Earl smiled, an unpleasant crease of a dried-out mouth. “I’ve done that… to lots of people,” it said. “Why would you be… special?”
“He’s the one—” Ledger started to explain.
Before he could finish, Dale made an awful creaking howl and swung the spear in an overhand blow. It hadn’t been sharp in a long time, the tip broken off and the edges dulled, but applied with enough force, that didn’t matter. The snapped-off point of the spear plunged into Earl’s eye and burst it. Slime tinged pink drooled down Earl’s cheek. Dale shoved the spear as deep as it would go, twisting it as he went, as if he could drill the eye socket bigger.
Earl staggered backward, dragging Dale with him.
“Remember me! Remember me!” Dale screamed. He wrenched the spear out of Earl’s eye and stabbed the thing again and again. Dried-out flesh and old bones crumbled under the blows, great rents torn in Earl’s skin, and its torso caved in as the bones crushed when the hilt of spear hit them. “Do you remember me now?”
Dale rammed the spear into the side of Earl’s throat and yanked it forward. It ripped half of Earl’s throat out, flesh and tendon and bits of bone. Sliced-through pipes poked out of the hole. Then Dale jammed the spear into one of the rotted-out horn sockets on its head. Pulp and pus oozed out around the blade as it was shoved deeper.
“Do you remember now?” Dale repeated.
Earl, head sagged over to the side until it nearly rested on its shoulder, reached up and scruffed Dale like a dog to pull him off.
“No,” it said. It waited long enough to watch Dale’s face sag and then tossed him away. Dale smashed into the side of the house, bricks cracking on impact, and slid down to the ground. Earl reached up and felt around its face until he grabbed the spear’s hilt. It yanked on it, bobbling its head around as it hung on by shreds of flesh and snapped vertebra. It would have been comical if it wasn’t horrific. The spear finally dislodged, dry-rotted chunks of wood sprayed over the ground, and Earl held it up to look at it. “This? You thought this was my death? This tool? Thisinsult?”
It clenched its hand around the hilt to crush it. The leather bindings ripped, and splinters of bone fell through Earl’s fingers.
“I am no small thing,” it spat as it stalked forward, “for my death to be so pedestrian.”
Ledger backed away, hands up to ward Earl off, as he tried to think of something—anything—to buy more time. He’d been right. Dale had been the John Doe who signed the deed. Earl had killedhiskin over and over because it couldn’t remember Dale.
So what had he been wrong about? If he could justthink, but the sickly pulse of blood in his skull made it hard.
“I thought… it was…” He stumbled over the excuse and then over his own feet. He fell on his back and nearly passed out from the wave of pain and dizziness that crashed over him. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to outrun Earl, and he wasn’t going to reason with him either.I was so closewasn’t going to get him an extension.
Earl grabbed the waistband of Ledger’s chinos and lifted him bodily off the ground. It grabbed his thigh with its free hand and dug its fingers in until the bony tipspoppedthrough the canvas and gouged holes in the skin and muscle beneath.
“I’ll start here,” it said as it kept squeezing. Ledger had thought that he’d reached as much pain as he could feel with his head. It turned out he was wrong. The sharp, meaty pain of pulped flesh cut through the heavy baseline. “The thigh bones. They’re nice and big. Easy to remove. And once they’re gone, you aren’t going anywhere.”
Ledger would have screamed. He wasn’t too proud or too tough for that. The sound just wouldn’t come out through his spasmed-shut throat. So he just squirmed and gagged.
Shadows flickered over the ground, pale and sketchy in the moonlight, and the soft whisper of wings filled the air. The birds eddied frantically around Earl, a cloud of feathers and sharp little eyes, and he staggered back in surprise.
Then they were gone. A second later, Wren crashed into Earl from behind, knocking them all to the ground. Earl’s grip on Ledger was dislodged as they landed, canvas and flesh both ripped.
“I told you,” Wren snarled as he straddled Earl, knees braced on the thing’s shoulders to pin it down. “Not him.”
Earl squalled, a furious choked sound like a half-dead deer, and reached up to grab Wren’s face. Bony, bloody fingers left filthy smears on Wren’s cheeks and forehead as Earl groped for purchase. Its thumb ended up digging in under Wren’s eye socket, and its fingers dug into his scalp.
“You dare?” it snarled. “You dare… defy me again? For what? You think… he could care about you? Delusional… patchwork… thing. I’ll wear… your skin until… I grind you down.”
Wren whined, a high, hurt noise, as blood dripped down his face. He grabbed Earl’s wrist and dragged its hand away long enough to look over at Ledger.
“Don’t just lie there,” he snarled. “You said you could fix this. Do it.”
He rolled away from Earl and scrambled clumsily to his feet, hunched over with one hand pressed to the open wound in his gut. Blood and threads of smoke oozed through his fingers. Earl got to its feet like a spider and shoved its head back on straight, flesh rolled and mottled where it had stretched.
“I thought… I had taught you the cost of… defiance years ago,” Earl said. “Perhaps you… need another lesson to jog… your memory. The Conroy boy can wait.”
It dropped its skin—the decrepit husk split as it hit the ground—and Wren dropped to his knees. He clutched his head with both hands as if that could keep Earl out as he doubled over.
Ledger ripped what was left of his T-shirt off and tied it around his leg. Blood soaked through the makeshift bandage quickly enough that he didn’t know if there was much point, but he pressed his hand down on the wound and tried to think.
He’d been right. Hehad.
Right up until he was wrong. So what had he missed?
