All of these things were still inside the suitcase when he’d yanked it free of the dark red earth that day years later. Also inside were Susanna’s small yellow comb, a rusted switchblade, a doll with a cracked face, and Susanna’s badly decomposed head.
“Tell me about the note.”
Someone had shoved a rolled up piece of notepaper into his sister’s right eye socket. With trembling hands, and hardly able to see through the sparkling film of tears, a sob caught in his aching throat, Luke had withdrawn the scroll and turned his back on his sister’s remains to read it.
“Two pieces from Leviticus,” he told his mother now, his tone grave.
“You ’member them words?”
There was no way he’d ever forget them. They were branded in his brain, a signpost on the border of a part of his mind he seldom ventured into. “’None of you shall approach any who is near of kin to him to uncover their nakedness: I am the LORD.’” He took a breath, slowly released it. “’The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover.’”
“Amen,” said his mother, serenely and he could tell from her voice she was smiling. “It was his message to you, son.”
She had said that more than once before, and still he wasn’t sure whether she meant that his father, or God, had written it for his benefit. At the time, and the years had only bolstered the conviction, he’d considered it a warning. A lesson, meant to scare away whatever latent strains of rebellion might have been subconsciously forming inside him in the wake of his sister’s desertion. He remembered the anguish, the suffering, somehow infinitely worse than the day Papa-in-Gray had strapped him to a chair in Momma’s room and used his razor on Luke’s privates. The pain had been excruciating, but it was pain of a different kind. In the fallow field the day he’d stumbled on his sister’s final destination, he had sat with Susanna’s rotted head cradled in his arms as the wind chased shreds of the sundered scroll away across the field, and he had felt as if her death had shoved him into a new world, a terrible place where no one could be trusted and the ground could swallow you and your dreams. And if the ground didn’t get you, the coyotes would, or Papa would see to you with his blade and carve the sin from your soul, the skin from your skull.
“Why did I ask you ’bout this today?” Momma asked.
Luke shrugged, his mood darkened by the memory of his sister.
“’Cause you poisoned your sister,” she answered for him. “And for that she had to be dealt with. Don’t you understand that if we’d let her go, she’d’ve been corrupted even further by Men of the World, and they’d’ve sent her back to us once they’d filled her with their wicked venom, and through her they’d’ve corrupted us, destroyed us, Luke.” Her hand left his knee, and found his fingers, enveloping his warm skin in a cold damp cocoon of flesh. “We’re the last of the old clans, boy. We stay together. We hunt and we kill Men of the World. We devour their flesh so they cannot devour us. We hold them off and resist their attempts to convert us to sinful ways. We protect each other in the name of God Almighty, and punish those who trespass, destroy those who would destroy us. We are the beloved, Luke, and once the light has been shown to those who are not of the faith, they must embrace it or be destroyed. All your life you have understood this.
“Today, you were lazy, and foolish. You let one of them get away. You sucked out her venom and showed her the light, but now she’s Out There again, with the light in her eyes and our fate in her hands. They’ll send her back again someday, Luke, and by then it’ll be too late. She will not come alone, and their numbers’ll be too great for us to survive. They’ll kill us and scatter our bones so our spirits cannot rest. Our work’ll be over, and it’ll all have been for nothin’. You and me, and all our kin’ll be left in the dark, far away from God’s grace.”
Luke was afraid. He believed her, knew she did not lie. And if the girl—Claire—came back with others, with Men of the World, he knew it would mean the end of everything. And it would be his fault.
“What do I do, Momma?”
“Talk to Papa. He knows the townfolk. He’ll know who owned that truck. Then you find ’em, and you’ll find the girl. Once you do, take her heart and bring it back to me. Burn the rest. We’ll share her meat, and save ourselves from Purgatory. But you ain’t got much time to waste now. You best move.”
Luke stood. But Momma’s grip tightened around his hand. She tugged him close. The stench was overwhelming, and he shut his mouth, hoping she couldn’t hear him gagging. “You find her, or we’ll take what’s left of your pizzle and eat it with grits for breakfast, you understand?”
He nodded, and held his breath until she released him. Then he turned and headed for the door. As his hand gripped the moist, grimy knob, her voice once more stopped him.
“Keep the skin,” she demanded.
“What, Momma?”
“My boy. My Matthew. Tell your brothers to eat whatever needs eatin’, to take what they need, but they need to keep the skin for me. Winter’s comin’ and I need all the heat I can get.”
Though Luke couldn’t imagine his mother ever being cold beneath the heaps of her own slippery rotting flesh, “Yes Momma,” he said, and opened the door to the rain and smoke and the aroma of cooking meat.
-8-
There would be no prayer. Not yet. Momma-In-Bed had made it clear that there was not enough time to indulge in giving thanks, not when Hell itself might already be gathering on the horizon. He’d been with her for what had felt like hours, a long slow walk through the sluggish waters of unpleasant times. And because of that inner sense of more time lost than they could afford to lose, the sense of urgency increased. Every minute that passed him by was more distance between him and their quarry, and closing the distance between him and whatever Momma-in-Bed would do if the girl was not retrieved.
Luke ducked his head as he stepped off the porch into the gloaming. The fire cast reddish yellow light, the flames sizzling in the rain and casting shadows on his brother’s faces as they looked at him, but he didn’t spare them a glance before moving off toward the wood shed. Still, he found it harder to ignore the smacking of lips, the clicking of teeth, the greedy swallows, the tearing of meat from bones, and the murmurs of appreciation as they sat around the smoldering corpse of their brother. It was even harder to resist the smell the breeze carried to him before whipping it away into the trees behind him, where animals with dark eyes would pause and look up, curious but not nearly enough to follow the scent to its source. Even the carnivorous creatures that existed in the premature twilight beyond the trees—among them, the coyotes Momma-in-Bed feared so much—knew the small series of cabins in the woods were best avoided, for they had seen few of their fellow scavengers return from there, and so their curiosity abated quickly and they wandered on.
Luke was hungry, his stomach hollow and aching, and he was as eager as the rest of them to feed on the meat, to savor both the taste and the feeling of their dead brother’s strength settling in his own body, Matt’s unspoken thoughts, dreams, and ambitions, however simple, weaving themselves into his own brain. But the flesh would keep, he told himself, as he sighed and felt his worn boots sinking into the moist earth. He knew the importance of the task that lay ahead. If they failed this time, if the girl had already found her way to a haven they could not reach, then there would be more than the authorities to worry about. Momma-In-Bed had threatened him, but it had been merely a formality, and not a true promise. What she would do to him, maybe to all of them, if the girl was not returned, would be much worse than simply skinning his pizzle with a rusty knife. She loved him, as he loved her, but that would not be enough to save his life if he didn’t make things right, no more than it had saved poor Susanna when she’d defied them.