“Could not wait, could you?” Jebidiah said. “Too impatient.”
The King Wolf’s ears flicked, its tongue came out of its mouth and licked at the air and lapped across its own snout.
“You are not tasting me yet,” Jebidiah said.
And then the King Wolf bent forward and came down on its front paws in a dive, came down the stairs at a run. Jebidiah’s pistols barked, once each, and then the King Wolf hit him and he went tumbling backwards, step by step, landing at the base of the stairs.
He looked up. Smoke was twisting out of the King Wolf’s body where the bullets had struck and it seemed frozen on the stairs, and he could see the creature better. It was unlike the others. Not only bigger, but there was a peculiar countenance about the horror that made Jebidiah feel as if he were in the presence of Satan himself.
And unlike the others, the bullets had done damage, but the King Wolf had been able to take it. Jebidiah got to his feet in a kind of shuffle, backed toward the door, the pistols held before him, his back aching, his side on fire. So far he had fallen out of a window and been knocked down a flight of stairs and he could still walk, so he felt he was doing well enough. And he hadn’t even added in the werewolves.
When he was in the street, the doorway of the Gentleman’s Hotel filled with the King Wolf’s shape. It stood on its hind legs and its cock and balls swung about when it moved as if they were a clockwork mechanism. It bent its head to accommodate the doorway and moved out into the street, its teeth dripped saliva in thick strings.
“Guess it’s you and me, Mr. Wolf. I know your boss. Both of them. One high, one low. I have not got such a great opinion of either.”
The King Wolf charged off the hotel porch and into the street on its hind legs. Jebidiah fired with his revolvers, two shots, and though the shots had effect, they didn’t stop the beast.
Jebidiah bolted and ran. He felt pain in every muscle, but fear of what was about to happen was stronger than pain. He ran. He ran fast. He was nearly to the overturned stagecoach when he looked back to find that the King Wolf was loping along rapidly, closing the gap. He could feel its burning breath on the back of his neck.
Jebidiah jumped up on the stage, dove through the open side window, dropped down inside. The King Wolf’s face dunked into the open space and it let out with a wild howl that shook Jebidiah’s already tormented insides.
Jebidiah let loose with both revolvers. Firing twice.
The King Wolf jerked back. Jebidiah quickly began to reload. He had three bullets in one revolver when the thing showed itself again. Jebidiah fired a shot that hit the King Wolf solid in the forehead, made a hole and smoke twisted up from the hole, but the beast took the shot and didn’t pull back. It stuck an arm through, caught Jebidiah by the ankle, jerked him up and out of the stage window, banging his head and causing him to drop one of his revolvers as he was pulled free.
The King Wolf held Jebidiah high above the ground with one hand, its face easing closer toward him. Slowly. Making the triumphant moment last. The King Wolf’s mouth opened wide.
Jebidiah jerked up the loaded revolver he still clutched in his fists, and fired his last shots straight into the King Wolf’s open mouth.
The King Wolf snapped its mouth shut. Smoke came out of its nostrils. It stepped back a step. It opened its mouth so wide Jebidiah could hear the bones in its jaws pop. And then the King Wolf dropped Jebidiah on his head. The Reverend rolled and came up with the empty revolver. He supported himself on one knee, began reloading, glad he still had some wax and wood shaving shells left, not happy that it seemed to be taking him forever to fumble the bullets into the gun. He glanced up fearfully as he loaded. The King Wolf was stepping backwards, slowly. Then it paused, its head tilted...and fell off, splatting heavily into the street, rolling over and over, losing hair, showing nothing but a skull, white as purity.
The rest of the torso fell over.
Finally, thought Jebidiah, the accumulated bullets, the shavings, had done their duty.
The great cold shadow rose out of the ground and filled the street. Jebidiah stood. The shadow rose thick and to the height of his neck, then the shadow fled, and with its passing came a cool wind, and when the wind was gone, there was nothing in the street, not even the shadow, which was melting into the tree line at the far end of the town.
The King Wolf was gone. There was only a twist of fur flying by. It clung to his cheek for a moment, then was blown away.
Out of the hotel came the white wraiths that had hidden there, among them the more solid Dol. All of the spirits rose up toward the sky, toward the stars, gathered into a fluffy, white formation that fled upward to join the Milky Way. In a moment they were all gone and the stars in the sky winked out like snuffed candles. The sun rose as if out of the ground and took a position at high noon immediately. The sky turned blue. White clouds boiled across it quickly, and then stopped, looking like mounds of mashed potatoes on a shiny blue, china plate.
Jebidiah turned his head toward a sound.
Birds chirped in a tree on the edge of the north end of the street. Brightly colored birds so thick that at first Jebidiah thought they were fall leaves gone red and yellow and blue and golden. The birds made a sudden burst to the sky, as if confetti had been tossed, and the sunlight behind them made them look strange and otherworldly.
In the hotel room Jebidiah found Mary. She lay on the floor. She had the rifle under her chin. She had managed to pull the trigger, shooting herself. He could see why. She had been bit all over. Maybe she had been in time.
He took her body out to the street, then brought the mattress out. He broke up chairs from the hotel and made a bonfire and got it started and put the mattress on that, put Mary’s body on top of the mattress. He leaned against the stagecoach and watched her burn. When there was nothing left, he went up the hill to the trees where Dol had said the graveyard was. He saw it and walked among it, went up the hill and into the deeper trees where he found gutted graves. The wolves’ graves. He used his pocket knife to shave off pieces of oak, and he made crosses from them, tying them together with strips of cloth from his shirt. One cross for each grave. Just in case. He tore pages out of his Bible and put those in the graves with them. Another just in case.
He went back to the hotel and got his saddle and saddlebags off of his dead horse, threw them over his shoulder, went out into the street and started walking south.
A crow followed, flying just above him, casting a shadow.
CHAPTER 1
WOOD TICK
WOOD TICK wasn’t so much a town as it was a wide rip in the forest. The Reverend Jebidiah Mercer rode in on an ebony horse on a coolish autumn day beneath an overcast sky of humped up, slow-blowing, gun-metal-gray clouds; they seemed to crawl. It was his experience nothing good ever took place under a crawling sky. It was an omen, and he didn’t like omens, because, so far in his experience, none of them were good.
Before him, he saw a sad excuse for a town: a narrow clay road and a few buildings, not so much built up as tossed up, six altogether, three of them leaning south from northern winds that had pushed them. One of them had had a fireplace of stone, but it had toppled, and no one had bothered to rebuild it. The stones lay scattered about like discarded cartridges. Grass, yellowed by time, had grown up through the stones, and even a small tree had sprouted between them. Where the fall of the fireplace had left a gap was a stretch of fabric, probably a slice of tent; it had been nailed up tight and it had turned dark from years of weather.
In the middle of the town there was a wagon with wooden bars set into it and a flat heavy roof. No horses. Its axle rested on the ground, giving the wagon a tilt. Inside, leaning, the Reverend could see a man clutching at the bars, cursing as a half dozen young boys who looked likely to grow up to be ugly men were throwing rocks at him. An old man was sitting on the precarious porch of one of the leaning buildings, whittling on a stick. A few other folks moved about, crossing the street with the enthusiasm of the ill, givin
g no mind to the boys or the man in the barred wagon.
Reverend Mercer got off his horse and walked it to a hitching post in front of the sagging porch and looked at the man who was whittling. The man had a goiter on the side of his neck and he had tied it off in a dirty sack that fastened under his jaw and to the top of his head under his hat. The hat was wide and dropped a shadow on his face. The face needed concealment. He had the kind of features that made you wince; one thing God could do was he could sure make ugly.
“Sir, may I ask you something?” the Reverend said to the whittling man.
“I reckon.”
“Why is that man in that cage?”
“That there is Wood Tick’s jail. All we got. We been meaning to build one, but we don’t have that much need for it. Folks do anything really wrong, we hang ’em.”
“What did he do?”
“He’s just half-witted.”
“That’s a crime?”
“If we want it to be. He’s always talkin’ this and that, and it gets old. He used to be all right, but he ain’t now. We don’t know what ails him. He’s got stories about haints and his wife done run off and he claims a haint got her.”
“Haints?”
“That’s right.”
Reverend Mercer turned his head toward the cage and the boys tossing rocks. They were flinging them in good and hard, and pretty accurate.
“Having rocks thrown at him cannot be productive,” the Reverend said.
“Well, if God didn’t want him half-witted and the target of rocks, he’d have made him smarter and less directed to bullshit.”
“I am a man of God and I have to agree with you. God’s plan doesn’t seem to have a lot of sympathy in it. But humanity can do better. We could at least save this poor man from children throwing rocks.”
“Sheriff doesn’t think so.”
“And who is the sheriff?”
“That would be me. You ain’t gonna give me trouble are you?”
“I just think a man should not be put behind bars and have rocks thrown at him for being half-witted.”
“Yeah, well, you can take him with you, long as you don’t bring him back. Take him with you and I’ll let him out.”
The Reverend nodded. “I can do that. But I need something to eat first. Any place for that?”
“You can go over to Miss Mary’s, which is a house about a mile down from the town, and you can hire her to fix you somethin’. But you better have a strong stomach.”
“Not much of a recommendation.”
“No, it’s not. I reckon I could fry you up some meat for a bit of coin, you ready to let go of it.”
“I have money.”
“Good. I don’t. I got some horse meat I can fix. It’s just on this side of being good enough to eat. Another hour, you might get poisoned by it.”
“Appetizing as that sounds, perhaps I should see Miss Mary.”
“She fixes soups from roots and wild plants and such. No matter what she fixes, it all tastes the same and it gives you the squirts. She ain’t much to look at neither, but she sells herself out, you want to buy some of that.”
“No. I am good. I will take the horse meat, long as I can watch you fry it.”
“All right. I’m just about through whittling.”
“Are you making something?”
“No. Just whittlin’.”
“So, what is there to get through with?”
“Why, my pleasure, of course. I enjoy my whittlin’.”
The old man, who gave the Reverend his name as if he had given up a dark secret, was called Jud. Up close, Jud was even nastier looking than from the distance of the hitching post and the porch. He had pores wide enough and deep enough in his skin to keep pooled water and his nose had been broken so many times it moved from side to side when he talked. He was missing a lot of teeth, and what he had were brown from tobacco and rot. His hands were dirty and his fingers were dirtier yet, and the Reverend couldn’t help but wonder what those fingers had poked into.
Inside, the place leaned and there were missing floorboards. A wooden stove was at the far end of the room, and a stovepipe wound out of it and went up through a gap in the roof that would let in rain, and had, because the stove was partially rusted. It rested heavy on the worn flooring. The floor sagged and it seemed to the Reverend that if it experienced one more rotted fiber, one more termite bite, the stove would crash through. Hanging on hooks on the wall were slabs of horsemeat covered in flies. Some of the meat looked a little green and there was a slick of mold over a lot of it.
“That the meat you’re talkin’ about?”
“Yep,” Jud said, scratching at his filthy goiter sack.
“It looks pretty green.”
“I said it was turnin’. Want it or not?”
“Might I cook it myself?”
“Still have to pay me.”
“How much?”
“Two bits.”
“Two bits for rancid meat I cook myself.”
“It’s still two bits if I cook it.”
“You drive quite the bargain, Jud.”
“I pride myself on my dealin’.”
“Best you do not pride yourself on hygiene.”
“What’s that? That some kind of remark?”
Reverend Mercer pushed back his long black coat and showed the butts of his twin revolvers. “Sometimes a man can learn to like things he does not on most days care to endure.”
Jud checked out the revolvers. “You got a point there, Reverend. I was thinkin’ you was just a blabber mouth for God, but you tote them pistols like a man who’s seen the elephant.”
“Seen the elephant I have. And all his children.”
The Reverend brushed the flies away from the horsemeat and found a bit of it that looked better than the rest, used his pocket knife to cut it loose. He picked insects out of a greasy pan and put the meat in it. He put some wood in the stove and lit it and got a fire going. In a short time the meat was frying. He decided to cook it long and cook it through, burn it a bit. That way maybe he wouldn’t die of stomach poisoning.
“You have anything else that might sweeten this deal?” the Reverend asked.
“It’s the horse meat or nothin’.”
“And in what commerce will you deal when it turns rancid, or runs out?”
“I’ve got a couple more old horses, and one old mule. Somebody will have to go.”
“Have you considered a garden?”
“My hand wasn’t meant to fit a hoe. It gets desperate, I’ll shoot a squirrel or a possum or a coon or some such. Dog ain’t bad you cook ’em good.”
“How many people reside in this town?”
“About forty, forty-one if you count Norville out there in the box. But, way things look, considerin’ our deal, he’ll be leavin’. ’Sides, he don’t live here direct anyway.”
“That number count the kids?”
“Yeah, they all belong to Mary. They’re thirteen and on down to six years. Drops them like turds and don’t know for sure who’s the daddy, though there’s one of them out there that looks a mite like me.”
“Bless his heart,” the Reverend said.
“Yeah, reckon that’s the truth. Couple of ’em have died over the years. One got kicked in the head by a horse and the other one got caught up in the river and drowned. Stupid little bastard should have learned to swim. There was an older girl, but she took up with Norville out there, and now she’s run off from him.”
When the meat was as black as a pit and smoking like a rich man’s cigar, Reverend Mercer discovered there were no plates, and he ate it from the frying pan, using his knife as a utensil. It was a rugged piece of meat to wrestle and it tasted like the ass end of a skunk. He ate just enough to knock the corners off his hunger, then gave it up.
Jud asked if he were through with it, and when the Reverend said he was, he came over, picked up the leavings with his hands and tore at it like a wolf.
“Hell, this is all right
,” Jud said. “I need you on as a cook.”
“Not likely. How do people make a living around here?”
“Lumber. Cut it and mule it out. That’s a thing about East Texas, plenty of lumber.”
“Someday there will be a lot less, that is my reasoning.”
“It all grows back.”
“People grow back faster, and we could do with a lot less of them.”
“On that matter, Reverend, I agree with you.”
When the Reverend went outside with Jud to let Norville loose, the kids were still throwing rocks. The Reverend picked up a rock and winged it through the air and caught one of the kids on the side of the head hard enough to knock him down.
“Damn,” Jud said. “That there was a kid.”
“Now he’s a kid with a knot on his head.”
“You’re a different kind of Reverend.”
The kid got up and ran, holding his hand to his head, squealing.
“Keep going you horrible little bastard,” Reverend Mercer said. When the kid was gone, the Reverend said, “Actually, I was aiming to hit him in the back, but that worked out quite well.”
They walked over to the cage. There was a metal lock and a big padlock on the thick wooden bars. Reverend Mercer had wondered why the man didn’t just kick them out, but then he saw the reason. He was chained to the floor of the wagon. The chain fit into a big metal loop there, and then went to his ankle where a bracelet of iron held him fast. Norville had a lot of lumps on his head and his bottom lip was swollen up and he was bleeding all over.
“This is no way to treat a man,” Reverend Mercer said.
“He could have been a few rocks shy of a dozen knots, you hadn’t stopped to cook and eat a steak.”
“True enough,” the Reverend said.
CHAPTER 2
NORVILLE’S STORY: THE HOUSE IN THE PINES
The sheriff unlocked the cage and went inside and unlocked the clamp around Norville’s ankle. Norville, barefoot, came out of the cage and walked around and looked at the sky, stretching his back as he did. Jud sauntered over to the long porch and reached under it and pulled out some old boots. He gave them to Norville. Norville pulled them on, then came around the side of the cage and studied the Reverend.