Creekers

She relaxed back on the couch with her feet up. Her jeans looked scuffed. Her blouse had been ripped open; she feebly clasped it together with her hand but not very effectively. Phil could see almost all of one of her breasts.

“Since I married Cody, he’s kind of held me in reserve,” she said. “He stopped making me turn regular tricks.”

“He made you his top-drawer, in other words,” Phil suggested, remembering how things worked on the street when he was with Metro. Pimps got prestige by “marrying” their most marketable women and charging more for them.

“Yeah,” she affirmed. “He’d save me for the bigger money tricks. Anyway, last night after my set at Sallee’s, he wanted me to do a six-way with three guys and two of the Creeker dancers. I had no choice. If I didn’t do it, Cody would’ve beat the shit out of me.”

“So who did beat the shit out of you?”

She paused as if to quell something. “Christ, you should’ve seen these guys, they were three bikers who ran dust north of Waynesville. Some friends of Cody’s. They just came off a big drop and were loaded with cash. Things got out of hand pretty fast; they were all smoking flake and doing coke at the same time.”

“Bad combination,” Phil said.

“Tell me about it. Anyway, these guys were kinks, and they started beating up on the two Creeker girls. Cody doesn’t mind so long as they don’t bust them up too bad. Lotta guys pay extra to rough them up. But these guys—shit. They got to beating up on the two Creekers like really hard. So I started to pitch a fit, and when they wouldn’t stop, I tried to leave.”

“So it was the three bikers who beat you up.”

“No,” she said. “It was Druck. He slapped me around and threw me right back in the room. Told me I shouldn’t embarrass Cody in front of his friends.”

“Jesus,” Phil commented. Then he took the mark. “So how is it that Cody’s friends with out-of-town dust dealers?”

She shrugged. “They spend a lot of money in the club.”

“That the only reason?”

“Yeah. Why?”

Was she lying? Was she hiding something? Phil couldn’t tell. Maybe she doesn’t even know that Natter’s the main dust supplier in the area. “I don’t know,” he eventually said. “It just seems strange.”

Vicki let out a quick, cynical laugh. “The whole thing’s strange, Phil. Christ… I could tell you things you wouldn’t believe.”

“Try me.”

“Just forget it, okay? I don’t feel like talking about it right now.”

Phil looked at her. So maybe that means she’ll feel like talking about it later, he considered.

“You know something, Vicki? You’re flushing your whole life down the toilet with people like that. Being married to Natter, working in his club. You’re just a curio to him, you know. You’re just status.”

“I know.” She laughed humorlessly again. “The top-drawer whore. The White Trash Queen of the Creekers.”

“So why don’t you do something about it? That whole Creeker scene is crazy. Why don’t you leave Natter? Go somewhere else, start over and try to get your shit together?”

“Phil, you don’t even know what you’re saying. If I did that…”

“What? He’d send people after you? He’d kill you if you left him?”

She made no reply.

“Well, let me tell you something, he’s killing you right now, and you don’t even realize it. The only way you’re ever going to make your life better is to get away from him.”

“I don’t need a lecture, Phil,” she said wearily.

“You need something,” he pressed. “As long as you’re running with Natter and his crowd, you aren’t going anywhere but down.”

“Don’t you think I know that!” she almost yelled. “Don’t you think I know what’s happened to me! My whole life has been shit since the day you left town ten years ago!”

“Calm down,” he said. “I just want you to start thinking about things a little more, about what you’re going to do with your life. And you can’t blame me for your problems. Yeah, I left town, that’s true, but I’m not the one who puts coke up your nose and makes you turn tricks at a strip joint.”

“I know,” she said much more quietly.

Phil got off her case and let her collect herself. Then he asked, “So where was Natter last night when all this shit was happening with the three bikers?”

“He was out. Somewhere—don’t know.”

Yeah, well I think I do, Phil felt sure. I think maybe your darling hubby was sending his Creeker boys out for a little party in the woods. Killing Eagle. Trying to kill me. But, of course, he couldn’t tell her anything about that…

He let more silence pass, looking at her. He felt helpless. She wasn’t part of his life anymore; nevertheless he hated to see her like this. He hated what Natter was doing to her. But what could he do to help her?

Nothing, he concluded. The only person who could help her was herself

“Look, I’m really sorry about dumping myself here,” she said. “I didn’t know where else to go. I better leave now.”

“Stay here,” he said. “Sleep on the couch. Get some rest for now. You can figure out what you’re going to do later.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. Her voice was trailing away. “Thank you…”

Then she was asleep.

Phil turned off the light, drew the shades, then quietly undressed and got into his bed. In minutes, he too was fast asleep.

And dreaming.

— | — | —

Twenty-Five

“Look-it, look-it,” Dawnie urged, hunched behind him and pushing at his shoulders.

Phil’s ten-year-old eye opened wide over the first keyhole. What he saw at first was just a stark, white glare; his eye, going from the hot dark of the third-floor hall to such glaring whiteness, needed time to adjust. But eventually his vision focused, and he could see.

He could see what was inside the room…

It was like a hole in the wall to hell.

In the room lay a sunlit bed. It was big and white. And on the bed lay some weird kind of motion Phil couldn’t figure out at first.

Shapes.

Shapes the color of skin.

One shape was a bearded man with a big hairy belly. He had long hair and was buck-naked.

“Suzie, Suzie,” he was saying.

Then Phil noticed the other shape on the bed. A woman—

“Suzie, Suzie…”

She had hair on her head that was blacker than Phil’s aunt’s fire hearth. Her skin was whiter than their front yard the time last winter when it snowed.

Then Phil realized what she was doing to the fat, bearded man.

Jesus to Pete!

Her head was positioned between the fat man’s legs. It was going up and down, and what she was doing, exactly, was—

Jesus to holy Pete!

—she was sucking the fat man’s thing. Her mouth was going up and down over it, slow at first, then faster, then real fast.

Just like Eagle said they do. She’s trying to suck out his baby-juice!

Then more of the scene came into focus, and Phil almost upchucked when he saw the rest…

The woman had a butt and hair and bubs just like most women. But it was what she didn’t have that hit Phil in the face like someone’s big fist.

She ain’t got no arms or legs!

She had stumps but that was it. The stumps ended where her elbows and knees should be.

“Suzie, Suzie…” Phil jerked his face away from the keyhole.

“Neat-uh, huh?” Dawnie said.

It was not neat. It was gross.

But it all added up. It was just like what he and Eagle had heard Uncle Frank talking about that night they stayed up late to watch The Alfred Hitchcock Show when the lady killed her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then cooked it for the police.

This was a whorehouse.

A Creeker whorehouse, where men paid to do it with Creeker girls who were all messed up on account of their fathers did it with their sisters and their mothers did it with their brothers and stuff like that.

It messed up their genes.

Dawnie tugged at his Green Hornet shirt, pulling him toward the next door. Phil didn’t want to see stuff like this anymore, but something made him put his eye to that next keyhole anyway. He couldn’t help it. It was like a ghost or something grabbed the back of his head and made him look.

A big naked man was tying a girl up on the bed with rope, stretching her out. Then he began to crack a leather whip across her thighs and belly.

Crack! crack! crack! went the whip.

It left marks on the girl’s skin that were so red. Almost like she was bleeding…

She was crying and shivering.

Then the man’s thing went up…

And when the girl lifted her head to look at him, Phil saw that her head was huge.

It was big as a watermelon!

“Here, here-uh,” Dawnie said next. She was pulling him to a door on the other side of the hall.

“No, Dawnie, I don’t wanna look no more,” Phil begged her.

But Dawnie didn’t seem to care what Phil said, and she was strong, stronger than most girls. She pulled him over and slammed him back down to his knees before the next door.

“Look-it.”

Phil’s head was hurting bad, and he was sweating so much his Green Hornet T-shirt was fully wet but still he felt cold and shivery. His stomach felt bad too, worse than the times in the past when he’d eaten his aunt’s stuffed peppers. His head felt lighter than a birthday balloon.

“Look-it…”

Inside the room another man had his face between a girl’s legs. She had a big black plot of hair there, and the man looked like he was licking at it. Phil couldn’t understand why anyone would want to put their mouth on the same place a person goes to the bathroom, but this man was doing it sure as hell and making more noise than heifers eating. The girl’s white legs went up into the air. Phil could see her feet. She had what looked like ten toes on each! And her hands were the same way, more fingers on ’em than two people, and they were running in and out of the man’s wiry hair.

Then Phil noticed her legs…

He couldn’t do anything but stare.

One leg was surely a foot shorter than the other, and it didn’t have no knee. But the other longer leg looked kind of like it was coiling in the air, and Phil soon saw why.

The longer leg had three knees.

The girl was laughing. She seemed to like the man putting his mouth on the place where she went to the bathroom.

And then the man’s face came away.

Phil looked into the sprawl of hair…

“She’s got two baby-holes! “ he shrieked.

“Shhh! Shhh! “ Dawnie panicked. “ I’ll’se get whupped if they’se know we’se lookin’! Nanc’ll let that there fella do all that ta me-uh if she’s knowed I seed!”

But it was too late. Phil’s face trembled as his eye remained over the keyhole.

“What was that?” the naked man asked, jerking his head toward the door.

“Oooo, Dawnie must-uh be lookin’ at us,” the girl on the bed said. She was grinning, leaning up to look right at the keyhole.

And when she leaned up, Phil saw something else.

He couldn’t help it…

“Dawnie! She’s got six bubs!”

And she sure’s bullpoop did. Six of ’em, three on each side, and each bub had a big nipple on it the size of the top of a can of beans, only they were stickin’ out real far and were real pink. Dang! She’s got herself six bubs! he repeated in thought.

But when he looked up at Dawnie, she didn’t look too good. She looked like real scared all of a sudden, and then Phil noticed that the front of that crummy dress she wore turned dark in the front.

She done peed herself, he realized.

And Phil knew that people only peed themselves when they were real scared…

The door swung open.

Phil shrieked, and Dawnie was crying real hard, blubbering like and stepping back.

Phil couldn’t move.

“What we got here, huh?” the naked man asked. He grabbed Phil by the hair and lifted him up, chuckling. “You part of the deal, boy?”

Phil wailed.

“You wanna come on in with me an’ Nanc?”

The man’s breath smelled like his aunt’s when she’d been drinking, and his belly jiggled when he laughed. “Maybe a good cornholin’ would teach ya not ta look in on folks.”

Phil tried to jerk away but couldn’t. The naked man just grabbed his hair tighter and kept on laughing.

It was a whole lot of madness going on in the same moment: the naked man cackling, Phil wailing, Dawnie blubbering and peeing herself.

Phil barely noticed the sound of bedsprings.

Then another sound:

thah-THUMP, thah-THUMP thah-THUMP…

It was the whore-girl.

She had climbed off the bed, and now—

Phil’s stomach shrank.

—she was walking toward the doorway.

Only she wasn’t really walking; she was kind of hopshuffling. The foot on her short leg dragged while the one on her long, three-kneed leg kind of lifted real quick, then snapped forward—THUMP!—and landed on the floor. Her black hair tossed in swaying strands; her head bobbed. Phil could see those blazing red eyes of hers get brighter as she approached.

thah-THUMP, thah-THUMP, thah-THUMP…

Her shoulders pitched back and forth, and each time she took another noisy crutchlike step, all six of her bubs bounced around fierce on her chest.

The naked man cackled. The whore-girl thumped forward.

Then it was Phil who peed his pants.

Her red eyes felt like spikes sticking into his face. “Hey-uh, boy. What’cha peein’ yerself fer, huh? Scairt?”

Phil wanted to scream, but his throat felt locked shut. “Yeah, he’s a’scairt, ain’t he-uh, Eddie?”

“Shore is. Little fella peein’ away like a reg-lar racehorse,” the naked man who held Phil by the hair said and cackled some more.

Then the whore-girl cackled, too, worse than the man. The cackle sounded like a flock of big catbirds picking at a dead possum in the road.

“Ay-uh, an’yer’s real cute, boy. Wannas come in an’ let Nanc suck yer thang? That like ya think, boy?”

Phil was shivering like he was buck-naked in the dead of winter. Then the girl’s weird ten-fingered hand slowly reached out—

“No!” Phil cried, head shaking and eyes pinched shut.

—and trailed tickling down his face. It felt like a bunch of big beetles crawling there on his cheek.

Phil thought he might die…

But then the whore-girl turned real fast and clopped out into the hall.

Toward Dawnie.

thah-THUNK, thah-THUNK, thah-THUNK…

“No-uh, Nanc, pull-eeese!” Dawnie cried.

“What-choo doin’ bringin’ boys in hee-uh!” the girl yelled, pitching forward. Her hand swept up and—

ka-Crack!

—smacked Dawnie in the face so hard she fell down. The girl’s hand flailed up and down, then, smacking away at Dawnie’s head like it was a tetherball.

“Nev-uh, nev-uh! Girl so dumb you! Nev-uh bring no one up hee-uh!”

ka-CRACK, ka-CRACK, ka-CRACK

“Yer daddy gonna so bad whup ya, but ain’t’s be gonna much left of ya after I’se through…”

It was horrible. Now the girl was not only slapping Dawnie, she sat right on her stomach, pinning her to the floor, and was punching and choking her. “ Bringin’ boys up hee-uh—crazy you? Bet you’s fuckin’ him, were yas? Girl-huh, were yas?”

“Stop it! Leave her alone!” Phil shouted. “She didn’t do nothin’!”

Then Phil peed some more in his pants, peed till there was nothing left in his insides.

Other naked Creeker girls on the floor, who must’ve heard all the noise, one by one opened their doors to look out. A girl with a bunch of belly buttons, a girl with a humped back and arms hanging down almost to her feet, a girl with no neck and no mouth. Also the girls he’d already seen through the keyholes: the one with the big watermelon head and whipmarks on her thighs and stomach. And the girl whose arms and legs were just stumps that ended where her knees and elbows should be. She edged out into the hall on all four stumps and jabbered something…

And at once the hall was full of sounds: mish-mash words, cackling and laughter, and dogs barking.

All that sound seemed to press against Phil’s head. He’d never been so terrified in his whole life…

The whore-girl climbed off of Dawnie and clopped toward Phil, and then that big weird ten-fingered hand of hers reached out and snatched him by the collar of his Green Hornet T-shirt.

“Get you-uh outta hee-uh, boy,” she said.

Then, in a split second, she opened her mouth and bared her teeth at him.

Big crooked fang-like teeth, like a dog’s.

Phil screamed high and hard, pulled away till his shirt tore to ribbons, then ran for the stairs faster than he’d ever run in his life…

— | — | —

Twenty-Six

The after-image remained:

The teeth.

Jesus God…

Jagged fangs, just like a dog’s or a wolf’s.

Phil kicked the sheets off his bed. He leaned up in the dark and sighed heavily. Another dream, he thought. They’re wearing me out…

This was an understatement. The dreams drained him. He felt hungover and exhausted now, mentally sapped and as physically devitalized as if he’d just dug ditches for six hours.

The dreams were boring into his mind, piece by piece unearthing what had happened that day twenty-five years ago. And there was one thing he was sure of—

There were still a few more pieces.

Why couldn’t he remember?

Do I even want to remember?

Phil didn’t think he did.

Vicki was still asleep on the couch, tossing fitfully. Her red hair lay across her face like a crimson drape, and she seemed to mumble things in her slumber. The room was stiflingly hot; sweat shined evenly as lacquer on the V of skin that her blouse exposed. Phil slipped into the bathroom and took a quick, cold shower, but as soon as he stepped out, he was burning up again. With a towel about his waist, he went to his dresser, was about to reach for some shorts, when

“Nuh-nuh-no!”

Phil turned and looked quizzically at Vicki. Her eyes squeezed shut against her sleep, and, evidently, against a nightmare. At least I’m not the only one who has them, Phil considered.

“No, pleeeeeeeease…”

Indeed, Vicki was dreaming up a storm, tossing and turning in the torment of her own mind. Phil wondered what she was dreaming about, but then he thought he had a pretty good idea, considering what had happened to her last night.

“Ona… Ona,” she murmured on.

Phil’s eyes narrowed.

“Skeet…inner…”

He peered at her.

“Ona…prey…bee.”

What?

Phil leaned closer, studying her.

Then, very clearly, and with her eyes shut so tight her face distorted, she whispered:

“Mannona.”

Dream jibberish? Phil wondered. But…

The word sounded familiar, and now that he thought of it, so had the other words she’d mumbled.

Onn. Ona.

Skeet-inner

Ona-prey-bee.

And, especially:

“Mannona,” the whisper came off his lips.

Phil felt momentarily adrift.

Then it dawned on him. Last night. The ambush at Blackjack’s. Now he remembered. That last Creeker kid, he’d said the same words, right before I blew him away.

Yes…

Phil felt sure of it.

What did the words mean? Or did they mean anything? Was it part of the Creekers’ sublanguage? Most were clearly deficient in verbal skills—

“Mannona,” Vicki again whispered in her sleep.

Then she sprang bolt upright and screamed.

“Jesus Christ, Vicki!” He rushed to her, to try and settle her down. The scream had rung out like a siren, and shocked her awake. Phil leaned over, gently jostling her by the shoulders.

“Vicki, Vicki, are you okay?”

Her eyes were frozen open, bloodshot. She shivered where she sat and just stared…

“Vicki?”

“Oh…oh, God,” she muttered and finally came out of it. She numbly pushed her hair back, her eyes fluttering. Phil could actually see a vein in her neck beating manically.

“Are you okay?” he asked again.

“Yeah. I—”

“You must have had yourself one hell of a nightmare.”

She paused, catching her breath. Her hand came shakily to her bosom. “I did. It was…awful.”

“I guess so. You screamed so loud you probably woke up every stiff in Beall Cemetery.”

“Sorry,” she wavered. She shook her head, rubbed her eyes. “I have nightmares like that all the time.”

“What was it about?” Phil asked.

“Nothing, nothing—”

But Phil wasn’t even thinking. He should’ve been.

Because a moment later the door swung open—

“Phil, are you all right?” a worried voice rushed. “I heard someone scr—”

Susan stood in the open doorway.

Awwwwwww, shit, was the only thing Phil could think, standing there agape with just a towel around his waist.

The next two or three seconds seemed like two or three years. Plenty of time for Phil to curse himself up and down. Goddamn it! How could I be so goddamn STUPID! How could I have left the goddamn door UNLOCKED! Meanwhile, Susan just stood there. The expression on her face showed worry, confusion, and disbelief, all percolating at once. Then the expression hardened. She glanced at Phil, then at Vicki, and then at Phil again.

Then she said, none too quietly, “Fuck you!” and turned around and ran back up the stairs.

Phil ran after her, ludicrously holding the towel around his waist. “Susan, wait!” he yelled.

“Eat shit!” she yelled back, thumping up the steps ahead of him. “Eat lots of shit!”

“Would you please wai—” Phil began, then barked “Jesus!” as he stubbed his toe on one of the uncarpeted stairs.

He heard Susan’s door slamming shut on the landing above.

The entire house shuddered.

Phil limped the rest of the way up, feeling about as low as a typical snake belly. What could he say that wouldn’t be a foolhardy cliché? He could hear himself now. Susan, let me explain! Or, it’s not what you think! If he said anything like that, it would prove an even worse insult to her.

Pathetically, he asked himself, How do I get myself into messes like this?

No answer was forthcoming.

“Susan?” he said, rapping gently on her door. “Please, open the door and at least let me talk to you.”

“Fuck off!”

“All right, you’re really mad now, I understand that. So how about if I come up a little later when you cool off?”

“Blow yourself!”

“Tomorrow, then. Okay? Can we talk tomorrow?” he all but pleaded.

“If I ever see you again, you lying son of a bitch,” she shrieked from the other side of the door, “I’ll kick you in the balls so hard they’ll pop out of your ears!”

Phil took a forlorn step back from the door.

Well, he thought. I guess that means no.

««—»»

Vicki, of course, was gone when Phil went back to his room. I guess she knows a bad scene when she sees one. He couldn’t blame her for the mishap—he could only blame himself. Susan had told him weeks ago that any sound in his room traveled up to hers through the heating duct. He felt scorned; he hadn’t even done anything wrong.

So what else is new, Phil?

Right or wrong, though, common sense told him that nothing he could say could salvage things between him and Susan.

It wasn’t even 6 p.m. when he was dressed and ready. But ready for what? Eagle’s dead—he was my closest lead, and God knows where Vicki is. He’d have to start from scratch again, go back to the club tonight, and try to cultivate the trust of another denizen of Crick City’s underworld.

It would take weeks.

But there was still one person he could work on…

He drove the Malibu to Millersville, to the county lockup. He flashed his ID, then signed his gun in with the block sergeant. In a few minutes, Paul Sullivan was brought to the interview room in handcuffs.

Phil sat with his feet up on the desk. “Hey, bub, how’s it going? I’ll bet you thought it was your Aunt Millie coming to visit, huh?”

“Fuck you,” Sullivan grumbled.

“Believe it or not, Paul, you’re not the first person to say that to me today. Oh, and I really dig your wardrobe. Brooks Brothers?”

Sullivan sat down, dressed in bright orange prison utilities. “How come I got moved out of PC to general pop?”

Generally new inmates were kept in protective custody for five days, for in-processing, before being moved into the general prison population, but it had been at Phil’s request that Sullivan was transferred immediately. And Phil noticed something else: Sullivan had a black eye and new bruises on his face. “You can thank me for that, Paul,” Phil told him. “A sociable guy like you, I figure you’d appreciate the company of your fellow convicts. And with that handsome mug of yours, I’ll bet you got a lot of fans already.”

“Motherfucker,” Sullivan replied. “Half the chumps in there hate my guts. I get in half a dozen fights a day.”

“It’s called socialization, Paul. Let me ask you something. Does the word mannona mean anything to you? Or prey-bee? Or skeetinner?”

“Naw. But it sounds like Creeker talk.”

“And how would you know that? You know a lot of Creekers?”

“Naw, man, but, you know, they’re all over the place, and a lot of the whores at Sallee’s are Creekers. I hear ’em jabberin’ all the time. Coupla years back, me and Eagle ran flake with some hillfolk out of Luntville, pretty much the same as Creekers ’cept they ain’t all fucked up from inbreedin’. They told us all about the shit the Creekers were into, scared shitless of ’em. Said the Creekers were cannibals and shit like that, and they got some weird religion.”

Phil raised a brow. “What do you mean? What kind of religion?”

“I don’t know, why the fuck should I care? But these hillers also said the Creekers, since they can’t talk right, they kinda got their own language. You been to Sallee’s, you’ve heard ’em jabbering that shit.”

This just proved more of what Phil already suspected. Sullivan’s familiarity with the way Creekers spoke only verified some kind of proximity to them. And it was also pretty obvious that he was hiding something.

“You been a liar and a scumbag all your life, Paul? Ever think you might want to do something with your life besides be a lying, ugly, redneck, dope-dealing piece of shit?”

Sullivan grit his teeth. “Man, if I wasn’t in these cuffs, I’d kick your cop ass up and down the wing. I’d dance on your fuckin’ face, bub.”

Phil leaned forward and smiled. “Oh? Well, you sure weren’t doing a whole lot of dancing the other night when we had our little party in your luxurious abode.”

“That’s just ’cos you didn’t fight fair.”

Phil laughed. “Bill me for the coffee table.”

“Go ahead and laugh, bub. At least I got ya back, blowing your cover all over fuckin’ town.”

“Blowing my cover, Paul? And how did you manage that?”

Sullivan mustered a smile, which made the wedgelike face even uglier. “You think you’re pretty smart, slapping that bullshit no-call order on me. So ya wanna know what I did?”

“What’s that, Paulie? I’m dying to know.”

Sullivan’s smile came to its peak, like a curved gash in a slab of tenderized steak. “I had one of the guys on the block call Eagle.”

“Oh? And this colleague of yours talked to Eagle?”

“Well, no, but he left a message on Eag’s answering machine, and spilled the beans about you.”

Crafty fucker. Phil leaned back, chuckling. “Well, let me tell you, Paul, unless they got an answering service at the pearly gates, that’s one message Eagle’s never gonna get.”

Sullivan’s face pinched. “What you mean?”

“Eagle’s dead. And so is your buddy Blackjack. We went out to his place last night, and Blackjack was lying there looking like something in the fresh meat rack at Safeway. Then some Creeker kid blew a hole in Eagle’s chest big enough to drive your big piece of shit truck through.”

“A Creeker?”

“That’s right, Paul. We got set up, there were six of them waiting for us. And I’m sure it breaks your heart to see that I got out alive.”

“A Creeker,” Sullivan quietly repeated.

“One of Natter’s boys. I smoked all of them. A tragic waste of some worthy humanity. Guess none of them will make it to Harvard now, huh?”

Sullivan’s cockiness quickly grew drained of its edge.

His shoulders slumped. Phil could tell the guy was worried now.

“All right, you want me to talk, I’ll talk. But you gotta get me outta general pop and back into PC, and you gotta drop the distro charge.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. “I’ll think about it,” Phil baited. “But you gotta give me something now.”

Sullivan’s big, unpleasant head nodded. “Awright. We’se been workin’ through a new flake lab outta Lockwood. New guys. Some backer from Florida and an egghead labman just out of stir from the federal can in Bradford, PA. The regular supplier jacked the price, and the rednecks went nuts. These rednecks out here, they go through flake and dust like kids buyin’ cotton candy at the fuckin’ carnival.”

“An eloquent simile, Paul,” Phil remarked. “So you got with these new guys and decided to corner the local market, undersell the group turning out the old product.”

“Yeah.”

“What was the deal?”

“It was me and Eagle running point with Blackjack and Jake Rhodes and another guy named Orndorf. They’d drop the product to us, and we’d take it to the distro runners, a couple of whacks—Scott-Boy Tuckton and some fat kid named Gut. They were the replacements.”

“Replacements?”

“For the other distro runners. There were a bunch of ’em, but they all disappeared. Like I told you the other night. But Gut and Scott-Boy, they disappeared too, I don’t know, a month ago, so me and Eagle were running the product to the distro points ourselves. That’s why we took you on to drive.” Sullivan sputtered. “Dumbest-ass thing I ever agreed to. Usually I smell cop a mile away.”

“I stopped using deodorant—that way, I’d smell just like you.” Phil whipped out a pad and jotted down the names. “Okay, Paul. Good boy. Now give me the loke on your lab.”

“Shit, man!”

“Come on, Paulie. You don’t want to miss the cellblock shower, do you?”

Sullivan glared. “They’ll know it was me who dropped dime on them!”

“No they won’t, Paul. They’ll think it was Eagle or Blackjack or any of the other guys in your operation who disappeared. For all your supplier knows, those guys are in the joint, too. I’ll even put the word out that it was someone else; I’ll say I heard it was Blackjack. They’ll believe it because nobody even knows Blackjack is dead.” Phil tapped his pen. Sullivan was small-time on a losing streak; Phil wanted the big fish, Natter. Give him a deal, he decided. Get what you really want. “You know what PBJ is, Paul? Probation before judgment? That means you don’t do time. Give me what I want, and if it all checks out square, I’ll talk to the state attorney’s office. I’ll tell them that you’ve been a good citizen, cooperating fully with the police, and I’ll get you PBJ’d. You’re out of here in forty-eight hours. You leave town, you leave the state, no one knows where you went. All you gotta do is see a probie officer once a week wherever you go. And you know what you could even do? You could start all over again, Paul, get a real job, a real life, live like a real person for once. Who knows, you might even like it. It’s got to be better than sitting in the slam, making dust runs, and sweating bullets every night not knowing when the other guy might have you in his crosshairs.”

Sullivan’s heavy jaw set. He was chewing his lip, thinking.

“It’s a good deal, Paul, and it’s either that or you get to sit in this stone motel for the next five to ten years. But don’t worry—I’ll send you a fruitcake every Christmas.”

It was fun putting the squeeze on a guy like Sullivan.

“Time’s a’wastin’,” Phil quipped. “Keep me waiting, and I might just have to go shake down some other dustdealer and get what I want out of him.”

Sullivan swore under his breath. “Awright, shit. Who else I got to trust?”

Then he gave Phil explicit directions to his supplier’s lab operation.

“Outstanding, Paul. I knew you were a good guy deep down. But there’s one more thing I want, and you know what it is.”

Sullivan looked at him, incredulous. “The fuck you talkin’ about? I just handed you the works, ya motherfucker! “

Phil idly shook his notepaper. “This is penny-ante, Paul. What I want more than any of this nickel-dime shit is the location of Natter’s lab.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about Natter,” Sullivan said. “Just that the ugly Creeker runs whores out of Sallee’s.”

“You’re pulling my dick, Paul. Here I am giving you the best present of your life, and you’re bullshitting me again. That’s no way to show gratitude, is it?”

Sullivan slammed his handcuffed wrists on the interview table. “You’re the one bullshitting, ya fuck!” he yelled. “I knew this was a crock! I just dropped the whole operation in yer lap, and now you’re not gonna give me shit!”

Phil didn’t flinch, though to himself he had to admit that Sullivan’s outburst was a bit intimidating. Sullivan was a big man. You know, Phil, he considered to himself, if he broke out of those cuffs, you’d be in a world of hurt. I don’t see any coffee tables here. “Let me put it this way, Paul. This shit here—” Phil held up the piece of notepaper, then crumpled it up and tossed it over his shoulder; he’d already committed it to memory, but the gesture seemed very dramatic— “it doesn’t mean squat to me. I couldn’t care less about a bunch of pissant punks like you—I want Natter’s lab, and if you don’t give it to me, I’ll make sure you do the full ten big ones with no parole.” Which, of course, was way beyond his power as a police officer, but Sullivan didn’t know that. So why not pour on a little more? “Shit, Paul, I’ll even lie to the judge; I’ll tell him that I saw you kill Blackjack. Then you go up for fifty.”

Sullivan’s face turned beet-red; it was a terrifying and nearly inhuman visage. The muscles in his forearms flexed, showing puffed, dark blue veins, and his massive chest threatened to tear open the orange prison shirt. “You can’t treat me like this, ya motherfuckin’ cop! We had a deal!”

“What deal?” Phil said, and smiled like a cat.

Yes, indeed, it was fun putting the squeeze on a guy like Sullivan, but there was one problem with someone like this. They weren’t exactly stable. And Phil found this out the hard way when Sullivan, handcuffs notwithstanding, leapt up, kicked the table over, and plowed into Phil’s chest.

“Ho, boy!” Phil fell backward in his chair. Sullivan was all over him, snapping his cuffs as he grabbed for Phil’s throat. Never mess with mad dogs, he remembered his aunt telling him once. ’cos you’ll only make ’em madder, and they’ll git ya. Well, this mad dog was definitely gittin’ him; Phil thrashed under Sullivan’s dense muscled weight. “Guard!” he yelled, but by then Sullivan already had his throat, and the sound that came out was little more than a loud rasp.

“So ya like fuckin’ with people, huh, bub?” Sullivan inquired, wringing Phil’s neck like a sponge. “Let’s see how ya like this!”

Through warped vertigo, Phil noticed that his opponent’s face more resembled some sort of a kid’s devil mask. The other night had been different; Sullivan had been half-asleep, and Phil had enjoyed the element of surprise—not to mention the coffee table—but now the guy was so wired-up mad Phil couldn’t even get a punch in.

Whap! whap! he heard just when he thought his neck would break.

The weight lifted. Phil squinted up to see two county detention officers dragging Sullivan off. A third officer calmly resheathed his nightstick. “You all right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Phil said and clumsily rose to his feet. Meanwhile, the other two guards had Sullivan face-first against the wall and were recuffing his hands behind his back. “Put a collar on that guy,” Phil said. “Don’t let him get out of the yard.”

“This punk’s been nothing but trouble since the minute he got his ass thrown in here,” the guard remarked. “Say, you’re bleeding a little. You want to go to the infirmary?”

“Naw,” Phil said, wiping a handkerchief at a small cut on his lip. “Sorry about the hassle. How’d I know he was gonna go berserk?”

“Happens all the time.”

Phil walked up to Sullivan, who was now chicken-winged in front of the other two guards. “Think about it, Paulie. You got no one else to play ball with.”

“Go ahead and take a shot if ya want,” one of the detention officers said. “What’s funny about us prison guards is we got really bad vision.”

“No, I think I’ve fucked with him enough today. You can take Mr. Sullivan back to his suite now.”

“You fuckin’ cops are all alike,” Sullivan growled as the guards tugged at him. “One day I’m gonna bust your head.”

“Paul, by the time you get out of here, you’ll be so old you won’t be able to bust an egg. I’ll let you sit a few more days in general pop, then maybe I’ll come back and see if you’re ready to have another chat.”

««—»»

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Mullins asked, gawking from behind his desk. “Last night you get in a shootout and wind up killing six Creekers, and today you’re getting your ass kicked by prisoners.”

“Not kicked,” Phil corrected. “Royally kicked. The guy went bonkers. I was playing with him, sure, and not exactly telling the truth about some things, but he went schizo on me. Took three screws to pull him off.”

“And the fucker didn’t give you the loke on Natter’s lab?”

“Nope. He gave me everything but. I already called the county tac team; they’ll be checking out that other lab. But as far as Natter goes, I struck out.”

“He’ll never spin on Natter,” Mullins said. “If he does, he knows Natter’s people will be waiting for him the second he walks out of the pokey. And he knows what they’ll do. These other guys—they’re lightweights, and guys like Sullivan ain’t afraid of lightweights. But Natter and his Creekers?”

“Different story,” Phil agreed. “You’re right. I didn’t even think that that could be the reason he squealed on his own outfit but not Natter’s.”

Mullins scanned Phil’s notes which he’d uncrumpled before he’d left the lockup. “Good work. I can’t wait for the county to bust this new lab.”

“Natter’ll probably be pretty happy about it, too,” Phil observed. “There goes his competition. But we still gotta get him.” Oh, yes, he thought. It was personal now, or perhaps it had always been. All he had to do was remember what Natter had done to Vicki, not to mention having Eagle killed. And then there’s always me, he reminded himself. Only now was he fully realizing how close he’d come to getting killed last night.

“Sullivan said something weird,” he pointed out next. “I asked him if he knew what those words meant—”

“What words?” Mullins asked, replenishing his bloated jowl with chewing tobacco.

“Those weird words the Creeker kid said just before I blew him away. Sullivan didn’t know what they meant, but he did know they were Creeker words. ‘Creeker talk’ he called it.”

“Just proves Sullivan knows more about Natter’s people than he’s letting on.”

“Yeah, I know. But he said something else, too. He said that the Creekers were cannibals.”

“Wives’ tales,” Mullins suggested. “I been hearin’ shit like that since I was a kid. It’s stuff our daddies dreamed up to keep us in line. ‘You don’t shut up and go to sleep, the Creekers’ll come and get ya.’”

“Yeah, sure, local legends and all that. I remember some of those stories, too. But Sullivan said one more thing that was pretty specific. He said the Creekers have their own religion.”

Mullins expectorated into his cup. “Oh, you mean they ain’t Catholic?” he attempted to joke.

Phil gazed blankly out the window. It was getting dark now, the smudged panes filling up with twilight. Their own religion, he recited. In the black sky, stars shone like swirls of crushed gemstones.

I wonder what it is they worship.

««—»»

“Ona,” the Reverend voiced to himself.

His voice was a black chasm, incalculable, endless like the night. The Reverend wore raiments just as black. Just as incalculable…

The shadow stirred in the corner. The Reverend could feel the miraculous heat, could smell the exalted stench.

Oh, how long we’ve waited, his thoughts wept in joy.

Ages.

No, a hundred ages.

He thought of things then, beautiful things. He thought of the recompense of all the truth of history. Of a time when the slaves would be freed of their fetters, when they would be praised instead of reviled, glorified instead of cursed. He thought of a time when he too would walk with his brethren through the holiest dark channelworks, amid the savory smoke of burning human fat and steaming blood, to gladly pay homage, and to eat, a time when he too, and all of them, would pull the flesh off the bones of the faithless, sink deft fingers into their wide open eyes, and strip their skulls of their pitiable faces. Their screams would ring out like the sweetest madrigals. They would inhale their blood and scarf their unchaste flesh forever and ever.

Yes, the Reverend thought of the most wondrous things.

Ona…

The Reverend bowed, then fell to his knees, his arms red with blood to the elbows.

Soon, your time will be upon us.

And from the stygian dark, his god looked back at him and smiled.

— | — | —

Twenty-Seven

“Hi,” Phil said.

The station door slammed. Susan trudged in, a knapsack full of her school books tugging at her arm.

“Need some help with those books?”

“No.” She dropped the sack at the foot of her desk, then sat down at her commo console and prepared for work.

“How was school tonight?”

Susan frowned at him. She wasn’t biting on the cursory small talk, but then Phil never really guessed that she would.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Talking to the chief.” He shuffled his feet, looking down. He felt like a little kid sent to the principal’s office. “Then I thought I’d hang around awhile, wait till you got in.”

“Why?” Susan sniped, checking the hot sheet and county blotter.

“Well, I think we should talk.”

“About what?”

Phil looked down at the floor. This was a lost cause before it started. Christ—women are so unforgiving. He didn’t know what to say then. But at the same moment a notion struck him very keenly. Forgiven? Wait a minute, Phil—don’t be a schmuck. What do you have to be forgiven for here? You didn’t do anything WRONG!

So against his better judgment, he mustered an unfounded gall:

“I didn’t do anything wrong!” he yelled.

Her expression seemed to recoil.

“Go ahead, make a face!” he yelled again. “Give me the cold shoulder! Treat me like dogshit! Do whatever you want, honey, but tell me this. What did I do wrong?”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Susan calmly replied, paging through her code book. “It’s a free country. You can do anything you want. You don’t have any obligations to me just because we went to bed. That certainly doesn’t mean we’re involved.”

“Well, pardon me if I’m just stupid, but I kind of thought that we were involved.”

“You thought we were involved?” She gaped at him. “Well, then I guess we both have drastically different definitions of the word.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She gaped at him again. Phil didn’t like it when she gaped.

“Doesn’t involvement imply some kind of monogamy?” she asked.

“I didn’t cheat on you!”

“Oh, I see. I hear a scream coming from your room,” she went on, “so I come down to see if you’re all right, and what do I find? I find monogamous Phil, with a bath towel around his waist, leaning over a prostitute.”

“I didn’t sleep with her!” Phil yelled.

“Oh, then what did you do? Tell me, Phil. What do guys with towels around their waists do with prostitutes? Play chess? Read the Sunday Post? Discuss the vagaries of quasi-existential dynamics?”

“I didn’t have sex with her,” Phil nearly growled.

“Oh, okay. You didn’t have sex with her. But you can have sex with whoever you want, Phil. That’s not my point.”

Phil felt like a pressure cooker about to blow its seam. “What is your point?” he asked as calmly as he could.

“My point is you lied to me.”

Silence.

“How did I lie to you?”

If looks could kill, Phil would be dead now, a dozen times over. Her eyes leveled on him. “Before you and I did anything, I asked you, didn’t I? I asked you if you were still involved with Vicki. And you said no.”

“And that was the truth!” he yelled.

“So what was she doing in your room with you standing there with a towel wrapped around your waist.”

“She had a problem,” he said. “She got beat up, and she needed a place to sleep.”

“So you thought your bed would suffice?”

“She slept on my couch! I didn’t touch her! And I just got done telling you—I didn’t have sex with her!”

More silence, but it was not a contemplative kind of silence; it was a mocking one. “So you’re telling me,” Susan asked, “that, since you’ve been back to town, you haven’t slept with her?”

“I—” Phil began. If there was one thing he could never do, it was lie to her. If he lied, he was as phony as the phoniest guy on earth.

“Well,” he admitted, “I did once. But not today. It was last week—before you and I even went out.”

She seemed to sit in a dull shadow generated by her own anger and disappointment. It made her bright-blond hair less bright, her blue eyes like ruddy stones. Her voice sounded just as ruddy when she said, “I’d have to be out of my mind to believe a load of crap like that.”

“Susan, you’ve got this all wrong—”

She mockingly glanced at her watch, then looked up at him again. “Oh, you’re still here?”

Phil turned and went out the back through Mullins’ office. Why flog a dead horse? She’ll never trust me in a million years, he realized. I fucked it all up—good job, Phil. I wonder what else you can fuck up today. He could scorn himself forever, but that would not change the fact that there was nothing else he could do.

clank!

Out by the back driveway, Phil looked to his left. The door stood open to the old lockup, which Mullins had converted to a supply room. He must be in there now, Phil deduced, noticing both the patrol cruiser and Mullins’ own sedan still in the lot. Probably getting more coffee and Red Man. Phil strode on toward his car. It was back to Sallee’s, to start all over again now. The low moon shone pasty yellow, just rising over the top of the station. Cricket sounds throbbed steadily.

Phil turned again, much more abruptly this time, at yet another sound coming from the old lockup.

The sound of breaking glass.

It was probably nothing—The chief probably dropped a coffee pot—but Phil thought it best to investigate anyway. What if it wasn’t Mullins? What if someone was actually breaking in? Yeah, the rednecks around here are even stupid enough to bust into a police supply room, Phil considered.

The building stood merely as a drab cinder block edifice about the size of a typical trailer. Phil entered cautiously. A single low-watt bulb lit the dusty hallway. Another door stood open at the end. Phil decided not to call out; in the event that someone was burgling the place, the element of surprise would work greatly to his favor.

He walked very quietly to the next door, peeked in, and—

What the hell is this?

—noticed at once that this was no supply room. It was what it always had been. A jail.

Three barred cells lined the wall. The first two were empty. Mullins bent over before the third, picking pieces of glass off the floor.

“Ya fuckin’A-hole dimwit. Ya busted a perfectly good glass,” Mullins griped.

But who was he griping to?

“Hey, Chief?” Phil spoke up. “What gives?”

Mullins glared up, his fat, round face inflamed. “What the hell are you doing here!” he shouted.

Then Phil saw why his chief was acting so guilty. In the third cell, which Mullins claimed had been empty for years, sat an unshaven, overweight young man.

A prisoner, Phil realized. Mullins had a prisoner in here all this time and never told me…

««—»»

“For shit sake! I was gonna tell ya!” Mullins insisted.

“Yeah, right, just like you were gonna tell me about how for the last six months you’ve been finding mutilated bodies all over goddamn town!” Phil was so mad he was shaking. “Yeah, you were gonna tell me, Chief, only you didn’t! Christ, you never would’ve told me if I hadn’t found out on my own!”

“Phil, you’re jumpin’ the gun here. Let me ex—”

“Goddamn, Chief! Everything you tell me is a crock of shit! And now this—” Phil extended a hand to the third jail cell. “You tell me you haven’t used the lockup for anything but a supply room, and now I walk in and see you’ve had a prisoner in here all along! What the hell’s going on?”

“Well, if you’d shut up and quit yelling a minute and let me fuckin’ talk—”

Once again, Phil couldn’t help but feel totally betrayed by his boss; this was the third or fourth time Mullins had oddly withheld information from him. Red-faced, then, he jerked his gaze into the cell. “And who the hell is this guy anyway?”

“His name’s Gut Clydes,” Mullins said. “Just another local punk selling dust and raising hell. Came in here one night all wired up and crazy, saying he’d been attacked by Creekers.”

“Creekers?” Phil asked, as astonished as he was outraged. “This fucking guy was attacked by Creekers, and you wouldn’t let me question him?”

“He said he was attacked by Creekers,” Mullins corrected. “Don’t believe a word of it—he was hallucinatin’, the fucker could barely walk, he was so high on dust.”

“No, I weren’t!” exclaimed the guy in the cell. “And it’s true, it was Creekers that jacked us up that night. And it was Creekers who killed my buddy.”

“Shut up, ya A-hole,” Mullins replied, “before I kick ya straight into the county can. Probably what I shoulda done in the first place.”

“What did you charge him with?” Phil asked.

“Nothing. I’m just lettin’ him dry out for a while.”

Phil rolled his eyes big-time. “Chief, you can’t just keep a guy in jail without charging him and filing with the DA for an arraignment.”

“Shore I can; this is a personal matter. I’m not charging the kid on account of his daddy’s a friend of mine. Figure I’ll let him dry out in there a while, and hopefully the fat punk’ll learn his lesson. Besides, he don’t want to leave—don’t believe me, go ahead and ask him. And I didn’t bother tellin’ ya about him ’cos I wanted to wait till he’d gotten his head straightened out before I let you question him. Shit, for a week he wasn’t talkin’ nothin’ except the craziest load of malarkey you ever heard, and he ain’t much better now.”

None of this sounded right, but it was beginning to occur to Phil that nothing Mullins said ever sounded right. True, chronic PCP users frequently required several days or even weeks to detoxify enough to regain their mental coherence, and it was also true that they frequently hallucinated. But at this precise moment that didn’t matter much.

“You think I’m bullshitting you, don’t ya?” Mullins challenged, his steely eyes leveling.

“Yeah,” Phil said. “I think I do.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to think any more.”

“All right,” Mullins grumbled. “The fucker’s crazier than a possum in a shithole, but don’t take my word for it. What do I know, I’ve only been the fuckin’ chief around here for thirty fuckin’ years. Go ahead and question him, then you can tell me about all the great reliable information you got out of the guy. Go ahead, go ahead, waste all your time—see if I care.” And with that final objection, Mullins huffed out.

Phil turned on another light and peered into the cell, to get a closer look at its occupant. The kid sat dejected on his cot next to a metal sink and toilet. Jeans, sneakers, baggy T-shirt, and a belly on him that rivaled Mullins’. Long, stringy brown hair dangled at his shoulders, and he obviously wasn’t given to shaving with any regularity. Just another fat, going-nowhere redneck, Phil suspected. But his name, Gut, rang a quick bell—one of Sullivan’s point runners, one of his “replacements.”

“So, Gut, what’s your story? How long you been in there?”

“‘Bout a month, I guess. It ain’t bad. Chief Mullins, he brings me in food three times a day, decent stuff from like the Qwik-Stop and Burger King, and takes me ta the shower ever so often.”

Qwik-Stop and Burger King, Phil mused. All the daily nutritional requirements for a growing boy. “Is it true you don’t want to leave here?”

“Well, yeah, it’s true.”

“Why’s that? Why’s a kid your age want to sit in jail?”

Gut ran a hand over his face, looking down between his feet. “I figure if I stays in here long enough, they’ll ferget about me.”

“Who’s they, Gut? The Creekers?”

“Yeah.” The kid gulped at the sound of the word. “The Creekers.”

Phil sat down on an opposite bench. Typical. Drug-induced paranoia. A common trait among chronic PCP-users. “And what’s this you say about them killing a buddy of yours? Would that be Scott-Boy?”

Gut looked up from between his knees. “Howdja know that?”

“I know a lot of things, Gut,” Phil said. “I know you’ve been driving drop-off points for some new dust lab backed by some money guy from Florida. I know you guys have been trying to take the local dust market from the regular supplier. And I know you’ve been working with Eagle Peters, Paul Sullivan, Jake Rhodes, and Blackjack.”

“Shit, man. Who’s been walking all over me?”

“Don’t worry about it. All those guys? They’re all either dead or disappeared. Your competition has been hitting them all, and they’ve been doing a damn good job. You should’ve seen Peters and Rhodes. Sullivan ever tell you why he took you and Scott-Boy on to drive points?”

“Naw. Why?”

“Because everybody they had doing the job beforehand disappeared. And there’s one more thing I know, Gut. I know that it’s Natter and his Creekers who’re making the hits. He’s been using Sallee’s as a distro point. I want you to tell me where his lab is.”

Gut looked suddenly perplexed, or just stupid. “Natter? I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Natter. Paul never told me exactly who we were selling against.”

Jesus, not this shit again, Phil thought. “Come on, Gut, don’t bullshit me. It’s nice and safe in there, but I don’t think you’d like the county slam. You ever heard the term ‘boy-pussy, cell-block bitch’?”

“I swear, man. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout Natter dealing in flake. All I knows is it was him who had the Creekers do the job on Scott-Boy.”

“You saw Natter kill your buddy?”

“He was there. I knows it was him ’cos I seed him with my own eyes. At first I weren’t sure on account of I was so shit-scared. But once I got out of there and turned myself in to Chief Mullins, I realized who it was. It was Cody Natter.”

Phil took a time out, to control his excitement. This was too easy. Five minutes ago I didn’t have a case, and now I got an eyewitness who can testify that he saw Natter perpetrate a drug-related murder. Guess I got up on the right side of the bed today.

“But it weren’t fer running flake that the Creekers jacked us up,” Gut continued, staring out from the darkness in his cell. “It was Scott-Boy, see? We picked up this chick hitchin’ that night—Scott-Boy had a mind to give her a goin’ over, ya know, we was out rucking. But it turns out this chick’s a Creeker. So’s Scott-Boy’s got her in the truck gettin’ ready ta do her, and all’s a sudden there’s Creekers all over the place, and they’se haul him out and slit him open right there in the dirt. It was, like, fer sackerfice or somethin’.”

Phil’s face drooped as he looked back through the cell bars. What the hell is he talking about? “Gut, you’re telling me the Creekers killed Scott-Boy as part of a sacrifice?”

“Yeah,” Gut replied with no reluctance—and, it seemed, with no lack of belief. “Cody Natter, he’s pure evil, see?”

“Pure evil?”

“That’s right, the evilest man I ever seed. Them Creekers, they worship themselves a demon, and it’s to this demon they sackerfice folks.”

Phil shook his head. “How do you know this, Gut?”

“I know it on account of ’cos Natter, see, he come in here and told me.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, Gut,” Phil caught him up. “You’re telling me that Cody Natter came into this jail one night and told you this stuff about sacrifices and demons?”

“Er, well, it weren’t like he came in here phys-ick-erty.” Gut, then, pointed to his temple. “He come inta my head, see? Most ever night. Sometimes while’s I’se sleepin’ and sometimes not. And he whispers ta me and shows me things, in my head. He shows me this demon, and he shows me hade’s place. Says he’s got hisself a special place fer me down there once he gits me.”

Oh, for Christ’s sake, Phil thought in disgust. There goes my eyewitness right out the window. I can see him sitting up on the stand testifying and then telling the judge that Natter comes into his head at night and shows him demons. Phil despondently put his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes. “You know, Gut, that shit you do really fucks up a person’s brain.”

“What shit ya talkin’ ’bout?”

“Dust, Gut. Flake. PCP. It’s fucking horse tranquilizer processed through paint thinner and industrial solvents. It causes irreversible brain receptor damage.”

“Aw, but ya got it wrong. I ain’t smoked flake but maybe twice in my life, and that were years ago. Didn’t like it, so’s I never did it again.”

Yeah, right, and the Pope shits in the woods.

“Now I ain’t sayin’ we weren’t movin’ it. What me an’ Scott-Boy did, see, was we used ta wait behind bars at night and jack guys out fer their green. Scott-Boy, he had hisself a pair of brass knucks that’d do a zinger on the biggest of fellas. And we went on doin’ that some, when the pickin’ was ripe, but, see, we could make lots more scratch faster by running drops fer Sullivan and Eagle. Folks buy the shit right up, any town you can name from here ta Lockwood. Big money ta be made. ‘A’course, I knows now all that shit we pulled, either ruckin’ or working fer Sullivan, was bad. And I also know that’s why Natter wants ta git me, to send me ta hade’s place where I’ll have ta pay fer my sins. See, what he plans to do is snatch me when I get outta here, and then he’ll take me to the demon.”

Phil groaned. Why does this shit always happen to me? Why do I always get the live ones? So far, nothing jibed. Every time he got close, his leads turned to garbage. It was almost like this case had put a curse on him.

“It’s part of their religion,” Gut said.

Phil’s thoughts stalled a moment. Religion. What had Sullivan told him at the county lockup?

Something about the Creekers’ religion…

But that was ridiculous. Mullins was right: Gut was obviously suffering from a PCP-related psychosis. Crazier than a possum in a shithole, you ain’t kidding, Chief. Nothing Gut said could be deemed reliable. He wasn’t fit to testify, and never would be.

“Thanks for your time, Gut,” Phil got up and said. “You sure you don’t want me to let you out of there?”

Gut flinched at a sudden pang of fright; his belly jiggled. “No, man, please. I ain’t safe nowhere’s else. Please don’t make me leave.”

“All right, Gut. You want to stay in there a few more days and get your head together, that’s fine.”

“Ain’t nothin’wrong with my head. I know it all sounds crazy, but it’s true.”

“Sure, Gut. Later.”

“And you best be careful, man. Don’t go messin’ with Natter and them Creekers, or else they’ll be doin’ the same job on you they did ta Scott-Boy. They’se be sacker-ficin’ you to that there demon.”

“I appreciate your concern, Gut, and you can be certain I’ll keep it in mind.” Jesus, just what I need, another whack, Phil thought. Aren’t there enough eightballs in the world?

Phil began to walk out, but before he made it to the hall, a single word sounded behind him:

“Skeet-inner.”

He stopped, stood a moment. The word nailed him in place. He walked back to Gut’s cell.

“What does that word mean?” he asked very slowly.

“That’s what they calls the demon,” Gut replied. “I thinks it’s sort of a nickname, ’cos it’s got another name, too.”

“What’s that?”

“Ona,” Gut said.

— | — | —

Twenty-Eight

Skeet-inner, Phil thought. Ona.

He drove the Malibu down the Route, the two words hanging like vapor in his mind. They wouldn’t go away.

A demon.

Phil didn’t believe in demons, but he definitely believed there were lots of people who did. The country was full of whacked-out cults that worshipped the devil—you read about them in the papers every day. And a lot of these cults incorporated drug-use in their rituals, and also sold drugs to finance their activities.

Before he’d left the station’s jailhouse, he’d asked Gut about the other words he’d heard. Mannona. Onamahn. Prey-bee. Where Sullivan had dismissed them as “Creeker talk,” Gut had indeed verified them as still more designations regarding the Creekers’ religion…

It could all be meaningless, but then again, everything Phil found out about Natter and his Creekers would lend a better understanding of them. And the more he understood them, the closer he could get.

Except when all my leads are either crazy, clamming up, or dead, he reminded himself. Starting from scratch would be a pain in the ass, but there was no other alternative. He’d have to go back to Sallee’s and try to cultivate more low-life, get back into the scene. Still too early, though, he realized when he looked at his watch. The denizens didn’t generally start coming in till midnight or so.

To kill time, he went back to his room and read more in the books he’d gotten from the library. One text did indeed mention a frequency among inbred communities to participate in non-Judeo-Christian systems of worship. This, of course, stood to reason: in their sheer isolation, such communities and settlements had no exposure to more popular religious beliefs. They existed and developed within their own spheres of influence; therefore, it made sense that their theological beliefs would develop on their own, too. Most of these religions, though, were nature-oriented, or revolved around self-made superstitions. Many actually were rooted in guilt-syndromes; in other words, the inbreds believed that the “gods,” through birth deformities, were punishing them for their sins. And those born non-defected were frequently given higher social status; sometimes they were even worshipped themselves as semi-gods, as proof of forgiveness. The book, however, made no mention specifically of demonological beliefs.

In time, Phil’s curiosities took him back to the more technical text, the one with photoplates. Again, his most immediate observation came when comparing the book’s most extreme examples of inbred defectivity to the most extreme examples he had seen himself among Natter’s Creekers. The enlarged heads (hydrocephalus), lengthened bone structures (endo-acromegaly), and cleft skulls (cranial bivalvism or “split-head syndrome”) were all well-known traits of congenital inbred birth defects, all caused by hypersecretions of pituitary growth hormones. Also common were crimson irises, additional or missing fingers and toes, even extra limbs (adulterated biamous appendagalus). But it was the extent of these extremes that struck Phil right off.

The textbook depictions were minor in comparison. He understood that the more actively inbred the community, the more grievous the defects. And this could only mean that Natter’s Creekers had been inbreeding for a very long time.

Next the text delved deeper into causal aspects of inbreeding. Initially, parental or sibling reproduction presented only one chance in about nine of producing a defected offspring. But it was exponential. After generations of incestuous reproduction, a community’s gene pool became so corrupted that normal births were rare. The text gave examples of several such communities which hadn’t known a normal birth in decades, yet—quite futilely—these same communities would inbreed even more actively on the false assumption that the more births they achieved, the greater the chances of a rare normal birth.

God, this stuff’s dense, he thought, reading on in the lamplight. Some of the words hurt his eyes just to look at.

Here was an oddity: homeoaxial transfective deflection—What a mouthful, Phil thought—a congenital syndrome where a person displayed horrendous defects while remaining possessed of absolutely normal reproductive genes. And here was another oddity, the kicker:

“Hierarchal savantism.” Phil had skimmed this description the other day, but now he read it carefully. One more commonality among inbreds. By some chromosomal fluke (which was termed homotopic genetic inversionism), some were born with grievous physical defects but normal if not brilliant minds, and these persons often became the community’s leaders…

Natter, Phil thought.

At midnight, he embarked for Sallee’s.

The notion of religion continued to peck at him. Were the Creekers really an inbred cult that worshipped a demon? And were they actually sacrificing people in some sense of appeasement, or in some plea for forgiveness? And if so:

Was Natter the “priest” of the “sect”?

Phil shivered. The entire idea shed new light on Natter’s possible motivations. Maybe he’s more than just a pimp and a drug lord, Phil considered. Maybe he’s also some crackpot cult governor urging his followers to commit murder…

He parked in the back of Sallee’s; the lot, as usual, was jammed. Concussive music hit him in the face the second he walked through the door. “Highway to Hell,” the speakers thundered. Cigarette smoke burned his eyes; the strobe lights flashed. Up on stage an ungainly blonde scarred by tattoos was demonstrating the dexterity of her pectorals, flexing them to the beat, which made her breasts jump up and down as if jerked by unseen strings. Then she flung herself to the top of the brass stage-pole and spiraled all the way down, a human corkscrew.

Don’t worry, honey, you’ll make the Olympics next time. Phil pulled up a stool, and in less than a second a draft was placed before him. “Ya never get here early enough,” the keep complained.

“Don’t tell me, I missed Sting whipping Ric Flair’s ass.”

“Ain’t no way in hell the Stinger’d whup the Nature Boy. To be the man—”

“I know…you gotta beat the man.”

“You’re catchin’ on,” the keep smiled. “But you did miss Ravishing Rick Rude winning back his U.S. title from that putz Ricky the Dragon Steamboat.”

“Them’s the breaks. Seen Paul or Eagle?” he asked to gauge a reaction.

“Nope, not tonight,” the keep replied immediately. He obviously knew nothing. “Can I interest you in a hot dog?”

“Maybe later.” Phil shook his head to himself, then turned when the crowd’s applause grew riotous. The tattooed blonde had stepped down, and in her place stepped Vicki.

More bad thoughts. He hadn’t seen her since being “caught” by Susan, which probably hadn’t been the most comfortable situation for Vicki. Yeah, he reflected sourly. I’ll bet that really made her day.

The jukebox chunked on to the next song, and Vicki commenced with her set, flawlessly as ever. Her red hair glittered in the fracturing light; her high, large breasts swayed with her movements. Even now, seeing Vicki close to naked before a roomful of uncouth rednecks didn’t exactly leave him overjoyed. And worse was the way she discreetly shot quick glances at him during her act. Yeah, she still loves me, he could plainly see. I better get out of here. He slapped cash on the bar and made for the back room.

Druck, ever the Creeker sentinel, stood by the door with his arms crossed, a meld of colors from the strobe roving his enlarged head.

“Hey, Druck,” Phil greeted.

“Hey-uh.”

“Can I get in back tonight?”

“Shore,” Druck said.

“Kinda muggy tonight, ain’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Seen Eagle or Paul?”

“Naw.”

A real motormouth, yes, sir. Druck pushed the door open with his two left thumbs, and Phil walked through.

The back didn’t seem as crowded tonight, not that he could see a whole lot in the darkness. The weird music churned in the air while light churned as well up on stage. “He-ah, come,” a soft voice whispered, then a hand queerly took hold of his arm. Phil couldn’t help but note that the single hand possessed only one finger, though the finger itself, by means of six or eight additional joints, was nearly a foot long; it coiled about his arm. A bosomed Creeker waitress with a grossly recessed forehead led him to a table. She wended through the semi-circle aisle with the aid of a tiny flashlight. But when Phil sat down and ordered a beer, he noticed that she’d been holding the flashlight with a thin, stunted “accessory” arm, small as a baby’s, sprouting from her armpit.

Jeeeeze…

These sights, along with what he’d read not an hour ago, depressed him further. He glanced around to survey the audience now that his vision had acclimated. Shit, hardly anyone here. Then he glanced up to the stage…

The dancer appeared normal. Beautiful. Sleek-white in nothing but a frilled, lemon-yellow g-string. Glossy straight hair, black as pure obsidian, shimmered past her shoulders and covered her face like a smooth, silk veil. Hour-glass figure and lustrous white skin. Her legs were perfect, and her breasts—Perfect, Phil recognized. High and full, centered by pink, undefected nipples. But the back room, he knew now, existed to accommodate those whose tastes were significantly bent: kinks and slobs who got off on the misfortunes of the handicapped and the defected. Phil noticed no extra fingers or toes, no warped head, crimped spine, multiple navels, or “accessory” limbs. What’s she even doing here? he wondered. There’s not a thing wrong with her. When the stagelights upped a little, Phil was able to see the number on her garter: 6.

And that gave him an idea.

He finished his beer, paid up, tipped the waitress, and went back out to the hall. Druck was still minding the door.

“Hey, Druck,” he said. “I think I’d like to spend a little time with that last gal, number six.”

Druck’s swollen head nodded. “Uh-yeah. Purdy one, ain’t she?”

“Sure is. So what’s the deal?”

“Fifty fer a half.”

Fifty bucks for a half hour must be what he means, Phil realized. “Square,” he said. Then he discreetly slipped a fifty-dollar bill into Druck’s twin-thumbed hand.

“Just ya go on out an’wait by the side door now,” Druck said. “Name’s Honey, an’ she’ll do ya right. Give her a few ta get ready.”

“Okay, man. Thanks.”

Yeah, Mullins would love this, his star undercover cop soliciting a prostitute at a stripjoint, Phil joked to himself as he exited the club. But, no, he had no intention of soliciting sex from the girl. What he planned instead was simply a little discreet talk. Drop a few hooks, slip in a few questions, see what I can get out of her

And perhaps she could even tell him what some of those strange words meant.

Skeet-inner. Mannona, he reflected. Prey-bee. Onnamann.

Of course, it might be all for nothing; most of the Creekers had serious speech impediments and could barely talk coherently, and some couldn’t talk at all. But he wasn’t making any headway in the club, so this seemed the next logical step. He had nothing to lose—except fifty bucks, he reminded himself

As instructed, he waited by the ill-lit side door. The big road sign flashed, painting one side of his face in garish reds and yellows. The moon peeked at him from the treeline on the other side of the road, and the night’s humidity seemed to suck the sweat out of his pores.

Then—

Phil turned.

The side door clicked open, then clicked shut. The girl stood before him in flashing silhouette.

She wore a red satin robe now. She stood there a moment. Her face remained occluded by the shiny black hair; she seemed to be looking at him through sliverlike black gaps.

“Hi,” Phil said.

She opened the satin robe, fully nude beneath it.

“Got you’s yer car here?” she asked in a strained peep of a voice.

“Uh, yeah,” Phil faltered in reply.

“Well’s then, come on,” she said.

««—»»

No one believes me, Gut lamented. They all think I’m done plumb crazy.

The darkness seemed almost gelatinous; only a slant of light coursed in from the bare bulb on the outer room’s ceiling. Sometimes Gut could look into that darkness and gander the same things he saw in his mind every night. Awful things…

But at least here, in the jail, he was safe.

It was hard to keep track of time; it was hard to keep track of anything. But Gut would just as soon sit here and rot than leave ’cos he knew full well once he did that he was finished.

They’d do me just like they did Scott-Boy.

He never really slept now—he just dozed off every now and then and was jerked awake each and every time. By Natter’s evil whispers, and by the hideous things he showed him in his head. Natter’s wrecked face always seemed to hover just outside the bars, all squashed like something run over in the road, them dry puffy lips barely moving, them big blood-red eyes staring at him. Sometimes Natter’d scratch on the wall, and other times Gut thought he heard him tapping on the glass of the jailhouse’s only window with those long kinky fingers of his. Gut, Gut, the whisper creaked like old wood. Look…

And Gut looked. He had no choice really. And Natter would say fancified things too, while Gut was looking, like, Such blessings, Gut! Such epiphanies! and Behold my promised dominion, little one. Upon some future time, it will be your dominion, too… And that’s when Gut was forced to look into that place.

It was a horrible place. Smoking canyons of rock, miles deep. There was never a sun, just a big warped black moon shining its black light over blacker hills and lakes-yes, lakes, like giant steaming pools of tar, and Gut could see things in those lakes. He could see people. And then he saw other things that weren’t people at all, but monsters. The monsters would pull people out of the lake and put a rucking on them like ta make the stuff he and Scott-Boy did look like two kids playing paddycakes. These monsters would bust open folks’ heads like they was melons under Scott-Boy’s big-ass hickory pick handle, and they’d yank off arms and legs likes they was wings on flies. They’d slice folks’ bellies open and haul out their kidneys and livers and stuff and play catch with ’em, and they’d pulls people’s faces off like they was rubber masks only they wasn’t masks at all, they was the folks’ real faces. One time he’d seen one yank a fella’s spine right out his asshole. They’d chop folks up into big piles of chunks and then walk around in the piles. Once he saw one suck some fella’s insides right out his mouth lickety-split and swallered it all right down neat. And as for havin’ themselves a nut—well, these ugly monster dudes got ta layin’ dick on gals—and fellas, too—in a bigtime way. They’d stick their peters inta any hole they seed fit. Shit, one of ’em twisted a fella’s head clean off and fucked his throat, and another time Gut saw one bite a hole in a gal’s belly and get his rod off in the hole, and a whole lotta super gross shit like that…

And the whole time, Gut knowed full well what it was he was a’lookin’ at. Sure as shit, yes, sir, he was lookin’ smack-dab right down inta hell…

Yeah, he assured himself yet again, but I’m safe in here. They can’t get me in here…

And that’s when he noticed the two figures step out of the shadow by the doorway.

Two Creekers…

They peered crookedly into the cell, inbred red eyes sunk into their bulbed heads. One’s face seemed jawless, the other had no ears and just a pit for a nose.

“You can’t get me in here!” Gut yelled.

The two Creekers tittered and smiled. Then the jawless one advanced, jingling the keys to the cell door.

««—»»

“What’s this?” Phil asked. “This right here?”

“Huh?”

“This tattoo,” Phil said, and pointed. His finger daintily touched her flesh, which felt moist and very soft.

It looked crude, primitive, burned onto the milk-white skin of her upper left arm. Probably homemade, he realized. Did it with ink and needles herself. The tattoo, tiny as it may have been, clearly depicted a horrifying face whose mouth was crammed with jagged teeth. Two stubs modestly sprouted from its head.

Horns, he realized.

“It looks like a demon. Is that what it is, Honey? Is it a demon?”

“Deem-nom,” she attempted. The mispronounced word sounded like a child talking with a sore throat. Her shining hair remained hanging in front of her face; she smelled slightly sweaty. Only a few wedges of blinking light from the road sign seeped into the car. The girl elected not to answer Phil’s question—if she’d understood it at all—but instead slid over right next to him.

The bench seat’s springs groaned as Phil, in reaction, slid away a few inches. “Honey, listen…”

At once her perfect hands touched him, one rubbing his neck, the other sliding to and fro along the inside of his thigh. “Blow job, ya want?” she asked. Then her hand slid directly over his crotch and squeezed.

Ho, lord! Phil thought and immediately jumped in the seat. He took her hand away and placed it in her lap. “Listen, Honey, I just want—”

“Fuck me, ya wanna then, huh?” she presumed. “Everwhat ya want, s’okay,” and then she reopened the satin robe and let it slide off her pretty shoulders. Suddenly Phil was looking right at her perfect bare breasts. Jesus, he thought, and promptly gulped. “No, Honey, that’s not what I want either,” he said and pulled her robe back up over her.

“Oh-uh,” she murmured. Then her head bowed in a pause. “Hit me ya wanna, I guess.”

Phil shook his head. The girl’s plight was just another exercise in despair. She thinks I want to beat her. “Honey, I don’t want to hit you, I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to do anything except talk.”

“Talk?”

“That’s right, I just want to talk to you for a few minutes.”

She peered back at him through her raven hair, as if in complete confusion. “Hit me no?”

“No, Honey, I won’t hit you.” The whole thing was so sad when he contemplated what life must be like for her. Though no deformities were noticeable, she was still one of Natter’s Creeker whores: kink fodder. Probably gets slapped around every night, he realized. Tied up, beaten, you name it. “Lets just talk, okay?”

“Talk I-uh good-no, er no good,” she peeped.

“You talk fine. I can understand you fine.” He wanted to set her at ease; he didn’t want her to be afraid of him, or think he was just another sick redneck slob who wanted to use her. “But first, let’s get all this hair out of your face,” he said calmly, and then he reached across and pushed her hair back.

And nearly shuddered.

Be cool, he ordered himself, and then quelled the urge to recoil. Once he’d pushed her hair back, her deformity was manifest.

At first she seemed to have no face at all; he was looking at her left side, and her face was—

Nothing, he saw. Featureless, No eyes, no mouth, no nose. Just…skin.

Then she turned her head toward him. Jesus, he thought, and it was a dry, inhuman thought. Nature had pushed her face all the way over to the far right side of her skull: tiny mouth, tiny nose, two tiny red eyes all existing in a narrow strip running from her right temple to her chin…

“Ugly me,” she wisped. “I know.”

“No, you’re not, Honey,” he said. “You’re just different.”

“Iffer-dent.”

“Yeah, you’re different, that’s all, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” But these words of consolation were hard to form looking at her. Here was proof of what a monster nature could be. It was difficult for Phil to absorb all at once.

She tied the sash of her robe and quickly brushed her hair back in front of her face.

“What about you wanna talk?” she asked.

Crickets trilled in his ears, backed by the bizarre words he remembered. “I want you to tell me about…Ona,” he said.

Suddenly the silence seemed to ooze from another world. Phil thought he could hear the girl’s heart beating.

“Ona,” she said.

“Tell me about Ona. It’s a demon, isn’t it?”

“Ona,” she repeated. Then her hair-cloaked face turned to him—she seemed about to speak.

Holy—

Phil didn’t have time to complete the thought. Shadows jerked and fluttered, maddeningly fast. At once his door was yanked open; misshaped hands reached in and hauled him out of the car. Can’t get to my piece! he realized; one guy had Phil’s arm twisted behind his back, and another had him in a half-nelson.

Creekers.

Phil’s captors held him up on his feet beside the car. The more Phil struggled, the tighter they gripped him. Two more Creekers pulled the girl out and shoved her forward.

Then another figure advanced, a huge figure…

“Welcome to our world,” a voice intoned. The voice was resonant, heavy as lead. “How do you like it?”

Phil squinted up. Standing before him, tall and still and frightfully gaunt, was Cody Natter.

“Tell these fuckin’ apes to—let me go!” Phil shouted.

“In time. But first, I understand you’ve been making some inquiries about my proud family, hmm?” Natter’s cracked face turned toward the girl. “Tell him, Honey. Tell our friend here about Ona.”

The girl, still backed by two Creekers, shivered in Natter’s presence.

“Go on, Honey—”

Then one of the Creekers put a buck knife in her hand.

“—our friend wants to know.” Natter was staring intently at the girl, his smile like a canyon gouged across his face.

“I-uh-yuh—” the girl muttered.

“Go on.”

“I—”

“Go on.”

Natter held his stare.

The girl raised the knife, croaked, “Ona-prey-bee,” then—

“Noooo!” Phil screamed.

—dragged the knife so deeply across her throat that her head fell back as if hinged. She collapsed to the gravel immediately, blood pouring from the wound freely as water from an open spigot.

“You motherfucker!” Phil exclaimed, wincing at the downward pressure on his neck. “You ugly sick Creeker son of a bitch!”

“Really now,” Natter chuckled. “I should think a police officer would be more politically correct.”

I’m made, Phil realized. “Who fingered me?”

Gravel crunched. Natter laughed softly as another figure stepped out of the bank of shadows.

“Hey, bub.”

It was Sullivan, his beady eyes fixed, his grin cocked.

“How the hell did you get out of jail?” Phil demanded.

Sullivan pinched Phil’s face between his fingers. “Well, see, bub, that no-call order you slapped on me didn’t wash with the public defender. He got it pulled. So I gave Mr. Natter here a call, and we had a nice long talk. And he was kind enough to post my bail.”

“Natter, you asshole,” Phil said. “Sullivan’s the one who’s been cornering your dust operation.”

“My ‘dust’ operation, oh dear,” Natter replied. The permanent smile seemed to appraise Phil with hilarity. “So you’re the best that Mullins could summon? Such a sad state of affairs for our local law enforcement contingent.”

“And, bub,” Sullivan added, squeezing Phil’s face harder, “I owe you a couple, and I think I’ll pay ya back right now.”

“Don’t be a fucking id—” Sullivan rammed his fist into Phil’s solar plexus. All the breath in his chest exploded out his throat, and his knees gave out.

“Hold him up. Lemme take a few more pops.”

Phil was hanging by his elbows; his two captors hoisted him back up where his face was suddenly on the receiving end—

whap! whap! whap!

—of Sullivan’s fists. Each blow jarred Phil’s brain.

Then he fell to the ground.

His vision wobbled, his head reeled. Spitting blood, he managed to raise himself to hands and knees, and gasp, “You assholes, I’m a fucking cop, you can’t do this to a cop!”

“Oh, but we can, my good constable,” Natter informed him. Then—

crack!

Sullivan kicked Phil square in the chin. Phil’s upper body snapped back, flipping him completely over in the gravel.

“No witnesses, bub,” Sullivan said, wiping his hands.

Phil was close to passing out. He wasn’t seeing stars, he was seeing galaxies. Footsteps scuffed around him in the gravel; chuckles and crisp laughter fluttered like birds. I’m losing it, Phil thought…

The Creekers picked him up and threw him into the car. Sprawled on the front seat, he sidled over, limp. He sensed more than saw Natter’s big warped face leaning over.

“Go home, officer. And don’t come back.”

“Yeah, later, bub,” Sullivan added. “Hope ta run into ya again sometime. Let’s make it soon.”

“But before you leave,” Natter went on, “don’t forget your prize. It’s well earned.”

More shuffling. More chuckles. Then a squeal…

A sudden weight landed on Phil’s back. Someone else had been tossed into the car. The figures were walking away, their laughter fading. Eventually Phil was able to lift himself up. He turned his head, drooling blood, and saw that the other person they’d thrown into the car was Vicki—

Those sons of bitches…

And he could also see that she’d been beaten considerably worse than he had been.

— | — | —

Twenty-Nine

Somehow, Phil managed to drive back to his room; he didn’t know how he was able to do this—instinct, perhaps. He’d practically had to lug Vicki down the hall. Blood dripping from her mouth left a trail along the floor. But—

Aw, no, he thought once he got her inside and had the door locked. His consciousness tripped around in his head like a rummie about to stumble and fall.

Eventually, and before he could tend to Vicki’s wounds, he did indeed fall.

He fell into the cloaks of his past…

He was ten years old again, on the stairs of the House and running for his life. He’d just seen the whore-girl’s big doglike teeth, and that was all he needed to know that this was the last place in the world he should be. His sneakered feet pounded down the stairs, his torn Green Hornet T-shirt hanging in flaps. Then he stopped short—

Halfway down the steps, he saw the figure.

It was a big figure, big as a wall, and it was just standing there, blocking his way out.

It stood in shadow, backlit. He couldn’t see any features, just its shape, and just that it was big.

“Young man,” it said, “curiosity is a commendable trait, but I think you and I have some talking to do.”

Phil ran back up the stairs, his feet pacing with his heart. When he turned back right, he saw the whore-girl standing there cockeyed and grinning, and the fat guy holding Dawnie, and he was grinning, too…

So he turned again.

And raced back up another set of stairs to the next floor.

He was so scared he couldn’t think. All he could reckon was the necessity of getting away from the giant figure on the stairs. And running up those stairs was like running through a swamp, it was so hot and humid.

A window, he thought mindlessly. Find a window and climb out!

Never mind the long drop…

On the next landing, darkness seemed to swallow him. Yes, he was in the guts of the darkness, and its heat seemed to shimmer. Suddenly he was so hot he thought he would pass out, or maybe even die. He shuffled along, frantic, blind, his blood racing through his veins like a siren. Then his hands landed on something—

A doorknob.

He turned it and fell inward…

His breath blurted out as he landed on his belly. The barewood floor felt damp and nearly too hot to touch when he pushed himself up. Threads of sunlight glowed through closed shutters. What…is this? he thought. It was just a room, sure, but—

Something was wrong.

Like the rest of this house, and the people in it, and the things that happened here, there was something wrong with this room. He knew it, he could feel it in its throbbing dark and in the thin white lines of sunlight pouring through the shutters’ seams. He could feel it like breath on his neck.

Then he opened the shutters—

It wasn’t movement that caught his eye. Instead, it was the sensation of sheer bulk, or perhaps it was breath on his neck all along, because when he opened the shutters and let the light blaze in, he knew there was something else alive in the room.

But Phil was too busy screaming to figure out what it was.

The door burst open. Figures clamored in: several of the whore-girls from downstairs, and several other men he hadn’t seen, Creeker men with big melon heads and humped backs and crooked eyes. One of them held Dawnie in front of him, with a big three-fingered hand clamped over her mouth.

Phil crawled to the corner, screaming himself nearly into shock. He was helpless, limp, staring…

Then another figure entered the room—the giant man from the stairs.

His face was hideous in the sunlight. It looked squashed and filled with crevices, with two red Creeker eyes that looked bigger than Phil’s fists.

“So the curious little boy has taken a liking to our sister,” the voice rattled in the dark. “We have many sisters.”

Every red eye in the room, then, turned to the corner opposite Phil. Phil couldn’t scream anymore; he could only shiver, sweat, and stare at the bulkish, glistening thing that sat there on its side…

It sat in the dark, the sunlight streaming in front of it. There was little to describe…but a little was enough.

Long, thin, crippled limbs. A roughened, tubby torso. Two oval holes for eyes, and a giant warped head the size of a feedbag. Its skin—pocked, spotted, and gray, like a slug’s—seemed smeared with some lumpy clear jelly. Shags of ribbony black hair hung in damp ropes nearly to the floor, and when it opened its mouth—a great thin slit a foot long—teeth like rows of carpet blades shimmered.

Ona…

Skeet-inner…

Ona-prey-bee…

In dumb horror, then, Phil realized that he wasn’t hearing the words in his ears. He was hearing them in his head.

A tearing sound, a thin, wispy shriek. One of the Creekers ripped Dawnie’s dirty dress off her body in one stroke and threw it aside.

Onnamann, us-save…

Mannona, come…

The giant man from the stairs stepped forward, the crevices in his squashed face like gouges in clay. His voice rattled:

“We give you this day your daily flesh…”

Dawnie shrieked a final time as she was thrown into the corner with the thing. Suggestions of limbs reached out, hands more like feet, with clusters of foot-long fingers. Dawnie was quickly pulled into the darkness.

Then came a wet gnawing sound. And then—

thump!

Dawnie was thrown back out onto the floor.

The sunlight blazed. It wasn’t Dawnie anymore, just the vaguely human shape of what was left of her. Radiant wet scarlet limbs askew on the floor. Scalped, faceless now. A tiny wet red body.

Fully and completely skinned.

The giant man’s hand reached out and down like a descending vulture. He hauled Phil up, and then his dark voice grated: “Go now, boy. Run away fast.” The red eyes drilled into Phil’s face. “But we’ll see you again someday.”

««—»»

“Phil? Phil?”

pap-pap-pap

“Phil?”

Repeated slight slaps to the face revived him. His eyes felt glued shut; when he opened them, he actually heard a peeling sound, and then realized that it was blood that had sealed them shut. He looked up at Vicki’s blurred face, which seemed to swim above him. His consciousness corkscrewed.

He muttered one word: “Ona.”

Did she scowl at him? The word seemed to put a pike in her expression. “You were out longer than I was. Are you all right?”

“I think so. Christ, that fucker Sullivan hit me hard.”

“You were dreaming,” she said.

Dreaming. Was he? Or was I remembering? Leaning up from the couch, he told her the whole story, twenty-five years late. About that day. About Dawnie, and the House, and the things he’d seen in it. “When I got back to my aunt’s house, I had a bad fever. I was laid up for days, didn’t know anything. The doctor came over, and I told him the story, and he told my aunt that I was hallucinating.”

“You weren’t,” Vicki said.

Phil contemplated that, reserving comment. He looked at her. Her face was bruised, there was blood crusting her red hair, and her clothes were torn. He also noticed that some of her teeth were missing.

“They raped you, didn’t they? I mean, before they beat you up and brought you out to the car?”

Very hesitantly, she nodded. “There were so many of them,” she eventually murmured. “They were taking turns with me. They were all laughing while they were doing it.”

“Don’t talk about it,” he said. “It’s best not to even think about it. Look, I’m gonna check you into the hospital, then I’ve got some things to take care of.” Oh, he had things to take care of all right. First, Sullivan, then Natter. And fuck the judicial process, he told himself. Why bother? He was going to tend to this himself.

“Don’t take me to the hospital,” she pleaded. “You don’t know Cody. He’ll figure that’s what you did, then he’ll send someone. You don’t understand these people. They’ll sacrifice themselves for him. He’ll send someone to kill me. Just let me go with you.”

What could he say? She’s right. “Okay. Let’s go.”

He helped her up, and aided her down the hall and back out to the car. He had lots of questions, but he didn’t want to pour them on all at once, not after what she’d just been through. “Let me ask you something, Vicki. How did Natter know that I’d seen you?”

“Watchdogs,” she told him. “He had Creekers following me. They must’ve seen me come here… I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s not your fault.” Watchdogs, huh? he thought. Well, I’ll be putting a leash on them, and fast. It was close to two in the morning. He drove the Malibu down the Route to the station. “Shit!” he exclaimed when he pulled into the lot. Mullins’ car wasn’t there, and neither was Susan’s.

Phil needed backup. And he needed guns.

“I gotta find some hardware,” he said. “Come on.”

In Mullins’ office there was nothing, just file cabinets full of papers, and an equipment locker hung with junk. He tried calling Mullins, but there was no answer. No answer at Susan’s either. And just as he hung up the receiver, the phone rang…

“Yeah?” he answered, wiping sweat. and blood off his brow.

The ancient voice creaked like an old house in the wind. “Didn’t I tell you, all those years ago, that we’d see you again someday?”

But we’ll see you again someday, his memories echoed.

He’d known the minute he regained consciousness that the giant figure from his childhood and Natter were the same…

And Natter’s voice, now, rattled on. “An incentive, perhaps? Yes.”

“What are you talking about, you fucker?” Phil yelled into the phone.

“There’s someone here,” Natter guttered on, “who’d like very much to talk to you.” The line crackled, the pause seemed to last hours. Then:

“Phil?”

Phil’s heart dropped. It was Susan.

“Phil, they have me!”

“Where are you?”

“They’re doing…horrible things to me!”

Phil needn’t imagine. “Tell me where you are!”

“Phil, don’t come here! They’ll kill you—”

Her voice was pulled away, and Natter’s returned. “Incentive enough? Or…perhaps not. Listen, lawman.”

A scream shot through the line. Phil winced.

“In case you’re curious as to the cause of that scream,” Natter told him, “I’ll have you know that your good friend Mr. Sullivan just cut off one of your paramour’s nipples with a pair of roofing shears. But perhaps you need even more incentive. Yes?”

“Stop it! I’ll do whatever you say!” Phil yelled.

“Listen.”

“No!”

Another of Susan’s screams shrilled through the line.

“That,” Natter said, “was the entirety of the breast. Your friend Mr. Sullivan really is deft with a knife.”

“Hey, bub,” Phil heard next. “Come on out. Let’s party!”

Phil’s emotions collided. He could picture what they were doing to her. And the only other thing he could picture was killing them all.

“Natter, you there?”

“Indeed.”

“Don’t hurt her anymore. I’ll come out there. Just tell me where.”

“Ah, a test. Think.” Natter chuckled. “You know.”

“No, I don’t know! Tell me where you’re at!”

“Little boy. You remember.”

click

“Goddamn!” Phil shouted and slammed down the phone.

“They have Susan, don’t they?” Vicki asked.

“Yeah. Why? Why did they take her? Why do they want me to come there when they could’ve killed me earlier at Sallee’s?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Come on!”

They raced outside to the lockup. Maybe Gut, the prisoner, would be able to tell him something. And maybe Mullins had some guns stored there.

But he wilted when he trotted into the room of holding cells.

Gut had been…

Gutted, Phil observed.

He’d been hung by the neck from the cell’s ceiling, his large abdomen drooping open like fat white lips from a spine-deep knife slash. His innards lay in a pile at his swinging feet.

He pushed Vicki out into the hall before she could see it all. “Go down to the end of the hall and check out the storage room,” he directed. “Look for guns, ammo, anything we can use for weapons. Hurry!”

Distracted, she did so, and Phil went back into the cell rows. Gut’s cell door was unlocked. Who unlocked it? And when he looked closer, he noticed a scrap of paper pinned to Gut’s chest.

Phil squinted through the bars.

WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU, someone had written on the note.

In blood.

Christ, they planned this whole thing. But why?

He didn’t waste time. Several more lockers lined the block. Phil rummaged through them all but found nothing in the way of weapons. What kind of a fucking police station is this? he outraged to himself. There wasn’t a gun to be found. Like a fucking gas station with no gas! All he had was a puny .25, but he’d need a lot more than that for the undertaking he foresaw. A shotgun at least, and a couple of 9mm’s would be nice. But in the last locker, in a box at the bottom, something caught his eye. He picked it up…

My God, he slowly thought.

It was a framed black and white picture, like something taken at a graduation, yellowed with age. Two men, in police cadet uniforms, stood smiling for the camera, their arms draped about each other’s shoulders.

Phil couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

One of the men was Mullins.

The other was Dignazio, the guy who’d set Phil up on the Metro scam.

“I just pulled up out front,” came a voice from behind him. “Didn’t want you to hear my car. Pretty nifty job they did on Gut, huh? It was me who gave ’em the keys.”

Phil turned to face Mullins, whose bulk filled the block entry. The chief’s fat hand was filled with a Colt .357.

“You set me up,” Phil said stonily. “You had Dignazio kill that kid and plant the illegal rounds in my piece.”

“You got it.”

“Why?”

“To get ya back. Me and Dignazio, we been friends since we got out of the academy. I asked the guy a favor, and he did it. And me and Natter—well, we ain’t exactly what I’d call friends, but we’ve always had an agreement. He runs his whores out of Sallee’s and gives me a cut for lookin’ the other way.”

“And I guess he gives you a cut for looking the other way on his PCP network, too, huh?” Phil suddenly felt certain.

Mullins’ big, bulbous face grinned at the remark. “Jeez, Phil, you must’a left your brains back at Metro along with your career.”

“What’s that mean?” Phil asked.

“Natter ain’t got no PCP network.”

Phil peered through his own confusion; he stood in an instant fog. No…network? Suddenly the revelation made sense: in all of his investigative work, he actually had found not one iota of evidence to suggest that Natter was dealing PCP. Just heresay, just lies. Just…Mullins, he realized.

“You’ve been lying to me the whole time. You’ve had me looking for a PCP lab that doesn’t exist. You made the whole thing up.”

“That’s right, partner,” Mullins admitted. “And you fell for it hook, line, and sinker. I know you’ve had a hard-on for PCP since Metro, so after I had Dignazio shit on you, I figured the quickest way to get you to take a job here was to make up some bullshit about Natter running dust. Shit, Natter ain’t never run dust. It’s all just been a bunch of cowboys like Peters and Sullivan and those guys, workin’ for a couple of labs out of town.”

“But…the murders—”

“Oh, sure, there’ve been murders for a long time, that part wasn’t BS. Natter and his Creekers have been offing people for as long as I can remember. It was part of the deal. I looked the other way on that, too. And when time started to get short, I told him to start hitting local dust runners ’cos that way you’d be more likely to believe the whole story in the first place.”

Hook line, and sinker, Phil thought. He’s right. Yeah, it all made sense now, all except one thing.

“Why? Why?” he asked in total perplexion. “Why go to all that trouble? It almost sounds like you were trying to lure me back to Crick City.”

“Something like that. It’ll give ya something to think about on our way to Natter’s.”

“Oh, so you’re going to deliver me, is that it?”

“Might as well, I’m here.” Mullins waved the gun toward the exit. “Drop your piece on the floor, and don’t try anything.”

Frowning, Phil took out his pocket .25—his only weapon—and tossed it aside.

“Good boy. Now come on. You’ve got some driving to do.”

Mullins kept his distance as Phil approached the exit. Shit, I’m had, Phil thought. He could try a disarm, but the chief wasn’t close enough; making a move would get him shot. His only chance was a distraction…

And at the same moment, Vicki walked in. “Phil, I couldn’t find anything in the storager—”

Mullins, taken by surprise, turned at Vicki’s voice. Then Vicki shrieked. It was all the distraction Phil was going to get, so he took his chance, spun back, and hit Mullins across the bridge of his nose—crack!—with his right hand. With his left, he grabbed Mullins’ gun.

A round went off; Phil flinched at the massive concussion. Next the two men were on the floor, wrestling. But Phil had the gun, and he shoved its blue-steel barrel under the chief’s jaw. “Give it up!” Phil growled, but Mullins only struggled further, his own hands pawing at Phil’s.

“Don’t!” Phil yelled.

BAM!

The magnum discharged, bucking fiercely once in Phil’s grasp. Cordite stinging his eyes, he lay still a moment. Mullins, however, lay significantly more still, his face agape. When the smoke cleared, Phil got up and saw that the chief’s bald pate had been replaced by a ragged, pulpous crater. A fantail of brains plumed from the man’s head across the shiny tile floor.

««—»»

They took Mullins’ souped squad car; it was more reliable than the Malibu, plus it had a pump shotgun in the dash-lock, and several revolvers which Vicki awkwardly loaded as Phil drove.

“Listen,” Phil said. “Earlier, when I told you about what happened to me as a kid, you said it wasn’t a hallucination.”

“It wasn’t,” Vicki grimly replied. “It’s all true. And that word you said when you came to—‘Ona’—”

“What is it? It’s a demon or something, right?”

“It’s something they worship. It’s their god.”

Their god, Phil reflected as the Route wound through another bend. A demon…

“I don’t know all the details,” Vicki went on, “but the story goes like this. The Creekers have always worshipped a devil, a male devil named Onn. For hundreds of years they made sacrifices to it—incarnation sacrifices…”

“Yeah?”

Vicki’s words darkened. “Well, supposedly, a long time ago, one of their rituals succeeded.”

Phil’s gaze saw little past the windshield. Am I supposed to believe this? She’s telling me that the Creekers incarnated a demon…

“Their goal, for all that time, was to add the demon to their bloodline. They considered this to be the ultimate blessing. According to the story, Onn mated with the least defected Creeker girl in their clan.”

“And then gave birth?” Phil guessed.

“Yes.”

“But to what?”

“To Ona, the female inbred of the demon and the Creekers.” Vicki paused. “That thing you saw when you were ten.”

Phil fell silent again, driving without direction. So many queer ideas were wafting through his head, he didn’t know what to think. “But they also call it ‘skeet-inner’—”

“That’s its nickname,” Vicki said. “Most of the Creekers can’t talk right—it’s called dyslalia—like dyslexia, only with words. When they say skeet-inner, they’re really saying—”

“Skin-eater,” Phil deduced, and with the deduction came a crushing weight of contemplation. Rhodes, those other cowboys on the death reports, and Dawnie, he remembered. They were all skinned. “So the murders weren’t really murders. They were sacrifices.”

“To Ona,” Vicki affirmed. “It’s symbolic. Consuming the appearance—the skin—of the unflawed. The Creekers consider themselves cursed by their inbreeding, so they pay homage with sacrifice victims. It’s the Creekers’ gift to Onn, by providing uncursed flesh to Onn’s inbred daughter. And the Creekers have been reproducing with it for generations.”

Phil thought about it, gripping the wheel. It was just too crazy. “I don’t believe it, Vicki.”

“How can you not believe it? You’ve seen the Creekers, you’ve seen how deformed they are. You ever seen any other hillfolk as defected as the Creekers?”

“Well, no,” Phil admitted.

“Most of them don’t even look human, and that’s because part of their bloodline isn’t human.”

Then Phil thought back to the books he’d read. She was right, at least in part. The worst-case examples in the photographs of typical inbreds weren’t nearly as genetically defected as most of the Creekers he’d seen. The consideration chopped through his head. Creekers. Inbred. With a demon…

By now he didn’t know what to believe. The only thing he was sure of was this: Natter and his Creekers have Susan, and they’re going to torture her to death unless I can find them.

“Okay, so you’re telling me that Ona is real, fine. Then the House must be real, too.”

Vicki nodded.

“Tell me how to get there,” Phil said.

— | — | —

Thirty

“So many years, so many ages,” he whispered.

Eternity, he thought.

Years were grains of sand sifting through his fingers.

Multitudes had gladly given their blood, their lives.

Onn, he thought. And blessed Ona.

“Unto you we bow forever…”

Redeemer. Sanctifier. Holy father, holy daughter.

The visions sang to him; they always did. Entrails routed briskly from the bellies of the unfaithful. Blood squeezed from the heads of the unsaved. Screaming faces clawed at till they were screaming plops of pulp. Soon, yes, the cursed would become the blessed, the damned would rise to the dark heights of the absolved.

Soon they would go on, shed of their curse, enlightened instead of deprived, one with their master.

Forward into the new nights of a new age, perfect instead of corrupted, no longer in turmoil but in bliss…

Natter, the Reverend, opened his eyes upon the hot, starry night. His old, blotched skin felt new and young now. His ancient mind felt aglow. His savior whispered blessings to him.

The moon shined on the crags and furrows of his disfigured face. His triple-jointed hands opened to the sky.

“So many years, so many ages.”

Time was no longer short.

Instead, the time was upon them.

— | — | —

Thirty-One

“They’re also telepathic,” she said.

“What?”

Vicki shifted in the passenger seat, her red hair flowing about in the warm breeze from the window. “Ona,” she said. “And Cody too, and some of the stronger Creekers. You can hear them in your head.”

Phil scowled. “That’s a load of—” But then he stopped. Wasn’t that what Gut had told him? That Natter talked to him at night, in his head? And showed him visions? Even Phil himself had to acknowledge it. Twenty-five years ago, at the House, and just the other night when he and Eagle had been ambushed. He’d heard words, hadn’t he?

In my head.

“Just tell me how to get to the House,” he insisted.

“You don’t believe it, do you?”

I don’t know what I believe, he told himself. “Look, I don’t want to hear anymore about demons, all right? I got enough to worry about.” That much was true. Like, how was he going to get Susan out? If she’s not dead already, he added. And since Natter was expecting him, and anticipating his motives, the House would surely be a fortress of armed Creekers. And all I’ve got to fight back with is a shotgun, three pistols, and a drug-addicted prostitute…

“Just keep heading down the Route,” Vicki instructed. “I’ll tell you when to turn.”

The night seemed crammed down onto the road; the mangy treeline on either side funneled them through each winding bend. Every so often the headlights caught the glimmers of possum eyes in the woods, which reflected red and reminded him all-too-keenly of the Creekers’ crimson stare. “Tell me about the House,” he said. “What, it’s just a whorehouse?”

Vicki smiled without humor. “Sure, sometimes it’s a whorehouse. And sometimes it’s a slaughterhouse.”

She’s high, Phil dismissed. “Come on, tell me something I can use.”

“The girls at Sallee’s, most of the time they’d just turn their tricks in the parking lot, in cars and trucks. But sometimes, if there was a high-paying john, or one of Cody’s friends wanted a girl, he’d let her take the trick back to the House. And then there were other nights…”

The rest of the words seemed to drift out the window.

“What?” Phil asked testily. “Other nights, what?”

“Cody would pick certain victims—”

“What do you mean, certain victims?”

“Drug dealers mostly, from the surrounding towns, the kind of guys nobody asks questions about when they disappear. And if anybody did file a missing persons report, Mullins would bury it, or stonewall the county cops. That was part of Cody’s deal with Mullins—Mullins took a cut to throw the county off track about any bodies that were found. The other part of the deal was Mullins let Cody run hookers out of Sallee’s as a lure.”

“A lure?”

“Yeah, like I was just saying. A john would buy a girl at the club, then she’d take him back to the house. But that’s where the trick ended.”

Phil glanced at her. “I don’t follow.”

“Cody would have some Creekers waiting, then they’d overpower the john and sacrifice him to Ona.”

Phil still couldn’t believe this, but then he couldn’t deny how well the pieces fit. All those murder victims found. All drug dealers from nearby towns. All regulars at Sallee’s.

All skinned.

Then another word emerged into his head: Skeet-inner, he thought. Then: Skin-eater

“Turn here,” Vicki told him.

Phil slowed and steered the cruiser onto a road that was little more than a rutted path twisting up into the woods. Like skeletal fingertips, the ends of branches reached out and scratched deeply into the cruiser’s paint. Mullins won’t complain, not now, Phil reminded himself. The sound, as they traveled farther up, was worse than nails on slate. And the cruiser’s wheels rocked over the road’s ruts so much that Phil’s teeth began chattering.

Several more turns onto even narrower roads took them into a no-man’s land of vines, brush, and hugely knotted trees. They passed rotting timberfalls; foxfire glowed green on enslimed logs; networks of spiderwebs glistened between drooping bows. The hot air smelled sweetly putrid.

All these roads, all these turns. Christ, no wonder I couldn’t remember the way. The woods were a labyrinth now, the road a juddering maze to nowhere.

But then another road opened to moonlight. An unkempt field, high with dying grass and weeds, swept to their left. And to their right—

Phil recognized the hill, which rose upward against the forestbelt.

And there it stood, before the hundred-foot oaks and bare in the moonlight, the abode of his worst nightmare.

The House, he simply thought.

His eyes felt glued to it.

It had changed little from what his memory offered: graying whitewash, narrow windows, a slightly sagging roof. Decrepit. Worn down by the weight of age but somehow still standing.

“Turn off your lights!” Vicki whispered.

Phil cursed himself, then quickly switched them off and cut the engine. Suddenly the air was alive with throbbing nightsounds, gently deafening, gracefully chaotic. The heat bore down, seemed to press against his face.

Something was calling him, his past perhaps, or the fears he’d kept buried for the last twenty-five years. Something was in there. Right this instant. He wasn’t sure what, but somehow that didn’t even matter. A demon, or a cult, or just a bunch of crazy inbreds—it was more than any of that. Something powerful, and something equally insane.

Waiting for him.

He grabbed the Remington pump, then stuffed a second pistol into his pants. The third he gave to Vicki. “Wait here.”

“No way!” she objected. “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to sit here by myself.”

“All right, then, come on, but stay behind me and keep quiet.”

They both got out. Phil, feeling like a vagabond mercenary, wiped sweat off his brow and stuffed loose ammo into his pockets. Then he clipped a flashlight to his belt and motioned Vicki to follow.

A dirt path wound around some trees up the hill; suddenly the moonlight blared at them. Perfect targets for these hayseeds, he realized. Some Creeker with a long rifle is probably scoping us right now. He leaned low and quickened his pace with Vicki in tow, moving in a rough zigzag. Sweat drenched them both when they got to the top of the moonlit hill. They ducked by the side of the house.

Phil leaned against cracked siding, staring down the hill at nothing. This is suicide, came the bald and very sudden thought. We don’t stand a chance, we won’t make it ten feet past the front door. I’m gonna wind up getting us both killed…

Vicki’s hand touched his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

There are probably fifty Creekers in there…

“Phil?”

Phil turned slightly; his stare lost all focus. You must be out of your mind. Take Vicki, get back in the car, and drive away. Go somewhere, anywhere. Start again, and live…

Just as he considered throwing in the towel and abandoning this madness, a high scream from one of the upper windows shrilled into the night—

Susan’s scream.

They’re torturing her, they’re tearing her apart—

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going in now.”

Lightly but quickly, he crept around to the front and mounted the wood steps to the porch. All the windows were vaguely dark, but he detected the faintest fluttering orange light from within. Candles and oil lamps, he realized. No electricity. “Anything that moves,” he whispered to Vicki, “shoot it.”

Shotgun at the ready, he stepped to face the front door, then paused. The strange brass knocker—a blank face bereft of features save for eyes—stared back at him. He remembered it, from all those years ago. A face from his past, beckoning him now. But there was another face from his past, too, wasn’t there? Natter’s face—

And that was one face Phil couldn’t wait to have in his sights.

The door stood slightly ajar, and it creaked appropriately when he pushed it open and aimed the Remington. Several candles flickered; it took Phil a moment for his eyes to adjust, then another moment to digest what he was seeing…

“Good God,” he murmured.

There were indeed Creekers waiting for them. Several waited right here in the foyer. But none of them were armed.

And none of them were alive.

Five or six of them lay in a heap on the threadbare carpet which was now just a sponge of wet blood. Knives lay on the floor too, having recently fallen from limp hands. Their swollen heads hung off their necks at impossible angles to show grisly gashes cut deep across their throats…

They all killed themselves, Phil realized.

Vicki gasped behind him. Phil stepped in. He spotted more bodies lying in the halls to either side, all pale in death, all throat-cut. What in God’s name… Each room off the hallways, too, were now death chambers. And when he’d finished checking all of the rooms on the first floor, he realized there must be over thirty dead Creekers total. All suicides.

It was hard to fathom so many dead bodies at once. Phil felt winded, and Vicki looked like she was about to pass out. “Come on, we gotta check the next floor,” he said.

The stairs were a slow waterfall of blood, and once they got to the second-floor landing, they saw more piles of bodies, more slashed throats, more dead-staring crimson eyes and twisted death-grins. “Why are they doing this?” he muttered to himself.

“I told you, they’ll do anything for Cody,” Vicki whispered. “Suicide is the ultimate homage to their god…”

He stood in ragged shock in the hall. More candles flickered about the heaps of disfigured and swollenheaded bodies. Homage? Phil thought. More like madness, sheer and total madness.

“Mannona!” a voice shrieked. A figure wheeled out of the dark, a Creeker. Phil brought the shotgun to bear and fired. Half of the Creeker’s head flew away in chunks. “Onnamann!” shouted another flawed voice, and then another Creeker, with a bivalved head, limped quickly out of the flickering darkness. Phil fired again. The report caught the inbred square in the chest and carried him halfway down the hall. Then—

Holy shit!

Every door in the hall flew open, and a legion of Creekers converged on them. Vicki fired ineptly behind him, screaming, as Phil emptied the shotgun into the approaching mass. Bodies fell only to be replaced by more. Then Phil whipped out his two pistols, pinpointing and dropping targets one after another in a hail of concussion and muzzleflash. He managed to reload twice in the melee, firing repeatedly, the guns bucking in his hands, and more inbreds fell like hinged ducks in a shooting gallery. When he was done, a lone overalled Creeker with a cleft face grinned at him, raised his arms, and said, “Mannona!”

Then he lunged.

Phil’s final shot caught the marauder in the eye and dropped him.

Gunsmoke filled the hall like tear gas. Now a deadfall of bodies lay at his feet. I just killed twenty or thirty people, he realized, but by now the shock had worn away, to be replaced by some stoical kind of complacency. None of the Creekers had been armed, yet they’d attacked anyway. Again, it didn’t make sense. They’d willingly, even gleefully, lunged to their deaths.

More proof of Natter’s evil.

“Where is he?” he asked, tasting cordite. “Where’s Natter? He’s upstairs, isn’t he?”

Vicki, blood-spattered and gore-flecked, nodded. “In the upper room,” she said.

Natter had gone to all this trouble to get him here, and had sacrificed all these people, but—Why? Phil asked himself. He had to know now, no matter what the risk. He reached into his pocket for more bullets but found none. He didn’t even care. He took Vicki’s hand, stepping over bodies, and made for the next flight of steps.

Then, not in his ears but in his head, Natter’s voice grated like stones.

Yes! Up here, little boy…

The narrow stairs creaked underfoot. The heat grew stifling, but Phil was oblivious. He felt oblivious to everything now, to blood, to violence, to killing. He was cauterized, immune. He didn’t know what he was walking into, and he didn’t care.

The memories hovered. He walked directly to the door at the end of the cramped hallway. Opened it. Stepped in.

Only moonlight lit the room, from the open shutters. Four black corners and a block of tinseled light.

I told you we’d see you again someday, he heard in his head.

Phil glanced at each of the room’s stygian corners.

Yes, little boy, we’ve been waiting…

“Where’s Susan!” he erupted. “If she’s dead, I burn this whole place to the ground and all you ugly fuckers with it!”

This invective was answered with a low chuckle. Not many of us left to burn, hmm? You’re quite handy with a gun.

“You killed those people, Natter!” Phil railed. “You ordered them to kill themselves! You sent them to their deaths.”

No, rather, I sent them to paradise. The time has come; we’ve all suffered long enough. They are in paradise now, which is where they deserve to be. Tonight our travails are at an end. Tonight our curse is lifted. Tonight we start anew.

The darkness, now, seemed to coagulate; Phil felt he was standing in a grotto with the moon, like a spotlight, casting an aura about him.

Welcome home, the voice croaked.

“This is a hell house, it isn’t my home.”

Oh, but it is. We’ve waited a long time for your return.

“What do you want?”

You.

“But you had me earlier in the parking lot at the club. Why didn’t you take me then?”

Because there were still a few things you needed to remember, weren’t there? Hmm?

The dream, he realized. The final part of my childhood memory. He gazed cockeyed into the dark. The last piece of the puzzle. “You can’t know when and what I’m going to dream,” he protested.

I know lots of things about you, Phil.

Because I’m your father.

“Bullshit.”

Think about it, son.

He did then. The darkness focused. Orphaned as an infant. Raised by an “aunt.” Could it be possible?

“But I’m not a Creeker,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m—”

You’re what?

Phil’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

You’re perfect.

“We’re both perfect, Phil.”

But it wasn’t Natter who’d said it. He recognized the voice at once.

“Susan?” he said, squinting.

Moving very slowly, Susan emerged from the dark. But she was fully dressed, smiling softly.

Unhurt.

“I thought—”

“That they were torturing me, raping me, killing me?” she finished. “If you didn’t think I was in danger, then you never would’ve come.”

A trick, he realized. All this time she’s been one of them.

“And, of course,” she added, “that wouldn’t be any way for them to treat your sister.”

My…sister?

“You should have read those books a little more closely, Phil,” she said. “We’re both Creekers, but we’re perfect. It took a long time for our father to breed us. Trial and error, for ages.”

Then Phil thought back to the books about inbreeding.

The more intensively inbred the community, the more astronomical the chances of an undefected birth. One chance in thousands, he remembered. And Susan and I are it.

“We’re living proof, aren’t we?” Susan said. “No red eyes, no black hair, no physical deformities. We’re the offspring the Creekers have been trying to produce for a hundred years. But—” She took another step closer. “Too bad for me I was born a woman. The progenitor has to be male.”

The Mannona, Natter said.

“You,” Susan said. “Haven’t you realized that by now? It’s you.”

Then Phil remembered what Vicki had told him about Creeker speech—dyslalia—how spoken words were inverted. Skeet-inner meant skin-eater. Ona-prey-bee meant praise be to Ona. And now:

“Mannona,” he said in a voice that was dark as the room. “And Onnamann.”

“The Man of Ona,” she translated.

Me, Phil thought.

The darkness seemed to hush.

The moonlight radiated.

Phil’s heart slowed.

“We’re hybrids,” Susan informed him.

Vicki had mentioned that too, hadn’t she? Hybrids. Ona, she’d said. The female inbred of the demon and the Creekers. Most of the Creekers don’t even look human. Because part of their bloodline isn’t human…

And what had Natter said, just moments ago?

Tonight we start anew.

Something thunked to the floor. Phil stared down. It was Vicki’s head—cleanly severed—just dropped from Susan’s scarlet hand.

Poor little whore, Natter’s black voice remarked.

“The whole thing, I’m sure you realize now,” Susan said, “was a set-up. To lure you here at precisely this time.”

“Why?” Phil asked dryly.

“It’s generational.”

“What is?”

The fertility of our god, Natter answered.

“Skeet-inner,” Phil whispered. “Ona…”

The thing you saw when you were ten, Vicki’s dead words echoed now.

Two more figures—Druck, and another male Creeker, grinned as they came out of the obsidian dark. But they were dragging a third figure by—its elbows.

The figure was naked. Bound and gagged.

The figure was Sullivan.

Watch, Natter said in Phil’s head.

Druck, with his double-thumbed hand, raised Sullivan’s head by the hair. Then he chuckled.

Then he shoved Sullivan into the room’s darkest corner.

Phil couldn’t see anything; it was too dark. But he could hear sounds, and the sounds were familiar. A wet, slavering sound. A sickly, wet grinding like ravenous animals at a trough…

We give you this day, your daily flesh…

And next:

thump!

The dark corner seemed to eject what remained of Sullivan: a skinned, glistening-red corpse.

And only now did Natter himself surface from his own darkness, just a deformed face in a black robe and black hood. “My daughter,” he said. “Now you, too, must go on your way.”

Susan shed her clothes, then turned her succulent body to face Phil in the moonlight.

“You’re our saviour, Phil. You’re the one. You should feel honored to serve our god in such a way.”

Phil could only stand numb and look back at her.

“And someday, brother,” she finished, “I’ll see you again, in paradise.”

Then Susan, with no reluctance, stepped into the deadly dark corner and disappeared, where, within moments, the skin was eaten off her flawless body, and she was spat back out onto the floor.

“My son, my god.” Natter’s face seemed awed now in its deformity. “A few of us will remain, to tend to your needs. You will be the father of a new and holy race. A perfect race. The answer to our prayers for all these years. The answer to our call and to our duty.”

Druck and the few remaining Creekers left the room. Then Natter slowly backed away. His disjointed hands raised high. His great scarlet eyes closed, and then his malformed face lifted.

“Praise be to you, my son,” he said in the deepest piety. “Praise be to the Mannona…”

Then Natter, the Reverend, was gone.

Phil’s eyes fixed on the corner. He could just barely see it now, just a trace of what he’d seen more completely all those years ago.

He was looking at his heritage, at his predestination, at the real reason he’d been brought into the world.

To make a new world, he realized.

His entire life up to this point had all been a lie. Only now did the truth shine plain to him. It was here, his true reality, right there in the corner, just a few yards from where he now stood.

And from that same abyssal and holy corner, another voice seeped into his head. It was a beautiful voice—

A woman’s voice:

My lover, my husband, my son, it said.

There was a cosmic ringing in his ears, and unfathomable visions swimming behind his eyes. Visions from the lowest places of the earth…

I’ve waited so long, the voice wept to him. But now we will always be together.

More vague features formed. The corrupted, bent limbs, the demonic face and razor-toothed slit for a mouth. The petite nobs of its warped forehead, its high, full breasts, and the faintest glimmer of its sex.

My love! It’s our wedding night, it rejoiced.

Phil stared, agape.

Come to me now.

Behind him, Phil heard the tiny click as the door was finally locked.

THE END

— | — | —

Edward Lee has had over thirty books published in the horror and suspense field, including Flesh Gothic, Messenger and City Infernal. He is a Bram Stoker award nominee, and his short stories have appeared in over a dozen mass-market anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories of 2000, Pocket’s Hot Blood series, and the award-wining 999. Several of his novels have recently sold translation rights to Germany and Spain. His movie, Header, will be available on DVD in mid-2007. Meanwhile, City Infernal, Messenger, Ghouls, The Bighead, and Family Tradition have been optioned for film. Upcoming mass-market novels include House Infernal, Golemesque, and The Order of the Scarlet Nuns, while he is currently at work on a limited-edition hardcore horror novel entitled Minotauress. Lee lives on Florida’s St. Pete Beach. Visit him online at:

www.edwardleeonline.com