The men turned to Minerva. She spat into the nettles. Why even speak the words? They must know what she’d asked for: I will never be killed by the hand of a man. Minerva could not say that was her exact wish—she was still unsure, then as now, as to the precise compass of her desires. But look at her now. The past fifteen years. The Sharpening, that most terrible gift. She could kill and not be killed, even by her own hand, much as she might now pray for death. What worth were those prayers? She had made a deal with something as powerful, if earthbound, as any god. Perhaps it was a god of some sort. A dark one. An ancient one. But yes, she must have wished to be cleansed of the fear and anxiety she had once carried into life-or-death encounters. As Micah had said years back, she was not cool in the cut. Her hands always took fright, fluttering like startled chickadees. Minerva figured that was what the vile thing had dredged up. It found that flaw in her, one that shook her straight to her core, and whispered: Oh, my ladylove, my dove, I will make it all better. And it had, hadn’t it? As sure as eggs is eggs. But it had played a dirty trick, too. Well, fuck a duck. You couldn’t expect a thing like that to play fair, could you?
The light was fading between the firs. An owl hooted from a low bough.
“And you, Shug?” Minerva said. “What did you get?”
“Only everything I asked for.”
THEY HIKED UNTIL DUSK. Ebenezer hissed every time he set his foot down. Minerva felt no sympathy for him.
A shape broke through the trees ahead. They checked their strides, approaching cautiously. A solitary shack. Smoke spindled from its chimney. The door was ajar. Light from a potbellied stove threw flickering shadows across its interior.
From inside, there came an ominous sound. Minerva envisioned someone sitting on a whoopee cushion filled with thinned lard: a wet spluttering.
We don’t have to look, she thought edgily. We can walk right on by…
Too late. Micah toed the door open. His eyes fell upon something inside. His knees buckled; he leaned heavily against the door frame. The spluttering sounds were much louder with the door open.
In the firelight flickering through the door, Micah’s face was drawn and haunted. He drew a shuddering breath, then stepped into the shack. Ebenezer hesitantly followed, and quickly saw whatever Micah had beheld.
“I can’t,” Eb said, shaking his head violently. “Oh Christ, no, I can’t, I cannot—”
Borne on a sudsy foam of dread, Minerva advanced to the door. She didn’t want to see, either. But she couldn’t not bear witness.
The cramped shack reeked of blood. The stove, a folding card table, pelts tacked on the walls. Something hung among those pelts—much larger than the coyote and muskrat skins, oh yes. And it was still moving. A paralyzing chill spread down her back, as if liquid nitrogen had been injected into her spinal column.
A man was tacked to the wall. His bare feet kicked weakly six inches above the ground. He had been opened up, his chest split down the middle starting at the level of his clavicles. The skin was peeled back in quivering wings that had been pinned to the log walls with pelt tacks. The silverskin and fascia and yellow adipose tissues had been flensed away with clinical skill; whoever had done it had great facility with a boning knife. The man’s arms and legs had been slit down their middles, the skin peeled back to reveal the shining bone of femur and kneecap and humerus.
Humerus? Minerva thought, her mind taking a sickening lurch. There’s not a damn thing humerus here—hey-o! Gimme a rim shot, Doc Severinsen!
The flesh was slit back from his nose in petals, the strips tacked to the wood. The musculature of his face twitched, his eyes massive without anything to cover them; they peered around with a vaudevillian shock that forced a cascade of giddy giggles to bubble up Minerva’s throat. It was the only way to get rid of the chest-splintering pressure building up inside of her.
It took a moment to grasp the final horror. The source of that spluttering.
The man’s neck had been slit, but he was still breathing. The man’s lungs heaved, forcing breaths out, the air blllpphhphhph-ing from his severed windpipe. Minerva watched the erratic beat of his heart through the naked bones of his ribs; his innards still pushed stubborn shreds of food along.
What infernal sorcery was keeping him alive? Was it the same that kept her own heart beating every time she tried to off herself?
She grabbed a hatchet from the wall rack. She took two steps toward the man and brought it around in a wicked arc. It buried in the man’s neck, widening the slit. His body thrashed, blood spraying. She pried the blade out of the wall and swung it again and again until the man’s head was completely separated from his body: it hit the floor and rolled under the table like a lopsided bowling ball.
Minerva stared at Micah, breathing hard. Her face was flecked with blood.
“Merciful,” Micah said after a span.
Noise from under the table. The man—no, the head—was laughing. The gibbering sounds of lunacy you might hear at a nuthatch.
That laughter unseated something in Minerva—it filled her with panic and sorrow and, yes, rage. She kicked over the table and swung the hatchet at the giggling head. The blade cleaved the skull dead center, splitting the bone; there came a hiss as pressure forced a chunk of gray matter through. Minerva threw the stove open and hurled the head inside with the hatchet still embedded in it. The head continued to howl laughter, and the pitch ascended as its lips began to melt. Minerva slammed the stove door. Fire flared behind it; there came a small explosion as the juices inside the man’s head heated up, blowing out part of his skull. The giggling ceased.
They gathered outside. Ebenezer collapsed against a fallen log.
“How?” he asked helplessly.
“It’s the work of that thing.” Minerva was doubled over, breathing in huge gulps. “The Big Thing. The Piper. Whatever you want to call it.”
The smoke rising from the chimney now had a meaty smell.
“I don’t know if I can go through with this,” Minerva said. “I thought I could, Shug, but…”
“I understand.”
“I’m scared.”
“I understand.”
LATER, MICAH WALKED from the fire they had stoked a ways from the cursed shack. He stared through the trees in the direction of Little Heaven. They weren’t far now. It would all come to an end of sorts. He was ready for that. He had one last fight in him—and if he had to, he would fight alone. Petty was his blood; in the end tally, neither Minerva nor Ebenezer owed him a debt. Their ledgers were clean with him.
But Petty—yes, he owed her. A parent always does. He stared into the formless dark, and a memory molded itself within it. Petty was young at the time, two or three years old. This was before Ellen entered her endless sleep. But that day she wasn’t with them; it had been Micah and his daughter, alone. He’d been working in the paddocks when he spotted a caterpillar—a big brown one wriggling along, doing its caterpillary thing. He called Petty over and drew her attention to it.
“Touch it,” he said. “It is… fuzzy.”
Micah simply wanted her to feel the soft, bristling, undulating little carpet of fuzz that is a caterpillar. Pet put her finger on it and pressed down. She wasn’t big in human terms, but to a caterpillar she was gargantuan. The caterpillar curled into a ball. He snatched Pet’s hand away. “Gentle.” She gazed at him with no comprehension. Micah thought the caterpillar would be okay—it had just turtled up defensively. It would uncurl once the threat was gone. But the wind picked up and blew the caterpillar across the boards, light as a dried seedpod, in a way that told Micah the life had drained out of it. It happened so quickly. A thing was alive; next it was dead. Petty lost interest and ran off after her ball. Micah stared at the caterpillar a long time. It was the first thing his daughter had killed that he was aware of. Micah had guided her to the act. And yet life went on. It always did. Pet was chasing a ball. The birds were singing. The horses nickered in their stables.