by Sam Witt
Joe didn’t need directions to the cathedral - he could feel it tugging at his guts, guiding him as certain as a compass pointing north. The tunnel from the cell wound down, a loose loop at the top, tightening as Joe descended. Side paths led away from the spiral, stretching off into the darkness. Joe passed them, ignoring the voices that echoed from deep within them. Voices raised in songs of praise, in hymns of repentance, in shuddering wails of unspeakable agony or ecstasy. They were the voices of men and women transformed, men and women who had found their god at last and had devoted themselves to a worship that consumed them utterly.
Joe envied them.
Elsa shifted in Joe’s grip, let out a weak gasp. “Daddy, please don’t do this. Let’s go home.”
He’d never wanted to do anything more than take his little girl home. But seeing those jagged spikes, the Kirshnir Marg, embedded in her frail body confirmed his suspicions. There was a storm coming, and running from it wouldn’t save her from the lightning it was going to throw. The only way out of this was through.
Joe just prayed his theory about this was right.
He stepped out of the descending spiral at last and into a wide and long cavern, the ceiling arching high overhead. Columns of quartz marched down the center of the chamber, forming a wide aisle. Light throbbed within them, waxing and waning in sympathy with the spikes embedded in Elsa’s flesh. At the end of the aisle, a shimmering stone formation hunkered on a natural dais that looked like a lump of melted wax. It called to Joe with an almost physical sensation.
He imagined turning tail and running with his daughter, but the thought was burnt out of his mind as fast as it could form. The new boss had plans for Joe and his daughter; it wasn’t letting go of them now that they were at the heart of its power.
As he walked among the crystals, Joe could see shapes within them. They stretched thirty feet to the cavern’s ceiling, long and slender and rolling in slow gyrations like drowsing serpents. Joe’s eyes burned when he tried to make out the details of the creatures. They blurred and shifted, slithering out of his thoughts before he could make sense of them.
“So old,” Elsa whispered. “Seems like they been here forever. Waitin’ on me.”
Joe stroked his daughter’s hair, smoothing it flat. He could feel the new boss in his head, a blind, growing presence. But the Long Man was down there at the bottom of his mind as well, like the memory of an old wound. He pushed the Long Man away, out of his thoughts, and walked to the stone dais.
The rock formation was smooth and warm, radiating a moist heat that Joe felt from a yard away. He paused in front of the altar and felt the new boss growing in his mind. It was close now, near enough for Joe to hear its wings rustling, its ancient jaws creaking open as it reached between worlds.
This was it. Joe knew if he put his little girl on that stone there would be no turning back. Everything would change. All the years of fighting the shadows, and he was going to have to let the real darkness have its way with him and his kin.
“Put me me me down,” Elsa said, her voice stronger, older than it had any right to be.
The words ached like a fish hook in Joe’s belly. It was his little girl’s voice, but as he pulled Elsa away from his chest and laid her down in a shallow depression within the stone, there was nothing of his little girl in her face. She watched him with old eyes and moved not at all as he arranged her limbs on the stone.
The spikes in Elsa’s flesh throbbed with a black light, and Joe smoothed the wrinkles from her brow with the palm of his hand. She watched him, and Joe could feel something changing within her. Her eyes faded, the pale blue color washing out to foggy white as her gift kicked in.
“Daddy,” she whispered, her voice thin and high, pushing past the alien presence forcing its way into her frail flesh, “it hurts.”
The new boss was coming. Joe could hear its labored breathing in the silence of the cavern. It was pushing its way from wherever it called home into Pitchfork County, forcing its way through the ether and into Elsa. With every passing moment, Elsa became more substantial, more impressive. She didn’t get any bigger, but seemed to take up more space, growing in potency as the dark god infested her flesh.
“It’ll be all right, baby.” Joe raked the fingers of his left hand through his hair. He hoped that was true.
The Night Marshal kissed his daughter on the forehead and waited for his new master to tell him what came next.
CHAPTER 65
STEVIE DIDN’T HAVE time to watch where she was going, but trusted in her gifts to get her down to the cavern’s heartstone. She knelt and blew across the back of her fingertips until a spark of silver light flared to life. With a gentle puff of breath, she sent it floating in front of her. “Show me the way,” she whispered.
The ghost light carved through Onondaga’s velvet-black belly, limning the path ahead of her. Stevie tried to ignore the spirits crowding around her, their indignant voices questioning her right to be on sacred Osage land. Their impotent rage splashed over her with every step she took, a spectral burden that added its weight to the pack of other worries she was trying to ignore. The half-made girls and their followers had defiled this place. Stevie wanted to fix that, but she didn’t have time to explain that to the angered ghosts.
Joe had laid the plan out nice and simple for everyone. He’d go in first to get the bad guys’ attention on him. Then everyone else would do their part and clean up the messes the half-made girls had made. But Stevie knew now that their enemies knew that plan. She feared they would be stopped, and braced herself for the fight she knew was coming.
The cave seemed to go on forever. Winding tunnels branched off in all directions, and at every intersection the ghost light dithered back and forth for long seconds before deciding on the correct path. Stevie chewed her lip at every delay, certain something had gone wrong and her husband and child were in terrible danger. She pushed at a breakneck pace until the tunnel opened up and the walkway became a thin sliver of stone running alongside a deep chasm that plunged far beyond the illumination shed by her ghost light.
One careful step after another, Stevie worked her way out onto the ledge. She leaned back against the cavern wall and pressed her palms flat against the limestone. Stevie moved her feet two inches at a time, sliding the right one, then the left one. She didn’t dare look down or see how far she had left to go. “Come on,” she whispered to herself, “Joe’s waitin’ on ya.”
“Not anymore.” The voice was a purring laugh worming its way through Stevie’s thoughts. “You were too slow. They’re ours now.”
Stevie’s ghost light wobbled in the air, and the path under her feet swam in a swarming tide of shadows. She raised her eyes to the end of the ledge and saw a monster floating there, naked tongue thrashing the air. “Get on outta my way, girl.” Stevie inched another step along the ledge. “I ain’ got time for ya.”
But the half-made girl didn’t move. Her blue eyes blazed with an unholy light that challenged Stevie to come closer. “There’s nothing for you here. Turn around. Go home. Find the child you have left to you. Mourn your fallen.”
The taunting words hit home, became a throbbing ache of loss in Stevie’s heart. She ground her teeth and took another step. Not much farther now. She just had to keep going.
The girl’s deformed hands pinched together in front of her. “Don’t make me kill you. You’ve already suffered so much.”
Stevie took another sidling step. “If you’re still there when I get to that side, I’m gonna skin ya for talking to me like that.”
Laughter echoed from a hundred voices, the overlapping sound like the scraping of locust wings in Stevie’s mind. “You’re a fighter. But why fight for a man who gave up on himself?”
Another short little step. Beads of sweat dripped from Stevie’s nose and chin, shimmering silver in the ghost light before falling out of sight. “Joe ain’ never gave up on nothin’.”
But in the back of Stevie’s mind, she could see Joe slouc
hed in his big old recliner, bottle of Jack dangling from his numb fingers, drinking his way down into a darkness that scared her more than any ghost she’d ever run across.
“You know that’s not true,” the half-made girl whispered. “He’s been trying to give up for years. We just gave him the excuse he needed to finally let go.”
Another sliding step, and Stevie could see the girl’s gaping face clearly now. The raw, empty wound where the jaw should be pained the mother in Stevie. She imagined someone doing that to her own daughter and decided she’d just kill whoever’d do such a thing. “Might as well scoot, girl. I don’t want to hurt ya no more’ns already been done, but I ain’ stoppin’.”
The girl slid forward, hovering over the edge of the ledge now. Her black hair crackled in the air, snapping like a screen door caught in a thunderstorm. “I see your thoughts, Stevie. No one did this to me. I did this for my father. To prove my love.”
Stevie took a longer step. She didn’t trust herself out here much longer; her knees were knocking from the stress of creeping along, and her back ached like someone had beaten her with a switch. “No daddy wants his little girl hurt. No daddy worth havin’, anyways.”
The girl’s tongue drifted past Stevie’s face, curling in the air, taunting. “Is that what you think?”
Stevie was close to the girl now. They were almost face to face, standing right at the end of the ledge. “It’s what I know.”
The girl moved so fast Stevie didn’t have a chance to react. The mutant hand looped around Stevie’s throat and hauled her off her feet, dragging her deeper into the cavern. “You know nothing. Sacrifice is love. Pain is proof.”
The grip around her throat had pinched off Stevie’s air. She couldn’t breath, could feel her heart thudding in her head as her brain gobbled up whatever oxygen it could find. She hooked her fingers around the half-made girl’s hand, but all she managed to do was scratch up her own throat.
“Let go.” The half-made girl licked a long, greasy line up the side of Stevie’s face. “Your husband knows the truth of what I say. He has offered up his own daughter to prove his loyalty to my father.”
Her lips formed a refusal of the half-made girl’s claim, but Stevie couldn’t find the air to make her denial heard.
The girl lifted Stevie, raised her into the air until her toes could just scrape the limestone beneath them. “In the darkness, your man switched sides. He saw the futility of your fight. He saw how stupid it was to suffer for the losers and misfits and degenerate idiots of this world.”
Stevie could feel her hands going numb, but still she pulled at the girl’s hand, struggled for air.
“He gave her to us, Stevie.” The half-made girl’s face was inches from Stevie, her beautiful blue eyes burrowing into Stevie’s thoughts. “I feel your doubt in there. You can see it; I know you can. Because what your man did was right. His loyalty will be rewarded, but your rebellion will bring only sorrow.”
The girl squeezed, and Stevie felt the last of her strength being crushed. Much more, and her throat would give way and it would be over.
But Stevie could feel something else. Spirits, old and new, gathering in the darkness around the edges of the ghost light. They didn’t like Stevie’s trespass, but they liked the half-made girl a hell of a lot less.
“There’s no help for you here,” the half-made girl’s gaping throat poured foul breath over Stevie. It was like standing next to a burning pile of rotting innards and breathing in the thick, black smoke.
But Stevie couldn’t quit. She hooked her fingers in the air and focused on making the signs, opening a ragged stitch in the fabric between the worlds of the living and the dead. It was hard work, but it was what she was born for. She felt her hand slip into a cold, dark space, and the way was open. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
The Osage came screaming through the hole, boiling into the world like a jet of steam from an overheated tea kettle. Their war cries were as piercing as an eagle’s hunting shriek and as bone-rattling as winter thunder. Stevie’s wordless command guided them, pouring their outrage down the half-made girl’s flopping gullet, filling the monster with centuries of anger. Ancient fingers pried Stevie loose from the half-made girl, who shook and seized in the air as the spirits raged inside her.
Stevie didn’t wait to see what was going to happen. She doubted the spirits could kill the monster, but they could distract it. Stevie ran down the tunnel, racing after the ghost light.
As she ran, Stevie found herself haunted by the half-made girl’s words. Had Joe turned? She tried to imagine a world without her husband or daughter in it. That wasn’t a place she wanted to be. She wandered after the ghost light, no longer running, but walking, thinking. Thinking about Joe with a drink in his hand, drinking himself away. Joe lording his authority over the poor and the weak and the stupid, shotgun in one hand, lash in the other. She imagined him drinking away his life, serving a master who never made him think, who never asked Joe to stand up and make a hard choice. Joe giving into the darkness that had haunted him since his father’s death, his rage free to run.
Stevie’s heart broke, because she could see Joe there, giving up because the fight wasn’t one he felt was worth winning. It wasn’t that he was a bad man, just a man forced into a role that had never really fit him the way it ought. He had tried hard, struggled to be a better man, to be the kind of guardian who could keep Pitchfork safe. But, in the end, maybe it was too much to ask. Because even the best shepherd can’t save a sheep determined to throw itself down the wolf’s throat.
Tears flowed down Stevie’s face as she walked. She loved Joe so much she’d been willing to put them both through hell, but now she wondered about that choice. What was love if all it brought was pain? The half-made girl, who tore off her own face in the name of love, maybe wasn’t as different from Stevie as she’d first thought.
The heartstone came into view without fanfare, an enormous, gnarled mound of stalagmites that had grown together over the millennia to form a strange, ribbed dome. Blood was sloshed over it, a thick stain that ran from its crown down its sides and into a crusted moat around its base. Stevie’s heart lurched in her throat at the scope of the sacrifice, at the profane statement it made. Stevie closed her eyes and saw it happen.
The girl standing atop the dome while cultists danced naked and ecstatic around the heartstone. The girl with her deformed hands and beautiful face, crying out with a love so powerful it tormented her with the need to prove itself. Hooking her spatulate thumb over her lower jaw and pulling, pulling, pulling with a strength born of the need to sacrifice. The girl sang even as her jaw came loose and her skin ripped down from the corners of her mouth. She sang even as the bloody rents ran down her throat like crimson lightning bolts and her jaw lay flopping on her chest like a speared fish. Two other half-made girls dumped a vat of steaming blood over the girl, baptizing her, transforming her.
The echo of that sacrifice rang in the chamber still, echoing that final moment when the girl tore her flesh free of her body and let it fall atop the dome as blood gushed out of her. That love had done awesome, terrible things. Even as she died, the girl was born anew, remade in the form of something darker, greater than herself.
In the face of that, Stevie felt the strength run out of her. Was that kind of madness something you could fight against? Was that what Joe had seen and decided it was better to give in than to rise against it?
“Yes,” the girl hissed in Stevie’s thoughts. She wobbled in from the darkness, her skin burst open from the rage of the spirits Stevie had dumped into her. One of the girl’s hands was gone, mutant thumb and forefinger reduced to naked stumps of splintered bone and dangling yellow tendons. “That is what real love does. It sacrifices. It hurts. It consumes.”
Stevie backed away from the half-made girl and toward the heartstone. She couldn’t get away from the words in her head, though, the thought that this girl had a point, as demented as it might be. She and Joe had lived for year
s with the pain of a love that threatened to destroy them both. Together, they’d fought through it, scraped and hammered and bucked until they were both so tired and just plumb wore out that Stevie didn’t know how they found it in themselves to go on.
“Let go,” the girl’s voice was quiet, almost normal. “Give in to what is coming, and you will know what it means to be free at last.”
Stevie shoved her hand into her work bag, wrapped her fingers around the old Coke bottle. She could feel her mother’s rage trembling in it, and the cold water that was her connection to Pitchfork County.
“Love don’t make ya free,” she said, smiling at the half-made girl. “It ain’ about givin’ until it hurts or bleedin’ to prove it. Love goes both ways, and the hurt and the pain and the miracle of it all does, too.”
Stevie lifted the bottle out of her bag. “Love ain’ about tearin’ skin off your bones to show you care. It’s about bein’ willin’ to lay it all down, not because the one ya love wants it, but because it needs doin’.”
“We’ll break you all,” the half-made girl’s voice was boiling with rage, so heavy with venom it gave Stevie a headache. “I will show you how to love your new master.”
“Child,” Stevie said, raising the Coke bottle up to her eye, “there ain’ nothin’ you can teach me about love that I ain’ already learnt.”
Stevie could feel the power in the Coke bottle. This was her offering, a sacrifice of her past. Stevie spun and reared her arm back to throw it against the heartstone, trusting that her love for this land, for her dead mother, would be more than enough to chase off the haunted taint the damned girl had spilled onto it.
A band of unyielding pain hooked around Stevie’s arm before she could complete the throw. Her fingers spasmed open, and the bottle slipped from her grasp. She heard it land hard on the limestone cavern floor, but didn’t care. Pain had taken hold of her, robbed her of her thoughts.
