The Dead Man: Hell in Heaven (8 page)

Mouse walked slowly around the couch three times, holding the candle steady except when she would let it drip burning wax down on him. As she passed him, he could see that her body wasn’t a child’s at all. Her breasts were still unformed and her pubes bare, but her arms and legs were cabled with muscles. How many years, how many decades had she been trapped in the shape of a little girl?

Matt struggled to move, but the ropes held him tightly.
Some hero
, he thought.
Tied up while I’m sleeping, and I don’t even notice.
Except that maybe it wasn’t all her doing. Mr. Dark had been in his dream; maybe he had kept Matt unconscious long enough for the girl to get the ropes on him.

“Mouse, what are you doing?” he gasped as a bead of wax scalded his skin.

“Sending you back.” Her voice was hard and cold; the girl was gone from it. She sounded as old and weathered as Orfamay.

“You don’t have to send me anywhere,” Matt said. “All I’ve wanted since I got here was to get out.”

“I summoned you here just like I summoned her,” Mouse said, continuing to circle the couch. “And you ruined everything. I have to get rid of you and get a real lawgiver.”

It took him a moment to realize what she was saying. “You brought Joan here?”

“I called her and she came,” Mouse said. “The book told me how.” She stopped by a table where an ancient volume sat. It was bound in something that looked like leather.

“You brought that monster here,” Matt said. “You inflicted all that pain. And now you want to inflict more.”

“You don’t know anything.”

After what he’d seen at the Grange, Matt thought he did. “Constant war between the families. You said your parents died before Joan came. Killed by Vetches?”

“Killed by Vetches because they’d killed Runcibles who had killed Hogginses who had killed Vetches,” Mouse said. “Vern and Cal wanted to get revenge, and they would have done it. Then someone was going to get revenge on them. And it was going to keep going until there was no one left. I found the book my grandmother hid away in her root cellar and I figured out how to summon the lawgiver. And we didn’t have any fighting anymore.”

“And the price?”

“We all paid,” Mouse said. “I did, too. When she fed, it hurt so bad. But when she was done you were still alive, and so was your family. And she only fed off the ones who made trouble. You just had to learn not to make trouble. That wasn’t so hard, was it? That wasn’t so bad.”

Matt thought he saw something behind her words—guilt maybe. Every time that Joan thing took away one of the townspeople for a feeding, it had been her fault. And in that guilt Matt found a glimmer of hope.

“If it worked so well, why summon me to kill her?”

“It was for Cal,” she said, and this time Matt was certain he saw a flash of the little girl she’d seemed to be when they met. “He was all sweet on that Vetch whore. Mixing like that, if Joan found out that was a lifetime of pain. But he wanted her so bad. Kept telling me he loved her and she loved him. Then you saw. She said he raped her and they killed him.”

“She was afraid,” Matt said.

“I’m afraid every day of my life,” Mouse said. “I’m afraid of what I did, and I’m afraid I’m going to do worse. I opened that book at it changed me and I changed everything. But I would never do what that whore did. And now they’re all killing each other and they won’t stop until there’s another lawgiver.”

“I wasn’t sent here to be your lawgiver,” Matt said. “I think we were both tricked, and I know who did it.”

“I saw you in my head before you came,” Mouse said. “Knew your face and your name. I paid the price of blood to bring you here. Only those lives were too small to bring the one we really needed.”

The lives were too small
, Matt thought.
All those bones hidden in Joan’s woodpile. Sacrifices to summon her replacement?

“I need more blood,” Mouse said. “The right kind of blood.”

Mouse disappeared from his view. After a moment, he heard the thud of a body falling on the floor.
The girl.

“Don’t do this,” Matt called.

“I can’t do anything else.”

Matt strained his neck to look around and saw Mouse bent over double, dragging the unconscious girl across the floor. Amazing how much strength there was in that little body.

“Thought I could do it the easy way, using animal blood, not having to hurt anyone,” Mouse said. “But look what they sent me in return.”

“Maybe they sent you what you needed,” Matt said.

“You already said you’re not the lawgiver,” Mouse said. “No one’s going to listen to you.”

She dragged the unconscious girl to a spot on the floor where she had marked out a pentagram in chalk and aligned her limbs with the star’s points.

“When you needed a lawgiver to stop the killing, they sent you Joan,” Matt said. “When you needed to stop the pain she was causing, they sent me. Maybe that wasn’t a mistake.”

“I saw what happened at the Grange,” Mouse said.

She picked up a knife from the table where the book lay and ran it across her thumb. Blood sprung up in its wake.

Matt pulled against the ropes, but they wouldn’t budge. “I didn’t kill those people at the Grange,” he said. “You did.”

She whirled around, raising the knife. She looked like she wanted to plunge it into his heart.

“You could have stopped it before it started,” she said. “You refused.” She thrust the knife at his throat. He felt its point pierce his flesh.

“How long ago did you summon Joan?” he said. “Years? Decades?”

“Don’t know how long,” she said. “Time went all funny here. But it seems like forever. Not going to make the same mistake with you.”

The knife pressed deeper into his throat. “All that time, and what did you do?” he said, fighting the urge to panic, to try to thrash himself free and force the blade in deeper. “You didn’t even try to change anything. You let Joan keep you from killing each other, and that was all. Did you ever give one second’s thought to making peace between the families?”

“We had peace until you came along.”

“You had a cease-fire. You couldn’t kill each other, but you never stopped the hating. Why was that, Mouse? Do you even know how this feud began? Do you have any idea why you’re killing each other?”

“Doesn’t matter why it started. It just is.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” Matt said. “If you don’t want it.”

Matt could feel the knife blade tremble under his skin. And then it slid out, a drop of blood falling on his shoulder as it went.

She was staring down at him, but he didn’t think she was seeing anything in the room. “What are you?” she said finally.

“I’m not the lawgiver,” he said. “And I’m not a hero riding in to save the villagers from the monster that’s been terrorizing them. I’m just a stranger passing through.”

“Then why should I listen to you?” The knife was getting closer to his throat again.

“You shouldn’t.” Matt fought to keep his throat calm and under control. “Not to me, not to Joan, not to that book. Because none of us can stop this for good. There’s only one person who can. And that’s you.”

Matt had never been to war. By the time he was old enough to enlist, the age of the existential battles that had consumed entire generations of Americans seemed to have been over forever, and by the time the country was actually attacked for the first time in his life, he was too enmeshed in his parents’ slow slouch toward eternity to think about anything bigger.

So he’d never seen what the Earth looks like the day after a battle has ended. Not until the red sun rose over Heaven.

The fight had started in the Grange, now nothing but a wisp of smoke rising out of the trees, but had spilled out into the town. Main Street was dyed crimson; potholes turned into drinking fountains for the crows, which lapped at the thickening pools of blood. There were mangled pieces of bodies scattered along the roadway, the town’s gene pools strong enough that even in death Matt could identify a Gilhoolie nose or a richly furred Vetch forearm.

Maybe we’re too late to make peace
, Matt thought as he walked toward the general store, the white flag of pillowcase on his axe handle held high.
Maybe they’ve all found the only peace they’ll ever know. The peace of the grave
. Except that if that was true there would be no graves, just food for crows.

One of those crows cawed and beat its wings. Matt turned to the sound and saw a body hanging from the eaves of Mabel’s Eat Fresh Diner Café. The birds had taken the sign literally and plucked away at the corpse’s eyeballs and tongue. But they had been especially drawn to the bloody hole where its genitals had once been. They’d pecked and bitten at the raw flesh until they’d broken through to the rich, sweet innards. Now a long rope of intestine hung down between the body’s legs like a parody of the penis it had once possessed.

Matt could hear Mouse’s sharp gasp, could practically feel her muscles tightening even though she walked two feet away from him.

“They didn’t have to do that to Cal,” she said in a voice choked with anger. “They didn’t have to do that.”

“No one had to do any of this,” Matt said. “What do you think your people have done to theirs?”

There was a long silence before she uttered one short syllable: “Worse.”

They walked in silence, Matt holding the flag of truce, Mouse gripping the rope that trailed behind her and wound around the neck of the Vetch girl, the one who had been Cal’s only lover.

This had been Mouse’s sole demand when she acceded to Matt’s plan. He’d wanted to leave the girl behind in Joan’s house, let her sleep off the horror she’d lived through and wake up on her own if she decided the rest of her life was worth living.

Mouse insisted they bring the girl along. If things went the way Matt hoped, she’d be a sign of the Gilhoolie’s good will. If not, she was a hostage.

It had taken a long time to wake the girl up, and by the time her eyes finally opened the sky above the mountains was beginning to turn the cool gray that comes just before dawn. Even after she’d shrugged on the robe and sandals they found for her, though, it seemed that the girl never woke up completely. Her limbs moved and she could follow their instructions, but her eyes were blank and hollow, and she never said a word.

The walk into town was a voyage through hell. The farms they passed had been attacked and the animals slaughtered, their corpses left to rot where they lay, the structures torched or simply torn apart. And everything had been looted. The road was littered with shattered glass and torn clothing. Jars of preserves that had been carefully laid away for years lay smashed on the ground, their contents slathered over books and photographs and anything they could be used to destroy.

There hadn’t been bodies though. Not yet, anyway. This must have been a raiding sortie, not a battle. This was one side destroying the other’s supply lines so there could be no retreat.

The bodies started when they turned onto Main Street. There was a ditch that ran along one side of the road. It had been filled with corpses, as if someone had come by with a snowplow and shoved them all in. They were mostly men, but Matt could see a woman’s delicate hand, covered in blood and torn flesh, sticking up between two faces. A disembodied head crowned the pile; one ear had been chewed away. Matt thought it must have been Ezekiel Vetch.

There was no way to tell how many people had died, how many homes destroyed. Matt knew how many more would be gone if his plan didn’t work. All of them.

He didn’t dare look over at Mouse as they came up Main Street. He didn’t want to see the hate burning in her eyes. And he didn’t want to give her the chance to explode at him, to break away and give up what they had planned.

They stopped when they reached the front door of the general store. Mouse stood absolutely still, looking at the building with hate so strong he thought it might knock down the structure on its own. Then she called out in a cool, clear voice.

“Orfamay Vetch, or whoever now leads the Vetch family if Orfamay is dead, this is Mary Elizabeth Gilhoolie. I stand here under the white flag of truce and ask for parlay.”

For a long moment nothing happened.
Maybe all the Vetches are dead
, Matt thought.
Maybe this war is already over
.

Finally the front door cracked open. Matt saw a flash of eyeball behind it, and then the door swung all the way. Orfamay stepped out onto the porch. Her bonnet had been replaced with a soiled, bloody bandage that wound around her head. Her right hand was gone, another dirty bandage wrapped around the stump where it had been.

“You here to beg for brother Vern’s life?” Orfamay croaked. “If so, that flag’s a waste of a white sheet that could have been used for bandages.”

“Vern?” Mouse said.

Orfamay moved out of the way and the giant stepped out next to her. In his left hand he held up what Matt first thought was a heap of dirty rags and used bandages. Only when he shook it and the bundle let out a moan did Matt realize it was Vern Gilhoolie.

Vern’s face had been pounded so long and so hard that even the strong Gilhoolie genes couldn’t make the features look like anything but heaps of ground meat. His hair had been torn out with such force pieces of his scalp were missing. His fingers were smashed and twisted beyond recognition; there were nail holes through his feet.

“You bitch,” Mouse said. “I should kill you.”

“Should have done that first, sweetie,” Orfamay said. “Someone takes off my hand, I just get mad.”

Matt could feel Mouse moving toward the door, drawn by a force of hate stronger than gravity. If he couldn’t pull her back, the fighting would start all over again. And never stop until they were all dead.

“We’re here under the flag of truce, and with your girl as evidence of our good intentions,” Matt said. That was supposed to be Mouse’s line, but she didn’t seem capable of saying the words just yet.

“Am I supposed to swoon away in a fit of gratitude?” Orfamay said. “That cow has been tainted by Gilhoolie flesh.”

“We could have fucked her to death with this axe and sent her back in pieces,” Mouse said. “If that’s what you want, we can do it right here in the road.”

“Big tongue for such a little mouth,” Orfamay said. “Especially when there are fifty Vetches still in fighting fit ready to take you out right now.”

Matt could see movement behind her in the store. He couldn’t count the bodies, but there were a lot of them, and they were straining to come out.

There was a bang from across the street. Matt turned to see that the diner doors had been thrown open and dozens of Gilhoolies were spilling into the street.

The war was about to start again.