Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

Although the farm was gone, the main house remained. With a quaintly old-fashioned sign surrounded by masses of daisies, the Miles Massacre House was still open to all. It was actually called the Peach Tree Inn, but where was the truth in advertising in that? We pulled into the circular drive of the rambling farmhouse, followed closely by the car carrying Thackery, Fujiwara, and the military driver requisitioned from the motor pool. The military might have Thackery by the short hairs, but I didn’t think the asshole knew it. Or if he did know it, he thought he could twist it to his advantage. The man had ego, you had to give him that.

“You think Thack and his pet, Fujiwara, booked the honeymoon suite here?” I drawled.

As expected, I was ignored. I climbed out of the car and squashed a daisy. Frowning, I stepped back and watched as the flower slowly wavered back upright. Tess had liked daisies. Didn’t all little girls? I carefully circumvented the billowing drifts of white and yellow and headed for the porch stairs. Another wraparound porch typical of the South, it was sprinkled with wicker furniture, mainly rockers, and pot after pot of blooming flowers. Poppies, roses, brown-eyed Susans, and more daisies.

It was remarkably cheerful for a supposed house of death. Didn’t mean a thing. I’d once touched the wedding ring of a perpetually smiling grandma. She had smothered two of her babies fifty-some years before, and she’d never felt one moment of regret. The sweet hid the poisonous all the time-in nature and in people. Why should buildings be any different?

“You said you don’t actually have to go into the buildings?” Thackery’s voice came from behind. “That’s what Allgood’s report stated. You can do your little tricks from right here, then.”

The man knew I was the genuine article-he had proof-but it didn’t stop the thick coating of disdain over his words. If he was capable of emotions other than arrogance and contempt, I’d yet to see that. It put my cocky sarcasm in the shade. I might have to try a little harder.

I bared my teeth in a humorless grin. “Care to shake? I’ll bet you have all sorts of skeletons rattling around. Got a little too friendly with the family goat when you were a kid? Let’s have a look.”

Most likely a murderer, and I was pushing him. Sometimes I just couldn’t help myself.

Cold eyes took me in and dismissed me. “Do your job, Eye.”

Yeah, do my job. Thanks to my third-strike baby sister, that’s what I was getting paid for.

“I’m Miz Susannah. This is my place. Can I help you gentlemen? You boys need some rooms?”

A curious voice came from behind the screen door. There was also a mop of tightly curled silver hair, amber-brown eyes magnified by thick glasses, skin as dark as aged mahogany, and a smile as cheerful as an entire field of those front-yard daisies.

“Ma’am.” Hector moved in to distract her while I stripped off my glove and put a casual hand against the wood of the house. It was painted a brilliant blue, the pure color of a summer sky. It was the color of a kid’s playhouse, not what you would put on a real house, but it worked. It was nice. It made me think of a childhood I’d never had-candy apples and fresh white sheets drying in a spring breeze, barking dogs and sleeping cats, lemonade and new clothes for school. The American dream. I hadn’t had it, but it was right there. Year after year, happy people came and went, and the house was always that candy apple, sweet on sweet with every bite.

Until I took a bite of 1853.

It hadn’t been a chunk of firewood. It had been an axe handle. But it had done the job. First, dear old Dad. Dear old tightfisted Dad who never gave a nickel when a penny would do. And Mother, who whined and whined until you thought you’d go deaf from her pathetic bleats. She was the one who’d gone deaf, though-deaf, dumb, and blind, and no whining bitch deserved it more. The satisfaction that had come from beating her gray head over and over and over-

With the taste of a savage contentment not my own still in my mouth, I pulled my hand back and put my glove back on with quick, methodical movements. “Bingo. Can we go now?”

Fujiwara’s soft, faintly accented voice asked politely, “You actually did see it? You know it was murder even though no bodies were recovered?”

“I saw it. And you people didn’t include what kind of farm it was in the file. It was a pig farm. He fed Mom and Pop to the pigs. Twenty minutes later, they were being digested. The perfect crime.” I amended, “For a drunken idiot.”

Miz Susannah remained behind her screen door, her mouth a perfect O, showing a good dental plan and sturdy dental adhesive. Then she croaked like an unsettled crow, “You… you boys want some lemonade… and cookies?” She started to close the main door. “For the road?”

Fujiwara brightened. “I would very much like some lemonade.”

Thackery gave him a withering glare, then turned to clatter down the porch stairs and back to the second car.

“No lemonade for you, Fuji,” I said sympathetically, because I wouldn’t have minded some lemonade and cookies, either. But when I turned back to see what my chances were, Miz Susannah seemed to have had enough of our weirdness and slammed the thick wooden door behind the screen. I heard a bolt slide into place.

Making friends wherever we went.

Two days, ten misses, and one hit later, I was standing at Job’s Quarry, my hand wrapped around Charlie’s keys.

It was Job as in the biblical Job. The preacher had been Brother Job, and the town was the Trials as in the trials of Job. 1840. It hadn’t been much of a town or much of a cult. Ten gullible families and a scattering of tents that would do them until cabins could be built. But purification came first. You had to prove yourself righteous enough to receive God’s word through Brother Job and to live in the Trials under the same prosperity the original Job had come to know once God and Satan had stopped dicking around with his life, killing his family, and giving him boils and leprosy to see just how far faith would go.

Show me a horror movie that equals that, and I’ll pay you fifty bucks.

Ten families plus Brother Job’s disciples came to about eighty people raising the canvas town of the Trials. At the end, there was only one to abandon it.

Job left the bloated, floating bodies of the faithful-and they were faithful, suicidally faithful-and wandered through the woods, shouting to heaven of his trust in the Almighty. He stayed faithful, too, despite the loss of all of his followers, despite the hunger, the coming winter chill. The walking, raving embodiment of faith… right up to when he ended up as a bear’s last snack before hibernation. When those jaws fastened around his neck, ripping and crushing, that faith vanished like a magician’s rabbit.

The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

Then again, who’s to say the hungry bear didn’t get its prayer answered?

I stopped staring at the blazing orange water and turned my head to see Fujiwara eating a sausage-and-biscuit sandwich he must’ve brought from the cafeteria. “They put blood in their biscuits.”

He gaped at me. “Ex-excuse me?”

“Job’s followers. As the wine was the blood of Jesus, Job followed in his footsteps and sliced his arm every morning when the women made biscuits. Drip drip.” I smiled cheerfully. “Smart for a psycho. He combined the blood and body, wine and host into one. Thrifty bastard.”

Fuji dropped the sandwich onto the ground and hurried to Thackery’s side thirty feet down the quarry beach. The machine to enhance Charlie’s energy and pull him through the ether to dissipate was still at what they considered the best bet: Cannibal Caverns. But Thackery wanted to see me at work if, by random chance, Charlie tried to come through here. At least, that’s what he said, but I saw something needful behind his blank face. There was something more to wanting to watch me work, not that Thackery was sharing the why of it. I’d find out sooner or later, one way or the other.