Gianfranco Mancini’s Reviews > The Tatterdemon Omnibus > Status Update

“Maddy!” Maddy turned and stared like a deer trapped in oncoming headlights. “Maddy!” The voice was coming from the field. She knew who it was. Daddy was coming home. She dropped the hatchet and ran for the shelter of the welcoming barn. She could fight a witch and a big-assed scarecrow from hell but this was a terror that she didn’t know how to begin to fight.

“Ding dong, the witch is dead.” the Tatterdemon rumbled in Vic’s voice. He was ready to play. “No more boss, no more woman to listen to. I got the power now.” “I’ll show you power,” Maddy screamed.

Fear touched the Tatterdemon’s spirit like a grim icy hand. The wind brought a voice to his ears. The voice of the witch telling him - don’t you worry about the girl. She is nothing but straw. You take the town and I will take the girl. You can have her, he thought. I will take the town. “I will take the town,” he yelled. “I will take all who walk and breathe and give them to the ground. I will give them to me.”

Barn rats are mean. And they tend to work in gangs. If you see one rat, you’ve missed ten others was how Daddy used to put it. One rat in the barn meant a hundred in the field. Sure enough there were more of them following. One after another through the crawl-hole,like they smelled something tasty in here. Where the hell were they coming from? Maybe the evil in the field had stirred them up. Maybe they smelled death.

His left leg bent in the wrong direction. It had bent that way since Vic the walking compost heap had thrown him through the window. Defenestration. That was what they called it in the forensic handbook. Death by going through a window. There was a word for anything, wasn’t there? Earl wondered what the word was for those things back there. The scarecrow zombies?

“Get the other two,” Vic snarled. Maddy blinked. She couldn’t understand what Vic was asking. “What?” “The two in the house. Go and get them and drag them out to the field.” She stared at him in disbelief. “Why?” she asked. “We got us some planting to do.”

Deeper. Now she stood in the basement of her mind, surrounded by the walls of memory, fantasy, and need. She knelt down and found a trapdoor at her feet. She opened the trapdoor and she found a hole. She clambered into the hole beneath and dug in the darkness, doubt and dirt. And somewhere down there in the shadows of memory; beneath the hole and beneath the dirt - Wendy Joe found her Momma.

It never was Carmen’s fault. Roland touched the scar on his stomach. Her goodbye note. He had left her the night she had taken the knife to him and could still feel the cool burning as the blade tore through the skin of his stomach. He could still feel his skin opening up, cut by someone who said she loved him. It wasn’t her fault.

Next she added a little sprinkle of graveyard dirt. Ghost dust, was what her momma called it, dust blessed with the touch of the dead. Forget about your nuclear energy. There was nothing stronger than graveyard dirt. Touched by a thousand lives and tears spilled upon, soaking up all that energy.

“Where do you live?” he repeated. “A little farmhouse,” she said. “Two miles up the road.” “I need somewhere to hide out for a while. I need some food. I need a bed – and maybe somebody to lay in it with me.” What the hell could she do? “You’re more than welcome,” she said wryly. He laughed at that. It was a harsh laugh, like metal grating against stone. “I figured that.”