by Sam Witt
The stolen power burnt in his veins, and Joe knew he was stronger and faster than he’d ever been. The Night Marshal leapt onto the goddess’s angled back and raised his knife overhead. The blade flared with eldritch power that reeked of thunderbolts. “Don’t count your chickens,” he growled and slammed his knife into her.
Itsike’s stolen power gushed out of the knife in an explosive rush that ripped open a crater in the spider goddess’s back. A dismal black light flowed from the wound.
Itsike’s spider-beast had taken the hearts and guts of her worshipers and replaced them with a mark of her power. The ritual severed the connection between the descendants of her followers and the goddess, but it had served another purpose. Itsike had left her precious steles to mark her territory and enforce her claim to Pitchfork.
And Joe had done the same. He’d buried his shotgun and his father’s pistols in a triangle with points sacred to himself and to Pitchfork. A triangle with its points outside the boundaries placed by Itsike.
Joe was gambling the ritual would work for him as well. Itsike didn’t worship him, but the connections he’d stolen from Frank and the others bound her to Joe just as it had bound her to her followers.
He pulled his badge free from his duster and rammed it into the crater in Itsike’s back. The silver metal sizzled with power and guided Joe’s hand to his target. He felt Itsike’s heart beat under his hand. It twitched and snapped at him, a hundred tiny mouths gnashing as the hellish spiders it was composed of tried to tear themselves free and make good their escape.
But Joe wasn’t letting her-or them-escape. He pushed the badge against her heart. Itsike heaved against Joe’s assault, but he held on and kept his badge buried inside her. “This is my county,” he whispered to the dying goddess.
He felt the last of her life flee her body. Her power bloomed in Joe like a crimson mushroom cloud. His badge blazed like a supernova and seared Joe’s palm with eldritch fire.
Thunder rolled through the Black Lodge, and Joe felt as if the entire world was coming apart around him. His skin felt too tight; his skull felt too small. There was something inside him now, something strange and enormous. It thrashed against the confines of his puny mortal frame and threatened to tear him apart.
He’d fucked up. Something had gone wrong. He’d grabbed the fire, and now the vultures were going to consume his gizzard.
Jagged bolts of white light glanced across his vision one after another until there was only a vast field of nothingness left before him.
Joe felt himself falling and knew he would fall forever.
37
Joe woke with his throat on fire. A swarm of angry bees had taken up residence in his skull while he was unconscious, and their incessant buzzing made it impossible for him to form a coherent thought. His eyes snapped open, and his gaze was returned by a myriad of glaring, inhuman orbs. The Long Man was on top of him and was doing his best to crush the life out of Joe. Hands formed of clotted smoke were locked around Joe’s neck.
Joe was unsure how long he’d been unconscious, but it hadn’t been long enough for the Long Man to finish him. The pain in his head and throat told him he was still alive, so he decided to stay that way. He just wasn’t sure how.
He had no idea where his knife or badge had got off to; if he wanted free of the Long Man’s grasp, he’d have to use his hands. Joe threw one punch, partially obstructed by the Long Man’s thigh where he was crouched over Joe, and his fist sank into the Long Man’s smoky body.
Joe’s attack did nothing but piss the old fucker off. A rasping hiss billowed from the monster’s cloudy form, and a crackling, distorted voice roared in Joe’s head. “We have spent millennia orchestrating this. I have wallowed in the disgusting filth of this world for generations in an attempt to put right what you naked monkeys ruined at the moment of your conception. And you have the audacity, the raw arrogance, to think you can take it all away?”
Joe didn’t have the breath to make sense of the Long Man’s raving. He put his energy into tearing the monster’s hands from around his neck. He threw a pair of punches into the greasy smoke, to no more effect than the first. “You think I give a single shit about whatever plans you’ve been cooking up? My whole job is stopping assholes like you from preying on the people of this county.”
The Long Man’s laughter rattled Joe’s teeth in his head it was so loud. Massive, smoky wings flared from his back, and he reared up, dragging Joe off the floor. “Then you have failed at your job.”
Joe sailed through the air and smashed into the massive mirror above the sitting room’s hearth. Shards of broken glass stabbed through his duster and bit into the meat of his shoulders and back. He fell away from the mirror, dazed, and bit through the very tip of his tongue when his knees smacked into the hardwood floorboards. He spat blood and the tiny chunk of meat from his mouth. It hurt, but it was a hell of a lot better than being choked to death by whatever the Long Man had become.
Joe wiped the blood from his lips with the back of his hand and sneered at his old boss. “I don’t know. I’ve finished two of the three of you, and this fight sure as hell isn’t over yet.”
Now that he wasn’t being choked, Joe felt surprisingly good. For the first time in too long, he didn’t have extra voices competing with his own thoughts. Now, it was just the two of them: the Long Man and himself.
More importantly, he felt stronger than ever before. Whatever misgivings he’d had about his plan for dealing with Itsike were banished now that he’d added at least part of her power to his own.
The Long Man paced back and forth, scarring the floor with smoking footprints. “I have fed on godsblood every day since your little trip to Ladue. I spent years draining the power from this piece of shit backwater nowhere and its people. For decades, I gorged myself on the blood and bones of rivals you helped me to destroy. For centuries, I consumed enemies whose might you cannot even imagine. And now, at the pinnacle of my power, you think to challenge me?”
Joe smirked. He needed time to figure out how he was going to kill the Long Man. Might as well keep the old asshole talking. “Sounds to me like you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re hot shit when we both know it’s not that simple. If you’re such a badass, why haven’t you managed to tear yourself loose from me?”
The silence from the other end of the room spoke volumes to Joe. There was a shift in his perspective now; something about what he’d done to the spider goddess had opened his eyes to a bigger picture. The difference between men and gods wasn’t as significant as the former hoped and the latter pretended. The Long Man hadn’t freed himself from Joe because he couldn’t.
His knife jutted from beneath the Long Man’s twisted metal and antler throne. It formed the point of an equilateral triangle anchored by Joe and the Long Man. If he made a break for it and he wasn’t faster than his old boss, Joe knew he’d end up impaled on a flaming sword.
The Long Man’s cackling laughter rattled through the Black Lodge. He extended his right hand, and the burning blade burst to life, gobbets of greasy flame dribbling from its tip. “Going to take your chance, Night Marshal? Can you beat me? Are you as fast as you think?”
Joe clenched both fists, and his knuckles popped like green wood in a fireplace. “I don’t suppose you’re going to be a gentleman about this? I could really use—”
The Night Marshal didn’t finish his sentence. He ducked his head and ran for the throne. He had a head start, but the moment of surprise he gained through his misdirection didn’t give him much of an edge.
Joe could hear the Long Man rushing after him, footsteps shaking the floorboards. The sword’s heat scorched the hairs on the back of Joe’s neck and penetrated his leather duster like the summer sun.
He’d never make it. The Long Man was too fast, and the knife was too far away. If he slowed, even for a moment to scoop the weapon up, it would be the last thing he ever did.
The throne was set back almost against the wall. If Joe jumped
past that, he’d be cornered. If he tried to double back, he’d run right onto the Long Man’s flaming blade. Running was no longer an option.
As he reached the throne, Joe threw himself forward and grabbed the arm of the overgrown chair with both hands. He used his momentum to turn and the strength he’d stolen from the spider goddess to lift the throne. The monstrous furniture made an adequate shield, giving Joe the moment of breathing room he needed. He dug in his heels and shoved the raised chair forward to meet the Long Man’s streaking blade.
The Long Man roared with frustration as his weapon bit into his throne and became tangled in the mass of iron and wire and bone. He planted his feet and wrenched his blade back, but instead of tearing the weapon free from Joe’s improvise shield, he found himself swinging the whole tangled mass.
Joe hooked the toe of his hobnailed boot under the knife and flipped it into the air. Before the Long Man could toss his throne aside, Joe held his knife in both hands. It thrummed with power and rage. “Gotcha,” he said.
The Long Man threw his tangled blade at Joe and lunged away from the Night Marshal.
But Joe was faster than his old boss had anticipated. He hurled the knife at the Long Man, and it lit the room with the furious glare of a lightning strike.
The blade caught the Long Man in the back. The force of the blow bounced the monster off the wall and left him curled on the floor like a dead spider.
Joe didn’t wait to see if the Long Man would get up. He could feel his old boss still in his head, like a splinter wedged under his fingernail. He walked to his fallen foe and stared down at the miserable wreck of his body. “That it?”
The Long Man tried to rise, but his broken body wasn’t up to the task. Through the smoke and the eyes, naked flesh the pale white of maggots appeared and disappeared, and long, emaciated limbs seemed to flicker in and out of reality. An enormous milky eye glared at Joe, rage sizzling in its depths. A guttural moan escaped the battered creature, but it could form no words.
Joe reached down and wrenched his knife from the Long Man’s back. Milky blood bubbled from the wound and spread across the floor around Joe’s boots. “All this time you had me convinced we needed you. I thought—we all thought—that we couldn’t defend ourselves against the darkness. You didn’t need power to keep us under your thumb, just lies.”
The Long Man lay still, but Joe could hear him rustling in his thoughts. The monster gathered the strength and whispered, “You have no idea what’s out there. You have no idea what you’ve unleashed. You do need me. There’s still time—”
Joe could feel the desperation in the Long Man’s words. He knew there was some truth in what the old fucker had to say. The balance was tilting toward the shadows. The world was going to hell. But working with the monsters wasn’t going to turn that around.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe there is something out there worse than you. Maybe we do need you to help us fight it.”
Joe drove his knife into the Long Man’s neck.
The Long Man screamed inside Joe’s skull. It was a cry of terror. It was the sound of an immortal dying.
But he wasn’t dead yet.
Joe reached out for the shredded fragments of the Long Man’s power. It was still trapped inside his head, still holding the two of them together as it had since Joe picked up the badge. “But maybe all we really need is to open our eyes and fight for ourselves.”
The Long Man died, and Joe felt his old boss’s strength flood into him. It was bitter and rancid, but Joe didn’t reject it. He’d need it for what was to come.
Joe opened his eyes and took in the carnage around them. The dead gods were crumpled lumps of corrupted flesh and cooling ichor.
He collected his badge from the charred body of the spider goddess and held it in the palm of his hand. It was still warm from the power he’d pushed through it. Its letters and sigils were stained black with Itsike’s scalded blood. He held it for long minutes, until the silver grew cold.
Then he let it fall through his fingers.
The connections he’d forged through the badge were part of him. For better or worse.
Joe Hark left the Black Lodge as something he’d never imagined possible.
He left a free man.
38
Patches of stubborn snow still littered the earth when Joe buried Stevie. It was as if the seasons refused to turn in the face of her death.
Joe dug her grave with his own hands and a rusted shovel. He dug the hole alone under the light of the full moon, working through the night. He climbed out of the hole at the first light of day more tired than he’d thought possible.
They were waiting for him when he clambered up over the edge of the grave. More people than he wanted to see just then. Really, more people than he ever wanted to see. He didn’t have the patience for them. He didn’t know if he ever would again.
Zeke was with them, but he wouldn’t meet Joe’s eyes. He stared off into the distance and pretended that this whole shooting match wasn’t his idea. The old man chewed on his pipe and shuffled his booted feet while he waited for Joe to make the first move.
There were deputies there, too. A couple of men and a woman Joe recognized from crime scenes they’d shared, but he couldn’t put a name to any of them. They’d come to Pitchfork sometime between Schrader’s death and Laralaine’s arrival, which meant they hadn’t developed a healthy respect for Joe’s temper and hadn’t yet been tainted by all the weird shit rolling around Pitchfork. They knew something strange was going on, but they didn’t know what. For now, they pretended to be cops out here to deliver some unpleasant news to a grieving husband and father.
Joe stared at them until they broke under the pressure. The woman stepped forward and scooped the wide-brimmed hat off her head. “Mr. Hark,” she began.
“Did you find them?”
Because that was the only question that Joe really wanted answered just then. His wife was dead on the ground next to him, her face calm and pale and dusted with just a hint of fallen snow. Those ice crystals caught in her eyes, the un-melting damning evidence that she wasn’t alive, made Joe want to burn down the entire world. If he never saw another snowflake or ice crystal for as long as he lived, he’d be just fine with that.
The deputies all shook their heads in unison like they all shared one idiot mind. The woman clenched her hat tighter to her chest and gave Joe a look overflowing with real pain. She’d come here looking for a quiet place, maybe, a small town that wasn’t plagued by sporadic race riots or meth kingpins or factories pumping toxic waste into the air and earth. Instead, she’d found hell on earth, and she stood next to a dead woman having to deliver bad news about missing kids. “No one’s seen any sign of them. It’s like they just…”
Joe knew what she was going to say and was glad she hadn’t finished the sentence. Vanished. His baby girl and his almost-grown son were gone from the face of the earth as if they’d never existed. Sometime between the death of the Long Man and Joe’s return to his home, everything he’d fought for had turned to ash and blown away on the winter’s wind.
He stared at Zeke and tried to burrow into the old man’s brain. He wanted to peel it apart with his fingers, dig through the greasy gray matter until he found the truth of what had happened in that house. But the old man wasn’t spilling any beans. He hadn’t said two words to Joe or the police after they’d taken his statement. Joe didn’t need the old man to talk. He could feel his guilt and sorrow through the connection they’d forged. He could feel all of them and had to fight to push those feelings aside. He didn’t want them. Not yet. “Still not talking to me, Zeke?”
Zeke didn’t say anything. His eyes were wet with tears he wouldn’t let anyone see him shed, and Joe knew he was as torn up about what had happened as almost anyone. The two men watched each other, Joe eyeing Zeke like he was about to tear him apart, and Zeke looking more like a rabbit hiding from a hawk than a man. He chewed his lip for a moment, sucked on his pipe, and looked away. �
�She was like a daughter to me,” he whispered. “If there was anything I coulda done, anything, I woulda done it.”
Joe turned away from the old man and put both hands on Stevie’s coffin. He looked down into the simple pine box and still couldn’t believe what he saw there. The Conclave witches had dressed her in a flowing white dress Stevie hadn’t worn since before Al was born. She looked as innocent and wild as the day he’d met her, but it was just for show. The fire and lightning and heat that had made his wife was gone. All she’d left behind was a sack of meat that wore her face.
He reached into the coffin and brushed the backs of his fingers down her cheek. The cold sank into his hand and burrowed through his veins until it wrapped his heart in a fist of ice. He didn’t think he’d ever be warm again. “Wait for me,” he whispered. “I ain’t gonna last long without you.”
Joe closed the coffin’s lid. There was a mallet and a bag of nails on the ground next to the coffin stand, and he lifted them both without a word.
The first nail sank through the coffin’s lid with a sharp crack that Joe knew he’d never forget.
By the time he’d pounded the last nail into his wife’s coffin, his audience had gathered near. They’d all heard rumors about what had happened up at the Black Lodge, but none of them understood what it meant. The sheriff’s deputies had enough sense to sweep the whole mess under the rug, but they could feel the power vacuum in Pitchfork like a yawning chasm at the tips of their toes. Preacher Aaron kept a respectful distance, but Joe could feel his eyes as they probed him for answers. The Conclave witches, now two members short and almost powerless as a result, wanted answers. Everyone wanted to know what was going to happen next. Everyone needed to know what to do now that Joe had thrown the whole county on its ear.
Truth was, Joe didn’t really give a fuck what any of them did.
