The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

One thing Norman Partridge Norman Partridge has always found curious about Lovecraft’s fiction is that “there’s really no reflection of his time — no sense of the Roaring Twenties or the Great Depression or the hardscrabble realities most Americans faced in those days. Along with that, I’ve always wondered how HPL’s otherworldly horror might have played if injected into other pulp forms of the day. So I dropped a chunk of Lovecraft’s mythos (“The Hound”) into thirties hardboiled territory, tossed in a pair of armed-and-dangerous California migrants on the run, and let things roll from there.”

Partridge’s first short story appeared in Cemetery Dance 2, and his debut novel, Slippin’ into Darkness, was the first original novel published by CD. Since then, he has written a series novel (The Crow: Wicked Prayer) which was adapted for the screen, comics for DC, and six collections of short stories. Partridge’s Halloween novel, Dark Harvest, was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the 100 Best Books of 2006 and has become a seasonal classic. A third-generation Californian, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, Canadian writer Tia V. Travis, and their daughter Neve. His latest novel is The Devil’s Brood.

Backbite

The Depression had been hitting California hard for years, but that year the rains hit harder. The peas turned black on the vines, withering like arthritic fingers before migrants like my brother and I could pick them with our own. Stone fruit didn’t fare any better. Peaches, apricots . . . all of it disappeared in one brutal season. Night after night and week after week a black dog of a wind howled through every orchard, and sleet rattled down and gnawed the fruit off the stone, and those dead stones hung tight to branches, inclined toward the mud like the skulls of lynched men.

Those stones weren’t worth anything to the growers, and that meant they were worth even less to men like Russell and me. Men who stooped and picked and boxed and carried. Most people said Russell wasn’t worth anything at all, just some mangled halfwit who couldn’t be trusted with a sharp spoon. Even I had to admit that my older brother hadn’t been right in the head since he’d come home from France, missing an eye and a chunk of his face thanks to a German bayonet. Of course, Russell never talked much about that. All he said about the war was that he spent it digging trenches and killing in them, but it was living in them that taught him some homes were as welcoming as the grave.

Bleak poetics aside, that wasn’t saying much at all. I figured the truth of it was that the mustard gas had done a real job on Russell, but no one wanted to hear anything about that. No one wanted to hear anything about anything in those days. Talk didn’t buy you much, and a sweet lie beat out the truth any day of the week. But Russ and I weren’t the kind who had any sweet lies in us, even in the best of times.

By the time the rains came, we didn’t have much left in us besides a whisper. There wasn’t a way out, and the words that might have found one were hard to cough up. Honest explanations, sob stories, alibis . . . even the truth seemed like begging. Russell couldn’t do it, and I didn’t want to. If you asked me, our words belonged in our bellies the same as our guts. Our stories, too. Wrapped up in our skins, locked in bone houses we’d built for them . . . way down deep.

Like they say: to each his own. It was that way for me and it was that way for Russ. We fell into silence. Summer slipped into fall. The black wind howled, and the rain beat down. The fruit rotted on the vine. Russell got a cough. I listened to it night after night in one tent or another, and soon I heard little else. The cough rattled, and it made me think of a desperate man trying to pick a safe, twisting the dial ’round and ’round, the tumblers never falling in place. But the dial spun on, and the storms drenched the land, and our work washed away in a flood. And soon there was nothing to do but turn our backs on the fields and orchards, the rain and the mud.

We found a new way of doing things.

A way that let us put away our words for good.

No more honest explanations. No sob stories. No alibis.

We started over.

We did our talking with a gun.

The first one was a .38 missing the pistol grips. Russell took it from the labor contractor who tried to cheat our crew out of one last payday, a mouthy little runt named Koslow. Russ also took the bankroll Koslow was going to pocket for himself. Only the idiot didn’t get the message. He figured he was still the boss, and he started jabbering about company muscle and cops and what was going to happen to us.

So Russ smacked him around with the busted pistol. As big as Russ was, it was like watching a tiger bat around a house cat. Koslow was lucky it ended that way. Russell carried a German trench knife in a steel scabbard that hung from his belt, and I had no doubt he knew how to use it. Anyway, the bastard was smart enough to shut up before it came to that, and we took his car keys to seal the deal.

We never paid a price for what we did. At least, not the kind of price you’d figure. And if what we did felt good, Russell didn’t say so and neither did I. I didn’t say anything about how the roll of greenbacks felt tucked into my pants pocket, either. But the truth is that having those bills in my jeans gave me a hard-on . . . the first one I’d had in months. Jesus, life is funny.

The stolen Ford took us north of Fresno. We bought some groceries at an Armenian market along with a few bottles of bootleg wine. I picked up a local paper and a local map. Pickings were slim, but I knew what I was looking for. I checked the obituaries and circled a few addresses, and we drove around casing houses. The rain had slacked off at long last, but that black dog of a wind was still behind us . . . ahead of us . . . everywhere. It raged like a twister and wiped away the clouds, pushing them over the mountains to the east. The sky it left behind was as flat and gray and empty as the country roads we traveled.

The Ford’s bald tires hummed over blacktop as we drove from one house to the next. I crossed addresses off the obit page as we went — most of the places were in town, with too many neighbors around. Finally we found an old ramshackle farmhouse just past the outskirts where the windows didn’t light up at night.

The house was surrounded by overgrown fields, set back from the road down a gravel drive that twisted through an old stand of eucalyptus. We parked the car, and Russell yanked his German Nahkampfmesser from its steel scabbard. In his big hands it looked like a butter knife. Two seconds later he levered open the back door, and that was that.

Inside, there was nothing to greet us but a boxed-up sour smell — not like death, but the kind of feral scent that lingers in a house when there’s an animal holed up in the crawlspace. Either way, the stink didn’t bother me. Even a dead man’s clapboard was a big step up from a leaky tent in a migrant camp. And anyway, the smell wasn’t so bad on the second floor.

There were two bedrooms upstairs. We couldn’t tell which one had belonged to the dead man. To tell the truth, I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered to me was that my bed was soft, and I slept better in it than I had in months. My brother was another story. That lingering cough had Russell up and down all night. He must have memorized every corridor. Hearing him move around in the darkened house, I wondered if my brother had ended up in the dead man’s bedroom, even toyed with the idea that Russell’s cough was some kind of ghostly echo. That’s the way things would have ended up in a pulp magazine. But I tried not to think about it, and eventually that twister wind spun over the old gables and took those sounds away.

The only bathroom was next to Russell’s bedroom. It was a dull little pocket with a burned-out lightbulb and a little bit of a window set high near the ceiling. Most nights that window allowed enough moonlight to let you do what you needed . . . or maybe it allowed too much. In the middle of the second night, Russ smashed the bathroom mirror. He said he saw a shadow moving behind the glass. He slept better after that, though some nights I was sure I heard him rooting around in that dark bathroom, shifting pieces of that broken mirror in the sink like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. But Russ never said a word about it, and I didn’t ask.

I’d get up in the morning, and the broken glass would still be there. I’d wash up, my eyes staring at me from the same broken shards as they had the day before. Russell never did clean up the mirror. Of course, I didn’t clean it up, either. I could have, but I didn’t want to mess with it. After all, I hadn’t broken the thing, and I figured we’d earned letting things go at least a little bit after busting our asses to survive for so long. Even if it couldn’t last, it seemed a stretch of rest was the least we deserved before we faced up to whatever was coming next.

Slice it up neat and clean: We both knew that we should move on. But neither one of us said it, and one day seemed to snake into the next before we could make a new start. I gained a few pounds eating the groceries we’d bought at that Armenian market. Russell drowned the last of his cough in wine. He’d developed a taste for the grape in France and slept sounder for it now, but it didn’t help where it really counted. A couple slugs too many and Russ would end up out in the scrubby yard beneath the moon, staring at the stars with that lone eye of his, shouting at the cosmos in gutter Deutsch I figured he’d learned from a German whore. The dead man’s house was in the sticks — there was no one around to hear but me . . . except the sky, I suppose — and it sounded like my brother was cursing the gods, or maybe their absence.

Those words spilled out, and across the fields, and into the night. Maybe there was nothing to understand in them at all. I just sat in the house and listened. There wasn’t much else to do. We hadn’t found a radio, and there wasn’t a single book in the whole place . . . not even a pulp magazine. I loved those things, but no dice here. The only reading material was that local newspaper I’d bought at the market. I read it over and over, until I got the idea that simple act had set the whole world in stone. So I burned the paper in the fireplace. After that I fell asleep in an armchair while Russell drank and shouted at the stars.

Late that night I awoke to the sounds of my brother’s screams. I crossed the room in two steps. Headlights washed the front of the house. A black Nash was parked on the gravel driveway. I snatched open the front door and the cold wind blasted me along with sounds that would have been right at home in a backwoods butcher shop.

But that didn’t slow me down, because those sounds were coming from my brother. I crossed the porch and hit the scrubby grass in a dead run. Russell was down on his knees, his screams gone now, grunting as two guys worked him over with switchman’s clubs. I tackled the first one before he saw me coming and rammed him against the Nash. His head hit the fender with a sickening thud, and that spelled lights out. By the time I grabbed the switchman’s club from his hands and turned to face his partner, Russ had already gone to work.

Bark peeled as Russ shouldered his attacker against a thick eucalyptus. Then he moved in low, hooking to the belly like Dempsey, punching so hard I thought the stranger would spit up his liver. The guy was finished before he dropped, but Russ was just getting started. His left hand whipped back, fingers closing around the trench knife that hung at his side.

It took everything I had in me to grab Russ and pull him away before he could turn that German steel loose. Even so, the stranger shrank away like a dead man. His long black overcoat gathered around him as he collapsed, as if he were sinking through a trapdoor. Another second and he wasn’t moving. Neither was the guy by the Nash.

We didn’t need to yank their wallets to find out they were private cops set with the task of rousting squatters for a local bank, but we yanked their wallets anyway. They had thirty bucks between them. Toss in the Nash, and it amounted to a fair night’s work. We dragged them inside the dead man’s house and trussed them up. Then we closed the door behind us, and we left the two of them in that house with its feral smell, and the ashes of the last newspaper I’d ever read, and a busted bathroom mirror that tossed moonlight at the shadows.

Outside, the wind was dying off. The moon was brighter now. Pale, watching. The bats were out, circling in its cold glow, gobbling any insects that dared to flap wings.

I started the Nash and we backed out of the driveway. The headlight glow spilled across the front of the old house, and we left it behind us in the darkness.

It was time to move on.

Once we were clear of Fresno, we made a quick stop to search the car. There was nothing much up front — a couple salami sandwiches in a paper bag, a couple bottles of bootleg beer, and a map in the glove compartment that was folded up in a jumble. A town up north was circled in red, but its name — New Anvik — didn’t ring a bell. Besides, any destination we might set would come later. At the moment all we wanted to do was put some distance between us and the dead man’s house.

But first we’d finish checking the Nash. The real jackpot was locked in the truck — a pump-action shotgun and a couple boxes of 00 buckshot shells. I guess it was just dumb luck the bank muscle had opted to start things off with clubs instead of the trench gun. We wouldn’t make the same mistake. We stowed the Winchester in the backseat, tossed an old blanket over it, and headed north.

We blew through Merced and Modesto. Outside Stockton, we snatched a new license plate for the Nash. Breathing a little easier, we ate some burgers at a trucker’s joint on the Delta just as the sun rose in a blue sky. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen the sun, and it made me feel better . . . even kind of sleepy. We parked down by the water and I dozed a little, listening to birds call as a gentle breeze combed through the cattails.

Russ went for a walk. At least, that’s what I thought he was doing. When I awoke I went looking for him, following a deer run that cut through the cattails. The first thing I found was a broken wine bottle, the last of that Armenian bootleg. And then I found Russ. He was down by the water where it was quiet, sitting there all alone. The sun beat down on him and he stared up at it . . . at least, that’s what his good eye was doing. But whatever my brother saw, I was certain he was seeing it with the eye that wasn’t there anymore . . . the angry red socket that was scarred over like a ravaged coffin lid.

The scar twitched and heaved. Even now, I can’t imagine what Russ saw in his mind’s eye. I only know that it was the last thing he thought he’d ever see, because he had that Winchester shotgun propped under his chin and his thumb was twitching on the trigger.

As gently as I could, I took away the gun. Russ didn’t say a single word. Wherever he was, there weren’t any words at all. I didn’t have any words, either. But my hand closed around my brother’s, and together we walked back to the stolen Nash.

I opened the glove compartment and grabbed the map. Unfolding it, the first thing I saw was that little town circled in red, a place called New Anvik. It lay to the northeast, just a few hours away . . . if we were lucky, anyway. Lots of pines and mountains up there, and summer cabins that would be shuttered for the season. The way I figured it, we could find a place to hole up in the sticks and get some breathing room. Then I could figure out what to do about Russ.

My brother didn’t say a word as I drove. He just stared ahead, his one eye glazed as if a spider had spun cobwebs around his brain. A couple hours north of Sacramento the Nash overheated. I barely got it over to the side of the road, but I knew instantly we couldn’t linger there. One look at us and even the stupidest cop would start asking questions. So I wrapped the guns in a blanket, handed Russ a sack with the sandwiches and the beer, and we started walking.

A gravel road cut away from the main one, and we followed it through a field. Eventually we hit some railroad tracks and trailed them north. The air was still. The sun shone down but the light it cast was flat and cold, so barren it didn’t even glint off the railroad tracks. The only way to stay warm was to keep moving. That’s what we did. Our boots thudded over ties and gravel, and we didn’t move slowly. I set the pace, and Russ kept it.

The landscape was spare — fields rimmed by pine. We hoofed it a couple of miles and didn’t see a single house. But with guns in our possession and little else, I was still wary of any kind of law . . . even a local yokel. I felt a little safer when the train tracks cut into a wall of pine. The ground within was as red as rusty iron, and the little forest seemed to hold a month’s worth of frosty mornings. Which was another way of saying it was like a pine icebox in there, so we didn’t slacken our pace. Instead, we doubled it.

The red earth disappeared beneath a carpet of rusty needles, muffling our footsteps as we moved deeper into the forest. The only other sounds were our breaths, which by now were just short of ragged. A sour scent greeted us about a quarter mile in — the same feral crawlspace scent we’d breathed for a week running at the dead man’s house. The stink burned my lungs, and I have to admit that sucking it down made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. We found its source soon enough — a dead boar lay to one side of the tracks, body mangled and partially devoured by god knows what, bristly coat heavy with frost as if its slayer had left it on ice for another meal.

I stared down at the carcass, but not for long. Fate might be pushing us, but there was no time to consider it. Not now. I wasn’t going to gut the dead animal, spill its entrails, and give them a read. Not the way we were moving. The way I saw it we’d already placed our bet . . . wherever we were headed. And the chips could fall where they may.

So we skirted the dead boar and kept walking. Not far ahead, the forest opened on a circle of light. It was dull light, the kind only found in the shank of an afternoon, but it was light just the same.

Russell’s lone eye narrowed as we stepped into it, and I got the feeling the cobwebs in his brain were melting away. A railway station lay ahead, just a little more than a stone’s throw distant. The platform was empty, and a lone Ford was parked in the lot outside the office. If the place was as empty as it looked, we might be able to muscle our way in and steal whatever the station agent had in the cash drawer, maybe snatch a bag of mail from the warehouse . . . then keep moving. But all that was gravy. The main thing I wanted was the key to that Ford.

It was time to get it. The wind had picked up while we were in the forest, and now it was whipping cold from above and behind, driving the stink of that dead boar through the pines as if it were ready to gouge our heels with its tusks. Russ set down the bag with the sandwiches and the beer. We weren’t going to need it now. We started toward the depot as the sun dipped behind the treetops. In an instant, afternoon slipped into twilight.

The wind didn’t slacken, and the sign above the platform swayed on thick chains. As we drew closer, I recognized the station’s name. New Anvik — the same town I’d seen circled on the map I found in the Nash’s glove compartment.

Right now, it was our destination.

It looked like it had been all along.

Gravel crunched beneath our boots as we crossed the station lot. I brushed a hand along the Ford’s hood as I passed by. The metal was as cold as a witch’s tit, which meant the car had been sitting there a while. Russ trailed behind me as I climbed the stairs that led to the station platform, and together we followed a raised walk around the front of the building. All the while, a single hope stuck in my mind — that the depot was a one-man operation, and we’d only find the station agent inside.

That’s exactly what we found, but not the way we expected.

“You’d better give me that shotgun,” Russ said as we neared the door.

I stopped dead in my tracks, turning only to meet my brother’s eye. It was as green as a piece of polished jade, and clear of cobwebs.

“Welcome back,” I said, thinking I understood.

Of course, I didn’t understand anything.

But I handed the Winchester to Russ.

And we moved toward the open door.

Deep notches marred the molding, as if someone had gained entry with a dull axe. I didn’t have time to worry about that any more than I’d worried about the dead boar, because the Ford was still parked out front and I wanted the keys that cranked its engine more than I’d ever wanted anything in my miserable life. So I nudged Russ and he took the lead, stepping into the dark room like a golem with a trench gun.

His big shadow spilled across the floor, joining other shadows that pooled on the waxed hardwood. I flipped on the light as I followed my brother inside. With the shadows gone there was nothing much in the office except a couple of desks. It didn’t take a detective to figure out they’d been moved — both rested at odd angles against the far wall, and the legs had gouged long scratches along the hardwood floor. As near as I could tell each desk had traveled about ten feet. And judging by the damage to the plaster wall the desks had moved fast and hard, as if they had been bucked across the room.

There weren’t any car keys in either desk. No cash box, either. Between the two desks another open door waited, a large sliding panel that led to the warehouse. Maybe the keys to the Ford were back there . . . and maybe something else, too. Maybe some boxed freight we could snatch, or a bag of mail. If we could grab it fast, I’d take it . . . but I sure as hell wasn’t going to hang around a second more than necessary.

Dull electric bulbs glowed from tin cowls set high in the warehouse ceiling, spilling yellow circles of illumination on the floor. In the middle of the largest circle stood another desk, its surface reflecting light from above in yellow shards, as if tossing sharpened knives back at the timbered crossbeams above. A broken mirror lay on the desktop — that explained the reflected shards of light. And in the middle of the desk, an open box waited. The box hadn’t been opened neatly. Ragged slices crisscrossed the top, and rusty patches the color of dried blood had splattered the cardboard, as if someone had shattered the mirror and sliced into the box with the broken fragments.

Bits of broken mirror smashed against the hardwood floor as I brushed them off the desk. A glance at the top flap indicated that the package was addressed to a man named Smith in Auburn, California and had been mailed from a university in Massachusetts. That told me nothing, so I upended the contents. A sheaf of papers dropped out, followed by a statue attached to a chain.

The statue wasn’t huge by any means, but it was large enough that I couldn’t imagine anyone wearing it around his neck. Russ snatched the chain before I could get a close look at the thing. I only saw that it was fashioned from jade, and it looked like a hungry Doberman with the wings of a gigantic bat.

The chain swung back and forth as Russ dangled the statue before his good eye. Broken mirror-shards on the desktop caught the idol’s image, and green light splashed against the warehouse walls. I barely noticed it because that sheaf of papers was still nestled between the reflected idols, and to me those papers were just as tantalizing as the statue itself.

I unfolded the pages and started reading. I didn’t know if it was a letter or a story. All I knew was that the writer began by describing his strange partnership with a man named St. John, and then he turned to the subject of a statue they’d dug up in a European graveyard . . .

And just then Russ started reading, too. The jade statue lay cupped in his left palm like a miniature pet, and once again my brother’s eyes were glazed with cobwebs. He was staring down at an inscription carved in letters I didn’t recognize. His lips moved slowly, deliberately, and the whispered words that spilled from them were the same words I’d heard him use outside the dead man’s house . . . the words I’d always taken for gutter Deutsch.

Quite suddenly, I understood those words weren’t German at all.

They were another language altogether.

A language no one understood this side of hell.

In another moment, those words were buried by another sound . . . a scuttling percussion that erupted from a garbage can next to the desk. It was a twin to the night sounds I’d heard coming from the bathroom at the dead man’s house, and a chill capered up my spine.

Russell’s lips snapped shut, cutting off his words.

The garbage can tipped over and banged on the floor, dumping more broken-mirror shards.

A severed hand crawled through the mess, dragging a gnawed and splintered wrist.

The hand moved across the floor like a giant spider.

In another second it crossed through the doorway that adjoined the station office where the dead station agent stood, pointing at my brother with the bloody stump of his right wrist.

The agent was a bucket of gore dressed in a suit — face torn to ribbons, mangled lips hanging in shreds. Those lips slithered together like a pair of hungry grave-worms, and above them the thing’s eyes shone with a stark blue brightness that made a glacier seem warm. Whatever the station agent had become wasn’t anything close to human anymore. Its bloody teeth cut words in the absolute silence of that dark warehouse, and though I heard those words I knew they were meant for Russell alone.

“You unearthed the idol,” the thing said. “You used its power to survive, and you hoped you had left it behind in the trenches with the corpses of all those soldiers you murdered in the Master’s name. But you cannot escape the Master, any more than you can escape His talisman. It is risen from fallow killing fields just as the Master is risen, and it has found you just as He has found you, for the leash you occupy is a long one. The killing will never end, for this time the Master will bring you to heel like a prize bitch. This time you’ll wear a brimstone collar, and you’ll be forever at His side.”

The words slapped Russell out of his daze, and he hurled the idol into the darkness. A quick whirling motion and the Winchester thundered in his hands. The agent’s corpse flew backward in a red shower, thudding against the office floor. Before the smoke cleared, the scuttling hand disappeared into the shadows.

Russ and I exchanged a single glance — there was no time for words. There was nothing to do but get shed of this place, the things in it, and whatever waited for us beyond its doors.

Russell turned and slid open the door that led to the station platform. An icy wind blasted through the doorway along with a cold stream of darkness, and it wrapped Russell in its grip and pulled him into the night.

Before I could take a single step, the warehouse door slammed in my face like a guillotine blade . . . but not before another black shadow blasted into the room.

It was the dead boar, and it was coming straight for me.

The boar raged through the darkness, crossing the room like a red torrent loosed from a broken dam in hell. I leveled the .38 and put two slugs in the creature, but it plowed over me before I could fire a third.

The pistol flew from my hand and spun through the jade shadows. Hoofs scratched over hardwood as the boar turned to attack again. I hadn’t even made it to my knees, and the only thing within reach was a thick shard of broken mirror. Dizzily, I snatched it up as the boar closed on me — its face a mask of caked blood, its snout flared with exertion.

I drove the makeshift blade into the creature’s right eye. Tusks raked my belly as the glass tore into my palm but my grip held firm, and I jammed the misshapen blade deeper as the monster smashed me backward. My head thudded against the wooden door, and a black galaxy opened before my eyes. For a second I was nowhere . . . and then in the space of a single blink I was back, just in time to see the boar topple to the floor.

I didn’t wait for it to get up. The pistol lay near the door, and I grabbed it with my bloody hand. Tittering laughter rose behind me, and I didn’t have to turn around to know the dead station agent was rising again. But I’d already heard enough words from that thing’s mouth, and I didn’t want to hear any more.

A rattling shove, and I slid open the warehouse door.

Outside, the air was thick with the stink of gunpowder.

Russell’s shotgun boomed in the darkness, but my relief at seeing him alive didn’t even last a second.

Bound up in the Winchester’s echo was the unearthly baying of a gigantic hound.

The jade statue didn’t do the monster justice. Nothing could have. Its clawed feet set coal shards burning as it came down the tracks. But faster than the demon came the darkness, sweeping past the monster like a scalding wave, cascading through the tunnel of pine, filling it, and the demon’s eyes boiled in its narrow skull as it was overtaken by a night so black it might have been torn from a patch of universe beyond the farthest star.

Just ahead of the monster, my brother stood his ground. The demon paused only a moment, then reared as it closed on Russell. Its great wings spread, slicing a gap in the nightwave, and its claws drew wide as if ready to tear that piece of earth from the womb of the world along with the man who’d claimed it.

Russ fired the shotgun into the gap between those enormous claws. Again and again, as the monster’s talons raked the darkness. Blood sprayed from my brother’s chest as he was slammed backward. But the Winchester was still in his grasp, and another blast of 00 buckshot splattered the night.

Severed muscles gushed blood. The demon’s shoulder was skinned to bone and gory socket, and it howled as the next blast took half its face away. That sound couldn’t be described with words, but it didn’t defy understanding. Not if you had a something like it locked up in your own guts . . . not if you recognized the doomed tenor of it as my brother did, even with his own life draining away. Russ tossed aside the empty shotgun and struggled to his feet. The demon kept on coming, but blood no longer pulsed from its wounds. Now howls and screams erupted from each buckshot trench, as if every soul the beast had devoured was at long last free of the flesh prison housed within the demon’s body.

The sound became a roar . . . a hellish cacophony that shook the earth and blasted glass from the train station windows. And Russ screamed as the demon closed over him . . . screamed those horrible words he’d kept locked inside for so long, the gutter sacrament that had doomed him from the time he first spoke it. But now his words were black taunts meant to challenge his tormentor, and soon those words became a howl of his own, slicing through the night like a scythe.

I ran toward my brother, the .38 in my hand. Russ had drawn the Nahkampfmesser from its scabbard and was grappling with the demon, the German knife driving through scaled flesh as the creature’s great hands closed around his ribs. I was running fast, faster than I ever had. And then that black wave hit me . . . but it wasn’t anything as ephemeral as the night. In a moment I was twisting upward in a flock of gigantic bats, and their wings caught me and raised me into the pines in a boiling whirl, and the howls I’d heard from Russ and the monster and all those tortured souls were lost in the chittering screams of a thousand winged nightmares.

The whole world seemed to spin in that black whirlpool. My hands clawed out, fighting for purchase. As I tumbled through the darkness my fingers brushed the station agent’s ravaged face. Pages of the letter whipped by along with the bloodstained box that had held it, and as the demon storm churned on I glimpsed the monster’s boiling eye in the distance, much dimmer now. Tattered flesh flapped over it like a broken coffin lid. And Russell was there, too — just for a moment, like dead Ahab riding the whale . . . and then he was gone.

I dropped from the black twister’s winged embrace. Pain exploded in my ribs as I slammed down on steel rails. The night spilled past me, twisting into the pine tunnel. I watched it go. Bones cracked against pine boughs as the darkness spun into the forest, and dead wings were carved and torn by swirling eddies of broken window-glass, and gravel waves pounded all until there was nothing left but a final wisp of empty night.

Then came silence. And there I was — down on my knees, shivering against those cold steel railroad tracks. Everything was gone . . . everything except the thing locked in my grasp. At first I thought I’d managed to hold on to the .38 as I rode the whirlwind, but when I raised my hand I found it wasn’t a gun that waited there . . . not at all.

No. The thing that filled my hand was a jade statue.

I threw it into the trees, and I ran.

I must have followed the railroad tracks, because somewhere along the line I jumped a freight and headed east in a livestock car. The train rattled over Emigrant Gap in the dead of night. Nothing in the car but shadows and a howling wind that sliced the low-hanging clouds, whipping white ghosts through wooden slats as the car traveled over snow-capped mountains.

Or so it seemed to me. Except for wind and shadows and those wisps of cloud, the rail car was empty. The railroad didn’t ship livestock over the Gap once fall delivered the first heavy snow. Try that, and the company would have ended up with a few tons of frozen meat. And maybe that’s how I should have ended up, just a couple hundred pounds of not-so-prime cut ready for God’s own butcher shop.

But it didn’t work out that way.

I was still alive when the train made it over the mountains. At least, that’s what they told me on the other side.

They sliced off three frostbitten toes at the indigent ward in Reno’s main hospital. Stitched up my hand, took care of my other wounds, too. After a few weeks I got around okay. One of the nurses helped me find a job, and I worked in a casino restaurant for a couple months. When I got a little stronger, I landed a gig loading freight for a trucking company. It was a lucky break — the guy who owned the business was a casino regular.

Anyway, the business wasn’t always straight up. Some nights the dispatcher would call a bunch of us down to the warehouse and we’d unload a truck of bootleg liquor. The boss must have liked the fact that I didn’t nip bottles or run off at the mouth, because it wasn’t long before he made me a driver. In those days that was like catching the brass ring. For me, it didn’t matter. The way I saw it there was no brass ring. There was just one day, and the next, and the one after that.

But what mattered most were the days that had come before. That’s where my mind wandered, and returned. To a leaky migrant tent, where my brother’s cough echoed like the spinning tumblers of a locked safe. To a dead man’s house, and a broken mirror I stared into morning after morning. To a stolen Nash, where my brother and I found a map with our destination circled in red and a Winchester shotgun that could bring down a demon.

Those memories held plenty of questions, but answers were in short supply. If Russ had any, he didn’t share them with me before he died. And now that he was past sharing . . . well, I got to thinking that maybe it had always been that way with Russ.

Even so, I still saw my brother in my dreams. Just in flashes, like a choppy silent movie. Russ in uniform, digging trenches, a blood-stained spade in his big hands as he unearthed something buried centuries before . . . German flares blooming in the night sky . . . that green idol gleaming in soil that squirmed with gut-colored worms . . . a demon freed from the catacombs of an underground temple, stalking through mustard gas clouds . . . a German soldier’s corpse clenched between the monster’s teeth, two more dead men locked in its clawed hands . . .

Those dreams formed a story, but I had no idea if it were true. It hardly mattered. When I woke up in the morning my memories were waiting for me, and they didn’t add up nearly so easily. My mind was a haunted house. That black dog of a wind still blew outside its walls, and there was a broken mirror in every sink. A stolen car parked in the driveway would take me exactly where it wanted and nowhere else. But the truth was that I couldn’t leave that house. I walked its corridors until I knew every step, even the ones that only led to locked doors.

There were plenty of those, and I didn’t have to look very hard to find them. But I did look for answers in other places. We had a pile of maps at the trucking office, and I discovered that there wasn’t a town anywhere in California named New Anvik. I checked with the railroad, and there wasn’t a train station by that name, either. And that Massachusetts University, the one that had shipped the jade idol to a man in Auburn? A trip to the public library told me there wasn’t a university by that name anywhere in the world.

But none of that mattered. A week after my library visit, a package from that university showed up on my doorstep. And yes — it was addressed to me.

I brought the box inside my apartment, but I didn’t dare open it. I was supposed to pick up a load of hooch just north of San Francisco that night. Instead, I called in sick. Then I drove into the woods above Donner Lake and heaved the package off a rocky crag. On the way back to Reno I thought about buying a pistol and blowing a hole in my brain. If that box had been waiting on the front porch when I got home, I would have done it. But I never saw it again.

A few months passed. I tried to keep busy. I took every job the trucking company offered, especially the bootleg runs that paid top dollar. When that haunted house started calling, I’d try to distract myself with a stack of novels from the library. If that failed I’d hit the tables at one of the casinos downtown, and I’d keep my mind on the cards.

That’s how I ran into the nurse from the indigent ward, the one who’d helped me land that restaurant job. Emma was out with a couple girlfriends playing blackjack, and we started talking across the table. The cards were falling my way. After a while I cashed in my chips for a stack of greenbacks, and I took Emma and her friends out for steak and pre-war champagne at a joint on Douglas Alley that didn’t care about Prohibition.

It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d ever done. I’m not sure why I did it. But at the end of the night, Emma gave me her phone number. I said I’d call her, but a week passed and I couldn’t pick up the phone. I knew why, of course. The short version was that steak and champagne didn’t really change anything . . . and the longer version was all the stuff locked up in that haunted house.

But for the first time I thought that maybe I didn’t want to look for the key to that house anymore. Maybe what I needed to do was leave it alone. I didn’t know if my brother had ever felt that way, but then again I wasn’t Russ. What we’d shared we’d always share, alive or dead, just as we’d always be brothers. But maybe the time had come for me to stop being my dead brother’s keeper, and the keeper of his ghosts.

I was just about to dial Emma’s number when the company dispatcher called and offered me a midnight run to Grass Valley. It was a straight freight deal, no bootleg, but I needed the money after blowing that blackjack bankroll. And I needed time to think, too.

An hour later I was driving through the mountains. Snow was falling. It was quiet. Not like it is when hail or sleet pounds your windshield, and you get the feeling that the universe is firing ball bearings at you from the darkness. No. This was the opposite of that. It was as if nothing was falling through the night . . . as if nothing was filling everything up.

I liked that idea. As I drove west, it seemed as if that white nothing could wipe the whole world away. It felt like starting over . . . or maybe more than that. I pulled over and watched the snow drift down, sipping coffee from my thermos. Then I climbed down from the cab and followed a path that twisted through the pines.

It was cold, but there wasn’t a breath of wind. The snow fell through the narrow gap above the trail and between the trees, powdering the ground . . . the branches . . . everything. Even me. I wanted that white silence to stretch behind me and before me like a blank page. I stopped and felt it on my skin, breathed it into my lungs, held it there. And then I closed my eyes and imagined snow falling on the rooftop of that haunted house inside me.

The snow drifted before my mind’s eye — heavier, and heavier still — smothering the eaves, burying the whole place in silence . . . burying everything so very deep. And when I opened my eyes it stood before me, waiting there in a clearing. A house dusted in white, with an open door. The house was made of flesh and bone, and the bone gleamed brighter than any snow. The open doorway was a red patch, the door itself like a scarred slab of skin meant to cover an empty eye socket.

My brother stood in that red doorway, a shotgun in his hands. Russell’s face was smeared with blood, but he smiled when he saw me.

And then he howled.