Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron (65 page)

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.

(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.

“Thank you for lettin’ me out,” Norville said. “I ain’t crazy, you know. I seen what I seen and they don’t want to hear it none.”

“Cause you’re crazy,” Jud said.

“What did you see?” the Reverend asked.

“He starts talkin’ that business again, I’ll throw him back in the box,” Jud said. “Our deal was he goes with you, and I figure you’ve worn out your welcome.”

“What I’ve worn out is my stomach,” Reverend Mercer said. “That meat is backing up on me.”

“Take care of your stomach problems somewhere else, and take that crazy sonofabitch with you.”

“Does he have a horse?”

“The back of yours,” Jud said. “Best get him on it, and you two get out.”

“Norville,” the Reverend said, “Come with me.”

“I don’t mind comin’,” Norville said, walking briskly after the Reverend.

Reverend Mercer unhitched his horse and climbed into the saddle. He extended a hand for Norville, helped him slip up on the rear of the horse. Norville put his arms around Reverend Mercer’s waist. The Reverend said, “Keep the hands high or they’ll find you face down outside of town in the pine straw.”

“You stay gone, you hear?” Jud said, walking up on the porch.

“This place does not hold much charm for me, Sheriff Jud,” Reverend Mercer said. “But, just in case you should over value your position, you do not concern me in the least. It is this town that concerns me. It stinks and it is worthless and should be burned to the ground.”

“You go on now,” Jud said.

“That I will, but at my own speed.”

The Reverend rode off then, glancing back, least Jud decide to back shoot. But it was a needless concern. He saw Jud go inside the shack, perhaps to fry up some more rancid horse meat.

They rode about three miles out of town, and Reverend Mercer stopped by a stream. They got down off the horse and let it drink. While the horse quenched its thirst, the Reverend removed the animal’s saddle, then he pulled the horse away from the water least it bloat. He took some grooming items out of a saddle bag and went to work, giving the horse a good brushing and rub down.

Norville plucked a blade of grass and put it in his mouth and worked it around, found a tree to sit under, said, “I ain’t no bowl of nuts. I seen what I seen. Why did you help me anyway? For all you know I am a nut.”

“I am on a mission from God. I do not like it, but it is my mission. I’m a hunter of the dark and a giver of the light. I’m the hammer and the anvil. The bone and the sinew. The sword and the gun. God’s man who sets things right. Or at least right as God sees them. Me and him, we do not always agree. And let me tell you, he is not the God of Jesus, he is the God of David, and the angry city killers and man killers and animal killers of the Old Testament. He is constantly jealous and angry and if there is any plan to all this, I have yet to see it.”

“Actually, I was just wantin’ to know if you thought I was nuts.”

“It is my lot in life to destroy evil. There is more evil than there is me, I might add.”

“So…You think I’m a nut, or what?”

“Tell me your story.”

“If you think I’m a nut are you just gonna leave me?”

“No. I will shoot you first and leave your body…Just joking. I do not joke much, so I’m poor at it.”

The Reverend tied up the horse and they went over and sat together under the tree and drank water from the Reverend’s canteen. Norville told his story.

∇

“My daddy, after killin’ my mother over turnip soup, back in the Carolinas, hitched up the wagon and put me in my sister in it and come to Texas.”

“He killed your mother over soup?”

“Deader than a rock. Hit her upside the head with a snatch of turnips.”

“A snatch of turnips? What in the world is a snatch of turnips?”

“Bunch of them. They was on the table where she’d cut up some for soup, still had the greens one ’em. He grabbed the greens, and swung them turnips. Must have been seven or eight big ole knotty ones. Hit her upside the head and knocked her brain loose I reckon. She died that night, right there on the floor. Wouldn’t let us help her any. He said God didn’t want her to die from getting hit with turnips, he’d spare her.”

“Frankly, God is not all that merciful…You seen this? You father hitting your mother with the turnips?”

“Yep. I was six or so. My sister four. Daddy didn’t like turnips in any kind of way, let alone a soup. So he took us to Texas after he burned down the cabin with mama in it, and I been in Texas ever since, but mostly over toward the middle of the state. About a year ago he died and my sister got a bad cough and couldn’t get over it. Coughed herself to death. So I lit out on my own.”

“I would think that is appropriate at your age, being on your own. How old are you. Thirty?”

“Twenty-six. I’m just tired. So I was riding through the country here, living off the land, squirrels and such, and I come to this shack in the woods and there weren’t no one livin’ there. I mean I found it by accident, cause it wasn’t on a real trail. It was just down in the woods and it had a good roof on it, and there was a well. I yelled to see anyone was home, and they wasn’t, and the door pushed open. I could see hadn’t nobody been there in a long time. They had just gone off and left it. It was a nice house, and had real glass in the windows, and whoever had made it had done good on it, cause it was put together good and sound. They had trimmed away trees and had a yard of sorts.

“I started livin’ there, and it wasn’t bad. It had that well, but when I come up on it for a look, I seen that it had been filled in with rocks and such, and there wasn’t no gettin’ at the water. But there was a creek no more than a hundred feet from the place, and it was spring fed and I was right at the source. There was plenty of game, and I had a garden patch where I grew turnips and the like.”

“I would have thought you would have had your fill of turnips in all shapes and forms.”

“I liked that soup my mama made. I still remember it. Daddy didn’t have no cause to do that over some soup.”

“Now we are commanding the same line of thought.”

“Anyway, the place was just perfect. I started to clean out the well. Spendin’ a bit of time each day pullin’ rocks out of it. In the meantime, I just used the spring down behind the house, but the well was closer, and it had a good stone curbin’ around it, and I thought it would be nice if it was freed up for water. I wouldn’t have to tote so far.

“Meanwhile, I discovered the town of Wood Tick. It isn’t much, as you seen, but there was one thing nice about it, and every man in that town knew it and wanted that nice thing. Sissy. She was one of Mary’s daughters. The only one she knew who her father was. A drummer who passed through and sold her six yards of wool and about five minutes in a back room.

“Thing is, there wasn’t no real competition in Wood Tick for Sissy. That town has the ugliest men you ever seen, and about half of them have goiters and such. She was fifteen and I was just five years older, and I took to courtin’ her.”

“She was nothing but a child.”

“Not in these parts. Ain’t no unusual thing for men to marry younger girls, and Sissy was mature.”

“In the chest or in the head?”

“Both. So we got married, or rather, we just decided we was married, and we moved out to that cabin.”

“And you still had no idea who built it, who it belonged to?”

“Sissy knew, and she told me all about it. She said there had been an old woman who lived there, and that she wasn’t the one who built the house in the first place, but she died there, and then a family ended up with the land, squatted on it, but after a month, they disappeared, all except for the younger daughter who they found walkin’ the road, talkin’ to herself. She kept sayin’ ‘It sucked and it crawled’ or some such. She stayed with Mary in town who did some doctorin’, but wasn’t nothing could be done for her. She died. They said she looked like she aged fifty years in a few days when they put her down.

“Folks went out to the house but there wasn’t nothin’ to be found, and the well was all rocked in. Then another family moved in, and they’d come into town from time to time, and then they didn’t anymore. They just disappeared. In time, one of the townspeople moved in, a fellow who weaved ropes and sold hides and such, and then he too was gone. No sign as to where. Then there was this man come through town, a preacher like you, and he ended up out there, and he said the house was evil, and he stayed on for a long time, but finally he’d had enough and came into town and said the place ought to be set afire and the ground plowed up and salted so nothing would grow there and no one would want to be there.”

“So he survived?”

“He did until he hung himself in a barn. He left a note said: I seen too much.

“Concise,” the Reverend said.

“And then I come there and brought Sissy with me.”

“After all that, you came here and brought a woman as well. Could it be, sir, that you are not too bright?”

“I didn’t believe all them stories then.”

“But you do now?”

“I do. And I want to go back and set some thing straight on account of Sissy. That’s what I was tryin’ to tell them in town, that somethin’ had happened to her, but when I told them what, wouldn’t nobody listen. They just figured I was two nuts shy a squirrel’s lunch and throwed me in that damned old cage. I’d still have been there wasn’t for you. Now, you done good by me, and I appreciate it, and I’d like you to ride me over close to the house, you don’t have to come up on it, but I got some business I want to take care of.”

“Actually, the business you refer to is exactly my business.”

“Haints and such?”

“I suppose you could put it that way. But please, tell me about Sissy. About what happened.”

Norville nodded and swigged some water from the canteen and screwed the cap on. He took a deep breath and leaned loosely against the tree.

“Me and Sissy, we was doin’ all right at first, makin’ a life for ourselves. I took to cleanin’ out that old well. I had to climb down in it and haul the rocks up by bucket, and some of them was so big I had to wrap a rope around them and hook my mule up and haul them out. I got down real deep, and still didn’t reach water. I come to where it was just nothin’ but mud, and I stuck a stick down in the mud, and it was deep, and there really wasn’t anymore I could do, so I gave it up and kept carrying water from the spring. I took to fixin’ up some rotten spots on the house, nailin’ new shingles on the roof. Sissy planted flowers and it all looked nice. Then, of a sudden, it got so she couldn’t sleep nights. She kept sayin’ she was sure there was somethin’ outside, and that she’d seen a face at the window, but when I got my gun and went out, wasn’t nothin’ there but the yard and that pile of rocks I’d pulled out of the well. But the second time I went out there, I had the feelin’ someone was watching, maybe from the woods, and my skin started to crawl. I ain’t never felt that uncomfortable. I started back to the house, and then I got this idea that I was bein’ followed. I stopped and started to look back, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Just couldn’t. I felt if I looked back I’d see somethin’ I didn’t want to see. I’m ashamed to say I broke and ran and I closed the door quickly and locked it, and outside the door I could hear somethin’ breathin’.

“From then on, by the time it was dark, we was inside. I boarded up all the windows from the inside. In the day, it seemed silly, but when night come around, it got so we both felt as if something was moving around and around the house, and I even fancied once that it was on the roof, and at the chimney. I built a fire in the chimney quick like, and kept one going at night, even when it was hot, and finally, I rocked it up and we cooked outside durin’ the day and had cold suppers at night. Got so we dreaded the night. We were frightened out of our gourds. We took to sleepin’ a few hours in the day, and I did what I could to tend the garden and hunt for food, but I didn’t like being too far from the house or Sissy.

“Now, the thing to do would have been to just pack up and leave. We talked about it. But the house and that land was what we had, even if it was just by squatter’s rights, and we thought maybe we were being silly, except we got so it wasn’t just a feelin’ we had, or sounds, we could smell it. It smelled like old meat and stagnant water, all at once. It floated around the house at night, through them boarded windows and under the front door. It was like it was getting’ stronger and bolder.

“One mornin’ we came out and all the flowers Sissy had planted had been jerked out of the ground, and there was a dead coon on the doorstep, its head yanked off.”

“Yanked off?”

“You could tell from the way there was strings of meat comin’ out of the neck. It had been twisted and pulled plumb off, like a wrung chicken neck, and from the looks of it, it appeared someone, or something, had sucked on its neck. Curious, I cut that coon open. Hardly had a drop of blood in it. Ain’t that somethin’?”

“That’s something all right.”

“Our mule disappeared next. No sign of it. We thought it over and decided we needed to get out, but we didn’t know where to go and we didn’t have any real money. Then one mornin’ I come out, and on the stones I’d set in front of the house for steps, there was a muddy print on them. It was a big print and it didn’t have no kind of shape I could recognize, no kind of animal, but it had toes and a heel. Mud trailed off into the weeds. I got my pistol and went out there, but didn’t find nothin’. No more prints. Nothin’.