by Nick Cutter
His men were sleeping in a car fifty yards off, in the shelter of the willows. The night was still, only the chirruping of crickets. Appleton poured a stiff belt of rum and reflected on how good things happened to good people—to enterprising people such as himself.
A sound carried across the wind-scrubbed earth, from the direction of the willow trees. A strangled scream that became a hissing whistle . . . the sound a man might make as his throat was cut. It was joined by a rising adagio of pain and bewilderment that ended abruptly, replaced by a wet hiccuping sound. That went on awhile, too, before being ushered into the softer notes of night.
Appleton adjusted the flame on his oil lamp, washing the VW’s interior with its shifting light. The sliding door was open. He could barely discern the flat fall of the earth, the rich soil dark as grave dirt—
“Eugene?” he called. “Danny?”
The imbeciles. They drank without measure. They played childish games and hooted laughter well into the night, only to act petulant the following morning, their heads rotten with the ache. He really should find new men, ones whose wits challenged his own.
He held the lantern out, squinting against its greasy glow. A figure coalesced from the darkness. It was joined by another.
“You dolts,” said Appleton. “If you’re looking for liquor, I have none for you. Go back to the goddamn car.”
A third figure joined. Appleton’s breath came out in a sharp hiss.
“Mr. Appleton.”
The voice seemed to come from a great distance away, deep within the guts of the earth . . . and yet it was close, too, so terribly close, nestled right up to his ear.
“I have come home to roost,” Micah Shughrue said.
Hearing his voice, Seaborn Appleton began to scream.
He would scream for some time before all was said and done.
1
PETTY SHUGHRUE did not know what this creature might be, but she was positive it was not a man.
It looked human. Two arms. Two legs. A head.
But that was the problem—it only looked that way. For one, it was far taller than any man on earth; the dairyman, Mr. Bickner, was the tallest man Petty had ever seen, and this thing was at least two feet taller than him. Its arms were long and its joints were set in weird places, making its arms bend in odd ways. Its legs were also too long and did not hinge at the knees so much as pivot in all directions, a bit like a spider’s legs. It wore dark pants and a duster of black lizard skin. The coat rippled out from its body, stinking like the dead gopher she’d found under the porch two springs ago.
Its face . . . Petty didn’t ever want to look at its face again. Its head was big and bulgy and hairless. It had no nose, only a pair of moist holes. Its mouth was so wide it nearly split its head apart—and its lips were plump, fleshy, somehow succulent, which was a word Petty had recently learned in grammar class. The summer strawberry was succulent. You almost wanted to kiss those lips—not really, in fact you’d rather kiss anything else, a bowl of razor blades or a starving piranha or any other thing at all . . . What Petty felt was an ungodly compulsion, a revolting desire to kiss those lips. Even though she knew they would taste like death.
Even worse than its mouth were its eyes. Two chunks of coal screwed into its head. The moonlight reflected off them in terrible ways, showing their broiling inner cores—Petty swore she could see things squirming behind its eyes like leeches in a jam jar.
It moved at a swift clip without effort. Its legs hurdled logs and snarled deadfalls in great, unhurried strides. She was carried along with it, her hand swallowed in its own. Her feet were still bare and she wore nothing but her nightdress, but she wasn’t cold or sore, even though they had covered many miles. Her feet rarely touched the earth—she seemed to ghost along it on a ribbon of air.
The Long Walker. That was what she would call this thing. It was her habit to name everything: her dolls, Jenny and Josephine; her wooden trains, Honey and Tugger and Pip; even the little brown mouse that lived in a hole in the kitchen, Mr. Squeaks.
She had been with the Long Walker for . . . Petty could not say how long. Her mind was foggy like it was after the doctor took out her tonsils. Time didn’t seem important. She could tell some hours had passed, maybe even a day. She was thirsty.
Soon, my dear. We both have thirsts to slake.
She had not uttered a word. Could this thing read her thoughts? It must have. It had slid into her head somehow. This worried her, but what could she do about it?
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Your father owes my father, the Long Walker thought-spoke in her mind.
The trees petered out. They came to an empty field. An encampment of some kind was set up not far away. Petty could see lights winking—brightly colored ones, blinking and circling . . .
They skimmed across the grass. A traveling carnival came into view. Shaky old rides, a midway, caravans where the workers slept. They circled the carnival’s perimeter where the light was weak, a pair of wolves scoping things out. They passed a caravan; Petty caught a snatch of a familiar jingle playing on a transistor radio hanging from its open window on a strap:
“We’re gonna make a . . . hot cereal lover outta you! With ready-to-serve Quaker Oatmeal—you did it!”
Cars were parked on a strip of beaten earth not far from the ticket taker’s booth. There were Monte Carlos and Dodges and pickup trucks with bales of hay in their beds. Beyond the cars Petty saw a string of shotgun shacks lining a paved road; they must be near one of the little towns ringing her home, places with names like Mescalero and Pecos and Elephant Butte. Elephant Butte attracts flies, her mother used to joke, even though it was pronounced beaut, not butt. Petty was sure the people of Elephant Butte were nice—people generally were around here: they worked and scraped their knuckles raw and drank too much and prayed away their sins every Sunday at church.
They skirted the midway, where grizzled-looking hucksters called out “One play, one win!” and “Test your luck for half a buck!” Rain dripped from the awnings of the ring toss and whack-a-mole booths. The Long Walker pulled her toward a striped tent. Light spilled from under its canopy and shone through eyelets where no ropes had been strung. They stopped a ways from the open flaps at the back, getting a view of its insides. Thirty or forty people were seated on folding chairs, facing away from Petty. Most of them were dressed simply, in sun-bleached frocks or overalls. A lot of the men had pipe holsters threaded through their hand-tooled leather belts, with their smoking pipes looped through them.
Everyone was focused on the man who stood on a raised stage in front. A preacher. It was not uncommon to find lay preachers peddling old-time religion from town to town around here—some people just couldn’t get enough. If there was a midweek opportunity for a top-up, they jumped at it. Strange to find a preacher at a carnival, but maybe some of these folk felt the urge to atone after too much cotton candy and spins on the Tilt-A-Whirl.
The preacher was tall and bony and what Petty’s mom would have called onion-eyed—meaning they bulged from his sockets like pearl onions—but he spoke with great conviction.
“. . . and many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and never-ending contempt!” he thundered as he strode across the stage. “Hell! That’s right, that eternal place of damnation where you will go if you are not right with God when you perish. That’s right—Hell is a real place! And you will be sent there, sure as shooting, if you do not obey the Lord’s commandments!”
The congregants swayed in their seats. Rain pattered on the tent and dripped to the earth in ragged streamers.
“What of God’s promise of eternal life? There are conditions of that promise! Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life, the Good Book says. So we must believe in Him. As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up!” The preacher stabbed an accusing finger at his audience. “My ques
tion to you, my good Christian neighbors, is this: Are you lifting the Son of man up as Moses lifted the serpent, or are you wandering around the wilderness?”
The Long Walker pulled a flute from the folds of its duster. It looked as if it was made out of a bone—perhaps a human one. It held it to its lips. The notes the flute made weren’t harmonious . . . but they were compelling. Petty turned toward the Long Walker instinctively, the same way a moth was drawn to a bug zapper.
The children in the tent turned, too. There were only five or six, but they all looked back. The adults didn’t take the slightest notice. A child seated in the back row—a girl of four or five—stood. She had been sitting on the aisle beside her mother. Nobody saw her walk out of the tent into the spitting rain.
The little girl strode right up to the Long Walker. A shy smile touched the edges of her heart-shaped mouth. But her eyes were huge with fear and her shoulders were set way back, as if every part of her was repulsed. The Long Walker whispered to her. Petty imagined how its voice would feel sliding into her ear—she pictured a thin, unbreakable icicle. The girl giggled. The Long Walker reached out and touched the girl on the tip of her upturned nose. She covered her mouth as if the Long Walker had said a dirty word. The flesh of her nose was beginning to blister already; after the ensuing chaos had ebbed, her mother would pale when she noticed the very tip of her daughter’s nose had gone the cracked gray of an old, unwrapped piece of liver forgotten in a freezer for months. The girl walked back into the tent.
“Now, what the Loooooord wants,” the preacher thundered on, “is for you to pay the tariff! The wages of sin, ladies and gents, is a high price indeed—”
“He touched me.”
The preacher stopped midsentence. The little girl’s voice cut through his sermon. She stood in the middle of the center aisle with her finger pointed at the holy man.
“The preacher. He touched me in my dirty spot.” Her finger dipped down and down until it pointed between her legs.
The congregation rumbled. The men—most of them with thick, sunburned necks and brush-cut hair—began to redden as their jaws went tense.
“I did no such—” A low moan escaped the preacher, who had turned pale as cottage cheese. “Oh God! Lies, lies!”
The Long Walker made a noise that could have been laughter. The men had begun to rise, their fists balling at their hips. The preacher was frantic, rung by all those blood-hungry faces.
“No! No, I . . . Where is this girl’s mother? Her father?” he said desperately. “They will tell you I did no such—”
“She was lost from my sight for five minutes,” a woman in the back row said hollowly. “I have never lost track of her before, not once until tonight . . . ”
“Let’s draw and quarter the turd,” a voice called out from the rear of the tent.
The Long Walker’s face was fixed in an expression Petty could not read. It might even have been sadness.
The men advanced on the preacher, who raised his hands skyward in silent plea. The first man who reached him threw a fist with pure venom; the preacher’s nose exploded. He fell. The men and more than a few women then fell upon him, kicking and stomping.
“Enough,” the Long Walker said, sounding bored.
He took Petty’s hand and led her away from the pandemonium.
2
THE GREYHOUND PULLED OVER on the side of the road at a quarter past five in the afternoon. Micah exited under a sun hazed with the grit lifting off the breakdown lane.
“Town’s a mile or so thataway,” the driver said, pointing.
Micah shouldered his bag. He had to stop himself from running. After that encounter in the woods, his first instinct had been to set off on foot after the thing that had snatched his daughter. But the creature would outdistance him easily, or back-flank him and kill him . . . or do something much worse.
Micah knew Petty would not be killed. She had been taken to establish Micah’s purpose, his end goal. Aside from his wife, his daughter was the only person capable of compelling Micah to retrace his steps back . . . there. And the black thing knew Micah’s heart as well as Micah did himself—better, just maybe.
He had hired a caretaker for Ellen, his wife. He had done so before on occasions when he needed to be away. Ellen’s sister, Sherri, was usually available, but was out of town at present. When Sherri returned, she would take over the caregiver role. Ellen posed only the smallest of burdens. She lay in bed. Occasionally she would rise, eyes open but seeing nothing, lips trembling with words Micah couldn’t quite understand, and pace the bedroom, vanity to door to nightstand. Her comatose state was unaffected. The doctors said this was uncommon behavior, but not unique. Her bedsores often burst during these episodes. Micah would trail her as she walked, dabbing ointment on her sores. The bedroom door was always locked at these times. There was no need for Petty to see her mother that way. Better to remember her as she’d been.
He hired a man to feed and water the animals. By all rights, his crops should die in his absence. But they would thrive. It had made Micah a wealthy man, the envy of those who eked a living out of the same inhospitable soil. But he was no crop whisperer. His fields produced simply because that was part of the deal—and that deal carried terrible penalties, too.
The town of Old Ditch seemed comatose. The industry had moved on, and with it went the hope, and with that went the incentive for the citizenry to improve. The buildings were stooped and tumbledown, as though affected with a case of architectural leprosy. A fine layer of dust had settled over the shop windows. A piebald dog dashed across the main street, through an intersection where the stoplights had gone dead.
Micah stopped in at a diner devoid of customers. The revolving pastry case displayed its unappealing wares: a lemon meringue pie so old the whipped eggs had cracked like the mud in a dry riverbed. A flyswatter lay on the countertop; below the swatter lay the smashed remains of the insects it had squashed.
A man’s face appeared in the kitchen pass. Old, fatigued, a grease-spotted fry hat cocked on his head at a defeated angle.
“What’ll you have?”
Micah set a dubious eye on the deformed pie, the coffee gone bitter on the burner.
“I am looking for a man.”
“We don’t traffic in that kind of business around here.”
“He is English. Black. Speaks with an accent.”
“There’s only one man in town has one of those.”
“Where can I find him?”
The man wiped his nose. “Sure you don’t want something? Hash is the specialty of the house.”
Salmonella is the specialty of this house, Micah thought.
“Just the man and where I can find him.”
Half an hour later, Micah had walked to the end of a narrow street lined with derelict dwellings. He spotted a blank, sun-challenged face peering at him from an upper-story window. The piebald dog moped along after him, flinching whenever Micah turned to face it. He rooted half of a 7-Eleven sticky bun out of his pack and dropped it. The dog ate it with that same flinching fear, as if under the suspicion that the treat was poisoned—as if it had witnessed its fellow pooches die that very way, in moaning paroxysms on the street.
The house he arrived at was small, but in better condition than the others. Micah knocked. Footsteps shuffled to the door.
“Who’s calling?”
“It is me, Ebenezer.”
A pause. A considerable one. The door opened. Ebenezer Elkins stood in a housecoat knotted chastely at the waist. His right hand was bandaged. He was drinking. He appeared to have been doing so for some time.
He bowed and stepped aside. “Come in.”
The main room was unadorned. The walls were bare save for the crucifixes hung at every corner. A small bookshelf with books that appeared to have been well read. Demons in America—that title jumped out at Micah.
Eb gestured to one of two chairs before taking a seat in the other. His bottle sat by the chair leg. He poured himself a
splash.
“Where are my manners?” he said, gesturing with the bottle.
Micah consented. Eb limped into the kitchen and returned with a glass. He poured for Micah.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Years,” said Eb.
“Looks like you just moved in.”
“It does, doesn’t it.” Eb blearily stared around. His eyes were bloodshot, but he did not seem especially drunk. “I suppose I never expected to be here this long.”
“Are you well?”
“Not especially. Thank you for asking. You?”
“Not really. What did you do to your hand?”
Eb waved the question away. They sat for a spell, drinking in silence.
“Have you come to kill me?” Eb asked.
Micah shook his head.
“I didn’t think so,” said Ebenezer. “I thought you would be coming soon. I . . . Believe it or not, I dreamt it. Which may sound ridiculous—or it would have at one point in our lives. Superstitious drivel.”
He refilled their glasses. The hooch was strong, cheap, with a wicked burn.
“Lot of crucifixes,” Micah remarked.
“I got a deal on them. Cheaper by the dozen.”
“The Ebenezer I knew did not have much use for them.”
Ebenezer looked at his feet. Each of them had spent the past fifteen years trying to unbecome the man the other had once known.
“It took my daughter,” Micah said.
Eb looked up sharply. “You have a daughter?”
“By Ellen, yes. Petty. Ellen’s naming. Pet is her common name.”
“Ellen. How is she?”
Micah said, “She is at home and untroubled.”
Eb’s brows knitted. “Her daughter is gone and she is untroubled?”
“She is unaware of the loss.”
The Englishman pursued it no further. “You have a daughter,” he said again, disbelievingly. “Jesus Christ.”
