by Sam Witt
“They don’t know,” Joe started, but the click of the pistol’s hammer drawing back shut him off.
“This is your last chance. Walk down the hill. Get in your shitty truck. Collect your family.”
The weight of the pistol pressed Joe’s head down to the porch’s boards. Someone tore Joe’s badge from where it was pinned to his shirt.
Dan’s voice was heavy with a bone-deep weariness that chilled Joe.
“And get the fuck out of my county.”
CHAPTER 40
DAN KEPT THE gun pressed to the back of Joe’s head while his deputies stripped away the Night Marshal’s weapon. He felt Joe tense as the shotgun was taken and pressed the pistol down harder. When one of the deputies tore Joe’s badge off his shirt, Dan thought the Night Marshal was going to come right out of his skin. “Don’t give me a reason.”
“You’re going to have a reason before this is over.” Joe growled the words through gritted teeth. His stomach churned and grumbled, his back ached from the awkward posture he was forced into. The pain was nothing compared to his anger and embarrassment at falling into this trap.
Someone patted Joe down, slapping his sides and checking the waistband of his pants and tops of his boots for weapons. “Clean.”
Dan nudged Joe with the pistol. “Get up. Easy.”
They let Joe go, and his arms flopped down, tingling from the strain placed on them and lack of circulation. It took him most of a minute to get his feet under him and his knees up off the warped, moldy boards of the back porch. The whole time he could feel the ring of steel pressed against his head, an itching, burning reminder of the fleeting, frail nature of life. How many times had he been on the other end of the equation, the one squeezing the trigger?
Dan pushed Joe’s head to the side, steering him toward the porch’s steps. “That’s right. One foot after the other. Don’t do anything sudden, or the crows’ll be eating your brains out of the grass come morning.”
Joe grunted and let himself be led across the hill. He looked away from the blazing lights, focused on the blackness on the edges of the hill. The gun’s barrel bit into the side of his head as Dan’s foot found an old gopher hole. For one moment, Joe was sure that his skull was about to be blown open. “You want to watch where you’re walking, asshole? You kill me because you’re too fucking stupid to walk, and I’ll haunt you until the end of days.”
Dan didn’t say a word, but he pulled the gun a bit away from Joe’s head and took a handful of deep, steadying breaths before he started walking again.
At the edge of the hill, away from the headlights and out of sight from the people behind them, Dan said, “All right. Get out of here.”
Joe nodded, felt his hair brush against the barrel of Dan’s pistol. “Hey, Dan?”
“Yeah?”
“You remember what I said at Red Oak?”
“I don’t -“
Joe ducked under the pistol and spun around to face Dan, driving his fist up into the sheriff’s solar plexus. Dan doubled over and gagged on the pain, pistol flopping uselessly in his right hand. Joe wrested the weapon away so hard Dan’s knuckles cracked like a pan of popcorn over a campfire.
Dan stared up at Joe, eyes watering, wind rushing in and out of his nostrils as he struggled to get his breath back. His own pistol stared back at him, a blind black eye rimmed in steel. “Go ahead,” he rasped. “I know you want to.”
Joe’s finger was heavy on the trigger. Dan had betrayed him, sold the Night Marshal out for spook promises of something better. For a moment, Joe stared over the sheriff’s head at the yellow glow of headlights up the hill. Those people thought they wanted him gone. Thought they knew what they were getting into with those half-made girls and the crazy old women who called them. He should just kill the sheriff, get in his truck, gather up his family, and get the fuck out of Dodge before another day could dawn on this cursed place. Just one little squeeze, and he would end one life and start another.
It would be so easy.
Joe tapped the tip of Dan’s nose with the pistol, then raised the barrel toward the sky. “Guess we know who’s faster.”
With practiced ease, Joe popped the clip from the pistol and ejected the bullets from the metal sleeve with quick flicks of his thumb.
Dan watched the bullets disappear into the darkness, eyes wide. “Why?”
Joe whipped his arm away from the Blackbriar place and sent the empty clip winging into the darkness down the hill. “You’re a dumbass, but I don’t think you’ve been dabbling in black magic. Have you?”
“No.” Dan gulped a relieved breath. “Things have changed. You have to understand —”
Joe threw the pistol. It hit Dan in the middle of his face, then landed on the grass at his feet.
The sheriff staggered back, holding his bleeding nose with both hands. He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, but he couldn’t get the words out.
Joe felt a mixture of pity and disgust well up in his chest. He was too tired and too angry to keep on like this.
“Joe, I - “
“Get the fuck out of my sight.” Joe shook his head, turned, and walked down the hill. He heard Dan running, fat feet tromping through the grass and underbrush. Heading back up to the Blackbriar place and whatever craziness they were up to.
“Why are we always cursed with such goddamned cowards for sheriffs?” The old man’s voice scraped at Joe’s ears like gravel under a tractor’s tires.
Joe went down the hill, slow and cautious. It had been hell climbing up when there was still some sun in the sky, going down it in the black of night was close to suicide. “Because this whole county is cursed with bad men and broken women. Keep waiting for a sinkhole to open up and suck all the rot straight down to hell.”
The old man laughed at that, a sound that raised goosebumps on the backs of Joe’s arms. “Not for you to judge, Son.”
Joe didn’t take the bait; he wasn’t in the mood to discuss the finer points of the Night Marshal’s responsibilities with his dead father just then. Instead, he concentrated on picking his way down the hill, using the distraction to keep the bad thoughts out of his head.
“Not like you could have stopped this.”
Where his badge had once rested, Joe’s chest felt chilled straight through, as if his heart was open to the night air. “People tell me you could have.”
“Since when did you give a shit what people had to say?”
A green branch sprang loose and smacked Joe across the forehead as he tried to push his way past a looming maple. Joe touched his head, and his fingertips came away smeared moist with blood. “Fuck. I don’t care. But I wonder.”
Something settled on Joe’s shoulder, a falling leaf, maybe. Or a dead man’s hand. He didn’t look to find out which.
“One of us still has a pulse, so I guess whatever you’re doing worked better than what I done. Maybe you can still turn this around.” Then the slight weight on his shoulder was gone, and Joe knew he was alone.
The hill tried to kill him a few more times as he walked down it, rolling rotted logs down after his steps, putting ankle-breaking mole tunnels in his path. Joe made his way around it all, but every near-miss made him wonder if it was worth the effort. By the time he reached his truck, he’d made up his mind.
If the bat fuckers wanted Pitchfork, they could have it. He was done. Let the Long Man find another sucker to ride herd over addicts who couldn’t smell danger when it was shitting on their foreheads.
He slipped behind the wheel of the truck and cranked the engine to life. It was still hours to daylight. He’d go home, gather up his family and whatever they could carry, then get out on the highway. By dawn, this shithole would be behind them all. It was someone else’s problem now. Joe was too tired, too goddamned angry for this job.
The truck rumbled its agreement and lurched out onto the old road, heading for home.
CHAPTER 41
STEVIE FOLLOWED THE Long Man through the Lodge’s
shadowed entry hall, Elsa draped over her shoulder. From the arched doorways on either side, Stevie could hear anguished whines, gristly popping noises, sibilant murmurs. The noises tugged at her curiosity, urged her to look through those gaping arches, just get a gander at all the eldritch delights that awaited her. Instead, she kept her eyes locked on the Long Man’s heels and followed as close behind him as she dared. Stevie didn’t know what lurked beyond the Lodge’s yawning doorways, but she recognized the oily touch of malignant spirits and refused to give them a foothold in her mind. Just being in this place put her perilously near to the line she’d sworn never to cross.
The Long Man swept his arm across an ornate coffee table, casting a stack of enormous books onto the floor in a jumble of torn pages and bent spines. He repositioned the table near the fire place and tapped its polished wooden surface. “Here,” he said. “Please.”
Stevie knelt next to the low table and eased Elsa from her shoulder. The girl convulsed as she touched the coffee table, jackknifing her head up to her knees. Inky vapors leaked from Elsa’s nostrils and drooled from her mouth to form a slow-moving cloud in front of her face. Stevie reached to wave it away, but the Long Man’s fingers closed around her wrist.
“That’s enough for now. Let me see what I can do.”
She nodded and let the Long Man help her up. He took her place next to Elsa and Stevie drifted away, shuffling in an aimless orbit around the room. She stopped at the bar against the far wall and caressed a decanter of amber liquor. The memory of her husband’s fingers touched her back, their rough tips brushing against the smooth surface of her palm. She imagined him lifting the bottle to his mouth and thought of taking a swig, if only to feel her husband’s lips against her own.
Stevie left the decanter and shuffled along the wall back toward the fireplace. Sometimes she envied Joe’s vices, his ability to dive into a bottle and blot out the pain, the memory of what he’d done. Times like this, she wished she could drink away her fears, but the risk was far too great. Stevie’s skeletons were unquiet things, lurking in the shadows, waiting for her to lose control so they could come clattering after her.
The Long Man stood, and his shadow stretched out to block Stevie from the fire. She felt the cold of places she’d never seen, the cold of places men were never meant to walk. “I believe we can save her.”
Stevie sagged against the wall, the words of relief tinged with a hidden threat. She waited for the Long Man to tell her the price of her daughter’s life. “What do you need me to do?”
“She’s infested. There’s no other word for it. The spirits within her are vermin. Broken creatures wounded by something they fear too much to articulate. They’re terrified to leave their host and willingly seek an eternal rest.” The Long Man reached onto the mantle and withdrew a small crystalline sphere from a rack that held twelve others just like it. “Something drove them to this dire place, and they will not leave without a struggle.”
Something growled in the hallway, a guttural, choking sound that set Stevie’s hackles on end. The house was filled with presences, forces that threatened and cajoled Stevie with whispers she could only half hear. She shut them out and turned her eyes to the Long Man. “Just tell me what I have to do.”
“I can extract these creatures from your daughter without harming her, but it will require all of my concentration.” The Long Man licked his lips, and an icy gleam flared in his left eye. “I will need you to bind them into these vessels for me.”
A cold stone settled on the hope in Stevie’s heart, trapping her breath in her throat. This was the magic she’d left behind, the old powers she’d strove so hard to bury and forget. A hot tear welled at the corner of her eye and ran down her cheek. Joe would hate this. Binding spirits was what he’d killed the Bog Witch for, it was Left-Hand Path sorcery of the darkest sort. She had promised her husband, swore to him, to never again draw on that forbidden power.
“Free them,” she whispered. “Set them loose and let them do as they will.”
“They aren’t ghosts. They’re fragments, parasites. If we let them free, they’ll come back to Elsa at once. They’re bound to her, becoming part of her, even after such a short time.”
Stevie took slow steps back to the bar. She poured the liquor into a shot glass, smelled it, felt its fumes burning the back of her throat. “Joe will kill me.”
“There’s no reason for him to know. Elsa’s mind is down deep in her own dreams. There’s only you and I in this room to know what you’ve done to save your daughter.” The Long Man flicked his fingers, and the shot glass appeared in his hand. He threw the whiskey down his throat. “Decide. The night is dwindling, and we have much work to do by dawn if we are to save her life.”
Stevie’s mouth was dry. She wanted a drink. It wasn’t as simple as the Long Man said. Joe would smell the Left-Hand Path on her, the brimstone would cling to her skin and hair like another man’s cologne. If she broke her promise, Joe would know. If she didn’t, Elsa would die.
She reached up to her throat and undid the necklace she’d worn since the day her mother died. The little silver cross felt slight, a splinter, a fragment of something much larger that the years had worn down to nothing. A battered blue cooler sat on the floor next to the bar, a commonplace object that looked alien in these surroundings. Stevie laid her necklace on top of it and rolled her shoulders as if relieved of a burden she’d forgotten she’d been carrying. “He’ll hate us both for this.”
“How much more will he hate us if we let her die?”
Stevie closed her eyes and let a single tear fall. A cold wind blew across the back of her neck. She smelled the rich, rotting perfume of the swamp. She breathed in deep and pretended she didn’t hear her mother laughing.
The Bog Witch’s daughter took the crystal sphere from the Long Man’s hand and gazed into its depths with shadowed eyes.
“You’re sure?” He didn’t look at her when he asked the question, but his voice seemed eager, hurried.
“Do your part.” Stevie’s fingers played over the ball, feeling its cold skin, the way it settled into her palm like the hand of an old friend dug up at last. “I know how to do mine.”
CHAPTER 42
JOE WAS ALREADY on his way across his porch before he realized the Rambler was missing from its usual parking spot. He looked at the stars and moon, figured it was well on toward morning, and wondered where the hell his wife had gotten off to. Joe peeked through the windows from the porch, but the gossamer curtains Stevie had strung up in the front room made it look like there was a convention of ghosts in there. He grumbled and pushed his key into the lock.
The door swung open before he could turn the key, and the nostril-scorching stench of bat guano slapped Joe in the face. “Motherfuckers,” he growled and slipped into the front room.
A wheelbarrow load of batshit dominated the floor. Oily black stains led away from it, crawling up the walls to the ceiling. Joe froze and held his breath, listening for intruders. When he heard only silence, he reached out and flicked the light switch next to the door. Nothing happened.
Joe crossed the floor, careful not to step in the shit, and he heard something crunch underfoot. Glass. The assholes had broken all of the light bulbs. “Poor winners,” Joe said and made his way into the kitchen.
Broken glass shone in the moonlight while dried blood stained the table and floor deep black. Joe stepped around the blood and swept the glass out of his path with the side of his boot. He looked out the kitchen window and saw the corpse of the freak from the Pryor place, scorched coveralls coated in a sheen of melted fat in the moonlight. “Knew I should’ve cut off your fucking head when I had the chance.”
Joe followed the trail of blood out of the kitchen and up the stairs. He felt his chest tighten as the dribs and drabs of blood turned into a steady line, then into wide splashes. By the time he got to his bedroom door, Joe felt as if someone had wrapped his heart in barbed wire. The door was closed and painted with blood, the wood
gouged by thick claws. “They’re not dead until you see the bodies,” he tried to reassure himself.
Joe stood in front of his bedroom door, hands clenching into fists, then relaxing, then clenching. He had to open the door, he had to see. But he wasn’t ready. Had he quit his crusade against the darkness too late to save his family?
He pushed the door open and blinked once, long and slow. When his eyes opened, Joe’s breath hitched in his chest. The room was splattered with more blood and batshit. The sheets were gone from his bed, thrown into one corner where they lay wadded up like the world’s biggest, bloodiest bandage. Joe stepped around the pile of guano and looked down as something crunched underfoot. Bat wings. The floor was carpeted with tattered scraps of leathery skin and hollow bone.
The Night Marshal sat on the edge of his bed near the nightstand and rested his head in his hands. His family was gone. He didn’t know where. Didn’t know if they were alive or dead. Joe opened the nightstand’s drawer, pulled out the flat black case his father had kept there. It was the first time he’d laid hands on the box in his life, and his hands shook a little when he lifted it. He needed a drink.
Joe flipped back the case’s lid and ran his fingers over the pistols inside. They were a matched pair of weathered revolvers, their hexagonal barrels engraved with so many wards and blessings they hummed at his touch. The old man swore these weapons were made by Colt’s own gun wizards, but they bore no identifying marks. They each held seven bullets, and while Joe had never fired them, he’d seen the guns take down a possessed bear. They were true relics and had killed more black magicians and demons than Joe could count. If he had to go looking for Stevie and the kids, at least he’d have weapons, even if those weapons did have a haunted history Joe wished he could forget.
Joe couldn’t help but wonder if even these guns would be any use to him. Whatever he was up against, whatever had called up the half-made girls and set the bats loose, seemed ready for him and his ways. While Joe had been out at the Pryor place busting up a meth lab full of bat-worshipers, the shadows were busy coming after his family. When he’d found their hideout, he’d walked right into their ambush. Joe felt beaten and stupid. He scratched at his forehead, the burning itch had stuck with him like a case of poison oak. He wasn’t firing on all cylinders, and he couldn’t figure out why.
