“Their goal, for all that time, was to add the demon to their bloodline. They considered this to be the ultimate blessing. According to the story, Onn mated with the least defected Creeker girl in their clan.”
“And then gave birth?” Phil guessed.
“Yes.”
“But to what?”
“To Ona, the female inbred of the demon and the Creekers.” Vicki paused. “That thing you saw when you were ten.”
Phil fell silent again, driving without direction. So many queer ideas were wafting through his head, he didn’t know what to think. “But they also call it ‘skeet-inner’—”
“That’s its nickname,” Vicki said. “Most of the Creekers can’t talk right—it’s called dyslalia—like dyslexia, only with words. When they say skeet-inner, they’re really saying—”
“Skin-eater,” Phil deduced, and with the deduction came a crushing weight of contemplation. Rhodes, those other cowboys on the death reports, and Dawnie, he remembered. They were all skinned. “So the murders weren’t really murders. They were sacrifices.”
“To Ona,” Vicki affirmed. “It’s symbolic. Consuming the appearance—the skin—of the unflawed. The Creekers consider themselves cursed by their inbreeding, so they pay homage with sacrifice victims. It’s the Creekers’ gift to Onn, by providing uncursed flesh to Onn’s inbred daughter. And the Creekers have been reproducing with it for generations.”
Phil thought about it, gripping the wheel. It was just too crazy. “I don’t believe it, Vicki.”
“How can you not believe it? You’ve seen the Creekers, you’ve seen how deformed they are. You ever seen any other hillfolk as defected as the Creekers?”
“Well, no,” Phil admitted.
“Most of them don’t even look human, and that’s because part of their bloodline isn’t human.”
Then Phil thought back to the books he’d read. She was right, at least in part. The worst-case examples in the photographs of typical inbreds weren’t nearly as genetically defected as most of the Creekers he’d seen. The consideration chopped through his head. Creekers. Inbred. With a demon…
By now he didn’t know what to believe. The only thing he was sure of was this: Natter and his Creekers have Susan, and they’re going to torture her to death unless I can find them.
“Okay, so you’re telling me that Ona is real, fine. Then the House must be real, too.”
Vicki nodded.
“Tell me how to get there,” Phil said.
— | — | —
Thirty
“So many years, so many ages,” he whispered.
Eternity, he thought.
Years were grains of sand sifting through his fingers.
Multitudes had gladly given their blood, their lives.
Onn, he thought. And blessed Ona.
“Unto you we bow forever…”
Redeemer. Sanctifier. Holy father, holy daughter.
The visions sang to him; they always did. Entrails routed briskly from the bellies of the unfaithful. Blood squeezed from the heads of the unsaved. Screaming faces clawed at till they were screaming plops of pulp. Soon, yes, the cursed would become the blessed, the damned would rise to the dark heights of the absolved.
Soon they would go on, shed of their curse, enlightened instead of deprived, one with their master.
Forward into the new nights of a new age, perfect instead of corrupted, no longer in turmoil but in bliss…
Natter, the Reverend, opened his eyes upon the hot, starry night. His old, blotched skin felt new and young now. His ancient mind felt aglow. His savior whispered blessings to him.
The moon shined on the crags and furrows of his disfigured face. His triple-jointed hands opened to the sky.
“So many years, so many ages.”
Time was no longer short.
Instead, the time was upon them.
— | — | —
Thirty-One
“They’re also telepathic,” she said.
“What?”
Vicki shifted in the passenger seat, her red hair flowing about in the warm breeze from the window. “Ona,” she said. “And Cody too, and some of the stronger Creekers. You can hear them in your head.”
Phil scowled. “That’s a load of—” But then he stopped. Wasn’t that what Gut had told him? That Natter talked to him at night, in his head? And showed him visions? Even Phil himself had to acknowledge it. Twenty-five years ago, at the House, and just the other night when he and Eagle had been ambushed. He’d heard words, hadn’t he?
In my head.
“Just tell me how to get to the House,” he insisted.
“You don’t believe it, do you?”
I don’t know what I believe, he told himself. “Look, I don’t want to hear anymore about demons, all right? I got enough to worry about.” That much was true. Like, how was he going to get Susan out? If she’s not dead already, he added. And since Natter was expecting him, and anticipating his motives, the House would surely be a fortress of armed Creekers. And all I’ve got to fight back with is a shotgun, three pistols, and a drug-addicted prostitute…
“Just keep heading down the Route,” Vicki instructed. “I’ll tell you when to turn.”
The night seemed crammed down onto the road; the mangy treeline on either side funneled them through each winding bend. Every so often the headlights caught the glimmers of possum eyes in the woods, which reflected red and reminded him all-too-keenly of the Creekers’ crimson stare. “Tell me about the House,” he said. “What, it’s just a whorehouse?”
Vicki smiled without humor. “Sure, sometimes it’s a whorehouse. And sometimes it’s a slaughterhouse.”
She’s high, Phil dismissed. “Come on, tell me something I can use.”
“The girls at Sallee’s, most of the time they’d just turn their tricks in the parking lot, in cars and trucks. But sometimes, if there was a high-paying john, or one of Cody’s friends wanted a girl, he’d let her take the trick back to the House. And then there were other nights…”
The rest of the words seemed to drift out the window.
“What?” Phil asked testily. “Other nights, what?”
“Cody would pick certain victims—”
“What do you mean, certain victims?”
“Drug dealers mostly, from the surrounding towns, the kind of guys nobody asks questions about when they disappear. And if anybody did file a missing persons report, Mullins would bury it, or stonewall the county cops. That was part of Cody’s deal with Mullins—Mullins took a cut to throw the county off track about any bodies that were found. The other part of the deal was Mullins let Cody run hookers out of Sallee’s as a lure.”
“A lure?”
“Yeah, like I was just saying. A john would buy a girl at the club, then she’d take him back to the house. But that’s where the trick ended.”
Phil glanced at her. “I don’t follow.”
