“And I’m not hunting tonight.”
If that was true, she wouldn’t have climbed down here. “All right,” I said. “I’ll go alone. Get my guts torn out, and then your daddy can beat you after my funeral too.”
Whatever Martha thought of me, whatever she said when I was alive and breathing, I knew she’d still feel awful if something happened to me. We’d seen so much death of late that every corpse in the road or among the trees felt like a personal failure.
“What do you guess he’d really do?” she said, following me into the woods.
“I don’t know. More than we can do. They’re not scared of us. Not even when we shoot them dead. But the purewater man has got some uncanniness.”
“It’s the uncanniness that I don’t trust.”
“You don’t have to trust someone to need them.”
She snickered. “Don’t I know it. Why do you think you’re the one spotting me?”
I let the night air absorb the insult. “No reason not to trust him. My daddy sent for him.”
“And? The world is full of good upstanding preachers getting the wool pulled over their eyes by anyone with a scrap of sheepskin to spare.”
“I know for a fact you’ve never been further out of here than Middleton, so how exactly did you get to know what the world is full of?” I shoved aside a tree branch, blinking so my eyes would adjust faster to the darkness. The cracks between the branches barely admitted summer sun, let alone moonlight.
Martha moved as if she was born seeing in the dark. She didn’t have a gun, just a bowie knife, but she brandished it so bold that no one besides a demon would have had the guts to lay a hand on her. “Tell me this. If the purewater man is so good and righteous, how come he isn’t talking to any of us but you and your daddy? Where’d he come from? Why is he here now?”
“There’s always been purewater men,” I said, and that was true. The purewater man never came to Pryor before, but before we never had bones unearthed from fresh graves, never had ten mothers disappear within two months, never had demons in the woods. I figured he’d come now because he was asked to come, because he had to come.
Martha wasn’t convinced, but something moved in the brush at our backs and she forgot that we were in the middle of an argument. The canines strung around her neck clinked as she slashed at ferns with her knife, exposing a big-eyed rabbit.
“I know you think I’m wrong in the head,” she said later as we tromped through the undergrowth. “But I don’t care. What happened to Emmalyn was my fault, really, even if it’s not like my daddy thinks, and the way things are going, I don’t have time to trust in men who think a bit of consecrated water will save us.”
“You don’t trust in that, then what can you trust?”
“I have this,” Martha said, motioning with her blade.
“You’d been doing that for a month already when my mother ended up hanging from a tree with a branch around her neck.”
Martha dragged a sigh through her teeth. “Then why do you even come out here?”
“What else am I going to do? No one came for a long time,” I said. “I thought no one would ever come. Now someone’s here, and you won’t trust him.”
“Look, I don’t care what happens to anyone but me now. So you can do what you want. But leave me out of it. I don’t intend upon getting crucified for trying to help, which is what’s gonna happen if we tell anyone.”
◊
I didn’t like the purewater man, but I found that I felt obligated to defend him from the scrutiny of Pryor. No outsider was ever safe from speculation within town limits, even if he was there on God’s business. Especially if he was there on God’s business. Everyone was perfectly polite whenever he was within earshot, but the stories about him grew wilder by the day. Mr. Raye at the corner store leaned over the counter when I came in for a gallon of milk, wanting to know: “does he do anything peculiar when he’s at home with you folks?” Not an hour earlier, Mrs. Lynch had stopped me in the street and demanded, “Have you seen his holy water yet? Does he really have it?” “Do you think he’s close to figuring out who killed that sweet little girl?” “Is he even looking? You know, I sometimes wonder if he’s even looking.”
I always said that yes, he was looking for Emmalyn’s murderer, even though mostly he just wandered the swamps like he was here on some sort of sightseeing expedition. No, I said, he didn’t aim to take the church from my daddy, even though they stayed up late at night debating every verse that included the words behemoth or abomination. One thing I could truly say: he drank his morning coffee and shaved his face like anyone else. He didn’t seem to have audiences with ghosts and spirits, holy or otherwise. He’s good people, I said, which is the soundest recommendation they could have asked for.
Martha frowned when she overheard me saying that, said, “I hope you’re watching him.”
“He’s here to watch us,” I said. We weren’t talking much, then. After that strange sweat-drenched hunt the first night the purewater man arrived, we’d both lost patience with each other.
“All the more reason to watch him,” she said.
“We did nothing wrong.” I tried to walk away, across the schoolyard to the patch of withered grass where some of the other girls stood.
“He won’t see it that way,” Martha called after me. “He’ll want someone to blame it on, and demons won’t do. You’d better watch out. He’ll blame you. You’re so perfect, everyone will want to believe it.”
◊
On the night Emmalyn died, the three of us chased a demon into the depths of a swamp. It laughed at us, flashing its eyes behind a cover of cattails and slapping the murky water with its tail. Demons can’t speak aloud, but they can talk inside your head and tell you what they want you to know. Sometimes they’re nasty, flinging insults that stick like thorns to calloused skin. But sometimes they try to sound sweet, like a dead mother or a would-be steady, and that’s a whole lot worse.
We were all scared that night; only Martha acted brave. She propped her bowie knife on a mangrove tree, stretched her arms up heavenward, said, “You want a taste? I promise it’ll be the sweetest thing you ever got a hold of.”
Emmalyn didn’t like when her sister taunted the monsters. “Martha, c’mon,” she said. “Let’s not lure it out.”
“She wants to get killed, we might as well let her,” I’d said, even though of course I had my gun cocked and loaded and I’d shoot the beast dead the second it emerged from the water. No use in waiting. Martha liked to wrestle with the creatures, but she could never have beat them fighting alone.
“I’ll be all right.” Martha looked back over her shoulder and smiled at Emmalyn. That’s all I can think of sometimes, that little promise folded in a smile. As soon as her focus shifted, the monster made a low, thick snarling sound and lunged out of the swamp, sleek amphibian legs unfurling and body crashing down into the shallows. I fired two shots that glanced off the creature’s skin, but didn’t aim well enough. The demon grabbed Martha and took off, galloping unsteadily over the fen and up through the birch trees.
We chased the creature without stopping. She screamed loud enough to make us sure she was still alive, yelling in high, eerie caterwauls that echoed through the trees and down into the marshes. I ran as hard as I could, but Emmalyn got ahead right away. She let the thorns yank her golden curls so she could fit into crevices where I wouldn’t dare to go, tromped knee-deep through swamp muck, stumbled over a moss-slicked log and cried in pain and still got up again. I never saw anyone like Emmalyn Blanchard.
We found the demon in the treeless patch of sunken earth that everyone called White Throat Holler, slamming Martha down on the dry grass again and again so she would stop fighting and lay still. I paused when I saw the sheer size of the thing, tall even hunched over, but Emmalyn never stopped moving. She shot five rounds, flinching as kickback shuddered down her spine, yelling for the demon to let go of her sister. It rose up on its hind legs, abandoning Martha, and
roared from the back of its throat as Emmalyn’s bullets hit their marks. She thought she’d won. That was her mistake. Emmalyn didn’t have any bullets left when the demon reached her, grabbed her by the back of the neck, and hauled her uphill, out of the holler, into the darkness. Before anyone could stop them, they disappeared.
There was some uncanniness in the way they sank into the trees, as if they had never even been real. I knew somehow that I would never find them even if I chased after them. That had never happened before. I was breathless when I knelt beside Martha. It was stupid, but I said, “Are you dead?”
Martha laughed, spat out of a bloodied mouth: “I wish. I wish I was.”
◊
For a while I thought maybe we could salvage things—if not in Pryor, at least at home. One night when the purewater man vanished someplace or other and likely wouldn’t be back ‘til dawn, I browned some beef and mashed a few potatoes. The gravy had just begun to simmer when Daddy stomped through the screen door, home from another prayer service for another dead mother. He sighed to see that I still lived inside the skeleton of our house and laid his head down on the table.
“They doubt me,” he said.
I did too, but knew enough not to say so. “They’re just scared, is all,” I said.
“I stayed awake from dusk to dawn last night, praying for this town’s salvation. That we would be delivered. That we would know God’s mercy and not only his wrath.”
Something in the stoop of his shoulders, the weary grate of his voice, made me impatient. He was like one of those olden-day monks, flogging himself in the town square to feel holier. I said, “Maybe this town is only made for wrath, not mercy. Sometimes I think we ought to cut our losses and leave for good.”
He lifted his head to look over his shoulder at me like I’d spit blasphemy. “You think we’re here for our good health, Esther Grace? You think I mean to be happy here?”
I stirred the gravy so hard I slicked the sides of the pan. “If you mean to be miserable, you’re doing a fine job.”
“Doesn’t matter what I am. Pryor needs a preacher.”
“What do you owe them?”
“I don’t owe them nothing. It’s not a transaction.”
“What is it, then?” I was thinking of finding my mother hung among the trees, of laying daisies over her at the funeral. The mortician driving to our house and frowning as he said he was so full up that he couldn’t take the body until next Tuesday. But she wouldn’t stink, he promised; he’d still do the embalming.
“Gravy’s burning,” my daddy said.
“What is it, if it’s not a transaction?”
Neither of us said anything for a while, not all through dinner. Then he laid his silverware down with a clatter and said, “It’s a sacrifice. Someone’s gotta be the one gets burned.”
◊
I didn’t like to hunt by myself, but Martha refused to come out with me after the unpleasantness between us in the schoolyard. And I couldn’t put off going forever. That night the house felt suffocating with Daddy and the purewater man emptying a decanter of whiskey downstairs, reading Deuteronomy aloud and laughing at the same time like they both knew the same secrets. I knew of no missing barn cats or chickens, no graves freshly dug up, no reason to load the gun and sneak into the woods. I just thought out there I might breathe a little easier.
Before long, a scale-studded beast crawled out of the swamp and into the sticks. I crouched down low on my stomach to take aim. The darkness was unbroken and the mist thick, but I could hear the creature moving. Demons can look like anything, but they always stomp over the earth like it belongs to them. I cocked the gun, resting the barrel on my shoulder, and let my middle finger ghost over the trigger.
Worst part of cutting down a demon is burying the body, no contest, but hunting made me anxious when it didn’t go quick. Sometimes I was lucky and hit my prey between the eyes or in the sternum; when I wasn’t, I had to take aim again. I aimed for the legs, the face, the gut—anything to bring them down long enough for me to make the killing blow. Digging a hole for the body by myself was hard work, but at least when I hunted alone I didn’t have to wait while Martha yanked out a canine for her collection.
That night, though, I didn’t even get a chance to take a shot. The demon was lumbering closer when a beam of light caught my eye. I looked over my shoulder, fumbled to my feet.
A man stood in the ferns, and he looked pleased when I inhaled a quick, sharp breath at the sight of him. He lowered the lantern and I felt exposed, having been found crouching in the reeds like an animal, swamp-muck dripping down my knees.
I frowned at him, said, “Sir, are you lost?”
“I was hoping that you wouldn’t be the lead I was following,” said the purewater man. “There are a lotta demons in Pryor, Esther Grace, but I’ve been suspecting more than half of ‘em live in you.”
I know there must have been recognition on my face when he said demons. But I remembered to look confused again when I realized that he meant demons like any self-respecting Pryor man means demons: dressed-up words for that second slice of pie or broom closet tryst, insubstantial things which never tore Emmalyn Blanchard, or the town of Pryor, for that matter, in half. I squinted into the lantern. Said, “Am I in any trouble, sir?”
“You’re in some trouble, I’m afraid.”
We stood still as stones for a second. I had the peculiar conviction that I couldn’t have moved if I wanted to. Then I broke into a run. I couldn’t see him, not even when I looked back over my shoulder, but I could hear his footsteps coming down on the rotten leaves and the thick drags of his breath. My own breath just about stopped up in my throat. I’d never seen a purewater man work before, but I knew what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to root out corruption.
My daddy’s gun was still tucked underneath my armpit, but I knew I couldn’t hope to reach it in time. Every victory I’d known in these deep dark woods felt like it happened a hundred years ago in a dream. I could hardly remember the clacking sound of the demon teeth on Martha Blanchard’s necklace. I hadn’t been prey in a long time, but I was prey now, living no further in the future than each footstep that came down hard and unsteady on the fresh mud.
The purewater man wasn’t fast but the woods never tricked him, and he never got slowed down by anything. He was far behind me, I thought, and then I stumbled and fell to my knees and all at once he was right there reaching out for me, his white hands protruding brightly from the mist. I heaved a shallow breath and swung the butt of my gun at him. I collided with his gut on my third try. He flinched back long enough for me to crawl into the arms of the trees, to get up on my feet again, to run so hard I thought I’d burn a hole in my lungs. I was scared but I was also furious. I did what I was supposed to, I was careful, and still I was going to die like Mama, like Emmalyn Blanchard, like everyone else ever laid on the Pryor altar.
I moved faster now that I’d already fallen. Not svelte and soundless like a native to the forest, but ruthless. Too full of rage and fear to stop for anything. When I pushed aside the low-hanging branches of a willow tree and half-tumbled down a hillside, I saw that I’d ended up in White Throat Holler again. The moon was high and white, spilling light over black-eyed birch trees and barren ground. There’d been a drought in Pryor since Emmalyn Blanchard died; this far from the swamp, nothing was left alive. Three weeks ago, when I’d last been here, grass still hid the black line burnt into the ground.
I followed the burnt line to the end of my eye line, where it trailed on and on to divide the trees. I couldn’t see any end. When Emmalyn crossed that line, she disappeared. Then she ended up in the river, covered with two days’ worth of muck and a whole lot deader than she was when she vanished.
The purewater man came fast into the glen, then stopped short. I watched his throat jerk with exhaustion and slowly I aimed my daddy’s shotgun at his forehead.
“Tell me what this is,” I said, and motioned with one hand at the burnt mark whi
le the other hand squeezed the life out of the trigger.
His eyes were wide and wet and almost see-through. “All right,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“Why is there a line here? Why did Emmalyn disappear? How come now there are demons in our town? I better know everything. All of it.”
“You know your town isn’t like other towns,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It just isn’t.”
I cocked the gun. “Why not?”
He swallowed, wouldn’t look right at me. “It’s an old deal got made between the founders and the real owners of this land. They live on the edge of hell’s mouth and the rest of the world leaves Pryor alone. That sounded like a good bargain, back then. The founders wanted a town free from the wide world’s corruption. And folks were safe enough, usually, so long as no one crossed over. But then you girls started killing demons, going out into the woods, and someone got over the line.”
“Emmalyn,” I said, and was surprised to hear the forest throw the word back at me. “You mean Emmalyn.”
“I suppose I do.” His face hardened. He took a step closer.
I wrapped both hands around the gun and stepped backwards. “What are we supposed to do, if we don’t kill them? What did anyone do before this?”
“You’re not supposed to do anything. A few of you get picked off, enough to—to keep them from getting too hungry, and they stay where they belong.”
“You expected us to die?” My voice caught a little on that word.
He took another step closer, slow, like he was trying to approach a wild animal. I didn’t move. I said, “Why are you coming after me?”
“It’s my duty.” He gave me a level look. His eyes weren’t see-through now, but dark and bottomless again. “I can’t let the demons get hunted.”
When I shot him, my aim was true. I got him between the eyes, then, for good measure, in the sternum. He dropped at once. This time, the worst part wasn’t burying the body. The worst part was going back to Pryor, past the wagon wheel of worn-out yellow houses, past the corner store and the schoolhouse with the broken bell, down to the police station, to drag a hundred-year-old corpse out of the ground.
Thin Places Page 10
