Devil's Oven (32 page)

Squatting in the parking lot, he drank from the bottle, letting some of the sticky fluid run over his chin and onto the ground. It was sweet and coated his mouth and throat. It filled his stomach.

He waited.

The lot was dark. After a few minutes, a single crow, drawn by the liquor pooling on the asphalt, lifted from the rooftop and glided down to land beside him. When he didn’t move, the crow took a few careful steps toward the puddle of liquid.

The moon was gone, reminding him of the night he had spent in the woods, in the hole beneath the tree. Nothing as strong as desire piqued him, but the image of the house came to him, of the room with the soft floor. Comfort.

The crow finished drinking and backed away. It squatted, shook its feathers, and defecated. When it finished, it stared up at him.

He looked down at the bird’s opaque eyes, and if he could have formed the thought, the words, he would have said it seemed he was looking into his own eyes.

The bird hopped toward the hillside and raised its wings to fly to the top of the concrete retaining wall. It landed, then looked back at Anthony as though it wanted his attention. After a moment, it took off up the hill.

He followed.

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

“They’re coming,” Jolene said. “We have to go.”

She had gotten Ivy calm enough to drink some tea and eat a few bites of a shortbread cookie. The items in the kitchen cabinets were arranged in much the same way she had arranged them herself, up in the trailer thirty years earlier. Despite Anthony, and the urgency Jolene felt about keeping Ivy safe, she clung to the sense of familiarity it gave her.

“I should wait for him,” Ivy said.

Jolene went to the closet and started pulling out jackets. “Which one is yours?” She pushed a warm-looking barn coat at Ivy. “Put this on,” she said.
How easily I’ve slipped into taking care of her.

“He’s going to come back for me,” Ivy said. “I’m waiting. You can go. You should’ve gone before, when I asked you. You don’t belong here.” Her mouth was set, the scar on her lip now a slash of red that had deepened in color as she became more agitated.

“They’re going to find Thora. You can’t be here.”

If they stayed at the house any longer, Jolene would have no chance to find Anthony. If he returned while the police were there, they were all lost. The police couldn’t help Anthony. They couldn’t even kill him. She was the only one. She and Ivy had to find him.

“I don’t care.”

“You’ll care a lot when you’re sitting in jail for Thora’s murder.”

Oh, she hated to be so cruel. She hated to see the alarm in Ivy’s eyes. Worse was the thought of Ivy being with Anthony again. He would kill her eventually; she no longer had anything for him. Surely it was Lila he wanted now. Lila with her glittering sexuality. Lila with her hearty, haughty air. There was something about Lila that reminded Jolene of her own mother, of the woman her mother had been before the mountain had changed her. The woman who danced. Who laughed. Lila’s life force shone through Anthony’s darkness, appealing to what he had once been.

“Thora was taunting him. Thora hated him.”

“Of course she hated him, Ivy. He’s evil. He’s not a man anymore. He’s…” What was he?
An expression of hell.
The brutal half of the dual nature of life. Death itself. Greedy death, the same that had gripped her mother and Byron, Ivy’s father. The greedy death that had taken her own father and baby brother, Samuel. The same greedy death she had denied by hiding herself away in the mountain’s flesh.

Jolene watched as an unfamiliar shadow of cunning crossed Ivy’s face. In that moment, she looked most like her father. It chilled Jolene.

“I won’t go unless you help me find him,” Ivy said.

“What if we do find him?” Jolene said. “Do you think he’s going to take you away with him? Do you think there’s going to be some kind of happily-ever-after with him?”

From the moment Bud left, she had known she’d have to keep Ivy with her in order to keep her out of the hands of the police. Ivy didn’t need to know that the bigger reason they had to go was because they had to find Anthony. She felt as though she were cheating by fooling Ivy.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ivy said. “I just want to be with him.”

•  •  •

As soon as they stepped onto the trail, Jolene felt a change in the wind. It was fragrant and warm, like early summer. It told her where they would find Anthony. She reached for Ivy’s hand.

“Please, Ivy,” she said. “Please trust me.”

She knew Ivy had lived a lifetime of mistrust because of her. But she needed Ivy’s strength, Ivy’s connection to the mountain—the best part of the mountain—if she was going to save her daughter. Could she save herself? She didn’t know.

She stood waiting, as though there weren’t police coming for Ivy, as though a dead man wasn’t terrorizing people she cared about, as though their world wasn’t about to end.

CHAPTER SIXTY

He followed the crow for a while. Every so often, it would swoop down, flapping madly to stay in front of him, close to the ground. If he stopped, it lighted in a nearby tree, waiting. If he veered off the crow’s intended course, it flew at his head with a vicious cry.

  A frigid wind began to buffet him, keeping him from heading too far up the mountain. Whatever he had drunk made him tired. Hungry. He wanted to be where it was warm. He had to find the small woman.
Ivy
.

The third time the crow came at him, he swung his arm wide, knocking the crow to the dirt.

Ahead, the trees seemed to beckon, parting with light.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Hearing Tripp shouting from the porch, Lila sprang from the couch to press against the front door to listen. The back of her head throbbed and bled, but it was nothing compared to the way her heart pounded in her chest. How had Tripp not noticed? The fall against the table had dizzied her, but hadn’t knocked her out. Certain that Tripp would leave her alone eventually, she had played dead the best she could. The troopers’ arrival was just luck.

She looked around for the gun. Of course he would have it with him. Her choice was between chancing a run out the front door past him, or out the back.

He would kill her either way.

What if
he
was waiting in the woods? Surely he had followed her. He was so fast. Inhuman. But he hadn’t caught her again. Despite the bath at the trailer, she could still feel his rubbery skin against hers, smell the sour-sweet odor of decay that clung to him. She knew she could douse herself in gasoline and it would never go away.

There wasn’t really any choice about what she had to do. Tripp was insane. If he caught her, she would die anyway.

Lila ran to the back door and slid it open as quietly as she could. Her bare foot was so numb that she could hardly feel the cold of the stone patio beneath it. She pressed herself against the outer wall of the cabin. As she followed it, she let one hand trail against it as though doing so would keep her from being sucked into the endless forest a few yards away. The shouting continued as she crept, but the words were lost to the blood pulsing in her ears.

When she reached the corner of the cabin, she saw that the front yard was a field of gray, misty light, broken by the stubby outline of a man in a suit and overcoat.

That thing lying in the glare of the truck’s headlights. The thing that had brought them all to this place.
She had wanted to vomit when she saw it. But given all she had seen since then, poor Claude Dixon’s body might have been a bad fake from a carnival freak show.

“Bring her out here, you bastard, or I’ll kill you myself!”

Lila felt the shell of her nightmare shatter inside her, and she was almost driven to her knees with pain. But she forced herself out into the yard, screaming Bud’s name.

•  •  •

“Lila!” Tripp’s voice rose over Lila’s as she stumbled across the winter-browned grass toward the wall of cars and police.

The voice inside his head was back. It mimicked him cruelly:
LilaLilaLilaLilaLilaLila!
Stupid cunt! Shoot her!
The voice was metal scraping against his brain.

She had fooled him again. He had always been her fool, like in one of those idiotic fifties songs his mother was always singing.

Puuuuuuuuussy whipped!

Lila, his love, didn’t want him. Didn’t understand. He was going to die without her. He saw her as she was in the picture on his phone, laughing, loving him, even as she had fallen on the ice. Like they were kids. Her breath had been warm on her lips as he kissed her. How had she forgotten?

“Lila!” he screamed, raising the gun.

•  •  •

Lila ran, oblivious to the cold and the grass and the sharp gravel, oblivious to everything but the certain knowledge that Tripp was going to kill her. Ahead, Bud was being forced to the ground by two troopers. When she was within a few yards of him, she heard Tripp yelling her name a second time. She reached out for Bud, who was struggling to get to her despite the two giants holding him down, and almost touched him as she stumbled to the ground.

As the gunshots rang out above her, her mind automatically counted: one, two, three, four, five, before they became a thunderous blur.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

“You’re not going to find him,” Lila said. The words felt heavy on her tongue. “He’s going to kill us all.”

The chaos following Tripp’s death—a blur of trooper uniforms and terse orders—had subsided. His body lay on the porch, waiting for the coroner to arrive. She found she couldn’t look back at the cabin.

Why can’t I feel anything?

One of the EMTs, a woman with calloused but tender hands, was treating the wound on the back of her head.
What about inside? What about the pictures of hell in my head? The smell of that animal on my body?
Those things were hiding now but she could feel them waiting for the moment she closed her eyes. The EMTs had wanted her to get in the ambulance, but she told them she wasn’t going anywhere without Bud, who was still in handcuffs. Lila hated how worn he looked. She hated that she had done this to him.

The detective, Burns, told her about Danelle’s murder, and that Bud was in custody because he had shot a police dog and obstructed an investigation. There was also something about his escaping custody, which she wasn’t quite able to process.

“Detective Johnson and some uniforms are on their way over to that woman’s trailer,” Burns said. “There’s nobody who can’t be caught. Eventually.”

She expected him to look at Bud, but he had the sense not to. Bud had practically given himself up. One of the troopers had taken off Bud’s cap, one she’d never seen before. Usually his closely shaved head made him look intimidating. Intensely masculine. Now all she could see was vulnerability. What if she was the strong one in the end? He had spent all his time taking care of her, and she had done nothing but hurt him.

“I know who he is,” Bud said. It wasn’t a loud exclamation, but everyone around them paused and looked at him.

“How?” Lila said.

“Dwight knows him.”

“What’s his name?” Burns said. He drew a pen and a small notebook from the inside breast pocket of his overcoat.

“Anthony,” Lila said. “Ivy called him Anthony.”

“
Saint
Anthony,” Bud said. They held each other’s gaze across the few feet separating them.

“A saint, huh?” Burns said. “Maybe you or Mr. Yarbro can give me a last name?”

“I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter,” Bud said. “He’s dead. Dwight killed him.”

Lila gasped. Was it possible? How long had it been since she left Anthony back at the trailer?

“Were you with Mr. Yarbro when this happened?” the detective said. “Telling us the location of the body would be a good thing, Mr. Tucker.”

“I can’t tell you because it’s not there anymore. Dwight killed him the night he got into town, maybe a week or two ago. Cut him up. Buried him here on Devil’s Oven. Apparently Dwight used to do that kind of thing for a living.”

“Oh, God.” Lila bent over, clutching her arms against her stomach.
He’s been inside me. Death has been inside me.

The EMT grabbed her from behind to steady her.

“Mrs. Tucker needs to be in the hospital,” she said.

A brown SUV pulled up the driveway. Lila could hear staticky voices coming from one of the troopers’ cars. She wanted to be somewhere else, away from this hellish mountain.

“Couple of weeks ago?” Burns closed his notebook. “I don’t have time for this, Mr. Tucker. Right now, it seems like you’re trying to tell me some kind of story to keep yourself out of jail.”

“Ivy Luttrell dug him up. Sewed him back together.”

Lila had known. Somehow she’d known he wasn’t human
.

Burns shook his head. “Give me a friggin’ break,” he said.

The sound started as a slow rumble, like thunder, coming from the west. They turned as one. With the sound came a wall of light, a silver dawn that rushed at them through the pines.

Lila broke free of the EMT and ran to Bud, throwing her arms around his neck. She hid her face against his chest, praying that whatever was happening would happen quickly. If it took them, it would be all right because they were together.

Helpless in the cuffs, Bud pressed his face into her hair. Later, when they were safe, far away from this place, he would remember the mineral taste of it against his lips, how the mountain had stripped it of its sweetness.

A great moaning filled their ears, as though the heart of the earth was breaking.  The ground quavered and rolled, knocking Burns and one of the uniforms off their feet. The uniformed trooper would be blind for months from the searing light. Across the yard, the upper timbers of Tripp’s cabin yawed. The porch roof detached from the rest of the cabin with a sound like a thousand branches snapping, and collapsed onto his body.