Tatterdemon

by Vernon, Steve

Then he jumped, like an overweight Tarzan, instinctively grabbing at the noose with his hands.

  The cord snapped.

  He fell to the ground like a sack full of gravity.

  He landed hard and damn near broke his ankle.

  “Shit.”

  He’d need something stronger.

  “I should have got that rope from Barrand.”

  He pulled himself upright.

  “Maybe tomorrow.”

  He reopened the freezer lid and made himself comfortable in the creaky lawn chair. He talked to her for another hour. He told her of his day and of the crash. She smiled when he’d said how pissed Ivan Barrand was.

  He could have sworn she smiled.

  Halfway through the hour he leaned his head against his arm, his arm against the edge of the freezer, and listened to the ting-ting ticking of his wristwatch.

  “I love you, girl. I always will. I love you until the stroke of death and at least a lifetime past that.”

  He’d said that to her the day they’d married.

  He figured he hadn’t lied.

  He closed the freezer door.

  The door stuck going down, like it didn’t want to shut.

  “I’ll let you sleep,” he said.

  He went back upstairs to the couch and turned on the television. He watched the night’s first movie. It was a zombie movie. An old black and white, with Bela Lugosi.

  The thought of dead people coming back to life damn near cheered him up.

  Sometime around three in the morning, Emma’s heart began to beat.

  * 2 *

  After Earl left, Helliard used Maddy two more times.

  That was the word.

  Used.

  It wasn’t sex.

  It was more like anger.

  Like he was pissed at something that he couldn’t hit and the only way he could reach it was to shove himself inside somebody.

  Maybe even that wasn’t deep enough.

  She wondered if he wasn’t hooked up to some sort of fountain of perpetual horny. It was like he’d made some kind of deal with the Devil. Maybe he wasn’t even human.

  Finally he finished.

  She guessed he was done.

  He pulled out of her, and wiped off on her sheets.

  “I’ve had better,” he said.

  That sort of pissed her off, but she was glad he was done.

  When he left the room, she rubbed her hands across her face.

  They stank of him, but she needed to shove the tears back before they started falling.

  She wouldn’t give the bastard the satisfaction.

  She hadn’t moved while he’d done it. It was the only way she could think to fight back. She had to show the bastard that he wasn’t hurting her, no matter how much he was.

  She thought of Vic.

  As cruel as that bastard had been, he was nothing next to Helliard.

  No doubt about it.

  She had clearly traded a demon for a bull devil.

  “You never knew how good you had it, did you?”

  She looked up.

  Bluedaddy sat on the edge of the bed.

  “Hell,” Maddy agreed. “Vic was a walk in a daisy field, compared to this asshole.”

  “That’s a fact. He beat you, but never as bad as this,” Bluedaddy said. “Sure, maybe he was cruel, but you know what? Vic Harker loved you girl. He would have killed any man who looked crosswise at you.”

  “That’s not anymore love there than what he felt for his backhoe. He just wanted to own me, is all. He didn’t want any fingerprints on his property but his own.”

  “No, girl,” Bluedaddy said. “He loved you. He just didn’t know how to show it, is all.”

  She thought about that.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she conceded.

  “Maybe nothing,” Bluedaddy said. “I’ll bet you wish you had him back. I’ll bet you wish he’d walk through that door right now. He’d rip that bastard another asshole and piss down his gullet.”

  She smiled at the thought.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she repeated, imagining what Vic might do to Helliard, gun or not.

  Bluedaddy stared at her darkly, like he was hearing her thoughts.

  “Careful what you wish for, girl.”

  Helliard came back through the door, dragging Duane’s dead body.

  “Are you talking to yourself, Mad Again?” Helliard said. “I thought I warned you about that.”

  Bluedaddy was gone, quicker than lightning.

  “I brought you a treat, I did.”

  He heaved Duane’s carcass into the bed.

  “Here you go,” he told her. “Love on that for a while.”

  Maddy stared at the corpse in disbelief.

  Helliard just laughed.

  He rolled the body on top of her.

  “Sloppy seconds, Duane,” he hooted. “You always liked your sloppy seconds, now didn’t you?”

  The night without end went on without ending.

  * 3 *

  Wendy Joe Joel sat in the office all night long, beating a soft rhythm on the edge of the heavy wooden desk, staring at what lay in her desk drawer, trying to pretend it didn’t stare back.

  She wasn’t supposed to be here.

  It was her night off.

  She touched the doll. It was still the same, as cold as polar bear shit. Cold might mean a hardening of the heart or it could mean her spell was working. Or maybe it was just the distance between the doll and Emma.

  Hell.

  She didn’t know.

  She was just guessing.

  Maybe it Earl’s fault, spreading all of that negative aura of his. Conjure needed total faith. Disbelief made magic weak.

  Hell.

  There was only one way to be sure.

  She had to try again.

  She covered the desk with newspaper. She removed three black candles from her personal filing cabinet. She carved her name on one, Wilfred on the second, and Emma on the third. She used a four-inch nail to do the carving. The same nail Clavis brought with him, still wet with his blood.

  It should have been a new nail, three of them, one for each candle.

  Never mind.

  The nail would bind the three of them together. A little blood never hurt a spell. She placed the candles atop the newspaper. The newspaper was open to the obituaries. Was that bad luck?

  Maybe, maybe not.

  She was trying to kill something, so a little death magic wouldn’t hurt.

  Besides, Wilfred took the front page into the toilet, and Earl kept the sports section in his car. The only thing left to use were the classifieds, the comics and the death notices.

  She laid the doll between the candles.

  She lit them, one by one.

  Then she tore open a packet of salt she’d found in Wilfred’s desk drawer, left over from some long ago fish and chips. She sprinkled the salt into a glass of water and stirred it with a silver key.

  “Spirit bless this water. Make it pure and make it sweet.”

  It was the first conjure her momma taught her, making homemade holy water. Water blessed this way was good for curing any ailment. It poured out sweet as pure bee honey, in spite of the salt. Only tonight, the water in the glass turned an inky black.

  That wasn’t supposed to happen.

  To hell with it.

  She’d wasted enough time with worry and doubt. It was time to stiffen up her courage, and get to it. She touched the button on her CD player. Stevie Nicks wailed into life, singing “Belladonna”.

  The music was another compromise.

  It was supposed to belladonna – the kind that grows in the dirt – but none of the herb stores in Halifax carried the real stuff.

  Next she added a little graveyard dirt. Ghost dust was what her momma called it, dust blessed with the touch of the dead. Forget about your nuclear energy. There was nothing stronger than graveyard dirt. Touched by a thousand lives and tears spilled upon, soaking up all that energy.


  She carved a circle in the air with a wand made of a dead stick. Dead things are strong. No illusions left once you die, and illusions were what made a body weak. Then she lay down in the center of the circle and tried to relax.

  She tried to get herself down into a deep trance state, letting her mind dance around her toe bones. She felt them buried beneath her skin, like cuddly sunken tombstones. From her toe bones she followed up her leg bones. She slid her mind around her knee bones like a merry go round. She danced a crazy spider jig around the hot pit of her pelvis, hopscotched the nubbins of her spinal column, and clambered up her neck bone, three times round her skull bone, skating like a summer cloud, until her thoughts were centered deep in her mind.

  She found a cool little room, deep inside her mind, all white and shiny, with cool white doors. She climbed inside and shut the door firmly, padlocking it three times with the memory of her silver key.

  Only then did she finally dare to call the name.

  “Legba. Pappa dad Legba. This is your daughter calling you. Calling you from the darkness of the moon, those old craters you hide inside. Legba. Pappa dad Legba. I conjure you. I conjure you. I conjure you.”

  She heard a voice from the shadows all low and fluttery, like steel being dragged over tombstones.

  “Yes?”

  “You know what I want, Pappa Legba. You know what I need.”

  “You got to say it.”

  “I want that man. I want him so bad my pisshole spews smoke and fire. I want him so bad I can taste the ocean moving in my sweat. I want him so bad, I can’t say his name without tasting his sweet love muscle pumping in my mouth.”

  “You got to say his name, girl,” Pappa Legba prompted. “You got to tell what you want, or the universe don’t listen. You got to speak it or I won’t listen.”

  She hesitated.

  She knew she shouldn’t speak.

  This was bad, mojo bad. She shouldn’t be doing this, no way. But she spoke the name.

  “His name is Wilfred Potter,” she said. “The Chief of Police, Wilfred Potter. I want him, Pappa dad, more than I want life.”

  “What stands in your way, daughter?”

  “The woman who calls herself his wife. She ain’t no wife, though. She’s too cold. I can feel it in my conjure. She’s colder than frozen bones, colder than Eskimo spit, colder than the heart of old Scratch himself. He needs the loving a good woman, and I can give him that loving, if you take her out of the picture.”

  Pappa Legba smiled, and his smile lit the darkness of her tiny mind room like the cut of a crooked knife, and in that light Wendy Joe saw a great white coffin.

  “Open the lid,” Pappa dad said.

  Wendy Joe opened the lid of the cold white coffin.

  Underneath the lid was the shape of a woman, lying there, like a cool blue popsicle.

  “Touch her,” Pappa Legba said. “Touch her heart.”

  Wendy Joe bent and touched the cold woman’s heart.

  She felt it beat, molasses slow, like a toad frozen in snow.

  “Magic like this got to have a price,” Pappa Legba said.

  And then Wendy Joe was standing in the cell room, standing over the sleeping form of Clavis Petrie. She held a long gutting knife in her left hand. She touched his cheek. She felt the bone quiver beneath his flesh.

  His eyes flew open.

  His mouth tried to scream.

  Before the scream escaped, it was over. She opened his throat. Unable to control her hands she made a second mouth, right under his chin. An open, yelling mouth clotted full with screaming red fear.

  “You got to be careful what you wish for,” Pappa Legba said.

  Only he didn’t look like Pappa Legba. He looked more like an old blue man, with a scraggish half beard sprouting from his chin. The old blue man cackled wetly. Only Wendy Joe didn’t see.

  She was too busy gutting Clavis’s body.

  Opening and emptying him like she was dressing a fresh-shot deer.

  And the night moved on.

  * 4 *

  Maddy lay in her bed, Duane’s corpse sprawled atop of her. She couldn’t move. Helliard had tied her akimbo and left Duane lying between her legs. She could hear Helliard in the living room, watching some kind of damn monster movie. It sounded like he’d found a bottle of something from somewhere.

  At least his choice in television was better than Vic’s. With Vic, it always had to be some kind of organized sport. Maddy didn’t care for any of that horseshit. The truth was she never knew just which team to cheer for.

  She heard him tipping the bottle.

  Good.

  Maybe he’d get drunk.

  But what good would that do?

  She’d still be tied up, with a corpse between her legs.

  Maybe he would die of a heart attack brought on by sudden cirrhosis of the liver and a chronic hangnail, aggravated by a stubborn bottle opener. She thought about him dead, thought about a search party finding her weeks later lying here beneath this corpse.

  She wouldn’t starve.

  There was meat close at hand.

  But how would she get water?

  You needed water to live, didn’t you?

  Just before she fell asleep she felt a strange compulsion to visit Vic’s grave. It was crazy, but she wanted to put pennies on his eyes. She could feel those eyes, watching her from out of the darkness, from out of the ground.

  Hating her.

  Wanting her.

  To hell with it.

  That was just Helliard’s eyes talking to her, and pasted over Duane.

  It was nothing more than nerves and imagination.

  Vic wasn’t going anywhere.

  Maddy fell asleep, focusing on that thought. Duane’s cold flesh kept her warm. The crawling of the maggots occasionally woke her, but for the most part she slept soundly, heedless of Duane’s steady soft blue whispering.

  And the night, as large and dark as sin, slowly moved on.

  * 5 *

  Out in the field, Vic’s face stuck from the dirt like a good-sized pumpkin.

  His yellow eyes stared wildly up at the fat full moon. He hated the moon. He wanted to eat it with his eyes, swallow it down in huge blue cheese chunks.

  He tore one stick-like hand from the dirt.

  For a time he leaned there, propped like a signpost warning of danger.

  Shortly before morning crawled from her dirty yellowed bed, the rest of Vic followed.

  PART 2

  Resurrection

  CHAPTER 17

  Reflections

  * 1 *

  Some things you know, some things you think you know, and some things you just spend the rest of your life trying to forget.

  Lily knew she could live forever and never forget the smell of popcorn rattling through the summer dust. She knew she would never forget the taste of Raoul’s sweet flesh. She would never forget the sound of the carousel and the feel of all those hungry eyes upon her. And she would never forget the clotted, sour aftertaste of sixteen tubs of premium ice cream.

  She lay on the couch like a beached whale, gazing through the dirty haze of her front screen window, trying to look through her own hazy reflection. She stared down at the town she would never be a part of.

  That was something else she knew.

  She was an outsider.

  If she lived in Crossfall for another six hundred years, she would always be the circus freak fat lady, the stranger.

  The outcast.

  She didn’t mind.

  The town was dying.

  Who wanted to join a walking wake?

  The sign outside Crossfall, reading POPULATION 3400, was a flat-out lie.

  The truth was Crossfall had been a ghost town for many years. A town that was full of tattered ghosts hiding behind a shroud of long-forgotten secrets. The town was dead and had died a foreverforever long time ago.

  Some said it died when the cod fishery gave out. Others blamed the death of the textile plant. Oth
ers blamed the distant malls, clustered on the outskirts like a handful of concrete tumors, drawing the business from the local stores, starving them slowly. Maybe you could blame the new highway for forgetting Crossfall was ever on the map. Maybe you could blame the church, folded into moral and fiscal bankruptcy.

  There were a lot of theories, but Lily knew the truth.

  Crossfall died a long time before any of that. Nowadays it just lay against the road like a derelict automobile. Someday, even the ghosts would move on. Someday, a great dry wind would blast the little town from the map.

  Life was a line drawn between the moving and the still; the light and the shadow. It was the difference between a body and a well-made puppet. Truth to tell, the town had been dying longer than anyone could recall. The motion that had begun when Maddy had brained and buried her husband Vic, only served to speed things up a little faster.

  Like dominoes, each event toppled into place.

  * 2 *

  Roland Friar grinned at himself in the side mirror.

  He’d left the lady of sweet lies lying in a bed he’d paid extra for far behind him.

  He wasn’t thinking about dying as he swung himself up into the Peterbilt semi-cab.

  He was thinking nice things.

  How good the road looked.

  How fine life could be, as he eased himself into the driver’s seat, letting the preprogrammed hydraulics work their magic.

  The preset seat raised him upwards, until he was just high enough to see over the cut-down dashboard. He wiggled his toes beneath the leather confines of his grease-stained work boots.

  He stretched his legs as far as they could reach.

  He double checked for safety’s sake.

  Yup.

  He could reach the pedals just fine.

  He grinned and stared around like a happy Cocker Spaniel. He’d already bullied the yardman out of the load of hay. The bastard had him lined up to haul a flatbed of four marble slabs to a tombstone factory. The damn thing had looked like Stonehenge on wheels. It was bound to play hell with any rig and driver stupid enough to try and haul it.

  No sir, he’d take the hay ride. There was nothing but sweet-smelling bales of tall dead grass. The worst he’d worry about was a case of hay fever. The load was headed to a Halifax landscaper. The bastard would peddle them to those with more money than brains, telling them that there was nothing like a bale of dead hay to give their yards a little harvest flavor.