The Liar of Red Valley

by Walter Goodwater

  The King’s massive head lowered until it was level with the floor and only inches from her face. She could feel heat radiating off him, whatever he was. Sadie slowly got to her feet. The King could kill her, but at least she’d be standing.

  A low rumble came from the King’s throat. The ground under her feet trembled. Don’t fight it, you big ugly bastard, she thought as she glared into his fiery eyes. You are already a Lie. I just made you into a better one.

  “Thank you, little Liar,” the King said, in a voice like the end of all things. Then it softened: “I now know what I have to do.”

  When the King moved, it was like watching the night sky get up and walk away. The darkness that filled the cavern shifted and rose. Ancient rocks – or maybe ancient bones, too long idle – cracked and split. Sadie scrambled back as far as she could go and pressed herself into the wall as stones fell around her like a hailstorm. Something like a huge hand – covered in craggy, lichened scales and tipped in claws – passed over her head, gripped the side of the well, and pulled upward. Her mouth filled with the taste of sulfur and decay and she screwed her eyes shut as the world around her vanished in an explosion of noise and fetid air. And then, the King was gone.

  Sadie peeled herself off the cavern wall, grateful and more than a bit surprised to be in one piece. High above, where there had only been dark before, she could now see the sky.

  At the base of the stairs leading up, Sadie found the wounded King’s Man. He was sprawled out on the floor, covered in dust and rocks that had fallen when the King made his exit. She nudged him with the toe of her shoe, but he didn’t move.

  “Sorry about that,” she said to the fallen King’s Man. She remembered the gleam of the sheriff deputy’s blood dripping from his mouth, that first night. “I hope I did the right thing. I guess I should go up and see.” The stairs looked long and treacherous. Even the thought of climbing them made Sadie’s legs ache, but she was eager to be free of this place. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to it. I think you’ve earned a break.”

  The climb took a while. She hoped something of Red Valley would remain by the time she got to the top.

  The manor house was gone, smashed to wooden bits by the King. Sadie scrambled out of the pit and surveyed the damage. The separate garage remained untouched, though a whole swath of trees leading toward town had been flattened. Giant footprints broke the dry ground. And in the distance, she saw the last great battle for Red Valley.

  The King was there, surrounded by smoke and ruin. Flames tore at his black, twisted body like they were alive. And hungry. His flanks had been scorched and burned, exposing raw, bloodied flesh. But he fought back, snapping with fang and claw. Darkness moved behind the flames, but the King slashed at it too. Sparks and gouts of flame and sprays of ichor shot up into the sky.

  When it was done, the fire faded. The darkness vanished. The night went still.

  And the King fell.

  We got him. That was for you, Mom, Sadie thought. I hope you felt it, wherever you are.

  A dusty car crested the hill and came to a stop at the edge of the crater that had once been the King’s home. Sadie tensed, fearing that one of the King’s Men had somehow survived, but it was a woman who got out. She was maybe forty, dressed in workout gear, with her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She looked normal enough, or as normal as anyone could, standing on the King’s hill that strange night. But the moment Sadie saw her, every hair on her body stood straight up. She didn’t know what this was, but she knew it was bad. Real fucking bad.

  “Can I help you?” Sadie asked in an unsteady voice.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “I’ve come to see the King.”

  Sadie looked over her shoulder and pointed. Unless she missed her guess, the King’s body had come to rest in the shattered ruins of Red Valley’s Walmart. “You just missed him.”

  The woman looked briefly at the town in the distance, then shook her head. “That is not the King.”

  This is bad. Bad bad bad.

  “Okay,” Sadie said. “If the King still exists, he’s down that hole. As I’ve just crawled my way out of it, I’d rather not—”

  “Show me.”

  Sadie was tired. She hurt. She wanted to see if anything she loved had survived the night. But she wasn’t stupid. Whoever this woman was—whatever this woman was—Sadie knew she wasn’t going to ask again. So against her will and better judgement, she once again found her way to the mouth of the King’s well and started down the damp stone stairs.

  The bottom was dark. The bioluminescent algae had faded to a barely visible glow. Sadie was about to apologize and maybe recommend coming back in the daytime, when the woman said something Sadie didn’t understand and the cavern filled with blue light. Sadie looked around but couldn’t identify where it was coming from. The light stretched into the distance, exposing parts of the cavern she’d never seen during her audiences with the King.

  And there, tucked away in a corner that had been filled with gloom and shadow, were the bones of the King. The real King, long dead.

  The woman laughed. Sadie shivered.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” Sadie asked. Her voice echoed in the nearly empty cavern. “The one who challenged the King, who gave him the wound that killed him?”

  “‘Challenged’? Is that what he told you?” A pause. “Did he tell you my name?”

  “He said it should never be spoken.”

  She laughed again. It was a distressingly normal sort of laugh. “Such a convenient answer. In truth, the King was not deemed worthy to know my name. Would you like to hear it?”

  That question terrified Sadie more than any of the monsters she’d faced in the last week. “No,” she said shakily.

  “A wise answer.” The woman approached the King’s skull. She ran a hand along bone and rotting flesh. “A long time ago, we fought. I gave him a mortal wound and he fled. And I waited.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  The woman turned back. “What do you mean?”

  “The King is gone. There’s no one here to stop you.”

  “Stop me from doing what? I came to make sure he was dead,” the woman said. “I’ve no other interest here.” She looked around the cavern and nodded. “Though I think I will rest a while. It would be mutually beneficial if I am not disturbed.”

  “I’ll spread the word.”

  The woman smiled, then collapsed to the cavern floor like her body was suddenly made of liquid. Something moved out of her and crept out among the broken rocks, something Sadie couldn’t have described even if she ever chose to, and she never would.

  This time, she climbed all the steps out of the King’s well at a run.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  She briefly looked at the stolen sheriff’s patrol car, but the driver’s seat was still slick with dark blood and it would probably draw the wrong sort of attention. So she went into the garage. The lights didn’t work, but enough smoky dawn light spilled in that she could find her way around. The first few tarps she pulled revealed nothing of interest, but then she hit pay dirt. She pulled the tarp all the way off then started to smile. A 1966 Shelby GT350, shiny black, with a pair of white stripes down the center line. And the keys were in the ignition.

  “Well your majesty, you were an evil, blood-sucking bastard,” Sadie said as she slid inside, “but at least you had decent taste in cars.”

  It took a while, but eventually Sadie found Beto at the hospital. The halls were full of the wounded and the grieving. Nurses with blood-stained smocks ran around with bags of antibiotics and rolls of gauze. Shell-shocked doctors with glazed eyes stumbled from room to room. But the reports on the TV in the waiting room said that the fire was now at 100% containment, thanks to the last-minute intervention of a massive creature everyone was assuming was the King. Sadie wandered the hospital in a daze until she found the familiar face of Nurse Abagail, who directed her to Beto’s room.

  Graciela was sitting at her brother�
��s side. As soon as Sadie walked in, she ran over and hugged her, lifting her off her feet.

  “You’ve got to stop almost dying,” she said into Sadie’s shoulder. “It’s killing me.”

  “Deal. How’s Beto?”

  He had tubes in his nose and arms, and his eyes were closed. His heart rate beeped weakly on the screen of an attached machine. It reminded Sadie too much of her last—and as it turned out, first—visit with her mom.

  “He’ll live,” Graciela said. “They weren’t sure, didn’t know what was wrong with him, but then he started improving not too long ago, like someone flipped a switch.”

  Sadie hoped the same would be true for the rest of Red Valley as well, with the King finally gone.

  “I told you she’d be here,” said a voice from the doorway. Thomas and Charles stood there, the former looking very uncomfortable dressed in green hospital scrubs.

  “Thank you,” Sadie said. “I’m sorry I made you come back.”

  “I’m sorry we left,” Charles replied. He elbowed Thomas in the ribs. “He’s sorry too.”

  “You decided to help?” Sadie asked Thomas.

  “I volunteered my services,” he said. “I may not be a modern man of medicine, but I can dress a wound, and there were plenty of those to go around.”

  “This town is lucky to have you.”

  “Yes,” he said with a little twitch of a smile, “they are.”

  “How is the Gray House?”

  “It survived the carnage,” Thomas said. “Barely.”

  “Kind of like Red Valley.”

  “Indeed. And how much of that survival is due to you, I wonder?”

  Sadie put a hand on Beto’s arm. His skin was cool to the touch. “I didn’t do anything,” she said softly. She’d seen people being interviewed on the news when she came through the waiting room. They spoke about the King with a kind of reverence, some with tears in their eyes. They honored him. They mourned him.

  It was all a lie, a damned lie. She remembered what she tried to tell them in the community centers, when she tried to get them to fight for themselves. It had worked, hadn’t it? They’d come, they’d fought. And won.

  Yet here they were, prostrate at the feet of their dead god, eager for their next fix. Maybe people didn’t want to fight for themselves. They wanted a hero, a god, a savior. Lies, but maybe lies people needed. “It was the King who saved us.”

  “Indeed,” Thomas said. Then, quieter: “You’ve got the makings of a great Liar, Sadie.”

  Beto woke a few hours later, complaining about scratchy sheets and dry air. The nurses needed the bed and didn’t need his attitude, so he was discharged with remarkable speed. Sadie waited with him just outside while Graciela went to pull her car around.

  “I hate hospitals,” he said.

  “Everyone hates hospitals,” Sadie said. She could still see the dark stain on the asphalt from where the King’s Man had mauled the deputy.

  “So you did it, huh?” Beto said. “Saved the town at the bridge, then convinced the King to come out of hiding and stop the fire, or whatever that was.”

  “Yeah, not gonna lie,” she said. “I’m pretty amazing.”

  “I think you’re crazy,” Beto said.

  “That too.”

  An ambulance with pulsing lights pulled into the lot and Sadie and Beto moved out of the way. The EMTs jumped out and raced their patient into the hospital, another burst of chaos, already lost in the noise.

  “I saw something on the news,” Sadie said when they were gone. “It said Undersheriff Hassler was killed in the fighting last night.” She didn’t share her memories of his final moments, or of the sound of his bones shattering.

  Beto’s face was impassive. “Fucker got what he deserved, then.”

  Sadie didn’t argue.

  “So what happens now, gringa?” he asked. “No King, no Peace, no bastard undersheriff. What’s Red Valley look like now?”

  Maybe it was the exhaustion, but for the first time in a while, Sadie was genuinely cold. It was sure to be another blazing summer day in Red Valley, but in that moment, she felt a hint of autumn.

  “I guess that’s for us to decide,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Beto said. “We’ll probably fuck it up.”

  “Yeah,” Sadie said. “Hey, you still want me to write that Lie for you?”

  He shook his head. “Been giving that a lot of thought. At first I thought a Lie was a way out, a way forward. Once you’ve been inside, life doesn’t feel like it belongs to you anymore. That’s for other people. But fuck that. They don’t get to take that from me too. My kid is going to know where they come from. Who they are. What kind of world they live in, good, bad, ugly, all that. Maybe learn from my mistakes, do it better than me.”

  “That’s good,” Sadie said, thinking of the last time she’d visited someone in this hospital. She could remember every crease in her mother’s face at the moment the life had gone out of her. And those were real memories, her memories. Maybe she’d only been alive a week or so, but she’d made it a memorable one. “That’s all any of us can hope for.”

  She drove her new car as far as the barricades would allow, then parked and walked the rest of the way. Firemen were still putting down small blazes here and there, but no one bothered to stop her as she worked her way through the ruins of Red Valley. Late afternoon sunlight fell on what was left of Main Street. The shops that she’d seen boarded up only a few days ago were now gutted. Broken glass sparkled on the sidewalk. A burned election poster fluttered by. The undersheriff’s face was blackened and mostly gone. Only a few words were left: for a safer red valley. It looked like an ending, but maybe also a new beginning.

  Red Valley had been here since the days of lumber and gold coming down from the mountains, but it had lost those callings years ago. Now, for the first time in generations, it would have to decide what it wanted to be, and why. She hoped it came up with a good answer; she was stuck here, after all. The Liar’s powers were limited to the land that had given them, so this was her home, like it or not.

  As she stared at the charred remains of everything she’d ever known, she was surprised to discover that she didn’t mind. Her house on the hill was gone, but she’d never really lived there, had she? That had been her mom’s house, isolated, separated from town. Sadie thought she’d move somewhere closer. There would be a lot of work to do, now.

  When she reached the Treehouse Diner, she almost walked right by. The sign was gone, as was the rest of the building. Only the tree still stood. Its trunk was black, its branches bare. It broke her heart to see it like this, even more than the homes or the storefronts.

  But there was something new in the air, something she couldn’t really explain. She stepped through the charred parking lot and over the burned threshold. She could see where the counter had been, and make out the melted booths along the right wall. There was even a bit of a menu that had survived, touting the daily specials that never really changed. If she closed her eyes, she could smell the grill working in the back, hear the clank of plates from the dish room and the hum of chewing and conversation. The spice of apple pie filling tasted sweet on her tongue, even as her mouth filled with ash.

  She waded through the destruction until she reached the tree. It stood in the middle of the destroyed diner, leaves turned to dust, branches curled and burned, barely distinguishable from the rest of the ruin. Its crown used to stretch high above the diner’s roof. Now there was no roof, no incongruous, outstretched limbs. Just a husk. A shadow. How many times had she brushed a hand along the tree’s rough bark as she moved around the diner over the years? A reassuring touch, a whispered word. Like an old friend.

  But those moments weren’t real, were they?

  They were as real as she was.

  Real enough.

  Sadie touched the charred trunk and her fingers came away black. But then she brushed harder. She wiped away the layers of soot and charcoal. She pulled back the grime and broke away
what had been killed by the fire. She dug and cleaned, until she found what she’d hoped to find. Underneath it all, sustained by a land that was finally free to breathe again, it had begun to regrow.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This is called the “acknowledgements” section so there’s something I’d like to acknowledge first: writing a book is hard, and I wouldn’t want to do it alone. There’s one name on the cover, but don’t let that fool you. Getting a novel out of the writer’s imagination and into your hands is the work of a community of mostly unsung heroes. I will enumerate some of them here. If you like this story, you can thank each of them for making it what it is. And if you don’t like it, well, I did try my best.

  This book wouldn’t exist without Jen Udden, who convinced me to write it and then convinced me to rewrite it. I pitched it to you thinking there might not be something here; you disagreed and you were right. You gave me tough feedback; I disagreed and you were right.

  Of course you wouldn’t be reading this at all if not for my editor David Moore and the team at Rebellion. Thank you all for taking on this weird, gothic, genre-fluid story and giving it a platform and an audience.

  A special acknowledgement is due to Velma and Gabe, who were willing to mine our collective traumas of growing up in a fading, rural California town for this book. You’ll recognize some stuff in here; sorry about that.

  My wife is always my first reader, and I appreciate the tight balancing act that requires. Thank you for improving every book I’ve written, and for ignoring my anxious, impatient glances while you’re reading. Though next time maybe can you read a little faster? That’d be great, thanks. (This will be an interesting test to see if my wife reads the acknowledgements section in this book.)

  And finally, Grandma—if you are reading this—I’m really sorry about all the swearing.