Julius Todd sat across from me, blanched to the bone. He"d scrunched up that cat face of his. I told myself that if I heard anything like fumbling around down there, anything but a straight pick, I"d shoot out my arm across that table and shove his adam"s apple in.

Black.

Dirty cheater- I just reached out and grabbed one. It felt like it wanted to slip out of my hand. I slapped it down hard on the table. Black.

Todd rocked a little. My nerves were steady.

I was going to win.

He pulled black.

Must have been the shuffle put them all back in order I thought. Could I count them-how many were there?

I pulled black.

Todd hesitated. He rubbed his fingers together. Nails all clean and buffed.

You"re going to lose, I thought at him.

He pulled.

I got up and swept the checkers back into the box.

"Red for Ruthie," I said. I left him sitting there.

Grover Julius asked me where Todd is and I pointed to where Todd was waiting for Ruth on the veranda because he wanted to see her. Julius made a noise and went back into his office to get ready.

It"s supposed to work like, Julius gets the girl and brings her here. Todd puts casts on her legs so she can"t run. Then he puts her in with the women but separate so they don"t mix. Todd holds, normally, because Julius has to do it himself. No one hears because n.o.body lives around here. When Todd gets the sign, she"s there. All ready. You always keep a girl, because you never know when Todd will get the sign. But there"s no girl now, because we just did the it. Julius can"t go back so soon because they"ll be on the look out. But Todd says it has to be tonight.

The last girl was black. Julius said it didn"t matter. He also said no one would care because she was colored. She was here three months, nearly. I only got to see her twice. Todd saw the sign and the next night he took her into the thing. She was so scared she didn"t even move. Julius did the it. He called when we have to bring her in because he has to start by himself, because he doesn"t like us to see how it"s done. He wants to be the only one who knows.

Todd knows the time, and Julius does the it, but I"m the only one who can put the right mark on the girl. That"s been since Father took us out to the first farm. Julius says it made me slow. He opens the girls up and gets the sack away, and then tells me put on the mark. It"s hard because the heart jumps all over. You can"t smudge. I always get it right because I practice. Then Julius grabs it and cuts all around and pulls it out. He always gets soaked because they take a while to stop going. Todd has to come up with the bowl and Julius puts it in it, because they have to burn it, and then it gets burnt and the spare-rib smell, smoke all over and then they come, they get into the girl, then we can go in the palaces.

The mark always looks different. I just paint it because I don"t know it. I see it and then I paint it on. I tried painting it on me once but the brush tickles and I don"t see anything. I think the it has to be happening. I try not to tickle the girl"s heart too much.

Todd Claire came down and set out the dishes for supper. Julius kept her locked up in the attic room during the day and didn"t want her to "mix" with Ruth. He never let her out and made her read the books all day long, over and over. He allows her to put on a frock before coming down to eat. When he feels like showing off, he makes her conjugate, standing by the table, in her miserable, reedy little voice.

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 gra.s.s, 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.

Julius 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.

Todd 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 Mr.Fox and Other Feral Tales Mr.Fox and Other Feral Tales (Roadkill Press, 1992), (Roadkill Press, 1992), Bad Intentions Bad Intentions (Subterranean Press, 1996), (Subterranean Press, 1996), The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists The Man with the Barbed-Wire Fists (Night Shade Books, 2001), and the horror novels (Night Shade Books, 2001), and the horror novels Slippin" into Darkness Slippin" into Darkness (Cemetery Dance, 1994), (Cemetery Dance, 1994), Wildest Dreams Wildest Dreams (Subterranean Press, 1998), (Subterranean Press, 1998), Wicked Prayer Wicked Prayer (HarperPrism, 2000), and (HarperPrism, 2000), and Dark Harvest Dark Harvest (Tor, 2007). He has also written the hard-boiled detective novels (Tor, 2007). He has also written the hard-boiled detective novels Saguaro Riptide Saguaro Riptide (Berkley, 1997) and (Berkley, 1997) and The Ten Ounce Siesta The Ten Ounce Siesta (Berkley, 1998) and has edited the horror anthology (Berkley, 1998) and has edited the horror anthology It Came from the Drive-In! It Came from the Drive-In! (I Books, 2004). (I Books, 2004).

*own 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 b.u.t.toned it down. Then I fed sh.e.l.ls 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: h.e.l.lo tree, goodbye heartbeat. h.e.l.lo tree, goodbye heartbeat.

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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d who"d ended his life in a monster"s stomach, or they were whimpering with blood on their faces, or they were running like h.e.l.l 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."

"You sure it"s dead?"

"I don"t know that, either. All I know is we"d better stay away from it."

We backed off. The only things that lingered were the afternoon light slanting through the trees, and the smoke from that hot asphalt, and the smoke from the wrecked Chrysler. The light cut swirls through that smoke as it pooled around the dead thing, settling low and misty, as if the something beneath it were trying to swallow a chunk of the world, roadbed and all.

"I feel kind of dizzy," Barnes said.

"Hold on, Roy. You have to."

I grabbed my deputy by the shoulder and spun him around. He was just a kid, really-before this deal, he"d never even had his gun out of its holster while on duty. I"d been doing the job for fifteen years, but I could have clocked a hundred and never seen anything like this. Still, we both knew it wasn"t over. We"d seen what we"d seen, we"d done what we"d done, and the only thing left to do was deal with whatever was coming next.

That meant checking out the Chrysler. I brought the shotgun barrel even with it, aiming at the driver"s side door as we advanced. The driver"s skull had slammed the steering wheel at the point of impact. Black blood smeared across his face, and filed teeth had slashed through his pale lips so that they hung from his gums like leavings you"d bury after gutting a fish. On top of that, words were carved on his face. Some were purpled over with scar tissue and others were still fresh scabs. None of them were words I"d seen before. I didn"t know what to make of them.

"Jesus," Barnes said. "Will you look at that."

"Check the back seat, Roy."

Barnes did. There was other stuff there. Torn clothes. Several pairs of handcuffs. Ropes woven with fishhooks. A wrought-iron trident. And in the middle of all that was a cardboard box filled with books.

The deputy pulled one out. It was old. Leathery. As he opened it, the book started to come apart in his hands. Brittle pages fluttered across the road- Something rustled in the open trunk. I pushed past Roy and fired point-blank before I even looked. The spare tire exploded. On the other side of the trunk, a clawed hand scrabbled up through a pile of shotgunned clothes. I fired again. Those claws clacked together, and the thing beneath them didn"t move again.

Using the shotgun barrel, I shifted the clothes to one side, uncovering a couple of dead kids in a nest of rags and blood. Both of them were handcuffed. The thing I"d killed had chewed its way out of one of their bellies. It had a grinning, wolfish muzzle and a tail like a dozen braided snakes. I slammed the trunk and cham bered another sh.e.l.l. I stared down at the trunk, waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did.

Behind me . . . well, that was another story.

The men from the road gang were on the move.

Their boots scuffed over hot asphalt.

They gripped crow bars, and sledge hammers, and one of them even had a machete.

They came toward us with blood on their faces, laughing like children.

The children in the cemetery weren"t laughing anymore.

They were gathered around an open grave, eating.As always, a couple seconds pa.s.sed before they noticed me. Then their brains sparked their bodies into motion, and the first one started for me with an axe. I pulled the trigger, and the shotgun turned his spine to jelly, and he went down in sections. The next one I took at longer range, so the blast chewed her over some. Dark blood from a hundred small wounds peppered her dress. Shrieking, she turned tail and ran.

Which gave the third bloodface a chance to charge me. He was faster than I expected, dodging the first blast, quickly closing the distance. There was barely enough room between the two of us for me to get off another shot, but I managed the job. The blast took off his head. That was that.

Or at least I thought it was. Behind me, something whispered through long gra.s.s that hadn"t been cut in five months. I whirled, but the barefoot girl"s knife was already coming at me. The blade ripped through my coat in a silver blur, slashing my right forearm. A twist of her wrist and she tried to come back for another piece, but I was faster and bashed her forehead with the shotgun b.u.t.t. Her skull split like a popped blister and she went down hard, cracking the back of her head on a tombstone.

That double-punched her ticket. I sucked a deep breath and held it. Blood reddened the sleeve of my coat as the knife-wound began to pump. A couple seconds later I began to think straight, and I got the idea going in my head that I should put down the shotgun and get my belt around my arm. I did that and tightened it good. Wounded, I"d have a walk to get back to the pickup. Then I"d have to find somewhere safe where I could take care of my arm. The pickup wasn"t far distance-wise, but it was a steep climb up to the ridgeline. My heart would be pounding double-time the whole way. If I didn"t watch it, I"d lose a lot of blood.

But first I had a job to finish. I grabbed the shotgun and moved toward the rifled grave. Even in the bright afternoon sun, the long gra.s.s was still damp with morning dew. I noticed that my boots were wet as I stepped over the dead girl. That bothered me, but the girl"s corpse didn"t. She couldn"t bother me now that she was dead.

I left her behind me in the long gra.s.s, her body a home for the scarred words she"d carved on her face with the same knife she"d used to butcher the dead and butcher me. All that remained of her was a barbed rictus grin and a pair of dead eyes staring up into the afternoon sun, as if staring at nothing at all. And that"s what she was to me-that"s what they all were now that they were dead. They were nothing, no matter what they"d done to themselves with knives and files, no matter what they"d done to the living they"d murdered or the dead they"d pried out of burying boxes. They were nothing at all, and I didn"t spare them another thought.

Because there were other things to worry about-things like the one that had infected the children with a mouthful of spit-up blood. Sometimes those things came out of graves. Other times they came out of car trunks or meat lockers or off slabs in a morgue. But wherever they came from they were always born of a corpse, and there were corpses here aplenty.

I didn"t see anything worrisome down in the open grave. Just stripped bones and tatters of red meat, but it was meat that wasn"t moving. That was good. So I took care of things. I rolled the dead bloodfaces into the grave. I walked back to the cottonwood thicket at the ridge side of the cemetery and grabbed the gas can I"d brought from the pickup. I emptied it into the hole, then tossed the can in, too. I wasn"t carrying it back to the truck with a slicedup arm.

I lit a match and let it fall.

The gas thupped alive and the hole growled fire.

Fat sizzled as I turned my back on the grave. Already, other sounds were rising in the hollow. Thick, rasping roars. Branches breaking somewhere in the treeline behind the old funeral home. The sound of something big moving through the timber-something that heard my shotgun bark three times and wasn"t afraid of the sound.

Whatever that thing was, I didn"t want to see it just now.

I disappeared into the cottonwood thicket before it saw me.

Barnes had lived in a converted hunting lodge on the far side of the lake. There weren"t any other houses around it, and I hadn"t been near the place in months. I"d left some stuff there, including medical supplies we"d scavenged from the local emergency room. If I was lucky, they would still be there.

Thick weeds bristled over the dirt road that led down to Roy"s place. That meant no one had been around for a while. Of course, driving down the road would leave a trail, but I didn"t have much choice. I"d been cut and needed to do something about it fast. You take chances. Some are large and some are small. Usually, the worries attached to the small ones amount to nothing.

I turned off the pavement. The dirt road was rutted, and I took it easy. My arm ached every time the truck hit a pothole. Finally, I parked under the carport on the east side of the old lodge. Porch steps groaned as I made my way to the door, and I entered behind the squared-off barrel of Barnes"s .45.

Inside, nothing was much different than it had been a couple of months before. Barnes"s blood-spattered coat hung on a hook by the door. His reading gla.s.ses rested on the coffee table. Next to it, a layer of mold floated on top of a cup of coffee he"d never finished. But I didn"t care about any of that. I cared about the cabinet we"d stowed in the bathroom down the hall.

Good news. Nothing in the cabinet had been touched. I stripped to the waist, cleaned the knife wound with saline solution from an IV bag, then stopped the bleeding as best I could. The gash wasn"t as deep as it might have been. I sewed it up with a hooked surgical needle, bandaged it, and gobbled down twice as many antibiotics as any doctor would have prescribed. That done, I remembered my wet boots. Sitting there on the toilet, I laughed at myself a little bit, because given the circ.u.mstances it seemed like a silly thing to worry about. Still, I went to the first-floor bedroom I"d used during the summer and changed into a dry pair of Wolverines I"d left behind.

Next I went to the kitchen. I popped the top on a can of chili, found a spoon, and started toward the old dock down by the lake. There was a rusty swing set behind the lodge that had been put up by a previous owner; it shadowed a kid"s sandbox. Barnes hadn"t had use for either-he wasn"t even married-but he"d never bothered to change things around. Why would he? It would have been a lot of work for no good reason.

I stopped and stared at the shadows beneath the swing set, but I didn"t stare long. The dock was narrow and more than a little rickety, with a small boathouse bordering one side. I walked past the boathouse and sat on the end of the dock for a while. I ate cold chili. Cattails whispered beneath a rising breeze. A flock of geese pa.s.sed overhead, heading south. The sun set, and twilight settled in.

It was quiet. I liked it that way. With Barnes, it was seldom quiet. I guess you"d say he had a curious mind. The deputy liked to talk about things, especially things he didn"t understand, like those monsters that crawled out of corpses. Barnes called them lesser demons. He"d read about them in one of those books we found in the wreck. He had ideas about them, too. Barnes talked about those ideas a lot over the summer, but I didn"t want to talk about any of it. Talking just made me edgy. So did Barnes"s ideas and explanations . . . all those maybe"s and what if"s. Barnes was big on those; he"d go on and on about them.

Me, I cared about simpler things. Things anyone could understand. Things you didn"t need to discuss, or debate. Like waking up before a razor-throated monster had a chance to swallow me whole. Or not running out of shotgun sh.e.l.ls. Or making sure one of those things never spit a dead man"s blood in my face, so I wouldn"t take a file to my teeth or go digging in a graveyard for food. That"s what I"d cared about that summer, and I cared about the same things in the hours after a bloodfaced lunatic carved me up with a dirty knife.