Liar's Harvest (The Emergent Earth) (13 page)

I
cleaned out the last of my stash that night. I was sitting in the frosty pre-dawn darkness with a pile of empty cans between my feet when the kitchen light snapped on, throwing a yellow rectangle out across the yard.

I bolted off the porch and ran for the garbage cans behind the workshop, clutching the evidence of my shameful ritual under my jacket as I ran. I buried everything underneath yesterday’s newspaper and coffee grounds, digging down deep into the garbage to make sure that it stayed hidden.

There was no way that I’d be able to sneak back into the house undetected, so I squared my shoulders and went in the kitchen door.

Leon spun around in alarm when I entered, knocking a bowl off the counter. Bits of broken glass and globs of raw egg exploded over his feet with a bang.

“Jesus Christ! What the hell were you doing outside?”

I grabbed a dishtowel and got down on the floor to start cleaning up the mess. “Couldn’t sleep. Don’t move until I get the glass up or you’ll get cut. What are you doing up so early?”

“I couldn’t sleep, either. I figured I’d make some breakfast for everybody since I was up. But maybe next time I’ll try your plan of jumping out and scaring the bejeesus out of people instead.”

I got up and shook the glass out into the trash, then began to wash my hands. “I recommend it. The look on your face was hilarious.”

Anne and Chuck burst into the kitchen, Anne wrapped in a pink Hello Kitty robe and Chuck in a pair of boxer shorts.

Anne scanned the room and then lowered her pistol. “What happened?”

“Nothing, just dropped a bowl,” said Leon, taking another one out of the cabinet. “Sorry to startle everybody.” He gave me a look. “Breakfast in about twenty minutes, though, if that makes up for it.”

“If there’s bacon, then yes. I’ll be back after I get a quick shower.”

Chuck glared at us with bleary eyes. “A lot of bacon.” Then he shuffled out of the room, scratching himself.

Half an hour later we were gathered in the kitchen, eating. Even Henry, who claimed to have not heard the commotion earlier, but who had somehow managed to sit down at the table exactly when the food was ready.

We ate and shared a little carefully worded small talk in an attempt to avoid the more painful subjects of the recent past. That lasted until Leon’s cell chirped. Conversation stopped mid-sentence while we watched him pull his phone out of his pocket as if it were a live snake.

“It’s just an address in town.”

“Who sent it?” I asked.

“No idea, I don’t recognize the number.” The phone rang loudly in his hand, making everyone jump.

He answered and put it on speaker. “Hello?”

Slow, ragged breathing.

“Hello? Who is this?”

More breathing, but hitching now. Then a strangled sort of wheeze, and then silence.

Leon hung up. “Do we go?”

All eyes turned to me. “No choice. Even if we’re playing into Prime’s hands, it’s not like we have any other information to go on. Our only other plan is to randomly search the woods in this corner of North Carolina, which isn’t exactly promising.”

Everyone grabbed their guns and I buckled on Hunger’s sheath. As always, it felt fever-warm to the touch, even though the house was cool.

The address was on a street in Halfway, so it took us twenty minutes to get to town and another five to find the place we were looking for, a brown single-story house at the end of a residential street. The driveway and the street in front of the house were full of cars and trucks, late model and mostly sporting dark tinted windows and oversized rims.

Nobody answered when I knocked and rang the bell. The door was locked.

“If we’re going to break in,” I said, “we should probably do it out of sight of the neighbors.”

The area out back looked like the aftermath of a year-long house party. Mounds of garbage bags formed a barracade around overflowing bins and cigarette butts and beer cans fought to obscure any hint of grass that may have survived in the backyard. Lots of young men living in a house together leave some pretty unmistakable signs. Between that and the kind of cars parked out front, I had a pretty good idea who lived here.

The back door was open a few inches. I stood to one side of the doorway and shouted through the crack. “Hello?”

No answer. A foul odor seeped out of the house.

Anne touched my arm. “Smells bad. I mean, obviously, but the other way, too.” She drew her pistol.

I nodded and pushed the door open. It opened into a laundry room, dirty clothes piled onto every available surface. I pulled Hunger from its sheath and stepped across the tiny space to the next door. There was no sound from the other side, so I slowly turned the knob and peered into the adjacent room.

I’m not a squeamish guy, but even I had to look away and collect myself for a second before stepping inside.

The smell was like a physical thing, thickening the air until you felt like you were pushing against it. The source was immediately obvious. KC was splayed out on his back on the kitchen table, his intestines heaped in a greasy pile on his chest.

21

C
huck spun around and ran back to the yard, retching. Anne covered her mouth and nose with one hand, but I don’t think it helped. The smell was the kind that coated the inside of your nose and the back of your throat. She followed Chuck outside.

A quick survey of the house showed that KC wasn’t alone. There were rubbery, shriveled bodies everywhere. I counted six in the kitchen, stacked in the corners like cordwood, and five more in the living room, perched on the sofa and chairs as if watching TV. Each was contorted horribly as Paulie had been, and obviously had been balanced on the furniture after they had died.

Back in the kitchen, Henry was leaning over KC’s body, carefully avoiding the blood that had run off the table and onto the floor.

“Look here, inside the body.”

“Come on, Henry. Seriously?” The stomach had been cut open from ribcage to pelvis. The intestines had been pulled out of the way, exposing wet lumps and shapes underneath.

He ignored me. “See here, where the liver has been cut open?”

“Not really. It’s just one big mess to me.”

“This was an act of heptomancy. Entrail reading. Somebody was looking for answers.”

I stepped back from the body and turned my face away. “Any idea what?”

“Usually it’s a yes or no kind of answer. If things look good, smooth and well-formed, then the reading is a yes. Bumpy liver, twisted entrails, anything discolored, then the answer is no. That’s what we get from historical records, back to the Babylonians and down through the Greeks and Romans. But there are accounts of more sophisticated divination practiced by an Etruscan Haruspex named Teitu, who was something of a genius in his field. The Etruscan Mozart of sheep guts, you might say.”

“I doubt I would say that, but okay. Can we do the lecture outside?”

“No. I mention Teitu because of two things.” He pointed at a series of symbols cut into KC’s skin all around the tear in his stomach. “First, these readings were generally taken without any other preparation of the sacrifice. The powers that be already knew what you were worried about, but if you wanted to be extra sure, you might chant something about it during the hoopla leading up to the viewing of the entrails. But Tietu wasn’t looking for a yes or no, so he cut specific information about his question into to the victim’s flesh beforehand.”

I looked longingly towards the door and fresh air. “How quickly can you tell me about the second thing?”

“Heptomancy is usually performed on a freshly killed animal. Teitu held that he could only read the entrails of the living. And, of course, it had to be a person. Look at KC’s wrists and ankles.”

I hadn’t noticed before, but now that Henry had pointed it out, I saw that the skin there was torn all the way to the bone. He’d been held down as he struggled and not by ropes or straps. Picturing the rough wooden hands of Prime and his creations, I could easily see how KC’s injuries would have been created.

I looked away and resumed my study of the back wall. No matter how long I lived, or what I saw, I could never seem to get the clinical detachment that Henry had. I figured it must be something you’re born with, as I’d never seen him bothered by this stuff, even as a young man.

“So, what was the question and what was the answer?”

Henry shrugged. “I have no idea about the question that was asked. These symbols don’t make any sense to me. But as for the answer, well, Old Teitu was famous for exactly one thing, and that was finding out the when to go with a what. So my guess is that these symbols describe what Prime is looking to do and the answer tells him when he needs to do it. It’s in the liver, right there. See?”

“Why do you always make me look at this stuff?”

He shook his head and laughed, white teeth flashing in his dark face. “Builds character.”

I leaned in and found the liver Henry had pointed out before. It had been divided and the pieces placed face up to show the insides of the halves. On each were three dark symbols made of what looked like black blood that had seeped to the surface. The symbols on each end were hollow and rounded with one point on the bottom and three points on top. The one in the center was a stick drawing of a four-legged animal.

“Okay, I looked. I didn’t learn anything, but I looked.”

“The symbols on the ends are fire. The animal in the center represents livestock, either a cow or a sheep. Taken together, these are depicting an old harvest ceremony where farmers would walk their animals between two bonfires in a ritual cleansing to keep them healthy and productive. It’s done as a part of the celebrations of Samhain, or All Hallow’s Eve.”

“So it happens on Halloween.”

“Not just Halloween, but at a specific kind of Halloween celebration involving a bonfire. Like the one Halfway is throwing in town tonight.”

“Tonight? Are you sure?”

Henry’s answer was cut off by the sharp bang of the kitchen door slamming into the wall. Men with drawn weapons poured into the room, Sheriff Fowler first among them.

22

T
he deputies pounded into the room with guns drawn and eyes wide, ready to fight for their lives if need be. Two seconds later, standing in that kitchen and taking their first breath, all of the gung-ho just fell out of them. To a man they flinched and half had to turn their heads.