Luke gave the hole little more than a glance and stepped around it.

“Garrett—Luke—the fuck are you doing this for?” Whiskey shouted. “We’re your fucking brothers!”

Garrett answered with a bullet in the back of Whiskey’s knee. The boy keened into the dust.

A singed Polaroid drifted gently into the hole. Dirt whispered as it slipped over the spreading edge, just like Clark had heard in her dreams and a moment later, with a humid rush of air, the smell of rot billowed up from the open earth and overwhelmed her. The whispering voice rode on the stench, forced itself up Clark’s nose and down her ears and into her mouth and noosed itself around her mind and choked off every thought.

hatedhim, Bosheth whispered. youhatedhim

Clark couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t see her hands in front of her face. She was blinded by a vision of her brother, standing at the kitchen sink, telling her how afraid he was of this town, this county, this filthy trailer park where God knew what had been done to him. And how had she answered Troy?

By cursing him, running him out of her house, spitting on his truck. Troy had been trying to ask her for help—it was so obvious now—and Clark had been too petty and jealous to imagine that the man against whom she was always compared might need her help just as bad as she needed his. Cruel. Had anyone ever been so cruel as Starsha Marilynn Clark?

couldhavesavedhim

The voice was right. She could have saved him—could have loved him—but she had despised him instead. And now she couldn’t save anyone—not her brother, not her town, not a single soul here at this awful place. She had failed them all. She had always, would always

failthem

All around her, Clark heard a hungry sucking nose as the creature drew air into the pit, feeding on every doomed soul in the circle, because

—because now now now was the time, now was the time he had been waiting all these many years for, the reason he had hidden here, sleeping and licking old wounds and leaking with dreams. Now—at last—now he had burned enough blood to break open the trench and take shape in the dirt world, had found a vessel that could keep him tethered there, this boy who would help him stare at the stars again, yes.

Now was the time again for the stonethings and the bloodthings, the sandthings and the bonethings, all the things the carpenter had banished to the far place, all the things that now would beg to follow Bosheth across the trench, the things that would cry and the things that would weep and the things that would shout please, Bosheth, please forgive us, please: please give us a taste of your men.

And he would smile and he would tell them, When I’m through.

“Some of you we’ll keep in chains,” Garrett shouted. “And some of you will bring more people here. And some of you—”