by S. L. LUCK
With that, Mavis fingered the dream catcher hanging from her necklace and rendered the accountant speechless. Perry left Dak to inspect the displays while Dak and his sons accompanied Mavis the short distance to the Southbridge exhibit. She released Dak’s hand to remove her cardigan then clutched his hand tightly again before coming upon the only float concealed by scaffold-hung tarps. There was an open slit in the corner where two tarps met and Dak poked his head inside.
“Knock, knock,” he said, gently drawing his sniffing mother inside.
The area was a whirl of activity with t-shirt-clad volunteers hammering, painting, stapling, sewing, gluing, welding, and bolting the makings of a formidable medieval scene. Small woodland creatures frolicked on a sparkling Styrofoam-carved ice castle. A lowered gate, made to look like iron, held an enormous red dragon braced for attack as it protected the smaller creatures behind it. Chester, barking orders to the eye-rollers around him, had his back turned to the entrance and so did not see them until Dorothy stood up from her work painting wooden trees and rushed to embrace Mavis.
“We can’t stop now. Where are you—” Chester started; but when the rest of the Southbridge retinue put down their tools, he swung around and offered a half-hearted condolence to Mavis, Dak, and the boys. “Terrible way to go,” Chester said aloud, bringing a fresh wave of unease to the group. “Shouldn’t use a machine like that if you’re a nighttime traveller, but she’s in a better place anyway.”
Mavis’ cheeks went red. Her eyes flashed wide, and her small mouth opened large and angry, but Dorothy quickly clapped her own hands to get everyone’s attention.
“Now that Mavis is here, let me repeat what we’ve all shared privately. Hattie was a good woman. She was kind and funny and always, always helped whenever she could, never asking for anything in return. I’d like to dedicate this year’s float to Hattie’s honor. Let’s make it the best we’ve ever had, for the best person we’ve ever known.” She held up her paint brush, splattering a few green drops on her silver hair. Applause rose up the tarps and into the sky.
Chester tugged his sagging pants. “All right, then. Sounds good. Let’s get on with it.” No one did.
From behind the castle, where he had been adding glitter to the wet paint, Ed Norman stepped off the float. He took his time, cognizant of last night’s strain on his pacemaker, and was breathing heavily when he finally reached Mavis. They weren’t close, but through Hattie they had been friends, and he hugged Mavis until she squeezed him so tightly that his chest began to hurt.
“Sorry Eddie,” Mavis apologized, only now remembering that the man had a pacemaker installed not long before. “I’m really not myself.”
“None of us are,” Ed admitted. Seeing Dak, Ed shook his hand. “Are you joining us today?”
“Wish I could,” Dak said. “We’re running through the entries, and then we’re putting up signage for the route.” Thumbing a finger at the boys, Dak added, “They’ll be working on our entry the rest of the day, two behind this one, if you need anything.”
With that, the group gathered Mavis. Confident she was in good hands, her progeny moved to an exit between the tarps. They were almost out when Jesse froze so suddenly that Johnny stepped on the heel of his shoe and Dak had to sidestep to avoid both of them.
Suddenly filled with a darkness so overwhelming that it brought bumps to his flesh, Jesse shivered. There, demure in a thin, rose-colored blouse, sitting at a folding-table and knitting a small pair of mittens, was his former school crossing guard, Sylvia Baker. Her face had recovered some of its previous control, but her lips were still slanted as she talked to a woman whose name Jesse couldn’t immediately recall. They were snacking from a bag of chocolate-covered almonds that Sylvia directed to the working side of her mouth but, as though Jesse himself had grabbed her arm, she dropped the almond she was holding and glared at him. Even from this distance, Jesse sensed a coldness in the woman, and when she stood and began limping toward him, Jesse found himself stumbling backward to the gap between the tarps.
“Jesse?” As he said his son’s name, Dak felt a chill down his spine that made him uneasy. Through his t-shirt, he touched the outer edges of the medicine wheel hanging against his chest and intuitively fingered the white triangle that signified many things, including death. The piece grew warm beneath his touch, then burned so hot that Dak yelped, reached into the neckline of his shirt, and yanked off his necklace. It fell to the ground.
Gaping at him, Johnny reached to pick it up.
Old, knotted fingers arrived at the medicine wheel first, and when Sylvia curled her hand around it, Dak swore he saw a thin tine of smoke curl from the woman’s fist before she handed it back to him.
“Terrible heat today,” Sylvia said, looking up at Dak with eyes that were a little too dark in the center, a little too white around the iris. “If I hadn’t taken my earrings off an hour ago, they would have burned right through me like a hot knife through butter.”
She spoke slowly, carefully annunciating her words to make sure they were proper. To make sure they were human, Dak thought, though why the idea came to him, he didn’t know.
Swallowing the fear that bloomed up his throat, Dak accepted his necklace and shoved it in his pocket. It felt almost frozen against his thigh. “Thank you, Mrs. Baker,” he said. Then, because both his sons had fled and he was standing alone in front of her, Dak asked, “You’re helping out with the parade this year?”
Sylvia nodded, and as she and Dak spoke, Pandora rolled over the man, prodding and poking the magnified colors around him. He saw her; Pandora knew this with certainty. His older son had seen her too—past her weak layer of adopted flesh, through her brittle borrowed bones, to the essence of her immortal spirit. Their kind could, though in these modern times, with the growing detachment from spirit, they usually weren’t sure what they were sensing. They only knew she was evil. They called her calamity, corruption, suffering, catastrophe, the devil, but were never close to the truth. Until now.
Examining the man that saw into her, Pandora wondered if he were any relation to the medicine man who’d driven her from her host in Africa. She understood there were curiosities around the world she hadn’t yet discovered. As long as they posed no danger to her, she could let the curiosities be. But these two didn’t seem harmless to Pandora. They were trouble, and trouble had to be disposed of. She knew these two would take effort; their heightened awareness made them anxious, and Pandora worried their penetrating energy might deplete her own as had been done by the medicine man. Reflecting on her current depletion, Pandora considered the failure of her entry into the city—a bumbling escapade reserved for novices.
She had lost something with Harold’s death. The connection she’d had with him accorded Pandora a sense of belonging—the only time she’d ever felt that way—and when she felt the last tremble of his heart in that jail, there was a crumbling of her energy that could only be rectified with death. The bus crash should have revived her. The surge of forty-two souls from one plane to another should have made her whole again, should have remade her what she had once been—but like bark stripped from a tree, the act had made her thirsty and weak.
Only, she hadn’t gone fully around the tree, had she? She hadn’t felled it the way it was supposed to be felled. She’d left a filament there that kept the deaths from reaching her. A woodcutter with one last blow of the axe was an empty-handed woodcutter with a cold home. The last blow. The filament. Yes. Yes. Yes! That was her interference. The survival of a single passenger had siphoned Pandora’s power, draining it like the river, isolating it like the electric surge, sickening it like the animals. She’d never failed to kill before, and her Maker was punishing her for it. With a certainty that filled her soul, Pandora knew what she had to do.
First, however, she needed her strength, and that required death. Hattie had done a commendable job of healing Pandora. She’d fought long and grotesquely, but her death was only a thin scab on a deep wound. Pandora needed m
ore, so she waited inside Sylvia, picking at yarn with needles, until the volunteers were called to lunch.
20
Smoke rose from the grill in Roy Botcher’s backyard, where he and his wife Gretchen readied the last complements to the annual volunteer appreciation barbeque. In years past, the covered fairground pavilion was used for the event, but the space was presently dedicated instead to a framework of pictures and devotions, memorializing Garett’s recently lost citizens.
The day’s heat had grown stifling, so the Botcher children passed around cups of iced lemonade while the volunteers found seats. Heaping bowls of potato salad, steaming corn, and smoked beans were put on a serving table alongside the back deck, and these were soon joined by platters of burgers, grilled chicken, brown-sugar pulled pork, and jumbo hot dogs. Perry waved to his grandchildren, already playing on the swing set, then found Roy scraping the grill and clapped him on the shoulder.
“My goodness, what a feast!” he enthused to the sweating chef.
Roy wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and continued cleaning the grill. “It’s always so cold this time of year we never get the chance to do anything like this. Spaghetti or chilli. Chilli or spaghetti. We thought we’d do something different this year.” In the field, one of the llamas yipped.
“It’s always good, Roy, you know that,” Perry told him.
Putting his brush down and untying his apron, Roy looked down at the smaller man. “You mind if I say a few words before we eat?”
“Please,” Perry nodded, though his stomach had growled so loudly he glanced at Roy’s llamas, pretending the sound had come from them.
A few quick strides onto his deck and Roy stood above the waiting guests. He tapped a fork to the side of his pop can, and when the sound wasn’t quite loud enough to get their attention, Roy hollered. “Before we eat, I would first like to thank each and every one of you for joining Gretchen and me at our home. It’s a privilege we don’t take lightly, and we are honored by your companionship, now more than ever.” His usually steady voice quavered and there was a sniffling silence among the guests. Gretchen appeared beside Roy on the deck and held his hand, and Roy went on. “I lost three of my closest friends last week and more than a few neighbours. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m about done with this business. So let’s eat up and pray for our friends and pray for our river, and let’s make this the best damn festival the world’s ever had. Amen.” He mumbled the last word, unsure if he’d just delivered a sermon or a victory speech, but the words felt right.
“Not bad for an old farmer,” Gretchen whispered in his ear as she hugged him. Her hair, red and still thick in a ponytail, tickled his nose. Roy sniffed, then the sound of applause hit his ears and rang across his fields. Old and young, the volunteers stood, whistling, clapping, cheering, their voices a collective totem of respect.
Not to be outdone, Chester hitched up his pants and was about to take a stand on Roy’s deck to extol the virtue of hard work to the Southbridge collective, when the crowd disbursed and formed into a quick line with their plates where Gretchen was already serving them. Roy patted Chester on the back and put a bottle of water in his hand so that Chester had something to squeeze.
While plates were being filled, Dak, Jesse, and Johnny stood away from the assembly, feigning interest in one of Roy’s llama barns. Wary of the onlookers, the llamas straightened their long necks and stared at the men. Dak leaned his elbows on the fence, waiting for his sons to speak, but either they were disinclined or just as stupefied as Dak. Looking at the llamas, he said, “What the hell was that?”
Jesse’s fingers slid down the length of his braid as he joined his father at the fence. “You tell me.”
“You two got something going on that I don’t know about?” Johnny asked, his face knitted with confusion. “He’s tripping and running away, and you act like someone stuck a taser to you,” he said to his brother and father. “The heat getting to you?”
“You didn’t feel it, then?” Dak asked Johnny.
“Feel what?”
It was Jesse who spoke. He said only one word, but its vocalization made the men catch their breath so that there was no movement of air between them. “Flint.”
A mixture of disbelief and terror clouded Johnny’s face. Legends of the evil spirit who’d cut himself out of his mother had been taught to Johnny since ever since he could remember. Where other spirits supplied necessities like food, fertility, good weather, or strength, Flint instead was a taker, ravaging and damaging whatever he could, whenever he could. Flint’s malicious association with death and darkness was no secret to the Cardinal family, nor their band, and it wasn’t a rare occurrence that their Elders interceded to rid Flint from a struggling home. Johnny, young and detached from his spiritual self, hadn’t yet had experienced the proximity of Flint’s presence, but that didn’t lessen his apprehension of hearing it now. He said, “In Mrs. Baker?”
They nodded at him, then Jesse said, “I felt it at the hospital, when those cats were running around. I should have said something then; maybe Nikonha could have done something about it.”
“She still can,” Dak maintained.
“You ever feel it like that, Dad? I mean, that strong? Nothing’s ever gotten to me like that, nothing. I don’t have a good feeling about this.” Suddenly, Jesse felt so small and insignificant that a desire to take Sarah and leave the city shuddered through him.
Dak shook his head. “Nothing this strong, no. I suspect it has something to do with that crash and the river, probably those animals, too. It’s not the first time things have gone strange around here. Before my time, Akśotha said there were ice floes on the Huron that poisoned many animals and people. Turned them all gray with sickness until her great uncle shot an arrow into a stone stuck in the ice. He told her it was the demon’s heart.”
“I’ve never heard that story,” Johnny said, watching the slow approach of a coffee-colored llama.
“Stories have a way of bringing things back; they let the settled access us again, whether or not we’re prepared to handle them.” Dak pressed his lips together and picked at a splinter on one of Roy’s fence posts. “I didn’t want to give Flint an entrance.”
“So what do we do now?” Jesse asked.
“We do nothing. We stay away and we pray. Don’t go near that woman and don’t let Sarah go near her either, you hear, Jesse?” Dak instructed.
But by then, Sarah had already arrived for the luncheon and was seated at a table between two leaf-shedding maple trees. On a much-needed day off, Sarah was easy to spot in her brilliant yellow sundress as she slid a plate of food over to Mavis, who looked none too eager to eat. Jesse waved at them, but their view to him was obstructed by a quick group of food-toting Southbridge residents aiming directly for the empty seats at Sarah and Mavis’ table. Jesse’s mouth dried when he saw Sylvia’s pink blouse among the mix.
They were turning to beat the residents to the table when Johnny suddenly screamed. Like his father and brother, Johnny had been leaning on Roy’s fence but was a little slower removing himself. With his attention on Sarah and his grandmother, Johnny hadn’t seen the approaching llama rush toward him, nor had he seen the big jaw open wide or the crooked teeth clamp down on two fingers of his left hand. A flash of pain sped from his knuckles as the llama grinded its jaw and chewed Johnny’s bones. Blood fell from the llama’s lips, tears poured from Johnny’s eyes, shrieks of gradually awakening horror erupted from many mouths, then Dak and Johnny ran to the fence. A number of saliva-flung expletives burst from Johnny’s quivering lips then, as his brother and father reached his side, Johnny went limp against the top fence rail when the llama finally spit his severed fingers out.
By now, Roy, Gretchen, Perry, and Chester had reached the llama enclosure, the first two wrangling the offending animal into an isolation stable while the latter each fished one of Johnny’s fingers from the dirt. “Ice! We need a bag of ice here! Quick! Hurry damn it! Hurry!” Chester ordere
d anyone who would listen.
The disturbance-riled group gathered to the fence, gaping, gasping, groaning at the bloodshed. All but Sylvia Baker, who went on eating her beans.
21
Dan slammed his hand on the conference phone where he let his fingers lie for fear the black screen in front of him would once again light up with Mark Bennett’s face. Never had he expected a time when the chief of staff from the Department of National Defense would demand his presence, but he had woken to the undeniable request and hadn’t the energy in the early moment to orchestrate a plausible excuse. He’d scrambled into his too-familiar shower at the Sunset Motel, washed quickly and took the last of his clean uniforms out of the dry-cleaning bag, then rushed to the station to prepare his team for another shitshow. Sitting beside him now, his closest sergeant, Hoss Brander, groaned. “What if we just come back when this is all over?”
Dan buried his face in his palms and sighed. “Station vacation. I like the sound of that.” Generally, Dan wasn’t a man who lived for time off. He enjoyed his work even when things were ugly because he still held to the principle that he was a conduit of help. He’d felt this purpose in his bones as a new recruit and still all these later, even when his city had gone to hell and the Feds were on his ass.
Their impending involvement wasn’t a surprise to Dan. Already, the city was full of outsiders, and Ada had warned as much when he and Boyce were in her office at City Hall, but it still grated on him. He went to sleep chief of police and woke up federal lackey, with many caustic levels above him. They’d given him a lengthy list of reports he had to file, no time to file them, and asked that he prepare space at the station for an operational contingent to oversee the station’s activities in the proceeding months, should anything else of national interest arise. Presently he stood with the briefing binder his assistant Florence had prepared from the encrypted email they’d sent and considered tossing it in the trash.
