Half-Made Girls Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any person, living or dead, business establishments, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  HALF-MADE GIRLS

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Pitchfork Press

  Copyright © 2014 by Sam Witt

  Cover art by KPGS

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  First Edition: September, 2014

  Half-Made Girls

  Book One of the Pitchfork County Series

  By

  Sam Witt

  Digital Edition

  Dedication

  To my wife, who helps me become better every day.

  To my daughters, for inspiring me to chase the dream.

  To my readers, whose energy and feedback helped make this book everything it could be.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE NIGHT MARSHAL had wanted to start his Sunday morning around midafternoon. He’d wanted to roll out of bed and drown his hangover’s ghost in a belt of Gentleman Jack straight out of the bottle. He’d wanted a breakfast of fried sausage patties sandwiched in one of his wife’s drop biscuits, the whole mess slathered with drooling-warm honey butter.

  Instead, he’d started the Sabbath by hauling his eight-year-old daughter across Pitchfork County to get a look at the mutilated girl some asshole cultists had hung from a cross.

  The Night Marshal took a deep breath, killed the truck, and climbed down from its cab.

  He couldn’t remember the last day that had gone as planned.

  The Night Marshal picked his way through the labyrinth of police cars and wandering peace officers surrounding Red Oak Baptist Church. His skull ached and his guts rumbled with the memory of last night’s bottle of whiskey. He crossed his fingers behind his back and offered up a silent prayer that this would be nothing, that he could pass it off to the sheriff as a mundane crime and crawl back into bed until the unfriendly morning gave way to a more reasonable afternoon.

  Elsa, his daughter, hopped along beside him with her peculiar, hands-and-feet gait. A heavy clay mask covered her face, and her tawny hair frizzed out around its twine straps like a lion’s mane. Strange mumbles leaked from the mask’s ragged mouth slit, an old man’s voice struggling to form words with a little girl’s lips. Joe had never been able to get used to his daughter’s little friends speaking through her mouth.

  A half-dozen eager young deputies stopped picking their asses long enough to try and stop Joe from ducking under their crime scene tape, but he tapped the Night Marshal’s badge pinned to his flannel shirt, and they faded from his path like the early morning fog burning off in the sun.

  “What’s in there?” Joe’s hobnailed boots crunched to a stop on the gravel drive. The sheriff turned to the Night Marshal and squirted a brown glob of tobacco spit into the weeds lining the crushed stone driveway leading up to the old church. The two men stared at each other for most of a minute, breath steaming in the chill morning air between them. Joe stared down at the sheriff and shifted the strap of the heavy shotgun hanging from his left shoulder.

  “This is a crime scene, Joe.” Sheriff Dan Schrader hitched his belt up over his sagging gut and tossed a thumb back over his shoulder at the church. “How ‘bout I give you a call when my boys are done in there?”

  “This is Pitchfork County, Dan.” If the sheriff had dispensed with titles, Joe saw no reason to keep up the formalities. There’d been simmering resentment and mutual disgust between the two of them since Joe had taken up the badge and started rousting haints most of two decades ago. “You don’t get to decide whose crime scene this is. I do.”

  Joe took a step toward the church, but the sheriff stepped in front of him. “You can’t go in there. I’m asking nicely, but if you try and walk around me again, you and I are going to come to a hard place.”

  Elsa hissed at the sheriff, the mask amplifying her thin voice with echoing layers of menace. Joe glanced down at his daughter crouched next to him and nudged her with the side of his boot. The girl folded her arms around her knees and snorted with agitation.

  “Dan, did you call me while the sun was still dreaming and tell me to drag my sorry butt out of bed and halfway across this godforsaken county with my sleepy little girl in tow?” Joe waited for the sheriff to answer his question, then went on when it became clear he would get no response. “You did not. Now, who do you think did wake me up at the ass crack of dawn on a Sunday morning?”

  The sheriff rubbed the stubble on his flabby chin with the pad of his thumb. He stared down at the dusty gravel between his toes. Mentioning the Long Man, the strange old bastard who crouched above Pitchfork at the Black Lodge and gave orders to the Night Marshal, was enough to give most men raised in the county pause.

  “Dan, are you trying to upset the person who called me?”

  The sheriff grumbled and stepped aside. As Joe passed the lawman, he heard the faint, crisp snap of a holster’s safety strap popping fre
e.

  Joe froze, his back to Dan. “Next time you lay hands on that gun around me, we’re going to find out who’s faster.”

  Joe stomped up to the church’s heavy doors. He plucked his deeply creased Stetson from the crown of his head, revealing a thicket of night-black hair salted with a shotgun blast pattern of stark white at each temple. He hung his hat on the top corner of the open door. The Night Marshal licked the ball of this thumb and drew a single vertical line in the air, then wiped his thumb dry and crossed the threshold with his daughter scurrying along behind him.

  Joe stopped inside the church and let his eyesight adjust to the sanctuary’s gloom. After the bright morning sun, the shadows were a welcome relief for his throbbing hangover. The bitter tang of incense filled the small church, which did little to hide the sharp tang of blood that leaked into Joe’s nose with every breath. That didn’t help his hangover quite so much as the gloom.

  Elsa growled and scampered away from her father, mask bobbing up and down between pews as she made her way around the church, hunting. Joe didn’t worry about her while she wore the mask. With one of the spirits inside her, the girl was more mature and better prepared to deal with this mess than he was. The dead had seen it all.

  The biting stink of the incense made Joe’s head throb and his empty, whiskey-curdled stomach roil in protest as he drew near the altar. His appetite shriveled up and died, which was just as well because that sausage-and-biscuit sandwich was long hours away judging by the mess hanging from the church’s crucifix.

  Joe stood before the altar and pinched the bridge of his nose. Guttering flames clung to the wicks of heavy candles on the old oak, and thin columns of black smoke rose from them to disappear under the filthy-white dress of the young woman hanging from the cross.

  Thick coils of barbed wire dug into the pale skin of her biceps and thighs. Blood dripped off the wire’s tines to form silver-dollar-sized puddles on the altar below. Knowing this place, the ancient wood had drunk up far more blood than it left standing. Red Oak’s appetite was a thing out of legend.

  “Who did this to her, little bit?”

  Elsa’s head poked up from between a pair of pews and shook slowly from side to side. The mask’s eyes glowed a flat blue that left lingering trails in the gloomy air.

  “Of course, you don’t know.” Joe stepped closer to the altar and rolled his aching head on his stiff neck. Elsa had a deep well of knowledge to drink from in the shadow world of spirits, but there were limits to what she could dredge up.

  The blood stink crawled down the back of Joe’s throat and stirred the burbling pool of bile and stale whiskey it found at the bottom of his belly.

  He should not have picked up the second bottle last night, no matter how Stevie tested him. Even with all that booze in his belly, so drunk he could hardly stand, he’d still almost gotten up from the couch and stumbled down to his wife’s shack in the dead of night. The unwholesome attraction was like a lodestone in his guts, pulling at him night and day since the moment they were married. Joe wished to all the gods he knew that woman had never crossed his path, and knew she felt the same. They hated one another now, the innocent love of their teenage years knotted into a noose around their hearts by a hateful love hex.

  Joe swallowed hard and looked up into the bloody mess where the girl’s face should have been. Whoever had taken the time to wire her up had also taken the time to peel her skull from the ears forward. They’d taken her hand, too, and flensed her forearm away so her wrist narrowed to a spear tip of glistening white bone. They’d taken her feet, too, whittling her calves down to rough points. Joe took a bandana from his back pocket and held it under the girl until it caught three drops of blood. He folded it over on itself and tucked the worn cloth back into his pocket for safekeeping.

  He got as close to the altar as he could without touching it and took a good hard look at the girl. Her legs were ringed by spidery spirals of smudged-ink script that crawled down from her knees in flowing strings that made Joe’s brain itch when he looked at them straight on. He paced around to examine her left forearm and saw the same curving line of madness swirling out from her elbow.

  He went over her wounds again. The edges were tapered and smooth, not like cuts. Like her skin had never been there at all, and was just now starting to grow over the exposed bones.

  “You come to any conclusions yet?” Schrader stood in the doorway with both hands on his belt. “Or are you just fucking up my crime scene for shits and giggles?”

  Joe rubbed his dry eyes. His headache wasn’t getting any better.

  “You think this is what I want to be doing on a Sunday morning? I want to be sleeping in my bed as much as you want me gone.” Joe returned to the front of the altar to get a clearer look up at the girl’s bloody face. Her hair hung down on either side of the carnage and ran into the thick red bib that stained the front of her tattered white dress. Flies crawled across the bloody cloth, wings buzzing, labella licking. They walked in eccentric, widdershins circuits around one another, crossing paths in complex, eye-watering patterns.

  Joe looked away from the flies and up into the girl’s face. He could just make out the edges of more script, a band of arcane bullshit that tangled in the roots of her widow’s peak and followed her hairline back behind her ears. He watched the girl for several long seconds, until he saw what he hoped he wouldn’t. “But I don’t think either one of us is going to get what he wants this morning.”

  “Why not? You’ve let us clean up plenty of dead bodies for you over the years. Don’t see why this poor girl’s gotta be different.”

  “Well, Dan, that’s the first place you’re wrong.” Joe straightened up and lifted one of the candles from the altar, careful not to touch the old wood. “This girl’s not dead.”

  “This is God’s house, Joe. Why you want to tempt fate by lying to me here?” Dan walked up the central aisle of the sanctuary, giving Elsa a wide berth and hitching his belt up as he went. “That girl’s been up on that cross all night, at least. You and I both know she’s lost a lot more blood than what we see on that altar. I can see from here she’s not breathing. That’s what we professional law enforcement types refer to as deceased.”

  “You ever get used to being wrong all the time, Dan?” Joe held the candle’s flame just beneath the mess of the girl’s left leg. Soot stained her exposed bones black, and the words written on her skin grew blacker still. They gleamed like molten silver in the candlelight.

  “This is still a crime scene. Try not to fuck it up by setting the corpse on fire.”

  “Patience is a virtue, Sheriff.” Joe raised the candle up to the girl’s knee and watched as rising heat from the candle brought a pink blush to the her milky skin.

  The crucified girl moaned, a low, grating sound. Her leg jerked against the barbed wire, and fresh drops of blood spilled onto the altar. Joe pulled the candle away and turned to the sheriff.

  “This one’s not dead yet. She’s not alive just yet, either.” Joe jerked his thumb back over his shoulder toward the crucifix. “You still want the scene?”

  “I never should have taken this job.” Dan’s shoulders slumped. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Cut that girl down and lock her up at the station.” Joe snapped his fingers and Elsa came scrambling to him over the pews. “I’ll come by after sundown for a chat. Maybe she’ll be livelier then.”

  Elsa jumped into Joe’s arms and wrapped her arms around his neck, hooked her legs around his hips, and pressed her masked face against his cheek. The words she spoke were not her own. “She is the first seed, the planting before the harvest. Others will follow. The Haunter will reap them all.”

  The little girl shuddered and went limp in Joe’s arms. A dainty snore leaked out from behind the mask. It was time to go.

  Joe walked out of the sanctuary, whispering soothing words to his daughter. The mask was already crumbling, and the spirit it held would be leaving her soon enough. He didn’t want her at the s
cene when that happened. Last time, things had gotten messy. He was nothing if not protective of his family, even the members that scared him spitless.

  The sheriff trailed Joe out to his beat-up pickup and leaned against the hood while the Night Marshal got his daughter buckled up and tucked a heavy wool blanket up under her chin. It was chilly out, and he didn’t want her catching cold once the spirit wasn’t there to keep her warm.

  “Is it starting again, Joe?” The sheriff chewed at the inside of his cheek. A brown bead of tobacco juice sprouted at the corner of his mouth and trickled down through the rusty stubble on his chin. “Most of my boys are new. They aren’t ready for your brand of business just yet.”

  Joe walked back to the church. He fetched his hat off the door and eyeballed the girl inside. The first glimmers of real fear crawled up his spine and got their hooks deep into the kicking haunches of his lizard brain. He crammed the hat down over the top of his head and stomped back to the truck.

  “Joe, I asked you a question.” Dan spit onto the ground between them. Joe’s eyes flicked to the brown stain on the ground, then back to the sheriff.

  “This is Pitchfork. It’s not starting. It never stopped.” Joe hauled himself into the pickup’s cab, started it with a rough crank of the ignition, and slewed the truck around in a gravel-spewing circle as he headed to his next stop.

  He watched the sheriff in the rearview. Dan stomped back to the crime scene and barked nervous orders to his men, who seemed unsure of how to follow them. No one moved toward the church.

  Joe hoped the girl didn’t get too lively while the sheriff was getting her off the cross. Dan would never stop bitching if she ate all his deputies, and Joe just didn’t have the stomach to listen to his whining this morning.

  He had monsters to catch.

  CHAPTER 2

  JOE HATED PITCHFORK County. Driving along its shitty roads under the shadow of its haunted mountains felt like picking at scabs. Every landmark held some cursed tale; every little town festered like a boil on the Earth’s face. All he’d wanted from the time he was old enough to drive was to get the hell away from this place before its demons could drag him down and ruin him like they’d ruined his old man.