Prairie Gothic

by J. M. Hayes

  That, the sheriff thought, was an excellent question.

  ***

  Judy wasn’t worrying about a shot setting things off. She could see a ghostly figure emerging from the billowing clouds of snow behind Mrs. Kraus. Scraggly hair whipped about its head. Stick-like arms protruded from the quilt of rags that wrapped it, insufficiently, from the storm.

  Judy recognized the apparition. It was the hag, the one who’d shot Chairman Wynn. She shouldn’t be visible out there in the dark, but the woman was surrounded by a glowing aura. Its source was an old-fashioned blowtorch. It was lit and she was pointing it at the house as she advanced across the yard. If she got close enough…

  But she didn’t have to get close enough, Judy realized. There was a fire in the hearth in the living room.

  “We need to get outside,” Englishman told the assembly. Judy wondered if he’d seen the hag, wondered if she should tell Becky and Mrs. Kraus what was behind them.

  “Lord, it’s the witch!” Simon howled, absolving her of the responsibility.

  There was a brief moment of confusion as everyone looked to see what Simon was talking about. Judy was already grabbing one Heather and whispering to the other. They had to escape before the gas found the fire, or the old woman found the gas. And then everybody was moving. Bodies threw themselves about like Keystone cops in choreographed confusion. Someone sprinted down the hall to where the chairman waited for a miracle. Someone tall went through the swinging door to the living room. Becky, Judy decided, since her silhouette was no longer blocking what little light came through the back door.

  “Now,” Judy told Two as she began hauling One toward the exit. Mrs. Kraus had stepped away from the doorway. Judy and the Heathers cleared it as the old woman held something up to her torch. It looked like she was lighting a candle.

  “Dynamite,” the second Heather cried. “I think that’s dynamite.”

  Mrs. Kraus opened fire. She was a few steps from the back porch, windward of the house and the propane. The Glock bucked. Judy kept moving, dragging one daughter with the help of the other, as far as she could get from the disaster she expected. Dorothy was right behind her with Mary in one hand and Wynn Some in the other, urging them on for all she was worth. Englishman followed, pushing Doc.

  Judy hoped they could get far enough. It wasn’t going to matter whether Mrs. Kraus was accurate. Not when the gas found those flames.

  Mrs. Kraus emptied the Glock and the specter staggered and went down. Then it got back up again. It still held the torch.

  The hag lighted and hurled the first of her bombs. More were stuck in a belt holding her rags about her waist.

  The explosive hurtled toward the back door. And then its course was altered by the snowball that intercepted it. Dorothy had stopped, once she got the deputy and Mary clear. Now she was bent over, scooping up a second snowball even as her former companion lit another stick of TNT.

  The first one tumbled and landed, still sputtering, almost at Judy’s feet. While she tried to decide what to do about it, Wynn Some hurled her violently aside. “Run for your lives,” he shouted, throwing himself on top of the explosive. “I’ll absorb the blast.” Then Englishman was there, pulling him off and Judy could see that the fuse was out and Deputy Wynn, of all people, had saved their lives.

  The hag let fly again. This time Dorothy’s makeshift missile defense failed to intercept. The stick of dynamite tumbled through the air. Mad Dog came pounding out the back door, the chairman over his shoulder, just ahead of it. Simon was hard on his heels. The TNT glanced off the side of the doorframe as Simon came through. He dropped his AK 47 and frantically grabbed it out of the air. He looked around, deciding what to do with it.

  “Hey, you Englishman’s Bastard,” Simon shouted. “Catch this!” He cocked his arm to hurl it. Then he disappeared. Along with the house.

  Judy felt like she was at ground zero of a nuclear blast. Her shadow etched the snow. She tried to throw herself between the explosion and her injured daughter. Something slammed her in the back. She never knew where she landed.

  ***

  The first thing Mad Dog noticed afterwards was that he couldn’t hear anything. His ears were ringing, not the constant singing of summer cicadas that was his tinnitus. This roar rivaled a Kansas tornado.

  He struggled to sit up and saw Englishman ask him something. Probably, “Are you all right?” He nodded an uncertain yes. Doc was scrambling toward Judy and the Heathers. Englishman followed and that left Mad Dog alone with the chairman, who had already proved beyond his help.

  It was no longer dark in the yard. He couldn’t make himself turn to look at the house, but flickering shadows indicated that pipes back there still vented gas. And there were little piles of burning debris scattered about, adding their own fitful efforts to light the scene. It was surreal, like something Dante Alighieri might have imagined.

  Dorothy had the cup. She wandered around touching people with it. Becky had claimed it could heal. Dorothy touched Mad Dog and Chairman Wynn, then mouthed something in Mad Dog’s ear. He heard enough to understand her. She still thought he could heal too. Only he wasn’t any more Oz than that pottery bowl was the grail. Still, maybe he should try.

  Mad Dog willed himself to that other world, the one no one here but Dorothy seemed to believe in. It wasn’t easy. His body ached. Wind and snow stung him. Cold seeped out of the earth. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore it all, tried to find that other place where his soul sometimes escaped.

  And suddenly he saw two who were one and yet not one. He didn’t understand, except that they were a danger on either plane of existence. Again, Mad Dog needed weapons to fight them. He remembered that moment in the hog shed. He’d searched for a thunderbolt and found one. He looked for it again, begged its help. He thought it agreed. And something, or someone, else agreed as well.

  Mad Dog opened his eyes and tried to comprehend. Judy was coming around. Dorothy went over and touched her with the cup. She touched the injured Heather as well. He was surprised when Heather’s eyes flickered open. But he didn’t have time to celebrate because they were fixed on something behind him.

  It was the hag. She was back. She was soaked in her own blood and she’d lost her torch, but she still had plenty of candles. And lots of places to light them.

  Englishman fumbled with his pistol. The witch bent over a pile of flaming debris, tried to light another bomb.

  Englishman dropped to one knee, used a two handed grip, squeezed. Nothing happened. Mad Dog watched him frantically rack the slide to eject the failed round. It jammed. Englishman looked about for something else to use against her, only there was already something there.

  Hailey seemed to materialize out of nothingness. The witch gave up on the stick that wouldn’t light and tried another as Hailey limped toward her. The wolf’s flank was caked with frozen blood. She could barely move, wasn’t capable of attack in the usual sense. The hag didn’t notice, not until Hailey snapped a jaw full of fangs within inches of her face. The witch recoiled, fell into the flaming wreckage and emerged, aflame herself.

  Hailey glared at her. For a moment, the woman stared back. She didn’t seem to realize she was on fire. Her hair vanished in a puff of acrid smoke. The rags she wore glowed and flickered in the wind. Hailey began to move. Ears down, fangs bared, she advanced. The hag turned and ran. Mad Dog saw the woman’s eyes go wide, her mouth fly open in terror. The flames engulfed her, and the fuses on the sticks in her belt burned as well. She vanished into the storm as Hailey sank to the ground. Then the north turned bright and the earth shook, and Mad Dog ran to see to his lightning bolt.

  ***

  Blazing headlights were the sheriff’s first clue that another danger was on them. They were mounted on an old green and yellow John Deere tractor with a cab around the driver’s seat.

  Old John Deeres don’t move fast, but they move more surely than most things in Kansas blizzards. This one moved straight for where the sheriff’s family lay. Judy,
his Heather, they weren’t mobile yet. He couldn’t get them out of the way in time.

  A snowball exploded against his chest. It drew his attention. Dorothy, who else could have thrown it. She threw him something else and he understood.

  The sheriff ran to meet the tractor. He dodged its front wheels by inches, but as he did so, he showed the driver what Dorothy had given him. He knew who guided the tractor, and how badly she wanted the pottery cup. The tractor veered away from the others and twisted to follow him. He ran.

  In his mind, he saw the figure in the tractor as a thing that burned, much the like the hag had, though this one’s fire was internal. The sheriff burned too. He felt pure and perfect and electric, capable of saving the world, or a small part.

  The tractor closed fast. The sheriff wasn’t sure where he was. Then it didn’t matter. In spite of dark and snow, he saw every building. He tasted the trees, heard the fences, smelled the anger behind him, and touched its fear. He dodged and the tractor followed, no longer gaining.

  He stretched himself, flattened his ears, and ran. He felt long and lean. His feet clawed through the snow and found earth. His tongue lolled across sharp canines.

  The tractor followed. He knew the frustration of the thing guiding it. And its resolve that he would not get away. He had no intention of getting away.

  He leaped a fence, then trotted slowly to give the tractor time to follow. He hadn’t been here before, yet he knew the place. This land had never felt the plow. Generations of beef and sheep had altered its vegetation, but the earth was the same. The prairie recognized him. They were old friends.

  The pasture was flat and empty. The tractor could go much faster here. Faster than a man, but not so fast as what the sheriff had become. He circled toward his goal, came at it from the north. The terrain gave little hint of where he led. He crashed through clumps of thicker vegetation, jumped a low mound of earth and felt the surface change beneath him. Ten strides more, and then he spun and stopped. The tractor followed. It nearly reached him. Then the earth opened and swallowed it whole.

  Only it wasn’t earth, of course. It was ice, the pond’s surface. Frozen thick enough to let the tractor come all the way to the deep end. But not thick enough for more.

  The sheriff felt human again. Human and winded, utterly exhausted. He found his way to the edge of the pond, a place where the dam had begun to erode. He sank down beside an icy cut from which old bones protruded.

  Behind him, something scrambled from the frigid depths. Somehow, a shape pulled itself from the water and onto a place where the ice was still thick enough to hold. It wobbled toward him, the chill of wind and water stealing its life as it came. It had Becky Hornbaker’s face, but it wasn’t Becky. Somehow, it had lost most of its clothing escaping from the submerged cab of the John Deere. Its hair was short and dark and frozen. So was the longer gray wig it grasped in one hand and held in front of its genitals.

  The sheriff reached out and knocked the wig aside. Though shrunken by cold and trauma, it was clearly male. The face was Becky’s, but it was Zeke’s too.

  “Tommie Irons, I presume,” the sheriff said.

  The figure reached for the sheriff. Its eyes locked on his, pleading. The sheriff understood. He looked down at the cup for the first time. It was decorated with a ring of alternating swastikas and swavastikas around the rim. The cup looked ancient enough, but it didn’t look worth dying for. The sheriff shrugged and handed it over. Eyes blazing, the figure grabbed it. But its fingers were frozen, too stiff to hold on. The cup dropped to the ice…and shattered.

  The thing that had been Becky, and sometimes Zeke, collapsed onto the shards and slid down among the bones. The sheriff felt its flame extinguish, felt the spirits of those who lay in the earth reach out and claim it. Something, never wholly human, died. That’s when he noticed. The wind had died also. And snow had ceased falling.

  ***

  Stars hung, twice as bright as normal, over Buffalo Springs. It was good to have horizons back and appropriately distant beneath that endless vault of sky. The MEDEVAC helicopter lifted off. It carried Chairman Wynn, still clinging to life by a tenuous thread and accompanied by his son, toward the nearest trauma center.

  It was too cold to stay out and watch them disappear into the distance. The sheriff had checked a thermometer. It was just over ten degrees in Buffalo Springs. With cloudless skies, the mercury would fall farther before morning.

  He picked his way around snowdrifts and pushed through the doors and into one of the town’s few lighted buildings.

  “Any word yet?” he asked.

  They occupied the lobby of the Sunshine Towers Retirement Home, its residents and staff having been shooed elsewhere. Doc had chosen it as a worthy emergency medical facility. It had a well-stocked nurses’ station, a generator to supply its own power, and was closer at hand.

  “Doc’s still back with Heather,” Judy said. “What’s taking so long?”

  No one ventured an opinion. The other Heather sat with her arms folded tight to her chest. Mary dozed in one of the big chairs near the birdcage. As if they understood, the birds kept their songs soft and comforting.

  Judy paced near the door that led to where Doc had taken her daughter. “Why won’t he let me in there?” she demanded.

  “She’ll be fine,” the sheriff and Mad Dog told her simultaneously. She looked at them and shook her head.

  “What’s that,” she countered, “the expert opinion of our local witch doctor and his brain-damaged brother?” But she stopped pacing and leaned against the wall.

  The sheriff’s head throbbed, but he felt surprisingly good. The people he loved had all survived. So far. Chairman Wynn was yet to be determined, but keeping him alive until the MEDEVAC team arrived already constituted a miracle, or so Doc had told him. Equally miraculous was the fact that he’d managed to get a cellular call through and start the chopper on its way. Since that one call, his phone had gone stubbornly out of service again. And there was Mad Dog, who had lost the beloved pets that were killed at his farm. Only animals, some people would think, but he knew his brother’s pain was intolerable.

  “I’m the sheriff,” he announced. Saying it reassured him. “I’ve still got a job to do. People died. I need to know why, clear up loose ends.” He looked across the room to where Dorothy hovered protectively over Mary. “Let’s start with you.”

  She didn’t seem surprised. “OK,” she said. “I confess. I’m the phantom snowballer.”

  “After seeing you pick off that dynamite, I already worked that out. But the snowball case is the least of my worries. Why did this happen?”

  She stood there, nervously clicking ruby-tennied heels.

  “Silver,” Mad Dog said.

  Everyone looked at him curiously. Mad Dog shifted in his chair. Hailey lifted her head to check for threats, didn’t find any, and put it back on her paws. The wound along her shoulder had stopped bleeding. Mad Dog had made Doc promise to see to her as soon as he could, even though Doc had already assured him it wasn’t serious. Mad Dog ruffled the fur on her neck with his hand and the sheriff wondered which of them drew the most comfort from it.

  “You’re trying to go home, right?” Mad Dog asked. “Well, they changed those shoes for the movie. Ruby slippers were more photogenic. They were silver in the book.”

  Dorothy smiled and turned to the sheriff. “What do you want to know?”

  “I’ve got most of it,” the sheriff said. “I know that Becky and Zeke were actually the same person. I know the real Becky was the one locked up in that cage all those years. I know you’re her sister. I even think I know who Tommie really was.”

  “Yeah, that was Tommie who followed you down to the pond,” she admitted. “And it was Tommie who passed himself off as Becky and Zeke all these years.” She looked down at Mary and sighed. “He believed all that lineage stuff, us being Christ’s children and all. It was our legacy.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Doc said he read about the legen
d of the Magdalen’s offspring somewhere.”

  “That’s where it began. Tommie and Becky thought it meant they could live by different rules. Like when they were kids. They baptized that boy until he stopped breathing. After that, she and Tommie got shipped down to Uncle Abel in Oklahoma real quick.”

  “Doc found a file at the library,” the sheriff said. “There were newspaper clippings about your uncle’s murder. What really happened?”

  “Becky, the real one, the witch. She and Tommie persuaded Abel’s three boys, Ezekiel and Obadiah and Malachi, to help her kill Abel. Abel was Simon’s father. Becky hated Abel for making her a brood mare for the new Messiah. She was married to Zeke, but it was a sham Abel came up with to explain Simon and the others he intended. Abel was rich. Made a fortune selling collectibles. Had that chest you open with the ring and she told them he kept a treasure in there.”

  “Becky and Tommie were about the same size. Looked alike as well, and resembled their cousins. All that inbreeding, I suppose. Becky needed an alibi. There was a dance that night. She sent Tommie, dressed up as her. Zeke was his escort. Obadiah and Malachi stayed to help with the killing.”

  “When it was done, they split up. Zeke got the ring. Tommie tossed the chest in a truck and drove up here to hide it. They never looked inside. Things were too frantic at first, then Abel left Becky his fortune and it didn’t seem important.”

  “Zeke and Malachi and Becky got arrested,” Dorothy continued. “Tommie and Obadiah got away.”

  The sheriff let his eyes slide around the room. They were like a little band of primitives, gathered around the wise woman as she told them there really were things to be afraid of out there in the dark.

  “Abel had a housekeeper, a young Cheyenne girl. She helped Tommie and Obadiah hide out till Becky got cleared. Then Becky and Tommie came home to Benteen County. Tommie was laying low since the law wanted him. His fingerprints were on the murder weapon ’cause he hid it for Becky. He’d been at the dance, only as Becky. None of the witnesses were going to admit they might have danced with him. ”