gotta get him.” Oh, yes, he thought. It was personal now, or perhaps it had always been. All he had to do was remember what Natter had done to Vicki, not to mention having Eagle killed. And then there’s always me, he reminded himself. Only now was he fully realizing how close he’d come to getting killed last night.
“Sullivan said something weird,” he pointed out next. “I asked him if he knew what those words meant —”
“What words?” Mullins asked, replenishing his bloated jowl with chewing tobacco.
“Those weird words the Creeker kid said just before I blew him away. Sullivan didn’t know what they meant, but he did know they were Creeker words. ‘Creeker talk’ he called it.”
“Just proves Sullivan knows more about Natter’s people than he’s letting on.”
“Yeah, I know. But he said something else, too. He said that the Creekers were cannibals.”
“Wives’ tales,” Mullins suggested. “I been hearin’ shit like that since I was a kid. It’s stuff our daddies dreamed up to keep us in line. ‘You don’t shut up and go to sleep, the Creekers’ll come and get ya.’”
“Yeah, sure, local legends and all that. I remember some of those stories, too. But Sullivan said one more thing that was pretty specific. He said the Creekers have their own religion.”
Mullins expectorated into his cup. “Oh, you mean they ain’t Catholic?” he attempted to joke.
Phil gazed blankly out the window. It was getting dark now, the smudged panes filling up with twilight. Their own religion, he recited. In the black sky, stars shone like swirls of crushed gemstones.
I wonder what it is they worship.
««—»»
“Ona,” the Reverend voiced to himself.
His voice was a black chasm, incalculable, endless like the night. The Reverend wore raiments just as black. Just as incalculable…
The shadow stirred in the corner. The Reverend could feel the miraculous heat, could smell the exalted stench.
Oh, how long we’ve waited, his thoughts wept in joy.
Ages.
No, a hundred ages.
He thought of things then, beautiful things. He thought of the recompense of all the truth of history. Of a time when the slaves would be freed of their fetters, when they would be praised instead of reviled, glorified instead of cursed. He thought of a time when he too would walk with his brethren through the holiest dark channelworks, amid the savory smoke of burning human fat and steaming blood, to gladly pay homage, and to eat, a time when he too, and all of them, would pull the flesh off the bones of the faithless, sink deft fingers into their wide open eyes, and strip their skulls of their pitiable faces. Their screams would ring out like the sweetest madrigals. They would inhale their blood and scarf their unchaste flesh forever and ever.
Yes, the Reverend thought of the most wondrous things.
Ona…
The Reverend bowed, then fell to his knees, his arms red with blood to the elbows.
Soon, your time will be upon us.
And from the stygian dark, his god looked back at him and smiled.
— | — | —
Twenty-Seven
“Hi,” Phil said.
The station door slammed. Susan trudged in, a knapsack full of her school books tugging at her arm.
“Need some help with those books?”
“No.” She dropped the sack at the foot of her desk, then sat down at her commo console and prepared for work.
“How was school tonight?”
Susan frowned at him. She wasn’t biting on the cursory small talk, but then Phil never really guessed that she would.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Talking to the chief.” He shuffled his feet, looking down. He felt like a little kid sent to the principal’s office. “Then I thought I’d hang around awhile, wait till you got in.”
“Why?” Susan sniped, checking the hot sheet and county blotter.
“Well, I think we should talk.”
“About what?”
Phil looked down at the floor. This was a lost cause before it started. Christ—women are so unforgiving. He didn’t know what to say then. But at the same moment a notion struck him very keenly. Forgiven? Wait a minute, Phil—don’t be a schmuck. What do you have to be forgiven for here? You didn’t do anything WRONG!
So against his better judgment, he mustered an unfounded gall:
“I didn’t do anything wrong!” he yelled.
Her expression seemed to recoil.
“Go ahead, make a face!” he yelled again. “Give me the cold shoulder! Treat me like dogshit! Do whatever you want, honey, but tell me this. What did I do wrong?”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Susan calmly replied, paging through her code book. “It’s a free country. You can do anything you want. You don’t have any obligations to me just because we went to bed. That certainly doesn’t mean we’re involved.”
“Well, pardon me if I’m just stupid, but I kind of thought that we were involved.”
“You thought we were involved?” She gaped at him. “Well, then I guess we both have drastically different definitions of the word.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She gaped at him again. Phil didn’t like it when she gaped.
“Doesn’t involvement imply some kind of monogamy?” she asked.
“I didn’t cheat on you!”
“Oh, I see. I hear a scream coming from your room,” she went on, “so I come down to see if you’re all right, and what do I find? I find monogamous Phil, with a bath towel around his waist, leaning over a prostitute.”
“I didn’t sleep with her!” Phil yelled.
“Oh, then what did you do? Tell me, Phil. What do guys with towels around their waists do with prostitutes? Play chess? Read the Sunday Post? Discuss the vagaries of quasi-existential dynamics?”
“I didn’t have sex with her,” Phil nearly growled.
“Oh, okay. You didn’t have sex with her. But you can have sex with whoever you want, Phil. That’s not my point.”
Phil felt like a pressure cooker about to blow its seam. “What is your point?” he asked as calmly as he could.
“My point is you lied to me.”
Silence.
“How did I lie to you?”
If looks could kill, Phil would be dead now, a dozen times over. Her eyes leveled on him. “Before you and I did anything, I asked you, didn’t I? I asked you if you were still involved with Vicki. And you said no.”
“And that was the truth!” he yelled.
“So what was she doing in your room with you standing there with a towel wrapped around your waist.”
“She had a problem,” he said. “She got beat up, and she needed a place to sleep.”
“So you thought your bed would suffice?”
“She slept on my couch! I didn’t touch her! And I just got done telling you—I didn’t have sex with her!”
More silence, but it was not a contemplative kind of silence; it was a mocking one. “So you’re telling me,”
