Deep Thinking
* 1 *
There’s a place where each of us goes when we hurt, or when we have to face something too impossible to be believed. It’s a little like a private sort of heaven, an almost-sanctuary, your own personal time out place.
It was where a body went to go when it knew it was time to die.
With Wendy Joe it was a jungle trail, leading down into a shadow world painted with dark brushes.
With Clavis it was a church.
With Wilfred, a battered fire helmet resting upon a cold, white freezer.
Maddy had her own place, brighter, and that made it sadder.
Maddy’s place was a field of lonesome sunflowers, tall as steeples, waving like paper dancers high in the blowing wind. The grass of this field was strangely permeable. It floated, just a hair span above the dirt, moving in the wind like light over glass, like it could swallow her whole.
Maddy was down there now in the dream world, swimming the undercurrents of memory. From somewhere across the field she heard a man’s voice calling her name. The voice sounded as angry as a thunderstorm on two legs.
Had she been awake she’d have assumed the thunderstorm belonged to the Tatterdemon, but because she was so close to sleep and death and childhood, she decided that the voice had to belong to her Daddy.
Daddy was a big man in life with hair as black as coal. He had arms like corded leather, wiry and strong, like there was nothing beneath his hide but twists of ironwood. In her memory the man grew larger and stood above her like a floating giant. He talked to her in her dreams and poured his words in her ears like whispers of molten molasses.
“You’re as blonde as sunflowers,” Daddy said. “That’s rare. Blonde all the way through, too. That’s real rare in your father’s family, even rarer in your mother’s. No telling where you got that blonde hair from, my little sunflower.”
He touched her cheek.
His fingertips burnt against her cheekbone, like the hot blue flame of a welding torch.
“Why don’t you come out with me to the shed in the barn?” Daddy asked.
Maddy grown up knew just what her Dream-Daddy was asking her. She wouldn’t go anywhere near that barn shed. But in the dream Maddy was a little girl who didn’t know any better.
She was torn between knowing and being too young to know better.
All the sunflowers opened their mouths like a million screaming lions, and sirened out her name.
Maddy, Maddy, Maddy...
They tried to warn her but it was useless. In her dream, which was nearly as dangerous as her reality, Maddy followed the old man down to the barn shed.
Down to the place where everything hurt.
* 2 *
The thing that had been Marvin Pusser squatted like a patch of mobile leprosy, staring at the stretch of dirt where the Straw King had buried what was left of Lily.
In the slow, murky swamp of his thinking, he missed her.
He wondered if she’d come back like the others.
He wanted to touch her, one more time.
He trailed the sticks of his arms across the dirt.
Magic, he thought. I am a magic man and I will call Lily back from death. But it didn’t work that way. Only the Tatterdemon held the magic. Marvin had been contaminated with the Tatterdemon taint, but he could never use it like the Tatterdemon could.
Yet Marvin also knew that the Tatterdemon was nothing else than Vic Harker wearing somebody else’s set of clothes. Vic was doing nothing more significant than holding on to someone’s power until they came to get it.
And that someone was the woman who slept with her broom.
Marvin could see her in the back of his mind.
He wasn’t sure just how he could see her.
She was just there, like a candle burning in the night.
He shook his head.
Things were sure different now.
He wouldn’t have to polish another shoe. He’d died, and the Tatterdemon had remade him. That made the Tatterdemon a kind of almost-god. But even that could be changed. The rules always changed.
When Earl had shot the Tatterdemon’s woman he hadn’t been able to prevent it.
That made the Tatterdemon fallible.
Maybe he wasn’t a god, after all.
All Marvin knew was that he had a woman, and the Tatterdemon took that woman and put her in the field.
Lily was to be his, not the Tatterdemon’s.
The notion of rebellion kindled deep within Marvin’s pissed-off consciousness.
He lined up the facts as best he could.
He’d been killed. He’d been put in the field and brought back.
Maybe Lily would come back too.
That would be a good thing.
Now the Tatterdemon’s woman was shot by Earl. Maybe the Tatterdemon would put her in the field too. Maybe he would make her like Marvin. Then maybe Marvin could have her.
The way he’d had Lily.
But that would be no good.
Marvin’s way had ended Lily, ended her so bad he didn’t think she could ever come back.
Maybe the Tatterdemon would do things differently. Maybe the Tatterdemon would think of some other way to bring his woman back. That was why he was lying there stretched out in the field and talking to the woman with the broom.
I could kill him now, Marvin thought, but what if he came back?
What if he kept coming back?
What was I going to do?
* 3 *
Vic opened his eyes to darkness all around.
It was kind of like waking up inside a box.
He didn’t like the feeling.
He was the straw king now. The Tatterdemon. He didn’t like the feeling of being closed in, any more than a dog likes its chain. He used his anger to push his mind deeper into the dirt. It was like feeling a trapdoor open beneath you or sinking into slow, muddy water.
There was a whole other world down here.
He hadn’t seen too much of it while he’d been growing. His eyes had been too busy staring up where he’d come from to notice what he was growing through.
Deeper.
Deeper.
Slow worms pushed mindless paths through the dirt. Ants crawled from surface into shadow, bringing their tribute to the queen underground. He saw Maddy’s blood, slowly absorbing into the field. He watched as bits of Lily eked down deep into the guts of the field and took root.
It was hot down here.
It was so hot the Devil would have broken a sweat just thinking about it.
Then he saw her, the woman who slept with her broom. She looked a little like Maddy, only not so pretty. There was too much anger in her eyes – like she was pissed at God and the universe. Like she’d been down here stewing in her own juices for half of eternity.
This wasn’t the way anger should work.
Anger was something you got out of yourself.
Something you threw at other people.
Something you burned off.
Not for this woman.
Not for Thessaly Cross.
Thessaly Cross, the broom woman, was hanging onto her anger, the way some women hang onto children.
She was hanging onto it, like she loved it.
Screw her, Vic thought. I’m here for Maddy.
“What do you want from me?” the broom woman asked.
“She’s dead. My Maddy’s dead. The goddamn cop shot her.”
“I know,” the broom woman answered. “I felt her leaving.”
“What do I do?”
She stared at him like his mother used to stare, straight down the bridge of her nose, like he was the stupidest bit of dickweed to sprout since Eve fucked Adam.
“What do you do?” she asked. “Does the rain ask what it should do when it is ready to fall? Does the wind ask why the tree bows before it? Does fire need permission to burn? Plant her, like the others, that is exactly what she is for.”
“I don’t want to,” the Tatterdemon protested. “I don’t want her to change. I want her to stay the way she is. She’s my roots and my memory. There has to be something I can do.”
The woman considered his plea.
The Tatterdemon didn’t care what she wanted.
He’d deal with the old witch anyway he could.
He’d listen to her for now.
But later...?
“Tell me what I can do,” he demanded.
“Lean closer,” she commanded.
The Tatterdemon leaned closer, and Thessaly Cross whispered a slow, dark secret into his ear.