Hell in Heaven

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Grange turned out to be a grand old barn nestled in the middle of a stand of pines. It seemed like a strange place for such a structure to Matt, but everything else had seemed so bizarre since he got to Heaven it barely even caught his notice. Especially once he'd stepped through the wide doors and discovered just how beautiful a barn could look. There were brightly colored tapestries hanging from the walls and rugs on the floor. The ceiling was open to the roof, revealing an exquisite structure of wooden beams, all painted in a pattern of birds and wildflowers. Oil lamps hung from these beams, casting the vast room in warm, golden light.

Mouse led Matt into the Grange a few minutes before six, and the room was already filled with people. It seemed as if everyone he'd met out on Main Street was here, along with quite a few others.

Three long tables were set up in a U-shape right in the middle of the floor. The two sides were long enough to easily seat a hundred people around each of them. The bottom of the U was much shorter, with only seven seats. Or, Matt thought as he took a second look, six seats and a throne. Unlike the rest of the bare wood chairs, the one in the middle was thickly padded and stood at least a foot higher than the others.

"What a surprise that Orfamay Vetch has got such a nice seat," Matt muttered to Mouse as they came in.

"It's her due as leader of the Vetch family," Mouse said. "Vern's is just as good as head of the Gilhoolies."

Matt looked around, but didn't see another throne anywhere in the room. Maybe they take turns, he thought.

"It's getting late," Mouse said. "We'd better sit down."

Matt hesitated, not sure which side to choose. Mouse grabbed his hand and led him to the short table.

"Can't we just find a quite spot on one side?" Matt said.

"You're funny," Mouse said. "I didn't expect that."

"I didn't expect any of this, so we're even," Matt said.

As they came around one side of the short table, Orfamay Vetch rounded the other. Matt stopped to let her get past him to the grand seat. But she stopped short and pulled out one of the wooden chairs next to the throne, then sat in it without ceremony. Matt turned back to Mouse, confused.

She gestured to the throne.

"That's not for me," he said.

"You set us free," Mouse said. "It's yours."

Like the rest of the town, apparently. Matt had tried to get Mouse to tell him how things had been while Joan was alive, how long she'd been there and what she'd done to them. But somehow the girl always managed to change the subject, telling him little anecdotes about the town and the people who lived in it. If he pressed, she started talking about how happy everyone was that he'd come. Finally she'd led him to Orfamay's house. It was another shack with no electricity and no running water, but he'd been able to use the pump outside to wash off the pig blood that had been splashed on him, and when he pulled his head out from under the water he could see Mouse disappearing down the road. He hadn't known how he was going to pass the hours until six that evening, but as soon as he sat down on Orfamay's soft sofa his eyes closed and he fell into a deep sleep, waking only when Mouse came back to take him to the Grange for the supper. When he did awake, he was pleased and only a little disturbed to discover that the damage he'd suffered when he lost his bike was almost all healed. In the months since his resurrection he'd noticed that his recuperative powers were much stronger than they had been before his death, but this was the first time he'd really put it to the test. So there were some benefits to dying, apparently.

Matt glanced up and saw that almost everyone in the room had taken their seats, and the tables were now filled. He couldn't be any more certain than he'd been when they'd all lined up to meet him on Main Street, but judging from the very strong gene pools that dominated here, it seemed that one side of the room was filled with Vetches and Runcibles, the other with Gilhoolies and Hogginses. They were all standing behind their chairs, like schoolchildren waiting for permission to be seated.

As Matt reluctantly headed toward his appointed seat, a giant broke away from one of the long tables and loped over to him. He was almost seven feet tall, with arms the size of tree trunks. The only thing about him that wasn't huge was his face, which seemed squashed and tiny on his pumpkin-sized head. Squashed and tiny and, oddly, almost identical to Orfamay's.

The giant Vetch – because a Vetch he must have been – reached the throne at the same time as Matt, even though he'd been coming from at least three times as far away – and drew it back from the table for him. Matt cast a questioning look at Mouse, who encouraged him with a nod, then sat down and let himself be slid up to the table.

Only then was there a scraping of wood on wood as everybody else in the barn took their seats. And another, as they all turned their chairs to look at the short table. To look at him.

Matt wanted to ask Mouse what they were expecting from him, but she was seated two seats away. To his immediate left was a sallow kid, maybe all of twenty, with sandy hair, a sunken chest and no chin. He looked like an Easter Peep that had been missed in the egg hunt and left out in the sun and sprinklers for days. Next to him was an empty chair, and then Mouse, who gazed up at him with worshipful eyes.

The Peep caught Matt's gaze and immediately misunderstood it. "Yeah, I'm Vern Gilhoolie," he said with the kind of pride at the sound of his name that most would reserve for the birth of their first child. "You did good with that Joan bitch. Wish I'd thought of trying it your way. We would have been out of the shit faster and wouldn't have needed to bother you."

"Nice to meet you," Matt lied, wondering how it was possible the same womb produced these two siblings.

"You want anything, you just come to me," Vern said. "If you can't find me, you can ask any Gilhoolie. Any Hoggins, too. They all do what I tell 'em, and I'll tell 'em to treat you right."

"That's good to know," Matt said. "What I really want is a ride back to the highway as soon as possible. Can one of your people help me with that?"

"The highway?" Vern said.

Before Matt could press him further, there was a hacking sound on his right that sounded like another one of Ezekiel Vetch's pigs being slaughtered. He turned to see that Orfamay had stood up and was clearing her throat for attention. The giant was sitting next to her, and even with her standing and him sitting she barely came up to his earlobe. There might have been someone sitting on the other side of the giant, but Matt was as likely to see him or her as he was to see a satellite orbiting the dark side of the moon.

Orfamay cleared her throat again, and the room settled into silence. Matt took a moment to look around and confirmed what he had thought – the two tables were divided by clan.

"You all know why we're here tonight," Orfamay started. "So I'm not going to try to make any fancy speeches about how we were delivered from evil by the arrival of this young man. You lived through it, you suffered the same pain we all did, now it's over. The bitch queen is dead. I sent Percy and Ranulph out to the house to confirm it, and there's no one there besides a rotting pile of goo on the ground."

The crowd erupted in cheers and applause. Orfamay let it go for a few seconds, then cleared her throat again. Somehow that awful sound cut through the celebration, and everybody settled back down.

"You're happy about this, and you've got the right to be," Orfamay continued. "You know how it was with Joan, you're glad it's over. But you know what it was like before Joan was here, and that wasn't any better. We've got a chance to start over a third time now, but that doesn't mean it's all posies and kittens yet. There are costs to everything. Before the food comes and we all make fools of ourselves on meat and shine, let's hear what we're going to be paying this time."

Matt didn't know what that meant, but there was an ominous tone that made him want to get out of Heaven even faster. He was trying to figure out if there was a way to slip out unobserved from his place of honor when he realized that Orfamay had stopped speaking and was now staring directly at him.

"Me?" he whispered to her. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You've got to tell these people how it's going to work around here," Orfamay whispered back. "You owe them that much."

She sat down, never taking her eyes off him. Matt felt the gaze of hundreds of people burning into him.

"I can't even begin to imagine what all of you went through while Joan was here," he said, searching for words as he went. "I mean, I can begin – and I've got to leave it there. Because what I saw was pretty horrible. If I'd come across anything like that a year ago, I think I would have dropped dead of a heart attack."

There was a spatter of appreciative laughter from the crowd.

"The fact that you were all able to survive this horror tells me how strong you must be," Matt said. "I'm sure it won't be long until everything goes back to normal around here. So, um, welcome back to the real world. I think you're going to like it."

Now there was applause from the two tables. But it died away quickly when Orfamay cleared her throat again.

"You've got the pretty words," she said. "But we're still not hearing what you expect from this town?"

"I don't expect anything," Matt said. "There is one thing I'd really like, and that's a ride back to the -"

His words were cut off by a scream coming from outside the barn door. And this was no sow choking on the blood from the slit in its throat. This came from a woman, and it was filled with pain and fear.

No one moved. They didn't even swivel their heads away from Matthew.

"Didn't you hear that?" Matt said. "There's a woman out there. She's hurt."

Still, no one moved. Matt tried to push away from the table, but the throne must have weighed half a ton. It wouldn't budge.

Matt grabbed the edge of the table and was about to flip it over to free himself when there was a blur of pink motion and a pale form tumbled onto the floor in front of him. Before he could make sense of what was happening, a grizzled man in denim overalls without a shirt stalked in and grabbed the thing he had just hurled through the door.

It was a girl. She couldn't have been more than seventeen years old, as lovely a young woman as Matt had ever seen. Her hair was blonde and her eyes blue. She had a narrow waist and small breasts that ended in pale nipples; her pubic hair was so pale as to be practically invisible.

Matt could see this all because, aside from the bruise she wore on her right cheek, the girl was naked.

And there was blood running down her legs.