“Victory, my child,” Father Pat said, “will never be, as you put it, ’all right.’ But let’s pursue your plan. Whom would you contact on the outside, and what would you tell them?”
The young woman began pacing the floor of the crowded living room. “Why, I’d tell them . . .” She paused, then frowned and sighed. “What would I tell them?” She glanced at Jim. “You’re with the state police. They’d believe you.”
“I have no proof that anything illegal is going on in this town, Amy. People have certainly disappeared, but I can’t tie any person or groups to those disappearances.”
“How long have you been doing this type of ... work?” Jay asked the priest.
“About thirty years.”
“And you really believe, you are convinced that the . . . devil is right here in this little hick town?” Piper asked.
“Old Nick himself?” the priest said with a laugh. “Oh, no. Of course not. This town isn’t that important. No, my dear. There is but one Satan; thousands of his minions. Satan looked at this area a couple of hours ago, blinked his eyes and gave us a storm, and then was gone. There is no need for him to be present. He has ample evil here.”
“Why us?” Jay asked. “I’m not a religious person. Neither is Deva.”
“And neither am I,” Amy added.
“I haven’t been to church in years,” Jim said.
“I never question God’s decisions,” Father Pat replied. “I just work with what I have on hand. And you all may be much more religious than you are consciously aware of.”
“All right, so we’re here.” Jay stood up. “I guess we’re going to stay. So what do we do now.”
The priest relit his pipe and puffed for a moment. “Wait.”
“You assholes!” old man Milton yelled.
* * *
Over the objections of everybody present, Eric and Father Pat went back to the rectory. Father Pat said there was no need to be fearful – yet.
Jay called the parents of Carla and the rest of the kids. There was no answer at any of the homes.
Long after the others had found a place to sleep, Jay sat alone in the kitchen, at the little breakfast nook, watching a very small-screen TV on the table.
Everything seemed normal and usual around the world. Folks were still killing each other in the Middle East and in Ireland. People were starving in Africa. Homeless in America.
Victory was not mentioned on the late night news.
It isn’t important to anybody except us, Jay thought. Nobody elses knows, or probably even cares.
He looked at the white band of flesh on his left wrist.
“I wonder what happened to my watch?”
* * *
Jay thought, due to the silence of the big house, that he was the first one up. But when he entered the kitchen, he found that coffee had already been made. He poured a cup and walked outside to the porch. Jim and Amy and Deva were sitting on the porch. Old man Milton was still rocking next door.
Jay sat down and took a tentative sip. “Anything new this morning?”
“Everything appears to be perfectly normal,” Deva told him. “People going to work, as usual. The newspapers are being delivered, as usual. The mill whistle just blew, as usual. And old man Milton is rocking, as usual.”
“One thing different,” Jim added. “We’re being watched.”
“I made up my mind last night; this morning. Whenever,” Jay announced. “I’m going to see Parnell this morning. Get all the paperwork done, and then I’m taking Kelly and Piper and pulling out.”
“We were just discussing that,” Jim told him. “I was awake most of the night thinking about the situation.”
Jay looked at the cop. “And? . . . ”
“I don’t think Chief Craig would stop you. I think he’s using a bit of reverse psychology on you all. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit to see him show up here this morning and tell you that there are no charges against Kelly. That you’re all free to go.”
“And you, Jim?”
“I’ll probably be pulled out of here. I’ve spun my wheels for months and haven’t come up with any solid evidence.”
“Deva, Amy?”
“I’m staying.” Deva stood up and moved toward the door. “I’ll get Jenny and we’ll go on back to my house. Take the other kids with us.”
“Amy?”
“I’ll stay with Deva.”
They both walked into the house. Rather stiff-necked, Jay thought.
“You blame me, Jim?”
“Hell, no. It’s the sensible thing to do.”
It did not take Deva and Amy long to round up the kids. They left without saying a word to Jay.
“I don’t owe this town one goddamned thing,” Jay said. “Nothing.” He walked back into the house.
He made sure Piper was up and looking after Kelly. Then he told them both what he was going to do, and to be ready when he got back.
He looked up Parnell’s office address and drove straight there. The receptionist ushered him right in. It was almost as if he was expected.
And maybe, Jay thought, I was.
“You look a little tired, Jay,” Parnell said, after waving him to a seat. Parnell had not offered to shake hands, and Jay did not offer his.
“Long night, Parnell.”
Was that a smug smile on the lawyer’s face? Yeah, Jay thought. Sure was.
“What’s on your mind, Jay?”
“Settling up Aunt Cary’s estate and getting out of this town.”
“Small town’s kinda dull for the big city boy, huh, Jay?”
“Did you send the wire to me, Parnell?”
“Yep. Legal thing to do.”
“You forgot to sign it.”
“No, I didn’t forget, Jay.”
Another point or two cleared up.
“How’s your grandbaby, Parnell?” Jay took a chance.
“Eh? Oh, ah, just fine. Nice baby boy.”
“Get along well with your son-in-law, do you?”
The lawyer flushed deeply.
“No son-in-law, huh?”
“I don’t have time for chit-chat, Clute. The papers are all ready for you to sign.”
“You goddamn sorry bastards. All of you!” Jay’s voice was low and menacing.
Parnell leaned across the desk, pushing his face close to Jay’s. The man’s breath smelled awful. “Don’t push your luck, Clute. Besides, you only know half the story; if that much.” He sat back down.
“First thing you do, Parnell, is you show me how much cash on hand Cary had.”
The lawyer tossed a folder to Jay. “Read it yourself, accountant.”
Jay did and softly whistled.
Jay pointed to a phone. “Get on the horn and arrange for that money to be transferred to my bank in New York City.”
A paper was shoved at him. “After you sign where I’ve X’d.”
Jay signed. “Now call.”
It was not a long wait. Billions of dollars are transferred around the world daily. The computer age.
Jay put his bank account number card back into his wallet. “The house, her businesses, and other properties?”
Parnell tossed another folder to Jay. P & L statements, holdings, dividends. Jay took his time, reading them carefully. “Sell it all.”
“That will take some time.”
“I’m fully aware of that.”
Jay signed a dozen more papers, then tossed the pen on the desk. “One more thing and then I’m gone.”
“And good riddance.”
“I want some sort of legal paper showing that the Cadillac I’m driving is legally mine.”
With a very ugly grin, Parnell laid a title on the desk. It had already been notarized. “Sign there.” He pointed.
Two minutes later Jay was standing out front of the office. He was a millionaire. But he felt unclean. He was financially set for the rest of his life.
But he felt like a traitor.
He drove to the big house o
n Sixth Street. Piper and Kelly were sitting on the front porch. Jim had gone. Old man Milton was rocking and squeaking.
As they were pulling out, Milton hollered, “Good-bye, you asshole!”
* * *
They were driving on the county road, heading toward Highway 50. There, they would turn east and head for St. Louis.
Kelly had not uttered a word.
They were a mile out of town when Jay saw the object crawling along the side of the road. Piper gasped and covered her eyes. Kelly looked out and began crying. Jay slowed, stopped, and got out of the car.
He squatted down on the road and stared in disbelief. It was a little man, no more than six or seven inches tall. Its legs had been crushed. It was pulling itself along with its tiny fingers. A bright trail of blood lay in its path.
The little figure placed its head on the gravel. He was gasping for breath. Jay thought the little creature not far from death.
It looked up at Jay through the saddest eyes Jay thought he had ever seen. “Don’t go,” the little man spoke in a pain-filled voice. “Stay. Help us. Please?”
Blood gushed from the little creature’s mouth and he trembled and died.
Jay could hear Piper and Kelly bawling in the car.
“Goddammit!” Jay swore. “Just goddammit all to hell anyway.”
He took out his handkerchief and wrapped the bloody little man in the linen. Opening the trunk, he opened a suitcase and took out another handkerchief, wrapping that around the blood-stained handkerchief.
He didn’t know what to do.
“Put it in here with me, Daddy,” Kelly called.
Jay laid the bloody little bundle on the floor of the back seat. He lifted his eyes, meeting his daughter’s teary gaze.
“I’ve got to think of you before anything else, Kelly.”
She pulled on the chain around her neck. The gold cross dangled from her fingertips.
He shifted his gaze to Piper. She had twisted in the seat to stare at him.
“But you’re the one who really wanted to get out,” he reminded her.
“Since when is it against the law to change your mind?”
“Then take the car. Take Kelly and get out of here. It’s only about a mile back to town. I can hoof it.”
She smiled at him. “Get in the car, Jay.”
Behind the wheel, he looked at his ex-wife. “I’d feel a lot better if you two were clear of this . . . mess.”
“I just realized something, Jay.”
“What’s that, Piper?”
“I never have stopped loving you.”
“Yukk!” Kelly said.
BOOK TWO
To live a life half dead, a living death.
Milton
1
Deva answered the phone on the second ring.
“I came back,” Jay said. “We came back. We found something on the road. I’d like for everyone to see it. Can you get the group together?”
“Of course. I’m glad you’re back, Jay. Come on over, all of you.”
* * *
Father Pat touched the bloody little man, tracing his broken outline with gentle fingers.
Even the stone-faced Eric was visibly moved. “Never one like this, Pat.”
“No,” the priest whispered. “Get my bag, Eric. We’ll have a service.”
The crushed and broken little man was buried in Deva’s backyard. Jenny emptied out a wooden jewel box with a red satin lining to use for a casket. Rocks were piled over the small earthen mound to keep animals from digging it up.
Back in Deva’s den, Father Pat turned his face to Jay. “I don’t know if you’re a brave man or a foolish man. But I’m glad you returned.”
“Something like ’the die is cast,’ Father,” Jay responded.
“Our own personal Rubicon? Yes. For in coming back, you passed the point of no return.”
“You’re that sure, Father?”
“I’ve seen it many times, Jay. But nothing to match the evil in this town.”
“What do we do?”
“I’ve been talking with Deva. I think she was on the right track in researching the town’s past. We find the beginning. That’s where we start.”
“We get a think tank going – is that it?” Jay looked around the room.
“You have a better idea?” Jim asked.
“No. I have no ideas.”
“Tell him what you just told us, Deva,” Father Pat said.
“My staff at the newspaper office just quit. Called me right after you all pulled out. Only one left is General Douglas. He’s in his seventies and does it more for a hobby than anything else.”
“They give any reason for quitting?”
“No.”
Jay looked at Kelly. “Honey, run outside and get me my briefcase out of the trunk, please. I want to go over that will in detail.”
Robert Gibson was waiting on the sidewalk, his gang gathered across the street. “You gonna pay for cutting me with that hatchet, bitch,” he said to Kelly. He squeezed his crotch. “And you know how.” He laughed as the red crept up the girl’s neck, coloring her face.
“But you got time,” Robert told her. He noted the look of disbelief on her face. “You don’t believe me? Hell, baby, I’ll even show you the town. The side of the town you’ve never seen. You see, we’d rather have you with us than agin us. Think about it.”
He turned and walked away.
She told the group what Robert had said to her. Including his gestures.
“News sure travels fast,” Piper noted. “We haven’t been back that long.”
“If I ever get that boy in gunsights, I’ll sure pull the trigger on him,” Jay said tightly.
“Yeah. Chief Craig would love that,” Jim said.
“Jay,” Father Pat spoke gently. “You grew up with these people in town. Very little new blood has been added. You went to school with many of them. Could you kill them?”
“If they threatened my life, Kelly’s, Piper’s . . . the lives of my friends. Yes, I think I could.”
“Uummm,” was the priest’s only reply. He stuffed and lit his pipe.
Jay carefully read the will, then reread it. He smiled. “Now I see why they wanted me out of town. Listen, if something happens to me, everything. . . all her money, her estate, holdings, everything would go to the town of Victory. And no matter what, the house on Sixth Street cannot be sold. Ever. Nor can her doll collection. The old Clute place remains as is. Aunt Cary set money aside to see to that. The hitch is, my death must be a natural one.”
“That’s why they were so anxious for you to get out of this town,” Jim said.
“If the old woman hated me so,” Jay mused aloud, “why would she add ’natural death’?”
“You’re the last Clute, Jay,” Deva said, dropping another piece of the puzzle into place.
“That still doesn’t explain why the old woman was murdered,” Jim added.
All eyes swung toward the trooper.
“What?” Jay exclaimed.
“Remember a couple of days ago on your porch, Jay,” Jim said. “I was going to tell you, but we got interrupted. Until that little Viking whacked me on the hand, I had no idea who might have done it. Now I do.”
“Oh, we knew that,” Ange said. “Didn’t we, Jenny?”
“The little people killed her,” Jenny said calmly. “They hacked her to death with tiny spears and knives and swords.”
“And then she fell down the stairs and broke her neck,” the trooper said. “The official report states that she fell to her death. But she was alive long after that.”
“How do you know that?” Jay asked.
“Too much blood. Dead people don’t bleed. The heart can’t pump out the blood. And after she was pushed, or fell, the little people followed her down and hacked at her face and neck. It was a real mess.”
The trooper was silent for a moment. “It’s all beginning to add up. I was at the scene only briefly. Then the chief ordered me outside to
keep any sightseers away until Zucker could get there from the funeral home. Zucker is also the coroner. Craig kept saying, ’She wasn’t supposed to die. How could she have died?’ I couldn’t make any sense out of that. But I still don’t know why the little people killed her.”
“You will all please forgive me,” Piper said. “I’m the new kid on the block, so to speak. But no one here seems to be willing to address, what is to me, one very large issue: the little people. You’re all just accepting them. But what are they? What do they represent? And how did they become what they are?”
“They’re us,” Jenny said.
“Us?” Her mother looked at her. “What do you mean, Jenny?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “That’s what the colonel said.”
“What colonel?”
“The soldier out at the old Clute house.”
The adults exchanged glances. “You’ve gone out there often, Jenny?” Jim asked.
“Sure. We all have. But you got to be careful. It’s usually guarded.”
“Guarded by whom?” Piper said.
“Kids. Older than us. But kids. Teenagers, mostly. They’ll hurt you if you mess with them. They carry knives and hatchets and guns.”
“What do they guard?”
Again, she shrugged. “The house, I guess. And those who live there.”
Deva suddenly stood up; she appeared very agitated. “You mean, those dolls and clowns and toys that I saw out there, they’re . . . alive?”
“Sort of. They’re as alive as that little man we buried awhile ago was.”
“How do they get, well, the way they are?” Jim asked her.
“They never told us that. We just got them to talk to us a couple of weeks ago. They wouldn’t have done it then, except they got real scared about something.”
“Scared of what, honey?” her mother asked.
Jay began walking around the den. “They’re us. They’re us! That’s why I kept thinking everybody in this town, kids that could not have been born when I left, all looked so familiar. And why shouldn’t they be? They’re the dolls!”
That shook everyone in the room, including the priest and Eric. “Not possible,” Eric said.
“When dealing with the devil, Eric, you, above all here, should know that anything is possible.” He held up a hand for silence and was thoughtful for a moment. “Monstrous,” he finally said. “Hideous. But quite novel. And I see why he is doing it.”
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