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Somewhere between the death of Timothy Beals and the October afternoon when the young lovers had their brief discussion about her, Lucy Thompson came to the conclusion that God’s affection for humankind could best be measured by the joy He/She/Them/It seemed to take in the suffering of the innocent. If ever she had doubts on that score, there were always the occupants of the Walls of Madness to remind her, to reinforce her belief that God was a sadist and probably didn’t even know it, and it seemed to her that a Being of that sort deserved a more fitting title than the one given it by those ancient scribes who’d invented purple prose and decided to celebrate by authoring the Bible. She then took it upon herself to bestow this Being with a more appropriate moniker, and when at last it came to her, it was so simple...

Lucy had always thought of God not as “He” but in terms of He/She/Them/It. She wrote those four words down one night while, on the outskirts of Ross County some ninety-plus miles away, Mr. Hands was slowly, gleefully peeling the face off of Karen Lawrence, who’d killed her infant son Billy with a hot iron because he wouldn’t stop crying, and who was later acquitted by a jury of her peers because several reputable doctors had testified that she was suffering from a severe case of Post-Partum Depression and was not responsible for her actions.

As Karen Lawrence was releasing the last horrified, ragged, gore-clogged scream of her life, God’s new title came to Lucy.

Rearrange the words He, She, Them, and It so they read: She, He, It, and Them, then take the first letter of each word and—presto!—you have the perfect acronym for a Being who seemingly created the innocent so It could rejoice in their suffering.

Ergo, God became SHIT.

Lucy liked that right down to the ground.

Vengeance is Mine, sayeth SHIT; Let us pray to SHIT and rejoice in SHIT’s love for us; I believe in one SHIT, the Feces Almighty, maker of monsters and death; SHIT is great, SHIT is good, let us thank SHIT for this food...

Yes. To the glory of SHIT, who rejoiceth in the tortured screams of the innocent.

It restored certain grace-notes to her soul, and made the rest so easy. There was never any guilt over the deaths of the monsters; in fact, she hadn’t slept so well in years as she had in the last fifty days—and she had Detective Emerson to thank, in part, for that.

For almost two months now, three times a week, Lucy had been volunteering at the local offices of Licking County Children’s Services. Most of it was gruntwork—filing, typing, routing phone calls, making coffee—but it was the type of gruntwork that, while very much appreciated, went for the most part unsupervised.

Which meant access to files. Two of the dispatched monsters had been chosen from those files. Lucy had been very careful to choose monsters who lived outside of Cedar Hill, and had made doubly sure that Mr. Hands dispatched them while she was at the office, in full view of witnesses.