Foreword 4 page

All while using hot dogs, ground chuck, catsup, and the secret ingredient.

Food lay all around in the kitchen, on presentation platters, but it had curdled or dried, crumbled or gotten covered in flies. He even had packaged cupcakes arranged on a set of stacked trays looking festive. They were the only things that hadn’t gone bad yet, but that didn’t soften the most gruesome aspect of the scene‑aside from the corpse, that is.

On the granite countertop of the island, in a roasting pan surrounded by potatoes and carrots and chopped onions, lay a leg.

A human leg.

Carlson’s leg.

He’d managed to hack it off at the knee, rub some salt on it, add pepper, before he collapsed and bled out on the floor. The butcher’s knife lay half beneath him, covered in bloody prints. The angle of the cuts and the way the bone was sheared meant he’d taken the leg off with only a couple whacks.

I looked around. “What did Prout say? Carlson slipped?”

Cate shook her head. “He was gone before I got here. Manny said he covered his mouth with a handkerchief, then got that look on his face like he’d gotten an idea.”

Manny, who was taking pictures of the scene, grunted. “I said he looked like he’d just dumped a load in his tighty‑whities.”

“Same thing when his brain has movement.” My eyes tightened. “Time of death?”

“Two days, three.”

I glanced at my PDA and the listing of case files. “Killer’s on a tight cycle, and it’s getting faster. Two days between Carlson and Anderson. Someone is going to die in the next twelve hours.”

“No, they won’t.”

I spun. Prout had returned, with handkerchief in place. “We just arrested the murderer.”

“What? Who?”

He lowered the handkerchief so I could see his sneer. “Martha Raines.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Only if you are, Molloy.” His beady eyes never wavered. “You followed the money. So did I. The Fellowship’s made millions on these deaths. You didn’t want to see it because you always were a lousy detective.”

“Arresting Raines solves nothing.”

“You trying to confess to being an accomplice? How much did she pay you?”

I glanced at Prout through magick. He looked almost as bad as the corpse, all mushroom gray and speckled with black. He had no talent ‑nor talent, for that matter‑so one spell, just a tiny one, and his white suit would be sopping up blood as he thrashed on the floor.

Cate grabbed my shoulder. “Don’t.”

Prout gave her a hard stare. “I think you better escort your friend from my crime scene.”

“He’s going. He’s got a friend in jail who could use a visit.” She poked a finger into Prout’s chest, leaving a single bloody fingerprint on his tie. It looked like a bullet hole, and I wished to God it were. “But this isn’t your crime scene. It isn’t even a crime until I says it is, Inspector. Right now, my running verdict is that he slipped. Death by misadventure, and unless you want to be doing all the paperwork and having all the hearings to change that, you’ll be letting me finish this one fast.”

Prout snorted. “Take your time.”

Cate shook her head. “I don’t have any. The killer’s next vic will show up in another six hours, so time is not a luxury I enjoy.”

I would have stayed, just to bask in the glory of that sour expression on Prout’s face, but Manny got a shot of it. He gave me a wink. I’d be seeing it again. I wished he had a shot of the sneer too. I wanted it for reference. Next time I saw it I was going to realign the nose and jaw.

Cate had been right. Martha was in jail, and it wasn’t for picketing some city office this time. She needed a friend. I owed her. I didn’t think the bulls down in lockup would want to do her any harm, but they’d have to cage her with the hard cases. Still, a visit could get her out of a holding cell at least for a little bit.

I got down to the jail pretty quick. I only made one stop, at a drive‑through liquor store. I bought a bottle of twelve‑year‑old Irish whiskey and took a long pull off it. Recorking it, I slid it under my seat. It burned down my throat and out into my veins. It made me feel more alive, and it prepped me to use magick, just in case.

I didn’t need it. Hector Sands was working the desk, and he’d always believed I’d been framed for bribery. “You want to see Raines? Do you have to?”

“What am I not getting?”

Hector took me through into the holding area. Two big cells separated by a tiled corridor. Usually it was awash in profanity, urine, spittle, blood, and any other bodily fluid or solid that could be squirted, hurled or expelled. People didn’t like being caged like animals; so they acted like animals in protest.

Not this time, though. Martha Raines sat on a cot, with all the other inmates sitting on the floor and the people across the corridor hanging onto the bars. And hanging onto her every word. She just spoke in low tones, so quiet I could barely hear her.

Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I was just remembering her calm voice and soft words. I heard her telling me that drinking myself to death wasn’t going to solve problems. She told me I had something to live for. It really didn’t matter what. I could change things from day to day. They were out there. I owed it to them and myself to straighten out.

“Been like that since we put her in the population. See why I don’t want to take her out?”

“Yeah. You’ll call me if there is trouble?”

Hector nodded. “I have to call Prout, too.” He glanced up at the security cameras. “I wouldn’t, but he wanted to know when you showed up, and he’ll go through the tapes.”

“Got it. Don’t want you jammed up.”

“I’ll wait till the end of my shift, about an hour, to call, you know, if that will help.”

I nodded, even though I didn’t care. He’d call Prout. Prout would call me. I wouldn’t answer. It didn’t matter.

“Thanks.” I left the jail armed with two things. The first was the list. The fact that Martha had given it to me without hesitation spoke against her guilt. If she were killing people, there’s no reason she would hand me a list of her victims.

Unless she wanted to be stopped.

Serial killers feel compelled to kill, which is why they cycle faster and faster, their need pushing aside anything else. I wanted to dismiss the possibility of Martha’s guilt outright, but I didn’t know if she had alibis. I only had her word about how nicely things had gone. What if Anderson and Hogan set up the trusts for another reason, to deny her funding and to oust her? What if they were scheming to move the mission and profit from the location, using that project as some cornerstone to gentrify a swath of the city? Would that be enough to make her snap?

I crossed to a little bistro and ordered coffee. Martha was talented. She sat in that den of lions and made them into lambs. I’d felt it. I knew her power. I’d benefited from it. But that was the good side of it. Was there a dark side? Could she talk someone into hanging himself or chopping off his own leg?

And if she could do that, could she convince a jury‑no matter how overwhelming the evidence‑to let her go? If she could, there was no way she could ever be brought to justice. While the Fellowship was a noble undertaking, did its preservation justify murder?

Those were bigger questions than I could answer, so I did what I could do with the meager resources at hand. Starting at the top, I called down the donor list. I left messages‑mostly with servants, since these sorts of folks like that personal touch‑or talked to the donors directly. I told them there was a meeting of donors in the Diamond Room at the Ultra Hotel at nine. I told everyone to be there. I didn’t so much care that it disrupted their evenings as much as I hoped it would disrupt the killer’s pattern.

It took me two hours to go through the list. I spent a lot of time on hold or listening to bullshit excuses, so I used it to study those case files. Cate was right; I really didn’t want to look at the Preakness photos. There was something there, though, in all of them, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

At the end of those two hours I was no closer to knowing who the next victim would be.

Then it came to me.

Prout.

He’d never called.

I drove to his home as fast as I could. Red lights and a fender bender let me double‑check the full case packages Cate had sent me. I finally saw it. As far as a signature for a serial killer goes, this one was pretty subtle. Maybe there was part of me that didn’t want to see it before, but there was no denying it now.

I rolled to a stop on the darkened street in front of the little house with the white picket fence. Figured. He probably owned a poodle. A sign in an upstairs window told firefighters there were two children in that room. I didn’t even know he was married.

I fished the whiskey from beneath the seat and drank deep. I brought the bottle. Prout wouldn’t have anything there, and if he did, he’d not offer.

That’s okay. I don’t like to impose.

I crossed the street and vaulted the fence. I could have boosted my leap with magick, but there was no reason to waste it.

And it didn’t surprise me that the hand I’d put on the fencepost came away wet with white paint. Had my head not been full of whiskey vapors, I’d have smelled it. White footprints led up the steps and across the porch, hurried and urgent. The screen door had shut behind him, but the solid door remained ajar.

Beyond it, darkness and the flickering of candles. That wasn’t right for the house. It should have been brightly lit, all Formica and white vinyl, with plastic couch‑condoms covering every stick of furniture. Lace doilies, and white leather‑bound editions of the Bible scattered about.

I toed the door open.

I got the last thing right. Bibles had been scattered, page by page. They littered the darkened living room. Across from the doorway sat a woman in a modest dress, and a little girl in a matching outfit. Both had been duct taped into spindly chairs, with a strip over their mouths to keep them quiet.

On the wall, where I guess once hung the slashed portrait of Jesus crumpled in the corner, someone had painted a pentagram in sloppy red strokes. A little boy hung upside down at the heart of it, from a hook to which his feet were bound. He’d been muted with duct tape too, and stared in horror at the center of the floor.

His father sat there, naked, in a circle of black candles. Thirteen of them. He’d cut himself on the neck and wrists‑nothing life‑threatening‑and blood had run over his chest and been smeared over his belly. He clutched a long carving knife in two hands. He waved it through the air, closing one eye, measuring his son for strokes that would take him to pieces.

I took another drink, and not because I needed the magick.

Prout looked up at me. “Yes, Father Satan, I have serve thee well, and I now have this sacrifice for you.”

I held a hand out. “Easy, Prout.”

He wasn’t listening. “You come to me in the shape of my enemy to mock me. I did harm to your pet. That opened my heart to you, didn’t it?”

I had no idea what he was going on about, but talking was better than slashing. “You begin to see things, my son.”

He nodded and studied his reflection in the blade.

I looked at him through magick. Prout had always been leopard‑spotted, just full of weaknesses. That had changed. The spots had become long, oily rivers that ran up and down his body, like circulating currents. I’d never seen its like before, but it wasn’t part of Prout. He had no talent.

I closed my fist and opened it again. A blue spark, invisible to Prout and his family, flew from my palm and drilled into his forehead. His stripes went jagged. He tried to rise, then toppled and fell, snuffing two of the candles against his belly.

I looked past him toward the kitchen. “Come on out, Leah. This ends here.”

The young artist stepped from the darkened kitchen, glowing silver with magick. She’d streaked paint over her face and in her hair. It had to be her trigger‑something in it, or the scent‑and the glow made her very powerful. She opened her hands innocently and stared into my eyes.

“You don’t know what he did, Trick.”

“He arrested Martha for your murders.”

“Not that.” Her voice came soft and gentle, like a lover’s whisper. “Before that, when he was investigating you. He knew you were set up. He had evidence to clear you. He didn’t. You know why? Your mother is part of his church. You were an embarrassment for her. He wanted to make you go away.”

I stared down at the man and suddenly found the knife in my hand. Prout had known I was innocent. He destroyed my life because magick was evil, and he couldn’t abide it. He got me tossed from the force and hid behind being a good church‑going man, an upstanding officer.

I weighed the knife in my hand. “Right. He’s a hypocrite.”

“Just like the others. They all pledged money, but only in trust, only upon death, for capital expenses, not operations.” Leah’s eyes narrowed. “They knew how tight things were for the mission. They helped Martha to expand until she couldn’t keep the place going. They had their own plans. They’d move her out, revoke their gifts. They had to be stopped.”

“You made them pay.”

“I made them reveal themselves. They wallowed in their own vanity. They died embracing their inner reality.”

“Why the staging? The rotten food from the vanitas paintings?”

“It was all a warning to others. They should have seen death coming.”

“And the Twinkie. I saw one at each site.”

Leah smiled coldly. “The promise of life everlasting. They never saw it.”

“They never could have understood.”

“But you do, Trick.” Her eyes blazed. “You have to kill Prout. He betrayed you. Let him die here. Let everyone see how black his heart really is.”

Argent arcane fire poured over me. Every moment of pain I’d felt exploded within. I’d made a good life. I’d had friends. I’d been respected, and Prout conspired with my mother and with criminals to smear me and destroy me. Leah’s magick wrapped me up and bled down into the blade, tracing silver lightning bolts over the metal.

One second. A heartbeat. A quick stroke and Prout’s blood would splash hot over me. I could revel in it. Victory, finally.

Then it was over.

I dropped the knife.

She stared at me. “How?”

“I’ve been where you’ve been, darlin’. As low as can be.” I let blue energy gather in my palm. “No vanity. No illusion. I know exactly what I am.”

The azure bolt caught her in the chest and smashed her back against the wall. Plasterboard cracked. She left a bloody smear as she sank to the floor.

In turn I used magick to put Prout’s family out and to let them forget. They’d have nightmares, but there was no reason to make them worse.

And it was going to get worse.

I’d been worried that Martha could have turned a jury with her talent. There’s no juror in the world, much less jurist or lawyer, that isn’t a little bit vain. I never figured the way Prout did, that being talented meant one was evil; but I knew better than to rule it out.

I had to deal with it.

I picked up the knife. I wrapped Prout’s hand around it.

We went to work.

Cate found me on the hill overlooking Anderson ’s graveside service. Huge crowd, including Prout. He dressed properly. The only white on him was his shirt and bandages on his face. He stood beside my mother, steadying her, being stoic and heroic.

That was his right, after all, since he’d put an end to the Society Murderess.

“How can you watch this, Trick?”

“Only way I can make sure he’s dead.” I half‑smiled. “Think my mother will throw herself on the casket?”

“Not her. Prout. Preening.”

“Why shouldn’t he? He’s a hero. He killed a sociopath.” I nodded toward him. “She put up a hell of a fight before he stabbed her through the heart. I heard his jaw was broken in two places.”

“Three. Cracked orbit, busted nose.”

“Whoda thunk she could hit that hard?”

“Never met her.” Cate shook her head. “How’s your hand?”

“Scrapes and bruises. I’ll be more careful walking to the bathroom in the dark.”

“You know, there were some anomalous fingerprints on the knife.”

“Ever match ’em?”

“No. Was I wrong about you, Trick?”

“I don’t think so, Cate.” I met her stare openly. “They need their heroes. They need someone to fend off the things lurking beyond the firelight. Prout battled to save his family. Its best he never knows how much danger he was in. How much danger they were all in. All their fear and they couldn’t even imagine.”

“I don’t think they really want to.”

“You’re probably right.”

Down below, Martha Raines closed the prayer book and made a final comment. I didn’t hear it. I didn’t need to.

They did, and they looked peaceful.

Witness to the Fall by Jay Lake

The bottles shiver quietly in their rack on the kitchen windowsill. Wind gnaws at the house like a cat worrying a kill. Rafters creak the music of their years fighting gravity’s claim. Outside a groaning window, trees dip in a dance likely to break a back and give me kindling for half a season.

Most strange is the sound. The weather hisses and spits, a long‑drawn ess slithering from one horizon to the other. I can yet see the water‑blue of the sky, furtive clouds hurrying along the wind’s business. This will not bring rain, no relief of any kind. It is only the hands of angels pushing the house (and me) toward our eventual ashy dissolution.

Down in the town there has been a murder. People will say it was the blow, five days of wind so strong a man could not stand facing it. People will say it was an old love gone sour, the harder heart come back for one last stab at passion. People will say it was a baby, never an hour’s rest since the poor squalling mite was first born into this world.

Me, I listen to the quiet clatter of the bottles, a tiny sound beneath the roaring lion of the air, and hear the song of death as clearly as if I’d played the tune myself on the old piano in the parlor.

Knowing the truth, I turn out my cloak, fetch my bag and inkwells. Soon enough the preacher man or old Cromie will call for me to sit judgment. It has never hurt to be prepared, to remind them of their own belief that I can hear the hammers of their hearts.

That’s not all true, but I never lost by letting them think such a thing.

I am surprised when Maybelle turns up for me. She is the preacher’s daughter, a pretty peach borne off the withered branch that is Caleb Witherspoon. For every glint‑eyed slight and patriarchal judgment out of him, she has a smile or a warm hand or a basket of eggs and carrots. Of such small economies are the life of a town made.

Still, she has not before called at my gate on business such as this. A Christmas pie, or a letter come by distant post over mountains and rivers, yes, but she has never come for blood or sorrow.

I open the front door before she can raise her hand to knock. “Hello, child,” I say, though in truth I do not have even ten years on her new‑grown womanhood.

The wind runs its fingers through her braids, sending hair flyaway around her in a pale brown halo. The hem of her dress whips wompered about her shins and calves. The practical countrywoman’s boots beneath are scuffed and too solid to be pulled by air. There is a smile on her face, belied only by the worried set of her pale gray eyes.

“Master Thorne,” she says, with a fumbled curtsy that is withdrawn before it can truly take hold. “Please, sir, the beadle and Mister Cromie have asked you come right quick.”

I nod and step out on the porch, my cloak seized in the dry gale as soon as I pass the door. “Death’s a sad business,” I tell her, more loudly than it is my wont to speak, “but there’s rarely a hurry once the thing is already done.”

“Yes, but ’tis my daddy with blood under his nails this day. We need a Foretelling.” She holds her silence a breath, then two, before blurting, “I know he ain’t done it.”

Interesting. The bottles had not spoken clear, or I didn’t listen well. I’d have thought it was a child died for love, not a preacher taking literally the murderous word of God. “All will be well.”

My words are both a lie and a truth, depending on how far away from the moment one is willing to stand. Together we set out down the track amid summer’s brambles and the wind‑flattened heads of wild grass caught gold and sharp beneath the noonday sun.

Neverance is a town of small blessings. There is enough of a river to water the horses and fields in all seasons, though it will not sustain navigation from the metropolii far downstream. There are groves of chestnuts and hoary pear trees to lay forth autumn’s windfall and provide children with ladders to the sky come spring. The first white men to settle here had possessed more ambition than sense and so laid strong foundations of stone quarried from the surrounding hills for the city that never came.

In sum, Neverance is a town typical of these mountains‑nestled in a valley between tree‑clad peaks, sheltered from winter’s worst excesses, surrounded by bounteous fields bearing hay and corn and the small truck grown on hillsides by farm wives and those too old to harness a team to work the larger plantings. The cattle now standing with their faces away from the remorseless wind, clumped like crows on a kill, are symbols of sufficiency as surely as the great beeves of ancient myth.

Wealth, no, but neither is life is too difficult here. Some, especially women fallen on hard times, live at the edges. Most people in the valley show their faces in church on Sunday with a smile. A turnpike might come someday, or even a railroad ushering the restless through the ever‑moving Western Gates, but for these years Neverance slumbers amid its quiet dreams of pumpkins and smokehouses and the peal of the school bell.

Not this day, though.

There is a crowd outside Haighsmith’s Dairy. They huddle like the cattle against the wind. Despite the name, the dairy is a co‑op serving farmers and townsmen alike. Maybelle leads me to the back of the kerfuffle, intent on pushing through the mass of shoulders to the door, but I tug at her elbow to halt our progress.

At my touch a spark passes between us with an audible crack, tiny lightning raised by the dry wind. Her face flickers with a fragment of pain as she turns toward me.

I cup my hand and speak close to her ear. “I should like to remain out here a few moments, to observe.”

Maybelle scowls, an expression that suits her poorly, but she nods. Taking that as my permission, I study the people who crowd the door of the dairy.

Most are known to me. Farmers in their denims and roughspun blouses, townsmen wearing wool trousers and gartered cotton shirts, a scattering of women bustled and gowned for the sake of their appearance before one another. The wind has stolen a few hats and sent hair flying, so this assembly bears an unintentionally disrupted aspect, as if some tiny demon of disorder has descended upon Neverance’s well‑starched citizens.

What I do not see in evidence are firearms or ropes or shovels. This is not a lynching awaiting its moment. These people are worried, frightened even, but they have not turned to hunters of blood.

The bottles would have told me if they were.

I listen now for whispers in the windows, echoes of truth, but the wretched wind snatches so much away out here in the street. Instead I nod to Maybelle, and we push forward.

To my surprise the crowd parts like loose soil before a plow.

Thin as a fence rail and with a face just as weathered, Caleb Witherspoon sits upon a coffee‑stained settee in the co‑op manager’s office. In here the howling wind is little more than a murmur, a substitute for the voice of the crowd waiting outside for justice, or at least law. The room reeks of male fear and rage mixed in a sour perfume all too familiar to me.

The manager has absented himself before the face of justice, but in his stead is Ellsworth Clanton, the elderly beadle from Neverance’s sole church. Clanton stands shivering with age beside Witherspoon, hiding a hard smile that he cannot keep from lighting his eyes as he clamps a hand on the preacher’s shoulder. Mister Cromie is also present, who would be municipal judge if Neverance had the formality of a city charter. Still, he wears black robes and mounts a bench to pronounce marriages, hear suits and sign the certificates of death. Though not smiling, he too seems strangely pleased for someone officiating over a murder.

I am witnessing the fall of a man.

Clearly it matters nothing what Caleb Witherspoon has actually done, whether Maybelle has the right of her father’s innocence. His years of uncompromising rectitude have layered old scars in everyone around him, the memories of which still burn within angry hearts throughout Neverance.

Though I have not lived here so long, being one of the few immigrants in living memory, I know well enough for what sorts of sins these countrymen punish one another. They can be read so easily.

Clanton the beadle always craved the pulpit for himself. He nurses a coal of resentment in his heart for Witherspoon as the faith holder who took the word of God from his mouth. There is old blood between them, a thorn prick scarred by time and never healed.

Cromie rushes to judge lest he be judged himself. Of his misdeeds I hold more certain knowledge, having emptied the wombs of two of his daughters by the dark of the moon in my years here. Not long after my attentions, his Ellen Marie drowned herself in the mill pond. Jeanne Ann is long since married to Fred Sardo’s son and lives at the high end of the valley, where they tend nut orchards and rarely come to town. I doubt Cromie will ever see his grandchildren except in church.

Caleb Witherspoon has measured all of these men time and again and found them wanting in his holy scales on each occasion. Now that the preacher is caught on the point of justice, they have no more mercy than ferrets on a rat.

Maybelle has requested a Foretelling. Even so, I know without asking that these men desire a Truthsaying, which they might use as a cloak for the vengeance each nurses in his heart.

“Do not tell me aught.” I address Cromie, for he is the power in this room. “I know there has been a murder, and I know where the blood is found. Let me first do my work untrammeled by testimony, then we shall see what we shall see.”

“He is guilty, Thorne.” Cromie’s voice is cold as a child’s headstone. “There does not even need to be a trial, except for the form of the thing.”

I meet Cromie’s slate‑gray eyes. “Then why did you trouble to send for me?”

“I did not.”

Though I do not glance at Maybelle, I know she blushes like the fires of dawn. I ask the next question, the true question. “If I am unsent for, why did you await my coming?”

Though the words seem to choke him, Cromie manages to spit an answer. “I could do nothing else.” This time he looks at the girl.

There is nothing more to be said. I shed my cloak, sweep the dairy’s business journals off a small table, and set out my inkwells.

These are the essential inks with which I sketch the visions of my art. You will forgive me if I do not tell the precise secrets of their processes of creation.

Culpability ‑Made from lampblack and the ashes of a hanged man’s hand. It smells of a last, choking breath.

Vision ‑Made from the humors of an eagle’s eye and the juice of carrots, much reduced. A sharp scent of nature.

Realization ‑Made from photographer’s chemicals and the bile of a dying child, strained through pages torn from Latin Bibles. Tingles the sinuses like an insult not yet forgotten.

Action ‑Made from paraffin and the crushed bodies of bluebottle wasps. Stings the nostrils as if to sneeze.

Regret ‑Made from grave dust, the tears of a nun, and the juice of winter apples. A musty odor that will close your throat if you are careless.

I tip them from their wells by drop and gill and mix them in proportion to the need that I have at the moment. A scrivener’s greatest works are meant to be drawn on vellum scraped from the flayed skin of kings or presidents, but most purposes can be inked onto any paper at hand. Always, it must be something that I will eventually burn. Fresh wood, living skin, or stone are therefore not ideal.

All children draw, if the stick or coal or pencil is not snatched from their hand. All children represent the world they see in a language that reflects the essentials of their vision. For most, growing up means accepting the way the world is said to look. But a few cling to their craft. A few hang onto their lidless vision the way ants cling to a rotting apple.