“I feel she makes a valid point,” said Saul, sounding as if he were standing in someone’s parlor, not naked and tied to a table. “Don’t you, Phelps?”
The gun trembled. This didn’t make me feel any more confident. A scared man with a gun is much more dangerous than a confident one. What if he shot Saul? What if, after everything, the man bled out in front of me?And it will be your responsibility if he does, because you didn’t get help that first night.
I would like to say that I thought about what I was doing, that it was an act of considered courage, but it wasn’t. I didn’t really think about what I was doing. I just clutched the pan in front of me with both hands and walked slowly forward, until I planted myself between Saul and the cold eye of the gun.
Phelps bit his lip. He looked awful. His skin looked looser and he seemed to have aged a decade since the night before. Hishair stuck out from his skull in ragged clots and his eyes showed white all around the iris.
“Miss Wilson, youneedto get away from him.” His voice was pleading now. “I brought you more food and more lamp oil. Knew this one wouldn’t last all day and I hated to think of you down here in the dark. Just… just come over here. Please.”
My nails scraped on the enameled pan as I gripped it more tightly. Would it stop a bullet? Probably not. I didn’tthinkPhelps would shoot me, but I didn’t want to find out. I took a deep breath.
“What Halder has done to this man is monstrous,” I said. “But we can still make this right. Just help me—”
“He ain’t a man,” snapped Phelps. “Don’t you understand? He’s one ofthem.”
“One of what?”
“Devils.” Phelps’s hand twitched and the gun jittered sideways. My flinch must have been visible, because he set the lantern down and took a two-handed grip on the pistol.
Devils? Oh god, was this the shape of his delusion?My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as I tried to figure out how to navigate these waters.
“They look like us,” said Phelps, “but they ain’t human. I’ve seen it, Miss Wilson. I know. They’reblood thieves.”
I swallowed. “Mr. Phelps,” I said carefully, “I know that there was a frightening incident a few years back. I know that there were a lot of stories around the… the two people… doing those awful things. But you have to understand that people were whipping themselves into a frenzy. Like a sort of lynch mob. The stories that people made up afterward, they weren’treal.”
Phelps closed his eyes briefly. If I had been closer, perhaps I would have gone for the gun. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have. When he opened them again, he was looking at me almost pityingly.
“Miss Wilson, they weren’t just stories. I know you’re educatedand think you know better, but I wasthere. That girl we buried was a devil and Iknowthat for God’s own truth.”
My knuckles were beginning to ache from clutching the pan so tightly, but I couldn’t make them relax. “How do you know, Mr. Phelps? Did Halder tell you? Because—”
“I know,” Phelps interrupted me, “because I killed her twice.”
I am not always the quickest thinker. My response to this dramatic statement was to say, “Err… what?”
Saul made a sound behind me, the faintest huff, as if he wanted to say something but didn’t quite dare.
“There were two of ’em,” said Phelps. He sat down on the step, lowering the gun barrel just a fraction. I didn’t fool myself that he couldn’t snap it back up in a hurry. “Never saw the boy until the end, but I recognized that girl right enough.”
“Oh?” I said.Every minute he’s talking is a minute he isn’t shooting. And it’s daylight, so maybe someone will have seen him.
He nodded. “About six months earlier. Had a couple of shoats penned up. Heard squealing one night and grabbed my gun. Thought maybe a bear decided he wanted a taste of pork. Only it wasn’t a bear.”
“What was it, then?”
“It was that girl. Three pigs dead, with bites taken out of ’em. Lotta bites. Couldn’t quite get through the hide, but she’d kept trying ’til she hit a spot on the throat she could get through. And the fourth one…” He stopped and swiped a hand at his hair, which turned into pawing at the back of his head, a terrible grimace on his face. It reminded me of how a dog will sometimes scratch its ear until it begins to yelp in pain, but doesn’t stop scratching. The gun lurched back and forth and my stomach lurched with it.
“Mr. Phelps—”
He shook himself. “Sorry, Miss Wilson.”
“You should have Ma Kersey look at that again,” I said. “It might be infected.”
Phelps tilted his head, still doglike. “You really don’t know,” he said almost wonderingly.
“As wise as a serpent and as innocent as a dove,” Saul said, speaking up for the first time. “You should let her go, Phelps. She’s got no part of this.”
“The Devil quotes Scripture,” Phelps said, his eyes narrowing.
