P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“Or she already has,” Carrie said. “Or Nathan’s gone and taken them up to some hole in the mountains where he’ll bury them alive.”

“Gone where?”

“Shit, take your pick. To any one of the hundreds of hideouts, caves, old mines, sinkholes, you name it, up there in that ten thousand acres of blank space on the map the state calls game lands.”

“First things first,” I said. “Let’s go do what no one else has ever been able to do.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Get inside that cabin.”

“Why not wait for backup?” she said. “Get the Bigs here, at least.”

“Time, Carrie, time. You know what might be happening in there, now that she knows someone’s rumbled their operation.”

“I can just imagine the kinds of things Grinny Creigh will have in her house,” she said. “Can’t wait to go inside.”

I turned to look at her. “What’s the matter-that witchy-twitchy bullshit didn’t get to you, did it?”

She looked away. “No,” she said, most unconvincingly.

“Aw, for God’s sake, Carrie,” I said. “Focus! There might be a half dozen little girls in there, and they’ve absolutely got something to be scared of. Let’s not give her any time to think about this. We need to go back there, eliminate the dog problem, and get inside. No one else is going to do it.”

She didn’t reply.

“Okay, look,” I said. “Watch your cell phone. You get a signal, tell me to stop, call your boys, get ’em out here.”

It took us an hour to get over to the cave. We hadn’t spent too much time around the remains of Laurie May’s cabin, which was indeed all gone. Even in the moonlight, the pile of blackened rubble was a desolate sight among all the pretty flower beds and the fenced yard.

Carrie had been unable to reach the Big brothers. Our problem now was that the Creigh dogs didn’t show up when they should have. Carrie figured Grinny had retrieved them and put them back under the house. It was one thing for us to hole up in a cave and shoot them as they attacked. It would be another thing altogether if we were creeping Grinny’s cabin and they all appeared at once like the last time.

“We shouldn’t have left,” I said. “We could have dispatched that whole pack right there from the car.”

“And if those kids are there, Grinny would have been down in the basement cutting throats while we were eliminating attack dogs,” Carrie said.

The field leading down to the Creigh cabin was just as bare of cover as before. I’d brought the spotting scope and spent some time scanning the whole compound, but that wasn’t helping us get any closer. It was nearly midnight, and we needed to either back out and get some help or get down there and start some shit.

“Cam-look,” Carrie said, pointing down the hill. I looked. A child was walking out of that tree line that ran down alongside Grinny’s cabin. I swung the scope around. She was blond, almost white-haired, wearing a long dress that reached to her ankles. Her face was pinched and scared, and she was somewhere between eight and ten years old. And she was coming right up the hill toward us like a diminutive ghost.

My God,” Carrie said. “They are in there.”

“And can you tell me how she knows we’re up here in this fucking cave?” I asked.

Carrie had no answer for that and neither did I. If ever I wished for a working cell phone it was right then, which is when I remembered that the cave was a signal point. Nathan had captured my ass when I stepped out to improve the signal.

“Cell phone works here,” I said. “Call the Bigs.”

She looked at her phone, swore, and called the Bigs. I watched the little girl climb the hill, and then remembered to put away the guns and to make the shepherds lie down. She looked scared enough as it was. I heard Carrie talking to someone, so I stepped out, without the guns, to wait for the child to make it up the long hill. I hoped she wasn’t a stalking horse for some guy with a long gun down at the cabin, but she was coming purposefully, as only a frightened child could. I cursed M. C. Mingo, Hayes, Grinny, and all their works.

Carrie snapped the phone shut behind me. “Zoo city in Marionburg,” she said. “Sam’s there with an SBI squad, and there’s real goat-grab under way. Bigger John says he’s heard talk of the Bureau coming in. I told him to back out and meet us at Laurie May’s.”

“Look at her,” I said, and Carrie looked. The child knew precisely where we were. She was almost there, and we could hear her puffing with the exertion of climbing the hill.

“You go out there and talk to her. She’ll be scared of me.”

“Right,” Carrie said, and went partway down the hill to meet the child. I went back to the spotting scope to make sure there wasn’t some Creigh snake-in-the-grass setting up on Carrie. A moment later, the two of them came into the cave. The child recoiled when she saw the shepherds.

I told her it was all right and brought each dog over to lick her hands. She relaxed, but only a little, so I took the dogs to the cave entrance with me, where I went back to the scope and Carrie sat down to talk to the little girl.

“What’s your name, sweetie?” she asked.

The girl put a grubby fist in her mouth for a moment before answering. Her eyes were pale blue and just the slightest bit out of focus. “Honey Dee,” she said. “I’m Honey Dee.”

“Well, Honey Dee, what are you doing out on this big old hill so late at night?”

The girl closed her eyes for a moment, as if she were recalling a rehearsed message. She was wearing a long white shift and had a frilly little bonnet on her head embroidered with crude yellow bees. She continued to nibble on a knuckle; then she got the message out.

“Grinny says y’all have to leave us alone, or we all goin’ in the glass hole.”

I stopped breathing for a moment when I heard that. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Carrie stiffen.

“Who else is down there with Grinny?” Carrie asked.

The little girl had to think about that. Then she began to count on her fingers and name names. She named five more names.

“So there’s six of you in the house?” Carrie asked.

That provoked some more heavy-duty brow wrinkling. Somehow I didn’t think Honey Dee was operating with a full deck, not with that partially vacant expression I’d glimpsed earlier. Vacant? Or partially blind? I couldn’t tell. Then she counted laboriously on her fingers to six this time and nodded.

“What is the glass hole, Honey Dee?” Carrie asked gently.

Honey Dee shrugged. She didn’t know.

“But it’s a bad place?”

She nodded vigorously. Bad place.

“Do you know where it is?”

More head shaking.

“Is it downstairs, under the house?”

Another shrug. Fist back in her mouth, and then a yawn.

“Keep her here or send her back?” I asked quietly, still sweeping the area with the scope. I was looking for dogs.

Carrie sighed. “I think we have to send her back. We keep her…”

“Yeah.” Then I saw movement on the front porch of the house. It was too dark to see what it was, but the shape was big enough for it to have been Grinny. I told Carrie, and the child perked up. Interestingly, she seemed more eager than fearful.

Carrie took the child’s hand and walked back out into the open. She pointed down the hill and told her to go to Grinny. Honey Dee giggled and then positively ran down the hill and into the trees. I focused the scope on the dark porch and saw movement again, a bare glow of yellow lantern light, and then just shadow.

“Think she’ll let those dogs out again?” Carrie asked.

“Actually, I don’t,” I said. “She knows we could take them all down from inside this cave. No, I think the dogs will come out if and when we get a lot closer to that house. Then we’d be the ones in trouble.”