by Lee Goldberg
Not in the USA of the 21st century, that was.
How long had the Vetches and the Gilhoolies been locked in stasis under Joan’s rule? Years? Decades? Centuries? It didn’t seem possible. Hell, it wasn’t possible.
He tried to shut the idea out of his brain. To pretend that it had never crossed his mind that this was anything but a perfectly normal town that just happened to be inhabited by perfectly strange people. That the people of Heaven, Washington, were what he had originally feared, some kind of bizarre religious cult.
But he couldn’t.
There was too much that didn’t fit. And most of what didn’t fit was him. They’d known he was coming-known him by name. They’d prayed for him to come, that’s what the little girl Mouse had said.
Then he remembered-only after she had started to say something else. Summ. Summoned?
They’d summoned him, like some hero or demon out of an ancient story? If that was true, what did it make them? What did it make him?
The night outside was cold and bright; the stars shone down, white like a cleansing fire. He closed the door gently behind him and listened. For a moment there was nothing. And then he heard a rustling in the brush.
And then a cry, high and piercing, so loud he could feel blood trickling from his ears the way it had dripped down the young girl’s leg.
Matt whirled around as a black form exploded from a stand of trees. It was too big to see all at once, moved too fast to make out its form. He saw the black of feathers, the white of claw, jaundiced yellow beak.
Some kind of bird. Some kind of hideous black crow. But bigger than him, wingspan the length of the house, an eye as big as his head. And a jagged beak plunging down directly at his heart.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Matt dived to the ground and rolled, came up slashing at the giant beak with his axe. But in the time it took to swing the weapon through its arc, the bird disappeared. Didn’t jump, didn’t fly. It was there and then it was gone.
Matt stumbled forward, carried off balance by the weight of the blade, then heard the terrible shriek, this time from behind him. He whirled around just in time to see the beak flashing down at his head. Again he dived to the ground, but the hell crow was a fast learner. It tracked his movement with its giant head, then snapped its beak, tearing a ragged gash across his shin.
Stifling a scream of pain, Matt jumped to his feet. Then almost fell, his nearly severed calf buckling under his weight. The bird was on him, the beak open wide, the bright red tongue quivering as it let out another shriek.
Matt wanted to run. He wanted to drop to the ground and beg for his life. He wanted to open his eyes and realize he was still buried under 25 feet of snow, that everything he’d seen and done since the avalanche had been the desperate dream of a man suffocating to death.
Instead he stood his ground.
Stood absolutely still as the beak flew at him. Waited until he could feel the hell bird’s hot breath in his face.
And then he threw himself on the ground. Let himself fall out of the way as the beak passed by him, its knifesharp tip slashing open his shirt.
The bird crashed down next to him, its beak getting stuck in the dirt. The bird let out a muffled squawk and tried to pull free, but it couldn’t.
Matt jumped up on his good leg. The bird’s head was already swinging around, the bill pulling out of the soft ground. Matt whirled around, his axe at the end of his outstretched arm pulling him through the circle, gaining speed and momentum until it ploughed into the crow’s eye.
The bird screamed in pain, and Matt could feel his eardrum explode under the pressure. But he didn’t back away. He threw all his weight against the axe handle, felt it push through the foul jelly that had been an eye. The crow screeched again, but less loudly now. Matt fell forward on the axe handle and heard a crack as the head snapped the thin bones around the eye and plunged into its brain.
The hell crow spasmed violently, then fell over. Matt was nearly pulled off his feet as he held on to the axe handle. He gave it a yank and the blade came free, dripping blood and brains and optic fluid.
Matt leaned on the axe, gasping for breath.
And then heard another sound behind him.
The sound of hands clapping gently together.
Matt whirled around, expect to see Orfamay at the head of a Vetch army.
There was only one man standing there. He had the cocky grin and jaunty posture of a basic cable game show host. He wore a loud checked jacket with plaid golf pants. A lollipop dangled from his mouth.
“Bye bye birdie,” Mr. Dark said. “A ten-year-old with a BB gun couldn’t have done better.”
“You brought me here,” Matt said, his hand clutching the axe handle.
“As I recall, it was a lawnmower engine on bicycle body that brought you here,” Mr. Dark said. “Pity about your bike. You looked so heroic puttering along on it.”
“And if someone else had come down the highway, would that exit have been there for them?” Matt said.
“That’s a good question,” Mr. Dark said. “If there’s an exit and no one takes it, does it really exist? If you try to find your way out of Heaven, will it still be there?”
“You can’t keep me here,” Matt said.
“Of course not,” Mr. Dark said. “I wouldn’t dream of trying. After all, you’re the big hero. Rode into town on his trusty steed, killed the monster and saved the day. I wouldn’t dare mess with Sir Galahad. Even if the big bad dragon looks a lot more like a puppy.”
Matt didn’t want to look back. This was probably just one of Mr. Dark’s tricks. But his eyes betrayed him, casting a glance toward the carcass of the creature he’d killed.
It lay sprawled on the ground like a deflated balloon, ragged feathers spilling off and revealing a layer of black felt underneath. Matt couldn’t stop his hand from reaching down and touching the cloth. It crumbled at his touch. Underneath he could see a flash of pink.
Matt tore at the decaying cloth, pulling away fistfuls of feathers, scraping his fingers against a rusty zipper. It couldn’t be. The bird had been real. It had nearly killed him. He had killed it.
But there was no way to deny what he was seeing, feeling. The thing he had killed was a costume, badly constructed and sloppily sewn. He ripped open a seam and saw the truth of what he had killed.
It was the girl. The one he’d saved at the barn. She lay lifeless on the ground, sightless eyes staring up at him. Blaming him.
“It’s not possible,” Matt said, backing away.
“That’s what they said about putting chunks of cookie dough in ice cream, but just ask any fat girl what she eats when her date stands her up,” Mr. Dark said cheerily.
“It’s a trick,” Matt said, clutching the axe tightly. “I didn’t kill her!”
“You don’t have any idea what you’ve done,” Mr. Dark said. “Just pooted into town on your lawn mower and started swinging that axe. ‘Cause that’s what a hero does, right? Gotta say, my job’s a lot easier when I’ve got heroes doing my work for me.”
Mr. Dark chuckled and he reached down to stroke the dead girl’s cheek.
“Don’t touch her!” Matt shouted.
“Stop me, hero.”
Matt lunged for Mr. Dark. Or tried to. His feet were planted in the ground; he couldn’t lift his arms. He strained, but he was completely frozen. From somewhere he heard a girl’s voice.
“Take this one back,” the voice said. “Take him back to hell and send us what we need. Take him back and let him rot.”
Mr. Dark flashed a happy grin. “I think that’s for you. Bye now.”
Matt strained to lift his axe hand, but it wouldn’t move. Tried to scream but tongue, teeth, jaw were stone.
“Take him back, I beg you,” the girl said. “I give you the gift of blood.”
A blast of pain ran up Matt’s chest. It felt like somebody was opening his chest with a butcher’s knife, completing the Y incision the coroner had failed to finish the day
he came back to life.
The pain came again, and Matt’s eyes flashed open on darkness.
Not in the woods. He was in Joan’s house, lying on the couch he’d never left.
He tried to sit up.
Thin ropes held him in place. His arms and legs were tied to the sofa’s legs.
There was a flicker of light. A candle. It dripped wax on his chest, burning him again.
Mouse stood over him. At first he thought she was dressed in red. Then he realized she was naked, her little girl’s body just beginning to turn into a woman’s. The red she was wearing, the red that covered her from her shoulders to her feet, was blood.
“Take him back to hell,” Mouse said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mouse walked slowly around the couch three times, holding the candle steady except when she would let it drip burning wax down on him. As she passed him, he could see that her body wasn’t a child’s at all. Her breasts were still unformed and her pubes bare, but her arms and legs were cabled with muscles. How many years, how many decades had she been trapped in the shape of a little girl?
Matt struggled to move, but the ropes held him tightly. Some hero , he thought. Tied up while I’m sleeping, and I don’t even notice. Except that maybe it wasn’t all her doing. Mr. Dark had been in his dream; maybe he had kept Matt unconscious long enough for the girl to get the ropes on him.
“Mouse, what are you doing?” he gasped as a bead of wax scalded his skin.
“Sending you back.” Her voice was hard and cold; the girl was gone from it. She sounded as old and weathered as Orfamay.
“You don’t have to send me anywhere,” Matt said. “All I’ve wanted since I got here was to get out.”
“I summoned you here just like I summoned her,” Mouse said, continuing to circle the couch. “And you ruined everything. I have to get rid of you and get a real lawgiver.”
It took him a moment to realize what she was saying. “You brought Joan here?”
“I called her and she came,” Mouse said. “The book told me how.” She stopped by a table where an ancient volume sat. It was bound in something that looked like leather.
“You brought that monster here,” Matt said. “You inflicted all that pain. And now you want to inflict more.”
“You don’t know anything.”
After what he’d seen at the Grange, Matt thought he did. “Constant war between the families. You said your parents died before Joan came. Killed by Vetches?”
“Killed by Vetches because they’d killed Runcibles who had killed Hogginses who had killed Vetches,” Mouse said. “Vern and Cal wanted to get revenge, and they would have done it. Then someone was going to get revenge on them. And it was going to keep going until there was no one left. I found the book my grandmother hid away in her root cellar and I figured out how to summon the lawgiver. And we didn’t have any fighting anymore.”
“And the price?”
“We all paid,” Mouse said. “I did, too. When she fed, it hurt so bad. But when she was done you were still alive, and so was your family. And she only fed off the ones who made trouble. You just had to learn not to make trouble. That wasn’t so hard, was it? That wasn’t so bad.”
Matt thought he saw something behind her words-guilt maybe. Every time that Joan thing took away one of the townspeople for a feeding, it had been her fault. And in that guilt Matt found a glimmer of hope.
“If it worked so well, why summon me to kill her?”
“It was for Cal,” she said, and this time Matt was certain he saw a flash of the little girl she’d seemed to be when they met. “He was all sweet on that Vetch whore. Mixing like that, if Joan found out that was a lifetime of pain. But he wanted her so bad. Kept telling me he loved her and she loved him. Then you saw. She said he raped her and they killed him.”
“She was afraid,” Matt said.
“I’m afraid every day of my life,” Mouse said. “I’m afraid of what I did, and I’m afraid I’m going to do worse. I opened that book at it changed me and I changed everything. But I would never do what that whore did. And now they’re all killing each other and they won’t stop until there’s another lawgiver.”
“I wasn’t sent here to be your lawgiver,” Matt said. “I think we were both tricked, and I know who did it.”
“I saw you in my head before you came,” Mouse said. “Knew your face and your name. I paid the price of blood to bring you here. Only those lives were too small to bring the one we really needed.”
The lives were too small, Matt thought. All those bones hidden in Joan’s woodpile. Sacrifices to summon her replacement?
“I need more blood,” Mouse said. “The right kind of blood.”
Mouse disappeared from his view. After a moment, he heard the thud of a body falling on the floor. The girl.
“Don’t do this,” Matt called.
“I can’t do anything else.”
Matt strained his neck to look around and saw Mouse bent over double, dragging the unconscious girl across the floor. Amazing how much strength there was in that little body.
“Thought I could do it the easy way, using animal blood, not having to hurt anyone,” Mouse said. “But look what they sent me in return.”
“Maybe they sent you what you needed,” Matt said.
“You already said you’re not the lawgiver,” Mouse said. “No one’s going to listen to you.”
She dragged the unconscious girl to a spot on the floor where she had marked out a pentagram in chalk and aligned her limbs with the star’s points.
“When you needed a lawgiver to stop the killing, they sent you Joan,” Matt said. “When you needed to stop the pain she was causing, they sent me. Maybe that wasn’t a mistake.”
“I saw what happened at the Grange,” Mouse said.
She picked up a knife from the table where the book lay and ran it across her thumb. Blood sprung up in its wake.
Matt pulled against the ropes, but they wouldn’t budge. “I didn’t kill those people at the Grange,” he said. “You did.”
She whirled around, raising the knife. She looked like she wanted to plunge it into his heart.
“You could have stopped it before it started,” she said. “You refused.” She thrust the knife at his throat. He felt its point pierce his flesh.
“How long ago did you summon Joan?” he said. “Years? Decades?”
“Don’t know how long,” she said. “Time went all funny here. But it seems like forever. Not going to make the same mistake with you.”
The knife pressed deeper into his throat. “All that time, and what did you do?” he said, fighting the urge to panic, to try to thrash himself free and force the blade in deeper. “You didn’t even try to change anything. You let Joan keep you from killing each other, and that was all. Did you ever give one second’s thought to making peace between the families?”
“We had peace until you came along.”
“You had a cease-fire. You couldn’t kill each other, but you never stopped the hating. Why was that, Mouse? Do you even know how this feud began? Do you have any idea why you’re killing each other?”
“Doesn’t matter why it started. It just is.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Matt said. “If you don’t want it.”
Matt could feel the knife blade tremble under his skin. And then it slid out, a drop of blood falling on his shoulder as it went.
She was staring down at him, but he didn’t think she was seeing anything in the room. “What are you?” she said finally.
“I’m not the lawgiver,” he said. “And I’m not a hero riding in to save the villagers from the monster that’s been terrorizing them. I’m just a stranger passing through.”
“Then why should I listen to you?” The knife was getting closer to his throat again.
“You shouldn’t.” Matt fought to keep his throat calm and under control. “Not to me, not to Joan, not to that book. Because none of us can stop this for good. There’s only one per
son who can. And that’s you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Matt had never been to war. By the time he was old enough to enlist, the age of the existential battles that had consumed entire generations of Americans seemed to have been over forever, and by the time the country was actually attacked for the first time in his life, he was too enmeshed in his parents’ slow slouch toward eternity to think about anything bigger.
So he’d never seen what the Earth looks like the day after a battle has ended. Not until the red sun rose over Heaven.
The fight had started in the Grange, now nothing but a wisp of smoke rising out of the trees, but had spilled out into the town. Main Street was dyed crimson; potholes turned into drinking fountains for the crows, which lapped at the thickening pools of blood. There were mangled pieces of bodies scattered along the roadway, the town’s gene pools strong enough that even in death Matt could identify a Gilhoolie nose or a richly furred Vetch forearm.
Maybe we’re too late to make peace, Matt thought as he walked toward the general store, the white flag of pillowcase on his axe handle held high. Maybe they’ve all found the only peace they’ll ever know. The peace of the grave. Except that if that was true there would be no graves, just food for crows.
One of those crows cawed and beat its wings. Matt turned to the sound and saw a body hanging from the eaves of Mabel’s Eat Fresh Diner Cafe. The birds had taken the sign literally and plucked away at the corpse’s eyeballs and tongue. But they had been especially drawn to the bloody hole where its genitals had once been. They’d pecked and bitten at the raw flesh until they’d broken through to the rich, sweet innards. Now a long rope of intestine hung down between the body’s legs like a parody of the penis it had once possessed.
Matt could hear Mouse’s sharp gasp, could practically feel her muscles tightening even though she walked two feet away from him.
“They didn’t have to do that to Cal,” she said in a voice choked with anger. “They didn’t have to do that.”
