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  The sound of tearing cloth came from above him and cool air blew across his shriveling scrotum. His mind locked up in terror. A hand gripped his balls and pulled. The flat, cold blade of the straight razor slapped against his inner thigh.

  “Just one last donation for the cause,” the witch said.

  His manhood disappeared with one quick slice.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Mayor Maggie McCormack pulled back her hood and held Dalton’s testicles aloft like a prize. A murmur of assent arose from the other witches.

  “Stake him in the front,” she said. “Don’t let the rest of him pollute our ceremony.”

  A half-dozen witches lowered the crossed planks and trundled the dying man around to the front of the house. Maggie dropped the man’s testes into a bowl on the ground. She returned to stand in front of Dustin and his bride. The two stared ahead, impassive and unaware. Maggie returned the bloody razor to under her robe and pulled out a tube of Super Glue. She took Dustin’s left hand and squeezed a blob of glue onto the center. She grabbed the girl’s right hand and pressed them together, palm to palm. She held it a few seconds. When she released them, the bond held, in permanent mockery of a true couple’s union.

  The other witches arranged the children around the oval altar of kindling. Each compliant child followed its handler to a prearranged spot and lay down on command, feet towards the great wooden U. The witches faced center and joined hands in an imposing, dark-robed circle.

  Tammy stepped down from the uprights. She went to each blazing torch and drew a different rune in the dirt at its base. She returned to the other two in red and the three stood in a triangle. They extended their left hands and clasped them in the center. Maggie wrapped her right hand around the locket hanging from her neck.

  “Great longarex,” Maggie called. “We summon you in your earthly daylight form. Come so that we may free you, and in turn you shall free us.”

  “Sisters, release the spirits of your offerings,” Tammy and Janice said.

  A phosphorescent mist rose from the children on the ground as the ceremony bled the essence of their lives away. White sparks danced in the mist as it crawled towards the uprights.

  From up on the hill, deep in the woods rose the call of a bird’s strangled squawk. Branches rustled in the darkness beyond the torches’ light. Then a vulture soared into the circle, great black wings spread wide. It braked and alighted atop the U, between the two joined children. It stretched its bright-red beak skyward and let loose a piercing shriek, a high-pitched wail no bird could ever make.

  The mist crawled up the posts. The sparkling fog crept up behind the marital child offerings and lit the backs of their heads. The mist continued upward, and then in along the crossbeam from both sides.

  The twin silver runners met in the center. The vulture’s feet sparkled. The vulture cried with enough force to tingle each witch’s spine. It stretched its wings and the creature doubled in size. The feathers on its breast ruffled in waves as if the true longarex within writhed in joy, anticipating its upcoming eternal release.

  Chapter Fifty

  Donkey Day was in high gear. The Ferris wheel rotated in its gaudy neon splendor. Screams from the Tilt-A-Whirl filtered out across the fairgrounds. The mouthwatering smell of fried everything drifted out through the new chain-link fence, drawing all to the special treats within.

  Big Mac lounged at the entrance, a cup of coffee in his hand. He leaned against the ticket booth. He chatted up the dark-haired teenage girl with a discomforting familiarity that made her lean in the opposite direction.

  A minivan with Ohio license plates pulled in off the main road. It passed the Lifeflight helicopter where Bentley and Sheriff Sam sat in the open door. The medic played a video game in the rear of the aircraft. The minivan pulled into a spot at the end of the lot.

  Three women exited the van. They did not exchange a word or glance, just headed out at a brisk walk in three separate directions towards the fairgrounds fence.

  Each arrived at a designated position, 120 degrees from each other outside the perfect circle the new fence created. They unfurled a hood rolled within the collar of their coats and pulled it far enough forward to cloak their faces in shadow. They knelt and waited for five minutes past the hour.

  At the appointed time, they raised their hands in unison. Each chanted the ancient words of their first magic spell, a consecration of the ground, an opening of a dialogue with the powers of nature. Each unzipped their jacket to reveal a fanny pack front and center around her waist. They extracted a handful of mixed herbs and dried sumac berries. The three began a synchronized counterclockwise ballet, one step at a time, in perfect practiced unison, though none could see another. They walked the outer fence perimeter. With every step, the witches repeated the invocation and sprinkled some of the fragrant mixture upon the ground. Each flake drifted down and on contact made a slight sizzle.

  Along her circuit, one witch approached the main gate, eyes downcast, hood forward like the top of a pitcher plant flower. Big Mac paused his unsuccessful string of pickup lines to the teen in the booth and stared at the approaching woman.

  “Hey there!” he called.

  She did not acknowledge. He squinted and tugged at his police cap.

  “Ma’am?” he tried again in an accusatory tone.

  No change. Step, sprinkle, chant. Step, sprinkle, chant. He moved his hand to the butt of his pistol.

  She advanced to one step away from the main entrance gate. Big Mac moved to intercept.

  A wire whipped around his bulbous neck. He reached for it too late. The teen in the ticket booth yanked the wire and twisted. Big Mac squeaked out a strangled cry. His eyes bulged and his face went warning-flag red. He tried to reach the girl behind him, but his fat, flailing arms found nothing but air. He sucked in a partial breath with the sound of a rusty hinge. His arms went limp. He slid to his knees. The girl released the wire. Big Mac fell on his face, eyes forever open in shock.

  The witch nodded as she passed the ticket-taking assassin. A dozen yards farther on, she finished her transit where another witch had begun. The teen rolled the main gate shut and wrapped a chain lock through the handle.

  A hundred feet on the other side of the fence, an overweight man in a Donkey Day T-shirt saw the gate close. He paused midbite of his enormous ice cream cone.

  “Hey now,” he called to the teen. “Whatcha doin’?”

  The girl turned and walked towards the parking lot. The man’s ice cream rolled off his cone and hit the ground with a splat. He approached the gate.

  “Hey, you can’t close this. Ain’t no other way outta here.”

  The minute hands of the witches’ three watches hit ten past the hour. From their equidistant positions at the edge of the mayor’s new trench, they raised their arms and pointed to a spot above the fairground’s center. They chanted a second incantation.

  Power blasted from the hill on Pear Tree Lane and arced through the sky like a bolt of lightning. It struck the point above the fairgrounds and split into a dome of energy that ran down to the trench like it covered an invisible inverted bowl. Sounds of awed acknowledgment came from inside the fairgrounds, as if this were part of a surprise fireworks display. The energy drained into the trench and left the night sky clear.

  For a second, nothing happened.

  Then the trench erupted in flames. Bright-red tongues of fire climbed twenty feet in the air. The impact of its arrival blew the man who’d lost his ice cream back onto his corpulent ass with a head of singed hair. The crowd in the fairgrounds went silent in shock. The midway rides’ loopy carny music continued like some sort of insane, incompatible soundtrack.

  Then came the scream. One spine-chilling group wail as the mood of the collective within the burning circle snapped from pleasure to panic. Rides jerked to a halt. Great cats roared within their cages.

  The three witches returned to the van without emotion. No remorse for the trapped, no elation at their success. T
hey had just done their part, turned a few cogs in the big machine the coven had set in motion. Others would do the rest.

  The van pulled onto the main drive and passed the locked front gate. The curtain of flame obscured everything inside. Big Mac lay across the wall of fire, arms and torso on one side, waist and legs on the other. The blaze had sliced his body clean in two.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Back at the Petty place, Aileen watched from her window as another car arrived and parked in her front yard. The whole place looked like a mall lot on Christmas Eve. She felt joy when the first car arrived, but now, dozens later, she did not quite remember why.

  There were children, so many at the house now, from all over. She couldn’t remember why they were here, or why was she tied in this chair, for that matter. The whole situation was fuzzy, the edges trailing off into fog. Tammy said it was for revenge against David, her dead husband, for the wrong he had done her. But she couldn’t remember the wrong.

  A woman got out of the car outside. She slipped on a long, hooded robe, turned and let a girl out of the back door. The girl wore a red dress and had her brown hair in pigtails, like little Ellie Martin used to wear.

  That brought a memory back through the haze. Not one of a wrong her husband had done, but of a wrong he had seen done, a wrong done to little Ellie Martin.

  She’d been home all those years ago when David burst into the house. He was supposed to be hunting deer, but he had instead become prey. He gripped his shoulder where blood had stained his tan-flannel shirt sleeve to black all the way to the elbow. His eyes were wide with panic. He slammed the door shut and leaned against it.

  “David, what happened?”

  “The Bertram brothers,” he panted. “Out in the woods, I seen ’em with Ellie Martin, had her down on the ground, one of ’em was—”

  The front door slammed open and David went flying into Aileen, knocking her to the floor. The Bertram brothers filled the doorway, two-hundred-plus-pound twins in camouflage hunting gear. They’d been unholy terrors since they were teens and hadn’t mellowed since passing thirty. Both still carried their rifles. Their beady eyes searched the room from beneath greasy, uneven bangs, and then locked on the couple on the floor.

  They marched into the room. With each step their unzipped flies opened and closed like snapping mouths, exposing bloody, soiled underwear. One put his rifle barrel against David’s chest. The other pointed his at Aileen’s head.

  “Bertie, this is out of hand,” David said. “You won’t get away with this.”

  “Not with a living witness,” the brother answered.

  His rifle barked. David’s blood and tissue sprayed the floor. He dropped back dead.

  The other brother prodded Aileen with his rifle barrel. “And what did you see?”

  She snapped her head back and forth in shocked panic. “N-n-nothing.”

  “You’re goddamn right, bitch.”

  The first brother probed David’s limp body with his rifle. The barrel shined bright red with blood.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Look what he made us do. Now we got another goddamn dead body.” He pulled the barrel from David and pressed it hard against Aileen’s tiny breast. It left a red blood circle over her heart. “Three’s gonna be too much work. Now here’s what’s gonna happen instead, Olive Oyl. We’re taking this here body with us. You gonna scrub this place clean. Anyone asks, you say he done run off. Treated you bad, say any kind of shit you want. Ain’t no one gonna find him, so ain’t gonna be no evidence he ain’t run off. Now any other story comes out…” he raised the rifle to her head, “…well you know what we can do.”

  The second brother shoved his rifle barrel between her legs, pulled up her skirt and jabbed her underwear. “And we can take our sweet time doing it. To you and your momma.”

  If only half of the Bertram boys’ legends had been true, and what she’d just seen said they were probably all true, they would have hunted down her whole family. And right or wrong, out of panic or fear or rational reason, she took that deal. She scrubbed the house, told the lies and moved back in with her mother, for her mother’s protection as well as her own. Fear that she’d cross paths with the Bertram boys again, more than principle, drove her to self-sufficiency. It was only after the evil siblings moved out of the county that she felt it safe enough to foster Bo and Caroline, a subconscious act of penance for Ellie Martin.

  So what Tammy had said about her David was wrong. He’d been a good man. She had no grudge to hold against him. She hated the Bertrams, but because they were evil, not because they were men. And most of all she hated herself, because in her moment of weakness she did not stand up, like her husband. And so Moultrie thought her husband immoral, while evil still walked unpunished in rural Shaw County. The weight of her silence about the twin crimes lay on her shoulders.

  The effects of the witch’s concoction were gone. The surge of adrenaline, or whatever her memories had triggered, flushed it all from her system. Those women, the ones she’d let into her house, were doing something malevolent, a malevolence on par with what the Bertrams had done. She had to get out of here.

  The antique rocker had been in her family for generations. Every joint squeaked like a box of mice with each rocking motion. Aileen had patched it back together more times than she could remember. She hoped she’d done a lousy job the last time.

  She rocked the chair sideways, back and forth across the polished wood floor, and walked it back against the wall. Aileen tucked her toes onto the curved runners under the front legs. She flexed her calves and pulled up. Nothing. She tried again. A few tiny crackling noises came from the base of the chair. Aileen took a deep breath and flexed with all her might. The legs broke free of the runners and the runners flexed out away from the legs. She exhaled and coughed against the bitter gag in her mouth.

  She Aileen shook her legs back and forth until the clothesline bindings slipped down to the floor. She pivoted the chair forward and stood up in a kind of stooped crouch. The chair pressed heavily on her lower back. Good news for the second part of her plan.

  She turned and shuffled backwards until she backed up against the bed. There was a good chance this was going to hurt. There was also a good chance someone might hear. But there was no chance she was going to miss an opportunity to escape.

  She Aileen leaned forward and sprang backwards. The chair pivoted back and the high back struck the footboard’s upper corner. The chairback hit at its weakest point and snapped all along the seat. Her head smacked the footboard. She hit the floor, back first, with a crash.

  She shimmied the lines binding her wrists, down through the broken slats. The ropes fell away. She Aileen stood up from the wreckage of the chair and grabbed one of the broken legs. The runner was still attached and she raised it like the Grim Reaper’s scythe. She waited for the sound of feet pounding up the wooden stairs. They did not come.

  She looked out the window into the backyard. Blazing torches bathed the area in a reddish glow. Two children were tied to some kind of homemade goalpost, their hands clasped together between them. She recognized the boy, the son of Theresa with the antique shop. She’d never seen the pale girl beside him before.

  A vulture, wings outstretched, was perched on the crossbeam. A crowd of women in black, hooded robes stood around them in a circle. A layer of impassive children blanketed the ground, heads to heels, staring up at the stars.

  Everyone in the coven seemed focused on the rituals at the uprights. She might never again get a chance like this to escape.

  She went to the front window and slid it open. She climbed out onto the front porch’s tin roof. Her leather soles slipped on the slick metal. She inched her way to the side. It was still a fair drop down to the ground, but if she hung halfway over she could—

  Her feet slid out from under her. She hit the roof and plummeted down feetfirst. She launched off the end into space like she was on some amusement park slide. In the dark, she could not see the ground.
The fall seemed to take forever.

  She Aileen hit the ground at an angle on her right ankle. Something inside snapped, and she crumpled to the ground. Pain stabbed all the way to her hip. She bit back a scream into a whimper, lest she sound her own escape alarm. She waited. No one came.

  She raised herself up on her good foot. A little pressure on the other delivered a jolt of pain that confirmed her worst fear. Sprained, possibly broken.

  Strange chants sounded from the rear of the house. Flickers of firelight danced along the trees at the property’s edge. Whatever was going to happen to those children, especially the ones at the uprights, was going to happen soon.

  The front yard was deserted. She Aileen hopped and hobbled across the yard and into the tree line along the driveway’s edge. She pushed herself from tree to tree as she race-limped through the dark woods.

  She’d grown up in these woods. Even in the dark, she could find her way back past the creek and to a covered deer stand near the edge of her property. The best plan was to hide out there until daylight, until the bizarre ritual in her backyard was complete.

  She Aileen took one step in that direction and stopped. The memory of David’s last day was still strong, strong enough to make the parallels with today impossible to ignore. She’d run from standing up to evil back then. She was about to run from taking a stand against evil now.

  But today wasn’t the same as yesterday. Today was worse. Today others were at stake. No good was going to come to those children in her yard, she was certain of that. And what of that vulture on the uprights? What awful things was that going to spread around the county, or beyond?

  The last time, she’d run and hid, for years, instead of making the hard choice. Not this time.

  She turned and headed for the main road. Once she made it there, she’d flag down some passerby, someone with a cell phone who could call for help. She hoped.