Demon Harvest Read online

  Candace leaned into Stuart, looking at him just a little bit like Jill and Dennis always looked at each other, and they laughed, easy and natural.

  “Let’s hit it.” Dennis counted down, and they started again, with a number called “Cinders of Summer.”

  The song was a testament to his versatility. Dennis eschewed his usual punkabilly voice projection for a gloomy, dreamy sound somewhere between Rozz Williams and Johan Edlund. He strummed rather than pounded his guitar and kept his eyes closed a lot.

  Pedro raised his confused look from the paper on his music stand to Dennis, then to Jill, then back, noticeably straining to stand still and carefully finger his strings without slashing.

  Jill choked up on her drumsticks to keep from hitting too hard, but soon found herself staring at her drum set like it was an alien artifact.

  She stopped, then Pedro stopped, and finally Dennis. “Okay, guys,” he began. “This transition might take longer than I thought.”

  “We wanna play ball, babe,” Jill said. “I mean, Mister Platonic Bandleader, sir.”

  “I could get it. No doubt about it.” Pedro looked around the basketball court. “Just not feeling it here.”

  Dennis leaned forward over his guitar and peered at him like an interrogating detective. He sat like this for a long time, until Candace cleared her throat, purely to break the stiff silence.

  “You’re right, Petey.” Dennis murmured into his microphone.

  “Of course I am.” Pedro’s puzzled expression belied his agreement.

  The door opened with an echoing clack, DeShaun returning, peering in between fingers. “You guys aren’t doing it, are you?”

  “Get in here, deserter.” Dennis had called DeShaun that, plus “traitor” and a variety of other, less palatable names, since the day back in March when the Lotts announced they would be moving away. “We got band business to discuss.”

  “Swell.” DeShaun made his way back to his seat. “Then can you guys keep your disgusting mush talk on a strictly telepathic wavelength?”

  “I wanna try a different location for rehearsal. Maybe even for recording.” Dennis stood and unshouldered his guitar. “This place’ll be off limits for the Devil’s Night shindig anyway, and we can’t spare the time.”

  “Where then?” asked Stuart.

  “I want everybody to think about it before you murder me. This could be good.”

  “Okay…”

  “I mean really good.”

  “Dammit, just spill already!” demanded Jill.

  Dennis walked out to stand roughly in the center of the group. “The church catacombs.”

  * * * *

  “Unlike your Jamestowns and your sponsored settlements and whatnot, Ember Hollow was totally independent,” DeShaun would explain to witches Violina and Maisie, just a few hours later, across a table at the Kronus Café.

  “Wilcott Bennington knew a trapper guy who had already been over here. That dude dropped some crucial info that nobody else in Europe knew,” Stuart would then say. “The trapper dude found a nice big spread, ya know, a piedmont, with lots of flat fields kind of closed in by the mountains and hills.”

  “Benzo knew that, sooner or later, Ol’ Lady England was gonna claim all this dirt,” continued DeShaun. “The Cherokee stayed near water, which our little burg isn’t, so it was basically there for the taking,”

  “And these local natives were ‘docile.’” Stuart frowned before his next sentence. “Lots of Europeans thought of Indians as less than human.”

  “Our boy hired this guy to get a crew and come back to survey it.” DeShaun drew an imaginary map on the table with his fingers. “Meanwhile, he got up some investors to foot the bill for making the settlement, with him in place as governor, so they could beat the king to laying claim on this bucolic death trap you see all around us.”

  “Ol’ Wilcott started recruiting ‘partners’ on the D.L. two years before ever setting sail. Difference between his deal and, say, the French settlements of the time was that Wilcott knew what to expect.”

  “And he wasn’t such a hard-ass on religious beliefs, since his own were pretty radical for the time.”

  “Rather pagan-esque, I take it,” said Violina, “given the Saint Saturn appellation.”

  “W.B. did some studying. He believed Christianity was actually Saturn worship. A few folks shared this belief, once he explained the backstory.”

  Chapter 3

  Valley of The Scarecrow

  Settlement era

  Friedrich Schroeder rubbed the back of his neck, his hand coming away damp. But there was no sting of sunburn, and for that he prayed his gratitude, if absently, as he did for every little thing, including the mild euphoria he got from his dandelion wine and, of course, the paying patronage of his fellow settlers.

  Soon after arriving, the settlers encountered the natives and found them kind and welcoming, a contrast to the terrifying rumors they had all heard in the port taverns back in England. That is, until Conal O’Herlihy introduced the tribe to his vaunted mushroom, and promptly scared them away.

  All except a few young males who were captured and imprisoned.

  Schroeder was ashamed to have played a role in their oppression and enslavement. But Conal, in his uncompromising wisdom, had declared that it was God’s will that man hold dominion over beasts, which these natives were to him, no different from horses or cattle.

  Still, keeping the small troop of young Tsalagi men and boys secretly encamped in the woods a few miles from the settlement was a logistical challenge. Schroeder’s special wine was a persuader for the settlement men in Conal’s confidence, for the young Indians themselves and for his own pesky conscience.

  His wine had secured his position among O’Herlihy’s most trusted lieutenants. But his absence the previous night might strain their friendship. Expressing his growing qualms would not salve it.

  At the moment, plans for the harvest of his corn and pumpkin crops were at the fore, and that labor would fall to his friends, neighbors and fellow disciples of Conal.

  There was a good bit of preparation to be done before he would call on them. First, he would need to make more wine, of course, and have Olga bake her special bread.

  For now, his task was to move the bootzaman to the eastern edge of his cornfield, beside the pumpkin patch. The crows, though mostly uninterested in the strange orange squash, often gathered there and perched atop the spheres, as if awaiting marching orders. They had heeded well his towering strawman here in mid-field. The move would keep them confused.

  At Schroeder’s invitation, a handful of settlers had come to behold the unveiling of his uncanny false man. They had all been left uneasy by it.

  Schroeder understood the fear of a thing that could not be real. His grandmother had ruined a good many of his dreams with her stories of the Sensenmann, or Death Angel, forever lurking out of sight, waiting to separate souls from bodies with his curved blade.

  By comparison, Schroeder’s straw-stuffed guardian was laughable. These Anglos could count themselves fortunate to have evaded his grandmother’s stories.

  Schroeder counted the rows and lanes he walked, his only way of knowing one identical section of field from another, and reminded himself to make a few more of the effigies. Stopping to part two familiar stalks, he found the scarecrow just where he had last placed it.

  But this was not his scarecrow.

  Just as Hezekiah Hardison, before dying, had believed for a split second that Schroeder was giving him a fright, Schroeder thought the opposite.

  It was Hezekiah himself who hung from the sturdy cross frame Schroeder had made. Hardison’s head lay at a hideous angle. His clothes were soaked through with something meant to recall blood.

  “Oh, stop this…game…” Schroeder chided, his voice trailing as early decay met his nostrils. This man, his n
eighbor, was dead—his neck torn open like a grain sack.

  Schroeder spun to look behind him, then up and down both lanes, then back to the ersatz scarecrow. He leaned as far forward as he could without taking a step, to touch Hezekiah’s hand—and recoiled, despairing that the hand felt so cold, here under the warm sun.

  He pivoted and ran to get his horse, blasting past cornstalk leaves so fast they cut his face. He needed to be near as many living folks as he could find, to hide from Death until it was wiped away in the Second Coming—oh, holy God, please let that be a true thing!

  * * * *

  Modern day

  Yoshida watched until Hudson’s taillights disappeared into the trees beyond the drive, then went back into the strange scents and sights of the barn.

  He switched on the portable stereo he had brought and tuned to local station WICH. Their two-month-long Halloween celebration for the region’s dwindling population, which had deejays assuming cornball Cryptkeeper-type personae, was always good for a few laughs, even if it seemed half-hearted at best these days. The deputy kept the volume low for the sleeping guest.

  The barn’s towering steel shelving units, filled with what the deputies had taken to calling “hoodoo potions,” had been pushed back to make room for the cage weeks earlier. As Yoshida and Hudson wrestled with one of the cabinets, a squat asymmetrical ceramic jar fell onto the plywood floor, and the lid fell off.

  The jar appeared empty, but when Yoshida went to pick it up, he was stunned to find it far heavier than it looked—it weighed at least sixty pounds.

  Hudson thought Yoshida was pulling his leg, until he too went to lift the jar. “Maybe we better not touch any more of this stuff.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

  Now, after three miserable days, and with Hudson heading back to Ember Hollow to greet incoming guests—consultants in this very case—Yoshida felt more alone than he ever had. The massive, chain-wrapped wolf in the cage had remained subdued from the tranquilizer dart throughout the drive. But when they slid her cage down from the rear of the truck, it slipped from the hands of the exhausted deputies and dropped the last few inches to the floor.

  Aura’s eye popped open—and instantly focused on Yoshida. She followed him around the room with her amber stare, straining to the very limits of her periphery to keep him in sight. Her wet nose twitched fastidiously, perhaps assessing her environment or the strap wrapped around her snout.

  Yoshida rechecked the chamber of his tranquilizer gun and the cylinder of his sidearm before settling into a lawn chair sitting just within the open barn doors. He couldn’t see Aura’s rolling eye from here, but he had no doubt it was directed toward him. He watched the steady rise and fall of the blanket that protected her against the burn of the silver chains.

  After all the vicious biker had done both as woman and wolf—a body count on par with Everett Geelens himself—she hardly deserved to be pampered.

  Then again, she had helped save the lives of his friends Candace and Jill, and that was worth something.

  Weighing whether to switch off the overhead lights, Yoshida caught himself rubbing the nagging tingle on his arm again, where her tooth had nicked him. He pushed up the sleeve of his flannel shirt, dreading to see angry redness and watery discharge.

  Instead, he found that the wound was nearly healed.

  Other than a red mark, which could well have been from his constant rubbing, there was no sign of the bite, no indication his skin had ever been broken.

  Chapter 4

  Settlement era

  The new scarecrow costume was not Everett’s favorite.

  Life had been very strange for him lately. He had awakened from a strange dream in which he had burst from a pumpkin, like a baby raven leaving its egg.

  Then he played Halloween games with a witch, some motorcycle men, and a pretty girl with shiny black boots. His sister Candace was there! And he was so happy and ready to play with her too, to give her a mask he would make from the nice face of the girl in the boots.

  Then a big werewolf came and attacked him! And then Bravo did too! Why? The girl in the boots smashed something over him that made him burn up.

  The next thing Everett Geelens knew, he was lying in a field full of corn, naked and cold. He was sad that he hadn’t really gotten to spend time with Candace.

  There were colored leaves in this new place, and a cold breeze all around. The scarecrow could only be…a Halloween decoration! He had awakened just in time for his favorite day!

  The scarecrow was just standing out in the middle of the cornfield. Not many people would see it way out here, so Everett decided it would be okay to put on its clothes.

  The costume fit him just okay. It was itchy and too tight, but it looked like a really real scarecrow, and it was better than being naked.

  Everett walked around for a while to try to figure out where he was, though he didn’t know the names of places. He just knew it was time to start celebrating Halloween and to help others celebrate too.

  Lo and behold, he found a pumpkin patch! So many big beautiful Halloween squashes wanting him to carve them into jack-o’-lanterns. Everett could almost hear their voices, scratchy and low like his, but not from what evil church men did. Just because they were full of seeds and stuff.

  Everett picked up one of the pumpkins and carried it with him, reassuring it he would get it ready for Halloween, as he would do for each and every person he found.

  Just as soon as he found a good knife.

  He had followed a trail to a little old barn and found a nice sharp hand sickle. He sat down on a stump to carve the first pumpkin jacko ever.

  Last night, he finally found somebody—a man in a funny, old-timey pilgrim costume. But it wasn’t spooky enough, so Everett helped him get spookier with the sickle. A scarecrow like him! Everett didn’t know the man’s name was Hezekiah.

  Everett ate the pumpkin’s seeds and some of the corn. They tasted weird and sweet. Very different from the meat and potatoes and pumpkin pies his Mamalee used to make for him back when he lived in his little haunted shed, behind the big house where Mamalee and his grumpy old father and his sweet little sister, Candace, and fuzzy dog, Bravo, lived.

  Father would never let him out of the shed, except for on Halloween. Then one Halloween not very long ago, Everett realized he was grown up and could decide for himself when he could go out.

  Now he walked around the fields and found footpaths but no houses. He saw a column of smoke, so he ventured out of the cornfield to find where it was coming from.

  A house! A cute little one, made of skinned trees, like a fairy-tale house. There was no car outside and, even worse, no Halloween decorations. Someone inside was singing, and her voice was nice. But she was singing about the mean old man in the sky that those priests always talked to, the priests who hurt him and made him feel so wrong.

  Maybe this lady was nice, though. The best way to find out if someone is nice is to trick-or-treat them.

  Everett got his scary sickle ready, trying to hold back his giggle as he crept to the door. There was no ding-dong button. The lady didn’t even have any paper skeletons or toy black cats put out front. Maybe she didn’t know it was Halloween time.

  He would have to help her get ready, like he had so many others.

  * * * *

  The harder Glory worked, the louder she sang praise to the Lord, and Glory Brightwell was surely the loudest-singing woman in the settlement, perhaps in all of the new world. Certainly, her husband, Allard, was the hardest-working man, and he deserved no less. Chopping these carrots for his rabbit stew was the Lord’s work.

  Allard was always eager to avail himself for the unexpected needs of their fellow settlers. When he wasn’t leading hunting parties to keep the settlement well-stocked, he was helping to raise barns and houses.

  Then there were frequ
ent, secret meetings with Conal O’Herlihy and a growing group of men. That was a matter that was none of Glory’s business, and just as well.

  Glory’s ordained purpose was to keep Allard’s one-room domicile as tidy as she had their rented flat back in England.

  Tending this home and the land around it was more than enough work for a woman, especially one belonging to such a busy and important man like Allard.

  Allard’s frequent vague promises of a bigger and better home, like Bennington’s, were as certain to bear fruit as God’s promise to Moses of a land filled with milk and honey. For now, there was only a bed, a dining table, and the fireplace, which took up nearly a quarter of the house.

  Still, Glory was grateful for a new life in a new world. This poor street girl, who had bitterly considered prostitution before the miracle of meeting Allard, then becoming his bride and helpmate in Wilcott Bennington’s wilderness settlement across the sea, would forever offer thanks in work and in song.

  An oddly cadenced knock at the door severed her psalm.

  Whenever Allard returned from a hunting excursion or a barn raising, he always knocked and gaily called out so he wouldn’t frighten her.

  But this was not his knock, and he did not call or enter afterward.

  Glory stared at the door, finding small comfort behind the barrier of the big oaken table. She sought to sense something familiar in the shadow that broke the light between cracks in the wood of the door.

  Burly Hezekiah Hardison came to mind. Whenever he tipped his hat at her in the town commons or at gatherings, it accompanied a penetrating, lustful stare upon her bosom.

  And Hezekiah would surely know Allard was out hunting. Thinking of Glory all alone, he might have got himself a head full of carnal mischief and corn-liquor courage.

  “Who’s there!?” she called.

  The answer was the kind of stifled snickering that came from a shy child. But its timbre, and the size of the shape filling the cracks—these were far from childlike.