Page 80 of The Devil Knows Her Name

I went back to the house to gather my materials. When I returned, the tarp-wrapped body of the pastor was rising from the water, long strings of mud and weeds dragging from it as if the pond were trying to hold on to its prize.

I snapped the chains that bound it with bolt cutters and hurled them aside, finding my own body strangely hot with anticipation. I stripped the corpse down, hanging the clothes on nearby trees to dry. It was not as rank as I expected, perhaps preserved by the frigid depths of the pond. But the skin was still slick and blue, and the abdomen bloated. It would need work.

I drew my knife and rent the torso open from chest to belly. The viscera swelled upward, released from its prison, and I rolled the body on its side so I didn’t have to go in up to my elbows. The intestines spilled out onto the grass, and I worked out the remainder with my knife before returning the corpse to its back. The lungs and heart I had to forcibly scrape out, the blade of my knife bumping over ribs and vertebrae.

“I think that’s good enough,” I said, mostly to myself. “It’ll help with the stink, at least.”

I sewed the body back up, clumsy and hurried; there was no need to make it beautiful, but it had to be tight. It was strange to me how, even days dead and years older, I saw shades of Norman in certain lines and angles. It stayed my hands ever so briefly, and for a moment I saw it as the remains of a person rather than a cold, slimy puzzle.

When I’d finished, I stood up and shook out my numb legs. The body was, perhaps, even more horrifying now, the once-bloated stomach sunken over the ribs, blood smeared around the long, hastily stitched gash down the center, more of it matted in the gray pubic hair.

“I don’t envy you,” I said to the devil.

“I’ve done worse.”

I didn’t ask. I gathered the coffin nails and the red thread from my satchel, and the devil stood over the body, interposed between it and the moon so his faint shadow fell over it, matching it hand to hand and foot to foot. I placed the point of the first nail at the pallid left wrist, lifted the hammer, and drove it home.

The body jolted, a spasm wracking it from head to toe. My throat closed around my scream, and the hammer fell from my nerveless fingers.

“Don’t stop,” the devil urged, just as he had when I took my mother’s teeth and bones. “Don’t be afraid. It’s just the magic.”

I nodded, picking up the end of the red thread and looping it around the nail and then the wrist, knotting it once. Then I went to the left foot, repeating the entire gruesome process, and then the right, and finally the remaining wrist. Each time I drove in a nail, the pastor’s corpse arched and strained, and each time the devil told me not to stop. His voice came quieter and quieter, but I didn’t dare turn to look over my shoulder.

When I knotted the final thread, there was a terrible moment of long, cold silence. Sweat dripped into my eyes, and my hands were slick up my forearms from the body’s entrails. “What now?” I asked the devil.

There was no answer. So long did the silence stretch that I nearly glanced back, but then the pastor’s eyes locked on mine.

A shiver of awe went through me. The eyes, by color and shape, were the same as Zeke’s, but I saw the devil in them. “You’re really in there,” I said.

The mouth cracked open suddenly, tendons in the jaw snapping. I expected to hear a breath, a gasp, but of course there was none—there were no lungs in that body. “Yeessss,” came the answer, a sound like an old door creaking open.

Minutes passed as the devil returned movement to the corpse, elbows folding, fingers digging into the mud, knees flexing. When he could finally stand again, it was with the wrinkled old back to me, and I saw the misshapen place in the skull where I’d struck.

“I need some time,” he said; the voice was Zeke’s but also not his at all. “Go get dressed.”

I gathered up my clothes in my bloody hands, and I took the pastor’s too, sodden and weed-netted, and went back to the house. The pastor’s clothes I threw in the dryer, stinking and filthy as they were. I brushed my hair and washed the worst of the grime from my face, the blood stinging my eyes as it sloughed away. When I’d finished, I went to my closet and took out a single clothing bag.

The dress inside was black. The skirt and sleeves were long and full, layers and layers of chiffon; they dragged like filmy hands over my skin. The neckline plunged deeply, the V of my exposed skin a white fang in the lamplight. The bodice pulled in as tight as armor. I’d never worn it.

The dress was a gift from Evelyn. She’d stopped by one day, years ago now, her eyes sparkling as she’d pulled the bag from the back of her car.

“I know this isn’t your usual wardrobe,” she’d said, giddy as a schoolgirl, “but I thought of you when I saw it. I thought you could wear it to the harvest festival with Paul.”

She’d dropped a wink as she said it, as if Paul and I were going together rather than the entire group of us manning different booths and stations the entire evening. The dress was far too formal for any Burrsville event, but I’d thanked her anyway and told her I loved it.

I’d never found a good time to wear it, so it might as well be tonight.

The devil walked the pastor’s corpse to my door some time later. The fingers were still stiff and swollen, the nails tinged blue, so I helped him dress, buttoning the sleeves to hide the coffin nails and thread. He did not speak, but I felt his eyes on me.

“Can you talk yet?” I ventured.

“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t know if you’d want me to.”

“It’s all right. I know it’s you in there.”

It was true, and yet I found that I avoided looking at him. It was too confusing with him wearing the pastor’s flesh like a mask, and besides, I had other things to focus on now. The real work still had to be done.

When he was dressed in all his dry but stained and reeking clothes, the buttons all done up to hide the nails and the thread and the very top of the incision at the sternum, we descended into the valley. The walk, which would normally take an hour or more, felt like a scant five minutes. The meadow grass was soft as paper under my bare feet, the soil cool and damp.