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othing smells like a burned-out house.
The damp carbon stink, stinging and sharp, combined with the odors that water and intense heat bring out of a wooden structure, long occupied and none too clean, is unforgettable.
The plain frame house was reduced to a right angle: one short, jagged horizontal fragment, and a longer one made of the stone fireplace, chimney and peeling wallpaper.
The wooden floor had a ragged black hole in it with a chalk circle around the edge and a sheer drop into the cellar.
“Hex sign,” the policeman said, pointing to a circular plaque.
“Just decoration,” I told him.
“The body was totally consumed,” the detective went on, making a sour mouth, “It was burned to ashes almost like soap flakes, except for that one hand, nailed to the floor where the chalk mark is.”
A mostly-burned copy of The Long Lost Friend, reduced to a few pages and the blue and white cover, fluttered in the cutting wind.
“Old Jacob sold those,” the cop said when I looked at it.“He was a wicked old bastard, mean as a snake and greedy as a goat, and he was no Amishman, I can tell you that. None of the Dutchmen would have anything to do with him, except on the sly.”
“He was nailed to the floor?” I asked.
“Looks that way. Common nails, but big ones, a galvanized fender washer and these brass ones next to the skin.”
He produced a plastic bag with a tarnished disk of corroded metal, incised rudely with angular symbols, probably with a scratch awl or a burnisher.
“Those marks mean anything to you?” he asked me.
Hot gall rose in my throat, and I gulped it down.
“Yes, those are runes, and a sort of magical alphabet called ‘Crossing the River.’ The others I don’t recognize offhand.”
“Can you read this?”
“Not without my references,” I told him, almost truthfully.
“This is going to be a shit storm—people raking up the ’28 murder, screwballs from all over showing up, local weirdos getting all stirred up . . . We want this closed in a hurry.”
”I’ll do what I can, but I’m not Carnaki the Ghost Breaker.”
“Who?” the cop asked.
“Give me a second, here, I have to pee.”
I went into the bushes, and while I was pissing, I took out my flask and had a pull. After I zipped up, I clipped a cigar and lit it. I tramped around a bit, mostly so I could work on my smoke before we got back in the cruiser.
I saw some madly-angled constructions of green twigs and twine, a couple of corncob dolls, and scars in the earth where circles had been cut and small fires kindled. An old fieldstone wall had folded sheets of paper stuffed into the joints, some new, some turning to pulp.
“Himmelsbriefs,” I told the detective, “if they were spells for good or for healing. Otherwise they’re Teufelsbriefs—curses and sex magic.”
“A lot of bad stuff happened here.” the policeman said sadly.“I can tell you, I won’t miss Jacob Wockenfuss one little bit. He was a nasty old bugger, and I’m glad this house burned down.
“He got rich in the ’70s, during the Pimps’ War. Some of the older guys remember seeing him outside the courthouse, chewing tobacco and looking pleased with himself.
“This was a mill town, then, and there was lots of defense work, three shifts and plenty of overtime. Guys with money in the pocket, a boner in the shorts, and not much free time are inclined to go with whores. Whores need pimps, and commerce was cooking right along.
“Then Vietnam wound down, work dried up, and all of a sudden there was no room for five major pimps, so we experienced a period of market adjustment, so to speak. And there were a lot of people who were sort of unesscessary in the new scheme of things. That led to a whole bunch of really ugly homicides—stuff with knives, razors and sawed-off shotguns. Blood all over the place, and several of our more colorful citizens in jail.”
“Wockenfuss did what?” I asked.
“He did something for Cookie Brown—he was sort of the last man standing—and Cookie got two hung juries in a row, then it all went away.”
“I’ve heard that sort of thing before,” I told him. “More than one place, but not here.”
“After that, when a dope dealer had legal difficulties, Wockenfuss would get paid a wad of cash to do a pow-wow. We had a very bad run of not-guilty verdicts in strong cases. Ol’ Jacob was a man in demand.”
“We figure he pulled in close to a million dollars some years. Sometimes he did his thing as far away as Philly or Baltimore. He was a real piece of work.”
“What did he spend it on? That house was a dump.”
“Jacob had a taste for young girls. He bought them like hamsters to feed to a snake, and used them up.”
“I saw the feds busted a sex slave operation,” I said. “This is a dirty old town, and it knows how to keep its secrets.”
“Who are you, Guy Noir?” he laughed. “Yeah, it’s a snakepit. That cellar was pretty grim—we found whips, shackles, and an old brake drum full of long carriage bolts and charcoal, some really nasty looking knives . . .
“There were skulls in the hog pen, too.”
“No ham sandwiches for me for a while.”
“You and me both,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
“Wockenfuss was a real puzzle,” the detective said as smoke leaked out of his nose. “He was born Mennonite, got into some kind of trouble and ran away to join the Army—during Korea—and he dropped out of sight for years. Then he’s running occult scams on hippies, blacks and Puerto Ricans too, in York, all during the ’60s.
“After those pimps got aquitted, every dope dealer who got busted wanted him to do the hoodoo for them.”
I took a hard draw on my cigar and stomped the butt,“Do any good?”
“A lot of people walked.” he said,“More than should have.”
We got into the green Crown Vic and headed back to the city. My stomach felt like a sack of billiard balls and Tabasco sauce.
Bad memories and the distinct possibility of making more were tugging at my sleeve. |
I’ve led a bad life, very bad, and done things no one would be proud of, for reasons that were worse.
In 1967, I joined the Army to get away from home—that, I’ve never regretted—and found myself in Vietnam just in time to experience the famous Tet Offensive of 1968.
That led me to be part of the CIA contract army that fought the shadow war of the 1970s. The money was good, Bangkok was close, and I’d aquired a taste for bloodshed.
In ’75, I was with a small band of cut-throats scouting along the Laos-Cambodia border, looking for a good spot to establish an observation post, to call air strikes in on the North Vietnamese units moving south in that final offensive. It came a lot quicker than anyone was ready for, and that left ten bastard children of Uncle Sam in serious need of a place to go.
We ditched our radios and other equipment we didn’t need anymore, and lit out for the border of happy Siam, where we could surrender to a cop or an Army patrol, and hopefully get to squander our last paycheck on an epic debauch. We tossed our maps (they only covered the operational area anyway), took a bearing west with a lensatic compass, and started to hike.
Six days along, we encountered a patrol of somebody, and had a bejeesusly firefight, a real dust-up that got down to knives and fists in the end. When it was over, we were scattered all to hell and gone, and I was alone. My knife had a little compass in the butt, so I headed west and hoped for the best.
One day, I stumbled into a crappy little village full of ugly little tribesmen, the kind that the Vietnamese call moi—savages, the next thing to monkeys. I lived there for eleven months, a slave for sure—and maybe livestock, because these chauchaus were outright cannibals.
I often gathered herbs and such for the stewpot, and my advanced survival training paid off, because I found a little patch of Death Cap mushrooms one day, and sent the whole damned gang of them to hell, or wherever they might go. It was truly satisfying to hear the final screams of those murdering, simian degenerates.
After that, with a snootful of their crude rice wine, I climbed into one of their dugout canoes and floated off down a river I didn’t know. If you go downstream long enough you’ll find a settlement, and in a settlement, you’ll find a cop, and that cop will start you on a long strange trip to civilization.
When I got home, I used the G.I. Bill to go to college, and wrote a book, because when you don’t sleep much, you have time to write. I also wrote on the paranormal, because I was looking for answers to questions from that unknown jungle, and I could reuse the information I found in strange old books to turn out paperback potboilers and tabloid squibs.
I also wandered back into the shadow wars, this time in Africa. |
Walking down King Street, I thought about those twigs and the symbols on the disc. I’d seen them before in the villiage of the chauchaus, in the devil-devil hut, where the shaman did things even they didn’t want to know about.
They were sometimes used to summon something called the Dark Woman, which scared even the shaman.
The cold wind had kicked my butt, so I went to bed early. That was a really bad decision—my dreams were full of flutes, screams and those damnable shadow puppets. |
Next morning, I met the detective in a taco place on Market Street. Like most cops, he could eat anything, any time and in appalling quantities.
“I’ve got blowups of that disc,” he said between bites, with bits of lettuce on his chin.“We’re still trying to make sense out of some of the stuff we found in the basement. What the hell is this thing?” He raised a plastic evidence bag.
“It’s an evil-eye charm. They make them by the thousands in the Middle East.”
“And this?” He held up another bag.
My bowels turned to water.
It was just a metal disk, marked roughly with what looked like the international hazmat symbol. On the back was an inscription in late cuneiform, graven deep. The thing was very, very old, probably old when Rome was still strong, old when Joseph was sold into Egypt.
“This is just an old sex charm,” I lied. “I’d like to make a rubbing of it and send it to someone I know in Spain.”
“Keep the damned thing,” he said, “It’s just litter, no value as evidence.”
“You sure?” I asked, hoping he couldn’t read my voice and realize how much I wanted it.
I took the photos home, fired up my PC and got out my books.
The most difficult part of figuring out an inscription on a circular object is deciding where to start. I managed to get a pretty good part of it figured out—a lot of it was simply decoration, with no real meaning, but the rest referred to the Dark Mother and the Magnum Innominandum—it was basically a spell.
It was dark, my eyes were tired, and I needed a break, so I decided to head over to Lucina’s for something to eat and a beer.
York was (and still is) untamed urban frontier, so it was a hazardous trip. I could almost feel the street’s dark past as I walked.
The horrible hedge wizard Mohias Dung was a spiritual ancestor of Jacob Wockenfuss. Dung and his partner in supernatural crime, Mordecai Brenner, used the black arts to help Conway and Gates displace Washington and take over the Continental Army.
Donnie Snell the child murderer was out there, too, and James Rathling the Satanist, known as the York Ripper in the ’70s. Now only newspaper morgues and dusty police files remembered their crimes.
The Witch Murder of 1928 was barely known to the man-on-the-street, despite being the subject of several books, a TV show, a movie and a rock opera.
There was a lot more—too much to remember all at once.
A man fell into step with me, just behind my right shoulder. He was a lean black man in his fifties, with a bashed-around face and a wall-eye.
“You bes’ leave Isinagarrab be,” he said.“She don’ care fo’ peeples gettin’ into her bidness, her—no, she don’t, her.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He laughed, a low, dangerous chuckle.
“You know plenty, you!” The accent was Louisiana, deep bayou Creole, straight out of Voodoo country.
“Just leave dis be, mon, ev’ting gonna be all right, all get forgot about. Be so easy dat, don’ need to do nuttin’tall.”
“And if I decide not to do that?”
“De Lady, get all het up, bad tings happen—how you tink dat house get boint up? Wuzzant no lightnin’, nobody foun’ no gasoline, or like dat.
“Let it go, ev’body be happier, yes. De flars grow extra nice when de Lady feelin’ happy. Don’t you like flars, you?”
I turned to look at him, but he was gone.
The front door of Lucinda’s Place was right there.
I went in, sank a shot of John Power’s Irish, then ordered a cheeseburger and a basket of onion rings.
I told the barmaid to hold the pint of Bass until my food arrived. John Barleycorn was still waiting for me in ambush, so I kept a wary eye on him.
And I saw Lisa Paxton at the back booth.
She made an elegant gesture of invitation, and I joined her.
Lisa was a reporter for the local papers, a tall lanky woman with coal black hair, blue eyes and skin like polished bone.
“Hello, Lisa.” I said.
“Hello yourself,” she replied brightly.“Did you miss me?”
“Horribly, Lisa, it was a living hell.”
“I was afraid of that,” she said.“But I do appreciate the sentiment.”
“How’s the news business?” I asked her.
“Slow. I’m covering the return of the Felton beast.”
“Eight feet tall, shaggy, stinks like all the four-letter words that aren’t about sex, leaves two-foot tracks that have three toes, and delights in uttering blood-freezing screams in the small hours?”
“That’s the one.”
“There are local stories about goblins,” I told her as she posed prettily for me, “direct from the Old Country.”
“This is a very strange place,” she mused.
“If I were a little more serious, I’d write a book about the local folk magic. It’s the last remaining link with European witchcraft.”
“I thought that was a fantasy,” Lisa said.
“Not a bit of it, pretty lady—it was as real as a dime.”
“The Black Mass?”
“Oh, hell, yes.”
My food arrived, and Lisa began snatching onion rings.
“The medieval Church had a lot of unwilling members—younger sons, unmarriageable daughters, morons and gimps—inclined to rebel, so they turned Church ritual upside down.”
“The Esbat?”
“A survival of the old heathen festivals. A chance to let off some sexual steam and throw a moon at the spoilsports in the Church.”
“The Church didn’t like that!”
“Neither did the Lutherans—and when you own a rack, get a big share of the confiscated property, and like to see people cringe when you walk by, well, it’s an incentive.”
“Even today—why, look what happened to that awful old Wockenfuss man!”
“You know I can’t talk about that.”
“Dammit, I almost had you!”
“Not even close, Lisa, and I’m going to order more onion rings.”
“Oh, good! You do know they aren’t fattening if you don’t pay for them, don’t you?”
“I guessed, yes.”
“Nobody will talk about this killing,” Lisa said between delicate bites, “Not even my regular leakers.”
“This isn’t something the local leaders want getting around. This is Dogpatch, but there’s new money coming in every day. Last thing any of the plutocrats want is something queering the game just when the sun is peeking out.”
“You have that right,” she said, and looked under the table with an exaggerated show of nonchalance. “Nice shoes. Wanna fuck?”
“I still have the riding crop and the handcuffs,” I said.
“You’re too good to me,” she said, smiling. |
Afterwards, we were snuggled in my bed.
“I certainly hope those shoes hold up. Otherwise, I’ll need to think up a new line to use on you.” She actually giggled—a sophisticated, sexy giggle, but a giggle just the same.
“How many times have you used it?”
“Only on you. You’re my main squeeze, you know. You give good afterglow.”
“This is the best time, isn’t it?”
“Only if I come,” she said, and wriggled closer.
“What have you discovered about the Felton Beast?”
“No fair! If I can’t have any of the skinny on the Wockenfuss murder, why should I share my Sasquatch with you?”
“Because I can’t publish it and get you in trouble?”
“Well, there’s that,” she said, putting a firm, slender arm across my chest.“The Beast had the whole county’s grapes in a bunch in the late ’40s, then it was all but forgotten until about six months ago. First, people heard the screams, then a few locals started seeing it, or smelling it, and those three-toed footprints were appearing—I found some reports going back to Colonial times, and it’s always three-toed prints.”
“I wonder if the Indians saw this thing, too.”
“Native Americans,” she said in a muzzy voice.
I put my arms around her; haunts and trolls were forgotten as we went off to sleep together. |
I dreamed I was back in Africa, when I was following the secret wars, as a reporter and a combat soldier, back when I was finishing The Wind is my Enemy.
I was sitting in a cheap hotel in Rhodesia with “Lead-Kindly-Light” N’Gomo, my mortar sergeant, halfway through a bottle of Bell’s whiskey. Everybody called him Gus; the huge black man’s nom-de-guerre was a literate joke on his formidable education.
I topped off our glasses. In my dream I could taste the whiskey and feel the smothering African heat.
“Issinickarrab is something you don’t want to fool with," N'Gomo told me. “Hell, this war is bad enough. If you get tangled up with that, you’ll never spend your pay.”
“I never spend it anyhow,” I told him, and sank a quarter of my shot. “What would I buy?” |
The phone rang.
It was the detective from the District Attorney’s office.
“We have an arrest in the Wockenfuss case,” he said. “Some kid from Jacobus. He wanted money to go to California, so he built a fire on the old bastard to get him to give up his cash.
“He’s in the York Hospital with an overdose, probably won’t last the night, but he left a confession on his MySpace page.”
The story smelled as fishy as a tidal flat, but it would wrap everything up in a hurry. I wondered who used the kid’s computer, or if they did it from a public terminal at the library. I just hoped the overdose was self-inflicted. The kid was a patsy, and the whole story was a crock of shit that wouldn’t fool a hamster.
But it certainly served a number of vested interests.
I was well within my six-ounce daily ration, so I poured a John Power’s and sat down to contemplate developments.
“Mon, dis all ober wid!” the voice from behind my left shoulder said.“You let it go, you, keep the Lady happy.”
I didn’t even bother to look.
“Yeah, so now the flars will grow.”
He was gone. Phantoms don’t have much of a shelf life.
The next phone call was from Lisa.
“Hey, big man, would you drive a defenseless girl reporter down to Felton, and keep her safe from molestation?”
“I might scuff my shoes.” I said.
“I’m serious, I get the creeps down there. I think all the family trees have the same root. A lot of women have gone missing from there over the years.”
“Mostly lusty wenches stealing away with their burly swains, seeking a new life.”
“Horse puckey—these were the nothing-missing, food-on-the-stove and boyfriend-still-around examples of the sudden bye-bye, and not even a postcard afterwards.”
“That’s still pretty wild country,” I agreed. “Sure, I’ll go with you.”
Lisa was grateful. She was scared—this was a tough cookie who’d survived some crazy places, like Beirut, and she was scared.
But other than a good meal at a country café, the trip was futile. |
Later that week, I foraged in the library’s restricted collections and found a disturbing series of events along the Mason-Dixon Line.
Women and children had vanished, strange creatures had been sighted and pow-wow doctors had practiced their strange trade, all since before the Revolution. A house near a hamlet called Lucky had simply vanished in 1864. The Felton Beast had appeared periodically since before the Civil War, once it had been engaged by Mosby’s partisans to no effect. In 1897 a man left his mother’s house for his home less than a mile away, never to be seen again. In 1923 a violent electrical disturbance sent a volunteer fire department on a four-hour search that yielded nothing. Six high school students had embarked on a late night drinking-and-sex outing to celebrate the end of the school year in 1954; their skeletal remains were found by a deer hunter in 1957. And there were more.
I didn’t like how the numbers added up.
In a neglected German text on demonology, listing ranks of devils and fallen angels whom dark wizards might invoke, I read: |
Issinagarrab, a powerful demon of the night, called “The Dark Lady.”
She gives gifts of fertility, and can aid in discovering buried treasure, but she is jealous and quick to anger.
She appears as a black, horned beast with three toes, and she is best summoned on Walpurgis Night, or by the dark of the moon.
Engrave her seal on a fresh copper plate, taking care that the sun is down . . . |
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There was her sigil—the hazmat sign—with some angled lines and runes around it. I’d seen that before, in the chauchau village.
I sent a passle of emails, and the replies all said one thing.
Shub-Niggurath.
The Goat with a Thousand Young. |
That night, Lisa was sitting on my sofa wearing nothing but an extra-large tee shirt advertising tequila, working her Blackberry.
“I can’t write about the most interesting part of the story!”, she groused.
“Him being castrated probably makes the editor feel insecure.”
“Old Denny Keller—you know, been with the coroner’s office since the Stone Age—says this happens from time to time. Every ten years or so, they find a man on the Delta Road, gelded, dead or dying. What do you make of that?”
“Good ol’ boys grow up castrating animals on the farm, they get a taste for it.”
“They normally use pliers? Somebody put the goo in goonads with this guy, he died of shock on the way to the hospital.”
“Ouch!” I said.
“What’s this all about?”
Her blue eyes were drilling into me like augers.
“And don’t tell me you don’t know—I hate it when a man lies to me!”
“It suggests a few things.”
“Such as?”
“Ever hear of the Cult of the Magna Mater, Kybele or the Dark Mother?”
“I went through the feminazi Wiccan phase in college,” she said, looking down at her bare feet, with her head cocked to the side. “It was mentioned.”
“Castration figured in the worship of Kybele.” I said, “But Kybele was only a shadow.”
“Of what?”
“Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods.”
“You are making a feeble joke, right?”
“Nothing funny about this.”
“Next you’ll be telling me that Toad Road and the Hellmouth are real, too.”
“There’s something evil here, but it doesn’t have anything to do with that apple orchard in Hallam. There’s some truth to the Toad Road, along with the kid’s legends and the Halloween nonsense.”
“I think I need a drink.” Lisa said,“Is that flask of yours handy?”
I got it for her, she took a long gulp.
I told her the whole truth. She sat with those pretty feet tucked up under her, and listened, and believed.
“Good God!” she said when I was finished, and made a motion that told me she wanted the flask again.
“Something draws them here,” I told her.“Places seem to attract them—remember, what we think of as magic is science to them, a way of making the universe serve their will.”
“How can we defeat them?”
“We can’t. We have to hold them. We win by not losing, until they become dormant again.”
“That sucks!” she said bitterly. “That really bites the bag!”
“Duh? Primordial evil?” |
That was an interesting summer.
Weekends we scoured the countryside, searching out local legends and stories. Little wheat, but not all chaff.
We investigated the tales of Toad Road, and found a dark, lonely place, where ancient trees grew twisted and hostile, where strange sounds were heard in the night, and pale lights bobbed among the gnarled trunks.
We also invested in a case of short dogs, Gallo Tawney Port, and chatted up the local drunks. Shoestring people with cardboard lives, but they hear things, and go places where others don’t.
One toothless wreck, unkempt, unwashed, unemployed and sinking into total deriliction, was tempted by a bottle, and began a tangled tale:
“They’s this old church, congregation moved to a new one in Brogue, left it go to nothing. But comes dark of the moon, a whole buncha cars, mostly outta-state plates, pert fair buncha people, they come there and set up a heulluva racket, blowin’ fifes, beatin’ drums and rattlin’ off at the mouth with gobbydagook.
“I sleep in there ’times, place still has a good roof, even though they’s no winders, but come New Moon, I sleeps somewheres else.
“Plenny times I seen’m paradin’ through the woods, wearin’ them robes an’ funny hats, scared the hail outta me . . .” |
We found an account of a man who burned to death in his car while driving over the Conawingo Dam, and only left a scorch mark on the driver’s seat.
A woman’s body was dug up by stray dogs in 1968—showing signs of having been buried alive.
A young musician, known to be afraid of heights, fell to his death from a scenic observation point in a state park late one night.
Earth, air, fire and water, and the castration ritual every fifth year. Enough victims going undiscovered to obscure the succession of deaths. |
Halloween was coming, and on the New Moon.
I remember when snow flurries at Halloween were not unknown, but with the changing climate, the jean-jackets and boots had become polo shirts, shorts and sandals.
Lisa and I took advantage of the decidedly clement weather to install a low-light webcam to cover the ruined church, and I placed some illegal but effective wireless microphones inside.
At my apartment, I sent the feeds to some digital recorders. We could watch the place at any time, and never go near it.
I had hoped to put a pinhole camera inside, but that would have been pushing our luck.
October 31, early in the morning, a black, windowless van pulled up at the church and produced ten people.
They had rakes, brooms and shovels, and they efficiently cleared the sanctuary of wrappers, empty bottles and cans, twigs, leaves, knotted condoms and old newpapers.
They carried in a folding wooden altar, a black, embroidered pall, some exceedingly nasty-looking candlesticks and a small bundle wrapped in a dark scarf.
These people didn’t talk much. Mostly it was grunts, requests for help and terse commands. But then they knelt—we could hear the thuds and cracking joints—and chanted a brief litany in some guttural language.
“Sounds like puking!” Lisa said. |
After the sun was gone, cars began to arrive—cars with out-of-state plates.
The audio feed indicated some thumping and mumbling as the rear door opened and something was dragged in.
The celebrants wore long hooded robes and domino masks in dark colors.
Behind the chanting, we heard the pounding of hammers, and muffled, hooting cries.
There was more chanting, then the music of flutes and drums, ecstatic cries, desperate moans and frantic howls over the thud of dancing feet.
Lights flickered, and as the voices blended in a beseeching cri de coeur, something came to be.
It was a black cloud, shot with flashes of red lightning. It roiled and gave forth appendages we couldn’t quite make out.
We heard a horrible scream of terror and despair.
Not long after, the worshippers departed, automobiles crunching along the old gravel road, wending their many routes to their particular destinations.
A glow arose in that profaned church as the last car went out of sight. In an apallingly brief time, the dry old lumber was blazing furiously, a howling, violent conflagration, more like some pyrotechnic than a structure fire.
We held each other tight that night.
I was sorry I’d brought Lisa into contact with this. She became like Flitcraft, the man in Hammet’s Maltese Falcon, who’d seen the lid taken off life, and had a look at the works.
Some things leave a person changed forever.
I walked down to the City Market to grab some Indian at a new stall that just opened. One of Lisa’s collegues had reviewed it, said the food was really good.
As I walked, I heard the voice of my skinny black phantom from behind me.
“Whatchoo dun, you? Dis all be forgot aboud, jes’ lak’ allus.”
“I did what I could.” I said, and didn’t turn around.
As I savored my Murgh Vindaloo, the detective sat down opposite me with a huge soda and a very disorderly grinder sandwich.
He was dirty with smudges of soot on his face, his eyes red from fine ashes and dust.
“Jesus God, I’m tired,” he said.“Another arson with a fatality, an abandoned church down by the Maryland line.”
“Who was the victim?”
“We may never know—he was burned to charcoal, and dental records won’t help. He didn’t have any teeth.”
There are questions without answers.
Knowing is not always a comfort. |
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