Bloody Mary is still. Absolutely. Like something dead. On top of him, bent over him, unseen but undeniable. She doesn’t move an inch, and neither does he.
“Lesson Two,” she says. “Never let your guard down.”
The gun barrel slides from the boy’s mouth.
By the time he catches his breath, Bloody Mary is gone.
The boy swallows, and he tastes blood.
It begins that morning. First, the chainsaw. Then, the sawed-off shotgun. Neither comes easy to the boy. But he keeps at it — that day, and the next, and the one after that… and into the next week. Soon he doesn’t look so much like a scarecrow dancing with a hurricane when he works with either tool.
That’s what Bloody Mary calls them: tools. She has others, and the boy learns about them. They are smaller, and the boy likes them better. A hatchet. A combat knife. A revolver.
At night, they sit in the house. Sometimes they talk, but not about the things the boy wants to know. There are many things he wants to ask Bloody Mary. He wants to ask about the mask she wears. He wants to know who she was before, and how she came to be the person she is. These are the things that used to matter before 10/31, the things people called secrets. But as he watches and learns, he begins to think that maybe secrets aren’t really that important anymore. Because whoever Bloody Mary is now, she is not the person she once was. Anyone can see that much is true. Anyone who heard her name would understand.
And there are other things that matter to the boy, anyway. The things Bloody Mary teaches him. And a million little things that wouldn’t seem to matter to anyone at all. The hiss of the propane lantern at night. The rustle of her black skirt against her legs, and the cadence of her boots on the hardwood floors. The open window beyond the dining room, and the things that might be lurking on the other side of it… or might not. The smell of the mint tea Bloody Mary brews, a foraging prize with mingled scents of peppermint, lemon grass, and spearmint. The shotgun, positioned just so for an easy grab. The cat — comfortable now with both of them — curled next to the Frisbee plate on the floor. The boy calls the cat Blackie; Bloody Mary calls it Spike. The cat doesn’t pay much attention, unless either word is followed by the vacuum pop of a cat-food can.
And so the nights become a kind of routine, almost comfortable in the wake of the day’s lessons. As always, there are never many words between them. So as the night stretches on, the boy reads his familiar books and magazines, only now he does not read them by the glow of a flashlight. Bloody Mary works the cyclops tusk with a long thin knife, paring… notching and excavating… carving. One night she tells the boy about the art of scrimshaw, and whalers from the days of old, and the bones and teeth and tusks of creatures once thought to be monsters. That same night she finishes embellishing the tusk and sets it on the table.
Immediately, the boy recognizes the chainsaw etched on the side. “Life imitates art,” Bloody Mary says. “Sometimes. And sometimes life runs in circles. And there are monsters everywhere — for everyone, for everything, for every time and place. Those aren’t lessons, but I do believe they’re things that are true. Sometimes.”
Bloody Mary spins the tusk on the table, and when it stops the killing point is aimed at the boy. He sips his tea, considering her words. The hiss of the propane lantern seems louder in the silence. He stares at the tusk, at the etched chainsaw waiting there. He can almost hear it growl. He takes another sip of tea. All of a sudden, he’s sleepy. Too sleepy. He rises and tries to take a step, but it’s as if he left his legs behind him on the chair.
The boy topples and goes down hard.
Bloody Mary stands over him. He hears the dull rattle of a pill bottle in her hand.
“Lesson Three,” she says. “Never trust anyone.”
Then she gets out the handcuffs.
The boy doesn’t know if it’s the thunder that wakes him or the rain, but there’s plenty enough of both to go around. Lightning flashes fill the sky, bathing the pasture before him in harsh white light. Has to be he’s a good piece out of town. Grass and mud stretch to an indistinct treeline, and between him and that there are only sheets of rain.
Walls actually, for it’s coming down even harder now. The boy shakes his head, clearing the cobwebs, waiting for another lightning strike. A peal of thunder… boom… and then a hard slash of crackling white splits the sky like a hammer-strike on black glass. And in that moment he spots Bloody Mary’s wheelbarrow, twenty feet away, near a clutch of old oaks. But there’s no sign of Bloody Mary, and the wheelbarrow is empty.
The boy starts to stand and feels a pull against his wrist. Another flash of lighting and he sees he’s handcuffed to a post, the empty handcuff locked around an old eyebolt screwed into rotting wood. Probably used to chain a bull here, he thinks. And then, just a little dizzily: Bulls must have seemed like monsters, once… Once upon a time…
He doesn’t know why he thinks that. He doesn’t know why Bloody Mary drugged him, or locked him to a post, or why the wheelbarrow is sitting twenty feet away as empty as a broken promise. He only knows that the crawlspace scavenger who lives down in his gut doesn’t like to be exposed this way. Before he learned to use the tools, being trapped in the open was his greatest terror, and now that push has come to shove it doesn’t seem like that has changed.
So his first impulse is to run. He jerks against the eyebolt, but it holds firm. Must be the rotted post is not so rotten. But he has not been trained to give up easily. He jerks against it again and—
A pool of light starts to spread behind him, somewhere over his shoulder. Not white light, like the lightning; this light is orange. Ten feet away, in the mud by a leaning barbed-wire fence, the glow grows brighter, spilling across the muddy pasture. The boy turns to face it, and he finds something waiting — something with triangular eyes and razor-cut teeth.
A Jack. Its eyes flare as it spots the boy, and orange beams cut through the black night and the rain and shine directly on him. Panic knots the boy’s chest — just for a moment — and Bloody Mary’s words mock him in memory: “You think that something would care about you? Specifically? Something smart… something that’s actually in control?”
The Jack starts to scream. And now the boy’s anger rises, because the sound tells him that something does care… something dangerous. He yanks against the cuffs again, and the short chain makes a sick little clicking sound that isn’t even a rattle. Metal slices his wrist as he yanks one more time, and harder, but the eyebolt doesn’t budge and neither does the old post. Then another lightning flash explodes above him, and he spots something in the mud at his feet.
Bloody Mary’s revolver.
Just as he bends to snatch it up, two sounds rise beneath the storm.
The screech of a bat… and a goblin’s cackle.
The boy’s head jerks up. The screaming Jack is in full hellfire blaze now, and he doesn’t need lightning to see the things riding toward him in the night sky. They’re coming for him. Goblins mounted on bats, black reins in their clawed hands and bits jammed into the bat’s fanged maws.
A grin creases the reptilian face of the goblin riding point, and his fanged teeth part like a rat-trap. He roars a command, one-handing the reins, jerking them taut. His mount’s wings dip, and the great bat dives, and as another bolt of lightning rips the night the goblin sets a meat-hook whirring on a long chain held tightly in his other hand.
The boy does not hesitate. He fires the revolver. No panic now; no anger. Just a conditioned response. Six shots in the cylinder, and he burns them down quickly. A head-shot blasts the goblin with the meat-hook out of the saddle, and the twisted green monster hits the ground a full second before a rain of his own skull fragments slice through the mud. The second rider makes it closer, and this time it takes two shots, but the boy kills the goblin just the same. The dead rider pulls rein with a reflexive jerk so that the giant bat piles into the barbed-wire fence, launching the goblin’s corpse into a headfirst slide that ends in the blazing glow of the Jack’s screaming smile.