Tatterdemon

by Vernon, Steve

  He knew what he had to do.

  He prayed to God that it wasn’t looking.

  He slid his hand over, reaching for Big Fuck. His fingers felt like bloated sausage. He could see that he was touching the gun, but he couldn’t seem to feel it. His skin couldn’t tell if the metal was hot or cold.

  Dear God, please.

  He nudged his fingertip into the trigger and slid the gun closer.

  Please.

  When it was close enough to wrap his hands around it, he broke the pistol open.

  The haystack didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  Helliard knew the gun was empty.

  He’d emptied it into the haystack booger.

  Now it had won.

  It would come back for him soon. He wasn’t sure how he knew that. He just knew he didn’t want to be there when it did. He had a pocketful of bullets, but he only needed one.

  It took him about fifty years to drag the pistol.

  Fifty more to break the pistol open.

  A damn century to fish the bullet out and load it.

  But it only took a half second to push the barrel to his eyeball and squeeze.

  Just before it hit him, he saw that little blue man wearing a johnny shirt, like in the hospital.

  His face looked so damn familiar.

  “Go ahead and shoot, son,” said the blue man with Helliard’s daddy’s face pasted on. “I’m waiting for you on the other side of hell, like a seed waiting for rain.”

  The last thing Helliard saw was death rolling out of a long steel tunnel, riding a cool gray locomotive.

  When the gun went off it sounded a little like a big steel country guitar string banging home one last note.

  * 2 *

  It had been a long time since Wilfred been in church.

  Not since his Grandfather, who would bribe him for his feigned devotion with a comic book, once a week.

  Wilfred pulled down Clavis’s wooden cross.

  It wouldn’t do any good setting him loose, only to have him come back and re-deify himself.

  He supposed Clavis could just nail the cross back up. It wouldn’t take more than a half hour’s work. Maybe he’d even figure a way around his one-hand-nails-the-other problem. Pre-aim a nail gun with his toe around the trigger, or something like that.

  Fuck it.

  There was no sense in worrying about what he couldn’t change.

  He set the cross on a pew.

  It wasn’t like anyone come to service any more.

  He pushed on the door to the church.

  The hinges needed tightening.

  He hesitated at the threshold.

  It seemed to him like everything crazy had started at this church.

  Maybe it was an evil place.

  A lot of folks thought that ever since Reverend Elliot hung himself.

  Wilfred shivered.

  That was a bad memory. He’d pulled Reverend Elliot down from the bell rope. The Reverend’s face had gone the color of moldy eggplant, his tongue hanging out like a dog in the summer heat. He had shit his pants and the flies had been having a Sunday church picnic with the meat of the Reverend’s flesh.

  A really bad memory.

  Wilfred stepped inside.

  Keeping moving was better than standing still.

  He looked at the pews laid out like rows of teeth. He remembered all the times he’d sat there with his Grandfather. He remembered the clink of the coins in the offering plate. The way he had tried to master the double bounce, bouncing the quarter off the bottom of the plate and catching it back in his hands.

  It never worked.

  He heard his grandfather, shushing him when he started to fidget.

  Shush, shush, shush.

  Wait a minute.

  That shushing was real.

  He turned around.

  Standing in the shadowed corner of the church was an old man. The shushing sound was sound of his broom as he quietly swept. The old man looked up and smiled. Wilfred felt a flotilla of goose bumps rising on his neck like an army of tiny pink tombstones.

  The old man was wearing a tattered wedding gown.

  What the . . . ?

  “Have you seen my boy Clavis?” the old man asked Wilfred.

  * 3 *

  Marvin took three backpedalling steps, damn near falling off the front porch, before Vic was upon him.

  “Piss on my grave, will you?” Vic snarled. “You stamp-licking son of a bitch.”

  Marvin turned and tried to run.

  He had time for one scream, cut off as Vic drove his stick arm through the mailman’s pudgy ribcage. The stick arm took Marvin hard in the belly, just like the swing of a pickaxe. The stump hand poked through the wreckage of broken ribs that grinned about the remains of Marvin’s stomach. The stump hand soaked the blood in, with a thick guzzlish sucking sound, like a long dangerous sponge.

  Maddy felt something hot and wet splash her naked torso. She was afraid to look, for fear it was pieces of Marvin, maybe his heart or other organs. Mercifully, it was only blood. Zigger was there in the midst of it, following his master. The blind hound lapped happily at the spilling blood. It was all soup and supper for him.

  “Get the other two,” Vic snarled.

  Maddy blinked.

  She couldn’t understand what Vic was asking.

  “What?”

  “The two in the house. Get them and drag them out to the field.”

  She stared at him in disbelief.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “We got us some planting to do.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Special Delivery

  * 1 *

  This didn’t feel like any spell Wendy Joe ever cast.

  It felt more like being some kind of pipeline, just a way for something real bad to get out.

  That’d be the snake, she told herself. Old Damn Baller. He was built like a tube, long and hollow. He was built like a tunnel leading from life towards death and never leading back the other way.

  It was bad to go the other way.

  I don’t want to do this, she thought.

  This is a bad thing.

  Waking what’s sleeping is always bad.

  To hell with it. I don’t have a choice. I am going to cast the spell, because I’ve got to. I’m going to cast the spell because I am expected to.

  It was a strange casting. It felt like being a puppet on strings. Throughout the spell she felt Momma’s cool, bony hands touching her own like moonlit moth wings, guiding her and forcing her. Some of the herbs and charms she handled seemed unfamiliar. Some of them she couldn’t remember where they came from.

  It didn’t matter.

  She was just here to put the pieces together.

  She didn’t need to know why.

  It was like a Halloween game. Passing peeled grapes and cold noodles.

  A rubber glove filled with chicken bones and milk-cooked Jell-O.

  A bowl of oily scrambled eggs.

  A knife.

  “This is the old witch. She lost her life and here is the knife.”

  Like children passing the magic of make-believe back and forth in the dark until it became real.

  Mysteries dug up and secrets like wind through cracks in a wall.

  Making a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded.

  Trick or treat.

  Trick or treat.

  Give me blood and bones to eat.

  * 2 *

  “Have you seen my boy Clavis?” the old man asked again.

  Wilfred reached for a cigarette, trying to ignore the old man’s dress. He poked the smoke into his mouth. He didn’t have a lighter, so he let the damn thing dangle.

  “Are you claiming that you’re Clavis’s daddy?”

  “There ain’t no claiming in it. I’m his paw, just as sure as sinning loves whiskey and women.”

  Wilfred smiled.

  His grandfather used to say that.

  He hadn’t heard it in a long time.

  “You look m
ore like Clavis’s Maw, in that dress and all.”

  That didn’t go over well. The old man grew real stiff, like his bones were starching up. He pointed the end of the broom like it was a magic wand.

  The crazy thing was it scared Wilfred.

  Then the old man leaned the broom down.

  “It ain’t mine to use,” he said. “Neither is the dress. I’m just borrowing it, is all. Besides, it’s awfully comfortable, you know.”

  Wilfred nodded.

  “You wouldn’t have any pockets in that thing, would you?”

  “Why?”

  “I need a light.”

  The old man snorted, which was funny, given he wasn’t breathing.

  “The dead don’t smoke,” he said.

  “Figured that,” Wilfred threw the cigarette to the floor. “The funny thing is, I remembered a funeral you already had. I remember seeing them carry your coffin down the street, old style. I don’t remember hearing about no miracle resurrections.”

  The old man shook his head slowly.

  “None of us really die,” he said. “We just sort of step aside, like winterkill making room for spring greening. It doesn’t mean we go anywhere. It’s just that most folks don’t see us, is all.”

  “So how come I’m seeing you?”

  “Might be you’re closer to death than most folks around here.”

  Wilfred thought about Emma in her Frigidaire coffin.

  Maybe the old man had a point.

  “So what’s with the wedding gown?” Wilfred asked. “I thought you ghosts went in for bed sheets?”

  The old man looked embarrassed.

  “It’s just that when my wife died, hell, it just sort of reminds me of her, is all.”

  Wilfred could understand that.

  “It looks comfy,” Wilfred allowed.

  “These spaghetti straps irritate the hell out of my sciatica, but the dress itself is as cooling as a spring breeze. It kind of air conditions you when you walk.”

  “Hot flashes much of a problem for the dead?”

  “It is where I’m headed. That’s where wife killers go.”

  “First I heard of this. I thought your wife died of a heart attack.”

  “She seen me dressed like this, the night before she died. She had a weak ticker to begin with. Seeing her husband wearing your hope chest will do that to a body.”

  “That don’t make you a murderer.”

  “Doesn’t it? Then how come Emma killed herself?”

  Wilfred opened his mouth. He didn’t hear anything coming out, so he closed it.

  “Don’t mind me,” the old ghost said. “The dead got nothing to do but gossip. You know why they lost the church, don’t you?”

  Wilfred nodded, grateful for the change of subject.

  “I heard a few rumors. I heard someone killed themself.”

  He knew more than that.

  He’d been the head investigator back when Reverend Elliot hung himself from the bell rope.

  He just didn’t like to think about it.

  “He either hung himself, or his knot tying went horribly wrong.”

  He could still see the minister’s body, swinging like a dowser’s pendulum, the bell ringing like Judgment Day had come at last.

  “Folks heard the bell ringing. They thought he was calling service. Ha – it turned out to be a burial service. He jumped from up there and the rope came taut a dozen feet down. It damn near yanked his head off. There’s thirteen knots in a hangman’s noose, and Elliot counted every one of them on the way down.”

  The bell had been quiet ever since. The town had taken the clapper off. Some swore the bell would never ring again. There’s even some who claim the clapper was buried with the body. Others swear it was melted down to help pay for the funeral.

  People say a lot of things.

  “I can tell you why he did it.”

  Wilfred looked up.

  “Why?”

  “He done it because he kept seeing a vision. A preacher, from way back, talking to him in dreams. Talking of an evil buried in a field, high in the hills. Young Elliot thought he was going mad. He figured the rope to be the only way out.”

  “A couple of months later the elders closed the church permanent. They yelled bankrupt, and called it a poor investment. Ha! The fact is, this is a haunted church.”

  Wilfred roamed his eyes around the empty pews, the cross hanging crooked, high above the mildewed altar, the boarded windows.

  Yes.

  He could believe this church was haunted.

  Hell.

  He was talking to a ghost, wasn’t he? If that was haunted than what was? Funny thing was, Wilfred ought to have been terrified, but he’d been having long late night chats with a freezered-up woman. Why in the hell should a little spookiness bother him?

  “So you’re a ghost? Is that it?” Wilfred asked. “Haunting this church? Rattling chains and whistling down pipes?”

  “You watch too many movies,” the old ghost said. “I’m just back now because there’s a whole lot of death coming back. There is an evil buried up in those hills, only it ain’t staying put up there. We’re coming back, policeman. Even your wife, she’s coming back from out of that freezer you put her into.”

  Wilfred gaped.

  The old ghost grinned.

  In the dimness of the church his grin lit the shadows a cool mocking blue.

  “Harken to her knocking,” the old ghost said. “Even now she’s knocking on your freezer door.”

  Wilfred heard a slow thumping sound.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  It was air in the pipes.

  It had to be.

  Wasn’t it?

  Only it was spring, and the heat in this place was turned off when they closed it.

  No, it was air in the pipes.

  Then why’d it sound so much like fists beating against metal?

  The old man laughed, loud as a clanging bell. He looked a bit like a zombified post-menopause Scarlett O’Hara, in that big billowed dress.

  And then somehow, between the space and time that blinked between thoughts, the old ghost vanished.

  Wilfred turned.

  He wanted to run, but his pride wouldn’t let him.

  So he turned and walked, just as stiff as a soldier on parade.

  He thought about heading home or back to the station house or maybe back to the tavern to get shitfaced drunk.

  The old man’s laughter followed him like the tinny ringing of a distant bell.

  Lingering on.

  * 3 *

  Maddy picked through the bodies strewn in her living room.

  It seemed like there were so many to choose from.

  There was Helliard, shot through the face.

  She wondered when that had happened. Did Vic do it? Squeezing a trigger would be hard with those peg hands of his. Helliard must have done it to himself. She supposed she didn’t blame him but now she had to deal with the mess. Wasn’t that always how it happened.

  Men make messes, and women have to clean it up.

  Both bodies looked similar, with half their face blown off. She held their heads together. It was funny how the two of them almost made one face, yet didn’t have a brain between them. As she held the skull fragments together she saw a cool blue vision in the back of her brain. She saw a pair of woman’s hands patiently fitting the pieces of a body back together, with a silver needle and black cotton thread.

  “What the hell?”

  Just as quick the vision vanished, leaving her staring at the bodies before her.

  The wounds seemed almost harmless in death, like they’d been painted on. Like sudden windows, you could see right through them, into the maggoty churn they called their souls. The maggots made a dry rattling sound, like cards riffling together, whispering secrets she didn’t want to hear.

  She caught hold of Duane’s feet.

  He was the one who didn’t hurt her, being dead and all.

  If Vic was going to b
ring anyone back, she’d rather it be Duane. And that’s just what Maddy figured Vic was up to. Somehow he had figured out how to raise the dead and he was going to start with these two.

  It was funny how this whole thing had started with her dragging a body. She wanted to take it all back, if she could. Maybe still kill Vic, but this time she would have liked an opportunity to burn Vic’s carcass into ashes so small there couldn’t be the slightest chance of a resurrection.

  How long would this go on?

  How many bodies could she drag and plant?

  She felt like that guy in the story, the one who rolled the rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down just before he got to the top.

  She felt like she’d be dragging dead meat and souls behind her until God woke up and turned out the lights.

  * 4 *

  Earl knocked on another door.

  That made one more than twelve this morning.

  He’d work a couple more before breaking for lunch. It was too early to quit, but he never liked to stop on the Judas number in anything. Not if he could help it. He blamed that particular foible on his mother. She was forever touching wood and crossing her finger and whispering the Lord’s Prayer when the thunder rolled deep and loud, whistling hymns to herself when the wind rattled the window panes.

  A woman answered his knock.

  She looked a little like his mother for just a half a heartbeat, but that was just his imagination talking.

  “Sorry for disturbing your morning,” he told her. “This won’t take long. I’ve just got a few questions to be asked.”

  This is what cops did. They asked questions and poked around like little boys turning rocks in the swamp, hoping to find something interesting. Maybe something moving – something good and gooey and gross enough to stick.

  Did he have time for coffee?

  No, no, just a few questions.

  Oh, but she had just put the kettle on.

  Maybe a half cup.

  Some fruitcake?

  That would be nice.

  He took the cup and cake to be polite. You didn’t get answers if you didn’t give folks a chance to start talking. He’d stop on the roadside and piss the next couple of cups of coffee away.

  That was something else cops did.

  He told himself this was a case. And he was working it. It might not be hot pursuit, like Wilfred lucked into, but it was detective work just the same.