Headstone City (37 page)

Mrs. Prott said, “Oh yes, that one. The dancer.”

First thing you saw when you looked at Mama Prott was the jiggle of turkey neck. Even when she wasn't turning her head, that neck still flapped, vibrating with her breathing, always catching your attention. Whitt couldn't get over it.

The woman boiling with gaiety, heavy and earthen. Someone you wanted to hug, really. Her expensive, chic clothing was mismatched and too tight. He figured she'd stolen them from ladies with taste in order to pretend she had some fashion sense herself. Lots of jewelry, most of it fake but some pieces worth more than this shit hole's entire mortgage. She wore men's wedding bands on both thumbs.

Franklin's hands opening and closing in perfect timing to Whitt's pulse.

Mrs. Prott smiling, her teeth dark and crooked. “Well, no one actually killed her. You cannot destroy that which is
obdurate. Insensible.
You can only transform it. She wasn't human.” Doing the fluttery finger thing again. “She was
other,
and the purifying light of Mucus Thorn-in-Brain struck her down when she tried to steal my breath one morning.”

“I see,” Whitt said.

“She climbed on top of me while I slept and tried to kiss me so she could steal the soulwind from my lungs. You can't call it murder to set right the karmic cosmic wheel again.”

“I thought it was a knot.”

“A knot that spins and spins like a wheel across the great ecclesiastical galaxy.”

“Okay,” Whitt said. “So what happened to her?”

“The only way to defend ourselves from a soul thief is to stab it thrice in the heart, with the point of the blade aiming north. Then the throat must be cut so its evil incantations will dribble to the floor instead of being raised to the cosmic masters. This is the transformation that must take place. Conversion. Reformation. Then the genitals must be removed or the seed may infect another vessel and give birth even in its dying throes.”

“Dying throes,” Whitt repeated.

“And we wouldn't want that. We could not bear that.”

“No, we could not.”

“More tea?”

“Please.”

That blank gaze of the blind man landed on Whitt with a certain amount of weight. Franklin's fists grasping nothing. The other brother with his hand on his chest. Whitt whispered, “Government, government,” and watched Merwin clunk his thatched head twice.

Mama Prott handed Whitt a series of graphs and charts that had been modified from the zodiac. Strange uses of Cabalistic symbols, Teutonic characters, numerology, and scatterings of nonsensical pseudo-sexual terms, with an emphasis on bodily fluids and naughty bits. Phlegm in Hair. Whore's Bait. Orifice Eye. Mucus Desisting the Efforts of Knee. Failure of Urethra. The handwriting so crimped that it would take hours to decipher it all.

Pulling out one particular sheet, stained with pinkish fluid. “Here, here it is,” she said, “proof that the girl was other. That the Sect of Purification and Consummation acted in protection of all the earth and humanity.”

“So you're a branch of a larger—” What should he call this thing she believed in? He didn't think she'd take offense at the word
cult,
but calling this a cult lent it too much credence. “—persuasion.”

“Yes. We have nineteen more members back at the other house, where the majority of our communicants live, and where we hold our official ceremonies.”

“Which house would that be?” he asked.

Pointing at the far wall, the mis-sized rings on her fingers jingling slightly. “The one on Carver Way, where most of the important rituals are held. This one here, we use it only every so often, to store our belongings. You're very lucky to have found us here this morning.”

“Yes,” he said.

It took another half hour of finagling, but Whitt finally got the ballerina's name out of her: Grace Kinnick. It was one of the names on the jars. What did the Protts think they had in there? Captured souls?

“And the child?”

“Stolen. That's why we need your help. The beget . . . the offspring . . . of the soulthief is still in its genuine form. It can be dealt with now. Sent back into the celestial continuum where it can once again rejoin with the great astral identiform.”

“Sure.”

“We have to have the child before midnight Friday night. You said you know who has it now?”

“That's right, it's with a friend of mine who works for social services,” Whitt lied. He grinned at Merwin. “A government agency.”

Merwin rapping himself in the head again, looking scared that somebody from the Pentagon might come take away more of his brain. And Whitt sitting here making a game of it. He had to have a little fun here so he didn't go wild and start crossing the hard line, becoming what everyone told him he'd become.

“Oh, it's dangerous to have the beget loose like this,” Mrs. Prott warbled, the neck going gangbusters. “Magic circles must be precipitated, the proper guiding influences invoked before the evisceration and following rituals.”

Whitt said, “So the baby is
other
. Genuine. It's blood-tainted. And must be struck down by Mucus Thorn-in-Brain. And returned to the cosmic knot.”

She broke into a delighted squeal that went on for too long. “Yes, exactly. Oh, you are adept. A true sensitive. You have the gift, do you realize that? I've never seen an aura quite like yours. You're exceptionally dark and very powerful.”

“How often have you done this?” he asked. “Purified these . . . evils.”

“Oh, we don't keep accounts of such things. This is a spiritual war we fight. There are many casualties sprawled across both sides of the veil.”

“Fourteen,” Franklin said, a wet chuckle easing from his chest. “The ballerina was number fourteen.”

That voice, obscenely joyful, yet frothing with its hate. Whitt shifted to the edge of the chair in case he had to dive. Thinking that maybe now Franklin was about to use those hands. “What do you mean?”

“The ballerina was number fourteen,” Franklin repeated. “The baby, it would've been fifteen.”

Mama Prott smiled at her boy. Whitt thought about the dead, probably buried in the yard, hidden in the house. He stared at the spot between her eyes, where she said they'd shot her and her brains had leaked out, and wondered if he could drop, roll aside, draw his .32, spring to his feet and hit the target, the way he'd been practicing.

“So, Mr. Whitt, can you help us retrieve the offspring?”

“Yes,” he said. “I consider it my reverent duty.”

“Glorious! We'll be holding services this afternoon at the other house.”

“On Carver Way.”

“Yes. Please join us so we can sanctify and protect you from harm. You'll never regret your initiation into that which is Mucus Thorn-in-Brain and the clarity and peace you'll feel afterward. We'll brighten your aura yet.”

That thick neck wobbling. The blind guy glaring. The other one grinning, his scars thick and shining like leeches.

“I look forward to it,” Whitt said.

H
e drove off, parked around the corner near a sump that doubled as a dump site, and waited until the woman and her sons left in their SUV with out-of-state plates. More stolen goods. Spoils of the dead. He returned to the house with a pickaxe, shovel, and flashlight and stepped in through the broken back door that had been tied shut with the elastic from an old brassiere.

He left the tools on the stoop while he searched the house for any other squirrelly cultists that might be hiding under a bed somewhere. Except there weren't any beds. The three upstairs rooms looked poisonous, toxic, the old paint peeling in strips and the plaster gouged by fingernails. He found bullet holes and dried spatters that could've been any of the bodily fluids the Protts seemed to groove on so much.

Whitt grabbed his tools again and looked for the cellar door. He found it hidden behind the metal shelving stacked with all the upside-down jars of trapped souls.

The old stupidity and lack of control overwhelmed him for a minute. He took great pleasure in smashing the glass containers and releasing Hogarth and Ussel and Airsiez and the rest. He held on to the jar with the ballerina in it and pressed it to the side of his head, knowing how insane it looked but feeling an urgency to will her to peace, if he could. You never knew what you could do when you put your mind to it. Finally he hurled the container against the wall with the rest of them and went into the basement to dig.

The body was in the corner of the dirt floor about three feet down, missing its genitals and wearing orange sneakers, just like Killjoy had said.

HEADSTONE CITY
A Bantam Spectra Book / March 2006

Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Tom Piccirilli

Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eISBN-13: 978-0-553-90235-8
eISBN-10: 0-553-90235-0

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