Half-Made Girls

by Sam Witt

  The girl didn’t respond, but stayed on her knees, head bowed to the floor. Her bleeding was unnaturally loud, heavy plops that echoed through the church as the ruby drops splashed onto the floor.

  Dan took a step toward the girl and the church shuddered beneath the soles of his heavy boots. It reminded him of the temblors that sometimes wriggled through the earth when the mines were going, an undulating, serpentine shrug from deep beneath his feet. It made him want to vomit.

  “Okay, then,” Dan said. He was close enough to the girl to touch her. “Just going to cut you loose, all right?”

  “Sure.” The girl said, and her voice was younger, a toddler’s pitch and inflection. But there was another voice there, too, a half-heard string of guttural sounds that scratched at Dan’s ears like the burring rasp of beetle wings.

  Dan shook his head and stepped away from the girl. This was a bad idea. A stupid idea. He needed backup before he did anything else. He didn’t know anything about this girl or where she’d come from. She wasn’t natural. What was he thinking?

  “Just wait here,” Dan said. He went down the steps from the altar and headed toward the front door of the church.

  “Come back,” the girl whined like a whipped pup. “Please don’t leave me, mister. He’ll come back for sure.”

  Dan stopped, turned back to the girl.

  “Who is he?”

  “The one what caused this,” the girl said.

  “Who?” Dan’s heart went out to the girl. He didn’t know who or what she was, didn’t know if she was a monster or an angel, but the fear in her voice rang true and clear as anything he’d ever heard.

  “The man who aims to kill me,” the girl said. “The one you call the Night Marshal.”

  CHAPTER 4

  JOE LICKED THE gritty residue of Stevie’s herb juice from his lips and stared through the bug-flecked windshield at Walker’s estate. The place was huge, by far the largest home in Pitchfork County, and the sight of its thick stone columns and gaping windows made him want to break something. He’d thought of plenty excuses not to come here, but none of them would wash. The girl’d been found in Red Oak, which meant Joe had to come and talk to the preacher. “Just get it over with¸” he muttered, and hopped out of the truck.

  A pair of young boys in white choir robes opened the gate for him as he made his way toward the house, their skin pale against the wrought iron. Joe tipped his hat to the boys, but their eyes were focused on the middle distance. Shaking his head, Joe made his way up the ruler-straight walkway to the mansion’s front door.

  Another boy opened the oversized front door and waited in silence for Joe to cross the threshold. “Where’s the preacher?” Joe asked.

  “In the parlor, like a civilized man receiving his guests,” Walker’s heavy voice thundered from the left side of the high-ceilinged entryway.

  Joe lifted his hat from his head and held it over his heart as he made his way through the preacher’s house. The place was bright and airy, with tall, open windows letting in the early autumn sunlight and a chill breeze, but Joe could already feel an uneasy sweat forming along his spine. Walker made his skin crawl, and the army of little choir boys didn’t do much for his nerves, either. There was something not right about Red Oak and its people, something Joe didn’t trust. There was a darkness there, but he’d never been able to prove it. Maybe this was his chance.

  Walker smiled when Joe entered the parlor, his teeth polished white and straight in the dark frame of his face. A pair of young boys flanked Walker, dabbing at his sweaty forehead, cheeks, and neck with wilted silk cloths. A third boy sat at the preacher’s feet, polishing designer shoes that cost as much as most cars. “Well, Marshal, thank you for paying me a visit this morning. A call would have been nice, but I suppose that would be expecting a bit much from you.”

  “Been a little busy cleaning up a mess down at your church.” Joe stood across from Walker, hat in hand. “I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that?”

  “That poor girl.” Walker pressed a heavy palm to his massive chest. “I was as disturbed to hear about what happened as were you.”

  Joe nodded. “I bet.”

  Walker leaned forward in his enormous oak chair and slapped his hands on his knees. For a man far on the wrong side of morbidly obese, he moved fast. “You sound suspicious.”

  Joe let loose a harsh caw of a laugh. “I reckon I am. Ain’ like you’ve never had weird shit going on up at that old place of yours.”

  The boys gasped, their pink lips forming identical little O’s. Walker patted the boy at his feet on the shoulder. He turned cold eyes to Joe. “You will watch your mouth in my home.”

  “Sooner you answer my question and stop playing dumb, sooner I can get the fuck out of here.” Joe rolled his shoulders. “Because I do not want to be here anymore than you want me here.”

  Walker lunged to his feet, choir boys scattering away from him like startled doves. He took two heavy steps and planted himself before Joe. “You will pay me the respect I deserve.”

  Joe leaned in until he could feel the heat washing off Walker’s forehead. “Who did you piss off so bad they hung that fucked-up mess of a girl in your church?”

  Walker took a long breath, sucking wind through his teeth with a tight whistling sound like a tea kettle working its way up to a scream. “Many people misunderstand my faith. But I assure you, I have done nothing to deserve this.”

  “Try to recruit any of the hill folk lately?”

  “No, I leave them to their ignorant ways.”

  “Messing with the yarb doctors again?”

  Walker ground his teeth. “You know I have no truck with sorcerers.”

  “Steal any little boys from their mamas?”

  “The children who live in my home are orphans. I saved them.”

  “Make any orphans lately, then?”

  “Get out.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Walker backed away, eyes squinted to glittering black slits. “Why do you insist on goading me? There was a crime committed against me and mine, yet you treat me as if I were the criminal.”

  Joe eyed the preacher’s heavy gold rings and expensive clothes. “That’s because you are a criminal. I know what you ask of those people you suckered into worshiping the Red Oak. I know how deep your tithes cut, you piece of shit.”

  “Maybe if you had not been sleeping off a drunk, that girl would still be alive.” Walker’s fingers cracked and popped as he clenched his fists. “Maybe if you had done your job, you would not be here, in my home, cursing at me.”

  “What have you done, you cocksucker?” Joe’s rage was blinding, a flame that sent blazing words flying from his tongue. “What the hell are you up to?”

  “Get out.” Walker stabbed a fat finger at the door. “I am done speaking to you, and my church is done speaking to you. The next words I hear from you had best be the names of the men who killed that girl in my church.”

  Joe stepped in until his chest bumped against the mound of Walker’s flab. “Or what?”

  “My God is old and protective, Marshal. Your father understood that.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  Walker stared into Joe’s eyes. “Yes.”

  Joe left, hands clenched into bony white clubs, as he stomped out of the house.

  He really needed that drink.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE YARB DOCTOR leaned over the possessed girl and slapped the top of her head, once with his forehand and then again with a sharp backhand. Her eyes rolled up in her head so far the whites glowed out at Joe where he stood in the doorway to the doctor’s cramped home office. She grinned at the Night Marshal, showing a mouthful of black-and-yellow stumps, and licked her pale lips with a tongue coated with gritty, green slime. She tried to reach out for Joe, but the yarb doctor was no fool and had the girl strapped into a wrought iron chair by thick hanks of hemp rope. The chair was bolted to the floor, grounded with a silver spike speared through each of its legs.


  The doctor followed the girl’s eyes and turned his bald head toward the door. His great gray beard, streaked with yellow ribbons of tobacco juice and brown flecks of gnawed betel nut, trailed behind his head and dangled over his shoulder.

  “I’m busy, Marshal.” The yarb doctor, Ezekiel Hathorne, spared no more than a cursory glance for Joe and turned back to his patient. “Ya’ll need ta come back later.”

  “I’m busy, too, Zeke.” Joe closed the cluttered shack’s door behind him. His eyes adjusted to the wan candle light, but his nose rebelled against the stink of burning herbs with a trio of hearty sneezes that drew a second irked glance from the doctor. “I’m looking into something bad.”

  “You think I had something to do with whatever’s got your hackles up? Here to burn my place down?” Zeke chuckled to himself and slapped the girl again, a hard smack to the forehead that rocked her skull back between her shoulders. “Accuse me of dark hoodoo? No? Might as well be useful then. Hand me that ooze there.”

  The Night Marshal lifted the pale-green jar from the crowded shelf to his right and unscrewed the lid. His nose protested with another sneeze when the stinging scent from the jar curled into his nostrils. It reminded Joe of ashes and rain, underlaid with the sticky sweet aroma of boiled honey.

  “Thank ya kindly.” The doctor dipped two greasy fingers into the jar and scooped out a thick dollop of the reeking mess. He smeared it all over the girl’s neck and forehead, working it into her skin even as she snapped at him with a mouthful of snaggled teeth and snarled broken words that raised Joe’s hackles. Her veins rose black and swollen against the skin of her throat, and Joe watched as the darkness spread up into her face and outlined her skull in a swarm of black threads. The demon was rising, pushed toward the girl’s mouth by the yarb doctor’s ministrations. Joe let his shotgun swing loose on its strap, ready to blow the girl and her demonic rider straight back to hell if she got loose.

  “I hear ya thinkin’, but no.” The doctor smeared the last of the ooze onto the filthy bib of his coveralls and stood up. His knees and back crackled and popped like green branches in a fire as he pushed his stool back. “Let’s have some sassafras tea, since ya ain’ leavin’.”

  Joe nodded and followed the old man through a short doorway into a tiny sitting room. The two men crowded around a stump table, squatting on hand-carved stools worn smooth by years of use. The yarb doctor lifted a boiling cauldron off a little fire set into the back wall of the room. Joe opened up the battered copper teapot and settled a wire mesh filter into its open top. The doctor poured the pink-brown tea through the screen, careful to slow as sediment and little chunks of bark bogged up the mesh. Despite the twitchy tremors in his hands, the yarb doctor lifted out the filter and poured two cups of tea without spilling a drop on the wooden tabletop.

  “Sugar?”

  Joe shook his head and took the offered cup. He blew across its fragrant surface and took a sip. The sassafras tingled on his lips and tongue, a spicy, bitter taste that cleared away a big chunk of his hangover and left him feeling refreshed and eager for more. His next drink was deeper, and the tingle spread out through his arms and legs.

  “That perty wife of yers oughter be makin’ ya the tea, not me.” Zeke laughed, coughed, and laughed again.

  “Didn’t come for the tea. Was hoping you might be able to help me.” But the tea was good. Joe took another healthy drink. “You hear about Red Oak?”

  The bound girl screeched and jerked up and down against her bindings so hard the bolts creaked against the shack’s wooden floor. The air thickened and grew shadows around her words. Joe found himself on his feet with the shotgun in his good hand before he had time to think about what he was doing. His tea spilled and ran off the edge of the little table, puddling on the floor around his feet.

  “Ya will not.” The yarb doctor shoved his way past Joe and towered over the girl. He chanted a handful of words that did nothing to set Joe’s mind at ease, and the girl quieted. She murmured something, and the yarb man stroked her long, thin hair. He left the girl and came back to the table. “Yer not much like yer daddy.”

  “Am where it counts,” Joe grunted and sat back down. He started to pour himself a new cup of tea, but a harsh tut from the yarb doctor stayed his hand.

  “Nah. Yer daddy knew to judge the man, not the tool.” Zeke pushed past Joe and took his seat. “He also knew savin’ a poor, methed-up girl is a might better’n shootin’ her.”

  “She’s not dead yet.” Joe gladly took a new cup of tea from Zeke and drained half of it in one go. His head felt better than it had in weeks, and his stomach gurgled with appreciation and a sudden, resurgent hunger. He nodded toward the possessed girl in the next room. “But I’m willing to bet I’ll end up putting her down before winter comes. Meth freaks are easy targets for demons. Next time she might not get to you before she makes a mess.”

  “She needs help. She don’t wanna do wrong.” Zeke’s bushy brows drew together over his eyes as he stared at Joe. “Ya know that’s why she come to me, not to ya?”

  “It’s not my job to help demon mounts. It’s my job to protect Pitchfork from those who walk the Left-Hand Path. Meth heads like her hold the door open for the demons that pour into this county. I reckon we’re better off without them. I don’t have to tell you that.”

  The yarb doctor harrumphed and shook his head. “Ya ever think the demons come afore the meth? Might be these people ya hate so much aren’t weak, they’re victims. Yer old man wasn’t too trigger happy to lend a hand to those afflicted like that ‘un.”

  “How’d that work out for my daddy?” Joe patted his shotgun. “I don’t figure I’ll end the same. Now, can you help me with this? There’s something evil out there, and it aims to bring hell down on this county. Maybe you heard something that might help me find whoever’s behind it before they do something really stupid.”

  “One of them squirrels told me ya was comin’ to ask about that poor girl. Wish I coulda sent it back and saved ya the trip. ‘Fraid I got nothin’ for ya on that count.” Zeke drank his tea in one big gulp, then licked his lips. He dug a battered puck of a can out of his pocket and pinched out a dip of snuff, which he offered to Joe. When the Night Marshal shook his head, Zeke plugged the moist clot of tobacco down in his own lower lip. “What happened with that girl is a kinda witchin’ I ain’ never touched. I stay well shed of that brand of bullshit.”

  “I know that. Maybe you’ve got some idea who would touch it?” Joe forced himself to relax, to unclench his fingers before they shattered the cup between them. Why did people always have to fight him? “I need to know. You have to tell me.”

  Zeke laughed and slapped the table so hard everything on it jumped a half inch into the air. “Say I knew who might get up to that dark work. I tell ya, what happens? Ya march up to their house and kick their door in. Maybe shoot someone? I don’t believe in settin’ the hounds out on people who might be innocent, just on account of a hunch I might have.”

  “Better me at your door than whatever’s messing with those girls.”

  “Really? Addin’ more notches to that fancy shotgun of yers ain’ gonna stop the bad winds blowin’.” Zeke poured the last of the tea into his own cup and drank it down. “Why’nt ya come back and bring yer perty li’l wife up here and we’ll jaw on this a bit, see if we can find a peaceable answer to yer questions.”

  Rage rippled through Joe at the mention of his wife.

  “This isn’t my wife’s business, it’s mine.” Joe’s hand slapped the top of the stump table. “You’d do well to remember that.”

  The girl howled from the other room. The yarb doctor shook his head and creaked up out of his chair. “Yer gonna need to go. Yer upsettin’ my patient.”

  “You really won’t help?” Joe watched the old man limp out of the sitting room. “Not even knowing how bad this is going to get?”

  “Things’re always bad, Marshal. Don’t see no reason fer me to make ‘em worse fer anybody. Yer a sma
rt feller. I reckon ya’ll get on fine without an old man tellin’ ya what to do.” Zeke disappeared into the candle-lit glow of the main room, leaving Joe alone.

  For a moment, the Night Marshal considered putting a hurt on the doctor to loosen his tongue. It was fleeting, a dark shadow of intent that he pushed away before it could take root. There were rules, and Zeke hadn’t broken any of them. He was off-limits to the Night Marshal’s punishments, for the moment.

  Joe eased into the main room and watched the yarb doctor at work. The girl was tainted; a demon held the reins to her soul. If he’d seen her out and about, he wouldn’t have hesitated to unload both barrels into the back of her head. He’d seen what happened when you tried to save the tainted. His father had thought he could redeem the Bog Witch, and that had ended in a flood of tears and a whole river of blood. It was a mistake Joe was determined never to repeat.

  The girl thrashed her head back and forth, spewing a vile torrent of curses in a language so old and profane it made angels weep to hear it.

  “You sure you can handle her?”

  “Git on out, Marshal. Yer not making things better.”

  “That’s your final word? You won’t even tell me who might get up to this kind of shit?”

  “I already told ya more’n I oughter, and a hell of a lot more’n ya think. Now git.”

  Joe let himself out. He dug the bloody bandana out of his pocket.

  It was time to do something else he’d hoped to avoid.

  CHAPTER 6

  ALASDAIR SLAPPED THE top of the truck’s cab, and Joe pulled over to the side of the gravel access road. He killed the truck’s engine with a shotgun backfire that sent a whippoorwill crying from its roost. Joe pushed the door open and winced as its hinges let out an anguished squeal.

  “Well, no use sneaking around now.” Alasdair hopped out of the pickup’s bed. “You have any flares you want to shoot off? Maybe start a forest fire just to make sure everyone knows we’re here?”