Status Updates From The Tatterdemon Omnibus

“Maddy!” Maddy turned and stared like a deer trapped in oncoming headlights. “Maddy!” The voice was coming from the field. She knew who it was. Daddy was coming home. She dropped the hatchet and ran for the shelter of the welcoming barn. She could fight a witch and a big-assed scarecrow from hell but this was a terror that she didn’t know how to begin to fight.

“Ding dong, the witch is dead.” the Tatterdemon rumbled in Vic’s voice. He was ready to play. “No more boss, no more woman to listen to. I got the power now.” “I’ll show you power,” Maddy screamed.

Fear touched the Tatterdemon’s spirit like a grim icy hand. The wind brought a voice to his ears. The voice of the witch telling him - don’t you worry about the girl. She is nothing but straw. You take the town and I will take the girl. You can have her, he thought. I will take the town. “I will take the town,” he yelled. “I will take all who walk and breathe and give them to the ground. I will give them to me.”

Barn rats are mean. And they tend to work in gangs. If you see one rat, you’ve missed ten others was how Daddy used to put it. One rat in the barn meant a hundred in the field. Sure enough there were more of them following. One after another through the crawl-hole,like they smelled something tasty in here. Where the hell were they coming from? Maybe the evil in the field had stirred them up. Maybe they smelled death.

His left leg bent in the wrong direction. It had bent that way since Vic the walking compost heap had thrown him through the window. Defenestration. That was what they called it in the forensic handbook. Death by going through a window. There was a word for anything, wasn’t there? Earl wondered what the word was for those things back there. The scarecrow zombies?

“I already told you. We need to get to a church.” “Old or new?” “Older is better. There’s power in tradition.” “They closed it down.” Wendy Joe said. “Closed what down?” “The church. They closed it down.” “Closed a church? What the hell will they do next? Baptise Satan?” “The reverend hung himself.” “Well no blessed wonder he hung himself,” Momma Clavis said. “They closed his church.”

“Get the other two,” Vic snarled. Maddy blinked. She couldn’t understand what Vic was asking. “What?” “The two in the house. Go and get them and drag them out to the field.” She stared at him in disbelief. “Why?” she asked. “We got us some planting to do.”

Deeper. Now she stood in the basement of her mind, surrounded by the walls of memory, fantasy, and need. She knelt down and found a trapdoor at her feet. She opened the trapdoor and she found a hole. She clambered into the hole beneath and dug in the darkness, doubt and dirt. And somewhere down there in the shadows of memory; beneath the hole and beneath the dirt - Wendy Joe found her Momma.

It never was Carmen’s fault. Roland touched the scar on his stomach. Her goodbye note. He had left her the night she had taken the knife to him and could still feel the cool burning as the blade tore through the skin of his stomach. He could still feel his skin opening up, cut by someone who said she loved him. It wasn’t her fault.

Next she added a little sprinkle of graveyard dirt. Ghost dust, was what her momma called it, dust blessed with the touch of the dead. Forget about your nuclear energy. There was nothing stronger than graveyard dirt. Touched by a thousand lives and tears spilled upon, soaking up all that energy.

“Where do you live?” he repeated. “A little farmhouse,” she said. “Two miles up the road.” “I need somewhere to hide out for a while. I need some food. I need a bed – and maybe somebody to lay in it with me.” What the hell could she do? “You’re more than welcome,” she said wryly. He laughed at that. It was a harsh laugh, like metal grating against stone. “I figured that.”

It was a bad start, to a bad day. It probably meant a good omen. He couldn’t imagine it getting any worse. The last thing Wilfred imagined was how fast he was entering the worst day of his existence. Worst, and maybe last.

Earl remembered the wide eyed look of the man as the lynch mob had snugged the rope about his neck. He’d hidden in the darkness while the men finished their work. Earl had watched one of the men catch hold of the dangling man’s feet, giving them a good yank to make sure the job was properly done. Earl wanted to do something about it, but even at twelve he knew there was nothing he could do.

He was fixing to leave a hell of lot of corpses, if things went his way. He’d been seeing this field of dead men, hanging like scarecrows, for the last half hour. Right behind his eyeballs, like a movie screen running all night long. It was like a dream, or a vision, or a masterpiece. To hell with it. If he was nuts, fine. He’d still go down running for it. Why not?

He hung up. He took a long deep breath. He walked to the basement door. He opened the door and walked on down. He stepped past the rotting meat. The popsicles, melted down to sticks. The pork chops. He reached the freezer and opened it up. He shivered at the blast of frozen air, staring down at the body lying in the freezer. “Morning, Emma,” he said. “Did you sleep well?” Emma, being dead, said nothing.

Two hours later, while Wendy Joe was scraping the last of the candle wax off the desk top, the telephone rang again. Two calls in one morning. It was some kind of record, maybe even some kind of omen. She hoped it was a good one. But later that day, when she got the third call she knew it was as far from good as bad could get. She had the feeling things were just getting started. The fact was she was right.

It was Saturday morning. The sun was crawling from beneath the distant hills. She didn’t know it, but she would sleep until Sunday. Behind her, forgotten in the field, the dirt and straw gave way. The root poked out like a blind worm. It twisted this way and that. Then the root bent like a thirsty leech and sucked at the clots of blood still soaking, deep into the dirt.

It took another half hour to load the car. Soda pop and chocolate bars. Rope and duct tape. A couple of large tins of kerosene and a big old hunting knife, twice the size of Duane’s. The last thing he grabbed was a bag of potato chips. He took the stuff he needed, mostly. And he would need it. The kind of road Helliard was traveling he would be bound to need this sort of gear. There was some killing to do.

Mind you, Helliard didn’t shoot nobody he knew. That would leave way too much motive hanging out there in the wind for some lawman to catch hold, like the tail of a kite. No sir, the only people Helliard shot were strangers he met on the road. He buried them deep in the woods a mile out past the town. Yes sir, Helliard was a real bad fucker.

Maddy didn’t notice. She was too busy staring at the hovering blue image directly between her and Vic. The hovering blue image of her long dead father. “Just how long are you going to let this skid mark with legs get away with that kind of crap?” Maddy’s dead father asked.

The wind grew gray with dust, straw and flesh. The earth opened in great cratered swallowing mouths. The townsfolk all died screaming. Only Fell remained. He stared at the carnage, as helpless as a snared rabbit. “Witches sow, Fell. Witches sow and men must reap.”