“They’re stone,” Bernard whispered, holding an arm across Stuart as if to keep him back. Like that was necessary.
Stuart took a step closer, resisting Bernard’s trembling arm, running his light along the room’s length. Symbols were painted there. “We saw these weird symbols in some of the historic stuff.”
“Up there on the walls too,” Bernard said. They held their beams side by side for a broader view. Through the dampness, the runes, painted in some thick dark liquid, were barely visible. Stuart decided to focus on something other than whether the paint was actually paint.
But he wouldn’t leave here until he found his friends. Not this time.
Hand over mouth, he brought the beam back around, stopping on a casket near the far wall that was separate from the others, clean and white. “There’s a newer one.”
Bernard’s breathing became somehow even more strident, but he said nothing.
Stuart played the beam over the entire chamber, searching for a second newer coffin.
Coming back to the lone pristine box, he swept his beam over its surface, to an inverted funnel that resembled a termite hill. “Maybe this is a breathing spout.”
Bernard’s wheezy puffs were still strident and urgent, but there was some sense of relief in them. “Can we open it?”
Are you crazy? cried Stuart’s brain. But he knew that was what had to be done. He tucked the light under his arm and shoved at the lid to check its heft. It was considerable.
Stuart considered how the labor of removing it would tax Bernard’s lungs to the limit. “We have to depend on each other to get this done.”
Bernard gulped and took tentative steps toward the container, his light beam dancing before him.
“It’s okay, Mr. Riesling,” Stuart said, hoping his cracking voice wasn’t just making things worse. “We’re gonna get your wife and my friend. And we are getting the hell outta here.”
It took a minute for Bernard’s breathing to steady. He held the flashlight between his shoulder and neck, and they set to work.
Bernard began wheezing within seconds, but his engineer’s mind rose to the task. He quickly settled into finding the best use of strength and leverage, making adjustments. The lid moved, little by little.
Once a pencil-thin opening appeared at the top edge, Bernard pointed his light into the crack, issuing an ecstatic laugh with a heaving breath. “It’s her!”
Stuart was relieved about Stella; more worried than ever about DeShaun.
Bernard went to the foot of the casket and gripped the lid. “Push…it toward…me…”
Stuart did, relieved that he was strong enough to move it. Then he spotted something. “Wait!”
Initially, he was afraid the coffin was booby-trapped. A shining spike jutted downward from where the funnel was, just over the unconscious Stella’s pale face. He pushed the light closer, getting a better view of the crystalline lance. It was just shy of touching her. “Should be okay,” he said. “Just…go slow.”
Stuart kept the light focused on the spike, warning the excitedly puffing Bernard whenever it came too close. After a strange aeon, they had created enough space and leverage to flip the stone lid off. It smashed on the floor with an echoing thunder.
Startled awake, Stella popped up with a croaking scream.
“It’s okay, Stella!” Bernard hugged her with a loving ferocity that Stuart remembered from his own parents.
“Bernard?”
“Yes, darling! It’s me!”
Stuart wished DeShaun were there to share an eyeroll at Bernard’s melodramatic lingo.
While the reunion continued, he checked the inside of the coffin and found clumps of the weird mushrooms, still fresh, along with dried flower petals and—pumpkin seeds.
But there was no time for an investigation. “We need to go.”
Stella, still disoriented, moved like an old lady. As they helped her out of the coffin, Stuart felt a sudden strange sense of danger. He panned the flashlight all around and then up, instantly wishing he hadn’t.
Crystalline spikes burst from the stone wall and grew down from the ceiling like greedy reaching claws, angling straight for them.
Bernard made a strange squeal as he pushed Stella’s head down and covered her.
* * * *
As Candace obeyed, Aura and Jill scrambled to push the remaining furniture—Matilda’s old overstuffed chair and a flimsy dining tray table—against the door.
They stood side by side, backs to the door as a minute passed.
Two.
“Why is he not trying to get in?” Aura whispered.
“He is,” Jill answered. “You can count on that. And he won’t stop till he does.”
They went to the window and squeezed their heads together to peek out as Jill eased the curtains apart. The roaring fire’s glare ruined visibility past its outer radius of about six feet.
“He went to the back!” Aura whispered.
Jill clapped her hand over Aura’s mouth as she saw Everett walk out from the far side of the fire, wearing his new mask.
A mess of twisted bloody flesh, peeling off a cracked skull front, was bound around Everett’s head with twine—Pipsqueak’s muttonchops were unmistakable.
Everett took a flaming chair leg from the fire and examined the house.
“Oh my god!” Jill whispered. “He’s gonna burn us out!”
Aura pulled her away from the window and stared intently at her.
“What?” asked Jill.
“I can give us a chance.”
“How?”
Aura peered back toward the window. “If I can get to one of those skins out there, I can change.”
Jill pulled her arm away. “I’m not so sure I bel—”
“We’ve already done it!” Aura insisted. “And that is a dead psycho! Do you believe in that?”
Jill had no answer.
“If I can get a skin, I’ll do the spell and kill him.”
Jill wanted to say “Good luck with that” but held her tongue. “Guess I’ll have to distract him.”
“I can’t do both, girlfriend.”
“I’m not your girlfriend.” Jill took a deep breath. “I can make him chase me I guess.”
“What about the little girl? Would he go after his own sister?”
“I’m not gonna put her—”
“We better come up with something, goddammit!”
Jill squeezed her eyes shut, dreading to say “I’ll run out.”
“Get to that barn. Maybe you can hide or hold him off till I finish the spell.”
“Doubtful.” Jill went to the door. “You just get Candace to Deputy Hudson Lott.” She unlocked the deadbolt. “No matter what.”
* * * *
Aura nodded. Jill opened the door and dashed out. “Everett!”
The madman was closer than she expected, extending the torch toward the dry splintery porch rails. Seeing him so close, Jill was startled. She stumbled down the steps but caught herself with her hands.
Everett dropped the torch—onto the porch’s warped floorboards. “The chasing game!”
His takeoff speed was insanely fast. “Catch and cut!”
Before she could go after a skin Aura had to stop and stamp out the fire; a single precious second.
Candace, watching from the room where she and Jill had been held, saw her friend running from her brother. “No!”
Aura gathered up the book, the jar of salve and a wolf skin, then bolted back to the house, too afraid to watch and see if Jill would make it to the barn.
She wouldn’t. Everett drew the athame from the sweater pocket and sailed it toward Jill in a single, underhand motion.
Jill felt the cold stinging steel invade her lower back, just to the left of her spine. She fell face-forward in the we
t grass.
Everett’s high-pitched giggle scraped across Jill’s brain like a knife on a blackboard, jolting her from her grogginess.
She took a split second to choose between trying to get into the barn or delaying Everett and chose the latter. She pulled the athame from her back and rolled over, hoping Everett would lunge onto her and the knife point.
He didn’t. He stopped some eight feet away. Backlit by the dying fire, his form was a twisted parody of a human being. Pipsqueak’s muttonchops dripped blood. Matilda’s hair trailed in black streams from the scalp crookedly adhered with blood onto the head of the boy-monster. She couldn’t see the grin, but her mind’s eye knew it was there.
She pointed the knife at him like a warning, though she knew warnings meant nothing to him.
He took several stalking steps toward her—then halted upon hearing the high, stirring note of a wolf’s howl.
* * * *
Aura’s voice took on a new timbre as she repeated the skinwalk incantation. It was a deep guttural hungry sound. The wolfskin shrunk, fitting itself against her. The dead fur rippled with new life and luster. Her eyes, reflecting wild and yellow firelight, fell on Candace. “Go now.”
At this crucial stage of transformation, Aura had to focus on the ancient words; on giving herself over to primal ferocity.
Candace ran to the door and burst outside to hit the ground running. “Everett!”
An eerie and unnatural howl spread across the night.
Chapter 27
Hellhounds
Stuart hunkered low and yelled, “Not real! Not real!” With an angry cry, he swatted overhand at the nearest one.
The stalactite dissolved to nothing, followed by the others.
“Move!” Stuart ordered, placing Stella’s arm over his shoulders.
They went as fast as they could through the aisle between coffins. In the lead, Stuart lurched to halt when he heard the coffin lids shifting.
Disturbed dust puffed out and swirled in their beam.
“Is that real?” Bernard cried.
“Just come on!”
Stuart blasted past the rumbling coffins, summoning lyrics to “13 Unseen,” the song he had written with his brother, to drown out the sound of stone scraping on stone. Imagining the feel of scrabbling fingers brushing his hips, he ran faster.
He braked hard when he saw the archway. It had shrunk.
The exit was barely large enough for his frame—certainly too tight for Bernard or Stella. Stuart made a quick check to see if he had somehow gone the wrong way. The tiny port was the only way out.
His flashlight revealed an uncertain terror on the face of the couple behind, counting on him to vanquish it.
“What do you guys see?” he asked them.
“It must be the wrong door!” Bernard said, repeating the futile exercise of panning along the wall.
“We…can’t fit…” Stella lamented with groggy despair.
Stuart heard stone shifting, saw shadows rising and writhing behind them.
He focused hard on the archway, fighting like mad to dispel what had to be an illusion. A touch of the cold stone was no less convincing than his murky vision.
“Oh god!” panted Bernard. “We’re gonna die!”
With the sound of sliding stone and moist, malicious movement growing in the dark behind them, Stuart knew there was no time to waffle.
* * * *
“Getting close, boys.”
The tree cover above the pitted road thinned, a sign they were approaching the fields and yard around Matilda’s property.
Tensions rose like steam.
“You’re grounded, Petey,” said Hudson. “You sit right there till this is finished.”
“Huh!? You guys need me, dammit!”
“We need to make the most efficient use of you. Sit right there and snipe.”
Yoshida was already handing him the scoped rifle. “Give that hog leg to Dennis.”
Dennis accepted the double barrel without argument.
“Son, don’t you dare pick tonight to put that to your head,” Hudson gruffed.
“Who’s got time?” Dennis said, loading the chambers with Yoshida’s special shells.
Bravo went crazy, barking and scratching glass.
* * * *
Despite the darkness, Yoshida’s trained eye caught peripheral movement. “Watch out!”
With a resounding crack, a foot-thick locust trunk fell toward them. It smashed into the vehicle at an angle, further crumpling the roof. The windshield gave way entirely, a sudden waterfall.
“Everybody okay!?” Hudson asked, trying to twist his body around in the shrunken cab.
“Still alive!” Dennis and Pedro were hunkered low in their seat, hands pressed against the sunken roof by reflex, as if they could keep it from sinking farther.
Yoshida fought with his mangled door. “We’re trapped.” Bravo clambered over him, furiously searching for a way out.
The dark wolf, Hobie, thrust its huge bloody snout in through Dennis’s window and snapped at the shocked singer’s face. Dishearteningly, it was already half-healed.
Hudson grabbed Bravo’s collar before the dog could counterattack.
Yanked away by Pedro, Dennis had room for a short uppercut with the brass knucks. Hobie withdrew with a piercing yelp,
“This thing is useless!” Pedro said, regarding the scoped rifle.
Bravo barked and growled furiously.
“Dammit!” Hudson battered the door with his shoulder. “Cover me, if I ever get out—”
Hobie’s black claw arced in from above, slashing across Hudson’s forehead.
“The roof again!” shouted Pedro, fruitlessly trying to angle the rifle pointed up.
“Where’s that goddamn double barrel!” Yoshida shouted, pressing his hand to the dazed Hudson’s head wound.
The shotgun had fallen to the floorboard during the crash. “I’m working on it!” Dennis contorted like an octopus trying to reach it.
Hudson recovered his senses and pushed Yoshida’s hand away. “Get that chaser, Pedro!”
Pedro wrangled the gun toward the window, cursing.
“One hog leg coming up!” Dennis called. Now he just had to get back in position.
The beast on the roof roared as it tore four long rows across it. The wolf peered through with one huge feral eye—the one it still had.
Yoshida aimed his service revolver at the roof. “Duck lower, Pedro!”
Pedro frantically worked to position the cumbersome rifle through his window. “Just shoot, man!”
“Nevermind!” Dennis shouted. He had just enough room to thrust the double barrel up through the claw canals. Before he could fire, the beast snatched the barrel to wrest it away.
Pedro sucked in a huge breath and placed his palms on the roof, rising up in his seat to put his massive traps against the depression as well. With a powerlifter’s shouting grunt, he exerted, pushed, straightened himself.
The weight of roof, tree and werewolf rose like a swimming pool float.
Dennis, thinking quickly, kicked at his door. Without the weight of the tree, it gave way easily. Bravo dashed out, ignoring the monster above, bolting toward the clearing ahead.
Dennis rolled out and aimed the sawed-off toward the roof.
The beast slapped the gun just as Dennis fired. Silver fragments tore through the back tire.
Trying to crawl out, Pedro could not defend against the wolf’s arcing kick that left him dazed.
Yoshida fired his handgun over his seat, putting two bullets in Hobie’s neck; a mere annoyance. But it bought Hudson time to aim the shotgun.
The wolf rolled past Dennis and hoisted him up as shield.
The chief deputy stopped himself from pulling the trigger by a microsecond. “Damn!”
Held aloft, Dennis rained down a series of rights onto the beast’s raw eye socket with the brass knuckles. The cracking of Hobie’s skull and the sight of blood spurting from his eye were as satisfying as a gulp of Diamante’s.
Hobie’s rage only grew with the assault. He dropped Dennis to his feet and clamped his head in his huge hairy hands, sinking his talons into the punker’s skull, crushing.
Through blurring vision, Dennis saw the double barrel driven like a wedge into Hobie’s toothy maw. The bestial biker’s head exploded in a spray of blood, bone, brains, and Leticia Lott’s finest heirloom Sunday silver, courtesy of Pedro.
Propelled to the ground, Dennis was knocked breathless for the second time.
* * * *
Everett stopped laughing and chasing to listen for the eerie howl, cocking his head like a curious bulldog. It sounded again. Everett answered, throwing his arms and head back to bellow the “O” sound with all his might.
Jill had a chance, slim as a knife’s edge, of getting away. Better still, she had no doubt that the howl meant Aura had made the change.
She hoped to spy something useful in the open barn, but had to fight not to puke.
Jiggy, cut mostly in half. The handles of a set of hedge clippers stood up from a mess of bloody intestines that lay strewn about like New Years’ Eve party streamers.
Jill jerked her head away from the sickening sight, and saw Everett staring toward the house, awaiting an answer to his howl. His attention span was short. Especially when there was killing to do.
Jill eased herself to a stand, fighting like hell not to cry out at the pain of her wound. Could she sneak up and stab him? Hell no. The barn was her best choice.
Soon he would remember her. With luck, she could keep him busy until Aura…changes into a goddamned werewolf—am I really counting on that? she thought.
She rose, eyes locked on Everett. She willed him to stay distracted.
He remembered her, just as she made it into the barn. His laughter shish-kebabed her spine.
She swung the barn doors shut and hit the light switch. Cursing its failure, she searched for something to use as a blockade.
Grim Harvest Page 19
