by Sam Witt
The injured man screeched and hopped around the kitchen, firing his right-hand pistol wild three more times before the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.
The kids were screaming, flailing around in their panic, splashing blood all over the place. Joe couldn’t tell at a glance who was hurt and who was covered in someone else’s gore.
Joe’s hate turned to ice in his chest. He didn’t know if there was enough whiskey in the world to burn away the memory of the last few seconds. He’d have time to regret the whole mess later, but he had to finish what he’d come to do, first.
The Night Marshal charged the kitchen, shotgun clenched in his right first. The jerky man threw his empty pistol at Joe, who batted it out of the air with his left hand. Joe drove the shotgun’s stock up into the man’s solar plexus. The junkie fell to his knees, gasping for breath and crying. His jaws chattered, clattering his mouth full of cracked teeth together as shock set in. Blood ran out of his mutilated arm and pooled around his knees. “I didn’t want to, man. You gotta believe me.”
Joe grabbed the man by the front of his filthy wifebeater and hauled him back to his feet. “Who dealt with Walter?”
Tears ran from the man’s jaundiced eyes, the only water his greasy face had seen in a month. “I don’t know Walt. Sally fixes me up, man. I didn’t want no hassle for her while she was cookin’ up a new batch for us.”
Joe tossed the man aside, heard him scream as he fell onto his shredded arm. Past the kitchen Joe could see a little utility room on one side and a stairwell on the other. He headed for the stairs.
The Night Marshal paused to slam more shells into the shotgun. “Sally? If you’re up there, we need to talk, girl. Nobody else needs to get hurt.”
Joe crept up the stairs, shotgun out in front of him like a talisman against evil. He had no idea what was waiting for him upstairs. Might be a bunch of tweakers pissing their pants while they hid. Might be an army of methed-up psychos with machetes and machine guns. Only one way to find out.
He moved slow and low, back pressed tight to the left wall of the stairway. If anyone popped up at the top of the stairs and started blazing away, Joe wanted to give them as small a target as possible. Maybe he’d get lucky, for once, and not catch a bullet.
No one tried to shoot him. He reached the top of the stairs and found himself on a slim landing lined with four open doorways. The air was thick with a chemical haze, whether from someone cooking or a bunch of someone’s smoking meth, Joe didn’t have the experience to tell. He kept low and darted toward the first door.
The floor was lined with filthy, naked mattresses. Filthy, naked bodies, writhed against one another atop the mattresses. Splintered fingernails picked at oozing ulcers, blistered lips worked at sallow flesh. Everything was speckled with drops of blood and crusting puddles of pus. Pale-blue lighter flames hovered under glowing glass pipes. Joe really hoped Sally wasn’t in there, because he wanted no part of picking those freaks apart to find her.
He ducked past the first doorway and peeked into the second. The room was filled with an admirable assortment of acetone-streaked pressure cookers, propane burners, and enough glassware to populate every high school chemistry lab in Missouri. The windows were open and big box fans spewed vapor from the tops of bubbling flasks out into the air, but the stench in the room still made Joe want to hold his breath forever.
Looking through the maze of equipment, he could see that Bill or Sally or some other asshole had torn a hole in the wall between this room and the next one to turn two bedrooms into one big cookout. What Joe didn’t see was anyone doing the cooking. He left the lab and headed to the last door.
Joe hugged the wall next to the door and called through it. “Sally, you in there?”
“Yeah,” he heard a young woman’s voice answer. “Next batch ain’ ready yet.”
There was a bubbling noise coming from inside the room. Joe stole a quick glance inside. Someone had blacked out the windows, and the only light came from a red LED in the far corner. The bubbling noise started again, accompanied by a faint groant.
“Not here for your meth, Sally. You know Walter?”
“Sure,” Sally drawled from inside the room. Her voice was thick and languid, tired, loose. “He brings the pseudo.”
“What else was he bringing?” Joe couldn’t shake the feeling of doom that had stuck with him since he’d left the Lodge. The inside of his skull was painted with dead kids with shark-bite throats and skinny tweakers with arms made of tattooed hamburger. He’d be reliving this day for years.
She giggled, and the bubbling sound intensified. It sounded thick, organic. “Something special. But he didn’t come. Ah, fuck.”
Something inside the room tore. It sounded like a sheet of construction paper being cut with dull scissors, a rhythmic, raspy noise that made Joe’s skin crawl.
“I’m coming in, Sally.”
“Better not.” Sally giggled again. “Bill’s feeling kind of, you know, frisky.”
Joe slipped through the open door and swung the shotgun left to right. Nothing rushed him. Nothing moved. Downstairs, the kids had been reduced to quiet whimpering. The man with the hamburger arm had stopped making any noise at all.
“Who was Walt bringing his shit to, Sally?”
“Mmm,” she hummed deep in her throat. The bubbling intensified. She raised her voice. “Me and Bill. We cook it up, give it to the family.”
Joe rubbed his thumb around the rim of his badge, whispering a short prayer as he did so. Light, silver and clean, cut through the darkness like a scalpel through a slab of rancid butter. He moved deeper into the room, closer to Sally.
She had eyes the color of the morning sky, so blue they made Joe’s heart ache. Her pupils were shrunk down to pinpricks, but she only had two of them. She stared into the light without blinking. “Hey, man, that’s not cool.”
“Walter was bringing something else. The Kirshnir Marg. Little statue things, did you ever see —”
Something heavy slammed into Joe’s neck, just at the base of his skull. It shattered and gouged bloody furrows down the middle of his back. His vision swam, gray and blurry, and he landed on his knees. Liquid fire poured down his back, gnawing away at his cuts.
Jagged fingernails dug bloody crescents in Joe’s scalp as someone grabbed his hair. Whoever it was jerked his head back and forth, a terrier with a rat.
Joe threw himself backward, slamming his weight against the legs of his tormentor. A mass of wires and hose tangled around his shoulders and head. A high-pitched burbling screech came from behind him. Joe grabbed a handful of the mess around his shoulders and jerked it forward. Something hot and sticky spilled down the back of his neck.
“You’re hurting him,” Sally said, her emotionless voice falling strange on Joe’s ears.
The hand let go of Joe’s hair, and the Night Marshal got himself back onto his feet. A tall man was staggering around, jittering hands trying to push a hose back into a bloody hole in the side of his chest.
“You must be Bill,” Joe said and scrubbed a hand down over his stubbly chin.
Bill pushed the tube in, but it went in too deep and before he could back it out, Joe saw bloody sludge spurt into the translucent rubber.
“Nng,” Bill moaned. He couldn’t speak, because his lower jaw and tongue had been replaced with a collection of flexible plastic tubes and coiled wires that disappeared down the gaping hole of his throat. Other pipes ran out of him, ending in plastic bags filled with murky fluids or looping out of sight behind him.
Sally crawled over to Bill, but she was clumsy from drugs and whatever panic could penetrate her numbed brain. “I think you done killed him.”
Bill slumped down on his dingy bed. His hands were loose in his lap, catching the blood that fell from the torn holes where Joe had ripped out the tubes and wires. His left eye went wide as he glared at Joe, and three burning pupils flared in the dim room.
“There was an accident,” Sally said. She sat next to Bill a
nd patted his head. “Explosion. Bill was gonna die. Walter said he could get us help.”
“Who? Who was he working with?”
Sally gestured toward the lab. “Cookin’ meth’s dangerous, you know? We got propane and acetone and all kinds of shit in there.”
“Just tell me who he was working with. I’ll go get them. They can help him again.” Joe didn’t care if they could patch Bill back together or not, but he hoped Sally would be dumb enough to tell him who they were working with. It’d make his job a lot simpler.
“You done this. They said you would. Said you didn’t give a shit about any of us.”
“That’s not true. What they’re doing is wrong. It’s evil. I’m trying to help.”
“Help? Shit. They fixed Bill when we was sure he was gonna die. Now you gone and killed him.”
Joe’s neck ached from the glassware Bill had smashed against it. He was so tired. He pulled on the supernatural strength that was his by right, but it was like trying to suck ice cream through a straw. His forehead itched with a sudden phantom pain, and he turned his attention back to the tweakers.
“Help me stop them, before it’s too late.”
“Already too late. They was right about you, I guess.” Sally kissed Bill on the side of his bloody face. “It’ll only hurt for a little bit, baby.”
Bill nodded.
“Help me put an end to this. No one else needs to get hurt.” Joe felt everything sliding away from him. He needed Sally to talk to him, but he didn’t have any way to make it happen. She was so far gone now she had nothing left to fear. Joe had taken away the only person she’d ever really cared about.
“Ain’ nobody gonna help you, Marshal. Not now.”
There was a small hiss and a pop. Sally’s left hand flashed through the air, and something shot at Joe’s head.
He ducked low, letting the little butane torch fly past. Joe watched the brilliant blue flame twirl through the air, sailing through the rough door someone had hacked through the wall between Bill’s bedroom and his meth lab.
“Fuck you,” Sally whispered as something in the lab caught fire. Orange flames flared red and began to spread.
“Fuck me,” Joe agreed. The Night Marshal ran.
CHAPTER 34
STEVIE APPROACHED HER children with slow, careful steps. The floor was littered with mutilated bat carcasses, torn wings, rib cages yawning open liked hungry jaws. Stevie felt a heavy, damp pressure on her skin, as if all of the blood spilled in this room still hung in the air. She brushed the skins and bones and blood-soaked sheets away from Alasdair with the edge of her foot.
Al took long, slow breaths, his ribs expanding, spreading open the wounds that dotted his sides and back, to reveal their rich, red interiors. His muscles jumped under his skin like a dreaming dog’s, and his breaths took on a ragged, growling edge.
She squatted an arm’s length from Al and stretched her hand toward her son. She brushed his ankle, and his skin was cold and sticky under her fingertips. Stevie pushed against her boy, jostling his legs in the hopes it would wake him. He didn’t stir.
Weight settled into Stevie’s chest, crushing her breaths, slowing her blood. She crawled to Elsa and wrapped her arms around the little girl. Stevie untangled her children and stood with Elsa held tight to her chest. “Mama,” Elsa said and buried her face against Stevie’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, let me get you out of here, get you some fresh air.” Stevie walked as she whispered to her daughter.
She was almost to the bedroom door when it slammed in her face.
Al groaned behind her, a thick, animal sound heavy with fatigue.
Stevie closed her fist around the door knob and gave it a twist, but the door wouldn’t budge.
“Al,” she raised her voice. “Get up.”
Elsa stirred against her mother. Her tiny hands shoved against Stevie’s chest, and she kicked. “Let me go.”
Stevie hugged her daughter tighter and backed away from the door. She leaned against the foot of Joe’s big bed and turned Elsa so she could see her face. The little girl’s brows were furrowed, but her eyes were still clamped shut with welling tears in their corners.
“Let me go,” the little girl begged, but there were other voices within and below her own. A humming hive of insect noises. The sound poured like ice down Stevie’s spine.
“Mom?” Al crawled to the edge of the bed. Moving caused fresh blood to leak from his wounds, and red tears trickled down his arms and thighs. He wrapped his bleeding arms around his mother and sister, curled up onto the bed around them. “What’s happening?
The torn bat wings fluttered up from the floor in shredded pairs, hovering around the huddled family like blood-dripping harlequin masks.
“They need room,” Elsa gasped the words and they were hers alone. “There isn’t room for us all in here. Help me make room.”
Stevie slapped Elsa’s cheeks. “Let go,” she commanded, her voice heavy with the authority she’d inherited from the Bog Witch. “Release her, spirits, and return to your rightful places.”
Elsa’s jaw fell open and dozens of voices rose out of her like echoes from the depths of a well.
We
The bat-wing masks fluttered in the air and loomed ever closer.
Shall
The discarded and dripping sheets shredded into bloody strands that wound themselves into cords and cracked the air like whips.
Not
Bones worked free from bat carcasses and spun around the perimeter of the room like a wall of churning needles.
Stevie pressed her index and middle fingers onto Elsa’s tongue, pulled her hanging jaw open, and peered down the little girl’s throat. She could see the shadows churning deep inside her daughter. Countless restless spirits had taken root within Elsa, and they were not willing to leave. The sheer number of greedy ghosts threatened to displace the little girl’s spirit. Without a body to anchor her, she would fall away and fade from the Earth long before her proper time.
“You will leave my daughter of your own will,” Stevie pushed Al back to make room and laid Elsa down on the bed with her head pointing to the east. “Or you shall be torn loose and cast asunder.”
The disembodied wings swooped in closer to Stevie, clinging to her face and hands. She pulled them away, and Al helped her. He plucked the bloody scraps from her and tore them into bloody clumps that he threw to the floor.
We shall not.
Their words were a rebuke of Stevie’s power, a denial of her birthright. She would not stand for their rebellion. She was the Bog Witch, the daughter of the night, get of the mad Goat King, and her power would not be denied by the restless dead.
Stevie straddled Elsa and held her hands before the girl’s mouth and nose. Old words, an exorcism ancient when the church was still little more than a man and his rabble-rousing friends, rumbled in her chest like grinding rocks and pulled the first of the tormented ghosts out of Elsa.
The spirit rose from the little girl’s mouth in a gout of black smoke. Stevie seized it with hooked fingers. It was like grabbing the business end of a running belt sander. Stevie’s fingertips stung as the surface layer of her skin was stripped away. She unleashed a word of subduing that cracked the corners of her mouth into a bloody grin, and the spirit throbbed and went limp in her clutches. Stevie reeled it out of Elsa like a knotted black thread, slow and careful.
This is what she had always been meant to do. It was her birthright to command the dead. Stevie bent her will to the task and felt her power rising to the challenge. The smoke stretched between Elsa and Stevie, growing thinner as the last of it was pulled from the girl. With a quick flick of her wrist, Stevie had the thing free of Elsa and wrapped into a tight ball of shadows writhing between her palms.
Elsa coughed and hitched under her mother. Blood sprayed Stevie’s face, a hot mist that clung to her eyes and tasted like tears on her lips. Another cough, and more of Elsa’s blood misted into the air.
We will kill
her.
The spirits’ words throbbed through the room like the voice of thunder.
If you drive us out, she will join our number and fall to ruin with us.
Stevie crushed the ball of smoke between her palms, forcing it down and in until it was no bigger than a marble. Her eyes were hot with unspilled tears. For all her power, the spirits inside her daughter had more tricks than she had believed. “You’re already killing her,” she choked. “There isn’t room in there for all of you and her. Just leave her in peace.”
There is no peace. The shadows hunger. We are their prey.
Elsa’s body convulsed, and blood bubbled up into her mouth and trickled over her lips. Stevie turned the girl’s head to the side to keep her from choking on her own blood. Elsa’s skin was pale, her pulse a trip hammer beat pushing at the side of her neck.
Stevie could feel the spirits inside her daughter, tearing at her, stretching her soul. She could pull them out of her daughter, but they would kill Elsa before the task was complete. Her shoulders slumped, and her clenched fists shook with fear and rage.
“Tell me what you want.” Stevie shouted to be heard over the growing tide of murmuring voices. Her ears rang with the throng of confused voices that filled Joe’s bedroom. It was like standing in a crowd of the fearful and blind, each person crying out, all trying to find that one person they knew, that one warm body they could cling to. “What can I do to save my daughter?”
Help us. Hide us from the Haunter in the Darkness. Shield us from the half-made girls and their terrible hunger.
“Tell me how. Show me the way to save you. Don’t kill my baby.” Stevie’s voice cracked and sounded all the louder in the sudden silence. The whirling wall of bones fell to the floor. The sheets wound themselves into a tight ball and hovered in the center of the room. The masks gathered around it.
The Long Man knows. Go to him.
Stevie shook her head. “I can’t. You don’t understand what he is.“
