by Sam Witt
Joe rolled his eyes. “That I should leave it alone.”
Stevie reached across the table, careful not to touch the stone, and closed her fingers around Joe’s forearm. Joe closed his hand over hers and had to smile at the electric zing that raced between them. More than twenty years together, and he still felt like they were dating. Now that the curse was off, their bond had become so strong, some days it was the only thing keeping Joe alive. “I’m guessing that’s not an option?”
“If this had been just an overgrown demon spider on a rampage, I’d let the sheriff take it. She seems hot to have my job these days.” Joe let out a weary sigh. “That’s what I thought it was at first. Because of the webs and the way that guy was just left hanging there. But then I had to go poking around and find that stupid rock.”
“You always were too thorough for your own good.” Stevie squeezed Joe’s arm in commiseration. “But it’s good you found it. Probably wouldn’t have been the greatest idea for you to let this one go.”
“Probably not the greatest idea for me to get involved, either.” Joe leaned back in his chair, sliding his arm from his wife’s grasp. “So, you have any witch lore about giant spiders that might help me wrap this shit up before anyone else gets killed?”
Stevie pondered the question, closing her eyes to dredge through the memories of the lessons her mother had taught her as she was growing up. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of spirits and other dead things, but she also knew more about nature and its critters than any seasoned woodsman Joe had ever met. “I keep thinking about how it left its prey. Most spiders, they don’t spin their webs like that. They like things to be a little more sheltered, more hidden away. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for it to have dragged the dead guy into his trailer?”
The thought had crossed Joe’s mind. The way the corpse was left, it was almost staged. The body wasn’t up high, even though the thread it hung from had disappeared into the tree’s upper limbs. Whoever, whatever, had done this had wanted the body to be found. “You’re probably right. Maybe it was a giant spider, but one that thinks like a man. It wanted us to find Jimmy, and probably wanted us to find that stone, too.”
Stevie jumped ahead of Joe’s thoughts. “The question is, why? Is it trying to scare something? Or is it just marking its territory?”
Scratching at the stubble on his chin, Joe rolled the options over in his mind. Leaving a kill out in the open like that, that was a statement. To Joe, who took all supernatural threats to Pitchfork personally, it felt like a challenge. It was a taunt, but he wasn’t sure whom it was directed at. “I think whoever did this was trying to piss someone off. I’m just not sure who they wanted riled up.”
“Maybe it’s not about us. Maybe something’s trying to get your boss’s goat. I’m sure he’s got plenty of enemies just waiting to take a shot at him.”
“Could be you’re right. I’m still going to have to get to the bottom of it. If someone’s taking a shot at the Long Man, they might decide to smack me upside the head on their way to finishing him off.” Joe still remembered the auction that had nearly ended with him being sold to a smiling lunatic. There were a lot of bad things out there, and most of them were not very fond of the Night Marshal.
“I’ll talk to the other witches,” Stevie said. “We’ll figure this out. We always do.”
Joe wrapped up the quartz and stuffed it back into his satchel. He was sure his wife was right; he just hoped they figured it out before it was too late.
6
Kathy was running late. Her dad was going to kill her if he found out just how late. Her boyfriend had dropped her off at the end of the block so she could creep home without alerting her parents. All she had to do now was get to her house, sneak around the back, and climb in through the window she’d left open into her bedroom. “Easy-peasy,” she whispered to herself.
But she didn’t feel like it was going to be easy-peasy. There was a strange chill in the late winter air that soaked into her bones more thoroughly than any mere wintry cold. She couldn’t put a finger on it, but there was something wrong about the night. She wished she’d had Rob drop her off in front of her house. Even if that had woken her parents, at least she’d have been home.
Her house was the biggest one on the block, and it was only a quarter of a mile away. But it seemed so small and so distant in the middle of the night. She just wanted to be home. She started jogging despite the slippery snow underfoot. Kathy would rather take a fall than spend any more time outside than absolutely necessary. She couldn’t shake the feeling that there was danger lurking in the shadows tonight.
Something fell from the oak tree in front of the Andersons’ place, and the sound made Kathy jump. What was that? There was a shadow beneath the tree. It was about the size of a baseball and seemed to be moving. Kathy’s curiosity got the better of her, and she found herself walking toward the tree despite her fears.
The shadow shrank as she neared it. By the time she was close enough to get a good look at it, there was almost nothing left. “What the hell is that?”
It took her a few more steps to see what was happening. It wasn’t shrinking; the shadow was breaking apart. Smaller shadows scurried away from it, and when Kathy realized what she was seeing she had to clamp both hands over her mouth to stifle a scream. Spiders. Dozens of them.
She backed away from the tree and the horde of fat, black spiders. The creatures turned toward her as one and streamed over the snow like a black snake. More joined the arachnoid army every second. They crawled up out of the snow and dropped off the bottoms of parked cars and leapt from hedges.
Kathy stopped backing away and turned to run. She didn’t care if she was running away from her house as long as she was putting distance between the spiders and herself. She couldn’t imagine where the spiders were coming from. It was the middle of winter—shouldn’t they have all been hibernating or whatever it is spiders did when it got cold? She couldn’t remember ever seeing a spider outdoors during the winter. What was going on?
She realized she was all the way back to where her boyfriend had dropped her off. She turned back and saw the spiders still coming for her. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, all headed in her direction.
A gooey lump landed on Kathy’s shoulder, and this time she did scream. She tried to brush it off, but whatever it was stuck to her fingers and tangled in her long hair. She pulled her hand away and saw it was covered in silvery threads that shimmered in the winter moonlight.
In the moment she’d been distracted, the swarm of spiders had closed the distance. They clambered over her boots and skittered up her jeans. Kathy stomped her feet and screamed again. She tried to shake the spiders off and then tried to slap them off, but there were too many. For every one she dislodged, three more climbed up.
Blind panic sent Kathy running. She didn’t even know which direction she was running; she just knew she had to get away from the spiders. They’d climbed inside her coat, and she could feel their pointy feet poking through her sweater and into her skin. As she ran, they made it into her hair and crawled onto her face. She could feel their sticky webs on her cheeks and her lips and across her forehead. She screamed again, and a spider scrambled onto her tongue. It ran toward the back of her throat until she gagged and choked and had to stop running to catch her breath.
Kathy managed to spit the spider out, but it left the inside of her mouth stinging and irritated. Her tongue and throat were coated with prickly little hairs that made her want to spit every time she tried to swallow. She was blinded by tears of pain and fear, but she could feel more and more spiders climbing onto her every moment she stood still. She knew she had to run, but she couldn’t. She could barely breathe, and the weight of the spiders dragged her to her knees.
“This is the price you pay when you forsake the goddess.”
The voice was creaky and ragged as if the speaker rarely had need for its words. Kathy tried to clear away her tears and the spiderwebs across her eye
s to see who was talking her. Why weren’t they helping her? Why were they just standing there?
Between the moonlight and the webs clouding her vision, Kathy couldn’t make out any details of the man. He was tall, but there was something wrong with his face. Something was moving around his mouth, but she couldn’t tell what it was. “Help me, please.”
Rough hands seized Kathy’s shoulders with such force she cried out in pain. The fingertips were too sharp, and they dug into her until she could feel warm trickles of blood running down her back and chest. “There is no help for you. You have forgotten to honor the compact. You have received her gifts without the proper obeisance.”
Kathy’s mind raced. She had no idea what this man was talking about. She hadn’t received any gifts. She opened her mouth to beg, to plead for help. But more spiders crowded over her lips and filled her mouth with their webs.
The man flipped Kathy onto her back, and she felt and a hard, unyielding cord wrapped around her toes. She struggled, but she was no match for the man’s strength. He wrapped her feet and her ankles and her calves and her knees with a thin, impossibly strong rope. Her bones broke, crushed together by the bonds the man wrapped around her. By the time Kathy’s pelvis crumbled, she could feel something pushing its way up into her throat. It tasted red and wet and raw like fresh-butchered meat. She couldn’t breathe; she couldn’t think. In the back of her mind, she knew she was dying, and she wished she hadn’t sneaked out to be with her boyfriend. She wished she’d just stayed home in her boring bedroom with her boring posters on the wall and her boring music playing. She wished she’d listened to her boring parents and done what she was told.
The man straddled her and hunkered down until Kathy could smell his rotten breath and feel its heat on her face. “She will take back what is hers, and she will rule this place as she has in ages past.”
Kathy’s mind raced in a vain attempt to find some meaning in these last words she would ever hear. It was too hard to think with her throat full of blood and raw meat and her mouth clogged with spiderwebs.
Kathy whimpered as her ribs cracked, and the world turned red.
7
Since the Long Man had stopped talking to him, Joe had started using more mundane ways to keep tabs on the goings on in Pitchfork County. After returning from Zeke’s and talking to Stevie, he’d spent the afternoon hunched over a worktable in the basement, poring over his father’s old journals and listening to the police scanner he’d picked up from the pawn shop. It mostly did nothing but spit static at him, but the droning white noise helped him concentrate.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t helped him discover anything of use. He’d gone to bed exhausted, his eyes burning from staring at his father’s cramped handwriting, a thousand theories whirling in his head, but with no more information than he’d had that afternoon. After a fitful night’s sleep, he’d poured himself a cup of coffee and stomped right back down to the basement to start looking for answers again.
He didn’t find anything in the trove of old journals, but the scanner alerted Joe to another murder. They weren’t giving out any details over the scanner, but he could tell from the panicked sound of the deputy’s voice that they’d found something he needed to see.
Laralaine wasn’t going to be happy if Joe showed up at a crime scene unannounced, but he didn’t really give a shit. He wasn’t going to be able to clean this mess up if he didn’t do some digging.
He tore ass across Pitchfork and decided to leave his guns at home because he didn’t want the sheriff to think that he’d come loaded for bear. He parked well away from the crime scene and approached on foot, careful to stay out of the sheriff’s line of sight. Joe was sure she’d toss him out on his ear as soon as she caught wind that he was on her scene, so he wanted to delay that confrontation for as long as possible.
This house was different from the trailer where Jimmy’d been killed. It wasn’t as far out in the boonies, for one thing, and it wasn’t a rundown shitbox for another. He recognized the place, not because he been there before, but because it showed up in the local papers from time to time. The Yodlee family owned a whole chain of florists that extended well beyond the boundaries of Pitchfork County. They were renowned for their charity work, and now it looked like they were about to be well known for something much worse.
A silk-wrapped body dangled from the arched entryway at the front of the house. It was small, and the stature combined with the long black hair flowing from the bottom of the cocoon told Joe this was the Yodlees’ daughter. If his memory served correctly, she was fifteen years old, and one of the few bright stars in the Pitchfork’s dimming heavens. A dull spike of rage thrust itself up from his guts, filling the back of his throat with the taste of bile. He needed this mess wrapped up before any more innocents died.
A scrawny deputy with more freckles than skin darted out from between two of the cruisers and grabbed Joe’s arm. “You gotta get out of here,” he whispered. “If the sheriff sees you, she’ll make us lock you up.”
Joe looked at his arm, then at the young deputy, then back to his arm. It took the kid a second to figure out just how badly he’d fucked up, and then he dropped Joe’s arm as if it were a cottonmouth ready to strike.
“What charge am I going to get jailed under?” Joe asked. He knew the sheriff didn’t really need a legitimate accusation, but he also knew putting a little doubt in the minds of her deputies could work in his favor if things went south. Small town sheriffs could get away with a lot of shit, but only as long as they kept their people in line. Joe wanted this deputy thinking about whether or not the sheriff might be crooked, in case things came to a shoving match.
The deputy licked his lips and tilted his hat back to wipe the sweat from his pink forehead. “She says you been interfering with official police business. Says if you show up at a crime scene, we gotta lock you up for obstruction of justice.”
The sheriff came out of the house, but she didn’t see Joe. All her attention was taken up by the dead girl hanging overhead. Joe imagined she’d been inside talking to the parents, trying to make some sense of this whole mess. He attempted to imagine her, an outsider to Pitchfork, doing her best to soothe the nerves of someone whose child had just been eaten by the bogeyman. If the scene hadn’t been so dismal, he would’ve laughed. “Kid, if you try to arrest me, I’m going to feed you that stupid hat.”
The deputy just stared at Joe, mouth wide open. He looked young, way too young to handle fighting crime in a place like Pitchfork County. He looked like a baby, and his flushed pink skin and gaping mouth didn’t do much to shake that impression. Joe stared at him, leaning ever so slightly toward the boy, and the deputy got the hint. He backed away, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and slunk away between the cruisers.
Joe had some options, but he didn’t like any of them. If he left the crime scene to the sheriff, there was a better than even chance that whatever was going on would never get solved. She might be working with the Long Man, but Joe hadn’t seen anything to indicate that she knew dick about the supernatural world. On the other hand, if he stuck his hand into her business, the sheriff was going to ride his ass straight to the county jail. If he was ever going to get anywhere with Laralaine, Joe knew he’d have to make a peace offering that she couldn’t refuse. He didn’t have much to give her, but he thought she might be interested in a little tidbit he did have.
There was no point in trying to be coy. Joe tilted his head back a little so his face wasn’t hidden in his hat’s shadow then strode across the street and right onto the crime scene’s front lawn. “Morning, Sheriff,” he called.
Every eye on the scene swiveled in his direction. The sheriff stood her ground, but the deputies and crime scene tech suddenly had better places to be. Within a moment, Joe and the sheriff were alone on the snowy ground.
The morning sun sparked off her sunglasses, hiding most of her face behind a veil of light. “You really do want to go to jail,” she barked.
Joe r
aised his hands to his shoulders, palms out, and walked toward the sheriff. “I’m just trying to help,” he said, biting back on his anger. He had to stay calm if he wanted to get anywhere with Laralaine. “I don’t think this is your usual crime scene.”
The sheriff hooked her thumbs into her belt. “I don’t think you know anything about my typical crime scenes. Unless you want to be the next one I slap the cuffs on, you probably oughta get the hell out of here.”
Joe stared pointedly at the girl hanging behind the sheriff. He tried, and failed, to keep the sarcasm out of his tone. “What do you think happened here, domestic disturbance?”
The sheriff came across the front yard so fast Joe thought she might take a swing at him.
He didn’t want a fight, but he didn’t give ground, either. She didn’t stop until she was close enough that their knees were almost touching. “I don’t think you get it. This isn’t your deal anymore. I’m literally the new sheriff in town. And I didn’t ask for your help.”
Joe smiled, trying to cover up the cold ball of dread gathering in his belly. “You think you’re going to be able to keep a lid on this? Just satisfy my curiosity. What’s your best fucking guess what happened here?”
The sheriff said nothing. Joe could feel her eyes flicking across his face behind her sunglasses, felt her trying to figure out how far he was willing to push her. “If I had to guess, and since it’s my job I’m probably going to have to, this looks like the work of some witches.”
And there it was. The sheriff had swallowed the Long Man’s bait and jumped headfirst into the supernatural mysteries that flowed through Pitchfork County. She’d decided that magic was real, and she’d also decided that when she had a supernatural crime on her hands, the first place to start looking for suspects was among witches. “This isn’t Salem,” Joe began, but he bit off the words when he saw the sheriff’s face locked in stony determination. “You’re really going to try to pin this on the witches?”
