I left Ruth to herself and out of the way. I didn't watch her, but I watched him. He never forgave me getting ahead of him.
She looked nothing like Lorraine. She was less than a year old when Lorraine last saw her, and time has disguised her. I took great pains to get her away, recruited Amelia to carry her back home on the train while I hitched. Julius must have made up his mind about Amelia the moment he saw her coming in with the baby. I'll bet she was pregnant by the time I made it back.
I went out to wait for Ruth on the veranda, and she came along through the tall grass, just at the reddening of the setting sun. She was quiet, from being alone all day. I took her by the hand and led her to the table.
They're outside now. One glance is all I have time for. Grover is standing in front this time, and between him and Todd there's Ruthie with her shoulders in their hands.
I move into the second part. I have to go on and on and on, remembering how Father did it. The way he did what the elders did. They showed it me through him. I have to time each breath right. I can't stop in the wrong spot. Not even to draw breath. Every word has to get out exactly right. It's like a long elastic that draws me in closer. They're far away, but I feel them stirring. They hear me. It's stepping out into the light.
I finish that part and wait. My breath comes tight and I can feel the sweat run down my sides. The fane is stifling, like a grave. They will call in Todd and Grover.
Now the smell — I never could get used to that.
I begin to recite. They're taking their time coming in but I have to keep my mind on the words and not stumble. I close my eyes and I can hear them shuffling. I'm in the dark, and the palaces shine out there and I pull up to them like rowing up to still islands in a black lake. That gold light spills over my face I open my eyes and turn as Todd is throwing her up on the stone and as her hair falls back from her face I lock eyes with Claire.
He has to keep going and he can't so much as falter. He knows what will happen.
You're the one who does it, Julius.
Well.
Just go ahead on and do it.
I'm not afraid of Julius. Without me he'd miss the sign and we all know what'll happen if the sign comes and we don't act on it.
That gold light is all around — I can feel their greed blending in with his hatred in a cold, steady gush.
I pick the time.
He looks down at her. His eyes are in the shade.
I tear her frock open, baring her skinny chest. She doesn't even cry out, just stares into her father's face.
Any idiot can break a lock, Julius.
Lesser Demons
Norman Partridge
Norman Partridge is the author of the short story collections
Down in the cemetary, the children were laughing.
They had another box open.
They had their axes out. Their knives, too.
I sat in the sheriff's department pickup, parked beneath a willow tree. Ropes of leaves hung before me like green curtains, but those curtains didn't stop the laughter. It climbed the ridge from the hollow below, carrying other noises — shovels biting hard-packed earth, axe blades splitting coffinwood, knives scraping flesh from bone. But the laughter was the worst of it. It spilled over teeth sharpened with files, chewed its way up the ridge, and did its best to strip the hard bark off my spine.
I didn't sit still. I grabbed a gas can from the back of the pickup. I jacked a full clip into my dead deputy's.45, slipped a couple spares into one of the leather pockets on my gun belt, and buttoned it down. Then I fed shells into my shotgun and pumped one into the chamber.
I went for a little walk.
Five months before, I stood with my deputy, Roy Barnes, out on County Road 14. We weren't alone. There were others present. Most of them were dead, or something close to it.
I held that same shotgun in my hand. The barrel was hot. The deputy clutched his.45, a ribbon of bitter smoke coiling from the business end. It wasn't a stink you'd breathe if you had a choice, but we didn't have one.
Barnes reloaded, and so did I. The June sun was dropping behind the trees, but the shafts of late-afternoon light slanting through the gaps were as bright as high noon. The light played through black smoke rising from a Chrysler sedan's smoldering engine, and white smoke simmering from the hot asphalt piled in the road gang's dump truck.
My gaze settled on the wrecked Chrysler. The deal must have started there. Fifteen or twenty minutes before, the big black car had piled into an old oak at a fork in the county road. Maybe the driver had nodded off, waking just in time to miss a flagman from the work gang. Over-corrected and hit the brakes too late. Said:
Maybe that was the way it happened. Maybe not. Barnes tried to piece it together later on, but in the end it really didn't matter much. What mattered was that the sedan was driven by a man who looked like something dredged up from the bottom of a stagnant pond. What mattered was that something exploded from the Chrysler's trunk after the accident. That thing was the size of a grizzly, but it wasn't a bear. It didn't look like a bear at all. Not unless you'd ever seen one turned inside out, it didn't.
Whatever it was, that skinned monster could move. It unhinged its sizable jaws and swallowed a man who weighed two-hundred-and-change in one long ratcheting gulp, choking arms and legs and torso down a gullet lined with razor teeth. Sucked the guy into a blue-veined belly that hung from its ribs like a grave-robber's sack and then dragged that belly along fresh asphalt as it chased down the other men, slapping them onto the scorching roadbed and spitting bloody hunks of dead flesh in their faces. Some it let go, slaughtering others like so many chickens tossed live and squawking onto a hot skillet.
It killed four men before we showed up, fresh from handling a fender-bender on the detour route a couple miles up the road. Thanks to my shotgun and Roy Barnes's.45, all that remained of the thing was a red mess with a corpse spilling out of its gutshot belly. As for the men from the work crew, there wasn't much you could say. They were either as dead as that poor bastard who'd ended his life in a monster's stomach, or they were whimpering with blood on their faces, or they were running like hell and halfway back to town. But whatever they were doing didn't make too much difference to me just then.
'What was it, Sheriff?' Barnes asked.
'I don't know.'
