Strand licked his lips. “Meat. She wanted meat. She wanted salt. Missy said not to give her none, but I did. I had a joint of beef, raw and bloody, and I gave it to her. I dumped salt all over it. She chewed it right down to the bone…just gnawing and chomping on it, then licking it. When I tried to take it away from her, she snarled at me, she hissed and there was something in her eyes, something evil, Sheriff. It hadn’t been there before. Something black and godless and…and hungry.”
Strand said she went down in the root cellar with her bone and he could hear her down there nibbling on it. He ran out of the house and did not come back until the next night, which was last night. Eileen must have come home and found Mama Lucille…and Mama Lucille found Eileen.
“ Oh dear God, Sheriff,” Strand said, barely able to catch his breath. “I came home and right away I could smell it…that bloody, raw smell like you get around butchering time. I found mama with Eileen. She had bitten most of the meat off her face and eaten her fingers. She was chewing on her leg when I got there.”
“ What did you do?”
“ I hid in the corn patch all night,” Strand said. “I thought she would come after me, too. Then I got on my horse and I rode off. I was heading out of Boone County and never coming back. Then a couple hours ago, I thought I better come and see you.”
Bolan thought it over for a long time. Then he stood up and strapped on his Army. 44s. “All right, we better go take care of this, son. Ain’t no one but us that can.”
*
Missy Crow was sitting on her porch when they rode up. “I warned ye, Luke Strand. Did I not warn ye, boy, what ye were bringing onto yerself by calling up the dead? Oh, I knowed, God, how I knowed! I knewed ye wouldn’t listen! I knewed ye’d feed her the salt and the meat!”
Bolan dismounted his dappled mare, tying her off at the hitch post. “Then you know, don’t you, you old hag? You know what you’ve brought to being here? What terrible things you’ve set into motion?”
The straw-witch pulled off her ash pipe, grinning like a stuffed ape. “It’s not what I set into motion, Sheriff. It was that fool there! He’s the one! His mind and his hands and his heart! I was not the fire that burned down his house and damned his soul!”
“But you struck the match, you old witch,” Bolan told her, trying desperately to keep his hands from his guns.
Strand was beyond fear now, beyond retribution. He was just pale and small and lifeless. “She were not human, Missy Crow. She killed my wife…she et her…”
The straw-witch laughed with a booming, unpleasant sound like thudding from inside a buried box. “Ye gave her the salt? Ye gave her the meat? I cain’t help ye now, boy, ye brought this on yerself! She were a dead, mindless thing before, but now she’s something else! There’s things out there, boy, hungry and evil things that were never meant to be born…but now ye have birthed one and it’s in yer mama, hear? A scratching, hungry pestilence! Ye have to bury her deep in a chained box! Let her go back to death, let her feed on herself, starve until there’s nothing left but bones!”
Bolan had pulled one of his. 44s now. “I should put you down right now, you goddamn hag.”
“Yes, maybe ye should, Sheriff. But ye won’t. No sir, ye won’t. It’s not in ye to kill an old woman even if she be the devil’s own.” Missy Crow leaned forward in her rocker, her eyes blazing and sulfurous. “Hear me well, Sheriff Bolan. Ye might be thinking of mayhap riding up here with a posse tonight or tomorrow to burn me out. But ye better think on that careful. I know yer wife is with child. Didn’t know that, eh? Well, she is, boy, she certainly is. I knowed what’s growing in her now and I also knowed what could be growing in her if I make it so! Something with teeth that would bite her from inside. Now ye don’t want that, do ye?”
Bolan was taken aback, but not for long. “Listen to me, you hag. You’ve existed in this county because I’m a tolerant man. Now I give you fair warning: get out. Get out of my county before that posse does come, you hear me?”
Missy Crow just nodded. “I hear, Sheriff. I hear just fine.”
*
It was sundown by the time they reached the Strand farm.
And just riding up there, Bolan could feel something like fingers unfurling in his belly, white and cold and clutching. If there had been doubts seeded in his brain, looking for soil to spread their roots, they were gone now. There was something spiritually defiled about the farmhouse, a palpable sense of rottenness that was not sensed with only the nose. It crawled and coiled like it was looking for a throat to wrap itself around.
The wind rustled the corn and the branches of a dead cottonwood tree scraped together overhead like knifeblades.
Lighting a coal-oil lamp, Strand said, “She’s in there, Sheriff.”
“Maybe you better wait out here.”
But Strand shook his head. “Missy Crow’s right: I am to blame. I have to see this through.”
He was so completely calm about it all it was disturbing. Bolan wondered if there was a limit to what the human mind could suffer before the cogs of horror were worn smooth and there was only acceptance…indifferent, long-suffering acceptance.
Stepping up onto the porch and pushing the door open with the barrel of one of his. 44s, he could smell that tomblike, violated atmosphere just fine. It was not just a stink of decay and organic corruption, it was something far worse. It was the odor of black earth and mildew, of bone piles and spoiled meat and creeping vermin, but something else too. Just a fathomless black stench of darkness beyond mere darkness, the smell of buried graves and crumbling pine boxes, the oily blood of deep rank earth dripping and running and settling into the mold of ages.
Bolan sucked in a breath, that smell repulsive to not only his belly but his brain. He wanted to vomit, then scream. Maybe both at the same time. The shadows were thick and oddly bunched, slithering and heavy and aware. The air was grainy, it seemed, hard to breathe and Bolan knew it was the air of crypts sealed for decades and centuries. The air the dead breathed, suffocating and damp.
There was blood in the hallway.
Oh, just buckets of it sprayed and smeared and splashed around like a pig had been gutted and drained in there. Bits of meat and tissue and hair were stuck in it. It had dried now to a sticky film like a membrane of cooling molasses, but the stink of it was all-too recent: raw and savage and coppery.
Strand was breathing very hard and it took everything he had to continue on.
The trail of gore led to the cellar door.
It was standing open, bloody handprints all over its panels like some kid had gotten into the red paint. The steps leading down into that hot, seething charnel darkness were stained with more blood and scraps of flesh. A few white, gleaming bones that might have been from fingers. In the orange, flickering glow of the lamp, Bolan saw a single, fine hand laying on the fifth step down. The light gleamed off of Eileen Strand’s wedding band.
“Listen,” Bolan said.
Yes, he was hearing something now. A wet, tearing sound and maybe it was just in his head, but he did not think so. It was the sound of a bear gnawing on a meaty bone in the darkness of a cave. A nibbling and sucking sound.
When they got to the bottom of the steps, they saw the wreckage of Strand’s wife. The scattered bones carefully suctioned of meat. The husk of her trunk emptied of its dripping goodies. Her head smashed open, brains licked out, eyes plucked free like candied cherries. Her bowels were looped around the uprights of the stair handrail, chewed and slit and then carefully, expertly woven through those posts like Christmas garland.
“Show yourself,” Bolan said.
And then she did.
Or something did.
Mama Lucille was a wraith. A wraith that had bathed in blood, swam in rivers of it. She was filthy and ragged and rotting, her burial dress and her gray flesh hanging in tatters and strips so it was hard to say where one began and the other ended. As she lumbered forward, you could see the rungs of her ribs jutting forth. Her face was gray and puckered and infested with worms-they boiled in her left eye socket and squirmed from the innumerable holes in her face and fell from her mouth. Flies buzzed in her hair and from deep inside her belly. Her teeth chattered and her stick-like fingers sought meat to pull from bones, that one good eye gleaming a wet, translucent yellow.