

Right Behind You

Three Stories By

Dale Lucas

Author of the neo-pulp novel Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights

Published 2012 by Beating Windward Press LLC

For contact information, please visit:

www.BeatingWindward.com

Text: Copyright © Dale Lucas, 2012

All Rights Reserved

Book & Cover Design: Copyright © KP Creative, 2012

Cover Photograph by Richard North (creative commons) http://richardnorth.net

First Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this free ebook. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied and distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy at Smashwords.com, where they can also discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

**About the Author**

Dale Lucas is the author of the neo-pulp novel Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights (Beating Windward Press, 2011). He is a novelist, screenwriter, civil servant, and armchair historian. He earned his BA in Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida. His short stories have appeared in Samsara: The Magazine of Suffering and Horror Garage, his film reviews in The Orlando Sentinel.

He lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

Follow his blog at www.authordalelucas.wordpress.com and find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AuthorDaleLucas

If you enjoy these stories, check out his neo-pulp novel Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights _._ Available where ever books and e-books are sold.

**Table of Contents**

About the Author

It Takes a Light Touch For This Sort of Work

The Devil You Know

Dureski's Requiem

Afterword

**It Takes A Light Touch For This Sort Of Work**

Leta crouched in a shaded corner of the Plaza Mayor. Betani stood beside her, fanning their folded street map against her leg with one hand, the other hooked in the pocket of her second-hand jeans. It was a Wednesday in May, late morning, warming. There had been rain in the gray hours before dawn, and the plaza stones were still damp. The milling crowd was thin but adequate. Only a few locals. Most of those in sight were gawking _turistas_.

Easy marks.

Leta shifted her weight back on her hams, felt the wall against her back. Crouching gave her a better perspective and kept her inconspicuous. There were only the two of them today, neither her sister's baby nor Betani's little cousin being available to them as they normally might be. No baby in Betani's arms meant no visual distraction. No little cousin—young and wiry and prepubescent—meant no runner. It was just the two of them: Betani to draw the mark's attention, Leta to pick their pockets and dash. It was a risky set-up, but Duricio had left them with little choice.

They always met their fence on Wednesday mornings, down by the Puerta del Sol where the corrida touts circled like sharks, eager to hawk their billetes to stupid North Americans with bloodlust and too much money in their pockets. But they'd run into Duricio last night. Duricio, whose insistence that Leta and Betani were whores in his stable—and thus, owed him tribute—had passed annoyance and moved into outright harassment. If he was simply joking, or a coward, the two of them could have handled it. Unfortunately, Duricio was neither. He'd proven as much the night before, clubbing Betani's left ear, then whipping Leta across her back with his belt and buckle. They'd won out in the end, drawing blood and getting free of him, but Duricio had still been walking when they fled. Worse, he flew with their take. Their pockets were empty now, and if they wanted to catch their fence before he left for the corrida, they had only a few hours more.

At some point in the future, given the opportunity, Leta hoped to slit Duricio's throat. She owed him for the stripes on her back.

But first: cash. She'd worry about vengeance later.

A street cleaner in green coveralls moved past them, pushing his dumpster cart, picking up stray bullfight handbills, discarded maps and tour brochures. His eyes fell on Betani. Still crouching, Leta saw a smile creep onto the street cleaner's lips. He liked what he saw.

Then he saw Leta. Suddenly, he realized what the tall, thin girl in blue jeans and the crouched girl beside her were up to. His smile collapsed into a sneer. He shouted at them as he passed by.

"Putas gitanas!" he cried in Spanish. "Get out of our country! Keep your greasy fingers out of our pockets!"

Betani waved him off, spitting at him between forked fingers. All over the Plaza, the _turistas_ turned to see what the commotion was about. If any of them knew what the street cleaner was saying, their blank stares and gaping mouths gave no indication.

Betani stepped away from the wall. "Bastard," she muttered. "Come on."

"No," Leta said. "They have no idea."

Betani set herself against the wall. Leta lowered her eyes until the street cleaner passed. Soon enough, he forgot about them and went on his way, as did the milling tourists. Leta sighed.

The cities used to be easy places to pinch travelers for swag and fast cash. Two or three passports put more money in your pocket than one full wallet ever could. But the Spanish—especially the Madrileños—were getting ever-more belligerent, espousing the same sort of vigilanteism and anti-gitano sentiment that Leta and her clan had fled from in the Czech Republic. The conservative powers in the European Union didn't like foreign influence—communists, capitalists, Jews, or Muslims—but by God, they despised the Romani.

Leta had come to Madrid with her parents and siblings, but hard times—and the ever-darkening Madrileño humor—made regular, fruitful pickpocketing difficult. The family's income flagged. As Leta's father had never liked her, it was easy for him to chase her away. He called her shiftless, a layabout, a filthy little slut who couldn't earn her keep. If she'd been selling her body, he would've been content. Instead, he was sure she was sleeping around for free, maybe even keeping pinch proceeds for herself.

She did keep a percentage for herself. Who wouldn't? She was the one risking her neck every time she made a mark, after all, not her father. The courts and policia were notoriously brutal, true, but the greater threat were the Madrileños themselves. They saw the gypsies as a pestilence, little more, and they weren't afraid to make it known with their grasping hands and flying fists.

Stealth and confidence were required. Guile and cunning. It took a light touch for this sort of work. Therefore, Leta reasoned, the greater portion of the spoils were hers, not her father's or her family's. To hell with them all if they didn't want her anymore. Soon, she'd squirrel away enough to head north, and she'd never have to see them again. Paris, Amsterdam, maybe London. Only time and good fortune would tell.

Now a shuffling pack of Anglos led by a portly Brit in a corduroy jacket shuffled into the square. The Brit spoke loudly, gesturing from time to time with a rolled newspaper in his hands. Where his newspaper pointed, their eyes followed. From time to time, they asked questions.

Leta smiled. These were prime marks, but there were too many of them. Besides, she recognized one of them: she'd hit him on Sunday, gotten nothing more than a few American dollars from his wallet, and thrown it back on the sidewalk. He didn't even have the decency to tip her for returning it. They were an ungracious lot, Americans.

Betani tapped Leta's shoulder and gestured with a slight grunt.

Across the plaza, a young man in a black leather coat walked alone, studying the contents of a small book held just inches from his face. He stopped, sighed wearily, and lowered the small book into the outer left pocket of his coat.

What was he thinking, Leta wondered, wearing a leather coat like that in May? It wasn't hot, as yet, but no one could mistake a Madrid May for coat weather, could they? He didn't seem to be sweating, though, so Leta assumed he was comfortable.

Rummaging in the same pocket where he'd stuffed the book, he drew out a billfold. His other hand dipped into the right hip pocket of his slacks and emerged with a wad of bills.

North American. Leta knew it. Only they wadded money in their pockets like that. It was the first sign of their excessive caches of—and casual contempt for—money that they mistreated it so.

Standing still in the middle of the plaza, the young man in the leather coat ordered his bills and slipped them into his billfold. As he did so, he scanned the world around him with narrowed eyes, as if his extraction of the wadded cash had been the most casual, surreptitious act in the world.

Maybe no one else passing noticed.

But Leta and Betani did.

"Yes?" Betani asked.

Leta nodded. She rose. She and Betani swung behind a nearby column, out of sight, and prepared. Leta wiggled her fingers to limber them. Betani handed over the street map. Leta unfolded it, then closed her eyes and slipped into character. When she opened them again, she wasn't a gypsy pickpocket about to lift a stupid American's wallet any more, but a starving girl, lost in a strange city, with only a map in a language she couldn't read to guide her. Her hands shook and her face was drawn and her brow was furrowed and her dewy eyes pleaded and her lips shook and were down-turned.

Betani shook as well—enough to suggest fear and agitation and hunger, but not so much as to suggest methadone withdrawal or venereal disease—then the two closed on the young man in the black leather coat, babbling in Caló, telling him what a fool he was to see them and believe their charade, how sorry he would be when he checked his pockets and found his billfold gone.

Betani threw scattered Spanish and English phrases in with her native rebuke, just so the fellow would get the idea: _por favor... hungry... help... perdí mi familia..._

Up close he was handsome, but his stunned surprise and weak response made Leta loathe him even as she admired him. At least the Madrileños—hell, most Europeans—cursed and spat when the gypsies came to call.

But this fool... he stood with a gaping mouth, shaking his head, speaking slowly—and loudly, as Americans were wont to do when someone spoke in foreign tongues to them—and let the whole maneuver go down smooth as cream.

Betani had his arm, tugging, begging, pleading.

Leta closed in on his left, holding out the map, letting it shake to show off her terrible affliction—the hunger that stole her composure and strength. In a moment, her free hand snaked beneath the outspread map and her fingers slipped with serpentine grace into the deep leather pocket of the coat. Out came the billfold. As it rose into her grasp, it caught the small book, and rather than tug it free, Leta decided to lift both and be done with it. In the next instant, billfold and pocket-book were free, and Leta withdrew.

The young man worked up a response now, saying, "No, no, no" again and again. Betani held him. Finally, he cried out, "No! Get away!" and broke from them and hurried across the plaza, back the way he'd come.

As soon as his back was turned they slid on lithe feet into the shadows of the colonnade.

#

Within moments, they were a block away, strolling as casually as the _turistas_ with their wadded money up the Calle Mayor toward the Puerta del Sol. There, they crossed the square, threaded the noon crowds, and slipped into a small cafe where the owner—a kiddie porn merchant and dealer in whores—knew their faces but gave them no trouble. There, they were safe, and they could examine their take. They made for the restroom, a tiny closet down a flight of stairs. Once inside, they locked the door behind them.

The billfold was black leather, just like the American's coat, and held about three hundred euros and a single photograph. The photo was of a beautiful woman with olive skin and raven hair, not unlike a gitano girl, but with the fine, white teeth and unblemished skin of an American college coed.

"Society whore," Betani grumbled as she stared at the photo.

Leta nodded and studied the small book, their bonus acquisition. It was bound in soft, tooled leather, with serpentine patterns on the cover and spine, elusive in the dim, fluorescent light of the restroom. The pages were edged in gold leaf, the leaves bound by thin suede laces. Leta started to untie it.

"Leave it," Betani said, unlocking the door and slipping out into the hall. "Probably his appointment book. Let's eat and get some coffee before we head out."

"Go on," Leta replied, still fingering the edges of the book.

Betani left her.

Leta locked the door behind her partner and moved to the toilet. She had to make water, but that wasn't why she urged Betani away, nor why she locked the door.

It was the book. The silly little leather book. Betani could lift, sort and toss in a single breath. Leta knew it was probably a failing, but she couldn't move along so easily from lift to lift. Every so often she acquired something like this book, or saw something like the photo of the girl in the stranger's billfold, and she needed a moment—just a moment—to sit and study and contemplate it.

It wasn't conscience, only curiosity. She felt nothing rooting through the private pocket treasures of strangers—but the joy of stopping to study those treasures and wonder at their significance in the lives of their former owners—that was a fever she couldn't shake. In her more whimsical moments, she even imagined that the things she stole had voices. Alone, they spoke to her.

The appointment book spoke to her now. _I've got a secret to tell you,_ it said, it's voice cold and feminine and playful all at once. _Peek inside. You won't be disappointed_.

She undid the suede laces tying the covers shut and gently fanned the book open. The gold-edged leaves flickered in the murky green light. As the leaves fanned past, columns of numbers, words and phrases flickered by like moving pictures, and a strange opalescence on the pages cast shimmering curtains of colors over the shifting, snaking columns of script.

Leta stopped. She turned back to the first page and stared.

The pages felt like fine, thin paper, but their sheen and the colors thereon were unlike any paper Leta has ever seen. Colors played over the page, snaking in and around and through the neat, black letters of the young man's handwriting.

And written on those pages: names, addresses, dates, and meeting times. They were written in tight, black letters—bold but not sloppy—delicately serifed each to the next, the names reaching in a single column down the center of the page. As Leta stared, the names seemed to sway back and forth, as if they were a banner waving in the breeze. But of course, that was only a trick of the light and the strange paper on which the names were written.

Wasn't it?

She noted the first name on the list—Eduardo Velasquez—and began to flip through the rest of the book. Page after page after page of names, in that same neat script, from the top of the page to the bottom with only the barest of margins. And how many pages did this little book hold? She flipped and flipped and flipped. It seemed to have no end. When she finally came to the end of the pages, she closed the book and stared, measuring its thickness between her fingers.

It wasn't even a single finger-width thick, but it seemed to have hundreds of pages between its covers.

A knock at the door startled her. "Date prisa!" someone hissed outside.

"Uno momento!" Leta shot back, not sounding in the least bit sorry. She wiped, hiked up her pants and shoved the book in her pocket.

Already, Betani tore into a ham sandwich. Two cups of café con leche sat steaming before her on the table. She had also bought a pack of cigarettes. She puffed between hungry bites of the sandwich.

"Save some for me," Leta said, and Betani, still chewing, tore off a great hunk of the sandwich for her partner.

Leta slid into a chair opposite Betani, took a bite and washed it down with the caramel-colored coffee. Her body warmed and settled. She held out two fingers. Betani set the cigarette in them. Leta took a hearty drag, held it for a long moment, then gently let a plume of smoke back out through her nostrils.

"You took long enough," Betani said quietly.

Leta drew out the appointment book and laid it on the table. "Look at the pages," she said.

Betani scowled. She didn't like Leta's curiosity. Never had. But she often humored her, and she did so now, laying down her sandwich and taking up the book. She fanned the pages, much as Leta had.

Leta smoked, intermittently sipping her coffee. Her eyes rose momentarily to scan the restaurant.

"What is this?" Betani asked, a note of worry and incredulity in her voice.

Leta looked at her. "Isn't that paper wild? Have you ever seen—?"

"No," Betani hissed. She shoved the book forward, open to the first page. "Here!"

Leta looked. Eduardo Velazquez was nowhere to be seen. The first name on the list was now Maria Betani Heredia-Cortéz.

"Wait," Leta said, snatching the book. She rubbed the first page between her fingers, to be sure that there wasn't another page stuck to it. She checked the next leaf. The next. She saw the name Eduardo Velasquez nowhere.

Time and again she glanced back. Never once did that first name at the top of the first page change.

Maria Betani Heredia-Cortéz. The address was that of the café they sat in.

_That can't be_ , Leta thought, already filled with a terrible surety of what Betani's name meant, printed in the pages of the strange little appointment book.

_Don't be afraid_ , the book said softly, a honeyed voice in the center of her brain. _We've appointments to keep, and I'll not have you wreaking havoc on my schedule_.

Leta wanted to throw down the book, to watch it wither under her glare, to spit on its soft, kid cover through forked fingers and ward off whatever evil it now deigned to enact upon them.

But she couldn't. She only held it, staring, eyes moving back and forth between the book and her puzzled friend.

In that moment of strange, mute panic, a familiar figure appeared at the front window of the cafe. The black leather coat caught Leta's eye first, then, his smoldering stare.

Leta looked to Betani. "Up! He's here!"

"Who?"

Leta shook the book. "Him."

Betani turned.

He was already inside.

_Strange_ , Leta thought, scooting out of her chair and making straight for the back corridor, _I never heard the bells above the door ring._

They moved—not running, but swift—down the length of the counter, toward the kitchen, toward, they hoped, a back exit.

A busboy with a half-full tub of dishes spun around the counter and swept past them, almost colliding. They didn't stop for him, but when they heard the commotion of his tub crashing to the floor only a breath later, both girls dared glances over their shoulders.

The young man in the black leather coat had collided with the busboy. He was barely an arm's length behind them.

Leta had time for a single thought: _Impossible!_

Then Betani shoved her, screaming abruptly. Leta shot into a dead run, made the kitchen, and dared another glance back as she rounded a corner.

The young man in the black leather coat reached out for them.

The girls ran through the kitchen, leaving in their wake a number of puzzled ejaculations and cries for order behind them. Cooks and dishwashers grunted and shouted as the young man in the black leather coat collided with them, pushed past, then hurried on.

Ahead, a back exit. The girls shot through, found a line of trash bins arrayed on the alley wall outside, and threw them over in their wake, hoping to slow their pursuer.

"Throw it away!" Betani yelled.

Leta wasn't listening. The book was still in her hand, almost clinging to her.

Yes! Throw it away! Why not?

_Because I'm yours now_ , a new voice answered. _I'm yours, as I was meant to be_ —

Her hand wouldn't release it. She ran on, appointment book in hand, never looking back.

The alley spilled out onto a broad side street and swept down toward the Puerta del Sol. They careened around the corner and shot into the milling midday crowds, across the square, hoping to lose their pursuer.

Leta looked back. Above the oncoming tide of bobbing heads and shoulders, she couldn't see anything. Satisfied, she sped on, Betani now out in front of her, urging her.

"Run!" she cried. "He's behind you, Leta!"

Leta didn't look back. She ran faster, Betani nearing, the crowds slowing and falling behind.

Betani jogged on and half-turned to make sure Leta caught up with her. Her feet left the curb, carrying her out onto the Calle Mayor.

It happened quickly. Tires squealed and a horn squalled. The crowd seemed to freeze, collective breath held. Then Betani disappeared beneath a skidding BMW. The acrid smell of burnt rubber and the coppery scent of fresh blood filled the air. Leta, still sprinting, slammed into the BMW's passenger door and blinked, stunned. She was blocked, and Betani was nowhere in sight.

The crowd surged forward around her.

Leta glanced down. Thick, dark rivers of blood spilled out from beneath the sports car and forked around her shoes. She almost bent to see if Betani was really under the vehicle, but something deeper, something animal, urged her onward.

She turned. The young man's pale, pained-handsome face burst out of the gathering crowd toward her, black coat shining under the overcast sky.

Leta pivoted to one side and launched herself over the hood of the car. The driver cursed as she landed on the far side and beat on toward the Metro station ahead. Her peripheral vision snatched random bits of information—nearing policia, a gathering traffic jam on the Calle Alcala behind the BMW, a bloody hand with bent fingers protruding from beneath the car—but all of these things were simply recorded and filed away. She had to run. Escape was the only imperative.

She made the Sol metro station, spun at the head of the stairs, and started her descent. She pounded down three steps before she stopped and peered back through the iron railings at the accident scene.

The crowd closed in, blocking her view, but before they choked her vision entirely, she saw the pale, handsome young man in the black leather coat kneeling on the driver's side of the BMW. He lightly stroked Betani's protruding hand with pale fingers, then grasped and drew her out into the light.

She was a bloodied doll, some misused child's plaything, streaked with red streamers and pocked, here and there, with glistening, white, protruding bone. The young man bent over her, as if to try and resuscitate her, and laid his lips on hers.

Betani convulsed weakly, as if trying to shrink from him. Then her back arched, and her hand closed on his, and he seemed to draw her head up by his kiss alone. A moment later, she collapsed, limp. Thin, white smoke seemed to trail out of her open mouth. When the young man turned and eyed Leta across the square, the same tendrils of smoke twisted from his lips as well.

_As if he drew the last breath out of her_ , Leta thought. A terrible, numbing cold shot down the length of her spine.

She took the stairs two at a time, leapt the turnstiles, and pounded down into the catacombs toward the nearest departing train.

#

No train waited at the platform, but the first rumble of an approach sounded. Waiting for the train's arrival was the longest thirty seconds of Leta's young life. She was trapped now. If he came for her here, on the platform, she couldn't escape him. The crowd was too thin, and there was only one way in.

Save across the tracks. If worse came to worse, she could cross the tracks and escape by way of the far platform.

_Or throw myself in front of the train_ , she thought _. It'll be here. Any moment_.

But that would take me right to him, wouldn't it?

The train arrived and screeched to a halt. The doors opened with a pneumatic hiss. Leta scanned the thin crowd on the platform. Still no sign of him.

Leta hurried on board and positioned herself near the rear of a car in the center of the train where she could hide easily but still keep an eye on the stairs leading down to the platform.

The train sat idle for an impossibly long time. Leta kept her eyes on the entryway to the platform. For a moment, she sensed a strange, black blur threading a path through the late arrivals hurrying toward the train; a fleet shadow, moving of its own accord.

Then a moment later she blinked, and the flitting darkness was gone. The doors hissed shut, the brakes released, and the train went rumbling on into the dark passages beneath Madrid.

She was on the Ventas line. Bodies filled every available seat and stood in loose ranks, arms raised to the handstraps or rails above to steady themselves. The whole herd swayed with the gentle rocking of the hurtling train.

Ventas meant the Plaza de Toros. The Plaza de Toros meant a fine, dense crowd. It was the festival of San Isidro, after all. Each day throughout the month of May, six bulls were slaughtered, and always the stands of the bullring were full.

Always.

Perfect. If Leta had indeed escaped her pursuer, there was no way on earth he could follow her, or find her, in the massive throng that would fill the plaza before a corrida during San Isidro. She was free.

The door at the rear of the car opened. Leta spun, drawing breath, but saw that it was only a sturdy old Basque woman and her grandson, carting with them a red sack, no doubt full of wares to hawk on the sidestreets and alleys. Leta let them slide by and steadied herself with one of the overhead handrails. As the door slid shut behind her, a sudden draft caressed the nape of her neck. She shuddered and froze, a frightened animal. Someone blew breath into her ear.

His voice followed, a whisper.

"It would never have happened if you had simply let it go," he said.

Leta fought every instinct: run, scream, cry rape, turn and strike. Instead, she simply stood, eyes forward, one hand on the rail, the other on the appointment book in her pocket.

Again, the young man in the black leather coat spoke. "I don't care how many pockets you've picked, or how you make your living, or what the Madrileños think of you, Leta."

He knew her name?

"I just need the book. My wallet and whatever you found in it don't make a bit of difference to me."

Leta started to draw out the book, then paused. Something wasn't right. He'd chased them, driven Betani right under the wheels of a car, and seemingly tracked her. But now, he asked for his property back?

"Why don't you take it, if you want it so badly?"

He sighed heavily, impatient, even a little ashamed. "Because it's not your time," he said.

The voice of the book purred in Leta's brain. _Your name is nowhere in my pages. He can't make appointments, you see. That's what I do. He goes where I lead_.

"What is it?" Leta asked in a whisper. "What is that book?"

He sighed. "It's my appointment book," he said. "And I think, by now, you've figured out what sort of work I do and what appointments I must keep. Sometimes, the appointments change, such as this afternoon. If you hadn't taken the book, Betani would still be here."

"But I did," Leta said. "And she isn't."

"Touché," he replied. She couldn't see his face, but she assumed he was smirking.

The train neared the next station. As the brakes squealed the whole car lurched forward. Leta swayed into the man in front of her, begged his pardon in Spanish, and regained her footing. The young man in the black leather coat still hovered behind her, his lips right next to her ear.

"What will you give me for it?" Leta asked, now wearing a crooked smile of her own.

"Give it to me," he said slowly. "You don't understand... it can't have any use for you—"

"You don't know that," she said. "Maybe it wanted me. Maybe it wasn't satisfied with you."

"You don't know what you're talking about," he said.

Leta turned. They stood face to face—the thin, worn gitano girl and the handsome, pale young American in the black leather coat. There wasn't a handbreadth between them. Their bodies lurched back and forth in unison as the train carried on, accelerating.

"I know that if someone values a thing, they guard it. If this book means so much to you, why didn't you keep it nearer? In an inner pocket? In a moneybelt? On a chain?"

"Don't try to justify your thievery," the man said through clenched teeth.

"Sloppy," she taunted. "Very sloppy."

"Fine," he hissed. "The book is new to me. I've only had it for a few months and I'm still learning all that it can do—and all that I can do with it."

Leta felt a surge of hope. _All that I can do with it_. Whatever power it endowed him with, that power was diminished when the book left his hands.

Was it passing to her, then? Could it?

"Listen," he said, voice smoothing over again, honeyed, yet ever-desperate, "if there's something I can do for you—anything at all—just let me know. We can work something out."

Leta flashed a mischievous smile—a smile she knew would enrage and shame him—then turned away and drew the book from her pocket.

He tried to lean in for it. His movement was controlled but slow—he didn't want to arouse suspicions.

That's when she realized: he was _diminishing_. His strange speed, his fleeting shadow, all were diminishing. Moment by moment, he was less a terrible, mysterious stranger and evermore a common and awkwardly dressed American tourist.

The train lurched again, slowing. Leta used the lurch to carry her forward a few steps. She opened the book.

A new name was scrawled at the top of the first page. Ryan Allan Stanhope.

That name hadn't been there before. Not even under Betani's.

But it had a familiar ring to it. As if it put her in mind of an old friend. As if the book itself now whispered and drew pictures in her mind to fill the mnemonic gaps around the name and its associations.

Ryan Allan Stanhope.

A pale, quietly handsome face formed in her mind, followed by the association of a deep-if-a-little-strained, voice.

And a black leather coat. A favorite leather coat worn since his senior year in high school.

The leather coat he wore on the night a young, strange girl from a rival high school drew him into a closet at a party and gave him his first taste of anonymous sex.

The same coat he was wearing the night he met the woman whose picture he carried in his wallet.

The same coat he wore the night he left his weekend bartending job, flipping through a strange little appointment book found among the lost-and-founds and never reclaimed. That same night, driving home, he peeled an old black woman off the street with the front end of his Ford Probe. When he rushed out of the car to check on her, tears stinging his eyes, his heart strangled by grief and terror in his chest, he drew the book from his pocket instead of his cell phone, as intended. The book fell open and he scanned the first name within.

Instantly, he knew it to be his victim's name. And when he looked into her hemorrhaging eyes, he knew that she knew it as well.

She spoke through a mouth flooded with blood, great, red bubbles forming on her dark lips as she reached out and clamped her cold hands on the back of his neck and drew him toward her, like a lover desperate for a last embrace.

"Here," she gurgled, drawing him in for a bloodied kiss. "Here's where you take it from."

He didn't know what she was talking about, convinced himself for just a moment that everything—the book, the dying woman, the dents and blood-spatters on the hood of his old Ford Probe—were just figments of a tired imagination.

Then he lost his grapple, and dipped toward her, and felt her thick, bloodied lips close on his, and the warmth of her last breath was blown into his mouth. He drew away, terrified, wiping the blood from his lips. Her eyes were already fogged in death. A thin tendril of white smoke twisted up from her gaping mouth.

Much like the tendril of smoke tumbling out of his own open mouth. He'd never smoked—cigarettes made him sick—but breathing her last breath was like breathing a strange, sweet perfume. He drew in the last idle feather of smoke and held that breath for a long instant. Something new coursed through him. Something terrible and powerful and alien.

He glanced at the first page of the appointment book. Her name was gone.

Then the book spoke to him in a low whisper, like an untrustworthy but ever-seductive lover.

_Don't be afraid_ , it said softly, a honeyed voice in the center of his brain. _We've appointments to keep, and I'll not have you wreaking havoc on my schedule_.

_Rise and walk. I'll tell you where each step will lead you_.

Ryan Allen Stanhope did as he was told. He marched down the dark street, passing through pools of sodium arclight, and came at last to a four-way stop. The book ordered him right, and he turned right. As he rounded the corner, he found himself in a balmy, tropical afternoon in Rwanda, approaching a strewn heap of machete-hacked, club-broken corpses.

His next appointment—his next kiss—lay buried alive beneath.

All this flooded Leta's psyche in a terrible, white-hot instant. In that instant, her new mark's circumstance appeared in her mind, became an addendum to her own collected memories, and she understood precisely why he would never leave the Ventas Metro, and why she must.

The brakes squealed as the train hurtled toward its stop at the Ventas station.

Leta laid a hand on the back of Ryan Stanhope's neck and gazed for a moment into his puzzled eyes. He understood, opened his mouth to protest, shifted his weight to move away. She thrust herself toward the young man in the long leather coat, pitying and praising him all at once. His ineptness and stupidity would undo him, but they had set her free.

She set her lips on his and kissed him, long and deep, working her tongue in his mouth, filling his nostrils with her unwashed, cigarette-and-coffee-colored-sweat scent, and placed one hand on his forearm, squeezing as a lover might to silently settle their partner.

He submitted to the kiss for a moment—though there had been many kisses, it was a lonely calling he now departed—then, he seemed to regain himself and tried to draw away. As he did, Leta inhaled deeply. His breath left him and filled her mouth, sweet and intoxicating. Before her, he sputtered, smoke rising in a thin swale from his gaping mouth.

Leta inhaled the smoke trails rising from her lips through her nostrils, drawing every last bit of him down into her lungs. And as she exhaled, he was no more.

She was away and out of the car before the first passenger noted how the young man grunted, bled from his nose, then pitched forward. There were murmurs and even a choked scream. Someone whispered a prayer.

But already Leta was away, threading the slow-moving crowd, a fleet ghost among them. The taste of the young man's soul faded from her tongue. Leta marched on, a new spring in her step, a new swagger in her narrow hips.

She opened the book. It told her that she had a last appointment to keep in Madrid before departing.

Duricio Séba, in Barrio Lavapiés.

_Call that a gift_ , the appointment book purred. _A signing bonus of sorts_.

Leta felt warm; eager; satisfied. The world opened before her now, a lover's arms, a harlot's legs, a child's eyes. It opened wide and it beckoned her forward, beckoned to show her all its wonders, and promised to feed her newfound desire.

_You'll go far_ , her new companion whispered. _Ryan tried, I know he tried, but he was never prepared, never up to the challenge. Too serious. Too literal. Too clumsy._

It takes a light touch for this sort of work, Leta.

And what fleet, supple fingers you have...

**The Devil You Know**

It was night when the preacher swung out of his saddle and knelt by the stream to clean his hands and feel the cool water on his face. The stream was cold and clear in the moonlight, probably spring-fed, and it felt good on his face and in his hair. Refreshed, he drank, and after drinking, tried once more to clean his hands, even going so far as to fish a coarse stone out of the stream bed and scour his palms and knuckles with it. He tried to pick at his fingernails, but he knew that the soot and blood beneath them wouldn't wash away. He'd picked and scraped and scrubbed for eight days now, ever since he rode out of Creek Hill, but still the stains remained.

He didn't mount up, preferring to give his horse a rest. Instead, the preacher took the animal by the reins and carried on at a slow march, fording the little stream, and drifting once more out of the woods toward the Missouri riverbank. It wasn't too much farther on that he came to a sudden clearing in the woods and found a house waiting for him in the dark.

#

Mill Scott took the shotgun down from its place above the fireplace mantle. He'd made up his mind. Doctors had failed and so had the clergy. Still his son flung shit and pissed on the walls and called his mother a whore, among other choice epithets. Every new day of wrestling with the devil in the boy broke his mother's heart a little more, and made Mill feel less and less like the husband and father he'd hoped to be. Ellie, God bless her, was hanging on by her fingernails. Faith unshaken, she kept praying for God to deliver their son from bondage.

But prayers, to Mill's mind, were supposed to keep such things from happening in the first place. Once they'd happened, the truth was out: prayers were for shit, and God wasn't listening. Mill couldn't watch his boy devolve any longer, nor could he stand to see one more of the incremental heartbreaks he knew his Ellie suffered hour after hour, day after day.

So he decided: he would load the shotgun; he would put down Daniel and Ellie with one shell apiece; then he would reload and take both barrels between his teeth. That ought to settle things.

He had just cracked the breach and rammed the first two shells home when Ellie found him. "What are you doin', Mill? Why'd you take the gun down?"

Mill didn't have an answer that he cared to offer. All his fierce resolve melted at the sound of his wife's voice, and he was left with nothing but shame. He was a sorry son of a bitch, and if he was smarter, or stronger, or braver, maybe he could've come up with a better solution.

But the shotgun was all he could muster.

Luckily, before Ellie could ask another question, someone knocked at the door. Mill turned, shocked as hell that his immortal longings were being put on hold by his wife's inquisitiveness and an unexpected visitor.

And at such an hour! The sun was well down. Who the hell came calling, way out here by the river, this late at night?

"Don't answer that," Mill said, knowing no good would come of it. Ellie didn't listen. She hurried to the door and Mill followed, loaded shotgun swinging at his side. Whoever it was, he'd see them on their way promptly.

Ellie opened the door a crack—just about a handsbreadth—and peered through at their visitor. Mill couldn't see who it was. He slowed his approach, content to listen before looking for himself.

"Evenin'," a voice said: male, husky, rough with weariness and thirst. "I'm travellin' through and I could use food and somewhere to sleep. I'd never dream of begging leave to enter your home but if I could camp in your orchard—"

Mill took hold of the door and threw it open. He'd take care of this. The stranger would see the gun in his hand and know this wasn't the place to stop and beg—

Then Mill saw the stranger and nearly dropped the shotgun swinging at his side. The fella was dressed all in dusky shades from head to toe—hat, coat, shirt, trousers and boots—and wore a preacher's collar round his thin, corded throat. Mill tried to get a look in his eyes, but the lamp they kept burning on the porch couldn't chase the shadows out from under the preacher's hat-brim. Mill only saw a youngish-but-haggard face—no older than he, maybe even younger—a stubbled chin, and a close-cropped shock of dark hair on the fella's nape.

From under the shadow of his hat, the preacher stared back at Mill. Finally, after a moment's awkward silence, the preacher shuffled his boots a little and moved to retreat. "Sorry to trouble you," he offered. "It's late. I'll just be going—"

"You won't!" Ellie spat.

"Ellie," Mill hissed.

"He's a preacher, Mill," she said, as though the preacher himself couldn't hear her. She stepped onto the porch. "We got some peas and ham . . . a little cornbread—"

The preacher wasn't going anywhere now. Ellie had decided, and Mill couldn't dissuade her. "Sure, you can sleep in the orchard," Mill interjected with all the force he could muster, as though he'd prefer it if the preacher just kept on.

The preacher, for his part, seemed to agree. He tried to retreat from Ellie. "Y'know, perhaps some water from your well and some of that cornbread in a hank'll do. I'll just carry on—"

"No," Ellie said with finality, stepping onto the porch and locking both hands round the preacher's nearest arm. "You're tired and you're hungry. I see it—" she might as well have been talking about herself, Mill thought—"so camp and take your supper and your rest. It's no trouble."

The preacher nodded thanks. Mill stepped forward, took Ellie by her shoulders, and drew her back into the house. The screen door closed between the husband and wife and their clerical guest. "There's a pump 'round the side of the house," Mill said as the preacher descended the porch steps toward his tethered horse, "right by the trough. I'll have Ellie bring your supper out."

"If you don't mind waiting," Ellie offered, "I'll even heat it on the stove. Won't take long."

"Hot or cold, I'd just be thankful for a mouthful," the preacher said, and took his leave, leading his horse around the house and out of sight.

Mill shut the door and looked into his wife's eyes. There was hope in them, and that hope broke his heart all over again. "See?" Ellie said.

"See what?"

She suggested the preacher with a flick of her eyes. "He can help."

"The hell he can," Mill muttered. "Just keep your mouth shut and let him be on his way."

"God brung him," Ellie said.

"That flea-bitten gray horse brung him," Mill countered. "Go heat his supper. I don't want you up all night."

"With you?"

Mill lowered his eyes. A moment later, he realized he was still holding the shotgun.

"You never answered my question," Ellie said, and he knew that it was the gun she was talking about.

"I heard him comin' up the path, is all," Mill lied. "Kinda late for company."

That seemed to satisfy her. Without another word, Ellie turned and hurried to the kitchen to do her duty and feed their guest. Mill, sighing and feeling sick inside—sicker than he'd ever felt—sloughed back to the fireplace and put the shotgun back on its nails above the mantle.

#

All day long the preacher had been talking to himself. Sometimes he talked to his horse. Sometimes he even talked to Lilly and Myra . . . though those conversations usually blurred his vision, cut fresh tear-tracks down his dust-caked face, and left him alternately laughing like a madman or choking between hoarse, hitching sobs. Was that what going loons was like? Mind, body, spirit . . . all fleeing in three different directions at once, utterly disconnected from the world surrounding?

It barely mattered. Even in moments of clarity there was little comfort. The fact remained that Lilly was dead, Myra was God-knew-where, and there wasn't a goddamned thing he could do about it.

And then there's Tooms, he thought. I put him down in Creek Hill, but he won't stay down. Didn't stay down in Dodge, did he? Three days later, there he was, nippin' my heels... followed me all the way back to Creek Hill.

Same way he's right behind me now.

But I gotta sleep tonight. This horse, too. Sleep tonight, push on harder in the morning.

All this the preacher contemplated in the gloomy shadow of the house as he stripped off his dust-stiffened black coat, his waistcoat, his collar and his shirt. He set them aside on a nearby stump for splitting cordwood, then worked the creaking old pump to top off the horse trough with fresh, cool water from the well. Trough full, water rippling in the faint moonlight, he bent to dunk himself under.

I baptize you with water, but another will come, and he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

He held his head under for a moment, enjoying the darkness, the silence, the peace. I wonder if a dunk in the river'd be like this, he thought absently. Still wearing my boots. Still wearing my gun. Those'd take me to the muddy bottom right quick.

He thought of how easy it'd be. The river was only a thousand yards away, after all, and his hosts might be glad of a free horse.

I bet it's quiet down there, he thought. I wouldn't hear myself laughing or crying under the muddy Missouri.

His air was out. He stood upright, water washing down his bare shoulders and back. The preacher breathed deep, enjoying how his wet skin was cold in the night air—how it felt good to feel the cold . . . to feel anything at all . . .

Then he heard the scuffle of shoes. He turned toward the sound and found Mill, his erstwhile host, with a plate of black-eyed peas and cornbread in one hand, a rusty old lantern in the other. Mill wasn't looking at the preacher's eyes, nor did he seem troubled by how filthy and rail thin the preacher was.

No, Mill was staring at the Peacemaker holstered on the preacher's hip. The preacher couldn't blame him for being more than a little suspicious.

"Didn't see that before," Mill said.

"Guess it was under my coat," the preacher said.

"You really a preacher?" Mill asked. He wasn't scared at all. More likely, the preacher guessed a wrong answer would get him brained by a rusty spade or run through by a handy pitchfork. The man's taciturn speech and hollow stare marked him as bone-weary and impatient; a fella at the end of a frayed rope.

"Yessir," the preacher said. "Graduated Marthasville Theological Seminary, class of '71. Got a congregation in back in Creek Hill part of the year, ride the circuit spring to fall."

Had. I had a congregation. They're all ash and bone now...

Mill approached and offered the plate. The preacher took it, thanked him, and sat on the stump. In the lantern light, he saw that the peas had ham hocks chunked up in them and they were steaming in the dark. The smell made him so sick with hunger and grief and a sense of what he'd never get back, he felt the first sting of tears in his eyes.

Smells so good, he thought. But damned if it don't smell just like all those people burnin' in that church...

How I used to love Lilly's cornbread...

He fought the urge to cry and tried to meet the level, appraising gaze of his host.

"You got a name?" Mill asked.

"Delphi," the preacher said, and offered his free hand. "Zebulon Delphi."

Mill didn't shake his hand. "Circuit rider, huh?" Mill suggested the gun on the preacher's hip, snorting a little. "You preach at gunpoint?"

The preacher managed a smile, though he knew that Mill probably saw right through it. "Gift from my wife. Jesus said, 'Be wise as serpents, but gentle as doves.' She figured while I was out on my long rides, if I got in a tight spot, I'd get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word. If it makes any difference to you, she's been drawn, cocked, and cleaned a hundred times, but never fired."

The was a lie, but the preacher wanted to give Mill some sort of comfort.

Mill kept staring, inscrutable. "She loaded?"

"She'd be worthless if she weren't," the preacher answered. He chewed mouthful after mouthful of beans because he knew his body needed them, but still they tasted of ashes in his mouth. Every swallow was a struggle.

A long silence fell. "You gonna be on your way early?" Mill finally asked, and the message was clear: I'll give you what hospitality I can, but I don't want you lingering.

"'Spect so," the preacher said. "Just needed somewhere to sleep. Be on my way soon as me and the horse are rested."

Satisfied, Mill left him. The preacher finished his beans and sopped up their gravy with the cornbread. Before the last spoonful went down, tears cut new tracks down his cheeks and salted his cornbread.

#

While the preacher slept, he dreamt of Lilly and Myra. He saw them clearly, looking just as sweet and fresh as the last time he'd seen them alive, almost six months before, when'd left to do his circuit. Lilly's one good eye sparkled with tear-dew, the other covered by her familiar calico eye patch. Myra stood at her mama's side, barely up to her hip, clinging to her skirts. They waved as Delphi nosed his horse round and turned his back on them, starting down the path toward the outlying Creek Hill farms and the west-bound road.

Looking back, Delphi got one good, last look at them. Lilly and Myra stood in the doorway waving, and though they smiled, he saw the sadness in their eyes that he always saw when he left for a long ride.

Then it was night. His house was the church and the church was on fire. People screamed inside and battered at the shuttered windows, trying to escape the inferno. A man with a gun in each hand stood guard as the flames roared and the church roof began to shudder and collapse. From where he stood, Delphi couldn't see the gunman's face. Nonetheless, he knew he was smiling.

Barabbas. That was Barabbas.

The preacher ran toward the burning church. His horse was gone. No matter how hard he ran, how fast he thought he was going, he couldn't seem to get there fast enough. Running to stand still, too late to do any good.

And there was someone—something—following close behind. It called his name. He thought that might be Tooms, but he wouldn't dare a look back to find out.

Among the screams and pleas from within the burning church, Delphi thought he heard Lily and Myra calling out to him. The voices were theirs, no mistake, but they seemed to be speak in some strange tongue he didn't recognize. From the way the syllables lurched and hissed, he guessed they were cursing him as they burned. Why did he ever choose his damned circuit over them?

Why did he leave them, alone and defenseless, so that a man like this Barabbas could lock them in the church with all the others and set it ablaze?

Myra didn't die there, he reminded himself. They took her.

But who took her? And where?

He didn't know. He might never know.

She might as well be dead, just like the others...

Then the preacher woke. He heard those same strange words—those alien curses from his wife and daughter—but now he was wide awake and the wind carried them and they were almost lost among the breezy susurration of the orchard trees above and around where he lay. He wasn't dreaming those terrible words, he was hearing them. If he guessed right, they came back from the direction of the house.

Those words, and the voice that spoke them, were wholly unnatural.

Slinging his gunbelt over his shoulder, the preacher retraced the path through the orchard, following the voices back to the house.

When he reached the edge of the orchard and the yard, he realized the voices didn't come from the house itself, but from the big old barn on its north side.

He heard Mill and Ellie clearly now, the two engaged in a hysterical argument, neither really hearing the other... then there was a third voice: harsh, inhuman, spouting animal ejaculations and quick-fire litanies in languages the preacher had never imagined human tongues could utter.

Then that same third voice spat forth in perfect, gnarled English, "Do as your man says, bitch, or he may rap you the way he rapped me."

"You shut your goddamned filthy mouth!" Mill roared.

"Mill, you took your hand to him?" Ellie sobbed.

"Don't make me tell you again!" Mill said. "Get the hell out and stay out! Don't listen to a goddamn word comes outta this boy's mouth!"

Again, the sickly voice broke in. "When's the last time he gave you what-for between the sheets, mama? Cunny gone dry for want'a prime?"

Flesh on flesh—the sound of a hard slap. Ellie was conspicuously silent—struck dumb by that terrible, insensate question, most likely. The preacher felt a knot in his belly. That voice was like rusty spurs in a scabbed flank, but the things it said . . .

Is that their kid? he wondered. Sounds like some mad old man . . .

The preacher suddenly realized two things: he was ready to be on his way, and he needed to be, fast. If they came out of that barn and found him...

They're gonna ask for help, he thought, and I ain't in any state to give it. Can't no preacher wrestle with the devil with hate in his heart and blood on his hands...

And that was the voice of the Devil I heard. There's no mistake.

He strode back to his little camp amid the trees, slipped on his boots, and snatched up his horse's saddle and blanket. The horse snorted where it stood, aware that soon it would once more be carrying its master's weight.

The preacher spoke to it soothingly as he threw the blanket over its withers and cinched the saddle in place. "Meant to give you a little more rest—sorry—but all indications suggest a speedy departure . . ."

His mount was ready and so was he. The preacher took the reins and turned to lead the horse out into the night. Ellie stood in the path that led out of the orchard, a shadow rimmed in moonlight. Even in the dark he could see how her hair frayed this way and that, how her face was a mask of horror and grief, how her eyes and cheeks shone with fresh new tears atop the crust of older ones.

"Where're you goin'?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

"Rested up," he said. "Best be on my way." He drew the horse forward.

Ellie didn't move. "God brought you here," she said through gritted teeth. "You ain't goin'."

The preacher stood immobile, not sure what to do.

Then Mill appeared. To the preacher's dismay, he carried the scattergun that he'd greeted him with earlier.

They all waited for a time—the preacher with his hands on his horse's lead, Ellie blocking the path, Mill looking shamed and puzzled but still clutching that shotgun—but it was Ellie who finally spoke. She turned, studied Mill's slack face and red-rimmed eyes, then studied the shotgun. "What are you gonna do with that, Mill?" she asked.

The preacher watched Mill's face carefully. He could read men well—it had always been one of the few talents he'd been born with, and not simply acquired. He saw in the pained expression on Mill's face and the furtive darting of Mill's eyes that his intended use for the shotgun might have been worse than even the preacher suspected. In a breath, the preacher's mind's eye painted a trio of stark images: the gutter-mouth in that barn with a ragged hole clean through him; Ellie too, maybe right in the barn; Mill calmly reloading the shotgun's open breech, snapping it shut, and closing his mouth around the hot barrels.

Good Christ, but those are the eyes of a man at the end of his rope, the preacher thought. That's why he had the gun in his hand when I came to the door. I interrupted something . . .

"Get outta here, reverend," Mill said. "I'm sorry, but our hospitality's spent."

"Like hell," Ellie said.

"I should go," the preacher interjected, and drew his horse forward.

Ellie stepped up, laying hands on his coat and shaking him. She was small, but she was strong. "You ain't goin'!" she shouted. "Not 'till you do what you was brought here for!"

"Ma'am," the preacher said, and took her hands in his to guide them away, "you need to let go of me—"

"Don't touch her!" Mill suddenly screamed, and raised both barrels. The preacher stared into them. The feeling it gave him wasn't a feeling he relished.

Just like looking down the barrel of Tooms's two big Colt Dragoons...

"I aim no harm," the preacher said. "Just tell your wife to get her hands off of me—"

Ellie snatched her hands away from his. She beat him with closed fists then, and before he could try to calm her, she had slapped him full across the face. The preacher's cheek stung, and for a moment—just a moment—he had a good mind to take the woman's hair in one fist and pummel the grief out of her face with the other.

But he knew that was just his own madness at work, and he let the feeling pass.

"You're a man of God and you're gonna walk by us in our hour of need!"

Shame, indeed. You're a shepherd, after all . . .

No more! I'm a hunter now—and hunted! Every moment I waste here cools the trail, or makes it easier for Tooms to catch up with me...

I ain't gonna let that son of a bitch hang me while Myra's still out there somewhere.

"Let him go, Ellie," Mill said, shotgun still pointed at the preacher. "It ain't his concern."

"No, it ain't," the preacher agreed, then met Ellie's accusing gaze. "I'm sorry." He pushed her aside and led his horse up the path. He did his best not to stare at Mill, but he felt the shotgun's hungry black barrels following him all the way.

Before he knew it, he had his left boot in the stirrup and his hands up on the pommel of his saddle. Ellie didn't say anything else. She collapsed on the path, a sobbing heap. Mill was doing his best to ignore her and make sure the preacher set off.

Delphi swung up into the saddle. He'd barely settled when he heard that croaky old man's voice drift down from the barn far behind them.

"Carry on, reverend! Take your silver and your guilty conscience and run, run, run!"

Delphi felt as though he'd just fallen through ice into a frozen lake.

"Shut your mouth!" Mill shouted into the night.

Ellie kept crying, as though she hadn't heard a thing out of the ordinary.

Delphi was blind for a moment, his vision awash with fireflies and his heartbeat thumping in his ears like a regimental drum. Trying to blink away that momentary blindness, he turned and stared back up the path toward the house. The trees obscured the barn, but he still knew it was there.

He heard it. Take your silver and your guilty conscience and run, run, run . . .

The preacher swung down out of the saddle and stalked up the path to Mill. "Show me," he said. Only after he spoke did he realize the shotgun barrels were planted square in the center of his chest, just below his sternum.

"I told you," Mill said, looking more frightened than angry, "it ain't your affair."

"You say it ain't, I say it is." The preacher knew that he should run while he still could, that in truth, it wasn't his affair . . . but that voice . . . that challenge . . . run, run, run . . .

Maybe, if he were really lucky, Mill would just snap and blow a hole in him, and the whole stinking mess would be done with. Then, the blood and soot under his fingernails and the sights he could never unsee and the aching, empty hole at the center of him would just cease to matter.

Luckier, he might slip into the big empty and find there wasn't a god or a devil, a Heaven or a Hell, after all.

Peace. At last. I could only pray for such a simple end . . .

But it didn't happen that way. Instead, the preacher just reached up and snatched the shotgun out of Mill's hands, tired of waiting for Mill to summon the sand to shoot him. Without looking—his fingers knew their jobs well enough—he cracked the breach and plucked out the shells, then shoved the empty shotgun back into Mill's chest.

"Show me," he ordered.

Mill did as he was told.

#

The preacher smelled the barn before he entered. It wasn't the everyday barn-smell that some found so comforting—hay, animal dung, iron and leather, sun-seasoned wood. No, this barn smelled like a charnel house, even from outside: fresh feces, the sting of urine, old blood and feverish sweat. The big doors weren't latched, and swung open easily when the preacher shoved them.

There was a single hurricane lamp within, hanging from a nail in a stud. It gave off a sickly yellow-white light. In that greasy illumination, the preacher saw a barn like a hundred others he'd seen—earthen floor, stalls for stock, tack and tethers arrayed on hooks, hay all round and a loft above.

But there the normalcy ended.

Presently, the barn was hell.

Ordure was smeared on every rail and stud and wall in animal swathes and scrawls, sometimes forming words and blasphemous graffiti. There was a cartoon Christ on an upside-down cross, and Delphi saw the look of strange surprise on that Christ's face almost immediately. The barn's occupant was quite the artist, especially in the medium of his own excrement. Likewise there were stick-simple figures of men and women engaged in all sorts of unspeakable sex acts, sometimes with each other, sometimes with animals, sometimes with men wearing the shapes and skins of animals. The shapes and contours and images were all of the simplest sort, but they were just evocative enough that their subjects were unmistakable.

And then there was the word... a single word scrawled over and over again, above and between and on top of the terrible cartoons and caricatures. Mill himself slipped past the preacher and pointed to a bloom of the word, repeating again and again in a tight formation like a bed of dandelions on an otherwise clear lawn.

"There now," Mill said, with some desperation. "That's when we knew somethin' wasn't right. All the rest . . . that coulda just been the boy goin' mad, or fevered or what-not . . . but where does he get words and letters like that? It looks like something, but I don't know what it is!"

The preacher stared at the strange phrase for a long time. He recognized it instantly, but he refused to believe what he was seeing. He had to stare and be sure, almost expecting what he thought he saw to dissolve and become something else entirely if he gazed at it long enough.

It didn't.

"It's Greek," the preacher said. "They made us dabble with it at seminary."

"Well, what the hell does it say?" Mill asked.

"It says 'Delphi'," the preacher said. "My name."

"Reverend, reverend, reverend!"

That had been the barn's lone occupant, practically invisible to Delphi since his entrance—the barn's sorry state having drawn the lion's share of his attention. The preacher turned toward the sound of the voice and saw a teenage boy, no more than fifteen or sixteen, tied up in one of the stock stalls.

There was something terribly wrong about him. His eyes weren't the bright blue or big, sloe-brown of a strapping, eager youth, but the sickly jaundiced, red-rimmed yellow of a dying old man. Likewise, his flesh, where visible above his soiled, matted night shirt, was ripped and torn, festering in some spots with sores and infected lacerations. Behind his cracked lips, the preacher saw blue-black gums and a slithering tongue that coiled like a snake in its den.

Mill must have seen the preacher's eyes appraise the boy's condition. "I hit him once or twice," he said sickly, "when he said the worst things. But I didn't cut him. That's why we tied him up. He done that to himself, with his nails. You look at 'em, you'll see dried blood and skin under 'em."

"I ain't the only one," the boy-thing said.

"You shut your mouth!" Mill shouted.

The preacher held out a hand, trying to calm his host and keep him well back. Testing a hunch, Delphi drew a small, nickel cross out of his trouser pocket and held it out before him. He moved nearer the thing in the stall.

The boy-thing scowled. As the preacher neared, the boy shrank further, as though he could disappear into the filthy, frayed old blanket gathered underneath him and the rank bed of hay that littered his stall. Delphi kept closing, one foot in front of the other, cross held out before him.

The boy hawked and spat a thick glob of pink and green phlegm. The throat-bullet sailed straight and smacked the cross square-center. To the preacher's own surprise, the phlegm bubbled, hissed, and threw smoke the moment it touched the nickel.

"Christ almighty!" Mill whispered behind him.

The preacher wiped the cross on a nearby hay bale.

"Fuck you and the god you rode in on," the boy croaked.

"What's his name?" the preacher asked Mill.

"Ahz-ahz-el!" the boy-thing croaked. "Many names in many lands!"

"What's your boy's name?" the preacher demanded.

Mill finally answered. "Daniel. Daniel James Scott and—" Mill seemed to choke. For a moment, the preacher thought he was going to vomit, but the man only coughed up a sickly sob and a round of fresh tears. "He's a good boy, reverend—was a good boy, before . . ."

The preacher stepped nearer. "Course he was. Now listen to me, and listen good—this thing . . . it's got nothin' to do with your boy bein' good or bad, you hear me?"

Mill nodded.

"I mean it! I need you and your wife in a prayin' state of mind. Thinkin' on this thing in that horse-stall as your boy and not just some hellspawn takin' up residence in him ain't gonna help. I need your heart and your mind set on what's best in Daniel—every reason you miss him, every reason you want him back."

"Is there somethin' you can do?" Mill asked.

"Not a goddamn thing," Daniel croaked. "Look under the good reverend's fingernails and ask him why they won't come clean—"

The preacher turned on Daniel and leveled the little nickel cross. The devil in the horse-stall cried out and shrank, then let loose with a barrage of curses that made the preacher blush.

"Reverend," Mill said.

"Get out," the preacher said. "Me and Azazel need some time alone."

Mill hurried out, and shut the big barn door after him. In an instant, the air was too close and Delphi felt like he'd choke, maybe even vomit. He searched for a bucket, but the only bucket he found was crusted with old piss and stained with a fresh turd that had half-missed its intended target.

So the preacher just choked back the bile rising up his throat and approached the stall. Before presenting himself he took another look at the walls, studying his name in Greek laid here and there upon it. Then he met the demon's watery yellow eyes.

"What's that all about?"

The demon smiled, shrugged coyly.

The preacher steeled himself. Though it sickened him, he clamped one hand over the boy's bound right wrist and with the other pressed the nickel cross against the boy's bare forearm. The cross sizzled, marking the flesh like a hot iron. The demon thrashed against its bindings and spat curses again.

"Cocksucker!" he hissed. "Horse-fucking, pig-rimming, ass-pounding son of a half-breed whore!"

Delphi removed the cross, noting that it had left a fresh, blistered scar upon the boy's flesh. "Now I know you're all talk," the preacher said, "'cause my momma was a lot of things, good and bad, but I know who both her parents were, and they was definitely of the same breed."

"Probably brother and sister," the demon sneered. "You inbred cunt."

The preacher fought to control himself. He could feel his anger rising, but giving it vent would do him no good. He'd cast these bastards out once or twice before and he knew that his mindset, and the maintenance of his self-control, was of utmost importance.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"I told you," the demon said.

"Bull," the preacher answered. "Azazel's a big wheel. You tellin' me Azazel took time outta his busy day to set up shop in some farmer's boy in the Missouri backcountry? What's your name?"

"Daniel James Scott," the demon said, in the boy's own voice.

"What's your name?"

"What's yours?" the demon asked.

"You know my name," the preacher said. "You wrote it all over the walls before I ever got here."

"I told him you were on your way," the demon said in a sweet, feminine voice—the voice of the preacher's own dead wife. "I told him just what you done to me, Zeb. How you abandoned me... abandoned everyone..."

The preacher's body moved before he even knew what he was doing. One fist took the boy clean across his jaw. Something clattered, tinkling like a little bell, and Delphi realized distantly that he'd let go of the nickel cross when he struck the boy, and it had flown into an adjacent stall. He didn't care, though. He was already bent over the trussed-up boy, both hands closing around his thin throat. The demon's sallow face swelled and turned red, but its yellow eyes were alight with promise, and its cracked lips spread in a feverish grin. The preacher tightened his grip, felt the thing's foul breath blow full in his face, saw its blue-black tongue wagging behind its rotten little-boy's teeth like a serpent crushed beneath a rock. It wanted to die, by his hand, and he was willing to oblige.

Then someone was screaming—Ellie, maybe?—and strong hands, Mill's hands, laid on the preacher's shoulders and threw him off the boy. The preacher went sprawling. When he tried to rise, one hand fell in a pile of day-old shit and he slipped and fell again. He looked, saw Mill standing at the mouth of the stall, saw the demon in Daniel Scott writhing and laughing against its bindings, thrusting its pecker out toward him and cursing him with every thrust.

"We've got Lilly well in hand, reverend!" the boy-thing squealed, tittering with glee. "You were gone so long, and her cunny so dry from disuse, she's begging the Thorn-Cocks to do her three times over while she writhes in coal beds and spreads brimstone ash on those fine, pale teats of hers!"

Delphi didn't hear any more. He was on his feet then, turning his back on Daniel Scott and his hysterical parents, bounding out of the barn and making a sharp right. He was almost to the river, ready to turn west and follow its course again on foot—Hang my horse! Hang this whole goddamned farmstead!—when a stone or root fell in his path. He lost his footing and went sprawling forward. He fell face-first into the mud of the riverbank, and he lay there for a long time, trying to muster the gumption to rise and flee like he wanted.

Instead, he only managed to rise up on all fours and puke his peas and cornbread.

I ain't up for this, he thought. I ain't the one to do this. There's nothing holy left in me. Nothing hopeful. Nothing strong.

"Preacher?" It was Ellie. She and Mill stood nearby, watching.

Let this cup pass from me.

"Preacher," Mill said. "You all right?"

The preacher spat, then splashed Missouri river water on his face and swished some in his mouth to cut the bile. "A moment, is all. Guess the stench in there got to me."

"He says terrible things, reverend," Mill offered. "You shouldn't listen."

Delphi turned and studied the two in the moonlight. "What did you hear?"

"Nothin'," Mill said. "We was outside—"

"More's the better." The preacher stood upright. His head swam for a moment, but he stayed upright, and in moments his swoon passed. "Nobody oughta hear such talk."

"It's all lies anyway," Ellie said, but the preacher could tell she didn't mean it, not really.

"That's what you tell yourself," the preacher agreed.

There was a long silence. Wind threaded the trees and the river burbled silently behind them, making little noise for such a big, moving body of water. I never took that collar off. Wearing that makes me the shepherd, whether I want to be or not.

Whether I deserve to be or not.

The preacher drew a breath.

There's only one way to find out.

"I can't make any promises," he said. "I need a bible if you got one."

"I got one," Mill said. "Ain't a big old family bible, but—"

"More's the better," the preacher cut in, and started back toward the barn. "I'm lookin' for text, not weight. I need that bible, a bottle filled with fresh well water, and if you got it, a shot of whiskey."

"Whiskey?" Ellie asked.

"Just a shot, in a glass," the preacher said. "Keep the bottle outta my sight."

#

Soon enough he found himself back at the door to the barn, Mill's little leather-bound bible in one hand, the bottle of water—now blessed and made holy by the preacher's prayer—in the other. The sour tang of whiskey lingered on his tongue. He pushed the big door open and stepped inside.

"Myra watches while we have our way with mama," the devil in Daniel Scott said, then flicked his tongue and grinned.

This ain't gonna work. State I'm in, I can't bless a thing.

But I gotta know.

The preacher put the bible under one arm, doused one hand in the blessed water like a spate of cologne, and flicked it toward the demon. The water hissed when it touched its haunted flesh, raising blisters in an instant. The demon squealed like a bleeding pig.

The preacher was so surprised, he almost forgot to follow the attack with a prayer. "In Jesus' name," he blurted, "I still your tongue, and beg the Lord's grace in binding you!"

"Lick bung," the demon snarled through gnashed teeth.

Keep at him, the preacher thought, and anointed the demon again. With an ear-peeling cry, the demon writhed under the blistering weight of the blessed water. Silently, the preacher thanked God that his blessings carried any weight at all—but he kept wetting his hands, dousing his adversary, raising blisters as the demon hissed and spat and thrashed. Soon there were pink-green globs of phlegm all over the hay and the blanket knotted at the demon's feet, where it kept kicking, trying to retreat and failing, its bindings holding fast.

"The Lord is my shepherd," the preacher said, "I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, leadeth me beside still waters—"

"He delivereth thy whore and thy issue into the jaws of the Beast, and revels in their pleas for mercy and their unanswered prayers for aid," the demon answered, then turned its narrow hips toward the preacher and pissed at him with its adolescent pecker.

Delphi doused the thing with a handful of the holy water, then struck it flat across the cheek with the little leather bible. For good measure, he struck its other cheek as well, then held the book out flat before its face. "What's your name?"

"Myra Delphi," the demon snarled, then spat on the bible's cover.

Delphi struck it again, leaving its own phlegm on its face. "What is your name? In Jesus' name, I command you, name yourself!"

"Lilly Delphi, whore of Babylon!" the demon snarled.

Delphi stepped into the stall and straddled the boy. He drank a deep draught of the holy water, then spat it back in the demon's face. The spray sizzled where it landed, and the beast opened its mouth and cried holy hell, its foul breath and throaty issue blasting back into the reverend's face. Nonetheless, the preacher beat down his fear, his rage, his guilt, his surety that he was not the man for the job before him, and took another mouthful of the holy water. While the beast screamed, he spat the water down its throat.

"What is your name?" the preacher demanded.

The beast arched beneath him, choking on the holy water sprayed down its gullet. It belched smoked, then suddenly shat the hay—a viscous, yellow sewage that instantly made Delphi wretch and filled the room with a deadly, sulphurous stink.

"What is your name?" the preacher demanded again.

"Malik bar-Ashmedai bar-Litu bar-Cahin," the beast croaked weakly, then followed its proclamation with a saddened, desperate howl, a lost lamb bleating for its mother in the wild. The preacher waited, expecting a punchline, or another curse, but the beast only squealed, and squeezed out bloody tears and bucked and fought beneath him, sickened by its own submission.

The preacher dismounted. He turned his back on the demon in the horse-stall and paced the barn for a moment, regaining himself.

Delphi closed his eyes and prayed. It was the first prayer he'd dared in nearly nine days, and he had no idea where it flew to or if it was heard, but when the prayer was done, he knew all that he needed to know to continue. He turned and faced the demon in the stall, now looking more than ever like a scared boy with an old man's tired eyes. The blisters, lacerations, and festering sores on the skin stood out in sharp relief, and the preacher saw, in that moment, that the beast in Daniel Scott was a blight on the world—a blight on innocence and youth—and that he'd been called here to banish it.

Whether he wanted to or not.

The preacher put the bible under his arm again, held the bottle of dwindling holy water in one hand, and reached into his hip pocket to draw out a coin. He held the coin tightly in his fist and approached the stall.

He could see in the demon's eyes, and in the play of its lips, that it wanted to speak, but could barely manage the strength to do so. It was tired, and it was sickened by its own failure to stand firm against him.

"Answer me when I address you, Malik bar-Ashmedai," the preacher said. "Do you know a man named Barabbas? Word has it, he's one of your kind."

The demon stared for a moment, puzzled by the question, then its cracked lips lifted into a little grin. "Sure," it said, "we all know Barabbas."

The preacher showed the coin. It was a silver shekel, impossibly old, though still smooth and shiny as though it were minted the day before. The writing on it was Hebrew, and the demon recognized it instantly. "You know where this came from?" the preacher asked.

The demon nodded. "He carries those."

The preacher neared and bent low, eye to eye with the beast, close enough to feel its hellish breath on his sweat-beaded face. The preacher spoke in a low voice.

"Tell Barabbas I know his name. Tell Barabbas I know it was him burnt my church, my congregation and my wife. Tell him I know that he knows where to find my little girl. And when you've told him all that, you tell Barabbas I'm coming for him, and there ain't no gun, no pig-sticker, no fire, no noose that can stop me."

And without waiting for reply, the preacher drank another draught of the holy water and went to work.

#

Ellie Scott was in her favorite rocker on the porch and saw the first gray light of dawn in the east, above the trees, when the commotion from the barn reached its apex. She looked to Mill for assurance, but he was as terrified as she by the sounds of holy war being waged out in their barn.

They heard the shudder of rails and the creak of straining studs punctuated by thunderous thumps and claps. They heard the trembling of the barn roof and the groaning of its walls. They heard the voice of the preacher as a stormy roar, counting out the cadence of psalms and prayers and abjurations, and the answering squeals and raspings and shouts of the demon, writhing in the body of their son.

It was when the demon's voice rose and became a high-pitched wail of pain and suffering—the wail of a little boy whipped by an over-zealous father—that Ellie broke from her vigil on the porch and ran for the barn. She nearly made it across the yard, but Mill stopped her and held her in a tight embrace, and told her not to go out there, not 'til it was all over and done with. If Daniel came back to them, he'd speak in tones of comfort, not in suffering. This was only the devil in their son, and not their son himself. Ellie fought, though she knew Mill told the truth, and the greater part of her wished that she would just quit . . . that her heart would simply burst in her chest and her breathing would still and the darkness would take her and she'd be sleeping soundly before her body even touched the ground.

Mill led her back to the porch, never letting go of her. They took shelter under the eaves and listened. They couldn't make out what the preacher said, only that his litanies were punctuated by the name of their Lord again and again, though in brave invocation or terrified curse, they couldn't tell: Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ . . .

Ellie sank her nails into Mill's back, drawing blood through his shirt. To his credit, he didn't balk. He just held her tighter as the noise rose, and when she thought she might go mad with it and scream until her lungs burst, she bit hard into Mill's shoulder. Again, she drew blood. Again, he made no complaint.

Then silence fell. There were no more noises from the barn. Ellie heard her own choked sobs and realized that Mill was praying under his breath. She disengaged her teeth from her husband's bleeding shoulder, opened her eyes, and dared a single deep, shuddering breath. She looked up into Mill's slack face. Mill stared at the glowering barn doors. Vaguely, Ellie was aware that dawn was nearly upon them, the world turning purple-gray, shapes and shadows resolving out of the retreating darkness like the ghosts of old dreams. The familiar sounds of morning surrounded them: a light breeze in the orchard; the cock in the coop crowing; the river in the distance lapping at its muddy bank.

"Mill?" she said.

Mill slowly drew himself away from her, but gave her a single, level glance that assured her he would not leave her, he only wished to investigate. He moved toward the porch steps, descended, and started across the yard.

That's when they heard a new sound: the whicker of a horse, followed by hoofbeats, moving slowly up the path through the orchard.

Ellie watched, waiting for the new arrival to show himself, the shadows under the orchard trees still hiding him, though his hoofbeats drew nearer with every breath.

Mill returned to the porch, mounted the steps, stood at her side.

For just a moment, Ellie hoped that the hoofbeats were just those of the preacher's horse—but no, they'd tied him out back, with their own stock that they'd kept in the yard since Daniel had been imprisoned in the barn. So who was this, approaching as first light crept into the world, while their son might lie dead out in the barn?

He appeared from beneath the trees, his skinny, pale horse clomping up the path at an even, funereal pace. The rider drove his mount with intent, yet strangely, did not seem to be in any hurry. Ellie had a momentary thought—from whence it came, she couldn't say—of a wolf loping slowly-but-surely behind some wounded prey, tracking its blood trail, sure that it would overtake that prey and loath to show its impatience with the chase.

The rider was a big man, face shadowed by a wide-brimmed, ragged old hat, draped in a duster that hung to his boot-heels. They could not see his eyes, but his mouth was set in a clench-jawed scowl, yellow teeth bared like those of a snarling hound. Though Ellie could not see him clearly in the graying light, his pallor struck her as unnatural in some fashion—a sickly, chalky gray-green, like something long dead.

Perhaps, she told herself, it's just dust from the road.

She tried to accept that explanation, but somehow knew it wasn't true.

"Mornin'," the rider said. His voice sounded like a whetstone drawn across a rusted iron plow blade.

"Mornin'," Mill said, his own voice strangled in his throat.

A long silence fell between them.

"Horse needs water, maybe some feed," the rider said. "I got coin, so's it won't be just for hospitality's sake."

Ellie and Mill looked at one another. Should they? Could they afford not to? Who was this man?

Mill, God bless him, took charge. "Who might you be, sir," he asked, descending the porch steps. He left his scattergun propped beside the door. Ellie would have felt better if he'd taken in with him. "Ain't tryin' to be rude, just need to know. Got a family here, after all. Can't be too careful."

"No sir," the rider said. "Can't be. Name's Tooms." He reached up slowly and drew back the lapel of his duster, revealing a tarnished, battered tin star pinned to his vest.

"You're the law," Mill said.

"I'm the law," the rider answered.

His voice made Ellie's skin prickle.

"Up and about early," the rider said, seeming to study them both with eyes that neither of them could see.

"It's a big farm," Mill said. "Plenty to do."

"And we heard you comin'," Ellie added. "It's early... for a visitor."

Tooms made a strange, strangled sound that might have been a cough or a short chuckle. That rictus, gnash-toothed snarl of his never wavered. His lips were like stone around his clenched teeth, only moving the slightest when he deigned to speak.

"Trailin' a fugitive," Tooms said. "I'm passing through, following his trail."

Mill moved nearer and reached up for the horse's bridle, presumably to lead it and its rider toward the side of the house. "Trough and pump's this way," he said, and gave the bridle a tug.

The horse didn't move. Tooms didn't urge the animal along. He just stared down at Mill.

Ellie forced herself to descend the porch steps and share the yard with her husband and the strange, cadaverous lawman. "This fella you're after," she said, "is he dangerous?"

The constable turned his face stiffly toward her. She thought she could see his eyes now that a little more light had crept into the world. Maybe she was imagining things, but they didn't look like any man's eyes she'd ever seen before, except maybe a dead man's, all milky and clouded...

"Yes'm, he's a killer. May not even be in his right mind."

"Who is he?" Mill asked. "What'd he do?"

"You want to hear such things so early in the mornin', sodbuster?"

Mill, trying to remain amiable, shrugged.

The lawman, Tooms, gave another of those strange cough-chuckle sounds. His throat clicked, as though he were trying to swallow but found his gullet dry as Texas in July.

"Burned his church. Burned all his congregation. Burned his wife and little girl. Even stood by while the flames ate them and put bullets in any who tried to bust their way out."

Ellie could barely speak. "His church?"

"Yes'm," Tooms said. "Sumbitch fancies himself a preacher."

Ellie was speechless. What had they gotten themselves into? How could God be so cruel, sending a preacher to deliver their Daniel, but only a preacher who could burn his congregation and his kin alive.

And now, to send this fearful lawman on his sickly pale horse after him...

Then Ellie saw the lawman's gaze upon Mill. He studied him closely for a long, pregnant moment from his saddle, fixated on something. Ellie had her suspicions...

"You got blood on your shirt, sir," the lawman said.

Ellie started to formulate an explanation, but another new arrival interrupted her.

"Mama?"

Ellie and Mill both turned toward the breathless voice. For just a moment, Ellie thought the devil was loose—he stood right there in her yard, in his bloody, filthy night shirt, pale skin covered in sores and lacerations, hair a tousled, greasy mess.

But it took her only a moment to realize that she wasn't looking at the devil anymore. She was looking at her son. Daniel stood there before them in the cold, gray light of a new day dawning, and though he looked like he'd been to hell and back in longjohns made of thorns, his frightened, questioning eyes and the way he tottered on his bare feet told her that he had returned to them. He was cut and broken, but he had returned to them at last.

Ellie and Mill forgot about the lawman. Both of them rushed to Daniel and threw their arms around him and held him so tightly she thought they might suffocate him. Tears wet all their cheeks, and their laughter was tinged with sobs of joy and disbelief. For that moment—that single, indelible, everlasting moment of Heavenly reconciliation—Ellie completely forgot about the preacher, and the lawman, and all the terror they had just come through.

There was only Daniel. He was theirs again.

Then, from out back of the house, they heard a horse scream—probably in answer to a pair of sharp spurs digging deep into its flanks. The scream was followed by a rolling thunder, and a moment later, they all raised their eyes and saw a horse and rider come galloping out from behind the house, racing off northwestward along the scrubby riverbank. The horse was a flea-bitten gray. The rider was the preacher.

Ellie turned to the lawman, Tooms. He sat his mount, slowly turned his head to follow the preacher as he fled their farmstead, then lowered his dead gaze on their frightened, exhausted, reunited family. Ellie thought his gaze alone might stop her heart, there was so much hate, such a hellish rebuke, to be found in it.

"Your time'll come," Tooms said. "Everybody's time comes."

Then he laid spurs to his pale horse's flanks and the beast hitched forward with a snort. Its big, dark hooves ripped clods out of their yard as it sped past them, rounded the house, and fell into the track of the preacher's escape. In moments, Tooms was out of sight, lost among the woods that skirted the riverbank, and soon after, even his horse's hoofbeats were a memory.

The sun's first light crept over the distant horizon, bathed the yard, and cast copper fire on the muddy crests of the Missouri River.

Ellie and Mill took Daniel in their arms again and held him.

**Dureski's Requiem**

Karl Mann knew he was being watched. Shadows loomed around him, resolved, and became flesh in the jaundiced half-light from a streetlamp outside. Smooth, shorn crowns swayed in the dark. He heard the soft hiss of paper against paper. Low, thin, ghosts like underfed children neared, their tiny hands reaching out, grasping, seeking the hem of his coat, the legs of his trousers.

And the music remained. The memory of that terrible, hideous music.

Mann beat at the wall, seeking the switch for the lamp that stood on a small table beside the door. The lamp came alight. He blinked.

He was alone in his library, with only shadows and his thousand-odd volumes to greet him. Outside, Zurich seemed to sigh as a gust of wind swept down the narrow avenue fronting his home.

Had the music really affected him so? Or perhaps this was a stroke. He was an old man, after all, and strokes could be preceded by hallucinations, couldn't they?

But there was no pain. No numbness. Only the dull, lingering horror of the visions brought on by the premier performance of Josef Herzog's new Requiem—the performance he had just fled.

Desperate for succor, Karl hurried to the sideboard, splashed two fingers of brandy into a tumbler with shaking hands and drank it all in a single gulp. A buttery warmth invaded him from the belly outward. The tremors in his hands subsided. Gradually—very gradually—the beating of his heart slowed toward normal. He leaned on the sideboard with one hand and pressed the heel of his other palm into his throbbing forehead.

That was when the voices returned. _Goethe_ , they said.

He spun, heart hammering in his chest. Who was that? Was someone in the room with him?

_Goethe_.

On his left. He turned toward the partially open window, great, high bookshelves flanking it like sentinels. A chilly night breeze slipped in, silent as a serpent, billowing the sheer white curtains and slithering over the floor of the chamber, coiling at last around his feet.

For a long moment he stood, in search of anything out of the ordinary. Then, little by little, sense returned. He was in his library, in his house, in the city he had called home for more than half his long life. There were no hiding places in this room, no alcoves, not even a closet. It was a comfortably large box, filled with oak bookshelves and his vast private book collection. On the inner wall, a full company of phonograph records and compact discs stood arrayed as neatly as the volumes on his shelves. This was his sanctum, where he passed the bulk of his leisure hours at home. Here, he read and reminded himself what it meant to be human. Here, he listened to music and wondered at its beauty and symmetry and magic.

Yes, magic. That was always the attraction, wasn't it? Notes on a scale. Colors in sound. Ideas bereft of words or literal meaning. But, sequenced properly, spaced in time with care and skill, those seemingly random noises gained weight, form, function. He had always reckoned music to have a vast and awe-inspiring power over his mind and soul. It soothed him in times of distress, settled him in times of fear and doubt, warmed and comforted him in his darker hours. Music made him human.

And now it had turned on him, like a wayward lover or an ungrateful child.

_Impossible_ , he thought. _You're succumbing to an aging imagination, Karl_.

Nonetheless, he remembered his hurried walk home, his furtive glances into each dark alleyway, the silent, shambling forms in every well of shadow.

_So real_. He could still hear the awkward clicking of their thin limbs against one another, like winter-bare trees stirred by the wind. The sound of paper against paper. Staring eyes. Emaciated faces.

_But only shadows_ , he reminded himself. _Mere shadows_.

It was Josef's music. That horrible Requiem. Somehow, it had burrowed into him and awakened something long buried. Memories. Sights. Sounds. Smells.

Old names.

_Goethe_.

Karl Mann spun again. The whispered word had come from behind

him— _right_ behind him. But, of course, the only thing behind him was the sideboard, an open decanter, and his empty tumbler. Feeling the warm sting of tears in his eyes, Mann poured another brandy—three fingers, this time—and gulped it down.

Outside the library, he heard slow, deliberate footsteps climbing the front stairs.

Mann's breath caught in his throat. A momentary silence followed.

Then, a small, uneasy voice, just outside the door. "Karl? Are you in there? Your door was open."

Mann felt the dread upon him evaporate. "Josef?" he said. "Come in."

The door opened. There stood the maestro, Josef Herzog, Karl's longtime friend, recipient of his most generous patronage. The sight of him—small, slight and bald, eyes doe-like and dewy under dusky brows—settled Karl for a moment.

Then Karl remembered the source of his distress. Josef was the composer of the music which, this very night, had so affrighted him. Music which had seemed to conjure ghosts before his very eyes.

"Josef," Karl managed, a little sternly, as if scolding him.

When the door opened, Herzog had worn the same troubled, supplicant's smile he always wore when calling on his old patron and friend. Now, as he heard his name on Karl's lips, his aspect changed. He acquired an expression of inevitable, but unpleasant, dutifulness. Josef stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He nodded toward the bar.

"May I have a drink, herr Goethe?"

Karl obliged and turned to pour another brandy. Then he froze. His temples throbbed like twin timpani, and he turned back to Josef. "What did you call me?"

Josef's eyes dropped. "Herr Goethe, mein kommandant. Karl Phillip Emmanuel Goethe."

Mann swallowed. "What are you—?"

"Don't, Karl," Josef said shortly. "We've played long enough, and I won't have you degrading yourself by denying it."

"I assure you, Josef," he said, "I have no idea—"

"You've every idea," Josef said, moving slowly nearer. He loosened his bow tie and tuxedo collar, smiling a little. "I've always hated these things. I never understood why I couldn't attend the premiere of my work in comfortable pants and a warm sweater."

They were an arm's length apart now. Mann considered smashing his glass against the side of the maestro's face, stunning him, then taking up the nearest heavy object—some tome from the library shelves, the decanter of brandy—and dashing the maestro's brains on the hardwood floor.

But that seemed terribly ingracious. And questions remained regarding the Requiem, heard for the first time that evening by the public and recorded for posterity by Deutsche Grammophone.

Josef stared, smiling a little. "My drink?" he asked. "I could use it, mein herr."

"Stop that," Mann said. "You know my name."

"I do," Josef said, nodding. "I know both of them, in fact." He stared. "Just pour me a drink and we'll talk."

Mann poured and handed Josef the drink. Josef swallowed half of it and drifted away to scan the albums and compact discs arrayed on the inner wall, beside the door.

The room and its furnishings, like the house that contained them, were old—some two or three centuries—proof of Mann's love for antiques and fine sensibilities. But Mann loved music as well, and therefore updated his stereo system regularly—every five to six years, in fact, as time and technology dictated. It was housed in a custom-made armoire with the look of an antique, though the whole construction was designed especially for stereo equipment. Therein he kept his receiver, turntable, and compact disc player. Small, expensive acoustic speakers hid in the upper corners of the room, their wires run through the walls.

Josef admired it. "A fine system," he said, and turned back to Karl. "You love music. Truly and deeply. More than anything, I think."

Mann nodded. "You know this."

"I know this," Josef said, nodding. "That's why I had to strike there."

"Why?" Mann said dumbly, but he knew why.

Josef's hardened stare assured Karl that Josef knew that Karl knew, and that further pretense was useless. "I said I would not insult you," Josef offered. "Don't insult yourself, herr Goethe."

Karl stared at Josef, his friend for more years than he could count. He rifled backward through his trove of memories, seeking the moment when they first met. What had it been, some forty-five or forty-six years before?

Now, Karl scarcely recognized the maestro. For all their years as friends, Josef Herzog had impressed Karl as a great composer, but also a person of excessive sensitivity. He cried easily. He spoke in soft tones, avoided eye contact, and always carried himself with a deferential stoop. Humility and piety rode on his shoulders like heavy yokes.

Now here Josef stood, staring back at Karl with eyes full of fire and darkness, a deep hatred and sadness which Karl never could have imagined seeing written on his friend's face.

"Somehow, I've offended you," Karl said, lowering his eyes. "What have I done, Josef?"

"Look at me," Josef said.

"What's come over you?" Karl asked. "In just the few hours since I last saw you, you've changed—"

"Our masks are off," Josef said. "Here is my true face, mein herr. Here I stand before you, naked as the day my mother bore me. Moshe Dureski, of Krakow, Poland."

Karl shook his head, feigning stupidity, though it was becoming harder by the moment to do so.

"Here," Josef said, turning toward the stereo in its great cabinet. He turned on the power and stabbed two buttons on the CD carousel. The machine whirred, the discs within spinning past the narrow window in its face. "Perhaps this will help. Music is a means of time travel, after all. A few bars—even a few notes—and every memorable moment in your life linked to a certain melody is reconjured before your eyes."

The carousel stopped. Inside the machine, a disc fell into place. The opening strains of Mozart's Horn Concerto filled the room, as subtle and supple as a private performance.

Karl's eyes grew wide. He stared into Josef's face, and saw the ghost of a thin little Polish Jew—barely old enough for his bar mitzvah—staring back at him.

Josef was right—after only a few bars, it all flooded back.

#

Karl was a young man again, adorned in his uniform, smoking a cigarette. He stared down from the verandah, the camp below laid out like a gray-brown gathering of old bones swarming with tiny, striped insects. At intervals, he heard the pop of pistol- or rifle-shots. Black smoke poured from a pair of great chimneys protruding from a squat, fat brick building in the center of camp. White smoke snaking nearer on the northwestern horizon indicated a new shipment of workers arriving by train.

"Here's a pretty piece," Schultz said from within. The doors to the sitting room were wide open, allowing the autumn air to work its way through the house. It was sunny and cool. The leaves were just turning. Karl heard the whisper as Schultz slid the grammophone album from its sleeve, followed by a crackle as he placed the needle on the spinning album's face.

Mozart's Horn Concerto played, a balanced melange of buttery French horns and piquant orchestral counterpoint, like a fine Riesling in music. Cool on the surface, warm underneath. Smooth, sweet and balanced: ripe peaches in a bowl of cream, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar.

The three young officers were silent as the concerto played. Lemmler puffed his pipe, the fine tobacco a balm to his companions' senses. Schultz poured a small cup of coffee and sat, sipping. Goethe smoked his cigarette on the narrow verandah. Though the camp lay strewn below him, a piteous and ugly sight, he almost forgot about it completely. Those first few moments, when the music caressed him, were like the first forays of lovemaking. They erased the past, obscured the future, drew one into a perpetual, semi-permanent present. What could be wrong in the world, so long as such sublime music filled the air?

Footsteps. The tiny clink of crystal against silver. That would be the houseboy with their breakfast. Goethe turned and marched into the sitting room. The boy caught his eye for a moment, thin and underfed, ears and nose too large for his square little head and his bony, marionette's body. He saw the boy's hunger in his eyes, heard the churning and growling of his empty stomach. Just beneath those three tureens, salvation waited for the little waif: eggs, sausages, cabbage and brown bread. Butter. Sugar. In the pot on the sideboard, rich Italian coffee.

The boy set the tray on the sideboard and turned to hurry from the room. Goethe stopped him.

"Boy," he said, and smiled to set the boy at ease.

The boy turned. For a long moment, the young officer and the little Polish Jew shared a pregnant silence and appraised one another. Something strange passed between them.

Karl was struck by two thoughts. First: the boy was not afraid of him. Second: some part of Karl was afraid of the boy. That feeling defied all sense and logic—he was only a child, after all; no doubt, barely strong enough to lift the breakfast tray.

_It's not the strength in his shoulders or arms that worries you_ , a voice said within him. _It's the look in those eyes. Give him one moment alone with you and a straight razor and see what happens_.

What pity he held for the child—and the hundreds like him down in the camp—melted. This was no child to be pitied: this was a rodent; a pest to be eradicated, lest his fearlessness and impertinence spread. He searched his mind for some advantage, and in moments had it in hand.

"Are you hungry?" Goethe asked, smile broadening.

Lemmler snorted. "If he touches my breakfast, I'll break his goddamned little fingers."

"Calm down, Fritz," Karl said. "I've got a game in mind."

"What game?" Schultz asked.

Karl crouched, meeting the boy's gaze. "What would you do for a piece of bread, boy? For some butter on that bread?"

"You're mad, Karl."

"Quiet, Fritz. It's only a game." He looked the boy in the eye again. "Well, boy?"

The boy's eyes rounded the room: he took in Schultz, then Lemmler, then looked back to Goethe. He was trying to control his desperation—Karl could tell. The boy knew that something was amiss. Further, he wanted to spit in Karl's face—Karl could see that, too—but all the boy mustered was a tiny whimper, and a trembling lip. "Please," the waif said. "Please."

"Good Christ," Lemmler snorted.

"Schultz," Karl said, "call in that serving girl."

#

Josef was at the sideboard, pouring himself another drink. The concerto played on, lovely as ever. Karl's feet were cold.

"How did you know?" Josef asked. "All these years I've wondered how you knew."

Karl started to argue but had no strength left for it. Mozart brought it all back to him, conjuring the dead past like a fairy tale necromancer.

Just as Josef said it would.

He remembered his momentary search for some advantage over the child, and his subsequent revelation, spurred by the sound of someone still clamoring in the kitchen.

"The serving girl," Karl said aloud.

"She took care of me," Josef offered without looking at him. "She was kind to me."

With a sigh, and no little resignation, Karl moved to his leather chair and slumped into it. Josef, fresh drink in hand, rounded him and stared down, carrying himself like a stern father. Karl only nodded. He remembered the girl employed in their kitchen, the one who, he knew, snuck food and candy to the houseboy who slept in the basement.

The dead girl who had appeared to him in the concert hall just a few hours ago.

"You remember," Josef said. It wasn't a question.

Karl nodded, hanging his head. Tears stung his eyes. "I remember."

#

The serving girl had been hand-picked by Schultz—a Hungarian peasant of some natural beauty, blonde and blue-eyed. As a stranger in a strange land, she might have passed for an Aryan. But, she was herded with the rest of her Jewish family and friends and rode the same rails to the camp. A soldier had drawn her out of the line for the ovens, knowing that Schultz—on the lookout for a maid of quality—would be pleased with her.

Now, Schultz brought her in. His early attraction to her had long ago worn off. She rebuffed him at every turn, never so outwardly defiant as to incite her execution. Instead, she faked strange epileptic fits. Whenever Schultz cornered her in the larder or against the icebox, she simply diverted her eyes, went rigid, and fell silent. Schultz had beaten her more than once—Karl himself had pulled his fellow officer off of her—but she was still present, still breathing, still, to some extent, favored.

Likewise, Karl knew that she snuck the boy scraps of food and deserts, sometimes coffee or milk. She even sometimes slipped into the basement and slept with him at night, a surrogate mother, singing softly to him in the dark, rocking him in her arms. Something in her affections gave the boy hope. Something in the boy's need gave her strength.

Karl waved her near. "Come, girl. Here."

She hesitated. Schultz shoved her. "Bitch, move!" he hissed.

Lemmler puffed on, bored with the impending spectacle.

Karl drew the girl near, firm, but trying to be as gentle as possible. It would do him no good to frighten her too soon. He looked to Schultz. "Now the boy," he said. "Get him some bread and butter."

Schultz, puzzled but ever up for a game, did as he was told. The boy waited, staring at the girl, seeming to silently ask if she needed help. Her steady gaze told him to stay where he stood, and do as he was told. Something in their silent questions and answers left a knot in Karl's throat, and he forced his smile to broaden, even as his eyes narrowed and darkened.

"Schultz," he said.

Schultz offered the boy his bread and butter. The boy stared, starving, but uneasy about accepting anything from the men in gray uniforms surrounding him.

"Hold him," Karl said. "Make sure he eats. And keep him from running."

Schultz screwed up his face, puzzled.

Karl's fingers tightened on the girl's bare upper arms.

The boy tried to run. Schultz had him in a fierce bear hug a moment later and raised the bread and butter to his lips. "Eat up!" he said, forcing a laugh. "As the kommandant commands! Eat up!"

The girl tried to go rigid. Karl spun her, struck her twice across the face with his open hand, and thrust her down onto a nearby sofa.

Lemmler stared, blowing smoke rings, his boredom continual. He crossed his legs as if he were watching a fine tennis match.

The boy screamed. Schultz shoved the buttered bread into his mouth.

The girl struggled, whimpering in her guttural tongue. Karl had his trousers undone in moments, penis rising, full and engorged. His smile never wavered. He struck the girl again, three times, twice with his hand open, and once with his fist. She gurgled and spat when his fist struck her. Blood erupted from her open mouth, two of her teeth now lodged in her throat.

"Christ, Karl, she'll make a mess of you," Lemmler said with distaste.

Karl rose, turned the girl over in one swift movement, pinned her arms beneath her, and tore up her skirt. She wore old, stained underpants. Karl tore them away, baring her narrow, pale buttocks to the world.

The boy tried to scream again. Schultz held him like an overzealous grandfather. Each time the boy opened his mouth to spit the bread out, Schultz shoved it in further. The boy choked and spat and coughed, trying to chew around his screams and sobs, wriggling to get free.

Karl gave the boy a final glance—a terrible, leering, wild-eyed look that suggested an imminent revenge, redress for some wrong the boy could never understand—then he drove into her. She screamed as he did.

"Mind your trousers," Lemmler said, as if giving stage directions.

The boy's struggles stopped. He was limp in Schultz's arms, a doll with half-chewed bread and curdled butter hanging from his slack jaws. He tried to turn away, but Schultz held his head and turned him, urging him to watch, and watch carefully.

Karl glanced down at the girl. She stared at the boy, blood oozing from her open lips, a look of terrible shame in her eyes.

#

The sitting room at the Birkenau mansion dissolved. Karl now found himself in the Zurich Tonhalle Gesellschaft, where an expectant audience waited to hear the premiere performance of Josef Herzog's Requiem.

That very evening. Only hours before.

Karl remembered the moment when Josef's terrible music surpassed dread and slipped into the realms of mortal terror. It was the second movement, wherein the Recordare, a song of absolution, was overtaken by the more pitiful Lacrimosa, a plea for mercy. A male choir sounded a thunderous wall of sonic opposition to the ever-more-frenzied pleas of a feminine chorus, the brassy tenors, altos, and basso profundos of the male singers seeming to thrust savagely into the diaphonous spaces created by the female chorus' protracted and all-too-delicate arias.

There it began. A sudden shallowness of breath. Clammy hands. His tuxedo collar strangling him.

_Am I having a heart attack?_ he wondered.

The choirs sparred. Beneath them, strident brass opposed wailing strings, those strings struggling in vain for a higher purchase to oppose the brass. Surrounding all, the sound of trilling, spiraling woodwinds, plunging down, down into some nameless abyss—

That had been when she appeared. As the deeper strings began a feverish counter-assault on the ringing brass, flutes sighing piteously and violins weeping alongside, he saw her.

The serving girl.

She appeared near the orchestra, stage right, pale, thin, and broken. Moving with crude delicacy, as though the shock of ambulation might shake her to pieces, she shambled up the aisle, eyes on Karl, face bruised, fresh tears on her hollow cheeks. Gaps bloomed dark and vile amid her otherwise perfect teeth. Dried blood crusted at the corners of her lips. Fresh blood trickled in rivulets down her pale thighs.

Karl felt the first seizures of fear grip him then. There was a terrible, palpable pain in the center of his brain—like a steel splinter driven through his forehead—and he shot to his feet, tottering toward the aisle, eager to escape the spectral serving girl and that terrible, hideous music—

#

—then his library resolved around him once more. Josef stared from his seat opposite.

"My God," Karl said, breathless, as though he'd run a marathon. "My God, I beg you, Josef. I was young. I was little more than a boy—"

"I _was_ a boy," Josef said flatly. "You showed me no mercy then. I'll show you no mercy now."

"Josef, the girl—"

"This isn't simply about the girl. She's but one example of your casual cruelty." He paused, finished the last drops of brandy in his tumbler. "It has taken me decades of aspiration, but I do believe that, finally, my own capacity for cruelty approaches the same boundlessness as yours."

Karl leapt forward and fell on his knees. It was a superficial gesture, he knew, but perhaps it would somehow convince Josef; at least buy Karl enough time to formulate a plan. "What of mercy?" he begged. "Charity?"

" _Your_ god is the god of mercy, mein herr. _My_ god—the god you executed with the bulk of my people and my family—is a god of blood and sacrifice."

Karl took a chance and sprang, hoping his bursitis was held at bay by his madness. He lunged at Josef, hands grasping. If he could get the advantage, he could overcome him, he knew it. He was much taller than Josef, and still strong, though a good twelve years his senior.

Karl had Josef by the lapels, rose, then tried to throw him to the floor. Josef was small, true, and not strong, but his balance was good, and he was quick. He planted his feet, grasped Karl's shirt. Karl huffed through clenched teeth. Josef stared back, grimacing, indomitable.

Karl's heart beat faster and faster, filled with a passion and purpose unknown to him since the last days of his young manhood. Suddenly, the maestro's left arm flashed in a wide arc. Karl's vision exploded into a darkness aswarm with fireflies. Down he went, one leg bending awkwardly beneath him.

He drifted, lost in a brief, but seemingly endless, darkness. Nearby, he heard Josef rifling in his coat; the whir of the CD carousel in the hi fi system; a soft sigh, as of finality.

Finally, his vision cleared. Little by little, the darkness receded, though the fireflies remained. Then, Karl heard the first strains of a slow adagio moving toward crescendo, reminiscent of the opening dawn motif of Wagner's _Das Rheingold_ ; ascending strings with an underscore of brass, building slowly—so slowly—toward some unknown but inevitable climax. The crescendo rose at an impossibly slow pace, almost too slowly for its changes in intensity to be audible.

Then Karl realized what he was hearing. He drew himself up on the edge of Josef's chair and sat, still blinking, blood gumming his vision. It was Josef's terrible Requiem.

Josef stood beside the stereo system. "Deutsche Gramophone made a recording of our final rehearsal yesterday. They offered it to me for my criticism."

"The Requiem," Karl said. The adagio gathered like an oncoming storm.

"The Requiem," Josef said. " _My_ Requiem."

The crescendo sounded, like the tearing of a great veil. Amid the clamor, a choir broke in, howling a grand and feverish rendition of the first central theme of the Requiem: a tender folk melody, not unlike a lullaby, inflated to epic proportions by the full complement of choir and orchestra; a song of lost love transformed into a grand funeral dirge.

Something fleet and dark moved in Karl's peripheral vision. He turned toward it, lost sight of it in the blood choking his vision, blinked and wiped.

There was nothing. Josef was the only living soul in the room besides himself.

_Goethe_.

Karl snapped up onto his knees, peering round the chair that he leaned on. Amid the grand swelling of the music, its oceanic peaks and troughs, he swore he heard voices. Not a choir, but simple whispers, barely audible, hissing like a nest of serpents, calling his name—his real name.

_Goethe_.

He turned to Josef. The maestro stood staring at his bloodied hand, cut by the glass broken against Karl's temple.

"Josef," Karl said, pleading. He could sense it already—something terrible gathering at the behest of the music.

"Music is a strange and magical thing, isn't it?" Josef said. "As I said a means of time travel. A few bars, a single phrase, and every memory attached to said phrase is reconjured. Palpable, right before your eyes, as if you could touch it."

The whispering voices gathered, multiplying. They were all around him, though the room was empty. Beneath the murmur of the voices, the music played on, the grand theme of the opening giving way to a lone violin reprising the lullaby theme. Weepy counterpoint was provided courtesy of the violas, and beneath that, an ominous, throbbing underscore by the cellos and double basses. Beneath this triptych—solo violin, median strings, and throbbing bass—a small contingent of the choir provided an atonal wall of sound; a strange, shimmering cloud of noise, not unlike the sonic equivalent of a sky shuddering with summer heat lightning.

"My father was a musician," Josef said, still staring into his bloodied hand. "The greatest French Horn player in all of Poland." He smiled. "Perhaps the only French Horn player in Poland. Nonetheless, he loved music. It was his breath. The beating of his heart. And as he loved it, so did we, his seven children."

Karl felt breath on the nape of his neck. He lunged forward, turning to see who lingered behind him. His awkward lurch sent him sprawling. As he lay there, he heard footsteps in the hall outside, slowly, ponderously climbing the stairs.

Josef loomed over him. "I was the only one of them to survive the camps, mein herr. One of nine. My mother. My father. Six brothers and sisters. All of them fed the crematoria, or dropped dead in the factories, or were shot during a random liquidation, or were gassed. To this day I still have no idea what fates they met. I only know that I was the only survivor. The stories of others like me fill in the gaps sufficiently, I think.

"And you, a handsome young officer. Dashing, charming, refined . . . how you loved your music! That stayed with me, even afterward—how you insisted that I was to dust your records each day, as well as the grammophone, and make sure that your collection was alphabetized. As work details went, mein herr, your employ was almost civilized."

"You're alive aren't you?" Karl said around a mouthful of blood. He felt a loose tooth at the forefront of his jaw. "I saved you from the gas chambers or the quarries or the factories."

"True," Josef said, nodding and kneeling beside Karl. "This is true—" The first movement ended. The second began.

The Lacrimosa and Recordare. The same movement during which Karl had seen the ghost of the serving girl.

Josef continued. "—but you chose the one person who gave me hope and some small happiness in the midst of that hell you made, and you violated her—murdered her—right before my eyes."

Karl remembered. His thrusts had torn her. By the time he came, she was bleeding, the blood and semen rolling down her thin, pale thighs in thick rivulets. Before she could bleed on the floor and stain the Persian rug, he had hiked up his trousers, dragged her by one arm onto the verandah, and put a bullet in her head.

All while the boy watched.

"That was sixty years ago!" Karl roared, tears and mucous and blood on his face, in his mouth, dripping from his chin. "Is there no mercy in your heart, Josef? We were at war!"

"With _whom?_ " Josef asked, his bitterness evident. "With families who worshipped a different god? Who looked different than you? Who celebrated on different days of the year and prayed in a different tongue?"

The male and female choirs sparred; brass opposed the strings; strings clawed heavenward in search of advantage; the woodwinds spiralled out of control like a plunging fighter plane.

Then, suddenly, all voices and the whole of the orchestra were in concert, yoked by the force of the hitching tempi like a team of wild horses. The operatic grandeur of the Lacrimosa became a militaristic march-cum-funeral dirge—a theme of pure will and determination. Timpani thundered, keeping the march, driving the will theme toward a thunderous, fractious dissolution.

"It's been so long," Karl said, almost whimpering. "Who knows what moves us when we're young—"

"Love moves us when we're young," Josef said quietly. "Hope. Possibility. All of those you stole from me. Even my heart's true love—my father's true love, music—even this you stole from me. Forever after, the Horn Concerto—my father's signature repertoire piece—was anathema to me. It took me twenty years to return to my father's house—to the house of song, and sound, the house of the language without words. And when I finally returned, I found that house emptied; abandoned; gutted. Music, like the world, has never been the same in the wake of your terrible war on humanity."

Karl, in tears, terrified by the sound of the music and Josef's awful determination to persecute him, tried to turn away. Josef took his thinning white hair in hand, holding him.

"Furthermore, old friend, so ashamed was I of my heritage—so disgusted—that I changed my name and renounced my God in an attempt to move on with my life, to build something new. Moshe Dureski died that day in your sitting room, watching as the last person who cared about him was beaten, and raped, and casually murdered by a handsome young officer with exquisite taste in music."

"Please," Karl managed. The whispers were growing intolerable now, like the ringing in the ears of a tinnitus-stricken old artillery soldier. "Please, Josef—"

Josef continued. "When I met you again, I knew you instantly. Certainly, your name was false. But one fake sees through another, you know. Once we were better acquainted, and I found means of identifying you beyond a doubt, I was satisfied. Here was my opportunity for vengeance."

Goethe!

Karl heaved himself from Josef's grasp, trying to find the source of the hissing voices surrounding him. His eyes betrayed nothing, though his ears were abuzz. Outside, he still heard footsteps climbing the stairs toward the second floor landing.

Josef stood and took a deep breath. He threw a glance at the door, as if he, too, heard the footfalls. "For a time I considered exposing you to the authorities. There are still Nazi hunters in Israel who would gladly see you tried and executed, old man or no. But an altogether different opportunity presented itself. Even under an assumed name, you professed to love music. You were a passionate and generous patron—even supporting me through one of the darkest times of my life since the war—all because you loved and believed in the power and promise of my music."

That brought Karl back to the present; that single reminder of how they had first met when Josef was a promising but dirt poor conservatory student. Karl, impressed by a performance of the young man's second concerto, offered to pay for the remainder of his education.

Josef smiled, seeming to remember the time fondly. "What better means would I have of avenging myself? I would strike at the last thing that a lonely, aging German aristocrat loved and valued. I would damage, violate, and murder that thing you loved, right before your eyes. My art, my salvation, would also be my revenge."

Finally, the Recordare repeated, choir and strings leading the rest of the orchestra toward a frenzied, fractured crescendo. Then, nigh upon a great, ringing apex, the whole sonic wall seemed to collapse, as if from exhaustion. There was a long, ringing silence, followed by the final phrases, sung by a sextet of female voices accompanied by solo oboe and violin.

Reces meae non sunt dignae: sed tu bonus fac benigne, ne perenni cremer igne.

_Worthless are my prayers and sighing: yet, good Lord, in grace complying, rescue me from fires undying_.

The music ended, the second movement closed. Karl felt cold hands on the nape of his neck. The whispering voices grew louder. Skeletal knuckles rapped at the door.

Josef carried on, his demeanor darkening. "But therein lies the sting, mein herr. When the thing we love is tainted by the thing we hate, it is changed forever. When a means of avenging my family and my people occurred to me, I knew the price would be high."

Karl was wracked with fear, trembling, sweating, his old heart thudding mercilessly in his chest. "Josef," he managed, pointing toward the library door. "Who's out there? Who've you called into my house?" The third movement of the Requiem began: the Dies Irae.

The Day of Wrath.

Josef turned and surveyed the door casually. "I can't see them," Josef said. "Nor can I hear them or feel them. But I feel the suggestion of them when this music plays, as would anyone." He glowered down on Karl. "I've dared the wrath of my god, and tainted the only thing that ever offered me salvation in this world, all for your sake."

New knuckles rapped at the door. Karl cowered, watching with horrible fascination, half-expecting the library door to burst open on its hinges.

Josef clarified: "In each faith lies the means for salvation and ascension to a higher plane, or a path to worldly power—the pursuit of the latter usually costing one's soul. So it is even with the arts—with music. There are older and deeper magics still lurking in the orthodoxy, still available to the studious in ancient scrolls and tomes. For thirty years I've searched and studied. For thirty years, I've sought a means to strike at you in the most personal place possible, to cause you the greatest agony before your end."

Karl shook his head.

The door buckled. Someone was outside, now pounding, trying to beat their way into the room. All around Karl the voices sounded, like the instruments in the orchestra of the recording that now filled the room. They whispered his family name, and tittered, and jeered, and cried, and begged to be let in.

"Josef," Karl said again, begging.

"I could never reconjure them all, you understand. Six million ghosts—that would be a feat for even the most powerful necromancer.

"But eighty-four, that I managed. I gave each a voice through an instrument of the orchestra, or a voice in the choir. The musicians, the singers—all channeled the spirits of those tormented dead called back from the brink by me to punish you.

"Somewhere, the better part of all souls repose in paradise. Everything good and pure and hopeful and loving in them passes through the veil into the house of our father. Everything terrible in them—pain and pity, sadness and despair, hatred and wrath and hunger and thirst—all of these things linger when the soul ascends, like the skin shed by a serpent. In most of us, the balance is so small, that when we shed our darkness on moving to the light, our darkness evaporates. Like so much smoke. But for the worst of us—the most tormented of us—it will not depart, and it draws us down into the depths—to the place the ancients called Sheol—like a man with too many clothes trying to tread water in a stormy sea.

"And for those whose end is terrible, or slow, or sudden, what is left behind is palpable, one step from flesh. Every person murdered in your final solution, mein herr, left the dregs of their spirit on the earth when they passed to their reward. Those dregs linger still, and I've teamed them like horses through the Requiem. My music gives them shape, and form, and influence in the world of flesh.

"In _your_ world. Because, of course, herr Goethe, the Requiem is dedicated to you."

The door burst open. A cold wind swept through the library, and Karl looked to Josef. He saw that his old friend squinted against that phantom wind and drew his coat closer about him and shuddered, but his eyes betrayed no fear. Only a dark inevitability.

They crowded the hall and choked the landing, twenty deep, all the way into Karl's bedchamber and the game room at the rear of the house. More crowded the stairway, no doubt, the foyer and living and dining rooms downstairs. But all of those eyes in those sunken, skull-like faces were trained on he, Karl Phillip Emanuel Goethe, an old man cowering on the floor of his library with an old friend crouching over him, the terrible music of Moshe Dureski's Requiem filling the chamber around him. They looked like corpses made of shadow and ash, their skins gray and lifeless, their bones visible through their paper-thin flesh. All their crowns were shorn, and so, there seemed to be no men or women or children among them. They were fruiting bodies, shuttles of disease and rot and death, automatons of justice, without sex or identity or meaning beyond what they were called upon to do.

What the music bade them do.

The Dies Irae was aflame in his ears.

Quantus tremor est futurus, quando judex est venturus, cuncta stricte discussurus!

_Oh, what fear man's bosom rendeth, when from Heaven the judge descendeth, on whose sentence all dependeth_.

Karl looked to Josef. Josef stood and drew his coat around him. "There's a draft," Josef said. "I think I'll be on my way."

Karl moved to rise and follow him, felt his left ankle balk painfully, and fell forward again. Josef disappeared amid the ghostly tangle of thin limbs and square shoulders. The shades shambled forward, pouring into the room like a viscous flood.

The Dies Irae became a piercing threnody of strident violins and growling cellos. The chorus sounded another atonal phrase, their voices commingling in the most terrible of harmonies, singing of loss and madness and terror made manifest, of the dark reign of profane powers and the necessity, at some point, for justice. Simple justice.

The shadows crowded in around him. Karl begged for mercy, but his pleas fell on long-deaf ears.

#

Josef Herzog descended the stairs from the library to the lower floors. Though he seemed to be in the house alone, he was surrounded by a bone-numbing cold, a dread made palpable by the darkness and the midnight stillness. He felt them; felt their inexorable movement up the stairs, toward the library, drawn to the music as it blared from Karl's small, expensive acoustic speakers; felt their need to lay hands on an earthly avatar of their suffering. They were not souls, exactly; merely the shadows of souls. Sad remains and nothing more. There would not even be rest in Karl's end for them, merely a sort of closure. A sense of coming full circle at last.

And who knew, as the Requiem was recorded and released abroad, perhaps they might find their way to other needful listeners, other old fugitives with false names and forgotten pasts, suddenly overwhelmed by the power of a single composition; a piece of music whose sole purpose was to sicken the heart with grief, to terrify, to humiliate, and finally, to draw all meaning to its chaotic end. The common listener would feel some measure of this discomfort. Perhaps the disc wouldn't sell very well because of it.

But the common listener would be spared the true nature of the song which Josef Herzog had been condemned to transcribe and orchestrate. He would bear the weight of those summoned soul-shades, and when his hour and end arrived, they would, no doubt, be there to greet him, and welcome him into their number.

But there was no avoiding it. It was a necessary reckoning, however costly.

Upstairs, he heard Karl floudering across the hardwood floor. Furniture pitched over and clattered across the room. A bookcase creaked and tumbled with a thunderous crash.

_Rest in peace, Moshe Dureski_.

At the foot of the stairs, Josef stopped. The only light came from the open door to the library upstairs, and from the streetlights outside. The lower floor of Karl's house was dark and silent, a veil of night between the bright chamber above and the dimly lit avenue beyond the foyer and front entryway.

But there in the doorway stood a small, slight form. It was a child, no more than ten years old, and horribly underfed. Large ears stood out from his small, square head. The darkness swallowed the child's features, but in the half-light, Josef thought he saw the long bridge of a nose, two eyes glittering, set deep in the child's skull-like face. His paper uniform hung on him loosely, whispering the slightest in the wind that slithered through the open front door.

The child blocked Josef's exit. He stood in the doorway, staring, silent, waiting for Josef's next move.

Upstairs, Karl howled, the cries of a dying, maddened animal awaiting oblivion's salvation.

Josef stared at the child, afraid to approach, even to slip past him.

The child offered one skeletal hand.

For a long time, Josef waited, staring at that outstretched, skeletal little hand. In the darkness it was a thing composed of ash and soot and smoky shadows. Then, because he knew that there was no other choice, he reached out and took the child's hand in his. It was cold and dry, like a woodland deadfall in winter before the snow.

Hand in hand, the child led Josef Herzog into the night, Karl's screams fading behind them.

**Afterword**

Some people don't care where the stories they read came from. I do. A peek behind the curtain is certainly not a mandatory excursion, but I've always appreciated it when an author illuminates his inspiration. If that's not your bag, feel free to exit, travel safe, and we'll see you next time around.

"It Takes a Light Touch For This Sort of Work" was inspired by the two young gitano ladies that picked my pocket on a trip to Spain. It happened on my very first day in Madrid, only hours after landing, and they used the technique described in the story, obscuring what their fleet little fingers did in my pocket with a map and a lot of feigned hysteria. When Leta sees a group of tourists in the Plaza Mayor ripe for plucking, then dismisses them because she recognizes one whose wallet she had already taken and found nothing in? Yeah, that's me. I was so taken with Spain itself and the memory of that little run-in with street criminals that I just had to find a story in it. So, I asked myself, _What if that young lady acquired something from a mark's pocket that she wished she hadn't?_

"The Devil You Know" was a dry run for a screenwriting project. My screenwriting partner, Chad Rouch, and I were developing an original TV series pilot about an itinerant gun-toting preacher fighting supernatural menace in the Old West. In the midst of building the pilot and the series to follow, I sat down and hammered out my vision of our main character and how we might first meet him, just to establish the mood and texture that we would be aiming for in our teleplay. Many years and many drafts later, the teleplay itself is very different from the original story I wrote. Still, I always had a fondness for this first, stark vision of Zebulon Delphi and his world, so I present the story here in a newer, fuller form: still structured and stripped down like the first draft I wrote, but sporting some embellishments from later drafts of the teleplay.

I wrote "Dureski's Requiem" as an ode to the power of music. I've always been a music nut (my ridiculously cumbersome CD and iTunes libraries will attest to the fact) precisely because it's a strange, alien language for me. I've dabbled in playing guitar and I've read music theory, but the simple fact is that what composers and songwriters do really mystifies and amazes me, even as it exercises an unending fascination. So, I resolved to tell a story wherein music itself was a weapon, and to challenge myself with describing in the clumsy, exacting medium of words the abstract, wordless power of music's frozen sonic architecture. Hopefully, I succeeded.

Until the next time...

Dale Lucas

Saint Petersburg, FL

June, 2012

As a special offering, here is the firest chapter of my neo-pulp novel Doc Voodoo: Aces & Eights. (Available where ever books and e-books are sold.)

DOC VOODOO: Aces & Eights

By Dale Lucas

# Chapter 1

#

Wooley's hands shook, so Johnson offered him a tug on the reefer and Wooley took it. The sweet-grass filled his throat and nostrils, then his lungs, and he held it. Moments later, his brain felt like a wad of soggy cotton and every moment seemed to live in a perfect little bubble, separate from the last, like pearls on a string. His hands didn't shake anymore, and Johnson grinned beside him in the dark, teeth bright white in his mahogany face.

"Dig this! Wooley's grinnin' ear to ear!"

Tibbs rode shotgun. He huffed and jacked the breech on his pump twelve to make sure a shell was ready and waiting. "That mean you niggers are ready to roll?"

Johnson's reply, "Who you callin' nigger, nigger?" came with a smile, but there was venom in it. Wooley took another tug on the reefer and handed it back to Johnson. He blew on it, and the cherry glowed in the darkness of their idling Model T.

"Cocked and locked?" Bedoux asked from behind the wheel. Wooley answered with a snort, as did the others, and Bedoux eased the accelerator. The car crawled up the street toward their targets.

Wooley saw them up ahead through the windscreen: Lester Bernice, with the little tin lunch pail he used to shuttle the bolito slips from his route; his policy-boss, Chester, next to another one of the Harlem Knight block-bosses, Frupp; and a kid that Wooley didn't know, probably not even seventeen yet.

Not much younger than Wooley himself.

XX

"So pay attention," Lester said, and Beau did his best to listen, though it was getting late and he knew Fralene would want him home soon. If he wasn't careful, he'd have to explain to Lester, Chester, and Frupp why his sister was out wandering up and down Lenox Avenue after midnight, calling Beau by his unwieldy Christian name, Buchanan.

Lester plunged into his umpteenth explanation. "The pail's full of dough and slips. You bring it back to your block-boss, and they collect and give you blank slips for the following day. Never hand over the slips or the dough unless there's at least one witness, if not more. You don't want to do it out in front of God and everybody, but for fuck sakes, don't be dumb enough to hand over a pail fulla cash to anybody—anybody!—when there ain't somebody else there to vouch for you makin' your drop."

"Sound advice," Chester said, eyes still on the checkerboard before him. He and Frupp were melted into their chairs in front of Frupp's Barbershop, which had been closed for hours, but which Frupp never seemed to leave. The old barber and the bolito boss sat smoking thin little Mexican cigars, munching boiled peanuts, mulling over whether to jump or crown next.

"You gonna move?" Frupp asked. "Slow as molasses in goddamn January..." Frupp was boss for this block, but Beau was apprenticed with Lester, who made his slip and dough deliveries to Chester. Chester had promised that the game would soon be over and they'd all cross 128th and 129th Streets back to his block to see the slips and dough safely deposited at the night bank. But presently, the game didn't seem close to ending, and Beau was more than a little nervous, standing out on the street in the middle of the night next to a middle-aged Negro numbers runner carrying a tin lunch-pail filled with hundreds of dollars in coin and small bills, not to mention the receipts for the first flush of the following day's policy slips. Still, best to keep his mouth shut and go with it. They were the experts, he the newbie.

Chester made a double jump. Frupp countered with a triple, leading to a king. "Son of a bitch!" Chester huffed. Frupp burst out with a round of wizened laughter that sounded like a dull handsaw on a termite-ridden log.

"Shit on a stick, Ches," Lester moaned. "I saw that comin'. You didn't see that comin'? You blind, old man?"

Beau heard a click behind them and turned in time to see a heavy woman in a loose housedress come stomping out of the brownstone next to Frupp's Barbershop. She looked pissed, and something about the flip-flop of her slippers on the stoop stones and the sway of her ample bosom under the housedress filled Beau with maternal terror.

"Y'all wanna shut your filthy old mouths?" the woman hissed. "I got my little ones sleeping right inside—" she indicated the ground-floor window just a coin-flip from where Beau stood, "and I don't need you wakin' 'em up with all your carryin' on. Ain't you got gin joints to patronize?"

"Well, ma'am," Chester began, with a mock courtesy that Beau had seen him employ a hundred times in the name of good-natured sarcasm, "first and foremost, I'm insulted that you'd even suggest gentlemen such as we would patronize any establishment that'd serve liquor. This is a dry nation, after all."

"Here here," Frupp chimed in. "Goin' on five—naw—six years dry! That's Prohibition, miss! The law of the land, case you didn't know!"

Chester waggled a finger at her. "You'd do well to keep your own sorry after-dark activities to yourself, miss!"

Beau laughed in spite of himself and the fat woman in the housedress came pounding down the stoop steps toward them, thick lips pursed, eyes bulging angrily.

That's when the black Model T rolled into view and the gun chatter started.

XX

This was Wooley's first spitfire for the West Indies, but he hoped it wouldn't be his last. Running numbers was fine and good; likewise dealing at Papa House's card tables or crouping at the dice games; but real money and respect came by the gun. Kings didn't trust wetworks to just any flunky, and if your king offered you the opportunity—as Papa House had offered Wooley—then you took it and you made damn sure you didn't screw the pooch and spank her.

Part of Wooley felt bad when he saw the fat lady in the house dress appear on the stoop and knew she'd be walking right into the line of fire. But that small, remorseful bit of him was forgotten when his weed-addled brain moved on to its next bubble-moment and he was back on Papa House's dime: a lean, mean killin' machine.

So Wooley did just what Johnson told him, leaning right out the side window of the Sedan and squeezing the trigger of the Tommy gun with the muzzle low. It kicked and the gunfire made his ears ring and his teeth chattered and flossy tongues of flame spat from the muzzle in strobe-quick bursts. Above and behind him, he heard Johnson doing his part with a pair of Smith & Wesson six shooters, while next to Wooley, Tibbs made boom-chakka-boom music with his pump shotgun.

He sprayed the stoop and the brownstone and the barbershop with his Tommy; and Johnson took pot-shots at the numbers-runners, ventilating each in turn; and Tibbs provided the insurance, following Wooley's lead spray and Johnson's target practice with a carpet of buckshot.

The funny thing was that once he opened up, Wooley had no clue what was happening. The noise from the guns blew his hearing and the world was all bells; the muzzle flashes and gun smoke dropped an iridescent haze in front of him that he could barely see through; and the dust, mortar, and shattering glass from the brownstone and the barbershop clouded their targets. The only thing he saw clearly was a lunch pail that went flying upward, splaying its coins, bills, and numbers slips into the cold night air, so much expensive confetti.

Then the car lurched under him, their targets shrank behind, the cold wind kissed his face, and Wooley knew that Bedoux had his foot on the accelerator and their work was done. Away they went. Faintly, behind the alarm-clock ring in his ears, Wooley heard the fat lady screaming, voice echoing up and down the block.

So that was that. Wooley ducked back into the car.

XX

Beau thought he might be bleeding, but he'd just pissed himself. Strangely, he wasn't embarrassed, just glad to be alive. He even welcomed the fat lady's screams in his ringing ears—further proof that he was still breathing; still in the game.

Frupp lay folded backward through his shattered barbershop window, stitched up and down with the raspberry-jam pockmarks of bullet wounds. Chester had taken a belly-full of the Tommy slugs and a face-full of buckshot. A piece of his brain and skull stuck to the brick lintel above the barbershop door. Lester lay in a heap of coins, small bills, and pink bolito slips. He had a small pistol in his hand—a little .32 that Beau knew he always carried at the small of his back. The little revolver gleamed in the gun-smoked, lamp-lit haze.

When Beau saw the Model T speeding away down the block, heard its brakes squealing as it rounded the nearest corner and cut due south, he knew what he had to do. Those sons-of-bitches in that car made him piss himself! They weren't gonna roll off without a little bit of lead lip from Beau Farnes!

So he snatched up Lester's gun and took off running, cutting south through the nearest alleyway, hoping that he might get to 127th Street in time to catch them on their double-back. As he pounded down the dark alley, he heard the fat lady screaming, louder now, surprise and shock giving way to stark horror.

"My baby! My baby boy! Those bastards shot my baby boy!"

XX

They cut from 128th down to 127th and turned hard right again, Wooley sliding over against the rear door, thinking he might go spilling out into the night.

"Shoulda cut down farther," Tibbs growled.

"I'm drivin'," Bedoux snapped. "You shut your trap and—what the fuck?"

Wooley leaned forward, peering over Bedoux's and Tibbs's shoulders through the windscreen. It was the kid. He broke out of an alley, ran right into the street, raised a little .32 popgun and started squeezing off rounds. The first went wild. The second put a hole in the windscreen and Wooley heard it buzz by his left ear before punching out the back.

The kid didn't have a mark on him. Impossible! He was standing right there with the others, and Wooley knew they'd all taken heat!

Bedoux hit the gas and the car lurched forward. Tibbs shoved three more rounds into his shotgun and jacked the first into the chamber.

Another round from the kid's .32 punched through the windscreen, veering too close for comfort to Bedoux in the driver's seat. Bedoux bent, and the car swerved.

Then something big and heavy bounced off the roof. The windshield shattered with the impact. With the wind in their faces, they were flying blind.

"Did you hit him?" Johnson brayed. "You hit that little bastard?"

Bedoux hit the brakes, the car careened sideways, and the whole rumbling mess screeched to a halt broadside in the middle of 127th Street. Wooley wondered what the hell Bedoux was doing, but before he could ask, Tibbs was out the passenger door, shotgun in hand, rounding the car.

"Wooley," the elder gun barked, "get your skinny little ass out here and—Jesus Christ!"

Wooley did as he was told. He threw open the back door and leapt out with his Tommy gun, ready to follow Tibbs and finish the kid.

Wooley saw the kid. He was still alive, tumbled over in the gutter, neither broken nor bleeding.

They hadn't hit him.

Tibbs wasn't looking at the kid, though. He was looking at something standing right out in the middle of the street, and there was fear in his eyes.

_Tibbs is afraid_ , Wooley thought. _Tibbs ain't afraid of no man._

So he followed Tibbs's gaze and saw what had him so spooked.

Death stood in the middle of 127th Street. He had a gun in each hand.

The apparition conjured a whole slew of bedtime stories from the dusty bins of Wooley's weed-addled brain. He was draped in a long overcoat and a coiled, serpentine scarf, both undulating and billowing in the night on a wind that wasn't there. The coat was coal black and the scarf was the angry red of hot iron or an open wound.

Buried amid the coils of the scarf and the upturned collar of the coat was a broad face painted white in the semblance of a skull, framed by hoary, ropy dreadlocks and crowned with a black top hat. From the shadows under the hat brim, black eyes burned out at them, smoldering like banked coals.

_Fuck me!_ Wooley thought. _That's Baron Samedi! The gravelord! The Cemetery Man!_

Who called the Baron?

And who's he come to collect?

Tibbs, who was born in Jamaica and should have known the Baron on sight and been terrified of him, didn't seem fazed. He just hipped his scattergun and barked at the nasty apparition.

"You best be skinnin' out, mister! Three seconds, and you're goat meat!"

The Baron heard—Wooley saw the glint in his eyes that seemed to welcome the challenge, and the way his black-and-white painted lips seemed to sneer.

Tibbs opened fire.

The shotgun roared, ka-chacked, roared again. On Wooley's right, Johnson popped off round after round from his six shooters, laughing as he did so. Wooley raised his Tommy to throw a burst, but in the breath it took to do so, he saw the Baron's coat and scarf fan up before him. The slugs didn't draw blood. It was like the coat and scarf threw up a screen of black-hot heat before him, and all the lead that came barreling his way hit that screen and veered aside and left him untouched. Wooley even saw the shots going wild, kicking up scraps of cement, sparking off lamp-posts, shattering windows and popping the tires of parked cars.

But not a single shot touched the Baron.

Wooley's Tommy gun was heavy in his hands.

Tibbs kept firing, pumping, firing. When the scattergun was dry, he threw it down and went for the Webley he kept stashed in the shoulder holster under his coat.

That's when the Baron raised his .45's and opened up on them.

Wooley dove. The twin autos sounded like cannons and he heard the bullets whiz by above him; heard their hot lead punching ragged, wet holes through Johnson and Tibbs; felt their blood on his bent back and shoulders; smelled gun smoke and gore as the two of them hit the pavement on either side of him. Wooley raised his head. The Baron stalked nearer, smoking guns still high.

Before Wooley could cry surrender, he heard the driver's door open and knew Bedoux was stepping out. The driver's own .45 coughed, throwing round after round at the Baron in the center of the street.

But the Baron marched on, putting two slugs in Bedoux without breaking stride. Then he was looming over Wooley, holstering one pistol beneath his living coat, reaching down with his black-gloved hand to take Wooley by the collar and haul him up onto his feet. Wooley heard his own voice, high and reedy, pleading with the lord of all the dead and the keeper of their houses; felt the sting of tears in his eyes, and the ring of ruined hearing in his ears from all the gunfire, and smelled the blood of his companions and the smoky cigar stink that wafted off the Baron, and looked into his black, smoldering eyes and knew that if he stared into those eyes too long or too hard, they'd swallow his soul and make mince of it.

He realized his feet were off the ground. The Baron held him aloft with one fist, sneering behind his painted skull-face, and spoke with a voice that sounded like a wind moaning through a cane break.

"Listen," the Baron said, and Wooley tried to listen, but his ears were ringing and he couldn't hear a goddamn thing but his own heart thudding in his chest and the blood thumping in his temples.

"Can't hear nothin', baron, sir," Wooley stammered, snot choking him, tears salty on his tongue, "shit, sir, I can't hear nothin'..."

"Listen!" the Baron commanded, and suddenly Wooley heard it—the fat lady, a block or more away, screaming into the night, lamenting a lost child. The chill on her soul was clear as a song in his ears, ringing like a cold razor on a communion bell.

"We didn't mean it!" Wooley spat. "Didn't mean nothin'! We was just after the runners! Papa said they were too close to our turf! Said we had to put the fear'a God in 'em!"

The Baron pulled him close and Wooley smelled sour rum and cigar smoke on his breath. "Well, now I'm puttin' the fear'a God into you, Gordon Woolsey. You feel that?"

He knew his name! The Baron knew Wooley's name! "Christ, sir, please," he cried, "I'm beggin' you... pleadin'... please, my mama..."

"Your mama's ashamed you were ever born," the Baron snarled, then threw Wooley down hard. Through the ringing in his ears, he heard the click of the Baron's pistol and felt the still-warm muzzle as it pressed against his forehead. Wooley closed his eyes and waited for the big bang and the bigger black that would follow.

"You're a West Indy? One of Papa House's boys?" the Baron asked.

Wooley nodded, but his voice was gone for good.

"If you can deliver a message, Wooley, you can walk away from this. Can you do that?"

Wooley nodded again.

"Tell Papa House that Harlem ain't his battleground. Tell him if he wants to wage war on the Knights or the Mount Morris Boys or the Sugar Hill Gang or who the hell ever, he does it without a single drop of innocent blood being shed. He's got one dead child on his hands now, and that's enough to bring me down on him. If he lays off, mayhap we can keep the peace and this won't have to get ugly... or personal. You remember all that, Wooley?"

Wooley nodded. "Yessir," he managed to say. "Yessir, yessir, yessir, yes I can."

He heard the mute click of the hammer being eased down on the shiny black Colt. "And one more thing," the Baron added.

Wooley waited, but he wouldn't raise his eyes.

"You don't work for Papa House or any of the bankers anymore, you hear me? You're turnin' over a new leaf, Wooley, and you're gonna make your mama proud."

"What am I gonna do now?" Wooley managed to ask.

"Just do the right thing," the Baron said, and suddenly the muzzle of the gun was gone and the Baron took a long step back, and Wooley felt warmer now that the shadow was off him.

"Beat feet, Wooley, before you forget what we talked about."

Wooley rose and went lurching down the street, leaving the Baron far behind, never stopping, never looking back.

XX

Beau saw the whole thing. He saw the Baron leap off a ledge four stories above, bounce off the roof of the speeding car and land square and upright in the middle of the street; saw the stand-off and gunfight; saw the Baron offer cryptic counsel to the skinny young gunman and then send him running off down the street. Beau knew he should cut and run, lucky not to have taken a bullet or been run down, but it was all too strange, too wondrous, to just flee from.

But he regretted the decision to stay the moment the Baron turned and laid his brimstone gaze on Beau and marched toward him. Finally, Beau found his legs, turned tail, and ran back down the alley he'd used to cut down to 127th Street.

Just as he made the shadows, a huge, immovable wall of darkness melted out of the alleyway before him, and there was the Baron, blocking his path.

Beau tried to skid to a halt, but he ran right into the gravelord and felt the demon's black grip on him. The Baron drew Beau into the shadows and lifted him off the ground.

"I didn't do nothin'!" Beau managed. "Those sons-a-bitches sprayed the fuckin' block! Killed Chester and Lester and Frupp and that fat lady's kid! Lemme go, man! Lemme go!"

"You're in over your head, Beau," the Baron said, shaking him a little. "I know you think you're on the road to bein' a swell, maybe runnin' a gin joint or bein' a bolito boss for the Queen Bee one of these days, but I'm here to say it ain't all wine and roses, and you'd do well to beat another path through those tangled woods right now."

Beau stared, the gravelord's eyes like open tombs. Still, he saw something like the ghost of concern in them.

"Looks like you took some of Frupp's window in the spray. Deep cuts on your face and neck."

"Who are you?" Beau dared.

"I'm the one who's always watching," the Baron said. "Remember that."

He tossed Beau aside, and Beau landed hard amid a trio of trash bins.

"See a doctor about those cuts!" the Baron called, voice echoing through the alleyway. When Beau finally made his feet again and searched the alleyway, the Baron was gone.

XX

Wooley gave Papa House the message, just like the Baron told him. Though he knew that Papa wouldn't be keen to hear it, he didn't expect to get dangled upside down by his skinny legs above the muddy pit in the waterfront warehouse where Papa kept his pet alligator, Napoleon.

Still, there he was, Papa's goons each holding a leg like a wishbone, all the blood rushing to his head. Below him, fat, green Napoleon grinning his reptilian grin, roaring his bull gator roar and snapping at intervals as his head dipped too close to his gaping jaws.

Papa stood on the wooden catwalk beside his goons, snarling in his Trinidadi clip, demanding answers that Wooley didn't have. "Who the fuck was he, Wooley?" Papa growled.

"He didn't say, Papa, I swear! I told you, his face was painted like a skull! Looked just like the Baron, Papa! Baron Samedi! From the island stories!"

"You expect me to believe that, you skinny little bastard? The Baron deigned to manifest on 127th Street just to smoke my boys and let your skinny ass go?"

"I was scared and he took pity, Papa! I was cryin'! I nearly pissed myself!"

He couldn't see Papa, but he heard a smile in his voice. "Looks like you done it now, Wooley. Too bad. I thought you were braver than that."

"Papa, please! I's just givin' the message the Baron gave me! Please, don't drop me, please!"

"You say you think he took pity 'cause you were a cryin', blubberin' mess, Wooley? That's your opinion?"

"I don't know," Wooley said, choking on the snot that was creeping down the back of his inverted throat. "I don't know, Papa, I's just scared, that's all. I ain't never seen a man like that! Never looked into a pair of eyes like that!"

"Well, Wooley-boy," Papa said, voice softening to a velvet purr. "Ain't nothin' to be scared of. Not anymore."

Wooley looked up and caught a brief glimpse of Papa's broad face; a face sometimes capable of the most radiant, assuring warmth, and alternately of the most terrible, unblinking cruelty. The cruelty of a dictator or a god, mad on his own power and might.

And presently, the face he looked into was the latter.

"Papa," was all Wooley managed to say, then he felt the grip of Papa's goons loose, and he fell, and he hit the mud and it was soft and damp and cool.

Then Napoleon closed his jaws on Wooley's head, and Wooley couldn't see anything at all.

