Tatterdemon

by Vernon, Steve

  Revelations

  CHAPTER 29

  Bad Gets Worse

  * 1 *

  Wilfred raised himself up from the floor, one joint at a time.

  He felt like he’d been run over by a hearse on the way to his very own funeral. His clothing was smeared with blood and grease and stains that he didn’t want to find a name for. His shirt was torn at the pocket. He’d lost three buttons and his left sleeve hung in angry tatters.

  “Jesus three-toed ballerina.”

  The back lockup looked like a scene out of Charlie Manson’s biography.

  What the hell had happened?

  There was no sign of Clavis.

  No sign of Wendy Joe either.

  Was it a serial killer?

  A frat party run suddenly amok?

  A chainsaw juggling trick gone badly awry?

  The telephone rang. Wilfred grabbed for it, eyeballing the call display.

  Shit.

  It was Lily Milton.

  What in the hell was up her girdle?

  Never mind, he told himself. You are the town policeman. That means you answer every call.

  “Hello?” he asked, bracing for quick hang-up.

  A scream pierced his ear like an ice pick followed by a crash from the other end of the line. It sounded like the telephone company was having a goddamn earthquake.

  “Hello?” Wilfred shouted.

  The scream went on.

  He heard another crash.

  “Hello? Hell. Hello?”

  The line went dead.

  He hit callback.

  There was nothing but dead air.

  “Damn it.”

  He stared at the telephone. He better get hold of Earl. He thumbed the radio call button.

  “Earl? Come in, Earl.”

  Nothing.

  “Earl?”

  More dead air.

  “Earl?”

  Just before he gave up he heard three separate squelches from the radio receiver, just like a hunter popping off three shots into the air to sound distress.

  “Is that you Earl?”

  No answer.

  Hell.

  He had no way of knowing if Earl was hearing him or not.

  “If you can hear me Earl, squawk your sender.”

  Nothing but dead air.

  Now what?

  “To hell with this.”

  He weighed his options. There was nothing he could do here. He didn’t even know what happened or what the hell that mis-footed mis-handed Clavis thing had been.

  All he knew was there was trouble at Lily’s place.

  There had to be connection, but the only way he’d know for sure was to get his ass out there.

  He stepped outside.

  Shit.

  Somebody had stolen his car.

  Then he remembered that he’d left the Thunderbird parked in the hardware store. By now it was towed to the garage, and probably repaired down to nine kinds of useless.

  Then he’d just have to borrow Earl’s pickup.

  Only someone had taken that too.

  Damn it.

  What the hell was he going to ride?

  * 2 *

  Wendy Joe and Momma Clavis roared down Crossfall’s main street in Earl’s pickup, veering and skittering from curb to curb like a giant bumper car run amok.

  Wendy Joe pounded the horn, warning a stray cat out of her way.

  “Damn it,” Momma Clavis hollered. “Are you trying to kill us?”

  “You got nothing to worry about, Momma. You were dead a long time ago.”

  “I’d like to last a little longer,” Momma Clavis replied. “Let me drive. I’m the man, after all.”

  “You ain’t no man, you ain’t got but one hand, and besides you ain’t even got a license.”

  “Well you put me together. Couldn’t you have sewed a license in there somewhere along the way, what with you being an officer of the law and all? How you got a hand and foot mixed up I’d like to know.”

  “It was dark and I was scared. You try sewing bodies together blindfolded and see how perfect you get it. Now stop your yelling and tell me where to go.”

  “I already told you. We need to get to a church.”

  “Old or new?”

  “Older is better. There’s power in tradition.”

  “They closed it down.” Wendy Joe said.

  “Closed what down?”

  “The church. They closed it down.”

  “Closed a church? What the hell will they do next? Baptize Satan?”

  “The reverend hung himself.”

  “Well no wonder,” Momma Clavis said. “They closed his church.”

  Wendy Joe goosed the accelerator, steering for the church.

  “Wait!” Momma Clavis shouted. “We’ll need the hardware store first.”

  Momma Clavis grabbed for the wheel with her left foot. Wendy Joe hit the brake, way too fast.

  The pickup swung into an uncontrollable skid.

  “Oh Lord, don’t let me die in a Ford pickup before I get laid again,” Momma Clavis shrieked.

  * 3 *

  The bullet caught Maddy in mid-flight. She fell like a chunk of broken dreams.

  “Maddy!” the Tatterdemon called out.

  He turned on Earl, shaking his carcass like he was made of dandelion down.

  “If you’ve killed her I’m going to make it my duty to bury you down and raise you up and kill you all over again for the next hundred years or so.”

  The threat was wasted. Earl was out cold. The Tatterdemon tossed him back out the window that he had just jumped through.

  “Lay there for a while policeman. Bleed if you like, you trigger happy son of a bitch. I’ll get back to you when I can.”

  The Tatterdemon ran toward Maddy, cursing the awkwardness of his stick legs. He knelt clumsily at her side. He tried to feel for a pulse, but his stick hands wouldn’t work the trick.

  Damn it.

  She was dying.

  He felt life leaving her like water running from a broken bucket. She should have been dead already, but maybe there’d been just enough of him stuck to that bullet to magic her into staying alive.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

  What do I do, he kept asking himself.

  He cared for her.

  That was the hell of it.

  Monster and monstrous though he was, she still meant something to him. It wasn’t anything nearly as delicate as compassion. Rather it was a mixed-up sense of ownership. She belonged to him. That was about as close as either Vic or the Tatterdemon that he had become was ever going to get to feeling the feeling of love.

  He might kill her, sure, but it’d have to be his decision and doing.

  To have her die like this, victim of a single stupid shot was just not something he was prepared to comprehend.

  It was unthinkable.

  The Tatterdemon stared at Marvin.

  There was no help there.

  Zigger couldn’t help him either.

  The three in the field, watched over by the maggothead?

  No good, but they were all he had to work with. His army, his team, and they were shit-fucking-useless. He needed Dr. Kildare, Marcus Welby and House rolled into one.

  He needed someone with brains.

  He needed a higher level or maybe a lower. He felt something in the wind in the way his Granddad had sensed change in the weather long before anyone else saw it coming.

  The Tatteredemon knew what he had to do.

  “Bring her,” he said to Marvin, pointing at the mess that was Lily.

  He picked up Maddy.

  She felt so small in his hands, like a broken bird.

  They lumbered out to the field.

  Maggothead and his red-haired brother and the old couple were waiting there, damn near fully grown.

  The Tatterdemon laid Maddy down in the planting field.

  “Wait here,” he said to the others.

  He eased Lily’s remains into
the ground. It was awfully awkward work. There was too much of her too torn up to put down easily.

  “Damn it, damn it, damn it,” he methodically swore.

  Finally she was under.

  He hit her with the juice. He let the yellow energy flow from his stick arms and made the magic work. It felt different this time, like she was growing down, instead of up. A strange runny sort of shoot sprouted. Not a pole like the others. More like a cancer or a slime mold run amok.

  Never mind.

  It was a sacrifice and it had been freely made. All that was left was prayer.

  The Tatterdemon lay flat on the ground and pressed his black, rotting face against the dirt.

  It was a close kind of feeling, a little like breathing your own farts. The dirt stunk like pieces of himself and a part of it called up to him. He felt his spirit moving like slow sap, drawn to the dirt like flies to shit.

  He closed his eyes.

  He let his spirit fall down into the belly of the field, searching for Maddy.

  And then he was gone.

  CHAPTER 30

  Deep Thinking

  * 1 *

  There’s a place where each of us goes when we hurt, or when we have to face something too impossible to be believed. It’s a little like a private sort of heaven, an almost-sanctuary, your own personal time out place.

  It was where a body went to go when it knew it was time to die.

  With Wendy Joe it was a jungle trail, leading down into a shadow world painted with dark brushes.

  With Clavis it was a church.

  With Wilfred, a battered fire helmet resting upon a cold, white freezer.

  Maddy had her own place, brighter, and that made it sadder.

  Maddy’s place was a field of lonesome sunflowers, tall as steeples, waving like paper dancers high in the blowing wind. The grass of this field was strangely permeable. It floated, just a hair span above the dirt, moving in the wind like light over glass, like it could swallow her whole.

  Maddy was down there now in the dream world, swimming the undercurrents of memory. From somewhere across the field she heard a man’s voice calling her name. The voice sounded as angry as a thunderstorm on two legs.

  Had she been awake she’d have assumed the thunderstorm belonged to the Tatterdemon, but because she was so close to sleep and death and childhood, she decided that the voice had to belong to her Daddy.

  Daddy was a big man in life with hair as black as coal. He had arms like corded leather, wiry and strong, like there was nothing beneath his hide but twists of ironwood. In her memory the man grew larger and stood above her like a floating giant. He talked to her in her dreams and poured his words in her ears like whispers of molten molasses.

  “You’re as blonde as sunflowers,” Daddy said. “That’s rare. Blonde all the way through, too. That’s real rare in your father’s family, even rarer in your mother’s. No telling where you got that blonde hair from, my little sunflower.”

  He touched her cheek.

  His fingertips burnt against her cheekbone, like the hot blue flame of a welding torch.

  “Why don’t you come out with me to the shed in the barn?” Daddy asked.

  Maddy grown up knew just what her Dream-Daddy was asking her. She wouldn’t go anywhere near that barn shed. But in the dream Maddy was a little girl who didn’t know any better.

  She was torn between knowing and being too young to know better.

  All the sunflowers opened their mouths like a million screaming lions, and sirened out her name.

  Maddy, Maddy, Maddy...

  They tried to warn her but it was useless. In her dream, which was nearly as dangerous as her reality, Maddy followed the old man down to the barn shed.

  Down to the place where everything hurt.

  * 2 *

  The thing that had been Marvin Pusser squatted like a patch of mobile leprosy, staring at the stretch of dirt where the Straw King had buried what was left of Lily.

  In the slow, murky swamp of his thinking, he missed her.

  He wondered if she’d come back like the others.

  He wanted to touch her, one more time.

  He trailed the sticks of his arms across the dirt.

  Magic, he thought. I am a magic man and I will call Lily back from death. But it didn’t work that way. Only the Tatterdemon held the magic. Marvin had been contaminated with the Tatterdemon taint, but he could never use it like the Tatterdemon could.

  Yet Marvin also knew that the Tatterdemon was nothing else than Vic Harker wearing somebody else’s set of clothes. Vic was doing nothing more significant than holding on to someone’s power until they came to get it.

  And that someone was the woman who slept with her broom.

  Marvin could see her in the back of his mind.

  He wasn’t sure just how he could see her.

  She was just there, like a candle burning in the night.

  He shook his head.

  Things were sure different now.

  He wouldn’t have to polish another shoe. He’d died, and the Tatterdemon had remade him. That made the Tatterdemon a kind of almost-god. But even that could be changed. The rules always changed.

  When Earl had shot the Tatterdemon’s woman he hadn’t been able to prevent it.

  That made the Tatterdemon fallible.

  Maybe he wasn’t a god, after all.

  All Marvin knew was that he had a woman, and the Tatterdemon took that woman and put her in the field.

  Lily was to be his, not the Tatterdemon’s.

  The notion of rebellion kindled deep within Marvin’s pissed-off consciousness.

  He lined up the facts as best he could.

  He’d been killed. He’d been put in the field and brought back.

  Maybe Lily would come back too.

  That would be a good thing.

  Now the Tatterdemon’s woman was shot by Earl. Maybe the Tatterdemon would put her in the field too. Maybe he would make her like Marvin. Then maybe Marvin could have her.

  The way he’d had Lily.

  But that would be no good.

  Marvin’s way had ended Lily, ended her so bad he didn’t think she could ever come back.

  Maybe the Tatterdemon would do things differently. Maybe the Tatterdemon would think of some other way to bring his woman back. That was why he was lying there stretched out in the field and talking to the woman with the broom.

  I could kill him now, Marvin thought, but what if he came back?

  What if he kept coming back?

  What was I going to do?

  * 3 *

  Vic opened his eyes to darkness all around.

  It was kind of like waking up inside a box.

  He didn’t like the feeling.

  He was the straw king now. The Tatterdemon. He didn’t like the feeling of being closed in, any more than a dog likes its chain. He used his anger to push his mind deeper into the dirt. It was like feeling a trapdoor open beneath you or sinking into slow, muddy water.

  There was a whole other world down here.

  He hadn’t seen too much of it while he’d been growing. His eyes had been too busy staring up where he’d come from to notice what he was growing through.

  Deeper.

  Deeper.

  Slow worms pushed mindless paths through the dirt. Ants crawled from surface into shadow, bringing their tribute to the queen underground. He saw Maddy’s blood, slowly absorbing into the field. He watched as bits of Lily eked down deep into the guts of the field and took root.

  It was hot down here.

  It was so hot the Devil would have broken a sweat just thinking about it.

  Then he saw her, the woman who slept with her broom. She looked a little like Maddy, only not so pretty. There was too much anger in her eyes – like she was pissed at God and the universe. Like she’d been down here stewing in her own juices for half of eternity.

  This wasn’t the way anger should work.

  Anger was something you got out of your
self.

  Something you threw at other people.

  Something you burned off.

  Not for this woman.

  Not for Thessaly Cross.

  Thessaly Cross, the broom woman, was hanging onto her anger, the way some women hang onto children.

  She was hanging onto it, like she loved it.

  Screw her, Vic thought. I’m here for Maddy.

  “What do you want from me?” the broom woman asked.

  “She’s dead. My Maddy’s dead. The goddamn cop shot her.”

  “I know,” the broom woman answered. “I felt her leaving.”

  “What do I do?”

  She stared at him like his mother used to stare, straight down the bridge of her nose, like he was the stupidest bit of dickweed to sprout since Eve fucked Adam.

  “What do you do?” she asked. “Does the rain ask what it should do when it is ready to fall? Does the wind ask why the tree bows before it? Does fire need permission to burn? Plant her, like the others, that is exactly what she is for.”

  “I don’t want to,” the Tatterdemon protested. “I don’t want her to change. I want her to stay the way she is. She’s my roots and my memory. There has to be something I can do.”

  The woman considered his plea.

  The Tatterdemon didn’t care what she wanted.

  He’d deal with the old witch anyway he could.

  He’d listen to her for now.

  But later...?

  “Tell me what I can do,” he demanded.

  “Lean closer,” she commanded.

  The Tatterdemon leaned closer, and Thessaly Cross whispered a slow, dark secret into his ear.

  CHAPTER 31

  Straw Love

  * 1 *

  Ivan Barrand tacked the last of his nails to the plywood covering his broken front window.

  He kept track of how many nails he used and how much paint he used to make the plywood pretty and how many times he whacked his thumb. He fully intended to bill it all to the Crossfall Police Department.

  He stepped back to appraise his handiwork. It looked like a strip of flattened shit stretched thin over a soap bubble.

  Damn it.

  What kind of hardware storeowner was he? He couldn’t even nail plywood. The damn thing was crookeder than a broken dogleg. He was a lousy carpenter, a worse plumber a middling painter and just forget about electronics. That was why he’d opened the store. He’d hoped something would stick. He’d hoped he’d learn it through osmosis.