The Deadsong (16 page)

The wheel finally began to turn as Cooley jumped down from the control panel to examine Brock’s twisted body. Bryant was helping kids off the ride but it was taking too much time. After it was all said and done and the air was alive with wailing horrors so thick and shrill, it nauseated the masses and sent them into a fit of madness. But nothing could articulate the hysterical sensations shared by all when five lifeless children were carried out and laid onto the platform.

Six dead tonight
.

So far.

“I have no words,” Jared said in awe. “He’s really outdoing himself.”

“Oh Jared, we’ve got to find Mr. Pearson.”

“No, there’s…” He closed his eyes. “He’s coming for me now.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. Come on,” he said, grabbing her wrist and pulling her through the crowd.

“But why?”

“I screwed up, Gina. I shouldn’t have called them on Duke. And…”

“And what? Spit it out for God’s sake!”

“I told him I wasn’t going to reap anymore, and he would have it. He pawned it off on me so Duke wouldn’t have to. I know that now.”

They finally made it to the car. Jared fumbled with his keys to open it.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere to hide and figure things out. Get in.”

Gina climbed in and they tore through the soft earth and out onto the highway. The engine rose into a mighty growl as she watched the speedometer needle buried at seventy, leaving the carnival carnage far behind them.

“There’s something else,” Jared said.

Oh please, no more.

“Ellis said something about the boss being in town. I didn’t know what he meant at first, but I can sense someone else here, someone or something more powerful than Ellis or myself. I don’t know where it’s coming from, though. When I try to focus on it, all I get is static. Can you hear it?”

“Only the…the deadsong.”

“Well, I really don’t want to stick around to meet the boss.”

Gina turned it over in her mind. All of the pieces were slowly coming together, but the big picture was still an indiscernible mosaic not yet complete. But she went with her gut and said “Does the name Samuel Thade mean anything to you?”

He shook his head. “No. Should it?”

The Charger squealed to a halt at the intersection of Macklin and Potsdam. The lot at Bixby Lanes was peppered with a few cars, but Gina didn’t have long to look before she was thrown back in a splash of green as Jared gunned it through the light.

She spoke as fast as she could, telling him about the stranger who had been invited into their home and had been all but worshiped by her mother.

“That’s him,” Jared said.

“Who is he really?” Gina wished she hadn’t asked.

Jared didn’t look over at her. He was embarrassed and afraid to look into those blue eyes and deliver a heart-stopping truth such as the one ready to fall from his lips.

“He is Death. He is the devil. Evil with a capital ‘E’.” Jared finally cut his eyes to hers. “He’s the one who sold you to your mother.”

Gina sat there speechless, wishing for the nightmare to go away. “Sold me to her?”

“
Rented
might be a better word. A temporary arrangement.”

“Why didn’t he just kill me when he had the chance?”

“There are rules.”

“And what has he done to my mother?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s toying with you.”

“Why?”

“Because he can.”

Nothing like a dirty devil dancing up a little fun before the finale.

Jared parked the car at the end of an unnamed dirt road that stemmed off of Whippoorwill Road. He doused the headlamps and killed the engine. They sat there, exhausted and completely spent.

“Will he hurt my mom?”

“I don’t think so.” Jared unbuckled his seatbelt and turned to face her, taking her hand. “You’ve got to understand that your mom knew this would happen. Maybe not on the surface, but somewhere in her mind, she knew the Keeper would come for you this year.”

“Then it wasn’t a dream,” she said.

Jared wrinkled his brow. She squeezed his hand, afraid to let it go.

Then she began to tell him about the snake she saw in her bed. The one that had spoken to her. The one that called her
baby girl.

“They can’t do that.”

“This one did. And it knew things, Jared. It knew about me. It knew about Uncle Paul, too.”

“What about your uncle?”

She’d never told anyone before. Hell, she’d nearly forgotten about it herself. She tried to forget for so long, she’d convinced herself it never happened.

“Paul…molested me when I was little. He stayed with us for about a year after Aunt Cindy kicked him out. He…did it a lot. I swore not to tell. No one else knows. Except you. And…and…”

“That’s enough,” he said, putting up a hand.

Jared thought this over. Anger charged him up like a battery and he wanted to do things, terrible things, to make this asshole pay for what he did to Gina. That would come later. Right now, he had other things to chew on.

He’d been around the snakes for almost a year now, training with Ellis, and he’d never heard one speak before. Jared wondered if she had in fact dreamed the whole thing, but there was one other possibility he didn’t want to consider.

“It didn’t look like the others either,” she went on. “It had the same red stripes on its underside, but it was…bigger. Scarier. Its head was––”

“Red? Like its head had been dipped in red paint?” Jared shivered when he said it and Gina saw him do it.

She nodded slowly. Jared looked out through his windshield at the blackness beyond the tree line. Finally he said “It wasn’t one of mine.” His eyes rolled to hers, and she could see they had begun to well up with tears. He blinked and one slithered down his cheek, splattering into a dark spot on the collar of his shirt.

It all began to make sense. Jared needed to say no more but he opened his mouth anyway. Gina braced herself.

“It was Thade.”

6

Alan Blair caught himself a critter. It had bitten Billy Lowell beside the Double-Down Hot Dog stand over near the community center, which was across from the stadium where the tractor-pull was drawing to a close. No one had heard Billy’s screams over the raging International Harvester spinning its tires in the dirt.

The guy with the ponytail had pinned the snake’s tail with his rod and managed to force it into his bag, but the thing didn’t go in without a fight. Alan and a few others from Critter Catchers got the snake into a large clear Tupperware container where it nosed around, fretting, pissed off. They took it into the community center which had been closed up this year for renovation. It usually showcased photos and paintings made by local artists, but this year it would be a makeshift examination room. Deputy Bryant had set up a folding table he’d gotten from the back room and had carefully placed the caged serpent up onto it.

Alan put on his glasses and took out a tape recorder. There were about a dozen people standing around, watching, completely in awe.

Everyone jumped when Alan switched on the recorder; the large meeting hall amplified the click.

“It’s incredible,” he began, studying it, walking around it.

It was studying him, too.

“Body is approximately three and a half to four feet in length, dark brown in color with…crimson and gold alternating stripes on its underscales, diamond-pattern across its back from head to tail…appears to be a pit viper of some kind. It has very pronounced infrared pits. Demonstrated lateral progression, which is typical locomotion consistent with a pit viper. The teeth…”

Alan bent down to his knees and eased in close, eyes locked with the snake’s own––yellow, wide, and fixed. He slowly brought a finger out and inched it towards the plastic between him and the snake. “Say ‘ahh’––”

The snake lunged and thudded into the side of the container. It wobbled and two of the Critter Catchers ran up to hold the lid down. The serpent bared its fangs at Alan, almost in exhibition.

“There we go.” Alan resumed recording. “I see no grooves in the fangs. They appear to be hollow and erectile.”

“Sweet Jesus.” Sheriff Robertson walked up wiping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. “I ain’t never seen anything like that.”

“Neither have I,” Alan said.

Ned gathered his wits and looked around at everyone gawking at the thing squirming in the storage container. “All right, everyone out. All of you. Let’s give Mr. Blair some room to work.”

“I caught it,” the man with the ponytail said.

“That’s great, son,” Ned said. “Good work. But we’ll take it from here.”

The man looked at him, puzzled. “I haven’t been paid yet.”

“We’ll take care of that later. You and the others can go. You, too, boys.”

Everyone filed out of the community center and left Sheriff Robertson and Alan Blair alone with the thing in the box.

Ned took off his hat and shifted his weight to one leg. “I’m in the right mind to put a slug in that thing right now.”

“I’m in the right mind to let you, considering how dangerous they are,” Alan said, removing his glasses. The snake had curled up like a dog in the corner of the container and became still.

“Can it breathe in there?”

Alan nodded. “I’ll take it back with me tomorrow morning. Can you have someone tape the lid and cover it with something?”

“Sure,” Ned said. “What are you going to do with it in the meantime?”

“Leave it here, if that’s okay. I don’t want it in my motel room. Besides, the people at the Bartleby might not appreciate me toting this thing in through the lobby.”

“It can stay here, no problem, but is it safe, Mr. Blair? Can it get out?”

Alan walked over to the corner of the room and picked through scrap pieces of wood intended to reframe the door leading out onto the pool deck. He settled on a a carton full of sixteen-penny nails, carrying them over and dropping them on top of the Tupperware container. The snake roused and skidded around, its tongue probing the air curiously.

“Oh yeah, this’ll work just fine.” Alan gave the carton a good shake and confidently turned his back on his new discovery, wiping his hands on his khakis. “I need to use a phone. I should call Sedgewick right away.”

“Of course. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled. There’s one in the…no, it’s disconnected. Come with me. We’ll find one. There’s a phone in the park services office across the way there by the stadium.”

The two of them walked to the side door and went out. Ned flipped off the switch by the door. Light ran out of the fixtures slowly, the caged serpent fading away into darkness.

Alan called Dr. Sedgewick, who was delighted to hear the news. Alan let the recorder tell his mentor of his preliminary observations. Once the conversation ended, Ned gave Alan a ride back to the Bartleby and on the way, Ned called Deputy Bryant and told him to go back to the community center and tape up the container.

A solution was coming. Ned felt a rush of relief and resolve work its way through him as he began his drive back into Hemming.

Those warm feelings were soon chilled back to their normal frigid state when Ned picked up his radio and heard Deputy Bryant say the container was on the floor, the lid lying nearly four feet away with a bunch of nails strewn around it…

And the snake was gone.

7

Carl Motley rocked in his chair, praying quietly. Margaret Oates and Perry Smith walked into his office and closed the door.

“What is it? I’m communin with the Lord our God, prayin for a sign, prayin for––”

“Reverend, it’s the college boy. He’s caught one of the snakes.”

Motley stopped rocking and opened his eyes. “You sure?”

They nodded at their reverend, who blossomed into a smile fit for a postcard.

“That’s good. That’s real good.”

“He’s taking it with him tomorrow.”

“Well we can’t have that now, can we?”

“It’s at the community center. What should we do?”

“Well let’s go get it and carve it up. Might just make myself a wallet out of its devil-hide.”

“What about the college boy?” Smitty asked.

“Oh we’ll deal with him later. First thing’s first. Where’s Harley?”

“He’s combing the woods out along Highway 7 near the Cullman County line. He says the shack should be there––piecing together where Floyd might have seen the Keeper.”

“Ah, very good. Well then,” Motley said, getting to his feet, “who’s drivin?”

8

The boys watched Sheriff Robertson and that man from the college walk out of the community center and over to the park services office.

“Come on,” one of them whispered. The rusted chain on the back door of the place snapped and fell to the ground. A hand pushed open the door that led into the darkness where the mysterious reaper snake was now kept.

Andy Lubbock and Jack Monroe crept into the main hall and powered on the lights, stealing their breath away when they saw it staring at them from across the room.

They would kill it. Jack had a set of garden shears and Andy had a shovel he kept in back of his pickup. They’d been at the tractor-pull when they heard about  the snake sealed up in the old community center. Sure, there were probably a lot more of them out there, but these boys had buried their sisters earlier this week and they were about to exact revenge on one of these damn snakes.

Its eyes followed them as they walked over to the container with their weapons in hand.

Andy looked at Jack. “So, what do we do?”

“You knock it over and I’ll snip it right in two before it gets away.”

“What if it’s fast? What if it gets away before––”

“We gotta be faster than it. Now go ahead. Knock it over.”

“But Jack… I don’t wanna do it.”

“Fine, I’ll do it. Here.” Jack handed off his clippers and heaved the carton of nails from the plastic lid. The snake hammered into the side of the container and scared Jack so bad he dropped the carton, thousands of nails tinkled across the concrete floor.

“Hurry! We’re gonna caught!”

“Hush! All right, on the count of three, okay?”