Currency of Souls

Chapter Fifteen

Reverend Hill’s house sits by itself on a grassy slope, segregated from the rest of the community by a short stretch of woodland on one side, and the river on the other. Hill’s predecessor, the benevolent and much lamented Reverend Lewis, was never comfortable being so far from his flock, and was busy finalizing plans for the purchase of a smaller, more modest place in the town center when for reasons known only to him, he decided to string himself up. When Hill came to Milestone, he sneered at the idea of what he called an “odious hovel”, and quickly made his home out here, in the tall narrow house he deemed just big enough to contain a man of his importance. “You’ll know where I am if you need me,” he advised his parishioners, “But know too that I have little time to waste on trivial matters that you yourselves have the power to cure.”

The only time he would take an interest in the people was when one of them came to him with a blemished soul, but even those misguided few quickly realized that whatever god it was that Hill claimed to worship, it wasn’t one they recognized, or wanted to have their lives governed by. But fear kept them—kept us—within his power.

From the get-go he was an asshole, and everyone knew it. A fire-and-brimstone man they didn’t need, or want, but they were stuck with him, and as Cobb once said, “In troubled times, you can’t be choosy about which preacher’s voice you end up listenin’ to.”

Gracie’s right. We should have killed him three years ago, as soon as it became clear what we’d been saddled with, but despite everything we’d seen and heard, and despite instinct telling us what the wise thing to do was, we did nothing. For three years we kept going back to that tavern, kept drinking ourselves numb and waiting for the keys to be jingled, waiting for Hill to tell us which sinners we were going to erase from the world as repentance for our own transgressions.

And every Saturday night, one of us would. Take the keys, get in the car, drive, and kill. Pretend the screams and the horrible thud against our hoods were deer, then come back, drink some more and wonder when that spiritual cleansing would kick in.

Never did of course, and never will.

He never wanted to save us from Hell. He brought Hell to us. But even he can’t be blamed, not entirely, for what’s happening in Milestone, tempting as it is to pin this nightmare on him.

No.

This town is dying because we’re killing it.

“You want to wait here?” I ask Wintry, and watch his eyes slide slowly past me, to the house with its stained and buckled siding, leaf-choked gutters, unpainted frames.

He licks his lips, grunts with pain, and closes his eyes. “You might need my help.”

“What is it you think you’re going to be able to help me with in your condition?”

His shrug is slight. “Never know.”

“Wintry, look. I appreciate the backup, but I’m not sure I have the time to wait for you. My boy’s in trouble. I got to get to him, so do me a favor, all right? Wait here. If the ground cracks open and imps come flying out, or if the house takes off and starts spinning, then you come help me. I’m sure I’ll be glad of it. All right?”

He smiles weakly, but I know he’s not happy.

“See you soon,” I tell him, and shut the door.

A long gravel path twists its way around a large granite boulder that bears the names of all the clergymen who have presided over matters of the spirit in Milestone, going back as far as 1820, when the town’s soul was the charge of a Protestant minister by the name of Edgar Saxton. Seventeen men succeeded him. Sixteen of their names are etched there forever in the face of that boulder. Only Hill’s name is missing, and I reckon it’ll stay missing, unless his replacement decides he deserves the acknowledgment, if a replacement ever comes.

Though I’m running on fumes now and my head is threatening to split in the middle, I jog my way up the path, my pulse racing the closer I get to the house, and the red Chevy parked outside the main door. In a way I’m relieved to see it. It means Kyle’s still here. But another part of me seems to have been betting on the fact that he wouldn’t be, that either I’d make it here too late, or find that Kyle went home. Or back to Iris.

On the dashboard, there’s a worn deck of playing cards wrapped in a rubber band. Next to them is a pack of Camel Lights, one cigarette poking from the foil. Maybe they belong to Iris, or someone Kyle gave a ride to. Maybe they’re Kyle’s. That I don’t know is just another one of those things I’ll have to sit down and chastise myself about later. No time for it now, even though I’ve just wasted five minutes staring at the damn Chevy.

As I skirt around the car and make my way to the door, the gravel crunches under my boots loud enough to give me away. No harm in that. I’m not here to surprise anyone.

As it turns out, the front door’s shut, but not locked. It’s got one of those fancy brass handles with the little button on the top you have to press down to open the latch. With a cursory check of the curtained windows for faces that aren’t there, I depress the button and the door swings open without a sound.

I’m greeted by the smell of furniture polish, which isn’t what I expected. Not even sure why. Maybe it’s because the exterior has fallen into disrepair, or because the man who lived here up until some hours ago made everyone he encountered feel dirty so I naturally assumed his home would smell like filth. It doesn’t though, nor does it look filthy. Just the opposite. I step into a hallway with dark varnished floorboards and a wide colorful rug which depicts the Virgin Mary in a typically beatific pose, her hands clasped in prayer, doves circling her head, her eyes rolled up so far to look at the Heavens she looks like she might be having a seizure. There’s a bare coat rack to my left, the wood the same dark shade as the floor, and a few feet further in, a little ways past the rug, there’s a small table with two drawers, the surface of which is completely free of dust and reflects the light from the quaint chandelier suspended from a small brass dome in the high ceiling.

I wonder if Hill had a maid.

The hall is short and opens at the end, where to the left, an arched doorway leads to the heart of the house. To my right, a set of stairs—as dust-free as every other surface I’ve seen so far—rises up and around behind me, running past the oval stained glass window above the door, and on to the second floor, the landing of which is overhead, and manned only by shadows.

It occurs to me that the sharp smell of polish and the immaculate cleanliness of the place don’t make the place seem homely, but preserved. The kind of smell you get in a museum, or anywhere else you go to look and admire, but not touch.

At this point, I should call out for Kyle, just in case he hasn’t heard me coming and does something rash because I’ve startled him, but there’s a noise now, coming from somewhere beyond the arch; a shuffling sound, barely noticeable over the thumping of my own heart in my ears. Papers, I’m guessing. That’s what it sounds like. The same sound the newspaper used to make when my father rustled it at the supper table. His way of telling us to shut up. For a few years I thought he was human only from the waist down, his upper half made of paper and black print.

I make my way into the darkness of the arch and on, into another short hallway, this one just as pristine as the last. There are windows to my right, and though the glass is regular, not stained, and clean, the morning sun seems to be straining to get through. On the opposite wall there are three doors, the middle one open. I cross to that side and poke my head in. It’s a bathroom: sink, toilet, bath, no shower, and it’s deserted.

The sound comes again, as if it’s meant to draw my attention, to direct me, and it’s coming from the room I’ve passed to get to the bathroom, the first door in the row from the arch.

My pulse quickens. Blunt pain taps at my right temple like an icepick. I go to the door, open it, half-expecting to feel a bullet rip through me before I get the chance to see who’s holding the weapon.

But no bullet comes, and there’s no weapon.

I’m in what I guess is the living room, and there’s a man sitting on a brown leather couch across from two matching armchairs. I guessed right, he’s reading a newspaper, but I don’t have to wait for him to lower it to know it isn’t my son.

“Took your time, Tom,” Cadaver says in a hoarse whisper, as he closes the newspaper, folds it in half and sets it on the arm of the couch. He looks at me, expression grim, and motions for me to sit in the armchair opposite him. For a moment I don’t comply, just watch as he retrieves his little microphone and jams it to his throat.

“Where’s my son?”

“Sit,” he commands. “This is how it’s supposed to go. So do what I say.” A sympathetic look crosses his ancient face. “Please.”

Oddly enough, there is no mockery in his tone. The plea is a sincere one, so I take the seat, feel myself sink into it. Might be comfortable if I wasn’t wired to the moon right now. “Where is he?”

Cadaver sits forward, one hand on his knee, the other holding the mike to his throat. “Upstairs,” he tells me.

I start to move.

“Wait.”

“What?” I’m already on my feet, impatient to be gone from this room.

“You ain’t ready to see him.”

“The hell I’m not.”

He gestures at the seat again. “Please. I ain’t fixin’ to keep you from seein’ him, but now’s not the right time. You need to listen first.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear what you have to say.”

“Maybe so, but it will help you.”

“And why would you want to help me?”

“I ain’t your enemy.”

“I seem to recall Hill said the same thing.”

“Hill was an idiot.”

“Can’t argue with that.”

“Please…sit.”

I don’t move. Can’t. The door’s not that far away and I’m standing.

“Kyle ain’t goin’ nowhere, Tom. He’s restin’.”

Resting? Here? Of all the ways I imagined finding Kyle when I got here, taking a load off sure isn’t one of them. I can’t tell if Cadaver’s being straight with me. He managed to fool me for three years into thinking he was a harmless old man, and there’s not much hope I’ll be able to figure it out just by looking at him, so I do as he asks.

“Why is he here?”

“We made a bargain.”

“I know: a one-way ticket out of here, right?”

Can’t fault the kid for that. I don’t think I’ve met anyone in this town who didn’t dream of leaving it far behind them. But if that was what he got for his efforts, then why is he still here?

“That’s right.”

“In exchange for what?”

“I think you already know.”

I do, but I want him to say it, to bring the gavel down on what I’ve been told, and what I feel deep down in my gut.

“Tell me.”

“In exchange for you.”

There’s a glass-fronted bookcase behind the couch. In it I can see my reflection, but the gaunt overweight creature staring back at me with hollow eyes isn’t someone I recognize. I bring my gaze back to Cadaver. “My life for his escape?”

“I offered to bring back the woman he loved. I offered to bring back Flo and grant him safe passage from this town.”

“That’s quite an offer. I’m flattered you thought it would take so much for him to sell me out. He’d probably have done it for a six-pack.” I can’t keep the ugly tone from my voice.

“You don’t know your son very well, Sheriff.”

“Either do you, apparently.” I draw my fingers down my face. “So if he made the deal, how come I’m still breathing?”

“It interests me that you assume he did.”

“What?”

“Situations reversed, would you have accepted the terms?”

“This isn’t about me.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong about that.”

“I want to see him.”

“I understand, but let me have a few more moments of your time.”

I also want a drink, but even though there’s a fancy decanter in view on one of the bookshelves, I’m not going for it. I don’t want to be drunk for whatever’s coming, and I don’t want anything Hill might have touched. So I wait, and listen, and picture Kyle in a room somewhere above my head, sleeping, unaware that his father’s downstairs, chatting with the devil.

Or whatever he is.

“Is this what you do for fun?” I ask.

He looks surprised, maybe even a little insulted. “Fun?” He scoffs. “Hell…I wish that were the case, Tom.”

“Then why?”

He scoots forward a little, an intense look on his face, one eye like a white marble, the other in shadow. “I don’t enjoy what I do anymore than you enjoy livin’ in your own skin when your spirit’s already shriveled up and died inside it. I do this because I have to, not because I want to.” He sits back, drums his fingers on the arm of the couch. “You want to know what I am. I can’t tell you that, and not because I ain’t allowed to, but because no one’s ever explained it to me. What I can tell you is what I used to be. It may surprise you.”

I shrug as if I couldn’t care less, but I’m interested. “A preacher?”

He grins and his cheeks vanish. “A salesman.”

“Let me guess—bibles.”

“You need to abandon the religious angle, Tom. I was a door-to-door carpet products salesman. Damned good one too. In my spare time I liked to paint. Still life’s mostly.”

I frown at him. He laughs and it sounds like a gust of winter wind through the eaves. “I know. Hard to picture, ain’t it?”

“No shit. And when was this?”

His smile fades. “Can’t remember.”

I’m appalled to find myself feeling sorry for him. I have to remind myself why I’m here, and whose fault it is. But that’s not so clear, no more than it’s ever been. I can’t be sure Cadaver wasn’t toying with me by planting the seed of doubt in my brain. He hasn’t said Kyle took the bargain he was offered. He hasn’t said he didn’t either. The fact that I’m alive is about the only thing keeping me from being convinced the latter holds true.

“Had a wife, and two children too,” he continues, as wistfully as his artificial voice will allow. “Can’t recall their names, or their faces. I know I cared about them a great deal though.”

“So how did you get demoted to this position?” I’m hoping to get a rise out of him, simply so I won’t have to feel sympathy for the old bastard anymore.

It’s his turn to shrug. “Can’t rightfully recall that either, but I’m sure it began with the scandal. See, I mentioned I was good at my job. Turns out I was maybe a little too good. I could talk the talk like no one else in the company. Had a ninety-six percent success rate you see, which means almost everyone who opened the door to me bought whatever I was sellin’. Which is good, unless it’s discovered that what you’re sellin’ emits toxic fumes, which when inhaled, causes seizures, and eventually a very painful death.” He shakes his head. “Sold an awful lot before the company recalled it, Tom. That’s an awful lot of dead folk.”

“And that’s why you’re—”

“No idea. You could say the death of all those people wasn’t my fault, but we might have to argue about that. I’ve had plenty of time to think it through, and I suppose there could be any number of reasons why I ended up doin’ what I do now. Could be because I shot my father to keep him from beatin’ my Momma to death with a shovel, or because I shot a few bluejays with my BB gun when I was a kid. At the end of the day, don’t really matter why. I still am what I am and always was: a salesman sellin’ death to whoever opens their door to me.”

“And that’s what we’ve done? Opened our doors to you because we fucked up our lives?”

“Because you fucked up the lives of others. Why do you think you’re involved here? We both know you didn’t murder your wife, but you keep tellin’ yourself you did. Why?”

“I figured you’d already know.”

“Humor me.”

“Why should I?”

I search for words, but like the answer he’s seeking, I can’t wrench it free of the dark that’s coiling inside me like oil in a spinning barrel.

“Who’s the victim of your sins, Tom? Kyle?”

“Maybe.”

“No.” The word is flat, dead, delivered like a hand slammed down on a table. “It’s you. You’re the victim. You’ve let yourself drift on a tide of bad judgment, let this town suck the marrow from your bones and the ambition from your heart because it was easier’n puttin’ up a fight. You’re a quitter, Tom.”

I’m a little stunned at the vehemence in his artificial voice. Whatever the motive behind his little rant, I’m inclined to believe he’s just accused me of an unforgivable crime, not on some malignant whim, but because he desperately wants me to know. Because I have to know.

I’ve heard some people say that when they were faced with extreme danger their lives flashed before their eyes. That’s who Cadaver is, or at least a part of what he is. He’s a reminder of all you’ve done, and should have done. He’s an accountant who keeps track of how much you’ve squandered and how much you owe. He’s a debt collector of the most ruthless kind because he deals in the currency of souls.

“You’re a failure.”

I’m getting angry, and that’s about par for the course. I can’t walk away from this like I’ve walked away from everything else, and with no distance to put between me and the man judging me, and no gun to shove between his eyes to force him to reevaluate, I have no choice but to defend myself with words.

“Is this supposed to make me see the light? Change my ways? Am I supposed to leave here with an arm around my boy, both of us skipping to the tune of The Andy Griffith Show, all because I was fortunate enough to heed the wisdom of a mass-murdering parasite? Fuck you old man. You brought Hell to this town just as much as Hill did. You infected it, infected us, and then have the gall to sit there like God himself judging everyone you’ve set out to destroy. Why not just wave a magic wand and blow the fucking place off the earth and be done with it. Why drag it out like this unless you like the suffering, unless it’s how your limp dick gets to twitching?”

Cadaver seems unaffected by my outburst, but right now I want to wring his scrawny neck, or at the very least rip that goddamn box out of it so he’ll stop talking.

“I’ve done nothin’ in this town the people didn’t ask for, Tom. I’m as cursed as everyone else, maybe even more than they are. I don’t get to make choices. I just get to grant power to people who make them too freely, and without thinkin’ them through. And I don’t get to change them.” He frowns. “So no, I don’t expect you to see the light. That star burned out a long time ago. But whether or not you choose to understand what I’m tryin’ to tell you, you’ll learn to appreciate the message when the choice is taken away.”

“Riddles.” I stand, muscles trembling, hands clenched into fists I want so badly to use but know I won’t. I can’t. “You’re speaking in goddamn riddles. What do you want from me? From Kyle? How do we end this? Do we have to die, to burn? Is that it? Tell me!”

Cadaver rises, a skeleton beneath plastic skin. The smell of his cologne will from this moment on remind me of death. “How these things turn out depends on the choices that are made. Sometimes it happens that everythin’ turns out fine. But not often. It ain’t in our nature to consider others when we’re sufferin’ ourselves. And unfortunately for Milestone, everyone gets to bargain if they want it, even the monster hidin’ among you.”

I’m standing as close to him as I am willing to get. His one good eye holds me as sure as if it were a loaded gun. “Tom, you were a good man once. You lost your way. Tonight you’re goin’ to lose everythin’ else, and for that I’m truly sorry.”

He’s trying to scare me. It’s working.

“What about the coins, the loan? What about—” Frantic, I dig in my pocket until I have those two cold discs grasped in my hand, then I hold them out for his inspection. “—these?”

“What about them?”

“You said they were a loan.”

“I did.”

“What if I give mine to you? What if…?” Unsure what I’m doing, but praying it achieves the desired result, I shove one of the pennies under his nose. He backs away, looking slightly annoyed. “What if I let you have mine, me, right now, whether or not Kyle took the bargain? What then?”

“You misunderstood, Tom.”

That’s not what I want to hear.

“Just listen—”

He puts a hand on my wrist, forcing me to lower the coin from his face. “It was a loan for you. The coins ain’t some kind of barter for your soul and Kyle’s. They don’t represent souls at all.”

“Then what the hell are they?”

“Time. I let you borrow time.”

I feel something being yanked away from me, the knot in the tug o’ war rope vanishing into the darkness in the corners of a room that smells of death/cologne and furniture polish. The man looking at me from the glass over Cadaver’s shoulder is a monster. His eyes are gone. My eyes are gone, but I’m not blind enough to miss seeing the picture this old man has drawn for me.

“He couldn’t sell you out. I knew he wouldn’t, no matter what I offered him. He’s one of the few good ones, Tom, so I broke the rules for him. I gave you the pennies. Both were his. I gave you time to save him.”

Sweat trickles down my neck even as a chill dances across my back. “How much time?”

From the room directly overhead, something crashes to the floor. The light sways slightly. Grains of plaster float down between us like sand from a cracked hourglass.

I feel a vibration in my bones, terror twisting my gut.

Helpless, I look at Cadaver.

“That much,” he whispers.

Chapter Sixteen

I run, taking the steps two by two though the sweeping angle of them seems designed to slow me down. As my feet make sounds like gunshots on the steps, I feel a part of me rip away, a part of me that wants to go in the other direction, back downstairs to Cadaver, to kill him, so there’ll be nothing left to face when I return. In the split-second instances when my mind cuts away from the sight of my own filthy boots pounding polished wood on this fucking endless staircase, I can almost feel his body come apart beneath my hands, blood and bone, or maybe just dust and oil spattering the walls, wet and satisfying beneath my shaking hands. I’m ripping that box from his throat, taking no care with it, just yanking it free and delighting in the sight of the gaping void it leaves behind as his head lolls atop withered shoulders. I’m hurting him. I’m showing him agony. I’m showing him how I feel, how I felt long before I first stepped foot in that goddamn tavern.

I’m tearing him apart. Returning the favor.

But then the steps run out and the landing isn’t nearly long enough for me to get my thoughts in order, to force myself to be calm. Three strides and I’m at the door I’m guessing is the one from which that thumping sound came. I don’t wait a second longer.

I throw open the door.

It’s a bedroom.

Bed, neatly made.

Sink in the corner, dripping.

Sunlight making shadows that lay flat upon the floor.

Window overlooking the yard.

There’s no one here.

Cursing, I head for the next door, the echo of that sliding thumping sound bouncing around my brain. I know what that sound was, but I’m going to dismiss the certainty and tell myself I’m letting terror mislead me. But deep down inside where reality is a small dark plot of land under an indifferent sky, I know the truth. I feel it. Right now, there is no tiny dirt road I can sidle down to avoid that big sprawling highway that runs only one way—straight into the mushy black heart of truth, the true nightmare of this situation. I can’t get away. Never could. But I could have gotten Kyle out of this and didn’t.

Still, Be there; be alive. I won’t let you down. Not again, I repeat in a mantra inside my head, a head that feels as if it’s become a porcelain vase dropped from a height.

My hand finds the door knob.

Please. Just a little more time. One more chance. One more penny.

I open the door.

The hinges shriek.

There’s light coming in the window.

My mouth’s dry.

There’s light coming in the window.

I can’t see for the tears.

There’s light coming in the window.

And there’s a long thin shadow swinging in front of it, touching my own feet, which I let drop me to the floor. They’ve held me enough, held me longer than that creaking rope is going to hold my boy.

I can’t look at him. Won’t.

Then I do.

Help him down, goddamn it. He’s still alive.

I’m back on my feet in an instant, hugging my boy’s legs, my arms tight, lifting, lifting. Trying to unbreak his neck; trying to unchoke him. He rises, but doesn’t make a sound. Christ…he doesn’t make a sound.

No words, no breath. No life.

He’s dead and gone.

Slowly, so slowly, and gently, I let him go until the rope is tight once again and his body twists in a breeze that isn’t here.

Another man, another father, might persist, try to free him, try to save him, wailing and moaning all the while, crying out to God, promising retribution for this heinous injustice.

But I’m not another father.

And God isn’t listening.

I find myself looking at my son’s shoes, note that they are cleaner than mine, though we’ve walked the same paths tonight. Guess that probably means something. All I take from it is the fact that they’re cleaner, and that the laces are untied, same way they always were when he got done with a day’s work. He never could tie laces right, but he sure did a hell of a job with that noose.

His belt buckle is silver, a rearing horse locked inside an oval, and it glints in the sunlight, until the body swings around to the shadows again, then that silver mare turns black.

The floor hurts my knees as I let it draw me down again. Bare wood. I want to claw it to splinters, but I’ll wait. I have to wait to see if I choke to death like my boy because the feeling in my chest makes me believe that’s what’s going to happen. Someone has their hands around my throat, but there’s nobody here but us.

Just me.

Just me, and my boy, who’s wearing a brown noose pulled so tight it’s sawed almost clear through the skin.

Just me and my boy, who’s sticking his tongue out at me like he did when I teased him about the girl he used to walk home when they were in second grade. How many years ago was that? What was her name? Nancy something. Ellis, maybe. Damn it. Pretty girl too, but she moved on. She didn’t want to, and I guess Kyle didn’t want her to either. But wish in one hand…

“Shit in the other,” I say aloud, wondering if my voice is enough to make Kyle swing some more, because aside from that creaking rope, the room is deathly quiet, deathly still, which I suppose is only appropriate.

On the floor, there’s a chair, lying on its back, one its runners broken. I wonder if Kyle changed his mind as he stood atop that chair until the chair decided for him. Sorry, son. Too late now. Your old man hasn’t spent your time wisely.

I won’t look at his face, though it begs me to.

I won’t.

I’ve taken the blame for my wife’s death though I wasn’t even in the car. I got out, she drove away, and two hours later we pulled my Lexus out of the Milestone River. I never told Kyle that. Never told him that we found Alfie Tomlin, the banker, in the passenger seat either. No, I kept that stuff to myself because once she was gone, I was all he had left. I was what he needed. A target. Someone to blame, to hate, and I let him.

I let him.

You’re the victim, Cadaver said. Not Kyle.

He lied, of course. For all his sympathy and confessions, he lied to me. I’m not the victim. I’m not the one swinging from the rafters or burned to death.

I’m alive, and though I’m about to make myself a promise that I’ll rectify that before the sun goes down, I’m going to forget about Hell and devils and men with no voices and miraculous resurrections and ghostly spouses, and the cosmic or celestial balance that has made us all its slaves. I’m going to put out of my mind all thoughts of betrayal and lies and sin and hate and love.

Fuck all that.

Right now I’m going to restore the only balance that matters a goddamn right at this very second in my life.

And I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.

I expect to find him gone, fled like the yellow son of a bitch I know him to be, and when I storm into the parlor, he’s nowhere in sight. Rage is making me shake harder than a man in an electric chair, but when I turn, there he is, the front door open, poised, waiting, as if for me to accompany him. Like we’re about to take a nice pleasant walk of the grounds. The daylight doesn’t reach far into the hall. Maybe he’s holding it back. Maybe it doesn’t know how to penetrate the sickness, death and misery he wears for a coat.

“You killed him.”

He clucks his tongue, and I’ve just decided that’s the first thing I’m going to rip from him.

“You know that ain’t true.” It’s hard to hear him over the sound of my own blood roaring through me. “Maybe not in your head where the fury’s flowin’ from, but deep down you—”

Fists clenched tight and held by my sides, I start toward him. “I’m through listening to you telling me how I am, what I am, and what I’m supposed to do. And you’re all done messing with folk’s lives. You’re going in the ground today, Cadaver, right next to Eddie and the whore and the only choice I’m giving you is whether or not you want to be dead or alive when I do it.”

I need him to be unsettled, to look shaken. I need him to be afraid, but he isn’t. Nothing about him has changed much, except maybe for his shoulders, which have drawn in a little as if he’s waiting for the first blow. But there’s no fear in him. Nothing. He just looks sad, like none of this is a surprise, as if he saw the whole damn thing in some fucking crystal ball.

“You know somethin’?” he asks, when I reach him. “I would very much like if you could do that. But you can’t, and you ain’t the first to offer. Not by a long shot. And every time I hear it, I feel somethin’ I’m not allowed to feel, somethin’ I’ve all but forgotten how to feel. The very thing you and everyone else in this town squanders with every breath you take: Hope. So by all means, Tom, do your worst. Make your last stand in a town that has nothin’ left in it for you to protect even if you continue to pretend it does. Put me in the ground for a spell to teach me a lesson you still, despite all you’ve lived through, haven’t learned yourself.”

Words. That’s all they are. More words.

I close the space between us with one lunge, and insane animal sounds fill the hall, like there’s a pack of crazed starving jackals pouring down the stairs. Takes me a moment, but as soon as my hands find Cadaver’s coat, and then his neck, I realize that sound is coming from me. Spit flies from my lips into the old man’s face, flecks of foam stippling his sallow cheeks, and still, still he doesn’t look threatened, and that refusal to be afraid, to at least pretend I have a hope of ending all of this by ending him, is going to drain the fight from me if I don’t do what I need to do and fast.

“Bring him back,” I snarl, grunting with the effort of trying to strangle a man whose throat is mostly metal. He shakes when I throttle him, but his eyes, one living, one dead, stare at me with aggravating calm, his hands by his sides.

“Bring him back.”

“And what will you do for me?” he whispers.

“Just bring back my son.”

He mouths the words, “I can’t,” and then the bastard smiles, adds a silent, “I won’t” to it and my hands fly from his throat to his face, to those eyes. He jerks back, and somewhere inside me I’m celebrating the first reaction I’ve gotten from him, but I’m too focused, to driven to rejoice for long. His skin is cold—but not cold enough to indicate he’s already dead and therefore can’t be killed—and my hands brace his face, thumbs finding his eyes.

“If you won’t fix it,” I growl at him. “You won’t ever again see what you’ve done to people.” And as if I’m pressing them into fruit to test for ripeness, I let my thumbs sink into his wrinkled sockets, into the too dry but soft orbs of his eyes.

He doesn’t make a sound, but he’s beginning to sag. The feeling of victory increases, filling me with cold fire, igniting some part of me that’s been buried for far too long, the part of me that knew once upon a time how to make others pay for their sins.

And goddamn it, I’m not stopping until someone has paid.

Cadaver’s legs buckle beneath him. He’s kneeling, arms still by his sides, face still cradled in my hands, a queer hissing noise coming from the box in his throat. That little microphone clatters to the floor.

“Fight me,” I command him, because I want him to. I want him to fight for his life like everyone in Milestone has had to do because they were too blind to see it when it deserted them.

He gasps as his eyes give way beneath my thumbs. I increase my grip, letting them sink farther, drilling toward his brain, or whatever ugliness fills his rotten skull. Even without his eyes, he could be dangerous.

Sweat trickles down between my shoulder blades.

Cadaver mouths something as watery blood streams down his face, but I can only feel his lips move against the heel of my palm now. Dry and dusty, like the wings of a moth. I lean close. “Fix it.” It can’t be this easy. But it seems it is. Three years being governed by an old man and a lunatic priest and they were both made of flesh and blood at the back of it all. What utter fools we’ve been.

Cadaver, who hasn’t struggled from the beginning of this, gasps one more time and I feel his weight pulling away from me, his body headed for a resting place in the corner by the door.

Milky fluid squirts and reflexively, my grip loosens. There’s a gruesome squelch as my thumbs slide free of the man’s eye sockets. He falls back, legs folded beneath him, his skull thudding against the hall wall.

He’s still smiling.

I wipe my hands on my pants, and stand over him. The fresh air drifting through the open door cools the sweat on my brow but I’m shaking so hard I’m afraid it will shake me to pieces. My guts seem about to escape through my throat. They’re headed off by desperation. “How do I make this stop? How do I get him back?”

He gives the smallest little shake of his head.

“Goddamn it, tell me or I’ll carry you out of here in a basket.”

He does, but I have to bend low to hear the words. “It wouldn’t interest you,” he says.

“What wouldn’t?”

The fist he brings up is trembling, and for a moment he looks like an old man about to waggle it at some pesky kids who’ve left a flaming bag full of dog turds on his stoop. But then a twig-like finger springs free and bends toward him, indicating he wants me to come closer.

I hesitate, and in that hallway where the light is hesitating too, time passes unmeasured by the fall of the old bastard’s coins. I hunker down, knees crackling, my gut straining against my belt.

“Tell me what to do.”

With that maddening smile still mangling his lips, he brings his head close and whispers in my ear. “You have to give me what I want.”

Wintry’s been near-death since the fire, but in Milestone, even if you don’t have an old man’s pennies in your pocket, you can draw the time out just enough to get your business done. I’ve been doing it for too many years to count, and Wintry’s doing it now.

With his last reserves of strength, he leans against the doorjamb, awaiting my word. He says nothing, offers no condolences, asks no questions, just stands there, eyes narrowed against the gnawing pain, watching as I return from the kitchen, a bread knife clutched in one hand. When I ask for his help in cutting Kyle down, he dutifully steps over the threshold where Cadaver is playing possum, and accompanies me upstairs.

My boy is as I found him, though he’s stopped swinging, his shadow like a painted thing on the polished floor. The wounds mask the emotion on Wintry’s face as he supports Kyle’s legs while I drag the bed away from the wall and far enough into the middle of the room to allow me to mount it and reach the noose. There is little give in the mattress, though I can feel the hard springs pressing through. The rope has been looped three times around one of the rafters. It won’t be hard to cut and the blade is sure.

“Lift him,” I instruct. Wintry does. The sound of his breathing is like a steam train leaving the station.

Kyle is turned away from me, and I’m thankful for that. All I can see is the back of his head, the dark unruly hair. I can’t remember the last time I touched it, but I won’t touch it now. Later, maybe, when Wintry’s gone.

I begin to saw at the rope, tears or sweat running down my face, I can’t tell which.

The first loop snaps with a labored groan.

Then the second. When the third gives way the boy is free, and falling, but this time it is not a noose that catches him, but Wintry, whose eyes now seem to contain an emotion I have never seen in them before. It’s the same look he once drew from me whenever Flo lavished attention on him.

Envy.

And it’s directed at the boy cradled in his arms.

Chapter Seventeen

Wintry carries the boy downstairs. He goes slowly because of the pain, and because he doesn’t want to drop the boy. Doesn’t want the Sheriff to have to try to hide his mourning any more than he’s already doing.

So he takes the steps easy. Kyle isn’t heavy. It’s like carrying a baby, and right now Wintry wishes he knew magic, or had the power of healing, because he’d bring that kid back for the Sheriff lickety-split. But he doesn’t know magic, and he doesn’t have Cobb’s power to heal. If he did, he’d surely use it on himself, and make the awful burning go away.

Though the stairs seems to go on forever, it has an end, and when Wintry reaches it, it feels like he’s just come down off the mountain he calls home—used to call home—into the valley.

He stands there for a moment, ignoring the raging fire in his arms and the terrible pain from the muscles beneath, and he pictures Flo, who might walk in that door any second, smiling, delighting in his surprise. Just like the night he asked if he could walk her home and she agreed, except it was his home he walked her to. Just like she surprised him by refusing a drink, or anything but the short walk to the cot in the corner. Just like she surprised him by weeping all the way through their lovemaking, then asking him to marry her afterward. And sure, Wintry was no fool, he’d heard the stories, heard that she’d killed her husband, but at that moment it didn’t matter. He’d said yes, and in the morning, when he watched her leave, watched her until she had descended the mountain and was little more than a speck, he decided that if she did kill her man, he must have deserved it. And maybe he would too, but he could think of worse ways to die than at the hands of the woman he loved.

Burning, for example.

Grimacing, he turns to look at the Sheriff, whose face is almost the same shade as his son’s, and nods. For a moment it doesn’t seem as if the man understands what Wintry’s trying to tell him, so he adds, “Take him.”

The Sheriff reaches out with the kind of look a man not used to holding babies might have when presented with one. But he takes his son in his arms, anguish rippling across his face, and brings the boy close to his chest.

“Let’s go,” he says, as firmly as a voice broken by tears will allow him.

But Wintry doesn’t move. Instead he glances down into the corner by the door, where the man he wants to see, the man he came here to see is still sitting.

“Just a sec,” he says to Tom, and leans over the man with no eyes.

“He’s gone,” the Sheriff says quietly, and there’s a certainty to his voice that only the man who killed him can have.

“He welshed then,” Wintry murmurs. “Didn’t do what he promised he’d do.”

“If I were you I wouldn’t be surprised. The devil doesn’t keep his promises.”

Wintry straightens, a hard black knot of bitterness caught in his throat. With a sigh, he leads the way out into the sunshine, still taking it slow out of respect for Sheriff Tom’s grief. It ain’t fair. Ain’t fair at all. He’s real sorry for Tom, that’s for sure, but he’s sorry for himself too and impatient to be done with it all.

It feels like hours before they reach the end of the path, and here they stop.

“Thanks,” the Sheriff says. “For…” He shakes his head, brings the boy’s head close to his chest with one grubby, bloodstained hand. His eyes are filled with the kind of agony Wintry knows all too well.

Sheriff Tom blinks, as if to dismiss further conversation, or acknowledgment of his gratitude, and moves around the front of the truck, to where the sun through the overhanging leaves makes dancing patterns on the road, and he motions for Wintry to open the side door. Kyle’s head begins to turn, as if he wants to see what Wintry’s up to, or where he’s going to be stowed, and the Sheriff gently puts a hand on the boy’s chin, directs his gaze back to the gold star on his father’s uniform. The light breeze ruffles the boy’s hair, making him seem alive. But anyone who might come along this road need only look at Sheriff Tom’s face to know the truth about the situation.

And then the sound of an engine getting closer tells Wintry that someone is coming along. He hopes, for the Sheriff’s sake, that whoever it is doesn’t stop to offer help, or ask questions. But then, this is Milestone, and people rarely do. Can’t rightly be afraid of death if you’ve never had to look at it, which is why most folks in this town don’t look anywhere but inside themselves.

“Wintry…”

It’s Wintry’s turn to apologize for being distracted by the car. “Car comin’,” he says, and sets about opening the door for Tom. “We best hurry ourselves outta the road.”

He feels a cold lance in his side at the thought that maybe the kid—Brody—managed to get his hands on a car and is racing to put them out of their misery once and for all. Wintry wouldn’t mind, but he figures that’s more than the Sheriff deserves.

“Best hurry,” he says again.

The sound of the car grows louder. Should be just past the bend now, and it’s coming real fast. Wintry’s hand is on the door, on the handle, and has it cracked, just a little, when the engine roars, making him turn to look once more.

It’s a red Buick. He recognizes it as Doctor Hendricks car, and as it gets closer, still going way too fast, sunlight flashing across the windshield, Wintry sees that he was right. There, hunched behind the wheel, is the doctor himself.

“It’s the Doc,” he tells Tom. “But I don’t think—”

Even from back here, Wintry realizes two things: Hendricks either doesn’t see them, or doesn’t care. Whatever the case, he’s not stopping. And in a matter of seconds, the men standing in the way are going to be road kill.

He has time for one thought only: This is where it ends, and it is not a frightening thought. He has never feared death, and that’s just as well because here it comes now, bearing down on him, the Buick’s silver grille like grinning teeth about to yawn open and swallow them all wide, the headlights wide like the terrified eyes of the pale man behind the wheel.

The sound of the engine fills the world.

The Sheriff cries out a warning. There is a hand on Wintry’s arm. He ignores the pain it causes, grabs hold of the Sheriff’s wrist, turns and thrusts the man, still cradling his boy, clear across the road, where the lawman staggers and falls flat on his ass on the verge of the slight embankment leading down into the woods. Kyle tumbles away from him, lands sprawled on his back in the grass, shoes pointing straight up at the sky.

“Wintry!”

There is nothing but red in his vision.

See you soon baby.

Wintry bends low, as if he’s going in for a football tackle, head lowered, eyes forward, shoulders angled forward. He does not wait to die. With his last breath rushing from his mouth in a strangled cry, he rushes to meet it.

“Didn’t used to be this hard,” Cadaver says, easing himself onto a stool. “Didn’t used to be like this at all. Guess I’m either losin’ my touch or people are gettin’ smarter.”

“The hell happened to you?” Gracie asks, her hands flat on the counter, eyes cold.

“The boy is dead.”

“Shame.”

Cadaver raises his head, and smiles at her, though the absence of eyes and the raw bloody holes where they should be negate any semblance of humor from it. “You almost sound like you mean it.”

“Who says I don’t?”

“I don’t know, but if you’re lookin’ for character witnesses, you’re runnin’ kind of low. ‘Specially with you killin’ ’em an all.”

“Vess would have told them.”

“Could be they already know.”

Gracie leans in, teeth clenched, red-veined eyes wide. “The only way they’d know is if you told them.”

“Yeah.” He nods slowly, picks a speck of soot from the counter and inspects it, which, considering he’s blind, or at least should be, would seem amusing to Gracie under different circumstances. But she’s far from amused. In fact, she’d love nothing more than to rip the old guy’s head clean off his shoulders and preserve it in a pickle jar as a warning to future customers not to fuck with her. But of course, there won’t be any future customers. She’s getting gone and Cadaver’s her ticket, so for now at least, she has no choice but to let him keep that rotten head of his, and to bide her time.

Gracie’s hands become claws on the polished mahogany. “You dirty son of a bitch. Why?”

“Because you ain’t the only one who wants out, and I’ve been plyin’ my wares an awful lot longer than you have. Comes a time when it has to end, you see, when you start goin’ to bed at night and instead of seein’ nothin’ you start seein’ the faces of people you used to care about—”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

Cadaver ignores the interruption. “—Then you realize, one mornin’ while your busy materializin’ in people’s livin’ rooms right when they’re desperate enough to say yes to Hell itself if it means they get more time, that there might be salvation for you after all, an escape route you never believed existed. And then you start to want it, start plannin’, until at last the time comes when you have no more faith in what you do, only in what you can do to be done with it all.”

“You’ve got to be kiddin’ me.”

“For me that time is now.”

Gracie brings her face close to the old man’s, stares hard into his dead eye sockets. “Not before you get me out it isn’t.”

“I’m not a welsher. You’ll get what I promised if your side of the bargain is met. All of ’em, you said, correct?”

She nods, struggling to restrain herself from raking his sallow face with her nails.

“Well then,” Cadaver says, rising from the chair with a tip of an imaginary hat. “Let’s hope the Sheriff doesn’t live to see another sunset.” He turns and walks toward the door. “Or you’ll be watching a million of them from behind these windows.”

I’m winded, and not altogether sure what I’m seeing is actually happening. Could be I’m dreaming it all. Since finding Kyle strung up in Hill’s house, everything seems just the slightest bit off kilter. When I move my eyes, the world takes its time following.

But the sound, the earth-shattering explosion as steel meets flesh meets steel is enough to let me know there can be no mistaking this as reality. I saw Hendricks as the car approached, hunched over the wheel, shoulders raised as if he was manning a jackhammer. He was talking to himself, the sun making the tears in his eyes sparkle, face contorted in agony, the roots of which I’ll never know. Maybe it was simply the knowledge that he was about to kill someone.

And that look stayed on his face until Wintry let out a roar, fists held at his sides, and rushed forward like a bull, head and shoulders ramming into the car as if he hoped to stop it. I swear he almost did. The car seemed to stagger a little. There was smoke from the wheels, a horrible sharp screech before the car slammed into the wounded giant, crushing him against the front of my truck, his upper body snapping back like a jack-in-the-box. Blood flew. Flesh was torn away. But that wasn’t the end of it. The speed and the interruption Wintry presented to its passage didn’t stop the car. It’s front wheels reared up as if it was going to simply drive on over my truck. It didn’t make it. Gravity intervened. Hendricks’ car stalled and rolled back down on all four tires, the Buick bouncing on its chassis, but in doing so, crushed whatever was left of the big man beneath it.

The impact was so severe, I expected to see it had ejected the doctor from his car, but though the windshield was obliterated, he’s still in the driver seat, though what’s sitting there isn’t recognizable as anything human.

Can I call this an accident or assume it’s the result of another of Cadaver’s little bargains? Guess it doesn’t matter. The only thing that does is lying three feet away from me, spread-eagled, head cocked at an unnatural angle.

I have to leave here, but my truck isn’t going to move. There’s steam gushing out from beneath the crumpled hood and oil pissing from beneath it. It’s done, as is Hendricks’ Buick, so I guess I’m walking, unless someone comes along who doesn’t feel compelled to use their car as a weapon. And in Milestone, at least over the past few hours, such people are rare.

I stand up, check on Kyle to make sure he’s as comfortable as he needs to be, that he’s not just lying there like a buck waiting to be skinned, then I look at the road, at the twisted metal, the blood, the chaos.

Wintry’s gone, and though I know I should mourn him, I reckon he’s exactly where he wanted to be. At least his suffering’s over.

I step out onto the asphalt.

Though my truck’s a wreck, the front end doesn’t look all that bad.

There’s a slim chance the stereo still works.

Blue smoke, sad eyes. The smell of fresh blood and motor oil.

“Did you know?” I ask her.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I tried. You wouldn’t listen.”

Silence but for a faint dripping from somewhere behind me. Then, somewhere in the trees behind Kyle, a catbird does its impression of a hungry infant. I look toward the sound and see a flicker of dark gray, then nothing but green trapping the sunlight.

“What I’m going to do…will it be enough?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Can’t or won’t.”

“Can’t. And even if I could, I wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Knowin’ what lies ahead can’t change you, or make anythin’ better no more than dwellin’ on the past will. You’ve always done what your gut’s told you to. You’ve never been a great listener to the voice of your heart, not because you’re a bad man, but because you’re not wired that way. It doesn’t speak to you in words you understand, and that’s just how it is.”

I respond with a soft, bitter laugh. “So I can blame this voice for driving my son to kill himself? Jesus, that’s a relief.”

“Would Kyle have been happy if he’d sold you out, and got out of Milestone? Would you, in his shoes? Neither of us can see what would have become of him. He wanted out; he got it. He listened to the voice of his heart and it showed him the way.”

“And what is my voice telling me to do now? Can you hear it?”

“No. But it doesn’t matter if I tell you it’s the wrong or right way, you won’t listen. All that’s left is to see this through.”

“Hey,” I say, clearing my throat and scratching at my scalp—my way of letting her know I can’t discuss this anymore.

“I know.”

I wave away her mindreading and scowl. “Well for Chrissakes just let me say it anyway.”

“You don’t know how.”

“Then can I say I love you?”

The smoke curls into a smile. “Yes.”

“Will you buy it if I do?”

“Maybe.”

“I love you.”

“What about Iris?”

“Don’t start.”

“Get goin’ Tom. Do what needs to be done.”

“Wait.” I haven’t turned off the radio, haven’t told her to leave me alone, but when I search for her face, she’s gone, curlicues of blue smoke drifting on the breeze from the open car door. I watch it fade until only the memory of her is left, and the sad fact that when I told her I loved her, she didn’t respond in kind.

The sun’s high in the sky and glaring like the eye of a dragon by the time someone comes. We haven’t moved, Kyle and me. We’re still just sitting, and catching up on old times, though of course I’m doing all the talking, and I figure I must have been staring right back at that big old sun because there are white orbs wherever I look, even when I shut my eyes.

This car is a familiar one. It’s going too slow to present much of a threat, but in this town, who knows? There are no miracles in Milestone. Plenty of murderers, though.

The car stops a few feet away, and it’s a woman that gets out.

“Tom?”

“Iris.” I’m glad to see her, but I’m guessing she won’t know that by the look on my face, so maybe I’d better tell her. “Guess your magical power of screwing up electricity doesn’t extend to car batteries, huh?”

“Or telephones, or hairdryers. What happened?” She’s blocking the light now, her shadow cool and welcome across my sunburned face. It gives her a red halo.

I fill her in on the details, laughing my way through some of it, blubbering my way through more, and listening to the rest as if it isn’t coming from my mouth at all.

In the end it comes down to a litany of who’s dead, an out-loud reading of tomorrow’s obituaries. Iris is quiet through it all, and if she’s upset as I reckon she should be seeing Kyle lying here lifeless at the side of the road, I can’t hear it in her voice.

“C’mon,” she says. “We gotta get you home.”

“I’m not going home.”

“Where then?”

“Your place. Just for a little while. I need to rest.”

I expect her to ask questions, and there are certainly plenty of them, but we both know my son’s body’s got to be loaded into her car, so we say nothing more until the job is done and we’re on our way back to town.

“What are you goin’ to do?” she asks me, her voice laced with concern.

My eyes are closed; exhaustion’s taking me away from all this to a cool dark place where there’s only me, no one else, no angels with red hair or devils with no eyes. Just me. But I have energy enough to satisfy her curiosity as Cadaver satisfied mine, even though the dark wings of sleep have wrapped themselves around me and are already spiriting me away.

“Kill Gracie.”

Chapter Eighteen

Brody closes his eyes. His jaw aches something terrible, and he suspects his nose is broken. His breath whistles through the coagulating blood. Still, all things considered he reckons he could be a lot worse off. He’s still free, after all. There aren’t any sirens sundering the air, no thundering cavalcade he could never outrun on foot. The maddening chorus of birdsong drills into his eardrums and he kicks at the high grass, roars at the source of the noise, but that only makes his head hurt more, so he shuts them out, massages his jaw, and keeps walking. He’s heading out of town, tired, and sore, and on foot, but sooner or later a goddamn car has to pass this way and give him a ride.

He wipes his sleeve across his nose, winces and grunts with pain.

“Goddamn sonofabitch.” The guy got him good, there’s no denying that. In his haste to be away from the whatever-the-hell-it-was that came crawling out of the Sheriff’s car radio, he hadn’t thought of the big black guy, hadn’t considered that there might still be enough strength left in him to get in his way. But there was, and he did, and the fist Brody ran into was like a brick wall.

Worse than being knocked out by a burned-up giant he hadn’t had the sense to look out for though, is the fact that they tricked him. The Sheriff should be dead and Brody three states away by now, but the Sheriff knew what he was doing when he turned on that stereo, and all Wintry had to do was step up to the plate. Now they’re gone, and though he knows where to find them, and vengeance demands he do that very thing, he’s letting it go. There isn’t time; he’s wasted enough of that on these hicks.

He needs a car, and fast, and it’s only when he stops looking over his shoulder at the quiet road a mile and a half later that he realizes he’s been looking in the wrong place. To his right, through the trees surrounding a narrow overgrown path, is a small quaint little cabin. Smoke drifts from the chimney. There’s some kind of a wooden figure standing on the rickety looking porch, and what might be a totem in the small overgrown yard.

Parked out front is a beat-up old Dodge.

Well I’ll be damned.

Brody smiles and steps off the road onto the path.

The cabin is painted gray with crimson shutters. Dreamcatchers and wind chimes dangle from the eaves, tinkling away like tin-eared men trying to play a tune. A six-foot cigar store Indian either presides over the porch, complete with headdress, war paint, and battle scars. He’s stationed right next to the small bungalow’s warped and scarred front door, sharp-boned face upraised, ocean blue eyes staring reverently upward. There’s a quiver of arrows on his back, a bow slung over one shoulder, and a curved wooden blade strapped to one muscular thigh.

Brody stoops to pick up a dusty rock, half-expecting to find a door key hidden underneath, but is disappointed. Nothing but a few earwigs and earthworms, and after a second, even those are gone. He sighs, but keeps the rock in his hand, nods at the chief respectfully as he mounts the creaky porch steps. Now there’s a guy who’d have taken no shit from cowboys, he thinks as he raps a knuckle on the door. Immediately there comes a shuffling sound from inside the house. “Who’s that?”

“Yeah, hi,” Brody says, in as cheerful a tone as he can summon out of his aching head. “My car broke down a ways down the road there. I was wondering if maybe you had some jumper cables or something.”

“I ain’t got nothin’ like that. Be on your way.”

“Well, how about a phone so I can call someone?”

A dry chuckle. “You know where you are, boy?”

Brody groans silently. This is all he needs. Of course the option to just jump the car is still available to him, but if it turns out there’s a real life Geronimo behind that door, he’d rather not end up with a couple of arrows in his back. Better to just make sure the guy’s incapacitated one way or another.

“I need a ride is all. Doesn’t seem to be much traffic out here this time of the day. Thought folks would be coming home from work at least.”

“There’s no work in Milestone, boy, least not the kind you’d understand.”

“That so? Well, if you could help me out—”

“I know who you are.”

Brody stops, sentence unfinished, and straightens. “That so?”

“Yep.”

“Well I don’t see how you’d know.”

“I heard.”

Brody puts his hands to the sides of his head, massages his temple. Jesus on a cornstalk. This is all he needs. Obviously the guy is watching him through a peephole or something, though Brody doesn’t see one, and has recognized him. Could be his mug shot is showing on the guy’s TV right at this moment, or on the front page of a newspaper spread across the kitchen table. But just as he’s about to concede defeat, the guy mumbles something that gives Brody pause. “What did you say?”

Clearer: “I said the wind told me about you.”

“The wind?” Brody rolls his eyes. Another loon. “And what did the wind say?”

“Said not to trust you. Said you murdered some folks, one of ’em a drifter who looked like Dean Martin, your girl’s favorite singer. Said you tried to kill the Sheriff when he was just tryin’ to get to his son. That sound about right?”

Brody grits his teeth. “Wow, that’s quite a wind. Better than the main evening news.”

“You best get out of here now. I have nothin’ you need.”

Brody glances over his shoulder. The Dodge is a rustbucket, but the tires aren’t flat and he can see through the dirty window a set of keys in the ignition. With a smile he turns back to the door. “I need your car.”

“Take it.”

Brody stares at the door for a moment. Then: “Take it? Just like that?”

“Sure. I ain’t got no use for it anymore.”

“Why’s that? You a cripple or something?”

“Nope. I just don’t leave the house.”

Brody smirks, already starting to feel better about things, even if his head still hurts like hell. “Town like this, can’t say I blame you.” Eager to be gone, he slaps a palm on the door. “Much obliged to you for the car. Can’t say as it’s ever likely you’re going to see it again.”

“Don’t expect to.”

“Right. You take care now.”

Grinning, Brody turns, but halts so abruptly on the top step he almost falls. “The fuck?”

From behind him, the old man’s panicked voice: “What is it? What do you see?”

Brody opens his mouth, but quickly closes it again, smiles uncertainly. “It’s nothing,” he says.

But it isn’t.

No birds are singing, and the breeze has died.

There’s no sound at all, even from the hundreds of deer that have somehow gathered in the old man’s yard and are now standing motionless, heads lowered slightly, their dark eyes fixed on the house.

On Brody.

“It’s nothing,” he says again. “Just a bunch of dumb old deer.”

“I’m afraid,” the old man whispers. “They’re a little more than that.”

It’s time to go. I’ve only slept a few hours, but it’ll do. Iris’s hand is cool against my bare chest, and though we’re both naked and in her bed, we’ve done nothing except lie together. I didn’t ask for anything more, and she didn’t offer, and that sits just fine with me. It’s not why I came here.

The breeze through the window has the candles snapping at shadows. In the kitchen a sink is dripping water with the sound of a clock ticking in an empty room.

I take a moment to breathe in the scent of her, of this woman I hardly know and likely never will, then I carefully remove her hand from my chest and set it down next to her. Despite my efforts to make as little noise as I can getting out of bed, I’m heavy enough to make the springs squeal and when I stand and look back at her, her eyes are open, and clear, as if she hasn’t been sleeping at all.

“Leavin’?”

I nod.

“What’s your hurry?”

“I have to get going. Have to ‘tie up some loose ends’ as they say in the cop shows.” I’m trying to sound casual, like the darkness locked inside me isn’t trying to eat its way out, but she’s not fooled. She props her head up with the palm of her hand, her elbow digging into the mattress.

“What kinda loose ends?”

I avoid answering by pretending my clothes are proving tough to locate, even though they’re laid out right here at my feet.

“Tom?”

It isn’t until I have my underwear and pants on that I answer her. She’s looking impatient, worried, ready to reach for something to threaten the information out of me.

“I’m turning over my badge tonight,” I say.

“Why?”

“Because it’s the way it’s supposed to go.”

“That sounds like a crock of shit.”

I smile at her and sit back down on the bed. “Does, doesn’t it?”

She scoots close, drapes her arms over my shoulders, rests her head against my back. “If you’re plannin’ some kind of heroic exit, that’s one thing, but if you’re figurin’ to walk out of here without tellin’ me why, you’ll be doin’ it without your balls.”

“Nice.”

This is a tough one, and I’m not sure how much I can say, how much I’m allowed to say, so I guess it’s best to just keep it simple and hope she understands. “I’m done with this town, Iris, and it’s more than done with me. I should’ve handed over the reins years ago to someone who might have done something more than stand around watching people die. Can’t do it anymore.”

“Then don’t, but that don’t mean you have to leave.”

“I’m afraid it does.”

Her grip tightens on my shoulders. “Then let me come with you.”

“I would if I could.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Because you wouldn’t much like where I’m going.” I bring my hand up to hers, squeeze it tight.

“What if I don’t let you leave? What if I keep you prisoner? I could do it you know.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

She pulls her hand free, withdraws her arms and sits up. “What’s going to happen?”

“Something good,” I tell her. “And something bad.”

She says nothing else, just watches as I get dressed. She doesn’t cry, won’t cry, but I can tell she wants to.

When I’m ready to go, I carefully pick my way through the candles until I’m at the door. There’s no mad rush from Iris, no sobbing farewell. She just sits there, knees drawn up, hand on her chin, studying me.

With my fingers on the door handle, I give one last look at her. “You know just because you can’t leave with me, doesn’t mean you can’t leave.”

“I know.”

“Big world out there. Could be a better place for you in it. Never know.”

“Never know,” she echoes, and scoots down under the sheets.

“Wish I’d had more time to get to know you.”

“You had plenty of time, Tom. We’ve lived a stone’s throw from each other for a long time.”

“True. Guess I was busy.”

“Guess you were. And blind.”

I can’t argue with that, so I don’t, but when I start to open the door, she starts talking again.

“I’ve never loved anyone, Tom, and I’m not goin’ to say I love you, because I don’t. But I know people, and I know you better than you think.”

“Yeah, seems everyone but me does.”

“Your wife loved you though. No doubt about that.”

“Hope so.”

“I saw it in her eyes every time she looked at me. ’Course, we weren’t friends or nothin’ but you can tell a lot by the way someone looks at you. She was wonderin’ if you’d ever spent time with me, or if you wanted to, if maybe when you were in bed you were thinkin’ about me, and every time I saw that look, I shook my head, and she’d smile just a little bit. The kind of smile someone gives you when they’ve accepted a whore’s wisdom but don’t want them to know it.”

Our eyes meet and something powerful passes between us, maybe it’s some of that same power she has that knocks lights out. Maybe it’s trying to quench my soul before I do more damage.

“You should go” I tell her. “Get the hell out of Milestone. Find some place where the people are still alive.”

“I’m still alive, Tom. And with all the things I got stuck in here,” she says, tapping a finger against her forehead, “it don’t matter where I go. They’ll follow. So I might as well stay right here. Same as it don’t matter where you’re headin’. You’ll still be the same man tryin’ to run away from his shadow in a place where the sun never stops shinin’.”

“Iris…”

“Now you best get on if you’re goin’.”

“Take care.”

“Take care yourself.”

She turns away from me, and I guess that’s my cue to leave, so I do.

Three steps from the bottom of the stairs, I hear her sobbing.

Cadaver dreams of two young boys, one blond, the other raven-haired, sitting in vibrant green grass, the sun warming their legs as they play with toy soldiers, which are scattered around them in the frenzied order unique to combat. The blond boy giggles as his plastic tank appears from nowhere and mows down his brother’s army. The raven-haired child swats him, hurt and frustration on his face.

This particular war is defused in an instant by the soft calming voice of the woman sitting in a lawn chair a few feet away, a magazine spread open, obscuring her face. “No fighting,” she says, “Or you can go right back in the house and help your father clean out the attic.”

The boys are quiet, sulking, but once the raven-haired child locates a soldier the tank missed in its calamitous charge, a victorious smile crosses his face as he guns down his brother’s ranks. They are caught unaware and fall accordingly. The blond boy shrieks, and calls in reinforcements. The battle is on.

The woman in the lawn chair sighs, but it is a ‘boys will be boys’ sigh, and not at all annoyed.

In this summer-lit yard, life is good.

Cadaver awakes, and he is smiling too.

He is sitting on a smooth flat limestone rock at the bottom of the hill, head bowed, and though his eyes are gone, the cool breeze invigorates him, reminds him of all he has lost and all he will soon gain.

Minutes pass. Night sounds carry on waves to his ears. He waits, ragged breaths whistling through the rent in his throat above the box that gives him his words.

It grows dark.

And then, ice crawls through his veins, chilling him from the inside out. As anticipated, there is pain, for he is aware that he cannot be released from his duties without being reminded of the suffering that has been his stock-in-trade. These are secondhand agonies, all of them hard earned, all of them real. He grunts. Something touches the back of his hand, then again. The breeze seems to be blowing through him now and he relishes the feel of it.

“Soon,” he says and the smile cracks his face. Teeth drop into his lap, tumble and hit the floor with a sound like pebbles. The flesh begins to slide. The box in his throat starts to rust, disintegrate.

“Soon,” he says, one last time, his hair shedding and tickling what remains of his face as it falls.

Flesh withers; organs shrivel. Bones begin to crumble.

Cadaver sighs.

In his mind, the woman in the lawn chair is peering at him above her magazine. He can tell by the wrinkles around her eyes that she is smiling—Boys will be boys—and when next the breeze blows, there is only an old raincoat full of dust for it to attend to.

Chapter Nineteen

“If you’re plannin’ on goin’, now’d be the time, boy.”

The animals have filled the yard now, necks straight, eyes glittering, but still they make no noise. It’s as if they’re waiting for something. The sight of them standing there motionless, ears pricked up, is unsettling, but Brody knows better than to be threatened by so docile an animal, no matter how many of them there are. Hell, for all he knows the old man’s got a vegetable patch out back and they’re here to raid it. The only threat they could possibly present is if they stampeded and rushed him, but even then the car’s much closer to him than they are.

“Move for Chrissakes,” hisses the old man.

“Because of a bunch of deer? Man, take it easy.” But as the words leave his mouth, the calm he has forced into them sounds utterly false.

“To you, maybe, but right now you’re blockin’ Red Cloud’s shot.”

“Shit.” Instinctively Brody ducks, arms covering his head, and swivels on a heel to see where the hidden shooter is. He scans the house, then the yard, and it is here his gaze halts. The blood drains from his face. Somehow, the deer are closer now, almost level with the Dodge, and one of them has mounted the hood like some unfunny parody of a hunter’s prize. It stares at him with black eyes, head cocked a little to the left, thick antlers like a bleached tree branch reaching for the stars.

Brody feels the air change, a sensation he is accustomed to only when he is presenting the threat. But to feel it now means there is a very real danger here, and that mystifies him, until he recounts the events of the past few hours and realizes that nothing should, or ever will, surprise him again.

This belief continues for a few moments more, until the deer on the hood of the car begins to speak. “Come out Blue Moon.” The voice is a croaking whisper much like Cadaver’s, but stronger, and its lips don’t move. Nevertheless, despite how insane it makes him suspect he might be after what he’s gone through, Brody has never been more sure of anything in his life.

The fucking deer is talking.

Behind him, there’s a sound like a stick swishing through air and then a thump and clatter as the deer on the Dodge tries to keep its balance, then crumples and rolls, hooves beating a tattoo against the metal. Blood smears the hood, and now the creature is making all-too-normal animal-in-pain sounds, which surprises Brody, who almost expected to hear it scream in a human voice. The deer hits the ground, still moving, and Brody can see there’s a long stick protruding from the side of its neck. An arrow.

“Stay down, boy.”

Brody does, but looks over his shoulder.

The formerly inanimate cigar store Indian pays him no mind as it thumbs another arrow into its bow and draws back the string.

Brody breathes disbelief, and pushes himself away until he collides painfully with the porch railing. “No way in Hell.”

The whispering has spread, pouring from the unopened mouths of the deer herd like a breeze through the canopies of leaves overhanging them. More sharp reports as hooves meet metal and Brody is forced to resign himself to the incredible reality of the situation: In the yard, there are talking deer. Pissed off talking deer, and all that’s keeping them at bay, for the moment at least, is a wooden Indian whose every move is accompanied by a creak as flakes of dead wood fall like dandruff from his shoulders.

“Jesus.”

“Just stay d—”

“Yeah, I heard for Chrissakes. What the hell is happening here?”

The Indian lets his arrow fly. It hits home; another deer stumbles and falls.

“The short version: Long time ago my father and his friend made a mistake that got a lot of their tribe killed,” Blue Moon tells him from behind the door. “They stole somethin’ precious from a rival tribe. A statue of a deer, made from obsidian and wood, supposed to contain the spirits of every animal the tribe had killed. When caught, they put a curse on Red Cloud. They turned him to wood. My father escaped his bonds and stole a horse. They never caught him. Days later, the rival tribe attacked my father’s people, massacrin’ them for the theft of a sacred statue.”

Brody’s eyes drift to the wooden Indian. Grim-faced, time-roughened joints creaking, the creature loads another arrow.

“My father spent the rest of his life runnin’ from his tribe in their various guises: coyote, hawk, cougar…deer. When he died, the curse was passed on to me. They’re punishin’ me for his crimes. And they’ll punish you if you get in their way.”

Brody looks over his shoulder. Incensed, the herd pours over the Dodge on a wave of frantic whispers. The sound of them now is deafening. He scrambles away from the railing, puts his back to the door, wishes he had his knife, or better yet, his gun. He has never felt so vulnerable, and in truth, afraid, as he is at this moment. Sweat trickles into his eyes; he blinks it away. But, Death by deer, he thinks, and splutters a laugh. No one will ever believe it. He elbows the door.” Let me in, man.”

“I can’t.”

“Then toss me out a weapon or something. Anything.”

“You don’t need one. In protectin’ me, Red Cloud will protect you too.”

Helpless to do anything but watch, Brody draws his knees up as the deer that have made it onto the Dodge leap toward the house only to be struck down in mid air by the arrows from the wooden Indian’s bow. Red Cloud’s feet haven’t moved from his small rectangular pedestal; only his arms look alive. They reload the bow, faster and faster, until they become a blur, and above them, the Indian’s painted eyes are narrowed, mouth down-turned in a grimace. The wooden points of the arrows cleave the air, thudding into the hides of the seemingly endless ranks. As they fall, the deer turn to clouds of dust, which in turn swirl upward as if caught in a vortex. And in those miniature twisters, there are screaming faces.

Time draws out, and Brody is desperately aware of every second that’s lost to him. Any moment now he expects to hear sirens, drowning out the screams of the dying deer. Should have kept walking. Nothing but bad luck in this goddamn town. Should have just kept on walking. He imagines the faces on the cops as they jump from their cruisers, pistols trained on him, ready to bring him down, only to find themselves watching a wooden Indian pegging a bunch of homicidal deer.

“Every day it’s the same,” Blue Moon says wistfully. “And will be until they force me to take my own life, or step outside to meet them, whichever happens first.”

“Then why not make a deal with the old man? The guy who makes the deals.”

“Because I have no interest in the kind of peace he has to offer.”

More arrows tear flying deer from the air, their bodies thumping down hard on the car, making it rock on its wheels, denting the hood, the roof, decorating the pale blue metal with dark blood. Brody watches, mesmerized, until the death of the animals begins to feel monotonous, a tiresome display of a hunter’s brawn. He’s even starting to feel a bit sorry for those poor bastards. He stands, brushes splinters and dirt from his already ruined suit. “I’m leavin’. I have to. Pissed away too much time already in this freakshow of a town.”

“Better wait, boy. Won’t be safe till they’re gone.”

Brody puts his hands on his hips, glances at Red Cloud, who ignores him. “Tell me something, Blue. If you’ve got your goombah here with his endless supply of arrows, why can’t you come out, at least as far as the porch? That tribe of yours don’t seem to be bothering me none. Not up here.”

To Brody, it’s a short forever before he gets an answer, and when it comes, it is in the form of a door easing open and not a voice. Brody peers at the widening crack between door and jamb. It is dark inside. Low to the ground, as if Blue Moon’s been sitting on the floor all this time, the old man’s hand emerges from around the door. In it is held an old-fashioned revolver, which he sets on the porch. Then the hand withdraws and the door is quickly shut.

Brody stands there, staring at the grooves in the door, at the memory of what he thinks he has just seen.

“Take it. It’s loaded.”

Brody nods, but doesn’t reply. Instead, he stoops, collects the gun and checks to see if the old man is pulling a fast one on him. It’s an old Colt, but it’s fully loaded and looks serviceable. “Why are you helping me if you know so much about what I’ve done?” he asks at last.

“Because I’m no judge, boy, and I’m certainly no better. I know there are always two roads, but the right one ain’t always necessarily the good one. I’ve traveled both, and I still can’t tell ’em apart.”

“All right then,” Brody says, feeling dazed as he slips the gun into his waistband and slowly descends the porch steps. Arrows cut the air over his shoulder, but he doesn’t flinch. Deer rain down on the Dodge, smack hard against the ground, kick and protest imminent death. The gun is cold against his belly, as cold as he imagines the old man’s hand was. They stole something precious from a rival tribe. A statue of a deer, made from obsidian and wood.

Obsidian and wood.

He wonders how many nights his sleep will be plagued by what he has seen in this town, how often he’ll be dragged out of his dreams by the wooden Indian, the tribe, and the old man’s hand. He stops short of the car and ducks low as a deer launches itself up over the hood, watches it jerk back at the behest of Red Cloud’s arrow and drop heavily. Blood speckles his cheek. Antlers scratch the bottom of the driver-side door. The dust devils spin away, elongated faces within twisting in torment, and then disappear. The passenger side door is facing him, so this is where he’s heading. He expects it to be locked; another trick, another inconvenience, but it isn’t and swings open with a labored groan. There are cobwebs on the steering wheel, beer cans and used condoms on the floor. A pine tree freshener spins lazily from the rearview mirror but the interior smells of rotten meat. He’s inside, hand on the keys when another deer, eyes wide in fury or panic, Brody can’t tell which, and doesn’t much care, rams the side of the car, its head colliding with the glass on the driver side, inches away from Brody. It cracks, but doesn’t shatter.

With shaking hands, he turns the keys. The engine whines, then catches and roars into life. He yanks back the gearshift. The grinding noise is not encouraging, but then the car bucks once and heaves backward, throwing up dirt that sprays across the porch, where an old wooden Indian is tirelessly defending an old man made of black glass.

He shakes his head, looks back to the path. The deer are crowded there, watching him, blocking his way.

“To hell with this,” Brody mumbles and jams his foot down on the accelerator.

Chapter Twenty

The pain begins at sundown.

I’m walking, not even a half a mile clear of Winter Street when my guts turn to liquid fire. A gasp and I’m doubled over; another, and I’m on my knees, my shoulder against the graffiti-riddled wall of the long-abandoned Brautigan’s Drugstore, my hand splayed on the concrete before me. My vision begins to blur, then it paints everything red, as if I’m wearing crimson shades, or there’s blood in my eyes.

Another wave of pain and then I realize the first few rounds were nothing. Nothing compared to the incredible torture that comes with the sensation of my bones narrowing, shifting, bending, poking at the skin in an attempt to reshape me. My muscles protest as they’re played like cello strings. My nerves sing in torment, jarring the thoughts from my head. It’s as if I’ve been bound in barbed wire and someone is tightening it, ever so slowly.

I fall forward, both hands flat on the ground. Dark blood leaks from my mouth. In my peripheral vision, I see my arms shrink, grow thin. My gut no longer strains against my belt. It’s a deflating balloon.

I throw up and can’t face the gruesome sight of what’s emerged.

Jesus Christ, I’m dying, is all I can think, because surely this is what death feels like.

My hair falls out; my vision fades.

My throat is burning, but a hand raised to massage it meets cold hard metal. My nails scritch against it, then they too fall out.

I scream, or at least try to, but the power of that anguished scream is somehow diminished, robbed of its power by the metal box in my throat, and so emerges as little more than a forced whisper.

I’m afraid, petrified, and shouldn’t be because I asked for this. This is the bargain. This is what Cadaver wanted, what I wanted, and now I’m getting it. He’s out; I’m in, let’s call the whole thing off! my thoughts chant cheerfully, and its almost enough to draw a smile from me, but the agony scrubs that notion away in record time.

I glance to my left as tears roll down my sallow cheeks, into the soaped-over plate glass window of Brautigan’s Drugstore.

Cadaver is a pale ghost, on his knees, sobbing.

I weep for us both.

Abruptly, the pain in my head that seems intent on cracking it open subsides, and I’m flooded by memories and knowledge not my own. It’s almost as bad as the pain. Such an alien feeling, it’s as if my brain has become a theater, open to players I’ve never met. I bring my hands up and clamp them to the sides of my skull in an effort to contain them. When I close my eyes, I see myself as a bird, soaring high above the town, cocking my head occasionally to listen to the pleas that drift in dreams through the roofs of sagging houses. Where I land, is up to me. There is no shortage of time, no quota on the amount of promises I can make, or lives I can alter. Everyone can have whatever they desire most, if they are willing to offer me something in return. It is then I know, as the bird swoops down toward the tavern on the hill that was once burned but is burned no more, that all of us have been, and will continue to be, slaves, not to God or the Devil, but to ourselves, to our innate need to make things right, to attain what our lives tell us we cannot have, and do not deserve. Cadaver—I—am a mechanic in the clockwork of man, but I am nothing without the cogs that make it run. But no…I am not Cadaver, not entirely. I am still here, still stumbling around inside. My old self claws at the walls, looking for the exit, just like always.

At last I go numb, pinprick specks of light making my sagging skin glow from the inside, and when finally I trust my legs to lift me, I stand, and let myself lean against the drugstore window.

This is what I wanted, I have to remind myself from the depths of this alien skin. This is what had to happen. It was the only way. Every time I blink, I’m somewhere else. Flying, soaring, spying at lovers who have plans to kill each other, gazing into the eyes of elderly folk who have all but given up but would jump at the chance to escape, detecting the scent of long buried bodies in long forgotten plots, reading the minds of the lovelorn, the desperate, the lost. Every house in Milestone is a vault of secrets, but it didn’t take for this change for me to know that.

Now behind my closed eyes I’m standing atop a rotten post by a deserted parking lot, peering at the reflection of a raven, and beyond that, at the willowy woman in the gray dress who’s praying for my death as she scrubs another man’s blood from the floor.

He awakes in a bathtub, raises his head, and winces in pain. He has been sleeping. This much he knows, but it is all that he knows. His neck hurts from the awkward way he’s been lying. Cold water from the showerhead drip-drip-drips down the back of his neck, making him shiver. His joints ache; there’s a taste in his mouth that repulses him, makes him want to gag. It’s as if he’s been sucking on road kill. With no little effort, he manages to sit up, tries to look around and yelps as a bolt of pain shoots from the back of his head down to the base of his spine. “Jesus…” he moans, and reaches a hand back to try and negotiate his comfort with whatever muscle is holding it hostage. As he does so, he jerks his neck a little, the hand bracing the tendons and muscles there should they decide to unravel, and notices the faded flowers on the wall. Tulips, he thinks, and remembers the crude joke about them that he composed but never remembered to share with Iris. It doesn’t seem funny now, only cruel. He starts to shake his head and flinches as once again pain reminds him he has not yet been cleared for such a move. He moves his hand to his throat, gingerly probes the flesh there. It’s raw, tender. It hurts, and the feel of it combined with his discomfort starts to lead him ever so slowly back to the memory of what happened to him.

“I was—” He’s not sure where the rest of the thought goes, or what it’s supposed to make him see, but now his nostrils are filled with the scent of oil. The creaking of a strained rope resonates in his head and his eyes widen. “I was—”

“Dead.”

He turns too quickly and cries out as the muscles contract protectively around a not yet healed break.

“You were dead,” Iris says, from the doorway. “And now you ain’t.”

Her voice is cold, which seems to suit the situation, though he has never heard it from her before.

“What happened?”

“You daddy saved you. Now get up and get yourself together.”

“I can’t…I’m—”

“The only law we have around here now.” She tosses something at him. It glances off the side of the tub and tumbles into his lap. He recognizes the chipped and grimy gold star as his father’s. “And you got work to do.”

The sun is down.

On a post in the parking lot at Eddie’s, opposite one of the formerly broken windows, stands a raven. He caws and bobs his head at my approach, but I don’t know whether the greeting or warning is meant for me, its own reflection in the smoked glass, or if the bird is a familiar of the woman inside. It makes little difference, I suppose.

I open the door and step inside.

The smell of soot and smoke rushes to greet me like the extension of a ghost that can’t wait for me to join it. The room looks smaller than it ever has before.

Gracie is on her knees, both hands clamped around a sponge soaked rusty brown by the blood that has gathered in a wide ragged circle beneath a toppled stool.

“Vess,” I say, and she looks up. Her face is wan, and sweaty, her eyes narrowed as she tries to focus on my shadowy form. Cadaver, and people like him, like me, I have found, are not friends of the light.

“Come to gloat?” she asks, returning to her labors.

I let the door swing shut behind me. “There’d be little sense in that.” I suppress a shudder. It horrifies me every time I speak to hear that grated hollow whisper, though I am not dependant on that ugly little microphone for volume. Eventually, perhaps, but not yet. “It would be as pointless as cleaning up the blood of a man to hide it from me when I’m standing right in front of you.” The voice is my own, of that I am sure, but the throat through which it has to pass certainly is not.

Gracie’s scrubbing slows, her hair obscuring her face. I am struck by the desire to brush it out of her face, a lingering impulse from not-so-better times, but that brief surge of need is enough to confirm what I already know. I am still here. I am still me. Somewhere.

At length, she ceases her cleaning altogether and raises her face, tilts her head a little. Sniffs the air. “How did this happen? What did you do?”

“Fate is a fickle thing,” I tell her. “Which is why we are told to never put our faith in it, never to rely or depend on the chips falling where we want them to. It doesn’t work that way, and only a very desperate woman would try it.”

She smiles, sits back on her haunches, brushes the damp hair from her brow. Her eyes are like beetles nestling in bleached wood. “So you know then?”

“I didn’t, until the change. Until I was allowed to know.”

“That old bastard,” she sneers suddenly, rising to her feet. “He cheated me.”

“You’re hardly in a position to cry foul.” I step further into the room. The light from the hurricane lamp on the bar flutters. Shadows writhe.

“Fuck you.”

“Was a time,” I start to say and grin.

She stares at me for a long moment, her breasts rising and falling rapidly beneath her sweat and bloodstained dress, and slowly, slowly, a smile begins to crawl across her face. “But you’re him now, aren’t you?” she says. “You’re not just a pig-fucking Sheriff stuck in a rotten vessel. You’re him, which means you can do for me what he wouldn’t. What he was supposed to do.”

“Tell me why I should do anything for you.”

“Why else are you here? You know who I am and you want rid of me. I understand that, and I even promise not to hold it against you. We can consider the old contract null and void and start anew, what do you say? You give me what I want, and I’ll give you what you want.” She lets the fingers on one hand trail over her breast. An unconvincing look of lasciviousness crosses her face. “What do you say? I remember how you used to look at me, how you studied me.”

“Does life mean that little to you?” I ask her, ignoring the proposition. “That you’d sell so much of it for your own gain?”

“Spare me.” Contempt overwhelms her face. “Why should I be condemned to stay here because of a mistake, because of one small error I made tryin’ to escape that rapin’ bastard? Should I have shut my mouth and done nothin’?”

“You killed Gracie. You killed an innocent woman. Sacrificed her to get out.”

“I did her a favor.” The mention of her crime is apparently sufficient motive for her to drop the act, and so she does, even as the words continue to come. Her hair ripples, shortens, darkens. “She was miserable, just as much Eddie’s prisoner as I was. She hated me, and I her. She’d never have trusted me if I told her I’d take her from here, and she’d have been right.” Her skin turns stark white, cheekbones pressing against the skin as it tightens to suit the rounder shape of her face. “I would have taken her home to Toyko and sold her to the men who crave such bargains. But it never came to that. There was never much chance to plan anything.” Her accent has changed, become clipped, sharper, the lips forming them leaner. “Eddie made his own mistakes, and often. One of them was to accompany me home to meet my family.” She smiles proudly. “My family did not take to him. They put on quite a show for my American husband, and when he came home, he was quite mad.” Though she’s still wearing that drab gray dress, the body inside it has changed. It’s thinner, smaller, the breasts mere nubs beneath the material, the arms stick-like.

“Gracie—you—said you didn’t come home with him.”

“Not at first, but neither my family nor I were content to take his mind. They wanted to see him die through my eyes. So a week later, I came back, only something had changed in him, something we hadn’t foreseen. Whatever magic we’d done to his mind, it negated my magic. I couldn’t hurt him, couldn’t influence him. I was powerless. He was a raging beast, and he beat and raped me before I could think of a way to stop him. And then he tried to kill me.” Lian Su’s smile fades. She slowly turns her head to face the window, but her eyes are still on me. “In the moment of death, I left my body, and took the daughter’s, trapping her in mine. Too late I realized what I had done. The mark I had carved was still on the little bitch’s chest, and it was a hex I could not undo from the inside.”

“And here you are.”

“And here I am.”

“While Gracie rots in a freezer on the bank of the Milestone River.”

Her smile returns. “She liked the river. And her father took her life. Not me.”

“He thought he was killing you.”

“I’m hardly to blame for his short-sightedness.”

“And what about your family? Why not summon them?”

“Because of what he did to me. His violation was a lot more severe than even he—had he still possessed the faculties required to compose such a thought—even knew. He made me a victim, an unclean one, prone to vengeance of a basic kind: Human violence without magic, without influence. This is forbidden. I am either a majo, or a human, and whichever I choose is the way I must be.” Her face wrinkles in disgust. “And I have been forced to play as one of you for long enough.”

I approach her, taking my time. “And what if you get what you want. What then?”

“I will leave.”

“And go where? It doesn’t sound as if you’d be welcome at home.”

“Home is a small place. I am not tethered to it. I have survived on my own since I was fourteen. I can do so again.”

I walk past her and take a seat at the bar. She follows, a smile on her face that tells me she knows she’s going to get exactly what she wants. “One for the road?”

I nod silently.

“You shouldn’t look so glum, Sheriff. Is it all right to call you that now that you’re…in costume?”

Another nod, but I’m barely listening. What I’m doing as she pours me a tall glass of whiskey, is fingering through someone else’s memories, namely my predecessor’s seemingly limitless information about everyone in Milestone. It doesn’t take me long to summon up Lian Su’s callous visage, and in the time it takes her to put the cap back on the bottle after pouring her own drink, I know she’s been lying to me again.

“It’s a game,” I tell her, my fingers moving toward the glass. Old habits die hard, I guess.

I expect her to deny it, though at this stage of our little tête à tête, it would be silly. But she doesn’t. Instead she takes a long drink, sets her glass down on the bar and raises her hands. “Aren’t you the clever one?”

I shake my head. “You came here for the specific purpose of ruining this town. Why?”

“Like you said. It was, and still is, a game. When you’ve had the kind of life I’ve had, you get bored easily. Trust me. When Eddie came to my land, his talk of this place intrigued me. I had to see it. Had to smell and feel it, and ultimately…”

“Destroy it. And what was Cadaver?”

“A tool, but a powerful one, and I am stuck here, I didn’t lie about that. I needed him to set me free. Now I need you to do it.”

“And if I don’t?”

“If you don’t, I’ll break your son’s neck again.” She shrugs. “Simple as that.”

Of course I’m going to set her free, even without knowing what she’ll do once she’s no longer tied to this place. Walk outside and raze the town? Take off on her broomstick? It’s anyone’s guess.

“So tell me,” she says, casually, as if we’re discussing shoes. “What would you like for your part of the bargain?”

“I want you to leave Milestone.”

“I was planning to.”

“Well you’ll forgive me for not buying that. This way, you won’t get what you want unless I get what I want, and what I want is to be rid of you.”

She shrugs. “Plenty of other towns. Plenty of livelier places. You have nothing to worry about.”

“Good.”

“Funny though.”

I wait for her continue.

She sighs dramatically. “I would have thought as this town’s sworn protector you’d have asked to have your dead friends brought back and to have all the misfortune undone. Above all, I expected you to ask for escape yourself.”

I raise my glass in a toast and offer her a sardonic grin. “I have escaped.”

Chapter Twenty One

“Why aren’t you saying anything?”

Iris is looking out the passenger side window, at the silent houses hurrying past, the deserted streets whizzing by. There should be children playing here, their laughter echoing around the neighborhood. There should be adults standing in the doorways or sitting on the stoops, watching with dreamy eyes the vagaries of a youth they once knew and would kill to know again. There should be smoke from the chimneys, lights in the windows, but there are only houses, and the breeze, and a bruised horizon to suggest the sun has ever visited this town. “There’s nothin’ to say,” she tells Kyle.

“Well…” Kyle, still stiff-necked, but no longer in agony, frowns, struggling to understand how he is here, and why Iris won’t talk to him.

“Just drive, ok? We can talk later.”

He doesn’t respond, knows she doesn’t want him to, and that confuses him. He has remembered his meeting with Cadaver, recalls how the confidence he brought with him, its weight similar to the gun in his pocket, fled once he was given the chance to express it before someone who could make it so. Hate persisted, but his determination evaporated as he finally realized the power he held in his hands, the magnitude of what he was planning to do, what he could do. In the end, uncertainty stopped him. As Cadaver stood patiently before him, a figure made of dust and shadow, he could not determine whether he was condemning his father to death just so he could get out of Milestone, or because he really believed the old man deserved to die. And that doubt was enough to drain his resolve. Assaulted by memories of life before the hate, he wept and fell to his knees. Cadaver hadn’t seem at all surprised, leading Kyle to wonder if he had anything to do with the sudden sequence of sentimental flashbacks. In the end, he hadn’t known, but was left alone in the room to mull over the possibilities. He could still sell his father out and get away from Milestone. It wasn’t too late, but even as he told himself that, he knew that it was. Once in a man’s life is enough to consider betraying his own blood. He could try leaving on his own, a thought that filled him with such inexplicable dread, he quickly dismissed it, and the rational explanation it demanded as to why this was so. The third option was to stay, and die here, and it was as he was imagining this, maybe five or six more decades in a town without life or color, that the fourth and final option began to make itself known.

He could stay and die here now, ending the torment and the confusion, ending a life that seemed frozen in an unhappy moment that might last forever. And it would let his father know that they had both failed each other.

“Faster,” Iris tells him, interrupting his thoughts at the perfect time. Any further and they might have claimed him, left him the same gibbering wreck he was when Cadaver impassively handed him the length of rope.

“I’m going as fast as I can. And what the hell is wrong with you anyway?”

“You’re what’s wrong with me.”

“Why?” Because I’m a dead man walking, he almost answers for her, to fill the silence where her own response should be. But he swallows his words and concentrates on the road, the lights spearing through the dark. Eddie’s, she told him, and that was enough. Without knowing how, and too afraid to attribute it to some sense picked up during his brief walking tour of death, he knows they’re supposed to head to Eddie’s, and that he will find his father there.

That scares him.

Everyone gets to die. Few get to die and have to answer for it later, at least not to the living.

A twinge of dull pain across his throat makes him lift a hand from the steering wheel. He has already checked for marks and there are none, but the skin there feels stretched and smooth, like a healed burn. He should be dead; he isn’t, but something inside him hasn’t returned with him. There’s a cold empty space where his hate should be, and its absence has left him confused, without identity, as if in dying, he lost the only part of him that knew how to survive, the engine that kept him running.

They pass beneath the dark black rectangle of a set of broken traffic lights, swinging in the strengthening breeze. Beyond it, the street is deathly quiet, a deserted movie set. Vacant, lifeless.

Something dashes out in front of the car. With a hoarse cry of surprise, Kyle jams on the brakes and the car screeches to a halt, smoke from the tires rushing ahead of them, becoming fleeing ghosts in the headlights. But he isn’t looking at those ghosts, he’s looking at the deer that’s standing there, staring in at him, a glimmer in its oily eye.

“Fucking thing,” he says, and takes a breath that scratches at his throat. “I didn’t even…” He trails off with a shake of his head.

“Look,” Iris says, nodding pointedly.

The deer hasn’t moved, but beyond it, Kyle sees that it isn’t alone. “Jesus.” There must be a hundred of them, or more, all of them racing in from the road out of town, stumbling and leaping over each other in their haste. It’s an incongruous scene. Deer are not often seen in town unless they’re dead, their legs sticking out of the back of some hunter’s flatbed. “Looks like they’re running from something.”

“Or toward somethin’,” Iris says.

Brody drives, the night like a dark bubble around the car. He’s hunched over the wheel, sweating and waiting, just waiting for something to jump out in front of him, maybe a vulture made of razorblades or a clown made of fog, or some other trick the town keeps stashed up its sleeve to torment those desperate to escape it. The car makes clunking noises beneath his feet and there’s a barely visible stream of smoke coming from something under the hood, but that’s okay, that’s all right, he’s still moving and that’s what counts. A hawk feather suspended from the mirror by a black leather thong flutters toward him, then away, trying to distract him, trying to coax his eyes from the road so he’ll crash, maybe end up sinking in a quagmire where the sand sings as it takes you down. This godforsaken place has pushed him about as far as he can go. It’s taken his woman and run him through the grinder, and all he wants now is to be gone. Prayers tinged with reluctant promises of reform suggest themselves as a viable way to kill the time until he hits the edge of town, but he’s not quite ready for that yet. Him and the Almighty haven’t exactly been on speaking terms over the past four years or so, and there’s a good reason for that. Brody doesn’t like the uncaring sonofabitch, not after losing so many people he loved, and figures if God has any sense, he’ll feel the same.

Black tangled trees race past the car in a blur.

Brody blinks sweat from his eyes, wipes a sleeve down his chin where something has tickled him. The interior of the car feels awful small and getting smaller, and a glimpse of his reflection, lit only by the ghoulish green glow from the dash, forces him to keep his eyes on the windshield.

And then.,.there, up ahead, a sign, a big white sign with black letters, and Brody eases his foot off the gas. Hope tenses his muscles. The placard is the only pale sight in a night thick with dark, and as he lets the car coast up to it and stop, a smile splits his face. It reads:

Underneath, in a childish scrawl, someone has added: IN HELL.

“Amen,” Brody says, and closes his eyes, just for a moment, to thank the only thing he truly does believe in: Luck.

It’s only when the passenger side door opens with that awful grating shriek and a horribly familiar face pokes in to grin at him that he realizes, not for the first time in his uneven life, that belief is a misguided one.

“No,” he moans and begins to hammer his fists on the steering wheel in frustration. “This isn’t happening. Goddamn it all, this isn’t happening!”

The dashboard light makes his passenger’s grin a green one as he slides into his seat. A foul smell rolls in with him. “Aw, c’mon now. Don’t you go getting yourself all worked up, friend,” Dean Martin tells him, eyes wild above sallow skin. “There’s nothing wrong here the right number can’t fix.”

“It’s done,” I tell her.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

She looks doubtful. “Nothing feels different.”

“It isn’t supposed to. It’s still the same jail cell. You won’t see the difference until you try to step outside.”

She stares hard at me. “If you’ve tricked me…”

“Then I’ll be stuck with you, which wouldn’t make much sense, now would it?”

“Oh you’ll be stuck with a lot more than that, Sheriff.” The hardness doesn’t leave her eyes, which stay fixed on mine, as she steps back, slips the straps of her dress down over her narrow shoulders, and lets the drab gray dress fall soundlessly to the floor. Both of us look down. The scar, the angry welts that have kept her here, are gone, and she runs her fingers over the unmarked area, a satisfied smile on her face.

“I know what you thought,” she says. “When you saw me do this earlier. When you saw the mark. You had to struggle not to be turned on. You wanted me.”

“Seems to me,” I reply, “That it’s very important to you to believe that. Well, believe what you like as long as you’re going.”

She looks up, feigns hurt. “Is that any way to talk to a lady?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been that good at it.”

Her fingers glide over her dark erect nipples. “That’s too bad. You have no idea what I could—”

“Get going.” I have to clasp my hands on the counter to hide their shaking from her. “My part of the bargain is fulfilled. Time to fulfill yours.”

“You’re no fun at all, Sheriff. It’s no wonder everyone hated you.”

That’s a jab that hurts, and hurts deep, but I do my damndest to make sure she doesn’t see it.

“Such a waste. But I guess you’re wearing the only costume now that suits you, and that’s really all it comes down to, wouldn’t you agree?” She gives me a bow, and spits on the dress lying at her feet. “But it will get old,” she remarks, with a wink, and slowly makes her way around the bar, moves up close to me. There’s a peculiar smell from her, not entirely unpleasant, but strange and offensive all the same. Her pale hand alights on my arm. I repress a shudder. There is no appeal here; her nakedness does nothing but repulse me, and even if it didn’t, all I can think of is all she’s done, all she’s made come to pass in this town, even as I was bumbling around pretending I knew how to protect it.

Lian’s right breast brushes against my sleeve. Her fingers find my hair. “I should really kill you,” she says in a low voice. “What would what’s left of the town say if they heard I’d been hiding here all these years and didn’t go out with a bang?”

If that’s what she does, and assuming I can be killed, I’d consider it a mighty friendly gesture on her part, but of course, she knows that, and it’s not in her nature to do anyone any favors, which is why I’m certain she has no intention of leaving Milestone. I’m willing to bet those few copper pennies in my pocket that as soon as she steps outside and gets all the confirmation she needs that she’s well and truly free, she’ll raze this town and everything in it. Then maybe I’ll die, but for now, all I’m hearing is big talk from a small lady.

“But we’re friends,” she adds, perhaps because she’s had her fingers in my mind, and can taste the doubt on them. “And a friend wouldn’t do such a thing.”

I choose to take that as fear that whatever she thinks I’ve done for her will be cancelled by my death. Whatever she has in store for me, it won’t happen until she’s sure she’s off the hook. Makes me glad I took precautions.

“For a woman eager to be out of here, you’re sure taking your sweet time about it.” I draw the bottle toward me, fill up my glass and down it quickly. There’s not going to be time for another refill so I guess it’s best to get one while the going’s good. Too bad I don’t feel a damn thing. Might as well be drinking water.

“Then I guess this is sayonara,” she says, with another small bow. This time her eyes don’t leave mine, and her smile is decidedly unpleasant. She leans close; I try not to flinch. Her lips are like slugs against my cheek, her hair like catgut on my skin. When she draws back, her pupils have filled her eyes, making them look full to bursting with black ink. She moves away, toward the door, the dim light not dim enough to hide the black and blue shapes that are swimming beneath the milky pond of her skin. On the threshold, she hesitates. I can’t see her face; her back is to me, and I find myself wondering what might be running through her mind at this moment. Whether to kill me now, or later? Whether or not to trust the promise of an undead salesman? Whatever it is, it passes, and takes the tension from her shoulders with it.

Her hand finds the door, massages the wood grain as if it’s become a lover’s skin, then slides lower, lower, toward the knob, circling it playfully, letting her fingertips brush against the cold brass. A nail clinks against the metal. She’s toying with it, teasing it, as if enough foreplay could draw a reaction from a hunk of old wood. Her sigh too, comes from the mouth of a woman in the throes of passion and a ripple passes through her, but the satisfied chuckle that follows is not at all feminine, and even less human.

She grabs the knob. Giggles with delight.

“See you soon,” she says over her shoulder, as thorns begin to poke forth from her skin.

Then the creature that is Lian Su opens the door to the night.

Chapter Twenty Two

Kyle kills the engine at the bottom of the hill. He is quiet as Iris brusquely pins the Sheriff’s badge on his breast. Wearing it doesn’t feel right, and that’s to be expected. But Iris’s frosty attitude doesn’t feel right either, and he figures maybe he’ll get a chance to quiz her about that later. Right now, there isn’t time, or the breath required to force those questions out, because what he sees before him reminds him of a painting he once saw in an art magazine at the dentist’s office in Saddleback: A bunch of shadowy things flowing up a mountain toward a cabin with a single light shining in the window. He remembers wondering who in their right mind would hang something like that in their home, or even in a museum. It gave him the creeps just like the sight of it happening now in real life makes his heart slow and the hair rise to attention all over his body. But while it was too tough to make out what that dark mass in the painting was, he can see all too clearly what’s racing toward Eddie’s.

It’s the deer, a whole herd of them, the same ones he almost plowed into back at the intersection. But that’s not all that’s robbed the breath from him. He raises a finger, presses it to the windshield glass. “Isn’t that—?”

From the corner of his eye, he sees Iris nod.

Blue Moon Running Bear, the obsidian man, running like the hounds of Hell are snapping at his heels. Three feet behind him, there’s someone else, someone who doesn’t seem to be moving quite as fast and yet never falls behind. His arms are flapping wildly, at least that’s how it seems to Kyle, until he realizes there are pockets appearing in the herd as they scramble to get to him. Red Cloud.

“What the hell?”

“Here,” Iris says, drawing his attention away from the windshield. He looks down and sees she’s put a gun in his hand, still warm from wherever she’s kept it hidden. “You’ll need this.”

He shakes his head, not to deny that he thinks she’s right, but because right now, as he looks back out to the chaos on the hill, he can’t figure out how a gun, or anything else, is going to give him an advantage over what appears to be a thousand angry deer.

“Go.” Iris pokes him in the shoulder.

“Go where? What am I supposed to do?”

“You’re the Sheriff now. Go help the people who need one.”

He looks at her for a long moment, at how her eyes still manage to sparkle in the gloom, and he wishes just once, that he could read her mind and see what it is he’s done wrong, see how to fix it, because it occurs to him that hate, in leaving him, has opened his eyes to a lot of things he has let go to waste, a lot of things he’s squandered, and Iris is one of them. He’s known her for most of his life, and doesn’t know her at all.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

“Me too,” she tells him, only her words don’t sound like an apology. “Get movin’. And keep your eyes open up there.”

Lian Su screams and every one of those glasses behind the counter explodes. I don’t quite flinch, don’t quite duck, but I make damn well sure my head is turned the other way when that blizzard of shards comes toward me. And as the glass needles my back, I see what’s become of the woman in the open doorway. Down on her knees, Lian Su is no longer a woman, but a slideshow. There are so many shapes and colors and different forms slouching back into the bar, all of them pushing against her skin in an effort to escape, it’s hard to focus on any single one of them without it making my head hurt. Her face is a misshapen blob, mapped with dark veins, her hair more like snakes that rage around her skull as branch-like arms claw at the floor, dragging a body that no longer has the strength to carry it back to safety.

Her mouth, little more than a dark hole leaking worm-like things onto the floor, opens wide, and from that ancient and rotten gullet fly words in a language I don’t understand. The force behind them though, makes it clear they are not compliments.

I back away from the bar.

Back on this side of the threshold, Lian Su looks a little more human. The shape of her has settled, even if the activity beneath her skin hasn’t. There are still all manner of things pulsating and pushing at her from the inside out, making her seem like a rubber glove filled with cockroaches.

The head she raises to regard me is pitted with dark spots, like a negative image of chicken pox. Dark stuff runs from every hole in it. She convulses, grunts with pain, and I feel something inside me respond in sympathy. “Youuuuuu,” she says, grabbing another hand full of floor and pulling. “Welsshhhhhhed.”

That’s not exactly true. After all, isn’t death an escape in itself? And it’s not as if she didn’t provide me with the means to make this happen. Back here, after the fire, while still in her Gracie costume, she told me something she didn’t have to share, and I didn’t think I’d ever need to know: First time I tried stepping over the threshold of this place, it made me sterile and ejected the baby that was busy growin’ in my belly, and then: I put it down to coincidence and tried again. That one gave me such a pain it dropped me to the floor and left me there for two days, paralyzed and bleedin’ from every hole in my body. So I gave up, figurin’ if I tried a third time, it might be the last. She had no reason to tell me all of that, but she did, and I used it.

This will be her third try.

“I’m giving you what you wanted,” I explain, moving to the center of the room.

She gurgles something I can’t understand, and hauls herself closer until she’s lying about two feet from my shoes. If she stretched out her arm, she could touch me.

I trust her injuries to keep her prostrate for a moment and raise my head.

The door to the tavern is wide open. Beyond, I can hear rumbling as Blue Moon’s tribe try to run him down, the thwick-thwick-thwick sound as Red Cloud’s arrows take them out. They’re getting closer.

Kyle’s feet pump the crumbling earth as he races alongside the deer. They move like maddened things, their hooves barely scraping the earth, but much to his relief, they pay him no mind. It’s the two Indians they’re after, though Kyle can’t begin to fathom what they could possibly have done to invoke the rage of a dumb bunch of animals. Then again, neither man is made of flesh and bone, so trying to gauge the severity of their transgressions seems a bit ridiculous. As he runs, gun heavy in his hand, heart heavy in his chest, he realizes he’s glad to be alive. There was nothing in death but a vast empty space, now a small dark pocket in his memory, and despite the confusion that clings to him like a shroud, he’s here, and running, tasting life with a sense of purpose. He doesn’t know how long that will last, or if it will at all, but reminds himself that tonight, if nothing else happens in that tavern up ahead (which seems unlikely), he will swallow his bitterness and thank his father, who will no doubt shrug it off with embarrassment. The guy could win the lottery and he’d shrug like he knew it was coming.

A woman’s scream drifts down the hill and Kyle falters. Stops dead. He waits, listening for it to come again, and despite the thunderous passage of the deer only a few feet away, does not feel compelled to move.

Up ahead, Red Cloud turns and hurries, his stiff-legged gait carrying him into the tavern.

There is no sign of Blue Moon Running Bear, which suggests to Kyle that he has already made it inside. Then again, the man has been sculpted from the night itself and his eyes are stars, so it could be he’s up there somewhere and hidden within the folds of darkness.

Kyle stands alone, the grass damp with dew, crickets sawing their songs around him, birds making unenthusiastic attempts at nightsongs for an unappreciative audience. Some of the deer, heads lowered, antlers like daggers of bone aimed at the wood, assault the door of the tavern. The rest spread out around the long narrow building, encircling it, trapping the men inside. Still Kyle waits. He knows Iris has sent him here to help his father, to repay the personal debt they’ve established between them, and that time is of the essence, but he finds himself unable and unwilling to move. He waits, tells himself that despite the urgency of the situation and the obvious need for his help, he will continue to stand here until he hears the scream again and is proved wrong in thinking it came from his long dead mother.

When Dean gets done crooning some song Brody’s never heard, he flashes that famous smile, then, with a deft move like a magician shucking back his sleeve to demonstrate there’s nothing concealed inside it, his hand flashes out and he breaks one of Brody’s fingers.

Brody cries out with pain and doubles over, hitting his head hard on the steering wheel. Tears flow as he cradles the wounded digit. “Jesus, man. What the fuck?”

Dean sits back, admiring the night beyond the windshield. “The problem wasn’t so much you killing that guy pretending to be me, sonny. Problem was when you whacked him, you took away another reason for folks to remember me.”

His face contorted with pain, damp forehead pressed against the wheel, Brody tells him, “He was trying to rob me, for Chrissakes. Guy had a knife to my throat.”

Dean nods his understanding and spreads his hands. “Hey, he was a punk. I know that, but it still upset me. After all, no one wants to think about some dumb old dead crooner, now do they?” He purses his lips, then continues. “Oh sure, the old farts play us on their radios, but they don’t think about me or Frankie, or any of the old boys. Not any more, even though it don’t cost ’em a dime. Not one dime, friend. They just keep us locked away with memories of the first time they got laid.” He narrows his eyes at Brody, as if he’s worried that it’s too complicated for the kid to understand. “The proud moments, y’know? Life’s moments. But it don’t matter what the music playing in the background was. Oh no. That gets forgotten. We get forgotten.” He sighs, looks back out at the road. “Then you have the crazies, the guys who got hit on the head one too many times in the ring, or came back with busted heads from one war or another, and just because I was singing on the radio while they waited to get their brains put back in, they decide I’m God. They decide they’re going to be me, and damned if they don’t walk around like little mirror images, singing and dancing and reminding people of the good ’ol days. Highballs in one hand; smoke in the other. Reminding people of Dino.” He rubs his hands together in delight and grins. “So here you have some goddamn yuppie couple who are eating cavier, sipping champagne in the park while Tommy wonders how many deadbolts there are on the woman’s underwear and she’s wondering when’s he gonna stop wondering how many deadbolts there are on her underwear because she’s not wearing any, when up the street comes waltzing the ghost of Dino, looking like me right down to the smile and the sparkling eyes, right down to the snazzy shoes. Only he smells like dog shit and old pizza, but hell, the job’s already been done, because the girl sees him and starts remembering, and she tells the guy about how she’s free next Sunday and maybe he’d like to come over and watch a movie, and its one she remembers seeing as a kid, something about some lecherous but handsome lush, and it sounds like a prime opportunity for Tommy to bang the broad, so he agrees. Cut to Sunday, my friend, and both of those jerks are squatting by the TV watching me do my thing, and they’re enjoying it. And I’m getting off on it.

“That, kid, is who you knocked off.”

“I didn’t know.”

Dino lights a cigarette. “Why’d you kill him?”

“I told you.”

“Sure. Sure you did. Because he was going to rob you right?”

“Right.”

“Well ain’t that something. You took the guy’s life because he stole from you.” He slaps his knee, tipping ash onto the floor. “Just like you stole from me by killing him and robbing me of the limelight, right?” He laughs loudly. “Life can be a hell of a thing sometimes, can’t it?”

“I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t.”

Dean blows out a plume of blue smoke. It flows across the windshield and up Brody’s nose. He coughs before he can stop it, looks fearfully at his passenger, then allows himself a sigh when it appears his involuntary protest has gone unnoticed.

“That was some pretty broad you had too.”

With no small effort, Brody raises his head. “Yeah, she was.”

“Too bad about the drugs.”

“Yeah.”

“You know her long?”

“Maybe a year.”

“Know who she was?”

Brody feels a tightening across his chest. The casual way the man is asking these questions, the way he’s not looking at him, makes him fear that Carla might have been someone a lot more important, at least to the ghost of Dean Martin, than he ever suspected. She certainly played the guy’s music enough to drive him crazy, so maybe…

“Wanted to be a ballerina,” Dean tells him, a wistful smile on his faces. “Like any little girl. Grew up, wanted to be a lawyer because she got hooked on Matlock. Got older still and wanted to be a model, even spent some time in L.A. That’s where she discovered the shit she kept putting in her veins. Came back, cleaned up, got herself enrolled in a nice community college thing, studied to be a medic. Dated a guy who beat the shit out of her at every available opportunity, so she ended up getting involuntary hands-on training with the medics. She left him and the college, hitchhiked her way to Texas, considered getting into music. First guy she approached told her he’d give her as much time in the studio as she gave him on his couch. The old story. She thought of suicide, but dismissed it in favor of resuming her habit. Why? Because I told her so. I thought her being messed up and alive was better than her being dead any day of the week. And she was helping to keep me around, playing my records every time she felt blue, mentioning my name whenever the subject of music came up. And why? Because her grandmother and me had a thing one time, back in the late ’50’s, right when I was at the top of my game. Showed up backstage on night at a Vegas show, a real country girl, out of her league and well aware of it, but just there to prove she had the guts to come say “hi” to a man she thought she loved because of how I looked and because I could sing real well. I took her to dinner a few nights, and sent her on her way, and that was that. Liked that gal a lot.

“Once I went balls up and they put me in the ground, I figured I’d look in on her from time to time, and kinda got to like it. She always played my records too. After she died, I watched over her daughter, then Carla.” He whistles. “What a kid. Helped that she liked my music of course. But I watched her real close, watched her life get worse and worse and not a whole lot I could do about it. Oh sure, I’d help her throw up after a bad night, or put her car keys where she could find them, maybe keep a bad guy she was thinking of dating out of the picture until she forgot about him and he forgot about everything except when to empty his colostomy bag. But she was on the downward slope, friend, and I couldn’t do enough to keep that from happening. After she left Texas, I followed her to Gainesburg, where she met you.”

Brody remembers. The bank job with Smalls, a low-level thug with dreams of grandeur that ended up splattered all over the wall of the First National. Kyle had kept his share, and spent the first of it at a roadside diner a hundred miles from Gainesburg. That was where he’d met Carla. She’d been sitting alone in a booth, staring into a cup of coffee, looking like she was considering jumping into it and drowning. He’d watched her from his own booth, weighing up the positives and negatives of approaching a girl when he was on the run from the law, when she took the initiative and slid in beside him, started talking about the weather, and music (Do you like Dean Martin?), as if they’d been friends forever.

“I didn’t mean for her to die,” Brody says, grimacing as he inspects his broken finger. “I swear I didn’t. I loved her.”

“You think you did.”

“No, I—”

“The same way you think you loved all those other girls you dragged along on the little crime spree you call your life, all those other girls you turned into mothers because you don’t care. Sooner or later they stop becoming your problem. Sooner or later they stop becoming anything at all.”

“That’s not how it is.”

Dean looks at him, grins widely. “Look who you’re talking to. There’s no sense arguing with me, and why would you want to? You’re stressed out enough as it is.”

“Please, look…”

“I’m not going to kill you, kid.”

Every muscle in Brody’s body unclenches, and he allows himself to sit back.

“That’s not how I do things. I just wanted you to know who that girl was those guys put in the ground back there. She wasn’t just another one of your crack-whores good for a hundred miles only. She was someone, and she was a damn sight more human than you’ll ever be.”

Brody nods. “I know you don’t believe me, but I did care about her.”

“Sure you did, kid.” Dean cracks open his door, puts one foot out on the road. “Sure you did.” He exits the car, brushes dirt from his trousers and leans in the open window. “Do me a favor, will ya?”

Brody looks at him. “Sure.”

“When you get on your way, play some of Carla’s discs. I don’t imagine there’d be a nicer way to sing her to sleep.” He winks, “See you soon, kid,” thumps a set of gold-ringed fingers down on the door, and walks away whistling a song Brody has heard but can’t place. It comes to him by the time he finds the strength to sit up and start the ignition again. It was one of Carla’s favorites. ‘There’s No Tomorrow.’

Chapter Twenty Three

Though Blue Moon’s face is made of black glass, I can see the doubt and wariness etched into it, or perhaps I’m seeing those emotions swirling beneath the surface. Can’t say I blame him. He has risked everything to be here for a man he has always trusted. Problem is, I’m hiding in the body of a man he doesn’t.

He nods that great big hunk of glass, his eyes glimmering jewels in a dark mask. “Sheriff.”

“Thanks for coming, Blue. You too Red.”

There is nothing about Red Cloud to suggest he’s a living thing. He’s standing there to the right of the door just as he always stands by Blue’s door, motionless, face raised to the sky, painted eyes staring upward, mouth set in a grim line. He’s a cigar store Indian, nothing more, but I know he’s listening, and his quiver is full.

Something slams against the door.

Blue looks down at the witch. She’s on her knees now, head lowered, lank hair hanging almost to the floor. “She goin’ to make it?”

“Don’t know. Would be better if she didn’t.”

He sighs and steps closer to me. Seen through him, the flame from the hurricane lamp on the bar is fragmented, the light dulled and trapped in feeble shards inside his chest. “What do you want us to do?”

“She’s not going to let this slide,” I tell him quietly. “Chances are she’s going to make me very sorry I crossed her. If that happens, I want to be sure I’ve done at least one thing right. I wanted to give you and Red Cloud what you want. I want to set you both free.”

Blue glances from Red Cloud to me. “I didn’t come because of that.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“And after all this time, I’m not sure I want it.”

“Maybe not, but it’s no way to live, Blue. You deserve better.”

A sigh that sounds like someone blowing air over the top of an empty bottle and he shakes his head slowly. “Sheriff, we’ve been friends for a long time, but that don’t mean you know all there is to know about me. Now I’ve had plenty of time to think it over and it seems like everyone comes to this town for one reason only, and that’s to pay for the bad things they’ve done. I don’t know why it has to be Milestone, or whether or not there are a thousand places like this all over the world, if there even is a world outside this town anymore. All I know is we’re here because we brought ourselves here, and I figure if I’m meant to pay for my sins by living out the rest of my days like this, then that’s what I’ll do.”

“What about Red?”

“Hell, Red doesn’t know how to do anything else now but use that bow and arrow of his. Truth be told, he was never much of a talker even back when he was flesh and bone, but his company was always good, and company enough for me.”

“I’d go crazy stuck in that damn house, Blue.”

“You’re stuck in a house of your own now, Sheriff, and I don’t figure that’s much of a way to live either.”

A bang and a crack as antlers splinter the door.

As if it’s her cue, Lian Su raises her face, looks from Red Cloud to Blue Moon, before settling her gaze on me. Her eyes are gone, the remains of them already hardening on her cheeks. The teeth she bares are bloodstained. “You tricked me,” she says, with what might be delight. “You hid the mark, that’s all. A simple thing. What a fool I am.”

I take a step back. Blue Moon doesn’t move.

Thunder slams against the door.

“You don’t belong here, Lian, and you’ve done enough damage.”

“I’ve done enough damage?” She stands without moving, as if invisible hands have jerked her up from the floor. “I haven’t even begun to do damage.”

The light from the hurricane lamp goes out. Automatically, I move away from the queer gray light that seems to cling to Lian like a second skin. Again she looks around, as if counting her adversaries, and then, grinning, starts moving in my direction.

“Don’t,” I command. It isn’t directed at Lian but Blue Moon, who, though the darkness has made him all but invisible, is moving toward her. I can tell by the sound. I can tell…just because I can.

He ignores me, and suddenly the gray light around the witch begins to swim. Fuzzy misshapen shadows clamber up the walls. He’s standing before her. She looks up at him, a tall obsidian man, utterly fearless and with nothing to lose, and admiration flickers across her chalk-white face. “If I broke your heart,” she asks, almost sweetly. “Would it break the rest of you?” She doesn’t wait for an answer, and he doesn’t wait for her to hurt him. In an instant, his hands are around her throat, lifting her off the floor, and from the gloom comes the telltale sound of Red Cloud loading his bow.

“My, but you’re a strong one,” Lian says and brings her arms up between his, her hands grabbing his wrists. As three of Red Cloud’s arrows pierce the flesh at the side of her neck, one after the other, thwick-thwick-thwick, with barely a second separating them, she screeches. Her hands convulse, shattering Blue Moon’s wrists. Glass rains to the floor. He staggers back, stunned, and raises arms that no longer have hands at the end of them.

Thwick-thwick-thwick. Another trio of arrows fly forth from Red Cloud’s bow, this time hitting home in the side of Lian’s face. She whirls, ducks low, and ends up in a crouch, one leg splayed out, the other folded beneath her, hands like claws on the floor. It could be ballet; it could be martial arts, but either way it means trouble for the wooden Indian.

“Stop…”

She doesn’t acknowledge my request, doesn’t look over her shoulder at me. Blue Moon, forgetting his newly acquired handicap rushes her. By the door, which continues to deteriorate under the weight of the deer, Red Cloud calmly draws back the string on his bow, his face forever expressionless.

Lian Su raises her hand in the air, palm faced in my direction, as if she’s calling a halt to proceedings. But then something swishes by my ear, catches the hazy light and smacks into her palm. It’s the bottle we drank from at the bar, still half-full, and before I can begin to guess what she’s going to do with it, she brings it to her lips, empties it into her mouth, then almost immediately spits it back out. In Red Cloud’s direction.

Before it hits him, it ignites, and abruptly Red Cloud is engulfed in violet fire.

Blue Moon collides with Lian Su, driving her into the door. She laughs and chops her hand against the side of his neck. Dark fragments fly, but he raises his arms and brings them down on her skull. She grunts, but does not fall, and delivers a second chop to Blue’s neck. Then another. This time there’s a sound like spare change falling to the floor and Blue Moon falls. He does not shatter, but enough of him breaks and scatters across the floor that I know he’s not getting up again.

Red Cloud makes not a sound. The fire seeps into the cracks in his hide, vanishing inside him, burning him from the inside out. Smoke seeps from every fissure. The wood begins to blacken. His eyes have become red-hot coals.

He reaches for another arrow.

I’ve got to get her outside again. I’ve got to get her over that threshold, weaken her. With this resolution comes self-chastisement for not dealing her a killing blow when the opportunity was there, an error that cost Blue Moon and Red Cloud their lives. But of course, there’s a very good reason for that lapse in judgment: I can hurt Lian as much as I like, but I’m not entirely sure I can kill her, or anyone for that matter. I can set it up so they kill themselves, offer them bargains that put them in the line of fire, but pulling the trigger is not something I believe I’m allowed to do.

But I’ll do all I can.

As if she senses this, Lian turns to look at me, a smile growing as she gleefully steps on one of Blue Moon’s legs, crushing it and scattering glass everywhere. Behind her the door is weakening, barely hanging on its hinges, and I wonder how much of that is her doing, because the weight of those animals out there combined with their infuriated battering, should have brought it down long before now.

“I have to tell you,” she says, kicking aside a rough chunk of obsidian. “Although I ache in parts of me I wasn’t aware I had, this is turning out to be quite a lot of fun.”

There’s a whoosh of air, a sickening crack I’ve mistakenly thought has come from the door, and she stops with a sudden intake of breath, shudders, and looks down at the point of an arrow which is sticking out of her cheek, black blood dripping from the tip.

Red Cloud, still burning, reloads. But his movements have slowed and fresh flame has begun to erupt from those cracks in his body. He’s wreathed in smoke and wavering.

There isn’t much time.

The scream does not come again.

Too much time has passed.

Whatever thrall has held him here ebbs away at last, and Kyle runs. His initial awe and fear at seeing them forgotten, he steps off the path and right into the middle of the herd. They don’t so much move to accommodate him, as grudgingly let him infiltrate their number. Flies buzz his face. Warm bodies try to crush him between them. Antlers scratch his cheek, stab his flesh, but he continues on, aware that he still has the gun if one of the deer should decide to take him on. He fights his way through until he is almost there and almost out of breath. His throat aches. Anticipating a struggle with the animals that are busy ramming the door like maddened things, he is surprised when they stop their assault, look back at him, and slowly lope away. The wind seems to whisper, as Kyle moves quickly into the gap they’ve left for him, cocks back the hammer on the gun, and throws the door open.

I watch Lian Su’s expression change from hate, to rage, to pleading, as she spins around to greet the boy in the doorway. To greet my son.

“They hurt me,” his mother tells him, and Kyle feels every ounce of his resolve turn to dust.

“Mom?”

She nods slowly, a creature of ethereal beauty, her hair lustrous, skin pale. She is naked, but he does not register this for now. All he can see are her eyes, which look bloated and black. She reaches out to him in a gesture of pleading. She is asking him to save her. But from what?

He tears his fascinated and heartbroken gaze away from her to the burning Indian in the corner, watches as it topples and falls to the floor. The flames are mirrored a thousand times in the shards of black glass scattered around the floor like frozen puddles of oil. Blue Moon and Red Cloud. Dead. He feels a pang of sadness, but it is no more resonant than a gunshot on a battlefield. There is too much else to see, to understand.

Then he does.

Standing a short distance behind his mother is a gaunt old man dressed in a dark raincoat, one eye milky white in the light from the flames, the other staring at him.

Cadaver. The puppeteer.

Kyle steps into the bar, the gun held out before him, aimed at the old man. “You son of a bitch.”

His mother drifts aside, her face filled with pride and pain.

Kyle glances at her. “He brought you back?”

“It’s not her,” Cadaver tells him.

“You shut the fuck up, all right? I’m talking to her.”

“Yes,” his mother tells him, “but it was a trick. He tricked me. Tricked your father too.”

Kyle stops dead. “Where is he?”

“He killed him.”

He returns his gaze to the old man, who suddenly looks scared and helpless, and that encourages him. “I asked you a question.”

There are no words to make him understand, no way to make him believe me, because all the things I could say about his life, the things only a father would know, are a mystery to me. He stands there, Lian Su watching with malevolent glee, and the fire in his eyes does not come from the blaze that has consumed Red Cloud and is rapidly spreading, licking at the walls. This fire is his and I recognize it immediately. When I brought him back from the dead, it might have been forgotten, replaced by the shock of his resurrection, but it never left him. That same fire has marked the worst times of his life, and I’ve been there for them all, been the genesis of most of them.

But there is nothing I can say. Instead, I change the focus from me to the grinning witch to my left. “She’s not your mother.”

“That so?”

“Yes it is so. Her name is Lian Su. She tricked all of us into believing she was Gracie for years, but she isn’t. She murdered our friends and now she’s trying to destroy everything else. Don’t let her fool you.”

“Fool me?” He grins crookedly, comes closer, the gun held steady in his grip, the muzzle aimed at my face. “You’re the only one who did that. Was it you who brought me back from the dead after I refused your deal?”

“No. Your father did.”

“And in return…?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“The hell it doesn’t.” Agony makes a melting mask of his face. In an instant, he has closed the distance between us and the muzzle of the gun is a hard cold circle pressed between my eyes. “Start talking.”

“There’s nothing to say. If you believe that woman is your mother, then you’ll die.”

“And what do you suggest I do?”

“Start believing the truth.”

There are faces at the door, animal faces, but they’re not interested in this little showdown. All their eyes are cast down, toward the remains of Red Cloud and Blue Moon. I guess for them, the hunt is over. Kyle’s is too; he just doesn’t know it yet.

“Your voice…” he says, frowning.

Maybe he does know; maybe he suspects. I say a silent prayer.

“What about it?” With my good eye, I stare hard at him. C’mon kid. See it. See what’s there in front of you.

“You’re not using the…whatever it was.”

“Do you want to know why?”

He shakes his head, swallows. “What was the bargain? Tell me.”

“Him for you.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

“Then…then what happened? Where is he?”

Right here, son. Right here, if you’d only open your eyes.

“You were always a smart kid, Kyle. Figure it out.”

At length, he does. The gun lowers just a fraction, but the expression of confusion on his face tells me that somewhere within him, he is trying to understand, considering the possibilities. Like the possibility that his father would trade places with Cadaver to get his son back.

For a long moment nothing is said, but the gun drops another inch lower and the hand holding it is no longer so sure. He closes his eyes, shakes his head as if to deny the suggestion that I am willing him to believe.

“He wouldn’t do it. He didn’t have the guts.”

“Yes I did.”

I cannot grant my own wishes, can’t make my own world change its axis, but nevertheless I’ve used every ounce of wishful thinking I’ve got to summon from my rotten throat those three words, spoken in a voice that is unmistakably mine.

“Pop?”

I allow myself the tiniest of smiles, a mere tug of my lips as I’m lit from the inside by a flare of hope I haven’t felt since Reverend Hill’s corpse hit the floor. Things will never be the same; they can’t be, but if I die or go wherever I’d bound for with the knowledge that my son knew I loved him, it will be enough.

“Welcome back,” I tell him, and he lowers his head, a gesture of defeat. For the moment I’m uncertain why, or what it is he’s mourning. Perhaps he’s finally letting go of the fire. Perhaps he came here hoping to find me dead. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter.

“Kyle. I’m sorry.”

It takes him a while to look at me, and when finally he does, there are tears in his eyes. “Why?”

“You know why, and if you don’t, it’ll come to you eventually. Right now we—”

I trail off.

Lian Su is no longer by the wall, but my frantic search for her is a short one.

She’s standing right behind Kyle, and before I have a chance to call out a warning, her hands are slithering over his shoulders, clamping onto the sides of his face. Fear fills his eyes. “Give your mother a kiss,” Lian hisses. Blue veins begin to spread across my son’s face. Fog fills his eyes. He shudders. “What’s—?” is all he manages to say before his lips turn blue. He begins to sag.

“No!” I step forward, reaching for them both.

With little effort, and a sound like glass crunching beneath a boot heel, Lian Su wrenches his head around to face her.

Chapter Twenty Four

It doesn’t matter whether you’re God, or the devil, or an agent of one or the other, you always know the consequences of your actions. Even I did, though I chose to ignore them. Lian Su knows too what she has set in motion, and calls upon every trick in her book to evade my fury. She’s smoke through my fingers, fire on my skin, ice in my bones; she’s a legion of exotic bugs crawling over my flesh; blades cutting me to pieces, but I can’t die. All I can do is flail wildly at whatever form she chooses to take.

In the end it’s Kyle she becomes, a last-ditch effort to play on my grief, just as she distracted my son by becoming his mother. But I know her. I have stood idly by and watched everyone die and everything burn. I have heard from her own mouth and seen with my own eyes the soulless evil thing she is behind the succession of masks and costumes. And this costume is my son.

With a cry of rage I should not have the strength to unleash, I tear that costume apart, snap its bones, sunder its face, all the while shutting out his voice lest it shatters me like her hands shattered Blue Moon.

“You won’t win; you can’t,” Lian tells me in Kyle’s voice.

Once more, Eddie’s is in flames. Smoke fills the bar. The deer at the door have moved away.

I drag Lian to the floor, shove her face into the fire.

She laughs.

I grab fistfuls of charred wooden arrows from Red Cloud’s quiver and bury them in her chest.

She taunts me.

I slash her throat with a shard of obsidian.

She grins.

Exhausted, but driven by rage that is almost enough for me to erupt into flames of my own, I grab her hair. She turns to black tar to escape me, spins her limbs into threads that shoot out in all directions, latching onto unstable wood, the floor, the crumbling roof, anything to keep her inside this place. But the place won’t hold, and neither will she, not under the opposing weight of my anger.

Head lowered, I run through the flames. Joints and muscles protest in screaming agony. I ignore them, make claws of my hands.

Kyle, I’m so sorry.

Lian Su turns to stone.

I tried.

I barrel into her, breaking my nose, my jaw, my fingers, cracking open my skull.

I love you.

I feel none of it as I force her into the air.

Please forgive me.

And over the threshold.

“I’ll set you free.”

Outside, their faces made a rusty red by the roaring flames, stand the deer. One of them, its antlers more viciously intricate than those of its brethren, moves a little closer, eyes me with caution, inspects the writhing woman at my feet who is a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of colors and forms. Blood and fluids of every shade leak from the gaping hole in her belly. Threats in an alien tongue slither from her mouth.

“And what do you want in return?” the deer whispers, turning its head sharply to silence the sibilant dissension from the herd. “We didn’t come here for her.”

“Blue Moon and Red Cloud are dead. This…woman…has caused many people great pain, and in killing your quarry, has denied you justice, condemned you to search for something you’ll never find. There is no place I can think of to keep her that will stop her from returning. If you take her; if you keep her with you, I’ll set you free of the hunt.”

“What makes you think the land of the dead can hold her?”

“Because for a long time, this tavern was enough.”

Maybe Lian Su will come back, and maybe she won’t, but what I’m asking of this creature now is all I can think of and it’s better than nothing.

After a moment, the deer takes a step forward and slowly lowers its head, cocks it, and prods Lian Su’s wound with one curved tip of its antler. She convulses and shrieks as dark blue light flares, lighting up every nerve and blood vessel in her body.

The deer turns away. The rest of the herd follow suit. They have taken only a few steps when the wind rises and they become dust in its arms, whirling away in eddies. They leave a curious emptiness behind them.

I look down at Lian. The blue light is eating her away. She fights it, screeching, baleful eyes trying to will a slow and painful death on me as she spasms and struggles. White-knuckled hands claw at the earth; her legs kick. Then the struggling subsides. A faint sigh escapes her twisted lips as her hair turns to water and seeps into the ground. A single shiver, then the eyes are gone, draining back into the hollows that held them. Her fingers become trickles, the nails dewdrops, and in what seems like only a couple of seconds, Lian Su is gone, turned to water that quenches the thirst of the earth at my feet.

Behind me, Eddie’s collapses.

The fire rages on.

Iris is waiting at the foot of the hill, shivering in the cold breeze, her eyes focused on the blaze. When I reach her she says nothing, just shakes her head and gets into the car. I expect her to leave, to haul ass out of here and never look back, but she waits. Goes right on waiting until I come around to the passenger side and slide in beside her. We sit there in silence, watching the tavern burn for the second time.

At length, she turns to me and studies my face, tentatively touches the already healing wounds. “Did you tell him?”

“Yes.” I take a deep breath that feels like sand going down my throat, and wait a moment, debating whether or not the question needs to be asked, then I ask it before I can decide. “Why didn’t you?”

“It wouldn’t have mattered.”

“You don’t know that.”

She smiles sadly. “I’m afraid I do, Tom. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about my life and you’ll understand why.” She lets her hand fall away, brings it to the ignition and starts the car. “Where should we go?”

I look out the window, my mind already drifting along the road, to the remains of a car with a dead woman still inside.

“I have to bury Cobb’s wife. Promised him I would.”

“Okay,” she says quietly. “Then where?”

I haven’t the heart to tell her that whatever the destination is, it won’t be one we’ll share, so I close my eyes and try to find sleep that, like so many simple things, will forever remain out of reach for people like me.