The Tatterdemon Omnibus E-Book

Steve Vernon

• Herausgeber: Steve Vernon
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

In 1691 the town of Crossfall taught the witch Thessaly how to die. They beat her, they shot her, they hung her - but nothing worked. When they finally tried to bury her alive Thessaly set the field against them. The first man died as a gust of wind harrowed the meat from his bones. A root,flung like a dirty javelin, cut a second man down. Many more deaths followed. The Preacher Fell impaled the witch upon her very own broom but she dragged him down into the field to wait for three more centuries.

Three hundred years later Maddy Harker will murder her bullying husband Vic. She will bury him in the field as she buried her abusive father years before that. The very same field where the revenant spirit of Thessaly Cross lies waiting.

In three days Vic will rise again - a thing of dirt, bone and hatred.

Men will call him the Tatterdemon.

And hell - and Thessaly - will follow!

*************
Folks who are looking for a mix of Stephen King's SALEMS LOT small town sensibilities mixed with the grand guignol chutzpah of Peter Jackson's BRAINDEAD really ought to grab a copy of TATTERDEMON today!

*****************
WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT STEVE VERNON

"The genre needs new blood and Steve Vernon is quite a transfusion." –Edward Lee, author of FLESH GOTHIC and CITY INFERNAL

"If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub, and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon." - Bookgasm 

"Steve Vernon is something of an anomaly in the world of horror literature. He's one of the freshest new voices in the genre although his career has spanned twenty years. Writing with a rare swagger and confidence, Steve Vernon can lead his readers through an entire gamut of emotions from outright fear and repulsion to pity and laughter." - Cemetery Dance 

"Armed with a bizarre sense of humor, a huge amount of originality, a flair for taking risks and a strong grasp of characterization - Steve's got the chops for sure." - Dark Discoveries 

"Steve Vernon was born to write. He's the real deal and we're lucky to have him." - Richard Chizmar 

My Mom thinks I'm pretty cool, too.

Leseprobe

The

TATTERDEMON

Omnibus

***

REVENANT

RESURRECTION

REQUIEM

2013

THE TATTERDEMON OMNIBUS

By Steve Vernon

Cover Art: Keri Knutson

ISBN-13:  978-1-927765-00-5  

First Edition – May 1, 2013

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher and author do not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-person web sites or their content.

No scarecrows, dogs or deer were hurt in the writing of this novel.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of both the publisher and the author is strictly prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

DEDICATION

To My Wife Belinda – I am nothing but a lonely old scarecrow in a lonely old field without you.

BOOK ONE

REVENANT

PROLOGUE - SUMMER 1691

Preacher Abraham Fell stared down at the witch Thessaly Cross, breathing heavily, like he had just run for a good long stretch. He leaned over, bending at the knees to lay another slab of fieldstone upon her chest.

“We beat you with hickory and we beat you with iron,” he said. “And you have withstood every blow.”

He stooped down and he picked up another rock, never taking his eyes off of her, as if she were some kind of dangerous viper who might strike at any moment.

He set the next rock on top of her, directly beside the others.

“We shot you and the musket balls swerved in midair, like they were afraid of sinking into the taint of your flesh.”

He scooped up another rock, grunting as he scooped. He just wasn’t as young a man as he used to be – and no wonder.

Sights like this one would age you faster than years ought to run.

“We hung you in a noose woven from a widow’s gray hair, a noose soaked in children’s tears and you kicked and you cackled like a hell-kite in the wind.”

He laid the next rock down, and then sank to his knees and scooped up another stone. He was building a kind of rhythm that made the labor just a little bit easier.

“We burned you but even fire failed us.”

It was true. She had witched a storm from a cloudless sky and had drowned the blaze cold. Young Seth Hamilton, the town smith who had been the only man to dare kindle her pyre had been cindered into blackened ash.

“Let the stones crush you and the dirt eat you,” Fell said, laying another solid rock – which made thirteen stones in all. These were all good sized stones, hand-picked, at least the weight of child’s corpse. She ought to have been crushed by the weight upon her and yet she carried the load as if it were nothing but sticks and straw.

“Where did you hide the broom, witch?” Fell asked.

“Maybe it is up your bunghole,” Thessaly taunted. “Have you looked there recently?”

The broom was her power and Fell feared it – although he knew that he shouldn’t have. It was just a thing of woven willow. His grand-nanny had swept the pine floor boards of her cabin daily with just such a broom and she certainly wasn’t a witch.

Or was she?

Fell bent for another stone.

Thessaly spat in his face. “Bury that, god kisser.”

He dropped the fourteenth stone upon her. The impact made a hard sound, like the witch had stared too long at the Gorgon. He grunted at the effort and she laughed at his strain – which stung his pride hard.

“You must pay for your crimes against God and this community,” Fell said.

Thessaly snorted. It wasn’t any kind of human sound. Her snort sounded heavy and animalistic - like that of a boar in rut.

“What I pay for is for refusing to give you my land,” she pointed out, as the wind rattled the grass. “What I pay for is for witching your field in return for your greed. I pay for your cattle that ate the gray grass. Happiest of all, I pay for your daughter, Fell.”

Eliza.

Damn it.

Fell could still taste the smell of the dead meat festering in the back of his sinuses. He had put down the last tainted beast this morning. He had beaten the animal square in the skull with his best chopping axe. The metal of the blade had chewed into the bone and had stuck hard. He had to put his left boot against the cow’s forehead and lean back to work the axe loose. The unholy cattle hadn’t moved, not one of them - even after he had cut the first two down. The cursed cattle had just stood there in his field, the wind making slow soft harp sounds blowing through their gray rattled guts.

That had been the easy part.

Fell had put his daughter Eliza down before he had started with the cattle. Then he burned what was left of her and he buried her ashes in the furthest corner of the field.

The husk that he had burned and had buried wouldn’t have nourished a worm.

“Was the milk tasty, Fell?” Thessaly taunted him. “Did young Eliza find it sweet?”

“Witch!” Fell hissed.

He snatched up a skull-sized rock scraping his hand against the rough granite and marking it with his own blood. He would match his stone and his blood against hers, he fiercely swore.

But first he had to know.

“Where did you hide the broom?”

“Closer than you imagine.”

She spat again. The phlegm spattered the grass. The wind blew a little harder as Fell flung the stone. The granite chipped and sparked upon her flesh.

The farmer in Fell’s soul feared a run of wildfire. A spark could easily rise up in dry times like this and tear through an entire countryside.

“I will curse you Fell. I will curse you and all those who stand with you.” the old woman began to chant. “Merry through the prickle bush, the gore bush, the hump; careful round the holly fall, she’ll catch your shadow hold...,”

The onlookers stiffened like a pack of wintered over scarecrows. Fear, or something darker, rooted their feet to the earth. Fell stumbled back from the pit. The wind stiffened and gusted as Thessaly laughed all the harder.

“Our father,” Fell began to pray. “Protect us from this harridan’s evil spells.”

Thessaly continued to laugh.

“It is no spell, you fool. It is nothing more than a children’s rhyme, Fell. It was only a simple nursery rhyme. Maybe I wasn’t witching your field. Maybe I was merely waving my broom at a thieving crow.”

Did she speak the truth?

Fell smothered his doubt.

Thessaly Cross had killed Eliza and Abraham Fell would not rest until he saw the witch finally dead.

He knelt down and he caught hold of the next stone.

Only she wouldn’t stay quiet.

“Witches don’t curse, Fell. Only men curse,” Thessaly ranted. “They curse themselves and they curse their poor pitiful lot on this earth.”

“You lie,” Fell said, working the stone free

“Truth! I tell you the truth. Witches dance in easy circles. We follow the rhythms of time and tide and the wind that washes the earth’s bones dry.”

The wind howled. A tangled snare of root rammed through the dirt. Fell stepped back too late. The root twisted like a snake. It snared Fell’s wrists and it held him fast.

“Witches plant what men water with tears,” Thessaly shrieked. “Witches sow the sorrow men must reap. Know this, Fell. When you harm a witch you plant a grudge as old as regret.”

Fell tugged against the root. From the corner of his eye he saw the rest of the townsfolk, snared like screaming rabbits.

“I have you Fell, I have you all. Now you will all see what a witched field really is.”

And then Thessaly set the field to work.  

She stirred dead grass into unholy life. The strands and stalks whirred like a wind of teeth, slicing through men and women who tried too late to run away.

The first man died in mid-scream, as a gust of grass harrowed the meat from his bones. A root, flung like a dirty javelin, impaled a second man. A third went down beneath an airborne avalanche of fieldstone.

The wind grew gray with dust, straw and flesh. The earth opened in great cratered swallowing mouths.

The townsfolk all died screaming.

Only Fell remained.

He stared at the carnage, as helpless as a snared rabbit.

“Witches sow, Fell. Witches sow and men must reap.”

She raised her hands.

He saw gray dirt imbedded beneath her fingernails.

“Shall I tell you where I have hid my broom, Fell? Have you guessed? Do you really want to know? I buried the broom in your very own field.”

The broom rose straight up from the earth’s dirty womb, not more than an arm’s reach from Fell.

“I and my broom will wait for you, Fell. We will wait for you like a seed waits for rain. Live with this. I have taken every one you know, but I let you live to breed. I let you live with the knowledge that one day I will return to visit your descendants.”

Fell braced his feet in the dirt. He prayed for the strength of Samson. He fought hopelessly against the root.

“Now I will show you how to bury a witch,” she crowed.

She hugged herself as if hugging an unseen lover. The earth moved in reply as a thousand rocks flew from the flesh of the field and hovered above her homemade grave. Fell tore his wrists from the shackle of root.

He felt the skin rip from his bones.

“No descendants! No curse! Today we die together,” he howled.

He uprooted the broom with his freshly skinned hands. He threw himself down upon her. His momentum drove the broom handle straight through her heart. A hot gout of foul stinking blood splashed his face.

The willow twig head of the broom stood out in all directions like an angry star. Fell saw the flash of tiny unimaginable teeth grinning from the end of each writhing twig.

Then the broom took him.

It ate at his face like his skin was nothing more than apple rind. He felt the white-hot twig-worms gnaw his features. He felt them tear and burn through the bowl of his skull. They crawled into the jelly of his brain and nibbled at his thoughts.

He had time for one last scream.

The broom ate that as well. It swallowed each morsel of Abraham Fell’s pain and terror as it dragged him deeper down into the hole with the witch. The rocks poised above them like a pair of hands, ready to applaud. Thessaly pushed him from her. She nearly pushed him from the grave.

“Live, Fell. Let the meat grow back upon your opened skull. Crawl back from the brink of death. My curse shall stand. This earth grows too cold for me. I will wait for you and your descendants in the belly of hell.”

“No!” Fell pushed back down upon her. “The curse ends here.”

He shoved forward. He felt the broom slide and suck through the cage of his ribs. He pushed himself closer, impaling himself on the broom handle. The willow wood splintered inside of him. It nailed him to Thessaly’s twisting frame. He felt her bones wiggling beneath her meat like worms in the dirt.

She nearly slipped free.

He bit her lip, tearing grayish meat. The pain racked her concentration. She let her spell and the rocks above them drop. The grave, the broom, the witch and Fell were sealed in completely.

For a long time, nothing moved.

The moon rose like a slow ghost, like a lantern looking down upon the butcher field.

A small gray form pushed from the rocky grave. The gray hairless skin glistened beneath the cool wash of moonlight, like the hide of a stillborn rat.

It crawled away into the darkness that surrounded the field.

A lone owl hooted remorselessly.

…soooon…

CHAPTER ONE - Three Hundred Years Later

* 1 *

I am going to die, Maddy thought.

And the whole thing is all my fault.

She stared at her reflection in the dark kitchen window and her dead mother’s eyes stared back at her. There was a question asked in those ghost window eyes.

What are you going to do now, girl?

Maddy couldn’t say.

Vic stood in the center of the kitchen, waving his arms like a one-man windmill. Zigger slunk beneath his feet, gazing up with eyes pale as rotted moons, hoping to be fed.

Again.

“What the hell were you thinking?” Vic yelled.

Maddy felt her bones reaching down through the floorboards into the Nova Scotian dirt. She felt her bones take root, going to seed. What had she been thinking? She should have run a half a dozen years ago.

Now she was trapped.

Just like her mother.

Vic kept yelling, one of the only things he was good at. “I come home just a little bit late and you go and do a thing like this. Just what were you thinking?”

Maddy didn’t regret what she’d done, just doing it so stupidly. She’d been angry. She should’ve known there’d be trouble. She told herself that she needed to keep just as calm as possible.  

She watched her reflection as she answered.

“A little late? It’s nearly midnight. You could have phoned.”

“The payphone at Benson’s was broke. Somebody buried a goddamn slug in it.”

Vic always had a ready lie. Lord but she was tired of it. She was tired of a lot of things. Marriage with Vic had started out fun, but fun changed fast. Vic grew mean just as soon as he had his cubic zirconium leash planted on her finger.

“You weren’t at Benson’s,” Maddy said. “You were at the tavern, spending your pay check. You probably danced yourself a couple of go-rounds with the shortest skirt in the place, I bet.”

Vic grinned, knowingly.  

He was such a total bastard.

He didn’t even try to hide the truth of it.

“A man’s got a right to relax. Besides, I was at Benson’s, having a cup of coffee.”

She was tired of arguing, but what else could she do? Divorce him? She couldn’t expect any alimony. Vic would just laugh and drive away and that would be that – which would leave her with nothing but the welfare system to fall back upon.  

No way.

She would be cold in the ground before she would lean upon the dole.

“I smell bourbon,” she remarked and instantly regretted it.

Vic’s eyes flattened like slices of cut glass. He was that angry – and he didn’t seem to think that there was anything wrong with him being angry. The fact was, Maddy had just stepped over the line.

“Maybe your nose is broke and you smell things wrong,” he suggested. “It could happen to you.”

She was stupid, she told herself. She hadn’t planned to make him angry. She should have stopped right then and there - only she didn’t feel like stopping.

She made herself loose and got ready to duck.

She usually could dodge the first couple of swings.

“You could have phoned,” she argued. “It’s a public restaurant. You could have asked Jack to use the counter phone. He wouldn’t have minded.”

Vic just bulldozed straight through her argument. “Don’t talk goddamn foolishness, girl. Jack Benson never lets anyone use that phone, not unless the kitchen was burning down.”

“You could have tried.”

“Never you mind. Me being late is no excuse to do what you done.”

“It had gone cold,” she explained for the dozenth time.

“Well what’s a microwave for?”

“The microwave was broke, just the same as the pay phone.”

He nearly laughed. It was too bad that he didn’t. It would have been over but out of the blue old Zigger started to bark. Vic booted the hound square in the ribs. The dog yelped in protest.

“Shut up hound.”

Kicking the dog should have cooled him down only Vic never worked that way. A little violence stirred him up like a poker shoved in a fire.

“I just need to know what you were thinking,” he asked, coming back to his anger like a dog after a bone. “Doing a thing like that.”

“It went cold,” she repeated. “It went cold, I was tired and it was near midnight. The dog needed feeding. If you’d put some dog food in the house like I asked, I wouldn’t have had to give him yours.”

“There was a hockey game on,” Vic argued. “Can’t you understand?”

His voice rose at the last like a hurt little boy. Maddy nearly laughed. He was just so dense. He couldn’t realize what an absolute shithead he was being. She nearly laughed, but laughter right now would have been too much like asking for it.

She wasn’t suicidal.

Not yet.

She tried to make peace.

“Look Vic, there’s a stick of salami in the fridge if you want. Some pickles and some relish if you would like. I’d be glad to fry you up a couple of slices and make you a sandwich of it.”

“I don’t want any stinking salami and I am sick to death of your preserves. I want my supper, damn it, and I want it now.”

From beneath the table’s safety, Zigger barked again. He was always going off, ever since his eyes went. His baying bounced off the ratty gray walls of the kitchen until it seemed the plaster would shatter.

“Quiet!” Vic yelled, kicking at the table and the dog beneath it.

Don’t let him get you going, she told herself, but there was something growing inside her and getting bigger as every moment slipped by.

“So I thought,” Maddy started, still trying to figure how to change the subject. “I mean I was just thinking, is all.”

That instant of lapsed attention was all Vic needed. He grabbed her by the chin and he twisted her face around to meet his gaze.

“Thought what Maddy? What’d you think? What have you ever thought in your godforsaken life?”

He pushed his face close to her, looming over her. He really didn’t need to try so hard. Vic was large all over, a real totem of a man, all forehead and chin framed in a thicket of dark tangled hair. It made Maddy feel small, just standing next to him. It was a kind of slow erosion working away deep in her soul. Every year Vic made her feel a little bit smaller, like he was whittling her down until she was nothing but a shadow.

Some days she felt like she was nothing more than a puppet, dancing on his strings.

“If you have suddenly learned how to think, then I sure want to know about it.” Vic went on.

The thing got bigger inside her. Every breath cut like a fish knife, her heart banged like a crazy drummer. It is a heart attack, she thought. I am having a heart attack.

“Maddy? Are you listening to me?”

Oh god I’m glad it’s over. He can bury me where ever he wants to.

I don’t care.

Zigger bayed and skittered across the tile floor.

“Shut up hound,” Vic snarled. “It’s bad enough that you ate my goddamn supper.”

Maddy squeezed her eyes shut. She felt a burst of blue light open like fireworks going off inside her skull.

Oh god.

It is a stroke, she thought. It is a stroke or a heart attack or maybe some sort of a brain aneurysm.

Whatever it was it couldn’t be any worse than life with Vic.

Just then Vic snapped his fingers a half inch from Maddy’s eyes, calling her back from the brink of her imagined death.

“Hey!” he shouted.

Maddy opened her eyes, startled to attention.

“Are you listening?”

She stared. It wasn’t a heart attack, but it sure was something. A blue dot of light popped open in front of Vic’s chest. Maddy knew that the blue light had to have come from somewhere inside her. It wasn’t anything she thought. It was more something that she just felt.

The dot hovered over Vic’s heart, flickering like a blue firefly.

“Well?”

She saw her chance and she took it.

“It went cold, Vic. Your supper went cold and the pork chops were greasy and I figured you were out at Benson’s and it’s a restaurant so you must have had yourself some supper, now didn’t you?”

The cavalry rode in just that quickly. She shifted the blame to him. She put him on the defensive. It would work. She had trapped him in his lie and made him feel like he had to hide the whole thing.

She had beaten him again.

She didn’t care.

She didn’t even notice, not really.

She was too busy staring at that blue light, wondering just what it was. Maybe the light wasn’t from her. Maybe it was something else. One of those laser gun sights you saw in movies. What if there was a sniper out in the darkness of the field, taking aim on the kitchen?  Getting ready to fire? Would it bother her, watching Vic get shot to pieces?

She decided to wait and see.

“Are you listening to me, girl?”

She nodded vaguely, entranced by the blue dot.

Vic rolled his eyes in disgust. “Wake up, hay-for-brains! Jesus Christ, you look like some kind of sleepwalker. Are you listening, hey?”

“I’m listening, Vic.”

Only Maddy wasn’t listening at all. She hadn’t been for years. Vic just had nothing new to say. As far as their marriage went he had stopped growing a long time ago.

The blue light widened. It was like staring at her Daddy’s old television set, turning off in reverse.

“You ain’t listening. Christ. For the life of me I don’t know why I ever married you. Your Daddy was right, you know. You are stupid and you are ugly.”

That hurt.

“I ain’t ugly, Vic. Maybe I’m stupid, but I sure ain’t ugly.”

It was true. Maddy was always pretty. No movie star, mind you. She was a tough sort of pretty like a country weed in full bloom. Straw blonde hair, straight as a beggar could spit – with eyes that her Daddy used to call cornflower blue. A little gopher bump on the bridge of her nose, hooked down like a river running around a bend. Thin in the flanks from work and worry, but living with Vic would do that to any woman.

“You are skinnier than a bean pole, and if them tits get any closer to the ground they’ll leave skid marks where you walk.”

That was a cruel truth. Maddy’s knockers crept closer to her stomach every year. They nearly hid the row of five tiny circular scars that Vic inaccurately referred to as her rib holes. But what could she do about that?

Nail them back up?

“It’s the law of gravity, Vic.” she explained. “Sooner or later we all fall down. I can’t help that. There ain’t nothing but trouble ever comes back up.”

She stared at the blue dot, watching it grow. Vic didn’t seem to notice the blue light at all, no matter how large it got. The dot started changing like it was taking shape.

“There you go again,” Vic complained. “If you did some work around here instead of daydreaming, I might come home in a whole lot nicer mood.”

That was a bold lie. Vic didn’t know how to be in a good mood unless he was drunk and even that wasn’t any kind of a guarantee.

The blue shape grew into a form. It looked like some kind of rag doll, getting bigger all the time. Vic thumped the pine table for emphasis. The salt and pepper shakers shivered in their wooden box.

Maddy didn’t notice.

She was too busy staring at the hovering blue image directly between her and Vic.

The hovering blue image of her long dead father.

“Just how long are you going to let this skid mark with legs get away with that kind of crap?” Maddy’s dead father asked.

* 2 *

Helliard Jolleen drove a Mercury, just the same as his Daddy did. Two shades of red sprayed across a patchy rusted skin of red brown primer. Duane called it Martian camouflage. Helliard liked to think of it as something more like flames or blood.

Today it was both flames AND blood.

Helliard was certain of one thing.

Something his Daddy had told him a long time ago.

“Death is all around you boy. It’s just waiting around the next corner to jump you when you least expect it. Believe in that, and you’ll grow strong. The first thing you got to do is learn not to fear death but to welcome it like the earth welcomes the rain.”

Helliard’s daddy, who had once picked steel guitar with Hank Snow and could shoot the pussy out of a pregnant lady flea, had taught Helliard rhythm and how to kill.

“So long as you are alive, Helliard, you got to fight, eh? Now most folk, they say fight, they mean hit. I don’t mean hit. Hitting is for playground sisters. When I say fight, I mean kill. The man who goes into a fight ready to kill, he cannot be beat. So you got to learn to kill. And killing is just like a country song. It’s got a rhythm, easy as breathing, easy as dancing, whether you shoot them, knife them, or just beat them to flathead hell.”

It was Daddy’s truth and a goddamn lie.

Helliard knew that now, for sure.

Damn it!

Helliard swerved the red Mercury, tumbling half of Duane Telford’s potato chips down his beard.

“Goddamn it Helliard!” Duane swore, while trying to stuff the rest of the chips into his mouth. “Are you trying to kill a man?”

Duane was a fat useless fuck. Ordinarily Helliard wouldn’t have paid him any mind. Only today, after visiting that hospital Helliard felt a long way west of ordinary.

“Shut the fuck up, Duane. You eat too much anyway. That stomach is going to be the death of you yet, I swear.”

Helliard shoved a lock of red hair from out of his eye. The hair was another gift from daddy. He claimed it was the Joleen temper bleeding out.

“Goddamn it Helliard. Ever since you come from that hospital you’ve been acting meaner than a rusty meat axe. What the hell’s got into you anyway?”

Helliard thought about the hospital. He thought about his Daddy. He thought about what he’d been afraid to do.

He couldn’t deal with any of it.

“Shut the fuck up before I kick your ass through your teeth, Duane.”

“Well goddamn it Helly, you made me spill most of my potato chippies,” Duane loudly complained, picking and nibbling the larger crumbs from his beard.

“Chips, Duane. Not chippies. They’re called chips. Besides, you eat too fucking much.”

“I’m growing,” Duane said.

“You are growing on my fucking nerves is what you’re doing. Now shut the goddamn fuck up, eh?”

Duane shut up. People always shut up when Helliard said to, because Helliard was a tough old fucker.

Yeah, right.

Helliard slid an Export-A cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket. He snapped open his Zippo lighter and sparked flame without missing a beat. That’s the way Helliard liked to do things - smooth and tough, without thinking at all.

Only right now he didn’t feel so tough. Not after seeing his Daddy in the hospital bed with no more meat on his bones than a stick of kindling. Not after the way Daddy had stared at him, begging with his eyes for Helliard to find the guts to take Big Fuck and....

“Fucking cancer,” Helliard swore.

A growth, his Daddy had called it. Like it was some kind of fucking weed.

“Jesus.”

Daddy gave him the lighter on his twelfth birthday. It was supposed to be right from World War II. The lighter had some writing on it. The writing said - SO SHALL YOU REAP in big fancy letters, all hooks and knobs that reminded Helliard of meat hooks hanging in a slaughter house. Antique or not, the lighter worked damn good.

It lit the first time, every time.

None of that plastic butane shit for Helliard.

He puffed in a long hot drag and sparked up a couple of coughs to clear the air track. He ought to give this shit up. It was smoke that killed his Daddy. Sooner or later old man tobacco-weed would let Helliard know that his bill owed was long past due.

Fuck it.

He puffed again. He blew the smoke at Duane for the hell of it.

“Horseshit, Helly!” Duane protested.

The doctor gave Daddy three months to live. He said that Helliard ought to stick around to sort of keep an eye on things.

Like hell.

Sticking around, watching a man die, that was too much like sticking around to watch your house burn down after the oil tank lit off kiddle-tee-boom. Gone was gone and done was done and death was nothing more than a forever period at the end of a life sentence served.

Helliard tucked the lighter back in his pocket. He touched the gun, jammed in his black leather belt. It was a big old Ruger Blackhawk. Way too much gun is what his Daddy called it, but Helliard called the gun Big Fuck, because it made a big fucking mess of whatever it shot. It could put a hole through a man large enough to reach your fist clear through.

He knew that for an honest fact.

The pistol wasn’t legal in Canada, but God bless the U-S-A-holes. Helliard’s Daddy drove it up over the border, with the pistol tucked in the bottom of a welded over gas tank. He gave it to Helliard as a thirteenth birthday present. Since then Helliard had shot more men dead than he had fingers and toes to count on. And that was counting his extra little toe.

Mind you, Helliard didn’t shoot nobody he knew. That would leave way too much motive hanging out there in the wind for some lawman to catch hold, like the tail of a kite. No sir, the only people Helliard shot were strangers he met on the road. He buried them deep in the woods a mile out past the town.

Yes sir, Helliard was a real bad fucker.

“Yeah right, goddamn it,” he muttered. “A real bad gutless fucker.”

Helliard felt Duane eyeing him like he wanted something.

“We need some pop, Helly. Some Pepsi.”

Helliard glared at him.

Duane shook the Pepsi can meaningfully.

“Yeah, damn it. I am dry to,” Helliard admitted. “There’s a Night Owl up the road. We’ll pick up some Coke there. Pepsi is nothing but piss water.”

“I ain’t got any money,” Duane said.

Helliard rubbed the butt of his pistol like it was a woman’s tit.

“Don’t need any,” Helliard said

And he didn’t.

* 3 *

Maddy didn’t get it. There was Daddy, just as big as television. Skinny as a starved rake with that goatish half beard he grew because he’d always been too lazy to shave.

Only he was blue.

He was blue, and he was talking to her.

“I raised you better than this, girl.”

She had gone crazy.

That was it.

She had gone absolutely nuts. Daddy was dead and buried. She ought to know. Yet there he was. Was, and wasn’t. He wasn’t more than a tattery blue silhouette, like the light that tatters about a dead stick in a fireplace, just before it bursts into flame. He was Bluedaddy – that’s what he was - glowing like a dime store glow in the dark dashboard Jesus.

“What are you staring at?” Vic asked. “Have your eyes gone buggy?”

Bluedaddy just stood there straight in front of Vic, grinning like a bastard at the tit. She could hear his grinning somewhere deep inside the plates of her skull, humming like the twanging of a guitar string.

Only Vic couldn’t see a thing.

“I asked you a question, girl.” Vic said.

Bluedaddy jerked a crackling blue thumb in Vic’s direction.

“He asked you a question, girl.”

“You’re dead,” Maddy whispered, talking to Bluedaddy.

“You ought to know,” Bluedaddy replied. “You’re the one who buried me.”

Vic looked confused. Maddy thought that it suited him.

“Don’t you be threatening me now,” he warned her. “You’re the only one who’s going to be doing the dying around here Maddy. The only dead I am is dead tired. Dead hungry too. Fry me some eggs, damn it.”

Bluedaddy’s grin danced in the air in front of his mouth like fairy light in a haunted swamp. She could hear the old bastard’s grin buzzing just behind her left ear, like a hive full of crazy bees.

“Are you listening?” Vic asked.

He got tired of waiting. As quick as you could say stick he backed his right hand hard against her cheek.

“Wake up,” he said. “And fry me them eggs.”

He plunked himself down at the big kitchen table. He faced away from Maddy, like she wasn’t worth worrying about.

“Why don’t you kill him?” Bluedaddy asked. “You sure as hell know how to.”

“Why?” Maddy asked Bluedaddy.

“Because I’m hungry!” Vic shouted, misunderstanding her why. “Because I fucking told you, that’s why.”

Bluedaddy grinned even harder.

“Because I told you to,” Bluedaddy repeated snarkily.

Maddy grabbed her fry pan. She gave it a half twirl to spill any dust that might have grown overnight. She hadn’t stood griddle at a half dozen Halifax greasy spoons for nothing. In a minute she’d have the pan on the burner, the eggs cracked and sizzling.

“Get to them eggs, girl.” Bluedaddy commanded. “Your man has spoken.”

That stopped her.

Those last four words told her that this was her Daddy and not just some figment of her imagination. Your man has spoken. The same four words he’d said to Maddy’s mother more times than Maddy could count. The last four words he ever said.

Your man has spoken.

Maddy opened her mouth and three more words fell out.

“Make them yourself.”

The hell of it was she wasn’t even sure who she was speaking to. Vic knew though. At least he figured he did.

“Are you looking for a pair of homemade sunglasses, Maddy my girl?” he asked, without even bothering to turn around.

He’d do it, too.

It wouldn’t be the first time that he had blacked both of her eyes.

“Well?” he asked.

Maddy stared at the homespun wall of Vic’s back.

“I’m waiting,” he said.

She swung the pan over her head like a kindling hatchet and brought it down into Vic’s skull.

He hit the table face first. His hands pancaked out to break his fall but that was only reflexes talking. He was deader than Jesus’s dog, long before he hit the table. The impact launched the salt shaker into flight. It landed with a clatter, spilling salt on the floor. Hell, she thought, spilled salt’s bad luck. She had better throw some over my shoulder.

She stood there trying to remember which shoulder she was supposed to throw it over.

Vic’s brains began to spread like spilled porridge.

Maddy forgot about the salt.

She grabbed for a napkin to blot the mess.

Then realization hit.

She stared at what she had gone and done.

Then she smiled.

“How do you like those eggs, Vic?” she softly asked.

Bluedaddy smiled too.

For some reason he was holding a gray willow broom - kind of like her granny used to use. He passed the teeth of the broom through Vic’s skull. As the broom touched the skull the air crackled like a hairbrush on a dry winter morning.

“Time to clean up, Maddy,” Bluedaddy told her. “It’s time to clean up all of the old messes.”

Maddy nodded.

She let out a long slow sigh.

She thought it was over.

It wasn’t.

Because a few days later, just like Jesus, Vic rose up.

CHAPTER TWO - An Eveready Bunny Of Destruction

* 1 *

Maddy dragged Vic through the back yard, wrapped in an bargain store Indian blanket she’d have to burn to forget.

Bluedaddy followed behind, sort of hovering, sort of drifting.

It was hard going.

The yard was muddy with the afterbirth of spring. There were tufts of scotch broom and marestai; witch grass and scattered snarls of patchy alder.

“Christly damn you Vic,” Maddy complained.”I’ve been after you for years to lose some weight.”

Nobody knows just how heavy a couple of hundred pounds of meat and bone is until they’ve dragged their guts out hauling someone else’s guts across an untended spring field. There was absolutely nothing to grab hold of on a freshly-killed corpse. Most of the handles were very poorly built.

It was a good thing Maddy had never learned to be squeamish. Zigger pattered after her, following by nose and ear, getting under her feet, glad to be outside and surrounded by a thousand fascinating stinks.

“You should have locked the damn dog in the house,” Bluedaddy said.

Maddy snorted out loud.

She told herself that Bluedaddy was nothing more than a figment of her imagination – but what the hell. If she was going crazy she might as well enjoy herself.

“I ought to harness that mongrel up to this bastard’s body and make him drag it,” she said.

“So why don’t you?”

“Oh I don’t know. I didn’t think of it, I guess. I was kind of busy murdering my husband.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it murder,” Bluedaddy said.

Maddy thought about that as she dragged.

“You’re dead right Bluedaddy,” she agreed. “It wasn’t murder. He hit me. I was defending myself.”

Now it was Bluedaddy’s turn to laugh.

“Defending? From behind? With a fry pan the size of Cincinnati? I said you couldn’t call it murder but it sure as hell wasn’t self-defense.”

Maddy wasn’t so certain.

She kept having doubts.

“Maybe this is a bad idea. Maybe I ought to drag him back in. Call the police, and let them handle it. I mean, he was asking for it. He was going to hit me.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Bluedaddy noted.

“You been watching?”

“Girl, I was always watching. You let him hit you often enough.”

“You’re saying I let him hit me?”

“That’s gospel you can sing in the choir pit. Life is what we make of it. Nobody does things to us, we just let them happen.”

“So that makes me innocent. That means Vic let me hit him.”

“Maybe it does and maybe doesn’t, but it won’t mean piddly squat when that judge bangs his gavel. You’ll go to jail for sure. There ain’t no death penalty anymore, but there’s things can happen that are a whole lot worse than death.”

Bluedaddy was right.

There wasn’t a judge in the world would see it her way. She’d just have to bury her mistake and hope that nobody found out about it.

So she kept on dragging.

The ground got steeper as she went.

Maybe she ought to bury him here in the backyard.

No.

It was better not take chances. She leaned into it, using her weight. It was hard work.

Uphill and mud-ridden didn’t make it any easier.

“He can’t be that heavy, not with the way you cook.”

“Fuck you and the dead horse you crawled in under, Bluedaddy. Vic’s in around two hundred pounds, give or take.”

“That’s kilograms these days, girl. Don’t they teach you nothing in school?”

“I grew up on pounds and ounces and it’s hard to forget the old ways,” she said. “Besides, he’s a lot heavier in kilograms, so I’d rather not think about that.”

“Yeah, but he ought to be lighter after all that daylight you let into his skull bone. Did you ever see so much blood?”

“Of course I’ve seen blood. I’m a farm girl, remember? There’s more blood in a hog butchering than a little fry pan manslaughter.”

Ha. That was a big fat lie. Maybe she lived in the country but she damn sure wasn’t a farmer. She still shopped in Crossfall and that was only forty miles from Windsor, maybe ninety out of Halifax.

She and Vic got their meat from the co-op, just the same as everyone in town. It came wrapped in neat plastic packages. The closest she ever came to butchering was trying to bargain down the meat man on a tray of day old chops.

Bluedaddy grinned that eerie tattered grin of his.

“What kind of blood you seen, girl?” he asked, like he saw right through her lie.

“I ain’t been a girl in a lot of years. That means I’ve seen lots of blood. A lot more than most men ever see. Every moon, down she comes, the red sea.”

“I ain’t talking about that kind of blood.”

“There’s other kinds is there?  Listen Daddy, I seen lots of blood. Even seen yours, that last time.”

“That’s old history.”

“Nothing’s old in the country.”

Bluedaddy grinned at that. That was the way life worked in the country. You fought with your roots and never got too far from the tree. There was always someone to remind you about your last set of pooped in diapers.

Maddy kept on dragging.

Through the yard and up the hill and out to the barn, where Vic parked his back hoe.

* 2 *

It started out simple.

Duane wanted soda pop.

Helliard wanted a chocolate bar.

Only neither wanted to pay for what they wanted.

So Duane walked on up to the store clerk and said hi while Helliard pulled Big Fuck out.

“Open the cash,” Duane said, waving his hunting knife like an open sesame wand.

The clerked popped the register open, too quickly for Duane’s liking. He slammed the drawer shut on the boy’s fingers.

“You got a gun in there, boy?”

Duane was yelling, even though he wasn’t more than a half inch from the boy’s face. Then Duane made a quick movement, like a magician yanking a rabbit out of his sleeve. He laid the knife straight across the back of the clerk’s hand. The knife popped a couple of good veins and most of the hand strings. The clerk yowled like a scalded cat.

Ha.

As dumb as he was, Duane was surprisingly practical – cutting the clerk’s hand like that. It was awfully hard to squeeze a trigger or press an alarm button if you’re busy hanging onto a handful of blood.

Helliard didn’t like it, though.

“Damn it Duane. You’re getting blood all over the money.”

“Bloody money spends the same as clean.”

It made sense.

Then this old man popped out of the backroom like a jack in the box - waving one of the largest double barreled shotguns Helliard ever saw.

“Prick!” the old man swore.

“Shit!” Helliard swore back. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“Prick with ears!” the old man cocked the hammers.

Helliard turned Big Fuck around, dropping the big pistol in his haste to evade buckshot wounds.

“Shit,” Helliard said. All he could see were the old man’s eyes. All dark and preacherly and sewn nearly shut with wrinkles, like he was tired of all the things he had to look at. For half a second Helliard saw Daddy laying in that hospital bed just as big as life and talking a blue streak.

“You dumb fuck,” Daddy said from whatever dream space he was hiding behind. “You couldn’t even kill your old man, dropping your gun like a goddamn virgin killer, how the fuck did you ever manage to get laid?”

Duane didn’t see a thing. He was too busy blinking the clerk’s bloody finger spatter out of his eyes. Then the old man’s shotgun spoke. A load of buckshot opened Duane’s belly. It hit him so hard, Helliard expected to see him fly into the wall like in the movies.

Only this wasn’t the movies.

Duane stood there blinking stupidly as one side of him blew in and the other blew out just as quick as that.

What was left of his insides leaked out onto the floor and began soaking into the cracks between the floorboards.

“Shhh…,” Duane whispered, like he was trying to keep a secret. “Shit.”

The old man wasn’t whispering. He was too busy fumbling for a reload, cursing full throttle, like a water tap someone forgot to twist shut.

“Shut up, Daddy,” Helliard muttered, scrambling for Big Fuck.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Duane kept on cursing.

The clerk freed his hand from the cash drawer. He waved the sliced-up hand around like a drunken lawn sprinkler.

The old bastard kept cursing, spilling shotgun shells like they were Halloween candy. “Holy old baldheaded Moses, son of a Judas priest, Christ on a high hanging cross.”

Helliard grabbed Big Fuck.

Then Helliard pointed the pistol up at the old man who was busily cranking the shotgun right straight around towards Helliard. The two of them looked like a couple of fucked up tank drivers, trying to see who could turret their aim around quick enough.

Duane slid to the floor like a sack of wet oats.

“Shit, shit, shit,”

“Shit or get off the bleeding pot,” Helliard shouted, still aiming.

“Jesus, bejesus, be-jumped-up-jesus!” the old man cocked the hammer.

Helliard saw the shotgun ready to speak again. He swore he could see shells aiming out of both barrels. He dropped like a fumbled pancake. He hit the ground just as the shotgun blew. As he hit the ground he cranked off a shot that big-fucked an innocent jar of mayonnaise.

The clerk waved his knifed up hand.

Blood flew like an explosion in a ketchup factory.

Helliard expected to see one of the clerk’s fingers fly off.

Duane lay there, moaning like he’d eaten one too many bags of chippies.

Helliard squeezed off three more shots, working his way up from the old man’s belly, chest and his big old nose. The old man tipped back and fell to the floor. The old man’s last shot blasted skyward, blowing out an overhead bank of fluorescent lights.

Helliard dragged himself the floor, too shit scared to stand. His eyes were blind with terror and pissed off rage. Barely seeing, he caught hold of the clerk, dragged him down to the ground and pistol whipped him to death.

Minutes later, the clerk long dead, Helliard kept beating and beating, like he was possessed by the spirit of an Eveready bunny of destruction.

* 3 *

“Here comes Peter Cottontail,”

It was enough that she had already frypanned her husband to death and needed a hole to bury him in. Bluedaddy’s singing only made things worse.

Maddy wished for earmuffs as she keyed the backhoe into life. Vic’s sheeted body leaned and bounced against her. His flesh chilled in the cool night air. The blood on the sheet congealed into a brown crusty jam.

Bluedaddy hovered over the two of them in the backhoe cab.

“Hopping down the bunny trail,”

Maddy used the singing to keep her mind off her sore back. She had nearly sprained her back hoisting Vic’s carcass into the cab. It would have been far easier to just swing him into the front scoop but that seemed kind of sacrilegious.

“Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick, daddy. You couldn’t carry a tune if God gave it handles and a rope to hang on to.”

Bluedaddy’s grin buzzed and crackled above her like a burning rattlesnake. “I’m just trying to get into the Easter spirit, Maddy my girl. Just trying to get next to God, is all.”

She geared down and pointed the snout of the big yellow machine towards the field.

“Too late for that Bluedaddy,” she told him. “You went the wrong direction, if I know you. Besides, you been dead too long to worry about how close you’re sitting to God.”

“You ought to know that, being a husband murderer and all.”

Maddy ignored his snipe. She felt too giddy to give a damn about what her dead Daddy thought. It was late and she was tired. The swig of Jack Daniels, from the bottle she’d fished from off the floorboards hadn’t helped one bit.

She kicked the bottle to check its slosh, making sure there was plenty left. She might want to celebrate later. She might want to have a little toot, to wake Vic off to his happy haunting ground.

The bottle bounced between her feet.

She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. The roar of the heavy machine filled her with a greasy tilt-a-whirl excitement.

“Hoppity, hoppity, hoppity, little bunny.”

It was Vic’s backhoe. He made a half-assed living from it. It seemed only right to bury him with it. Like a Viking war chief tucked into the burning belly of his favorite longboat. Only Maddy wouldn’t burn the backhoe.

It was just what you’d call the delivery mechanism.

She headed across the field following the heavily rutted trail. She wasn’t worried about anyone seeing her. Vic often came home Friday nights, drunk as a tavern fart, drag racing the backhoe from one end of the field to the other. Besides, the nearest neighbor was a mile away - old Lily Milton, a fat old hermit who was most likely dead to the world by now.

Still, it didn’t hurt to be careful.

Maddy parked the yellow beast and lowered the scoop arm.

She skidded its teeth across the dirt, trying for that first gulp of earth.

“Yeehah,” shouted Bluedaddy. “Look at her go. Just as quick as a nun’s kiss. I bet you wish you had a rig like this the time you buried me.”

She shivered over the memory his taunts stirred.

She hadn’t thought about killing and burying her father for a very long time – and she wasn’t about to start thinking about it now.

She had other problems on her mind.

“Here comes Peter Cottontail,” Bluedaddy kept on singing.

She hadn’t made up her mind if Bluedaddy was a for real ghost or just a crazy woman’s hallucination. The only thing she knew for sure was his singing voice ought to have been buckshotted out of its misery half a hundred years before he was born.

She tried to keep her mind on the digging.

“Hopping down the bunny trail,”

“Daddy will you please stop singing?”

“Why?”

“Because it is pissing the hell out of my ears.”

“Where’d you hear language like that?”

“From you.”

“You got a point,” Bluedaddy said. “Anyway I was just singing to help keep you awake. Only had your goodness in mind.”

“Singing like that’ll wake the dead, daddy, that’s for sure.” Maddy said. Bluedaddy chuckled, like she’d said something funny. “Besides, we killed you a long time ago. Me and Momma dug your grave. It’s long dead, done and over with.”

Maddy couldn’t say that word, grave, without thinking what a hard old word it was. The word had an edge to it. You just couldn’t say it without hearing a steel blade clanging against unexpected rock.

Or a fry pan.

She rammed the scoop hard against the dirt to bang out the echo of old memories. She tore through the dirt, digging it extra deep, until she was done.

“Now all I got to do is fill the grave.”

She stared at Vic’s corpse, thinking about how hard it would be, lugging it down from the cab.

“To Hell with that.”

She turned the backhoe around. She opened the cab door and banged her left work boot squarely against Vic’s dead ass.

“You’ve wanted to do that for years, I bet,” Bluedaddy said.

“Never you mind, Bluedaddy,” Maddy said, even though he spoke the gospel truth.

She nudged her boot forward and levered Vic’s carcass up, over and down. He rolled down the side of the backhoe, straight into the grave. His body bounced as he hit bottom dirt. His left arm jumped like he was still alive.

“Look at him bounce, Maddy,” Bluedaddy shouted. “That boy is still kicking.”

A gout of red anger and a slight hint of panic flooded her heart.

“Oh no you don’t,” she said.

She raised the scoop and lowered it down. She raised it again and lowered it back down. Over and over, mashing Vic’s body into the dirt like a stubborn potato.

Then she clambered from the cab, carrying the spade she’d brought for close work. She stood over what was left of his body, raised the spade and started swinging.

This was for all of the history.

This was for every goddamn thing been done to her all her life.

She beat the corpse like a woman possessed by a jackhammer.

Just in case he was still alive.

Just in case he took into his head to dig his way back out, breaking bone with every swing, never taking her eyes from Bluedaddy.

She wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left to break.

She beat him like batter, pulping him into the earth itself.

Ground beef, she thought.

Bone meal.

Mush.

Bluedaddy watched her work.

He never said a word.

He just sat there, singing softly to his old blue self.

* 4 *

Back at the Night Owl Helliard raised himself up from what was left of the clerk. He dragged and stumbled over to Duane’s body. He couldn’t tell if Duane was dead or not. Buckshot made a hell of a wound. Duane’s stomach looked like a mess of spaghetti and meat sauce.

Helliard checked for a pulse.

Nothing.

Damn it!

Duane was as dead as tombstones.

He had to be.

He wasn’t even making any breathing sounds.

Helliard closed his eyes. He could hear Daddy’s thin raspy wheezes. He saw Daddy’s eyes staring from the hospital bed, just begging him to shoot. He heard the moan as he turned his back, unable to find the guts to shoot Daddy out of his misery.

“Damn it.”

Helliard slowly raised Big Fuck.

The gun weighed a thousand pounds.

He placed the barrel against Duane’s stone cold brow.

He fired once, just to be sure.

* 5 *

Three hours later, Helliard hit the road with his engine howling, the gas pedal squashed flatter than the shadow of a steamrollered footprint.

He hadn’t meant to fall asleep like he did.

It must have been some kind of reaction to all the killing.

Killing like that sucked the life out of a man. Still, it was one hell of a good morning coffee, waking up face down in the leftovers of Duane’s exploded skull. It took a half hour to rinse the blood from his scalp. Fifteen minutes to find and spill kerosene from one end of the store to the other.

It took another half hour to load the car.

Soda pop and chocolate bars.

Rope and duct tape.

A couple of large tins of kerosene and a big old hunting knife, twice the size of Duane’s.

The last thing he grabbed was a bag of potato chips.

He took the stuff he needed, mostly. And he would need it. The kind of road Helliard was traveling he would be bound to need this sort of gear.

There was some killing to do.

Helliard rolled the big car down the road with the light of the burning store behind him. Big Fuck lay in his lap like a lover.

The old man’s shotgun bounced on the floor boards.

Helliard saw a paperboy, teetering along on a rusty bicycle. Quicker than rattlesnakes he popped Big Fuck out the window and let fly.

BAM!

The bullet made a hole in the boy’s chest big enough to see through. The bike skidded to the side of the road. Papers flew in the air like ink stained shreds of confetti. The bike hit the ground and died, front wheel ticking like a Las Vegas roulette wheel.

The paperboy was dead a lot sooner than that.

“That’s for you Daddy. They are all going to be just for you.”

Helliard howled like a blood-sick wolf, and laughed at the way the papers flew. He glanced around to the passenger’s seat where Duane was propped.

“Some fucking shot, eh Duanne?”

“You’re a bad fucker, Helliard,” Duane croaked in Daddy’s voice.

Helliard grinned like a crazy man. He didn’t notice Duane’s head was damned near missing. He didn’t notice how hollow Duane’s voice sounded, like talking from beneath a grave. He didn’t notice the slow blue haze tattered around Duane’s body.

He gave the Mercury its head.

He let it take him where it wanted to.

He glimpsed a green road sign flashing past.

CROSSFALL - 75 MILES.

He’d drive until late.

He could sleep off road.

Just pull up under a tree or into an old barn.

Come the next day he’d hit town.

He didn’t have too much of a plan going for him. He just figured on going out in a hell of a blaze.

Yes sir. Next stop, Crossfall.

CHAPTER THREE - Bad Things Coming

* 1 *

Roland Friar liked nothing better than getting off the highway. Just a slice of intermission, no matter how brief, was all the heaven he ever needed. He parked the rig outside the Wandering Lust Motel. One of those places where the desk clerk routinely rented rooms by the hour.

Roland paid for a couple of hours.

He didn’t like to be rushed.

Now he lay on the bed sideways. He liked to feel his toes dangling in midair. He waited for the woman to finish her shower. She took her time, but he didn’t mind. It was important she felt comfortable.

He’d found her in the bar. He’d bought her a drink because that was the way things worked. The motel got its cut and the bartender got his cut. Everybody got a piece of the action. Roland didn’t complain.

He figured it was fair all around.

She was tall, the way he liked them. The kind of skinny that looked damn near anorexic. She probably thought it made her pretty.

Hell. Maybe it did.

He wasn’t much of a judge. Most women looked beautiful to him. Damn near every one of them, except one.

Carmen.

Forget her.

Concentrate on who you’re with.

She was tall, like he’d noticed. He liked that. The taller the better. He liked the way he could meet their eyes when they laid down together. No matter how tall you were standing up, in bed you reached the same altitude. It was the only time in his life except for children and freak shows where he could speak to a person eye to eye.

They made love for an hour. That was always good. There was nothing wrong with making love.

Still, it was what came next that excited him.

“Talk to me,” he would ask her. “Tell me nice things.”

Then she’d say something like - “Do you want me to talk dirty?”

They always asked that question.

A lot of their customers liked to hear all about the different ways that the girls had done it or all of the different men that they’d had.

Not Roland.

Roland was different.

“No,not dirty. No bad things. Just nice. Tonight I want you to just talk nice.”

It always took a while to get them into the mood for this. It would have been easier if he was asking to handcuff him or to whip him with strings of licorice. It would have been easier asking for a blow job, or to fuck her in the ass, or to beat her.

He didn’t want any of that.

He wanted to talk to her of the sunrises he had seen on the highway. To tell her of the nights when the stars winked at him or the time he saw the Northern Lights, unwinding across the heavens like a sky full of celestial cellophane. He wanted her to relax and forget about the clock for a while. He wanted her to fall in love with him, for just a few minutes, even if it was phony or clumsy.

He knew it was never real.

He just wanted it for a while, was all.

The girl stepped out of the bathroom. For a moment she vanished in the vague haze of light bulbs and steam. She looked like some ancient skeleton stepping out of the mists. Like a puppet made of sticks.

A scarecrow.

He felt a brief flash of intuition.

Bad things coming.

Look out Roland.

Bad things coming.

Then she turned out the light and came back to bed.

“What do you want next?” she asked.

“Tell me nice things. Only nice things. Please.”

They talked, slow and fumbling and warm, for the remainder of their last hour.

* 3 *

Lily Milton dreamt of gun shots.