CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

 

 

Five minutes on his back, coiled beneath the steering column of a '79 Datsun pickup truck with a screwdriver in one hand and wire-strippers in the other, and Fitch had the engine roaring. "Let's move, Detective!"

Goodwell shuffled across the street, a canvas backpack slung over each shoulder. Probably worried about breaking a bottle - each bag contained four Molotovs wrapped in old cloth, carefully siphoned from the leftovers of Fitch and Kimberly Archer's napalm brew.

It wasn't like gas to spontaneously ignite. Even if Goodwell dropped the bags on the asphalt, they'd simply have to go back for more. But the detective was playing it cautious, moving hunched, rain gleaming on his forehead.

Finally, he settled the two bags into the pickup's rear tray and clambered into the passenger seat. "Anyone watching?"

Fitch glanced around. The street was deserted in both directions, but that didn't mean nobody was peering at them from the darkness. Sometimes it felt like the shadows had legs and hands and eyes, waiting, tensed, ready to spring.

Sometimes, every dark spot was the thing that'd chased them out of the Rustwood PD. The creature in the black rainslicker, all latex curves and static.

That thing swam into his dreams some nights. Watching him from a distance. Silent, radiating fury. In the worst dreams, it lifted its cowl and let him see its face. In the rigid, sweating aftermath, when Fitch woke clutching himself, struggling to breathe, he thought he recognized the face beneath the rainslicker.

But that was impossible.

Goodwell finally buckled up. "You want to move this thing before someone sees us?"

"Safety first, Detective." The rain was coming down heavy, enough so that Fitch had to crank the wipers up to eleven just to see the road. "Didn't forget your lighter?"

"In my pocket."

"Got mine too." The wind was strong enough to shove the pickup sideways as they took a tight corner. Calm, Fitch reminded himself. The beast only had so many eyes. They could stay undetected if he kept a calm hand on the wheel. "Wanna give me directions?"

Goodwell leaned back in his seat. His expression was pinched, withdrawn, as if he was contemplating having made a terrible mistake.

Maybe he had. Maybe Fitch had, too. After all, he'd seen those kids on top of the mountain. Nothing left in them but the queen's critters all squirming and hungry.

Two adults against three children. Should've been easy odds, but they got their asses kicked sideways. Now they were heading back into the madness.

"Up the Berran Pass," Goodwell finally said. "You'll see the turnoff to the Hill Family Farm. Only thing for miles."

"So if things go bad out there-"

"No calling for help."

Fitch punched the pickup into fifth. "Detective, you sure know how to show a man a good time."

 

A tight knot of anticipation swelled in Goodwell's guts as they took the last turnoff to the Hill Family Farm.

This was the third time he'd visited the farm in the last few months. The first time, he'd killed three teenagers and hidden their bodies down a well. The second, he'd almost killed Chan to stop her poking her nose into things that didn't concern her.

Nothing ever went right at the farm. As he looked down at the dilapidated barn, the white-washed clapboard house behind the wild wheat fields, the piggery gone to ruin, he felt as if he'd just passed into a huge shadow, a place the sun didn't dare touch.

The whole valley was cursed, he knew that. Question was, who put the curse there?

The new queen, or him?

Fitch looked uncomfortable as he guided the car down the pebbled trail. "Don't feel like hanging here any longer than we have to. Mrs Archer could be back already, looking for us. Besides, got to mix up some more napalm, and we're low on supplies, which-"

"Can the excuses. This place makes me feel like shit too." The well emerged from between tall bushes, a silent edifice of stone crusted with moss, heavy and patient in the earth. A mausoleum. All it needed was a pithy plaque to complete the scene. "That's where I put them."

Maybe Fitch was getting bad vibes off the well too, because he parked a hundred yards distant and made sure to retrieve the Molotovs before he followed. The heavy wooden lid had been replaced on the well, although Goodwell couldn't remember whether it was him or Chan who'd fixed it up so neat.

Maybe neither.

Goodwell stopped ten paces from the well and tried to steady his breath. "I still dream about tossing them over the edge."

"After you killed them, or before?"

"I wasn't gonna dump three kids down a well while they were still breathing."

"Jokin', Detective. You've got to lighten up."

Goodwell didn't feel like joking. He was standing above a tomb. Even as he went to shove the cover off the well, his right hand recalled the sensation of squeezing the trigger. The fine mist of blood spattering his fingers.

"They were gone last time I checked," he said.

"Climbed out themselves?"

"The pretender works in mysterious ways. Maybe she hauled them out. Maybe..."

"Maybe they never left?"

Goodwell paused, the lid of the well ajar. "Then what chased us, up on the mountain?"

"If you're asking me to explain this town, you're shit out of luck. I don't know up from down in this place. All I know is that the dead burn." Fitch shivered, drawing his coat tight around his shoulders. "I don't like the look of that sky."

He was right - the clouds were growing darker around the edges, threatening to develop from a thin wash of rain to a smothering downpour. And Goodwell knew what was waiting in the rain, what hid in every droplet. The things squirming beneath the skin, beneath the jelly of the eyes.

Better to be under cover before the infection was unavoidable.

He shoved the wooden lid free and peered into the dark. No flashlight meant he couldn't see more than five yards down, and when Goodwell dropped a pebble into the shaft he heard a click click of stone, followed by silence.

Fitch hadn't approached the well, preferring to watch the barn at their backs. "What's down there?"

"No clue. Black as a witch's asshole."

"I've got a lighter, you've got a Molotov. Drop one and we can go home."

It sounded so simple. Burn whatever waited down there and walk away. But even as Goodwell took a bottle from his pack and unscrewed the cap, he had the awful feeling it wasn't going to work. The pretender had defences for this sort of thing. She could be beaten, but only when you went the extra mile.

He took a dry rag from the pack, worked it deep into the neck of the bottle, felt it go sodden between his fingertips. "Careful with that lighter or I'll go up too."

"Done this a hundred times, Detective." Fitch hunched against the rain. The lighter flame stuttered in the wind, and Goodwell kept his fingers out of the way as the petrol-soaked rag flared. "Quick, before it takes your arm off."

Goodwell didn't hesitate. He leaned over the edge of the well and watched the Molotov tumble, light washing over the stone walls as it spiralled down, down, down, into the dark.

For the space of one held breath, it seemed like the well was a lot deeper than it had any right to be.

The light winked out. Goodwell blinked, rubbed his eyes. Behind him, Fitch said, "Didn't break?"

"I don't know." The flames had left an afterimage trail across his vision. He wasn't sure, but...

In the second before the flames vanished, he was sure he'd seen the silhouette of something thin reaching up from the black.

A child's arm, snatching the bottle out of the air.

"God, I wish I had a gun." Goodwell backed up, looking over his shoulder at the barn. Was that a shadow in the window? He blinked, and the window was empty. All the trees around the edge of the farmstead were hiding places, wide enough for a child to stand behind, waiting, licking its lips...

A squashing sound came from the reeds growing beyond the well, like a bare foot pressing into mud. Goodwell whirled. "What do you want?"

"Detective?" Fitch rested a hand on Goodwell's shoulder. "Figure it's time you and me got out of here."

"They're watching." He narrowed his eyes, trying to make out shapes in the gloom. Was that a child running between the trees? Wood creaked in the barn. The old structure settling, or a dead boy taking up position behind the door? "What the fuck do you want? An apology?"

No reply. No taunting giggles. No cries of pain or threats mumbled through mouthfuls of mud.

Only the wind, and the battering of rain against the side of the barn.

"Nothing out there, Detective." Fitch tugged Goodwell back toward the car. "Came a long way for nothing, but it's time we went home. Got a couple bucks. We can stop for hot chocolate. Nothing quite like hot chocolate on a cold night, am I right?" When Goodwell resisted, he patted him on the shoulder. "Don't know what you were hoping to find, but the way I figure, no news is good news."

"I wanted it done," Goodwell said. His lips were numb with cold. "I wanted them gone."

"Maybe you don't get to choose. Maybe you step in shit and the stink follows you around the rest of your life."

"Didn't know you were a philosophical sort."

"Never said I wasn't. Then again, doesn't take an expert to know what it's like to walk around with a turd on the bottom of your shoe."

The vagrant's smile was all too knowing. Goodwell didn't like it. There was something behind that smile, he was sure. A sad truth he didn't want to hear, somehow worse than killing three children and tossing their bodies down a well.

He sighed. "Yeah. Let's get on home."

The rain grew heavy as they trudged back to the car. Grey clouds had turned black, and Goodwell could see the hard edge of a storm front approaching from the west. Soon it'd hit town, and the streets would become rivers.

Times were, rain like that would bring every cop out on to the street. Families stranded by temporary flooding, power lines down, small cars washed off bridges. But now, with most of the cops in town dead or as close to dead as made no difference...

He wondered how long it'd be before the town collapsed in upon itself. People never took long to notice a power vacuum. The citizens, the people on the street, wouldn't understand the power struggle behind the curtain. The queens warring with shadow armies, pulling each other apart stitch by stitch. But they'd sure as hell notice when police stopped responding to calls. When the cars stopped patrolling. When their families went out at night and never came back.

That's when the real troubles would start. First, shouting in the streets. Marches. Looting, maybe. Violence. Blood in the alleys.

And after that? The queens couldn't keep control forever. Rustwood only continued because it was a well-oiled engine. Goodwell had always been that oil, cleaning away the messes, tidying up after the new queen's little sorties. Easy enough when it was isolated. But as soon as the town became a battleground...

"We have to get this mess sorted, fast," he muttered.

"What?"

"The town," he said, waving a hand at the hills. "This... bullshit. Monsters and dead kids and cops gone crazy."

"Kill the beast and all of it calms down," Fitch said.

"You seem real sure of that."

"Only thing I've ever been sure of. There's a cancer in Rustwood and as soon as we cut it out, poof. Clouds gone. The sun comes out. Time to make everything right."

Goodwell kicked his way through an ankle-deep puddle. Foul water splashed halfway up his knee. His reflection wavered, twisted by ripples, unrecognizable. "Wish it was gonna be that easy-"

He stopped.

At his feet, his reflection solidified. It was wrong, but he didn't know why. More grey hairs appearing around his temples? Lines where there hadn't been lines the month before? The pressure of keeping a town intact finally stripping away the last of his middle-aged charm?

Goodwell blinked.

His reflection was smirking.

"Something wrong?" Fitch said behind him, but Goodwell couldn't reply. His throat was closed.

He couldn't even scream as the pale hand slid from the water and closed thin, childlike fingers around his ankle.