Longtree watched him walk away stiffly, wondering just what the doctor knew and what he didn’t know. And feeling for him, this entire town, a great compassion.
15
Skullhead, the last of the Lords of the High Wood, was far away from Wolf Creek by the time the posse was organized and dispatched. He was watching the Blackfeet camp in the hills, his stomach growling. He’d slept off last night’s feast in a shelf of rock a half mile from town. He woke just after dawn, realizing he’d fallen asleep, bloated and gassy, while in the process of eating the child. The boy’s innards were strung around him like a threadbare blanket. They were quite frozen and unpalatable.
He left the remains for scavengers.
After his long walk up into the hills, he was famished. He still had one more of the white men to kill, but no law stated that he couldn’t take his sacrifice before they were all dead.
He approached the camp carefully, being silent as possible. Once the dogs started barking, he’d have to kill them. Too bad there wasn’t some way he could simply slip in there and twist their necks without being noticed. But that was impossible. No longer able to contain his lusts, he moved into the camp.
The dogs began to bark.
Two of them ran at Skullhead and he slashed them into ribbons with a single swipe of his nails. A third and forth were torn asunder by a sweep of his bony, jagged tail. No more came. There was screaming now, crying. People were running about, gathering up children and retreating into the forest. Skullhead let them go. He went from one lodge to the other, tearing them down and stomping them into the snow with childish glee. A few of the tribal elders weren’t quick enough to escape their lodges and Skullhead grinned as their fragile bones crunched beneath him.
There was shooting suddenly and Skullhead grimaced in pain as bullets swept over his back. He turned and chased down the defiant ones. He killed the first by merely tearing out his throat, the second by detaching his limbs, and the third by crushing him in a hug that forced his viscera to exit from any available opening. There was another and Skullhead beat him into submission with ragged, bleeding parts of the others, then opened his skull with a blow from his own rifle.
But this was merely for amusement.
His real interest was the sweat lodge. It was set away from the others at the fringe of the forest. It was in here that would be the men who summoned him, the Skull Society members. They knew their debts and would not run. Skullhead forced his way in, the tanned flap of buffalo skin that served as a door coming apart in his fingers. The men in here squatted on the earthen floor, their naked bodies painted up with streaks of white, black, and red. They chanted and mumbled meaningless prayers.
They did not attempt to hide or flee.
These were the ones that had called him. It seemed so silly to think that these weak, cowering creatures had summoned him from his grave. Of all the absurdities. Skullhead emasculated them one by one, laughing with a dry roaring sound as he did so. He watched them bleed and cry and moan and writhe on the ground. Bored with this display, he crushed their heads to jelly and brought the lodge down on top of them. It was how sacrifice was offered and received.
Outside, he smelled meat cooking on the fire. Strips of it smoking and sizzling on wooden racks. The stench was sickening…yet Skullhead was curious. He snatched a strip and chewed the vile substance, forcing it down the cavern of his throat. When it hit his stomach, the reaction was instantaneous: he went to his knees and vomited. This done, he pulled himself up dizzily, remembering now the ancient taboos concerning cooked flesh.
He would do well not to forget again.
Skullhead decided now that these dark-skinned people were not worthy of worshipping him. As he devoured a woman and her child he decided they could only be of use as meat. The white men and their kin…they would be his new flock. They were the ones with power, with imagination. They reared cities like the ancients. A brutal and savage people. Skullhead liked them. They would do.
Moving into the forest, he found small packs of the dark-skins hiding under the cover of trees and rock. He took his time in claiming them. When he’d filled his belly to the point of bursting, he staggered back into camp and doused the fire with a stream of piss. Remembering that this was an old way of marking territory, he emptied his bladder throughout the camp. All who came here would know now that this place belonged to a king.
A Lord of the High Wood.
16
As the posse ran in circles outside town, Wynona Spence returned to the body of Mike Ryan. It had been very fortuitous of Ryan to order his elaborate headstone some days earlier. There were various stories circulating about how he had known of his approaching demise-everything from death threats to second sight-but Wynona was of the school that some men just knew when their time was coming. It hadn’t been the first time a man had ordered a stone only to be placed beneath it a few short days afterward.
Such was life…and death.
Wynona had spent most of the morning at Sheriff Lauters’ farm, sorting through the rain of flesh and bone, separating human from animal. The remains of Lauters’ family had already been buried in the cemetery outside town in one mass grave. A headstone would be placed tomorrow. It took a team of five men, volunteers all, several hours to dig through the snow and frozen ground and hollow out the grave. Nasty business that. But Wynona was used to death and dying and nothing surprised her anymore. The money was good, but her heart was heavy. This town was cursed.
She covered Ryan’s body with a sheet and settled into her chair, her head aching. She’d always considered herself something of an optimist. Her father had said that both optimists and pessimists were in truth fantasists; that a realist was someone tucked safely between. And maybe he was right. Her optimism told her, assured her, that this beast, this monster would be caught and killed. Pessimism told her it would never happen: the beast would kill everyone and then move on. And realism told her it would be killed but not before it slaughtered a great many others.
Realism was safe; it avoided the extremes.
Sitting there, thinking of Marion and her love for her, Wynona decided she would be a realist now. Under the circumstances, it was a safe thing to be. A cloak of pragmatism that could be donned and would safeguard against all circumstances.
But she forgot about fatalism.
Until she heard the door to the back room crash in, that was. And suddenly she knew some things were unavoidable. As she peered into the back room, her eyes trembling with awe on the blood-encrusted giant standing there, its massive head brushing the roof beams, she knew it was all at an end. She was dead. No weapons or locked doors would change that. The beast was here and the beast had business with her.
She’d flirted with death for years and now here it was, huge and pissed-off and smelling.
“My God,” she muttered.
And the beast advanced, teeth gnashing.
17
Lauters was awake when Longtree walked into Dr. Perry’s surgery.
Longtree wasn’t surprised; he expected this very thing. Perry had said he’d given the sheriff enough drugs to keep him unconscious most of the day, but somehow, Longtree figured, given the state of the sheriff’s mind, he wouldn’t be out for long.
“Sheriff,” Longtree said, staring down the barrel of his gun, “there’s no need for that.”
Lauters was a big man. Huge, really, bloated from alcoholism, but still a very large man in his own right. His eyes were red and puffy, presumably from crying, his face damp with perspiration.