THE WIND part 9

Copyright (c) 2018 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

       

By R. Peterson

                   Lavar Hicks felt bewildered, and to be truthful more than a little scared, when Tommy Lee parked the milk truck and got out. The smiling Chink should have dropped him off and scurried home to his own shack glad that the demands on him were at an end. Instead, Lavar now felt like he was the prisoner. What was he afraid of? The braid of hair that had seemed so important to the Chinaman had been tossed out the truck window as if it were garbage.

Lavar could feel the witch-woman’s Tarot card strangely cold in his pocket and it made him move faster. He was almost running. The card had been a source of infinite power that he longed for and craved.  Now it was a lead anchor pulling him to the bottom in an ocean of trouble. Lavar shook his head violently as if to dislodge reality.  It was time to put the subordinates, especially these Chinks from Asia, back in their place and take a stand. He stopped and whirled. “Damn you! Get out of here … and leave me the hell alone!” Hicks raised his fist as if to strike the tiny (man?) bouncing three steps behind.

Suddenly Hicks was slammed into the ground so hard all the air was knocked from his lungs. His arm lay at awkward angles at his side. Bone and blood protruded from a torn shirt sleeve. The grinning thing stood over him lifting first one leg then the other as if the simple act of walking were something new that he delighted in. For the first time, Lavar noticed the Chinks eyes were not normal. They appeared to be made of wood and rolled about in his head like ball bearings floating in water. The eyes found his face and stopped moving. There were too many teeth in the mouth that opened in a wide smile. “Look ma … No strings!” The Chinaman … or whatever it was … laughed and laughed.

-------2-------

When Melania and Dorothy arrived home from church services Brian was descending from the rooms above. With strings attached to a wooden cross held horizontally, he carefully made a marionette walk down the stairs. “Where did you get that?” Dorothy asked.

Melania didn’t have to ask. When she saw the human eyes in the puppet’s wooden head she knew it must have come from the locked chest in the attic.

“When I was eating my cereal I heard a banging noise coming from the attic,” Brian said. “I found this. I think it must be alive … it spoke to me!”

“Take it back to the attic,” Dorothy ordered. “You don’t play with things in this house without Melania’s permission.”

“It’s alright,” Melania told her. “Brian, did you open the locked chest in the attic?”

“No,” Brian told her. “The chest was open … and I found this hanging from the rafters!”

“Was there anyone else in the house?”

“I open box,” the marionette spoke and Dorothy jumped, her eyes looked as wide as dinner plates.  “I not want do. Dimoni make hands find key … turn lock.”

Melania thought the Oriental accent sounded familiar. After a moment she gasped and then asked. “Is that you, Tang Lei?” She gestured for Brian to turn the head so she could see the puppet’s face. It was their milkman! Melania recognized the bright brown eyes. Usually, they brimmed with great curiosity … but this morning they seemed filled with great sadness. The puppet strained against the strings to tilt its head downward. “I bring great shame to family,” the puppet moaned. “Not worthy of honorable ancestors!”

            “I don’t know how you turned into a marionette,” Melania said. “But I’m sure it wasn’t your fault!”

The puppet shook his head with such force that it caused Brian’s hands to shake. “Bad man cut off hair … wait in truck. Tang make deal to steal card. Bad man give thief back queue.”

Dorothy, Brian and the marionette followed Melania into the kitchen and she pulled the Ombré from the kitchen cabinet. “Did you take a Tarot card from this box?”

            “No,” Tang’s voice said. “Dimoni make climb stairs … open chest.”

            “The Ombré was on the table when I came up for breakfast,” Brian said. “I thought someone had left the recipe box out … and I put it back.”

Melania carefully spread the ancient cards out on the glass table. She counted the Major Arcana cards first … no WIND card.

            “Who waited in the truck?” Melania asked the puppet.

            “Bad man live junk house, animals no feed,” Tang’s voice said. “No pay for milk!”

            “Lavar Hicks!” Melania gasped. “Lavar Hicks has the WIND card!”

            “What will we do?” Dorothy said. “This coming Saturday night is Halloween and also the full moon!” She started to sob. “We have to bring Bolger back to life!”

Melania noticed the two extremely-rare coins in the box with the Tarot were still there. She picked one up. They depicted the goddess Roma on one side and on the other the mythical twins Castor and Pollux, but now instead of being made of rusted iron, they glistened with pure gold. Melania jerked and the coin slipped from her fingers bouncing off the table … making a jagged crack in the glass.

            “What’s wrong?” Dorothy gasped.

            “These coins were placed over the dead eyes of Jesus of Nazareth … and others,” she said.

Melania had spent hours in Joseph’s library learning all she could about the one-of-a-legion thing supposedly safely locked inside the chest in the attic. “It’s alive,” she whispered her voice shaking. “Demilune is alive!”

-------3-------

            Lavar Hicks struggled to stand as the Chinaman kicked him several times. His right arm was throbbing where jagged bones protruded from his sleeve. “What do you want?” Hicks moaned.

The Chinaman was looking toward the barn. “You’ve got something very dangerous trapped in there don’t you?”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hicks groaned.

            “Don’t lie unless you can do it well!” The Chinaman raked his fingers across Lavar’s face, bloodying his nose.

            “I didn’t make it!” Lavar screamed. “It was that witch woman! I trapped it in the woods and brought it here.”

            “But you can make more …” The Chinaman was staring at Hick’s coat pocket as if he could see the card inside. “You know how to create an army!”

Hicks reached inside his coat and pulled out the WIND card. It felt even colder than before. He held it toward the Chinaman. “Here! It’s yours! Just leave me alone!”

The Chinaman took two steps backward as if burned by frost. “Put that away,” he glared. “I’ll tell you when to use it!”

Hicks slowly put the card back in his pocket.

The Chinaman grabbed a handful of loose skin at the bottom of Hick’s neck and pinched hard dragging him toward the barn. “You don’t always feed what lives on your farm do you?”

            “I do my best,” Hicks moaned. “Sometimes the feed prices are too high!”

The Chinaman noticed a trash can overflowing with empty whiskey bottles as they walked past the house and smiled. “If the price of live chickens gets too high, we might have to find another source of meat for our … precious soldat!” He pinched Lavar’s neck harder and Hicks screamed.

“Go bring some squawkers,” he demanded, shoving Lavar toward the chicken house, “big fat ones! I want to see our first-of-legions … eat!”

Lavar staggered toward the coop … the pain in his broken arm dulled by fear.

-------4-------

            Melania considered driving out to the run-down Hicks farm and trying to retrieve the stolen Tarot Card but it was too risky. Not only was Lavar Hicks a violent sociopath without shame or regret but now there was a dangerous demon loose in Comanche County. And the monster could be lurking anywhere. The full-moon on Halloween was quickly approaching and she didn’t need the WIND card to bring Bolger back to life.

                Dorothy put all her energies into stuffing straw into old bib-overalls and sewing bits of colored cloth for eyes, nose and mouth onto empty flour sacks. Melania decided they needed thirteen partners for a Danza degli spaventapasseri and invited twelve of Cloverdale’s most prominent matrons to attend along with Dorothy. The women were thrilled. They seldom got to do anything without their husbands and a Halloween Dance of the Scarecrows with live Big Band music and Melania’s special brewed-cider sounded like the year’s most anticipated social event. A few of the special engraved invitations were put on secret auction and sold for more than one-hundred dollars … a fortune in depression-era America.

            “The dance sounds like fun,” Dorothy moaned. It was Wednesday night. “But I don’t understand how Bolger is going to come back to life in just three days!” Tang was hanging in a coat closet and they could hear him crying and speaking to ghosts in Chinese.

            “I’m sorry, Tang, but your condition will have to wait.”

Melania was threading dormant rose vines through a special copper, gold and iron garden trellis that she’d paid several local craftsmen to create. She was careful not to prick her finger on the dry thorns as she worked in the mansion’s parlor. “I’ll move the punch-bowl from under this trellis just before midnight,” she said. “And you will dance through with Bolger! Slip outside into the garden and no one will notice under the moonlight that your scarecrow has really come to life.”

            “I don’t understand how this magic works,” Dorothy said. “Don’t you have to read from a Tarot card or scatter Bolger’s ashes on special water?”

            “The magic to make things come to life is in the special design of the metal arch and in the rays of direct moonlight,” Melania said stepping back to look at her unfinished creation. She walked to a window and spread wide the curtains. The moon in the darkened sky above the trees shone inside and was in the last stages of Waxing Gibbous. Dorothy gasped as tiny white flower buds suddenly came to life on the thorny vines covering the trellis … and began to grow.

            “To bring an almost-human to life requires more exacting conditions,” Melania said. “And if you want your Bolger … you’ll need a tiny bit of his blood.”

            “But how?” Dorothy gasped. “He was blown to bits by that bomb!”

Melania turned just as Brian came into the house with another armload of rose vines. “There are ways,” she answered.

-------5-------

            The Chinaman kept Lavar Hicks and two of his friends working around the clock without sleep. They were exhausted but too terrified to complain. Butch Fowler and Lemont Pool stole a large industrial sewing machine from Callahan’s textile mill and Lemont was busy sewing dirty canvas dams into ragged pants and shirts. “Larger!” the Chinaman shouted. “They must be larger!”

Lavar looked at the scarecrow he’d already began to stuff with moly straw and bits of thorn-filled hay. When finished the thing would be over eight feet tall. “How much bigger?” he moaned.

            “Big enough to look into an attic peek-hole,” the Chinaman hissed. “I don’t want anyone hiding under their bed or in some crate … when we go searching.”

Butch Fowler was backing-up Lemont’s truck filled with more stolen dams. “How much more canvas we going to need?” he yelled from the open window.

            “Enough to bring to life two-hundred,” the Chinaman hissed. “Half of them will be without blood-craving … and will be destroyed by fire. “He dragged Butch from the truck and shoved him toward a stack of empty gas-cans. “Make sure you fill them all … before you bring back the next load.”

The Chinaman stared at the nearly-round orb moving slowly across the night-sky as the three terrified men worked furiously around him. The coming of the full moon on Halloween night promised murder, mayhem, blood and bedlam. The demon Demilune threw back his head and screamed … with unhindered joy.

TO BE CONTINUED …