James Axler - Forbidden Trespass

That silenced the rising murmur as though cutting it off with an ax. Immediately whispers started up again: “Oh, holy shit, her face.”

Ryan saw that it was missing. Something had taken much of the bone from brow to lower jaw along with flesh and skin.

Ryan heard Krysty gasp. Doc made a strangled noise.

“You can’t be talking to us,” Ryan said, as evenly as he could.

“I saw you! You bastards !”

“You didn’t see us,” Mildred said. “We were working at the claim until late. Then we came right here.”

“Tell us exactly what you did see, Wymie,” Conn told her.

The black-haired young woman stooped and eased her burden onto the floorboards. Blood began to trickle outward. Behind her Ryan could see a number of others with anxious, angry faces. Plenty held weapons, from hoes and axes to a muzzle-loader shotgun or two. Slowly, Wymie straightened.

“I looked out the window, soon as—as it happened,” she said, brushing back a lock of crow’s-wing hair sweat had stuck to her face. “I seen a white face lookin’ in at me. White hair. Bloodred eyes! ”

All eyes turned to Jak, who sat with his mug halfway raised to his lips and a thunderstruck expression on his face.

“Where’s your ma and stepdad?” Tarley asked.

“Chilled, both. I had to burn the house down as I got away. I couldn’t tell if one of you devils might’ve crept inside!”

“We’re all here,” J.B. said. “So that didn’t happen, either.”

“You callin’ me a liar? With the body of the child you murdered lyin’ right here at my feet?”

“We’re calling you mistaken,” Ryan said.

He stayed sitting. He decided that standing up might be taken as provocative, both by the frantic young woman and the retinue she’d evidently picked up on her personal trail of tears from her burning homestead. If he had to, he could stand up plenty quick.

He was afraid he might have to. The people out in front of the gaudy had clearly not followed the young woman carrying her chilled and mutilated sister here looking to party. And the other patrons inside the house were starting to shoot barbed looks their way. Things were no more than a hair away from getting bloody.

“It’s a terrible thing that’s been done to your sister, but we didn’t do it.”

“I saw what I saw.” Her voice was as low and deadly as a slithering copperhead.

“Ask yourself,” Krysty said, “why would we do such a thing?”

“You’re outlanders! From out there !”

Her hair whirled as she snapped her head left and right, looking at the stunned crowd inside the gaudy.

“You know what they call the rest of the world out there, outside the Pennyrile, don’t you? They call it Deathlands . Well, I reckon they call it that for a reason. People out there, or what pass for ’em, they just as soon chill you as look at you. Even if you’re just a tiny girl who never hurt a fly!”

“But these are plainly just regular folks,” Tarley said, “even if one is an albino. And he looks like a good puff of wind could blow him away. How could they take her face off like that, all at once?”

“Mebbe used an ax.”

“Don’t look like no ax,” said the black bouncer, bending slightly toward the corpse, as if wanting to see better but not too much better. “Got bit clean off, if you ask me.”

“Mebbe it was, Tarley. Mebbe he bit it off.”

“‘Bit it off’?” Ryan echoed incredulously.

“Mebbe he’s a—a werewolf or somethin’! We all know there’s monsters out there!”

Tarley shook his head. “Wymie, Wymie. Listen to yourself. We can’t go lynchin’ strangers because they might be werewolves. Not without some kinda evidence they are. Or that werewolves exist, even.”

“People say there’s all kind of weird muties, out in the Deathlands,” one of the men standing on the stoop behind Wymie said. “Like little rubber-skinned bastards with suckers for fingertips, can rip the hide clean off you!”

“That part’s real,” Ricky said. “Those are stickies. They’re bad news.”

“I’ve seen stickies,” Tarley stated. “They’re pretty much what you say. But stickies didn’t do this, and I see no reason to believe these folks did, either.”

“You takin’ their part, Tarley Gaines?” Wymie shrieked. “Of outlanders who murder our own?”

“Nobody’s takin’ anybody’s part,” Conn said, his voice level and as unyielding as an anvil. “Not tonight. Not in here. Except the truth’s, mebbe.”

“I know the truth!” the young woman yelled.

“You got precious little to show for it, Wymie.”

“I know what I saw!”

“And mebbe what you saw wasn’t what your mind’s made of it. Fact is, these folks have been right here a good past hour, half an hour spent hagglin’, half an hour eatin’ my venison, stewed greens and beans, and drinkin’ my brew. They came in without a dot of blood on them, wearin’ clothes they’d double clearly worked in all day. And their hair isn’t wet enough to be from anythin’ but sweat, so they didn’t clean themselves up after doing murder. The albino in particular—blood’d show up pretty clear on him.”

Wymie was looking around, but from the slump of her strong shoulders Ryan could see that, while the anger and even hate were still there, still smoldering, sheer exhaustion and emotional reaction had damped her fires. She had nothing left.

Not now, anyway.

“You out there,” Conn called past the suddenly befuddled-looking woman. “Burny Stoops. Walter John. Get in here, pick this poor girl up off my floor and take her to Coffin-Maker Sam, over to the Hole. He’ll see she gets a decent burial.”

“I can’t afford to hire a hole dug for her,” Wymie said, sounding more sullen now than raging. “Much less a box to bury her in.”

“Tell Sam I’ll cover the expenses,” Conn said. “But you got to leave now, Wymie. Find a place to stay. Don’t make any more fuss, now. It won’t do poor Blinda a speck of good.”

“But—”

“We’ll get it sorted out. When the sun comes up, we’ll go take a look at your old place. We need information, and that’s a thing we haven’t got.”

“I know all I need to,” she said, the spark of anger flaring again.

“The rest of us don’t,” the gaudy owner said, with just a bit of edge to his voice. “Mrs. Haymuss!”

After a moment a stout brown-skinned woman emerged from the kitchen. She was wearing a much-stained apron and wiping her hands on a rag. She was evidently the cook.

“Take this poor girl and see to her. Get her settled with Widow Oakey. She’s close and likes to take in strays.”

“But, Mr. Conn, the kitchen—”

“Kitchen’s closed,” the gaudy owner said. “Nobody’s got an appetite left now. And if they do, I’m not minded to feed them, right now.”

The woman walked forward, encircled Wymie’s shoulders with a brawny arm and began alternately clucking and cooing at her. Ryan couldn’t make out what she was saying. Or even if it was words.

The black-haired woman made as if to push her off. Then she turned, buried her face at the juncture of Mrs. Haymuss’s neck and beefy shoulders, and began to cry uncontrollably.

The two men Conn had called on came in past the two to gingerly pick up Blinda’s body. Mrs. Haymuss steered Wymie back out into the night. They followed, struggling to carry what a single woman had brought here on her own.

“The rest of you out there,” Conn called, “move along. It isn’t polite to stare.”

Whatever passions Wymie’s trek had excited in the locals who had collected to follow her to the gaudy house, they had vanished, as well. Shuffling their feet, not meeting one another’s gazes directly, they broke up began to go their separate ways.