Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

They finally got the knot to budge a single gasping inch, and then another, and then they were yanking the cord freely. She immediately rolled over and crawled blindly away on elbow and knees, hacking and grinding like an engine full of sand, one arm still bound. Lyle had a single panting moment to notice how clean the soles of the woman’s feet were, soft and seashell pink as a toddler’s, before he heard a throat clearing behind him.

“Pardon me?” someone asked. “No offense or nothing, but what the heck do you think you’re doing?”

Lyle rose slowly, sliding his hand into his jacket pocket as he did so, finding his pistol and the “Good Cop’s” badge. The owner of the twang was clear-eyed and amiable. He wore a filthy mesh-backed Marlboro cap and a similarly grimy work jacket, the cuffs black and chewed up from long years spent elbow-deep in engines. EARL was embroidered over his heart in red floss.

There was a crowd of very surprised people behind Earl, standing or sitting in lawn chairs shaded by the collapsing barn. To Lyle’s eye, they were prototypical rural Ohio: white people, men and women, mostly dressed like they’d just got off from work, mechanics and Subway sandwich girls and schoolteachers and farmers. There were even a few kids, seated cross-legged on a wide, flat board to keep their pants clean. The youngest looked confused by what had been—and was still—happening, but the older kids were keenly, sickeningly thrilled, both by the spectacle of the hanging of the woman and by the action-hero antics that had interrupted the show.

Lyle immediately understood how he’d managed to miss the spectators: He’d been focused on the woman fighting the strangling line in the blazing light of the sunset. They’d been sitting quietly in the barn’s deep shadow, as quiet and watchful and unobtrusive as birds on a wire.

He glanced at his watch. Fewer than five minutes had passed since he’d looked up from his car radio.

Behind Lyle, the woman hacked and retched, dragging her breath down her throat like a blade scraping a dry whetstone.

“You could have killed this woman,” he panted.

“Well, yeah,” Earl said. “Duh. If you hadn’t messed it up. Now we gotta start from scratch. She ain’t even a little dead.” Earl paused, giving Lyle a once-over: rumpled suit, blood-stiff shirt collar, puffy face, mangled ear held in place by a Mud Hens ski cap. “Not to be rude or nothing, but what happened to your face?”

Lyle fought the urge to reach up and check whether his ear had torn loose. Instead, he pulled his hand from his pocket and discovered he was holding the badge, J. GOOD embossed in clear blue lettering across the banner along the bottom of the shield.

Earl squinted at the badge in Lyle’s hand. “Officer J. Good?” He read. “Like ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in that song?”

“Detective Jason Good,” Lyle heard himself say. “I’m asking the questions.”

They waited. And waited. A distant dog barked.

“You said you wanted to ask questions,” Earl nudged, like a preschool teacher encouraging a shy show-and-teller. “Ask away.”

A large bearded man in one of the folding chairs raised a finger. “Um, Earl, shouldn’t we do something about Leighanne—”

Earl answered with a shrug and a shake of his head. “Naw. She’s not flying off anytime soon. Just look at her?” They all looked at her for a moment, including Lyle, who had to turn to do so. She’d stopped crawling, having only made it about a yard, and was resting her head on the dirt. Her jackstraw hair—a dull blonde with dark roots—was snarled in the scrub like dog fur caught in Velcro.

“So,” Earl said, “Detective Good, whatcha wanna know?”

Lyle wanted to know a lot of things: Why had his wife shot him? Why was he chasing after her? Why was Jason Good’s dick so crooked? Why had he just lied about being that crooked-dicked cop?

Earl could help Lyle with none of these.

“What,” Lyle finally asked, “what are you people doing?”

“Executing this witch,” Earl answered. Many of the gathered observers were nodding.

Lyle had no idea what to say to that.

“I’m not a fucking witch,” the woman croaked from the dirt. “Jesus, you dumb fucking bumpkins.”

Earl shook his head and rolled his eyes. “We been through this, Leighanne. Things were no good since you moved out here, and then…” His mouth twitched in an involuntary grimace. “All that other stuff. We convened a Common Law Court, tested you, and… well, and here we are.”

“Tested?” Lyle asked. He’d returned the badge to his pocket but left his hand there, sandwiched between Good’s shield and Lyle’s revolver.

“Yup,” Earl nodded. “Tested. And she failed.”

“We made a witch cake,” a woman seated in a beige plastic folding chair volunteered. She looked like a generic Ohio schoolteacher: heavyset, dark hair cropped short and teased out, vaguely cat’s-eye-shaped glasses on a beaded neck chain, cardigan sweater with seasonal bunnies-crosses-and-pastel-eggs motif. She looked eerily like Lyle’s own third grade teacher, who would have to be at least ninety now, and presumably still back in Schaumburg, Illinois.

“Which cake?” Lyle asked, feeling like the straight man in a rejected Abbott and Costello routine.

Everyone shifted uncomfortably.

“It’s like a regular cake,” the schoolmarm hedged, “but for testing witches. We used plain box cake from the superstore. Yellow cake. You make it like regular, but mix the batter with the, uh… ,” she girded herself for the next word, “urine of an individual, or individuals, hexed by that witch.”

Lyle stared at her as he reviewed this in his head, trying to find some reasonable way to understand what she was saying.

“I Googled it,” the woman offered apologetically.

Bile simmered at the back of Lyle’s throat. “You made her eat a cake you pissed in?”

The teacher lady grimaced in shock. “Good Lord, no! We fed it to a dog—”

“My dog Chet,” the fat man who had been concerned the witch might slither away interjected.

“—and the witch, Leighanne, got sick,” the schoolteacher continued. “You see, the hex is passed in the urine. Any harm it comes to reflects back on the witch.” She paused, then added, “I Googled it.”

“And that means this woman’s a witch? Because you think she got sick after that guy’s dog ate a cake someone peed in?”

“I Googled it,” the woman reiterated, her mouth firm.

“I had the shits from an expired can of Hormel chili!” the accused witch cried from the ground. “From the goddamn food pantry! Not ’cause Albert’s dog ate piss-cake!”

“What kind of a person—” Lyle began, intending to ask what kind of a person bakes a cake with her neighbors’ pee in it, but he was cut off by a fuming bald man with a white walrus mustache and bright red suspenders.

“Oh, that is it.” The mustachioed man spoke firmly. Earl rolled his eyes, an annoyed martyr with his cross to bear.

“ She is not a ‘person,’” the Great White Walrus thundered, pointing at the piss-baking schoolteacher. He then pointed at Earl: “He is not a ‘person.’” He jabbed himself in the chest: “I am not a ‘person’!” He flailed his pointing hands, indicating the gathered mob. “There are no ‘persons’ here!”

Lyle looked around, bewildered.

“We—” he gestured at the gathered crowd “—are sovereign citizens , not ‘persons.’”

A heavy man in a red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN ball cap piped up: “Flesh-and-blood asseverated private individuals!”

The Walrus nodded. “Article 4 free inhabitants, fully redeemed via duly filed UCC-1 statement!” The mob nodded and grunted their assent.