by Sam Witt
A heavy footfall shook the landing. Joe whirled around, and another foot crashed onto the floor to his left. He flicked his eyes around, searching for the source of the sound. Thick, black tar oozed up between the charred floorboards, sticking to the soles of his feet.
Alasdair shouted, and his voice was engulfed in a strange, pig-like squealing that mimicked his words. “They’re coming,” the voices screamed together.
Another heavy footstep crashed against the floor, and tar splashed into the air. Joe ran for the stairs, feet trailing sticky tar with every step.
At the top of the steps, the Night Marshal felt his head turning against his will. A bubble rose from the thick tar, a great mass heaving its way up out of the floor.
The bubble stretched into the air, dripping foulness. It split open, malformed eyelids parting to reveal a three-lobed eye. The pupils were bulging black shot through with veins of furious red, hatred boiling out of them.
Joe’s feet tangled as he ran down the steps. Whatever was back there, whatever he’d seen, whatever had seen him, was not something he could fight. He’d get his son and get the hell out of here. Then he’d come back with enough flares and gasoline to turn this place and everything within its walls into a bad memory.
On the next floor down, he passed doorways gaping open on two more rooms. One was being used as makeshift chemical storage, filled with enough open canisters and spilled fluids to cook meth for half the county. The other bedroom looked like a wild animal’s den. The bedding was shredded and stained, broad strokes of filth scarring the walls with indecipherable scrawls. Joe wasted no time investigating these rooms. He had to get Alasdair and get the fuck out of here. There’d be time to figure out how to deal with this godforsaken mess later.
Joe took the stairs three at a time, praying he wouldn’t plunge through a chunk of bad wood or stumble into some hole he couldn’t see in the dim light. Distance from the staring nightmare helped to clear his thoughts, but he couldn’t shake the dread he felt. Whoever had brought him here wanted him and his destroyed. They were willing to traffic with old things, creatures from days best forgotten, and they were willing to create blasphemy to get their revenge.
“They’re here,” Alasdair screamed, his voice a fractured wail.
CHAPTER 11
THE LAST STEP crumbled to gritty ash under Joe’s heel. Off-balance, he caromed off the mildewed stairwell walls before skidding to a halt in a cramped hall. The kitchen to his left was a nightmare of filth. The sink overflowed with unwashed dishes scabbed with molding food, and the table was littered with scraps of maggoty barbecue and stale pizza crusts. Broken glass pipes and empty, punctured beer cans with blackened, scorched lips jutted up from the squalor, signposts that meth lived here.
Al screamed again, and Joe followed his son’s tormented voice. A muffled whirring came from somewhere deep under the house, like a lonesome chord struck from a guitar at the bottom of a dry well. Joe’s feet picked up splinters from the naked wood flooring as he ran. The knife felt small and pathetic in his hand, and he yearned for the comforting weight of his shotgun.
The house was a tumble-down maze of squalid rooms and labyrinthine hallways, built up over the generations to contain the Pryor clan’s burgeoning numbers. They’d all lived together, generations of the inbred and bent, stewing in a witch’s brew of strange religion and old rites that Joe believed he’d shut the door on years before. Joe’s memories of the place were worn thin and faded by the passage of years and countless bottles of whiskey. He tried to keep track of his steps; it would be too easy to get lost in this place.
He pushed through a warped door and remembered a little girl, screaming in her bed, terrified of the man chasing her grandmother. Another door and the memory of a young man on the floor, choking on blood from a nose smashed in by a savage strike from the butt of Joe’s shotgun.
Joe kept his eyes low to avoid the cryptic scrawls that scarred the walls and kept moving to outrun the ghosts of his past. He cursed himself for not finishing the whole family off when he’d had the chance. One day of mercy was going to cost him a whole mess of pain.
Al’s voice broke into a pitiful whine. Joe chased the sound through a grungy utility room filled with empty chemical canisters and found what he was looking for on the other side. The stairs to the basement, dusty and stinking of the depths.
This was where he’d found the old woman, Alma Pryor, clutching her dress up to form a pouch loaded with so many fetishes and idols the fabric was stretched near to breaking. She’d come here hoping to make one last stand, but her gods had abandoned her that day.
Joe stood at the top of the stairs, half his mind looking to the future, the other falling back into the past. He remembered her screeching, dark words tripping over her tongue and fouling the air with the overpowering scents of decay and ozone. He remembered leveling his shotgun at her face, the weapon warm and heavy in his hands. Alma had trafficked with the darkness, she’d made deals with creatures Joe was sworn to oppose, and the Night Marshal was well within his rights to blast her skull apart.
But there were children begging for their grandmother’s life. Half-witted sons pleading with him to spare their sick old mama. And Joe had shown them mercy. He’d given them fifteen minutes to pack whatever meager belongings they could, barring those that could be used for the kind of sorcery he’d come here to end in the first place.
Then he’d gone room to room, splashing gasoline and dropping road flares. He’d walked out the front door, past the crying family gathered on their pea gravel driveway, tossed the last of his gas and flares into the barn, and drove his pickup into the night.
His strongest memory was of the flickering in his rearview mirror, fire and shadow, and the huddled, weeping family. A pathetic clutch of broken humans who should have been singing praises that they were still alive instead of crying over what they’d lost.
Had Joe known what was to come, he’d have made those brats watch as he torched the whole place and their granny with it. Then he’d have put a bullet through each of their incestuous heads and called it a day. He’d been merciful, and look where that’d gotten him.
Fuck mercy.
The smell wafting up from that old stone passage was thick with age. The stairs and the old basement they led to were older by far than the house built around them. Joe paused on the first step as the throbbing presence of a dark power set his teeth on edge. He didn’t want to go into that basement. He didn’t want to face whatever was down there in the darkness. But more than that, he did not want to leave his son to the thing’s attention.
Joe crept down the steps on the balls of his feet, knife held out ready to slash or stab anyone or anything that got in his way. The staircase was made up of thirteen stone steps with a right-angle bend to the left in its middle. Nothing came for him; nothing tried to stop him.
He found himself in a small, earthen room lit by guttering candles melted inside crude sconces hacked into the walls. Elaborate, runic carvings ran around the room and exerted a magnetic pull on his eyes. The whirring he’d heard upstairs was much louder here, a heavy rasping that made it hard to think. The Night Marshal focused on the one thing in the room he understood.
“Joe,” Al gasped. “Get me the fuck out of here.”
They’d laid Al on his back atop a low stone table. His arms, legs, and head draped over the edges and were bound in thick chains fastened to the table’s base, bending Al into a bent, crab-like posture.
“It’s on me, Joe.” Al whimpered, his voice breaking with fear. He bucked against the chains, but there was hardly any give to them.
Close up, Joe could see it wasn’t a table. The round rocks were the top of some sort of pit, a well maybe, the bottom hidden in shadow. The whirring was coming from the hole’s depths, a leathery whisper that grew louder as he peered into the darkness.
“Get it off,” Al whimpered. “Get it off me before it gets in.”
Al was stripped down to his boxers, but Joe couldn’t see anything
on him. The boy’s skin was bruised and scratched, but he was in better shape than Joe.
“Al, I don’t —“
“Get it off!” Al screamed and bucked. His body arched up against his chains in the throes of blind panic. He thrashed from side to side, and Joe was afraid the boy would rip his own arms out of their sockets if he kept it up.
Joe reached under his son and ran his hands along Al’s back. He brushed against something soft and warm that turned on him with demented ferocity. Pain blossomed as needles plunged into his hand again and again, shredding the skin of his palm.
The Night Marshal clenched his fist around the tormentor on Al’s back. It squirmed in his grasp, claws scratching at his wrist even as its teeth tried to rip chunks out of his hand. Scalloped wings jutted from between his fingers, black and velvety with hooked talons on the tips. Joe squeezed, and the bat’s body ruptured like an overripe peach. He flung it to the floor in disgust.
Even as damaged as it was, the demonic bat limped across the floor with one mangled wing. Its single, enormous eye, glared at Joe, all three bulging pupils filled with an ageless hatred.
Joe lifted his heel and brought it down on the monstrosity’s upturned face.
“Get me out of here, Daddy.” Al panted. “Hurry.”
Joe tested the chains. The manacles around Alasdair’s wrists and ankles were corroded and sticky with filth, but the old iron was an inch thick. Even if he had a bolt cutter and the time to work on the heavy links, Joe knew he’d never get through them.
“I need the key,” Joe said.
Countless wings shuffled and stirred in the pit, readying for flight.
“They’re coming,” Al whispered. “They can smell my blood. I can smell their hunger.”
“Al,” Joe licked his lips. His hands shook. He needed a drink. “I have to go back upstairs and find the key.”
“Don’t leave me,” Al begged. “Daddy, please. Don’t leave me down here with them.”
Joe rested one calloused palm on Alasdair’s sweat-slick forehead. “Hang in there. I won’t be long.”
“Then just kill me.” He stared into his father’s eyes. “Don’t let them eat their way into me. Don’t let it end like that.”
“I’ll be back,” Joe headed for the stairs. He had to get away from Al. He couldn’t take seeing his son in such torment.
“I’ll change,” Alasdair whispered at his father’s back in a low and petulant voice. “If you leave me down here with them, I’ll do it.”
Joe turned to stare into his son’s eyes, trying to see the limits of the boy’s desperation. Alasdair was up against the wall. He wasn’t lying. If push came to shove, he’d do the one thing he’d spent most of his life avoiding. Joe hoped the boy would be able to find his way back from the abyss if he did let loose.
“Don’t make me put you down, Son.” Deep sorrow tinged Joe’s words at the thought of what might come to pass. “Don’t force my hand like that.”
“Then don’t leave me,” Al said. His voice was a panicked whisper. “Please.”
Joe turned his back on his son and headed for the stairs.
CHAPTER 12
ELSA JABBED THE needle into the pad of her left thumb and squeezed a heavy drop of blood into the bowl of clay. Outside, scraggly tree limbs bowed before the gusting wind, throwing grasping shadows through the window and over Elsa’s face. “One for the angel who watches me by day.”
She squeezed her thumb until another fat drop splashed onto the clay. The flames of the seven candles on Elsa’s little workbench grew tall and burned golden white. “One for Granny Moon’s light that shows me night’s way.”
Elsa squeezed out another offering of blood. “One to call Strangers to hear the words they say.”
Each of the towering candle flames curved inward, bowing over the heavy wooden bowl and the bloody earth it contained. One by one, the flames shrank and winked out. Elsa licked the blood off her thumb and prepared to plunge both hands into the clay.
“Elsa, only your right hand.” Her mom was always reminding Elsa of The Rules. “You don’t mix old blood with new.”
She wrinkled her nose at her mother’s warning and held her thumb out for inspection. “It’s already closed, look.”
“Let’s not take any chances, little lady.” Stevie went back to sorting her herbs. It made Elsa sad to see her mom doing such boring work. People said her mom was something special back in the day, when she was younger.
Elsa obeyed her mother, but resented being told what to do. She knew what she was doing; she was good at this. She held the bowl with her left hand and worked the clay with her right. The moist earth soaked up all three drops of her blood as Elsa folded it over and over, its color warming from a greasy gray to a rich, chocolate brown. Just the right color to draw in a curious Stranger, not dark enough to get the attention of the always-hungry bogeymen.
She lifted the bowl over the workbench with both hands and upended it. The clay fell to the wooden bench with a wet slap, flattening slightly before drawing back up into a smooth dome.
Elsa smushed the bottom of the bowl into the clay, then flipped it over. She smoothed the clay down the bowl’s sides, forming the rough shell of her new mask. Her stomach felt all fluttery looking at the blank circle. She wondered what would answer her call this time.
“Why do we have to do this down here?” Elsa asked her mother. It was stuffy in the shack when the two of them were both working. She wanted to take her things up to the big house, maybe set up a nice space in the basement where she could spread out.
“You know why.” Stevie didn’t look up from her mortar and pestle, but Elsa could see her bear down harder on the stone mortar.
“It’s not fair.” She traced the grinning line of a mouth with her pinky, then again with her index finger to deepen the crease and form the lips. Elsa liked to do the mouths first, so she could get the happy ones. “I’m not the Night Marshal. I shouldn’t have to follow his dumb rules.”
“Elsa,” Stevie warned.
“Hmmph.” Her fingers tingled where they touched the clay. From the corners of her eyes, Elsa could see shadows shifting, straightening up and standing tall as they crowded toward her. She wondered what it would be like to do this in a bigger room, where more of the Strangers could gather round. Maybe she would have more to choose from then. Maybe she would get more girls that way.
Elsa loved her daddy, but she didn’t like the way he made her feel about her gifts, like they were secrets she should keep to herself.
Unless he needed her help. Then it was just fine to talk to the Strangers and wear her masks. Then it was okie-dokie to walk along the edge of the Left-Hand Path her father was always warning her about.
“Your daddy loves us, Elsa. But he has to be careful.”
“Maybe he should live down here.” Elsa turned the bowl this way and that, trying to find a good place to start working. “There are more of us. We shouldn’t be all jumbled up together down here. We should stay in the big house.”
“It’s best this way.” Stevie brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Your father only wants what’s best for all of us.”
“I’m going to ask him to let us move up to the big house. We’re his family.”
“Don’t.” Stevie rubbed her arms, suddenly cold. “Leave it be.”
“Hmmph.” Elsa wasn’t one to disobey, but she decided then and there things had to change. Her daddy had a big house with enough rooms for all of them. He’d have to learn to get along with his family. He’d have to learn to let them do what came natural. She was proud of her daddy and what he did. Why couldn’t he be proud of her the same way?
She gouged an eye from the clay with her right thumb and flung the wet scrap onto the stone floor. The eye looked strange, a little out of place. She was good with eyes, and the simple mistake irritated her to no end. Elsa thought about smoothing the hole over and trying again, but she knew better. Once the mask began to take shape, it was dangerous to change it. You
might call one of the formless demons doing that.
One of the Strangers stood taller than the rest. It flowed toward her and hovered just at the edge of her sight.
“Do you like that?” Elsa’s voice took on a singsong lilt as she coaxed the shadow closer. “It’s a little funny, isn’t it?”
She took a deep breath. The air was cool in her nostrils, and had a strong, musky scent, like a wet dog. She shivered a little and went back to work. She dug her thumb into the clay and scooped out the second eye, then frowned at her work. This eye was even more out of place than the first. It was on the same side of the face as the first one and too high, way up on the forehead.
Elsa turned the mask this way and that, trying to figure out why her hands were playing tricks on her. No matter which way she turned the clay-covered bowl, it didn’t make any more sense. Elsa frowned and pushed her thumb into the clay again, a third hole for a third eye. The three divots made a tight triangle, their edges almost touching on the right side of the mask. The left side was still empty and smooth.
“Mama,” Elsa started to say, but her voice froze in her throat. Blood welled up in each of the three eyes, fusing them together into a single scarlet pool. The tall shadow leaned in over Elsa, and she could hear it sniffing her long hair. The cold fell on her like a cloak, heavy and thick.
“You you you can come live in my my my house.” The voice made her ears itch. It buzzed like a bee hive. “Your daddy daddy daddy is here.”
“You’re not supposed to talk until the mask is done,” Elsa said. Her words frosted the air as they left her mouth and sounded dead to her ears. She wanted to ask her mama if this was all right. Elsa looked for her mother, but her eyes felt fuzzy and weak. She couldn’t see anything except for the mask.
“We we we will be together,” the Stranger whispered. Elsa’s head throbbed. She thought of wings, a storm of wings, billowing up from some dark hole. “All of you you you and all of us us us.”
