  “Get out here.”

  They did.

  “What’s this?” Yoshida grabbed the lapel of Stuart’s ninja uniform. He was not impressed with this misrepresentation of his nation’s history. “You supposed to be a cartoon character or something?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What the hell are you doing, breaking into the library?”

  “It’s a whole big thing, dude,” DeShaun said.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet.” Yoshi was pissed. “Start squawking.”

  “Your dad would bury his boot up to your hipbone,” Yoshida told DeShaun. “Then you’d have your mom to deal with.”

  “I know.”

  “So what gives?”

  The boys explained to Yoshida about Stella’s request, Jill’s absence, and what they had just experienced.

  “Well. The rev has seemed a little off-kilter lately,” Yoshida agreed.

  “Something’s up,” Stuart said. “Something weird.”

  Yoshida knew that Stuart meant the Big Picture. Ember Hollow. Its people. Its history. Things no one wanted to admit to themselves.

  “As for Jill, it’s too late to scare her landlords. Come to the station tomorrow and let’s fill your dad in.”

  “Thanks Yoshi.”

  “Deputy Yoshida, right now. I just caught you breaking and entering. Remember?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Go home,” he ordered. “Don’t pull anything like this again. I won’t tell your dad, this once.”

  The boys started walking to their bikes.

  “Come to me next time,” Yoshida finished.

  Chapter 19

  Mother of Tears

  Though the gates were open, Sergeant Shavers stopped at the drive leading through the cemetery and up to Saint Saturn Unitarian. That was where a good many new graves lay; graves that held deceased friends and acquaintances, victims of the parade tragedy.

  His victim.

  He couldn’t put it off any longer or push it back in his mind any further. The horrors in his head had to come out. If that meant confessing to the shooting, so be it.

  The nervous fear he felt was greater than that of the worst calls he had ever gone out on. This simple act of disclosure felt like the beginning of his end. Final. Fatal. Perhaps it was only the culmination of his year-long inner agony he felt coming on. Maybe there was even a chance McGlazer could somehow cleanse him.

  Like an exorcist.

  The thought reminded Shavers of what the press had screamed about Everett Geelens’s past. Perverse priests had released some inner demon in him, under the guise of an exorcism.

  His sparse optimism scattered like the smoke from burning leaves in a hard gust. But resolve remained. Talking to McGlazer was the only way he knew to start.

  Shavers’s former favorite radio personality Dee Mentia was on, trying her cute kitsch and sounding embarrassingly forced. He frowned at the realization he no longer brightened when she spoke, never even raised the volume. As she intro’ed The Blackrats’ “King of Monsters” Shavers forced himself to tap his fingers to the lively beat. He wound his El Camino up the hill and around the church at a turtle’s pace. He hadn’t made an appointment because that would seem too…set in stone. He’d had to leave himself an exit option, and right now, he almost exercised it.

  He parked in the rear lot and sipped from a Drenalade he’d been nursing for two days. He was at the back door about to enter when he heard a scraping sound from around the corner of the building.

  Half-hoping he would find McGlazer there in the middle of some project from which he couldn’t break away, thus forcing a postponement, Shavers went to the corner and peeked around.

  The wooden utility shed built against the side of the church was open. Several dusty, oil-spotted sheets of plywood leaned against the wall—the shed’s flooring.

  Why had they been pulled up? He could go in and ask McGlazer. Or he could just check for himself.

  Was it really that important? Or was he delaying the inevitable confrontation with himself?

  Shavers walked to the shed’s doorway. Even in daylight, the interior was dark as brine. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a set of stone steps leading down to an ancient wooden door.

  Scary, yes. But not as scary as a massive crowd of costumed revelers tearing each other to pieces.

  Not as scary as confessing to murder a year after the fact.

  Like the shed, the door at the bottom of the steps was left ajar, just less than an inch in its frame.

  Whatever else this was, “safety hazard” was the most convenient reason to further investigate.

  Someone had sure worked hard to unseal it.

  Shavers stepped down the narrow steps, disturbing a quick black rodent into a scurrying fit, like a fuzzy pinball bouncing off walls and bumpers. He drew his sidearm and whipped it to and fro, as if his gun hand could catch the animal’s frenetic movement. Uttering a hoarse curse, he shoved his weapon back in the holster.

  Coming to the bottom of the stairs, Shavers pushed lightly at the door. Sure enough—the same scraping he had heard a minute earlier.

  Shavers opened it a bit further and found only thick swirling dust. Beyond that, black.

  “Hello?” he called. “Rev? You in here?” Shavers pushed the door open just enough to squeeze his modest beer belly through, cursing himself for leaving his Maglite in the El Camino.

  Before his eyes could adjust, he sneezed three times, dizzy and disoriented in the pressing darkness. Looking behind, he was relieved to see gloomy daylight beyond the half-open door.

  Footsteps over his head knocked loose still more dust. He felt more sneezes coming on—and overwhelming disorientation.

  Shavers felt his breath coming in struggling wheezes, his sinuses closing up to pinpricks. Dizziness hit him like sudden head trauma.

  The door through which he’d barely taken a single step now seemed yards away. Maybe he had waited too long to address his problem and lost his damn mind.

  The footsteps seemed to stop just above his position. As if someone up there had sensed him.

  Shavers picked through his mind for something from his training or experience to comfort him, help him maintain composure. He was fast becoming reacquainted with the sheer primal terror of witnessing the Pumpkin Parade going to hell all around him. Clearer than any previous episode, he saw the chaos: peaceful townies snarling, attacking one another, attacking themselves, some of them on fire, for Christ’s sake.

  The woman in the cop costume, her deranged eyes laser-honed on his sidearm. Seconds from dying.

  Shavers focused on the door and reached out to it, hoping it was as close as it was supposed to be. But a new spasm of dazed coughing dulled his senses and reduced his vision to violent neon blossoms, his sense of touch to a mere dull pressure.

  By the time he could see again, someone was partially blocking the door.
>
  A human? Marginally, perhaps.

  He sensed something coming up beside him on his right. His gun hand was seized in an alien-fleshed grip; a bad copy of a hand.

  Something clamped over his face, aborting his scream.

  * * * *

  Stuart and DeShaun, with Bravo sitting between them, watched as a man they knew only as Crabs walked out of a “meeting”—a.k.a. interrogation—room, followed by Hudson.

  The denim-clad twenty-something raised a finger at the boys. They recognized him from the audience of Outlines shows.

  Hudson dropped his big frame in his rusty swivel seat across from the boys as he tossed a notepad to the side.

  “What’d Crabs do?” Stuart asked.

  “Nothing. Just asked him to drop by so I could see if he had any info on the Fireheads.”

  “Well,” DeShaun began. “Maybe we do, Dad.”

  They told him about the encounter with Pipsqueak at the library, and Jill’s no-show the next day. Hudson leaned toward them on his elbows. “You never saw this guy before?’

  “I’d remember this dude,” said Stuart. “Had a big mouth.”

  “…And didn’t mind using it,” added DeShaun.

  Hudson closed his eyes tightly, an idiosyncrasy DeShaun knew was a sign of concentration. His dad was putting together pieces of a very troubling puzzle. DeShaun took the opportunity to glance at Yoshida, who nodded.

  “Will you get somebody to go by her place?”

  Hudson drummed his thumb and pinky as he thought. Yoshida was already up from his desk and pulling on his jacket. “Let me take it. You boys can come along.”

  * * * *

  Crows exchanged urgent calls, piercing the roiling fog cloaking Matilda’s mind.

  She raised her head—a labor. When she opened her eyes, she thought she was blind.

  An angry stinging on her forehead, a throbbing numbness in her back, an insidious intrusion just above her left shoulder blade. She was messed up. It didn’t take long to remember how she got that way.

  Beyond a thin barrier, the crows fussed.

  Most mornings, they gathered in nearby trees to await the peanuts or corn she tossed out for them. But they weren’t begging now. They seemed to be mocking her, the murder, from just above.

  The scents were unmistakable. She was in the darkness of her storage barn. She’d been shot, stabbed in the back, and then, as a final insult, burned on the forehead with a cigarette.

  The Mid-Atlantic Fireheads motorcycle gang had left her for dead—and dead she would very soon be, judging by the way she felt and the wide sticky stain beneath her. She realized the chant she had begun when she’d realized they meant to kill her had probably saved her life—or at least, delayed her death.

  On the roof, the crows cawed the news of movement within.

  Matilda thought of her goats.

  The smarmiest and sneakiest of Nico’s crew, Pipsqueak, had caught Amos, which meant Argyle would have stuck around until she too was caught.

  “Please, Great Pan. No suffering for my babies. Please!”

  Tears pushed at her eyelids, but there was no time for them. She fought to fold one shaky knee up underneath herself, to gain enough height and leverage to raise her right hand. She could reach across herself, though it was difficult. Her arm seemed to weigh a thousand pounds.

  She got her right hand around her neck, spider-walking her fingers till she reached the knife handle. She levered it minutely, weeping from the pain. She worked it back and forth, loosening it, the pain deeper and more intense with each shift—but it was working loose. Within a few excruciating seconds, the knife fell out and off to the side. She gave a weak cry of both jubilation and exquisite suffering, grateful for the spaces between acidic throbs.

  She lowered her face to the plywood floor to rest, breathing in the mingled scent of dust and her own blood. Matilda repeated the chant of renewal, then pulled both knees up and rose to a wobbly kneel.

  She took a deep breath, though she knew it would hurt her ribs. She underestimated; her entire upper body radiated sharp agony and bolstered the steady throb of her punctured upper back muscle. She felt her life steadily leaking from the bullet wound.

  She felt around and found the athame, then crawled to one of the shelving units, using it to climb her way to a stand. Finding and switching on the light at the entryway would be both a great expenditure of precious physical energy and a risk. She knew by the feel of the shelf’s contents roughly where she was, and thus determined where she needed to go.

  Her feeble knees wobbled when she stumbled to the wall and clambered along it with her hands, till she reached the end and essentially fell to the next one, then the next. After catching her breath, she counted bottles till she reached the one that would accelerate her healing—as long as she took the right amount.

  There was little room for error. Matilda always measured the liquid by drops. So, as long as she could keep her hands steady…

  Matilda leaned back against the end of the shelving and held the bottle with both hands, whispering the words of revivification. She raised it to her mouth, tilted, and counted out seven drops, each of which assaulted her tongue with a sour putrescence. Fighting her gag reflex, she capped the bottle and dropped to her knees, slapping her hand against her mouth, then clutching her throat to keep the bilious elixir from escaping.

  The effort drained her. It would be several more minutes before she could move again.

  Vengeance bore her no sympathy.

  A difficult trek toward the doors was next, to find the small trunk in which she kept odd tools and implements she occasionally used. Her fingers soon fell upon the trunk’s hasp. “Praise ye, Pan…”

  Opening it, she chided herself about the squeaky hinges, hoping Nico had not posted one of his soldiers outside. She froze to listen. Hearing nothing, she reached into the trunk and felt around till her fingers met the sturdy pistol grip of a veterinary bonesaw.

  With Matilda’s more conventional tools in her house, the bonesaw would have to do the work of several. The curvature of its six-inch, kidney shaped sterling steel blade would allow her to cut through the plywood flooring and crawl out at the barn’s far corner, unseen.

  Then, to cross into the neighboring field beyond the row of scrubby brush that served as a border marker, and there, to begin the work of conjuring.

  Knowing she was paying off some of her own dark karma didn’t offer comfort. Only vengeance could do that now.

  She longed for her grimoire—her life’s work. But she could make do without it. The work would be sloppier than she would prefer, less predictable, but she would rejuvenate herself just a little more, and then…

  And then, by Pan…

  Oh, what Dark Doings, what thorny hate and venomous abandon would flourish and fester, to avenge evils still unfolding, this bleak autumn day.

  * * * *

  Whenever Stuart rode somewhere with DeShaun and Hudson, or in this case Yoshida, it felt like he had a dad, and a brother his age, and they were all doing menfolk stuff, like going to chop down trees, or maybe catch an escaped alligator that was terrorizing the town. Having Bravo around added to the fantasy.

  But the needling dread he carried with him as they rode to Jill’s only made him feel anxious and helpless and smaller than ever.

  Yoshida parked on the street across from the front door and instructed the boys to stay in the department’s Durango with Bravo. The Toppers were confused and wary when they answered the door, but quickly warmed to the genial Yoshida and waved to the boys as well.

  “Sorry to bother you folks. Just worried about Jill.”

  “Oh. I thought she was here,” said Mrs. Topper.

  “Her bike’s here,” Stuart said through the open window, frowning down at the garage apartment.

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Topper, I j
ust want to stick my head in and ask if she’s okay,” Yoshida told the couple.

  The boys knew that just by opening the door, Yoshida would see if lights were left on or off incongruously, listen for suspicious sounds, check for signs of struggle, or smell for decay, heaven forbid. “Stuart, you boys stay in the vehicle.”

  Yoshi, still being curt with the boys after catching them at the library, told them to roll up the window. Reasonable enough, given Bravo’s implacable drive to find Candace.

  They did as told, crowding together at the window with their furry friend.

  The Toppers handed Yoshida the key, and he made his way down the slope; hand on sidearm.

  Bravo whined and scratched at the half-inch opening at the top of the window, his ears pricked up high.

  Yoshida knocked and called to Jill.

  He unlocked the door and entered with his weapon drawn.

  Stuart’s eyes took on an intense alertness. “If that guy is in there, and he somehow gets past Yoshi…”

  DeShaun’s expression went deadly earnest. “…We jump out and nail his ass.”

  It was a fantasy, and they both knew it. But not at the front of their minds, like adults. Very much to the rear, like when they were just a couple of years younger, playing themselves as hardened detectives with black belts in a dozen martial arts, marksmanship world records, and all the right words for women with all the right curves, in the imaginary but dangerous alleys and seedy juke joints of Ember Hollow’s quiet suburban neighborhoods.

  But this was bigger than that. The boys sensed that Jill’s life was on the line.

  “I bet Bravo will help too,” Stuart said, and the dog gave a low half-bark, as if joining in their pretend scenario. It made the fantasy more comforting than ever.

  They watched the open apartment door for a second or so. It seemed so much longer. “Say. Do they keep another piece in here?”

  DeShaun leaned up and checked the glovebox. “Nope. But I don’t care.”

  “Me neither.”

  Stuart’s fantasies often included him and DeShaun having to back up Hudson or another of the deputies with a big arrest, working together like Starsky and Hutch—or Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, if they were feeling snarky.