Savannah trudged on for a few more minutes, until the slope gave way to a gentler rise. The underbrush thinned, and through the branches of dead trees Savannah caught a glimpse of Mitchell Manor, framed in fading red light from the setting sun. It was huge – four stories, at least a dozen bedrooms; no telling what else it held.
The vibration of Ray-Ray’s phone cut through the quiet like a buzz saw. Savannah fumbled around for it, finally digging it out of her pocket. She did not recognize the number – no time to worry about it now. She shut off the phone then crammed it back into her pocket.
She stopped in the shade of an old oak tree then watched the house. It was quiet, no voices from inside; no television playing; no radio blasting. Just a cold, heavy quiet. Savannah put her hand on her revolver then stepped onto the lawn.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Lashey’s little body felt like it was packed with lead. Rashad struggled under her weight. Draping Lashey over his shoulder was the only way he could hang onto her. The incessant, bug-like chatter of the spirits leaking out of Lashey’s open mouth did not help matters; the swarm of voices distracted Rashad and made him feel weak and helpless. He staggered to his old car while Carter ran ahead, fumbling with the keys.
Carter struggled to get the doors open. Rashad sighed impatiently, the Mayor’s last words stinging his ears.
“My doors close at sundown, Rashad.”
The Ford Country Squire was cobbled together from so many spare parts and junkyard relics it was only a distant relative of its namesake. The station wagon was bright yellow, with tan-brown side panels – “the Banana Boat,” Rashad called it – and windows scarred by flying gravel. Rashad kept the engine ready to roll, though. He had the car since he turned sixteen, the only gift he ever received from his father, and he treated it like he would never have another thing to call his own.
Carter lifted the hatchback. “You want me to sit back here with her?”
Rashad laid Lashey’s limp body gingerly in the loadspace, then pulled the hatchback closed. “No. Sit up front with me. Tell me what happened.”
Carter barely had time to close his door before Rashad spun the Ford Country Squire around in a tight circle then pointed it toward the big house. The heavy wagon bounced up onto the road, and the big V-8 roared as Rashad’s foot sank the accelerator to the floor.
“Raccoons… and… and mole rats, mama called ‘em,” Carter said. He rubbed the scabs on his arms. “There were so many.”
Rashad did not speak. He could see the pain in Carter’s eyes.
“I could not kill them all. They just kept coming. There was nothing—”
He caught his breath then blinked tears away. The next words were shaky and uncertain, as if Carter could not make sense of what he had seen.
“Lashey opened the door. She was screaming. So many voices. The shadows came alive, but the raccoons and mole rats were still eating me. Then, her hood slipped off her head.”
Rashad watched the sun sinking off to the west, its ruddy light spilling like blood through the clouds.
“They went into her,” Carter said, grimacing. “I’ve never seen so many. She screamed and screamed.”
“It’s not your fault,” Rashad said, but he did not have the strength to make the words sound true. Lashey was special, his precious baby girl, and no one could protect her. “They took advantage of her; used her to get what they wanted.”
“She sent me after you. That’s when they came after us. Because I tried to help you.”
The accusation in Carter’s voice hit Rashad like a punch in the face. His eyes stung with unshed tears. He did not dare look at his son.
“You should have stayed with her.” The words were out before Rashad could bite them back.
They did not speak to each other for the rest of the trip. Guilt, anger and weary resignation made the air in the car too thin to support apologies.
Rashad ignored the big dogs pacing the Ford Country Squire as he drove up to the Briarcliff. He had never seen them before, but there was plenty of strangeness he had seen. He had been to the Briarcliff twice before – both times as Savannah’s guest. The first time, he came so the mayor could study him, and he remembered Mayor Green’s penetrating and paralyzing gaze. The second time, Savannah had asked him to come along to study the mayor, and he remembered the cold, bottomless pit of the Jedediah Green’s soul. He did not trust him, but he believed the mayor could help Lashey.
Mayor Green met them in the big circular drive in front of the Briarcliff, his willowy arms crossed over his slender chest.
Rashad opened the station wagon’s door then slid out.
“Bring her in,” the mayor said. “We’ll see what we can do.”
The giant dogs swirled around Carter, sniffing at his palms and legs. Carter opened the door then took his sister from the back of the car, straining to lift her.
Rashad put his hand on Carter’s shoulder at the door to the Briarcliff.
Carter looked at his father and tried to give him a reassuring smile, but the muscles in his jaw were too tight.
“You’re changing,” Rashad whispered as he dragged Lashey from Carter’s grasp. “Relax. Breathe.”
The mayor ushered Rashad and Lashey into the house, but barred the door with one outstretched hand when Carter tried to follow. “This is no place for the likes of you,” he said with an apologetic shrug. “You’ll be more comfortable out here.”
The door closed. Carter hunkered down with the black beasts milling about him. They lapped the blood from his skin with their great, pink tongues, and he scratched at the backs of their enormous heads. As the horizon swallowed the sun, Carter raised a long, mournful growl to the coming night.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Watching the house for movement, Savannah went over her three step plan: Get into the house. Find evidence of the There Road. Kill the bastards.
The bald hilltop offered Savannah no cover as she made her way up to Mitchell Manor. As soon as she stepped onto the weed-strewn yard, she imagined the presence of crosshairs between her eyebrows. She ducked her head low then darted toward the huge house, reassuring herself that she still had a chance. But she could not shake the feeling that the big old house was watching her; waiting for her to draw within striking range.
She made it to the back corner of the house. She flattened herself against the weathered stone wall.
Thick fingers of mold pried at the mortar between the stones of the wall, and the wood trim had sprouted strings of plump mushrooms. Savannah tried to peer into one of the ground floor windows, but the inside of the glass was streaked with something brown and syrupy that blocked her sight. The whole place was a monument to neglect and entropy.
Savannah crept up onto the back porch, careful to test each step for rotting wood. She paused with her hand on the back door’s tarnished brass knob. She would have to be quick, quiet and efficient.
She eased the door open.
A powerful stench of putrefaction assaulted Savannah’s nostrils, choking her. The room was shadowed, the only light coming through the open door and a stained window, but she could see something glittering in the faint light. She tried not to think of what she was breathing and stole into the house. She closed the door behind her then crept forward.
Every step disturbed layers of crusted filth and sent spores of mold gushing into the air.
The place looked like no one had lived there in years; as if the Mitchells had walked out of the house one day and never returned. Savannah almost wished that was true, but she could feel it was not. There was a darkness here; something that had festered too long and now needed to be cleansed.
Savannah stepped from the room and into a long, crowded pantry. The walls were lined with once-sturdy shelves that now bowed in the middle, worn down by the weight of countless murky Mason jars and swollen canned goods. The labels from the cans had faded to yellow-brown and shed into drifts on the floor like dying leaves. There was enough food in the pantry to fe
ed dozens of people for weeks, if it had not been left to go bad.
The stench was stronger in the kitchen – an almost physical presence. Savannah’s stomach roiled, and her eyes watered. There was something wrong here; something infectious; something that wanted to spread.
Something moved. Heavy footfalls came from beyond the doorway to Savannah’s left. She tiptoed to the doorway, pressing against the peeling wallpaper and holding her breath.
The man who stepped into the kitchen wore old, stained overalls that strained to hold in his drooping bulk. He walked with his head back, nose in the air. Breaths bubbled in and out of his lungs in thick snorts.
Savannah waited for the man to walk past her before moving off the wall. She shoved the revolver’s muzzle against the rolls of fat on the back of the man’s neck.
“Hey,” Savannah said. “Nice place you’ve got here. Mind showing me around?”
The enormous man nodded his big head.
Savannah felt rolls of neck fat scrape against the gun.
When the man spoke, Savannah felt the words rumble in the air like thunder. “Anything you say, boss.”
“Who else is home?” Beads of sweat ran down Savannah’s forehead and into her eyes. “How many?”
The fat man laughed. “Lots.”
“Show me.”
The large man raised his hands then shuffled around in a slow circle, with Savannah mirroring his steps.
“You oughta leave,” he said. “Be better for everybody that way.”
Savannah nudged him in the back of the head with the revolver. “Show me.”
They walked through the house together. Lanterns shed dirty yellow light, showing Savannah the outlines of old furniture and piles of garbage scattered around. They passed through a ramshackle sitting room and into a long hall with doors on either side.
The big man stopped walking. “Granpa gonna be real pissed if you interrupt. Last chance.”
Savannah heard a new sound. Squealing voices she could not quite understand. The air felt thick, sticky, smothering. Vertigo stole her balance. She reached a hand out to the wall to keep from falling. Her fingers pushed through crumbling drywall and into something moist and gritty that stung her skin.
Savannah’s revolver crashed into her chest, shoved by the big man. The blow knocked Savannah off her feet, but she maintained a weak grip on the revolver. The Root Woman could not get her bearings; the squealing words were unraveling her senses.
A heavy boot caught Savannah in the hip with enough force to knock her three yards backward down the hallway.
Pain radiated from her leg. Thankfully, the agony drove the alien words from Savannah’s head, clearing her thoughts.
The big man twisted in the air like a blubber-covered top, then kicked Savannah in the shoulder, flipping her over onto her belly. Savannah crawled away from her attacker, fumbling with her revolver. Her left arm and right leg were wooden, blasted numb by the powerful kicks.
“Granpa’s songs aren’t for you,” the giant grumbled. “Never shoulda come here. Shoulda left us be.”
Savannah did not think she could take another kick. She scrambled down the hall on her hands and knees, struggling to keep ahead of the behemoth. The pain was fading, and the voices were crawling back through her ears to pluck at her thoughts.
“I’ll go,” Savannah gasped, raising her hand to ward off another attack. She shifted onto her knees then leaned back against the kitchen doorway, bracing herself upright.
The big man scratched the side of his head. Weak light fell across his chubby face, revealing narrow pig’s eyes, and a porcine nose that dominated the center of his fawn-colored face. “You’ll go?”
Savannah raised her revolver then squeezed the trigger. Silver fire and green smoke roared from the weapon’s barrel.
Flab and bone spewed from the big man’s gut.
His hands struggled to hold in the unspooling tangle of organs that spilled from the crater in his stomach, but they could not stop the gushing curtain of blood from pouring out of the smoking hole. The man’s knees gave out, and he flopped to the side, his mouth agape; his eyes fluttering.
The voices were banished from Savannah’s head. “Changed my mind,” she said, stepping around the smoking corpse.
She knew she did not have much time. The noise would attract the rest of the family, and she would not stay numb to their enchantments forever. She needed to hit them now, hard and fast, before they could react. She sprinted down the hall, glancing into each open doorway she passed.
She paused at a room that was some sort of ritual chamber. The room looked as if it had not been used in decades. The floor was inscribed with a rough collection of concentric circles that radiated out from a triangle. A blackened, gnarled bonsai tree sat at one tip of the triangle. The other two points were occupied by a pail of crystal-blue water and a hole hacked through the floorboards and into the earth beneath.
The room made Savannah’s eyes water, and her forehead flared with an intense new level of pain.
The Root Woman staggered back from the room. There was power here – the kind of power that could destroy the whole city if she did not do something about it.
Savannah continued her search for the family, walking to the last door at the end of the hall before she found what she was looking for.
The room beyond the doorway was gone, just a narrow ledge of the floor remained around its perimeter. The ceiling was missing as well, and Savannah could see attic rafters three stories overhead. The smell here was beyond anything Savannah had ever experienced – an overpowering fog of ammonia, rot and bodily fluids that almost kept her from pushing ahead.
Savannah peered over the floor’s crumbling edge. Green flames flickered at the bottom of a deep pit, illuminating the distant, scrawny figure of a naked old man with a huge silver afro. His head was thrown back, swollen black eyes staring at something no one else could see as his mouth spoke strange words, accentuated by clicks and squeals.
Seeing him again, after all these years, rocked Savannah back on her heels. Pigmeat Porter, alive and raising hell today because she had been too weak, too forgiving to put a bullet through his brain all those years ago.
Filth-smeared bodies writhed on the floor around the old man, a living carpet of intertwined limbs and flopping flesh. What drew Savannah ahead was what else she saw down there: a pig’s carcass bobbing in a vat of blood. Two conjured girls bathed with it, pouring blood from their cupped hands over the pig’s snout.
They were all so intent on their work, so invested in their actions, that none of them had seemed to notice the revolver blast. Savannah could feel the old man squealing at the edges of her mind – that same squealing, clicking song must have blotted out everything else for those in the pit.
Savannah found a rickety stairway around the edge of the room. She took the stairs three at a time, despite the throbbing agony in her leg. Every time she landed, pain dug its knives into the muscles in her hip, but Savannah pressed on. She reloaded the revolver as she went. This was her chance to end it all. Right here; right now. She just had to get down the stairs and pull the trigger.
The old man’s high-pitched chant filled the air. Savannah could feel the pressure in her ears. She followed the staircase as it spiraled down into the earth, orbiting the perimeter of the room, watching as the darkness unfolded before her.
The rest of the adherents wriggled on the floor, slathering themselves with greasy, black filth, licking one another’s faces and bodies. They were blind to the world around them, bound up in whatever spell the old man was casting; feeding the energy of their fervor to him.
Glass pipes dotted the black floor. Savannah watched the adherents take deep drags of something that smelled like a cross between maple syrup and sweaty ass as they worshiped some ancient, malevolent god.
The first conjured girl noticed Savannah at last. The girl raised her stump to her, wriggling the wreath of fingers and toes that now surrounded it. Her lips moved, b
ut Savannah could not hear the words. She had a feeling it was something like “You’re too late,” but hoped she was wrong.
Savannah hit the dirt floor running. She leveled her revolver at Pigmeat. His body was rigid with the power he channeled, and he was blind to the world around him. Blood ran from Pigmeat’s mouth, dripped from the tip of his pointy chin, then splattered on his leathery feet.
Savannah rushed across the space between them, aware of the conjured girls slopping their way out of the vat to cut her off. Blood clung to them like a living thing, slowing them, giving Savannah the edge she needed. Six feet away, she pulled the trigger, spraying iron and green fire at the old man.
The shot tore into the spiked conjured girl instead – a last-second lunge had carried her into the line of fire. The bullet chewed a bloody chunk out of her deformed body.
Savannah shoved her hand into her gris-gris bag, praying she could find what she was looking for before it was too late.
The first conjured girl slammed a punch into Savannah’s shoulder, knocking her off balance. She stumbled into a knot of adherents; their groping and writhing tipped Savannah off her feet. Her head smacked into the moist, muddy floor.
The spiked conjured girl landed on Savannah’s chest, splattering her with blood from the injuries she had caused. Savannah shoved at the girl, still desperately digging in her bag with her other hand. The spiked girl was too strong for Savannah, though. She slapped Savannah’s hand away then ripped her shirt open. The girl pushed her bony fingertips into Savannah’s side.
A Haunting in the SWATS (The Savannah Swan Files Book 1) Page 19
