Cradling his guitar, he pushed past us and walked forward.

The Mudman stopped moving.

The singers fell silent.

And the bear rose up on its hind legs.

The axe swung down swiftly and surely, deeply burying itself in Knight’s chest. The demon threw back its head and howled with laughter, then pulled Knight from the floor, his legs dangling as blood from his wound pumped down in heavy rivulets, splattering across the floor.

The demon opened its mouth, its jaws dislodging, dropping down, growing wider, until its face was nothing more than slick, dark maw, big enough to swallow a man whole.

Which is what it did.

Then spat out Knight’s guitar, that hit the floor and shattered into half a dozen pieces, the snapping strings a final death groan that echoed against the walls.

The demon turned around and walked toward the collapsed wall, then crouched down and began to move into the mounds of dirt, sludge, and muck, becoming less and less solid until it became what it had been; just mud.

I closed my eyes and began to cry. The Reverend came over and put his arms around me.

It didn’t help much.

11

We don’t talk about that night. Oh, every once in a while, when the four of get together to play cards, Grant McCullers will call us “The Wild Bunch” and everyone will get this look on their faces, but that’s as close as we come to discussing it.

One night Ted Jackson told us a story about something he’d seen after a recent labor riot that made me cringe, and Grant told us what had really happened at the Hangman.

We listened, and we all believed, but we don’t talk about it.

Like the Reverend says, this is Cedar Hill. Weird shit happens here.

Grant gave Beth and her kids five hundred dollars and put them on the bus to Indiana himself. Lump even got a seat, but he had to ride in a carrier, which didn’t please him too much from all reports. Beth and the kids promised to write and call Grant as much as they could, but if they’ve ever been in touch with him, he hasn’t said.

The basement was finally repaired after the Reverend got really pushy with a couple of local contractors. So far, it’s holding up fine.

Linus is touring with another carnival, once again as Thalidomide Man. He sends us postcards all the time.

I’d almost managed to learn how to live with what I saw, until one afternoon a couple of weeks ago when I was waiting at a crosswalk for the light to change.

A bird chirped.

A car backfired.

A child laughed somewhere.

The wind whistled.

And those four notes, in succession, in the right tempo, began that tune, and I remembered Knight’s words: The notes, they’re out there. They’re everywhere. A bird, the sound of the wind, a car backfiring…the notes are all over the place. And every so often, enough of them come together in the same place, at the same, and in the right tempo, that the doorway opens and he comes shambling in. And there’s not a goddamn thing you can do to stop it.