by Sam Witt
The phone buzzed in his pocket. Joe flopped into the driver’s seat and dug the phone out. He stared at the white squares, and his head ached. He didn’t know much about these phones, but he did know he couldn’t just keep jabbing random numbers into the passcode. Even if he had time for that kind of shit, which he didn’t, the phone would lock him out after three or four failed attempts. He looked around the inside of the cab, hoping something would show him the answer.
The phone buzzed again. He remembered Walter sitting next to him, screaming, scrabbling at the window. His index finger jabbing at the blood coating it. Joe looked at the window. In the smears, he could make out what looked like a pattern of smeared dots. He tried what he thought he saw, punching in 4589.
The red bar flashed. The phone buzzed again.
Joe stared at the bloody smears. Maybe it wasn’t a five. He punched in 4289 and the passcode screen disappeared.
A phone number flashed on the screen, with red and green buttons below it. Joe punched the green button with his finger and pressed the phone to his ear.
“Ah, Jonah.” The Long Man’s voice was half laugh, half sob. “So glad you were able to figure out modern technology.”
“How did you get this number?” Joe’s head throbbed. He didn’t have time for this. He had the phone unlocked, and now he just needed to start working through the numbers in it.
“You don’t sound pleased to hear from me.” There was a long, liquid noise from the other end of the line, as if someone were taking a deep drink from a tall glass. “I need you to come up to the Lodge.”
“I don’t have time to go all the way up there. I’m working.”
“You think I don’t know that?” The Long Man’s laughter reminded Joe of a bucket of glass thrown down a stairwell. “You need to make time for this. We have much to discuss.”
“No.” Joe felt a tingle of fear as the rebellious word left his lips. But he didn’t have time, he had things to do. The second half-made girl’s threat hung heavy around his neck. He didn’t know what it meant, exactly, but he wanted this wrapped up and buried before anything worse happened. “I can’t do it now. After this is finished, then we can talk.”
“Jonah. I am not assured there will be an after.” Rage crackled down the line, and Joe felt it like a slap across his face. “Come to the Lodge. Now.”
The Night Marshal felt the command tighten around his neck like a noose. He’d gone years without the leash being yanked, and the reminder of the Long Man’s power was unnerving. He couldn’t catch his breath, his heart raced. Worse, he felt weak, puny. His injuries no longer seemed like annoyances, but life-threatening wounds.
“I’m on my way,” he said through gritted teeth. The pressure around his throat tightened the slightest bit, then the oppressive weight of the Long Man’s displeasure was gone.
“Good.” The line went dead.
Jonah spent a few minutes cleaning up the worst of the blood and securing Walter’s body in the pickup’s bed. He made sure the boxes were still in the cooler, then tucked it in behind Walter’s corpse where it wouldn’t flop around too much. He had a feeling the Long Man was going to want to see those.
CHAPTER 31
STEVIE PRESSED HER palms to her wounded throat, but the blood continued to spill. She watched it dribble onto her feet, staining her toenails red while her head rang with a feedback whine. She tried to calm down, slow her breathing, settle her thundering heart. She could fix this, she just had to give herself time to remember the words.
Something hammered at the walls inside the house with a hundred fists. Stevie blinked away the fog gathering over her eyes and straightened up. Her babies needed her, she couldn’t leave them alone with whatever was making all that racket. She just had to remember the words.
“Been under that man’s thumb too long, girl.” The Bog Witch’s voice was strong and firm. “All I taught ye blown away like dust afore the wind of his blatherin’.”
“No, Mama.” Stevie shook her head and winced as jagged hooks of pain sliced their way out of the wound on her neck. “I’m hurt. Just need to think a second.”
“Go on, then. Not like I ken stop yer thinkin’.”
Stevie tried to ignore her mother and focus on her injury. The blood on her hands reminded her of moonless nights spent in the swamp calling to the spirits and bending them to her will. It was long ago, but the words were still there, still waiting for her to whisper and claim their power. All that stood between her and that ancient strength was a promise she’d made to the only man she’d ever loved.
“Your man know ‘bout that?” The Bog Witch was in Stevie’s ear. “Blood magic strikes me as well along the Left-Hand Path.”
“Not the same,” but Stevie couldn’t help but wonder. Was it the same? What would answer her call when she offered up her blood? What would she let into the world in exchange for sealing the hole in her neck? “It’s not.”
“We’ll see,” the words boiled with laughter.
“We will.” But Stevie didn’t say the words. They were right there, burning like stomach juices in the back of her throat, but she wouldn’t let them out.
“Better get to it, yer babies need yer help.” She stroked her daughter’s hair, a careful, wistful touch that lodged in Stevie’s guts like a fishing hook. “If ye ken still help ‘em.”
Stevie hooked her hands into talons, index fingers and thumbs tracing eccentric orbits in the air. She’d break her promise, but Joe would understand. He had to understand she couldn’t leave her babies alone with the darkness. Stevie let the first word fall from her lips, and it struck the palm of her left hand along with a droplet of blood from her torn throat.
The air hissed as the fabric of her world grew thin and frayed.
“Don’t have to stop with yer throat.”
Stevie let the next word fall. The blood in her hand boiled, red vapor rising from its bubbling surface. Black veins shot through her vision, cracks in reality that thudded with a tripartite heartbeat that squeezed Stevie’s throat in its grasp.
“Whatever’s in yer house, ye think yer babies ken stop it?”
She raised her hand to the sky and let her head fall back. The sun pulsed purple, and Stevie saw flashes of the spirit answering her call. Long limbs, crooked and warped like lightning-blasted trees. Eyes that shed an oily radiance that clung to everything they saw. A hand like a scorpion’s pincer fastened around her neck, holding the blood.
“Let it go, girl. Earn my name.” Grave-cold hands settled on Stevie’s shoulders, rubbed her muscles with a mother’s familiarity. “Make them pay for what they done.”
The last word gushed from Stevie and painted the world black. For one moment there was no air, no life, only the darkness of the enslaved spirit that dissolved her damaged flesh and stitched it back together strange and fresh.
Thirteen enormous eyes shone through the blackness, and the grip around Stevie’s throat faded away. She could feel the monstrosity leashed to her will, waiting for her to guide it. She felt the words ready to spill forth, a simple command that would send the specter raging into the house, ready to destroy anything that threatened Stevie or her family.
“This is who ye are, girl. This is what yer meant to be.”
Stevie bowed her head and brushed her palms together, scattering flakes of dried blood. The empty blackness gave way to the warm yellow sun, and she felt her mother’s presence wane.
“I can’t kill my way out of this, Mama. Death don’t solve nothin’.” Stevie felt her old accent coming back, poking through the layers hard-fought education. When push came to shove, she was who she was.
“Someone oughter tell yer man that.”
“Someone should have told you that.” Stevie limped to the back door and left her mother’s shade behind, staring holes in her back.
She came in through the back door into a kitchen in shambles. The table was covered with gouges and slivers of glass. Blood splattered the cabinets and ceiling, while weird, inky st
ains writhed on the floor to form a shifting pattern of shadowed glyphs.
The blood called to her heart, which thumped in panicked sympathy. This was the blood of her children, spilled in her house. The fear fell into her stomach like a spear of ice, pinning her feet fast to the floor. She listened for sounds of life, of conflict, for anything other than the tidal thunder of her pulse pounding against her eardrums. She heard nothing.
The crackling memory of her mother’s words haunted Stevie. Should she have unleashed the broken spirit she had called to heal her throat? Would it have made a difference if she had embraced the dark lessons she had learned at her mother’s knee and turned her hoodoo against these intruders? Had her fear of Joe, her terror of calling down his Night Law, stayed her hand when she most needed her power to protect her children?
Stevie pushed the fear back and followed the trail of blood and wreckage out of the kitchen and into the hall. The sigils on the floor were angular spikes of dread that hooked her attention with every step she took. They were words she recognized from the Black Book in her mama’s house, the symbols for broken spines and shattered dreams, threats and promises of a dark day to come.
“Not in my house,” she whispered to herself, “not while I still breathe.”
The blood led to the stairs, and Stevie climbed against the weight of dread clinging to her heart. The silence made her fear the worst; if her children were still alive, then they would be fighting the shadow. Al would roar, Elsa would shriek her anger at the intrusion. But silence could mean anything. In that moment, her children were many things. They were huddled together, exhausted, but victorious. They were taken. They were bleeding out onto the floor. They were defeated and dead.
From the top of the stairs she could see the door to Joe’s room. It hung from the hinges in three pieces, torn apart by blows that had smashed chunks of the heavy wood into splinters. The doorway was framed with more symbols, a tapestry of alien threats and dire prophecy. Stevie looked at them a second too long and found herself kneeling in the hall with her head down, vomit pouring out of her in sour torrents.
She clenched her teeth against the nausea, demanded her body rise. She got to her feet and walked ahead.
The door was slathered with blood, bright and red and wet. Stevie moved the ragged sections of the door aside, careful to keep her hands away from the spilled blood. Her senses were still acute from the magic she’d worked and touching blood now might trigger dark work she’d later regret.
She froze just inside the room, eyes wide.
The bed was smashed, the big posts at its corners torn free and smashed against the walls and left broken on the floor. The bedclothes were soaked red and stained black. The sodden sheets moved through the air in a sinuous pattern, airborne serpents that wove around one another to form a sphere of gliding, gore-laden ribbons.
In the center of the sphere sat Elsa, her face hidden behind a mask wreathed by shifting shadows, head bowed over her brother’s still form. Alasdair lay curled on the floor before his sister, his skin studded with shards of broken glass and striped with raw, red wounds. His head was in his sister’s lap, and Elsa stroked his gore-matted hair with the back of one hand.
Stevie waited in the doorway, afraid to move. She held her breath and prayed for Al to be alive, for Elsa to be unharmed.
“Baby?” she whispered.
Elsa’s head turned toward the door like a wind-up toy with broken gears, jerking to one side, then slipping back to the other. The shadows parted, and Stevie could see streaks of blood on her daughter’s mask, crimson lines leaking from the cavernous eyeholes.
“Mama, I’m tired,” Elsa said and her mask cracked in half. She collapsed over her brother, and the bloodstained sheets fell from the air to cover them both.
CHAPTER 32
CROUCHED ATOP A wide hill overlooking the old Ratliff Cemetery, the Lodge looked as if it had fallen into the future from the Dark Ages. Its tall, white stone walls were topped with barbed spikes and pierced by a single iron-clad gate of black wood. The gate swung open on silent hinges to swallow Joe’s battered old pickup. Sleek, black cameras with bulging lenses tracked the vehicle, swiveling atop the walls as the truck breached the walls.
Joe drove down the long, thin ribbon of blacktop between the gate and the main house. Black oak trees grew up on either side of the drive and tangled their long branches overhead to block out the sun. The shadows deepened, and Joe tried to shake off the heaviness that settled onto his shoulders. The closer he got to the Lodge, the smaller he felt, like a little boy bringing a willow switch to his angry father. Outside the walls, Joe was a man to be feared and respected. In here, he was just the hired help.
The dogs met him where the trees ended. The shadow-black mastiffs stood four feet tall at the shoulder and ran with the tireless, loping gait of pack predators. Five of them escorted the truck up to the house. They sat on the steps leading to the front door, long red tongues hanging from jaws that could close over a man’s head without their teeth touching him. Joe killed the truck. The dogs stared at him with bottomless black eyes, enormous teeth bared in vicious snarls.
“Well, that’s new.” Joe drummed his fingers on the truck’s steering wheel. He thought about getting out of the truck and just walking past the pack, but their malevolent stares gave him pause. He waited, and the dogs glared, and the clock on the dash ticked away a quarter of an hour.
The Lodge door opened at last, and the dogs stood and backed away from Joe, watching him with deep hostility as they slipped inside. The Long Man appeared in the doorway after the last of the dogs had vanished, his thin face a pale blot against the velvet dark of the shadows. He beckoned with one gaunt hand for the Night Marshal to join him inside. Joe left the shotgun after a long, sad look and hauled his tired body out of the truck. Under the Long Man’s watchful eye, Joe’s walk to the front door felt like it took half the day. His dread grew stronger with every step. He respected his boss, even admired him in some ways, but he knew enough to fear the man.
The Long Man closed the door behind Joe and gestured toward the sitting room at the end of the long, tall foyer. Joe tried not to look through the doorways they passed, but the scents and sounds kept dragging his attention through the shadowed portals. Something white and moist fell from the wall of one room and flopped on the floor like a decapitated copperhead. Another chamber stank of rot and stale sweat, and Joe caught the briefest glimpse of a young woman dancing with some sort of scaled squid.
“Eyes ahead, Jonah.” The Long Man laughed at Joe’s discomfort and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “You have been here often enough to know that much.”
Joe grunted at that and let himself be led into the sitting room in which the Long Man held their meetings. The Night Marshal crossed the room to the low bar against the far wall and poured himself a heavy glass of the good stuff. He raised the tumbler of amber heaven toward his lips, but it never made it to his mouth.
The Long Man held the glass Joe had poured in his own hand, across the room. He raised the tumbler in a mocking toast. “Let’s hold the drinks for a bit.”
Aggravated at having his liquor swiped, Joe flopped down on the overstuffed horsehair sofa in front of the bar and drummed his fingertips on his knees. The Long Man hunkered down in his customary chair, a strange contraption of bent wood and copper struts held together with knots of barbed wire and cured deer tendons. The chair looked more like a torture device than a seat, but the Long Man sat in it as if it were a plush throne.
Joe tried to get a handle on the conversation before it ate up his whole afternoon. “I can’t stay long. What can I do for you?”
The Long Man leaned back in his chair and drained the glass of whiskey in a single slow draw. He rolled his hand around his wrist, and the glass was gone. He seemed to be stalling, trying to put his words in order before he let them carry his thoughts out into the world.
“How are you feeling?”
“You mean aside from being almost killed
last night and digging a pack of demon bats out of a junkie today? I reckon I feel fine.”
His boss stared at him over steepled fingers, eyes measuring, probing. “Something seems different. Perhaps it is just the ordeal.”
Joe shrugged. He couldn’t deny the Long Man’s analysis. He felt different, stretched thin and frayed at the edges. Fear for his family, anger at the people he was trying to protect, it was all crowded in his thoughts.
“It has been a tough couple of days. Imagine it’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
The Long Man nodded. “I heard you’ve been rousting the locals. Vigorously.”
“I’ve been investigating an issue within the purview of my office.” Joe wished he had a drink. He’d take a beer, at this point, as long as he could drink it fast. His hands were shaking, and sweat pooled at the base of his spine. He kept his words formal, hoping he could mask the bloody reality with careful grammar. “Some of the offenders became violent. There were unavoidable altercations.”
The Long Man’s laugh cracked the air in the room and made Joe’s testicles crawl up into his gut. He tried not to look at his boss when he laughed. There was something canine about the man’s face, the way it sloped down to his nose and receded back from his chin. It didn’t help that the Long Man lived up to his name, seeming to stretch out and up at the edges of a man’s vision. All of the rooms in the Lodge had fifteen-foot ceilings, and Joe swore the man’s head scraped them from time to time.
“The way I hear it, everyone you talked to about this mess has ended up dead. And by dead, I mean that you have killed them.”
“They were cultists.” Joe clenched his hands in his lap to keep them from trembling. “Fanatics are hard to reason with.”
