Aloysius closed the door behind him. “Isn’t it funny that there’s no mold in the house?”
“You bring the book?” Theodore asked.
Sebastian tapped his pocket.
“It’s not the demons again, is it?” Aloysius asked.
“No,” Sebastian snapped. “I swore I wouldn’t do that again.”
“I didn’t say you had,” Aloysius said. “Where should we start looking?”
“Where it’s wet,” Theodore said.
Aloysius pulled a stick off a tree and wacked at a big blue branch, scattering mold.
“Knock it off,” Sebastian said.
“Couldn’t help myself.” Aloysius pointed at a big stand of trees. “If I remember right, the stock tank is over there. Garden on one side and the corral on the other.”
They walked through the mold, Aloysius scuffing his feet and kicking up spores. Sebastian just let it be.
There were two lumps lying under the mold in the corral.
They walked toward the water tank, which was covered with mold, like everything else.
“What are we looking for?” Aloysius asked. “What’s that?” He pointed at a pattern in the mold on the fence above the tank. Theodore wiped the mold off it with his bare hand and tried to shake it off. He ended up wiping it on his pants.
It was one of the symbols from the book. Sebastian said, “It’s a summoning symbol.”
“Summoning what?” Aloysius asked.
“Whatever wanted to come,” Sebastian said. They went back to the house. That, Sebastian thought, was too easy.
Aloysius stopped them outside the door, opened it, and yelled, “Mr. Hart!” He waited a few seconds. “I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s something you should know.”
A door opened, and Don walked toward them. He didn’t bother to wipe his face.
Aloysius said, “We’ll have to evacuate; the milk cows are dead already. I’m sorry, Mr. Hart, but you may lose the farm.”
From the living room, Claire shouted, “No!” She appeared at the door to the entryway.
“It’s up to the Extension Office,” Aloysius said. “There may be nothing for it but to kill everything on the farm. Come on, put your shoes on. Is there anybody else?”
“Frank,” she said. “He went out this morning—” Her tiny knees folded up under the hem of her dress, and she sank onto the floor.
Don said, “What about my wife?”
“We’ll take her with us,” Aloysius said.
Sebastian had Theodore help wrap Eileen Hart in blankets. There was a time when he would have turned his nose up at carrying a dead woman in his arms but not anymore. The two of them carried Eileen, Theodore under her shoulders and Sebastian at her feet, to the back of Theodore’s pickup truck. She stank already, or maybe it was the room.
“You take Don,” he told Theodore. “I’ll take Mrs. Christiansen. You look for Frank,” he told Aloysius. “And burn your clothes and spray your trucks down with bleach or vinegar, for God’s sake.”
“He’s in the north pasture by the creek,” Claire murmured. She swayed, and Sebastian grabbed her by the arm. He bit his tongue and walked her toward his Buick.
—
“Claire,” he said, hands at ten and two. “What did you do it for? We found the summoning symbol on the water tank.”
“The what?” Her hands were folded in her lap; she sat as straight as a fence post.
Sebastian drew the symbol—incompletely—in the dashboard dust. “That.” He brushed it away.
“Oh, that,” she said. “That was the water tank last Saturday. Is it a hobo sign?”
“Claire, we priests study many things at seminary, one of which is devil worship. This is one of their signs.” He was distorting the truth; another item for his next confession.
“Devil worship,” Claire said. “You mean it’s real? Eileen had a Bible with all kinds of weird things like that in it. In her bedside table.”
Sebastian stopped at the stop sign. “I’m going to take you to my father’s farm.”
“But that’s back the other way.”
“So it is. Peggy’ll take care of you.” He turned the car around.
Claire didn’t say anything for the longest time. “What’ll me and Frank do?”
“We’ll take care of you,” he promised.
“We, as in the church, or we, as in the Jennings?” she asked. “I don’t want any handouts.”
“Probably the latter,” he admitted. “My father could use help, now that Aloysius is on his own. And Peggy wouldn’t mind the company.”
Claire put her pointed chin in her elflike hand on the window ledge. “I wish we’d known that. I would have dragged Frank off like a shot. That woman hated me. Did everything she could to make my life miserable. We didn’t know there was anyplace else to go.”
He didn’t have any answer for that.
Sebastian left Claire with Peggy, who shoved him out of the house with a broom and told him to get his Buick away from the elms. He drove back. A white van from the Extension Office was parked at the Hart Ranch farmhouse. His friend Jasper stood next to it with a paint-fume mask dangling around his neck, smoking an unfiltered cigarette. Sebastian shook his hand. “Jasper.”
Jasper Long Horse was a jack of all trades in Buffalo County. He’d grown up on the reservation, gone to school in Sioux Falls, and had come back to work for the county as a repairman, tree-remover, snow-plower, killer of rabid dogs and coyotes, and agent of the County Extension Office. What he’d come back for, Sebastian had never been sure.
“What the hell, Sebastian, I mean Father?” he asked.
Sebastian chewed on a nail, then realized he was contaminating himself more than he already was. “Would you think I was crazy if I said it was black magic?”
Jasper let it go. “The inside of that house is untouched. I don’t get it.”
“You saw the church?”
“Sprayed it down. With any luck, you should have the place back by next Saturday. But this place, I don’t know.”
“I left something inside. Mind if I go in?”
Jasper waved him toward the door. “Be my guest.”
Sebastian found the book where Claire had told him, the same kind of Bible they’d used in seminary. He stopped in the living room to take another look at the quilt. The blocks seemed like random patches of different colors of scrap, sewn together any which way, but if he looked at the quilt as a whole, he could pick out patterns. Then he took another look at it and swore (another item on his list). The stitching wasn’t of flowers; it was protection symbols.
No wonder why Eileen wanted the quilt.
He unclamped the quilt from the frame, put it in a trash bag, and brought it with him.
Jasper peeked inside the bag. “Whatchoo taking that blanket for?”
“It was supposed to be a donation for the church at the Harvest Festival next month,” Sebastian said. “I don’t want anything to happen to it. Don’t worry, I’ll have Peggy wash it.”
“You should get a lot of money for that,” Jasper agreed. He got in the van, and Sebastian followed him off the farm. Jasper stopped, rolled his window down, and waved him over to the side of the road. “Don’t tell Don and them, but we’re going to have to spray everything. Might have to go into your dad’s property, too.”
“Do what you have to.”
Jasper nodded. “I get the mold and you get the black magic, all right?”
“Deal.”
Jasper laughed, rolled up his window, and drove away.
—
He threw down the quilt in front of Claire, who was sitting on the couch next to Peggy, wearing a dress about five sizes too big. “You lied to me. That flower pattern is a protection symbol.”
Claire ran her fingers over the stitching. “It’s just a nice design.”
Sebastian said, “What I don’t understand is how, if the house was protected from the mold by this symbol, Eileen could die of it.”
S
omeone coughed from behind him. Sebastian turned and saw Frank Christiansen holding his cowboy hat in both hands. “It wasn’t mold,” he said. “It was cancer.”
Claire looked up at him over the stitching. “How do you know?”
“I knew,” he said. “She’s been hiding it for a long time.”
Claire pressed her lips together.
“Don’t blame Claire,” Frank said. “I told her to put the symbols on the quilt. I’m sorry. She was going to get me fired. I had to do something to make myself look too good to get rid of. But it was too strong for me.”
Claire stood up, dropping the quilt, and went into the kitchen. “That bitch.” Sebastian heard drawers rattle and slam. He followed and saw her with the top of her dressed pulled open, holding a paring knife against her chest. She was covered in blood; she had carved the symbol from the water tank on her chest, upside down.
Sebastian looked away modestly from her naked breasts, then told himself to stop being an idiot. He tried to take the knife away from Claire; she shoved him. She was too small to make him lose his balance, but she stumbled out of arm’s reach anyway. She stretched her neck, making a twisted face in order to see better as she cut herself. She touched up one of the lines with the knife and tossed it on the counter.
“Goodbye, Father Vincent Paul,” she said.
Frank was standing beside him. “Claire. Wait.”
Without turning around, she said, “How else could you have known about that Bible? By her bed? She never told anyone about it. You saw it, you cheating son of a bitch.” The back door slammed and the screen door creaked shut after it.
By the time they nerved themselves to follow her outside, she’d roared down the road in Frank’s truck. Fortunately, it hadn’t rained in a while, and they could follow the dust trail. Frank pushed on the dash, trying to make the Buick drive faster.
“Do you know where she got the book, Frank?” he asked.
“Of course I didn’t want to. Have you seen how beautiful my wife is? But Eileen told me we’d lose our home if I didn’t.” Frank had left his hat behind, and the sun was shining straight into his wide, blue eyes.
“The book, Frank. Where did Eileen get the book from?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “She just had it.”
“Does Don know about it?”
“He didn’t go rummaging around in her bedside table.”
They turned onto the Hart Ranch road and found the pickup truck abandoned beside the road. The door had been twisted off its hinges. He swore again and decided to stop keeping an itemized list of his sins.
On foot, they followed the trail through the grass, stopping just past the mold. The mold crept toward them; Sebastian stepped back, but Frank started to ran into it. Sebastian grabbed his arm and swung him around so hard he ended up on the ground. Frank hissed at him, got up, and ran into the blue.
It wasn’t quite as blue as it had been earlier. More of a soft gray.
Frank ran down the hill, mold covering him from head to foot as he kicked up spores, until he disappeared into a tree belt.
Sebastian had failed them again—God, family, parishioner, and neighbor—and there wasn’t anything else he could do, so why he gunned the engine and sped down the hill toward the farmhouse, he never knew. He parked the Buick, pulled the revolver that Theodore had given him out of the glove box, and loaded it.
—
He found Frank by the milk barn, almost at the stock tank. The mold covered him as Sebastian approached him; the blood splatters turned blue and disappeared. One of the three mounds in the pen reared up and hissed at him.
Claire.
“Don is dead,” he lied. “Heart attack. It’s over. There’s no more vengeance to be had.”
The summoning symbol had worked, all right. She was more like a knee-high snake than anything else, but with several small, warped limbs. Her chin puffed out like a frog’s, so close to him that he could have reached out and touched it. Greenish, spotted, tiny gold-colored eyes.
Claire opened her mouth, sorted through the mold with her long tongue, and pulled out one of Frank’s legs. She gulped it down whole. Sebastian backed toward the stock pond, pulled out a pocket knife, and started to gouge out the summoning symbol.
Claire spat out bone and rushed at him. He had a split second to decide between shooting Claire or not. Instead he jumped backward as Claire smashed, face-first, into the symbol on the fence. How she’d cleared the stock tank with her spindly limbs, he didn’t know.
The fence shattered, breaking the symbol. If Sebastian was expecting a miracle, he wasn’t going to get one; the mold certainly didn’t disappear or turn into daisies. Claire backed up, shook her head, and tried to charge him again.
He pulled out the revolver. “Sorry, Claire.” He shot her on the head, which stunned her for a moment; then he rolled her on her side and shot her in the chest, ripping the summoning symbol there to shreds.
Quick as anything, he dropped the gun, pulled out his penknife again, and carved the protection symbol onto the first whole piece of skin he found. She shuddered and thrashed, knocking him down. He grabbed onto her, and carved, from memory, the symbol for banishing, over and over, until she lay still.
He asked God to forgive them and receive their souls, sinners all.
—
Aloysius kept Jasper from sending in the crop dusters until he and Theodore had dragged Sebastian, Claire, and Frank out of the mold.
“Holy shit,” Jasper said, when he pulled back the tarp and saw Claire underneath. Whatever she’d called inside her was gone, but it hadn’t left her gently. Her jaw was shattered, and her skin was stretched out so badly that Aloysius had barely been able to carry her back to the truck for all the flopping around she did. No two bones seemed to be stuck together, and of course she was covered with bloody symbols. And then there was Frank, in pieces.
“Eileen Hart blackmailed him into cheating on Claire.” Sebastian coughed up gray phlegm. “Claire decided to take revenge on him since Eileen was already dead. But I didn’t tell you that.”
“Black magic,” Jasper said. “Shit.”
“I took care of it.”
Jasper gave him a look. It was the first time Sebastian could remember that anybody had looked at him like he was a real, live priest instead of a kid whose diapers they’d changed or who had last been seen guzzling beer out on the reservation.
The mold was obviously dying, turning a flat gray, but nobody wanted to risk it, so Jasper sent in the crop dusters with heavy-duty fungicide. They’d been lucky. Don Hart took his savings and moved to Minnesota, near one of his daughters by his first wife. Liam bought the farm and hired more men to work it; the land grew well enough after a few years had passed.
Peggy finished the rest of the quilt using the protection symbol, and they sold tickets for it at the Harvest Festival. Sebastian put in twenty bucks and won it.
He put it on his own bed and slept very well indeed.
* * * * *
“And,” I said, “as far as I know, that priest still has it.”
That priest. You might think he doesn’t know what you’ve done. You might think you have him fooled, with his soft face and kind eyes and thick black glasses. You think your weeping and wailing over the death of your husband has deceived him. Perhaps it might have, once, before I started telling him tales about what I saw you doing at night, about the tales the girl told.
When I finished, the girl’s lips were pressed together in a small tight circle, as though they were a worm curled up tight. Her back was straight, barely brushing the seat. Twin streams of anger jetted from her nostrils, hot as dragon steam.
If she ever believed you, that is over now.
I hopped down from the mirror and strutted through the younglings, who parted before me, until I reached the girl’s foot. It was a good story, enough of a story to part chicks. But what did the elders think of it? It was a new story, one that I had not told before. Of course I had stolen it from
the priest, but that wouldn’t save me, if there was no good in the telling.
The elders said nothing, but Old Loyolo looked down on me with his black eyes, weighing.
After a moment, he pushed Facunde forward. Facunde who had been lovely, Facunde who had been eloquent. Facunde who I had long wished to be my mate, but who had ever eluded me. Her mate, Guerro, had been killed last year, killed by cats, and she had been mourning him ever since, building towers of sticks all over the dumping ground. She had gone mad. Her feathers were dull and gray, and crawling with lice. She was fed by her grown chicks. Always she was building her towers of sticks, even in the snow. The cats would take her soon.
Old Loyolo pushed her until she fell off the girl’s knees and landed beside me, on her back in the middle of a huddle of chicks.
They pushed her upright, then over to the storyteller’s perch. She cawed unintelligibly, nipping at them, flapping her wings. But they were inexorable.
I followed her, and pinched her along the wing with my beak, and helped lift her onto the perch.
Old Loyolo made a spot for me next to him. But I stayed at Facunde’s feet. Her ragged claws clutched the mirror over and over, leaving smears on the glass.
“Speak!” ordered old Loyolo. “A story!”
A story, a story!
“A human story,” I said. Meaning that muttering the tale of how Guerro had died under her breath, as she had been doing ever since he had been eaten, would not do.
“A story,” she croaked. “I will tell you a story. It is not a human story, though. It is a winter story that happens to have humans in it. And it has nothing to do with making our girl talk,” she sneered down at me, “when she doesn’t want to. It doesn’t mean anything. So don’t blame me if you don’t like it.”
What? What? cried some of the chicks who were at the edges. The ruffling of feathers was almost loud enough to drown out her voice.
“Speak louder,” old Loyolo ordered.
Facunde cleared her throat. It sounded as though she were coughing up a dry, sun-killed lizard stuck in her throat. Or, I thought, her heart.
A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre Page 3
