The one who’d been driving looked at me through his thin veil of plastic. Tilted his head. How often had I seen that gesture?

  “Where’s my son?” I asked. Something was slowly trickling into my veins and muscles and heart. Desperation. These bastards didn’t know it, but once I saw my son, once I saw even the slightest sign that he was alive and well, I would go on a rampage, killing like a demon released from Hell until Wesley was freed. I, nor he, had anything to lose now. They would kill us eventually, soon. And I knew it.

  The Bagheads didn’t respond. The driver rounded the truck and came to stand by his companion. Then he pointed into the woods, in a direction I already knew. The way to the House of Tongues.

  “Is he there?” I asked. “You took him there, did to him what you tried to do to me?” I knew the answer to this even as I asked it, but I needed confirmation, a stamp of approval for my pending rampage.

  The Baghead who’d been in the passenger seat finally spoke. He used the voice of old, the disguised voice, the voice of crushing rocks.

  “We won’t fight you. Follow us or the boy dies.”

  Neither one of them waited for a response. They turned and started walking away, down a tiny deer trail that I hadn’t noticed until they slipped through the bushes that framed its entrance. The two men were soon replaced by swaying branches and darkness.

  I jumped out of the truck and ran after them, slipping into the thick growth of vegetation. I couldn’t think anymore. Only act. Unlike the night all those years ago, fear for my own safety didn’t exist. It should have, because I had three other kids dependent on me, but the numbness was complete. Forward. Forward. Forward.

  I caught up to the Bagheads, slowed to a brisk pace right on their heels. Their flashlights cast a sporadic spray of brightness on the low canopy above us, eerie and dizzying. They didn’t speak, and I didn’t speak. The nocturnal insects serenaded us with their night song; the soggy leaves and pine straw squished beneath our feet. I studied the build of the two men, wondered if there was any way I could take both of them. As soon as I had Wesley in my sights, I planned to do whatever it took to put them down.

  We entered a clearing, the clearing from my childhood. The stone-brick tower still stood in the middle, though it seemed half as tall as I remembered. Both Bagheads shone their lights upon the tightly curved shaft—its crown still jagged, its sides still filthy, strewn with moss; the whole thing looked like a smokestack from an industrial revolution-era factory. Seeing it made my heart icy cold.

  “Is my son down there?” I asked. Images of the House of Tongues were flashing through my mind, the memories of it coming together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  The two men turned to look back at me, the bags on their heads crinkling with the movement. They said nothing, just stared through the plastic. I was so fed up. Fed up with how I’d been treated as a teenager, fed up with how I was being treated now.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked, trying to keep my calm. “What do you have against my family? Against me? What did I ever do to the damned Gaskins?” My breaths were quick and shallow, my lungs difficult to properly fill with air.

  One of the men took a step toward me, then another. He leaned closer, his bagged, shadowed face only a few inches from mine.

  “Your family is accursed,” he said, with no attempt to disguise his voice. It was Dicky. I knew it was Dicky. He said the last word with exaggerated emphasis on the syllables. A-curse-ed. “And for 200 years, you’ve made us accursed too.”

  His words didn’t baffle, didn’t confuse. They only angered. I shook from it as I spoke.

  “I’m glad that you backwoods, inbred, dumbass Gaskinses can feel better when you blame all the things you’ve done on everything and everyone but yourselves, but it ends tonight. I swear to God that it ends tonight.” I breathed in and out as heavily as if I’d just run a half-mile without stopping.

  The Bagheads stood there, saying nothing in reply. Several seconds passed.

  “Where is he?” I shouted. “Tell me where he is!”

  Still nothing.

  Fuming, I barreled forward, stepping right between the two men; I bumped their shoulders with mine, throwing both of them off balance. But I didn’t stop—I headed toward the small square door that I knew waited for me on the other side of the stone tower.

  “Ya might not like what ya find down there,” Dicky said from behind me.

  I stopped, couldn’t help it. Turned to face him and his partner.

  “Take off that stupid bag,” I said. “Stop acting like a damned child and take it off!”

  I don’t know how to describe the amount of anger that flowed through me in those moments without repeating myself incessantly. But it was a living thing, a consuming thing.

  “Take it off!” I screamed, then I was running forward. I reached the man I thought was Dicky, grabbed at his head. He didn’t resist. My fingers found the bag where it had been tied around his neck, dug into the thin plastic, gripped it. He still didn’t resist, even as the momentum of my efforts pushed him several feet. I stayed with him, using both hands now to rip at the material. The plastic resisted at first, but once I snipped it the whole thing burst apart, flimsy shreds falling across his shoulders.

  It was…

  It was my dad.

  I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand at all.

  Stumbling backward, two steps, three, four. Staring at my own father, his hair disheveled and sweaty, his face haggard, his eyes full of glowing pain. He said nothing, looked back at me with as blank an expression as I’d ever seen on his face, so empty that I doubted my initial recognition of him for a moment. But it was him. A confusion as big and complex as the universe filled my soul. And still he said nothing.

  Stunned, I looked over at the other Baghead—the one who had to be Dicky—as if he’d explain and make everything okay. It was all an innocent mistake, a joke, a prank. There was no way in hell, no circumstance under the sun and moon, no possible explanation for why my dad was here with Dicky Gaskins, disguised in the childish hood of my lifetime enemies.

  “What’s going on?” I said in a low voice, asking the grass and trees as much as anyone else. Nothing, absolutely nothing made sense in my life right then.

  But Dicky responded anyway; he left his ridiculous bag atop his head but made no effort to mask his voice.

  “Our families are stuck, David,” he said, as if I’d asked for directions and he was obliged to answer. “Doesn’t matter how many decades you spend tryin’ to forget, tryin’ to deny it. We’re as tied up as chicken wire, man. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change that.”

  I stared at him, either dumb or dumbfounded, I didn’t know which. “What are you talkin’ about, Dicky? I swear if you did anything to my son…”

  “Ha!” He barked the word, not an ounce of humor buried within it. “If I’ve done anything to your son. The nerve you’ve got, David. For 200 years your family has been doing things to my family, but all you can go on about is one little person. One person out of hundreds. You ain’t nothin’ but a damned son of a bitch.”

  I couldn’t take this for one more second. I leaped forward, grabbed his shirt with both of my hands. I yanked him close to me, his bag-hidden face only inches from mine.

  “Stop talking in riddles!” I yelled, sprays of spit sounding like raindrops on the thin plastic. “Where is he! What’d you do to him! Did you kill him? Huh?” I screamed every word.

  Dicky made no effort to fight back, hanging almost limp in my grip.

  Surely just to rattle me, he answered in that gravelly, Batman voice.

  “Course we didn’t kill him, you dumbass. There’s a lot worse things than that you can do to a man. Man or kid alike.”

  I let go of his shirt and pushed him to the ground; he fell flat on his back, let out a painful-sounding grunt.

  “One more time,” I said, hearing the danger in my own voice. “Where. Is. He.”

  Dicky leaned himself up onto an elbow. “He’s right below us, David.” He pointed a thumb toward the dirt and weeds beneath his body, as if pointing at Hell. “He’s down there doin’ what it is we been doin’ for two centuries.”

  “What, Dicky. What’s my son doing? Why don’t you enlighten me.”

  He didn’t respond for a few seconds, and I almost gave up—I was just starting to turn back toward the broken tower, the door, the spiral staircase, my son—when Dicky spoke four words that made the hairs of my entire body stand on end.

  “He’s using a saw.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  June 1989

  After Pee Wee had lead us into the long, dank, stone-bricked room with its shelves of preserved human tongues, the Baghead who’d come down with us grabbed Andrea and me by the arms and guided us past it all, made us sit in two wooden chairs with their backs against the far wall. The revelation that the mason jars contained tongues had really shaken me, made me sick to my stomach. Stunned, I sat down without fight or complaint, grabbing Andrea’s hand for support. A tether to sanity, reason, some kind of hope.

  Pee Wee untied the plastic bag handles around his neck and pulled the bag off, then scratched his fingers over his crew-cut hair. I stared at him, the pock-marked face, the weasel-like eyes, the lean, taut figure. A huge scab and bruise marked the spot where Andrea had hit him with a rock. He wore scruffy jeans, an old work-shirt with a name atop the pocket so faded I couldn’t read it, and dusty work boots. Standing before us, he folded his arms, looked down at the floor. A half-minute or so passed in silence; the other Baghead didn’t remove his disguise as he stood by the door through which we’d come. The world’s strangest watchdog.

  “Why’d you bring us here?” Andrea asked. She hadn’t given up with these types of questions, though everyone in the room knew they weren’t going to get us anywhere. I thought that by demanding information, it was her way of showing bravery, showing she didn’t plan to cower in fear.

  Pee Wee focused his gaze on her. “You didn’t have to be a part of this, ya know. This is between the Player family and mine, not yours. You and your mama could head back to Mexico for all I cared, but you’re here now, ain’t ya? Tough shit I say. It’s what you get for jacking me at the Honeyhole.”

  “I’m just as American as you,” she replied defiantly.

  That inflamed Pee Wee. He stepped up to her, slapped her across the face for the second time in a week. She didn’t so much as whimper, just straightened her head and glared back at him. I hated myself for being too chicken to do anything about it.

  “That don’t seem to work on you none,” Pee Wee said. Then he slapped me just as hard. My face snapped to the right, the blooming pain of it like a whoosh of lit gas. My eyes stung with tears.

  “Stop it!” Andrea screamed.

  I braced myself for another whack, but it didn’t come. Pee Wee took a step back and folded his arms again, his skin flushed and sweaty now.

  “If you kids think this is all gonna end with somethin’ as easy and quick and clean as death, you can toss that right out your heads. Oh no. That ain’t how this whole things works, ya see. No, sir. No, ma’am. Uh-uh. This here’s about torment. About payback. This here’s about makin’ things balanced betwixt our families. Got it?”

  His eyes were trained on mine as if he expected an answer.

  “I don’t get it,” I said meekly.

  “That’s ’cause your daddy’s too weak to tell you the truth. To tell you your history. Your Grandpa Player was yellow-bellied, too. Your whole damn family line’s been too craven to follow our pact, keep things… manageable. They keep trying to pawn it all on us, one-sided. It’s enough to make a man… Angry.”

  I wanted to ask. Ask the obvious and simplest of questions, but I literally could not speak. Pee Wee obliged us by answering the unspoken.

  “It’s a curse, boy. A curse upon our ancestors, yours and mine both. From those pricks, the Puritans. You study them in school, I reckon? You know what the hell a Puritan is?”

  I nodded, squeezing Andrea’s hand at the same time. We had to do something. Had to. The tension in the air was thick, something awful and dark ready to shatter it. This man was totally unstable.

  “Did you know you’re a Quaker?” Pee Wee asked.

  The question took me so much by surprise that I found my voice.

  “A Quaker?”

  Pee Wee turned his attention to Andrea. “Girl, you know what Puritans and Quakers are, don’t ya?”

  I watched her as she nodded, nothing else. But I could tell her mind was spinning, trying to come up with a way out of this shit show.

  “They hated us,” Pee Wee said. “We hated them, too, but they had all the power. All the power.” He paused. “I wanna read you a scripture. Ya’ll probably too busy committin’ whoredoms in the woods to read much of the Good Book, I’m sure. But you’re gonna listen to this one. Understood?”

  He waited. I nodded. Andrea nodded.

  “Proverbs,” he said, having calmed down, back to the reverential voice he’d used when we first entered. “Proverbs, chapter 10, verse 31. Either one of you know it?”

  He waited. I shook my head. Andrea shook her head.

  Then he recited the scripture as if each word were as sacred as the tomb of Jesus. “‘The mouth of the just bringeth forth wisdom; but the perverted tongue shall be cut out.’”

  He went quiet, perhaps hoping we’d ponder the meaning. My eyes naturally went to the bottles lining the shelves on the other side of the room, full of tongues, according to Pee Wee. I wondered what kind of evil was going on, here.

  “We were cursed to kill,” Pee Wee said. “Cursed to shed the blood of our fellow man, commit the ultimate sin. Passed down from generation to generation by the perverted tongue when pulled from our throats, then cured by its cutting out. It’s our curse and our blessing. It’s also why we remove the heads of the sinners, because it’s the dwelling place of their perverted tongues. We become their curse and their blessing.”

  He’s more than crazy, I thought. He’s… gleefully insane.

  “You’re gonna see the ritual, now,” Pee Wee said, barely above a whisper. “The Reticence and the Waking. The passing and the cure, all in one night. Then it’ll be your turn to carry the torch for a while. Don’t that sound fun?” He looked behind him, toward the Baghead standing guard. “Bring him in.”

  The man nodded and opened the door, letting a boy about our age into the room. He was short, skinny, brown hair mussed and greasy, long enough to hang down around his eyes. His face was bruised and battered, as if he’d recently had his ass kicked—the Baghead I’d pummeled at the Honeyhole. At first I thought his eyes were wild with fear, but after a moment I realized it was something more like fanaticism. His gaze darted here and there and his hands fidgeted at his sides, his whole body tense with some kind of excitement.

  “This is my boy, Dicky,” Pee Wee announced. “Pretty close to your ages, I reckon, though I ain’t got a clue what year he was born. Don’t matter none. He’s here to help out with somethin’ just a little bit wonderful. Things been goin’ along the same for long enough. Tonight we’re gonna put the hand on the other foot, or whatever the hell that damn phrase is.”

  I stole a glance at Andrea, my eyebrows raised to the roof. I had no idea what was going on, and based on her own baffled expression, neither did she. But something about her demeanor gave me pause. I couldn’t quite place why I thought it, but she seemed poised to strike, like a snake coiled up before a mouse. I’d seen her this way once before.

  “Come here, Dicky,” Pee Wee said. “Come on over here. I want these kids to get a good look while we turn the page on the old Player book. Time for the Gaskins’ chapter, ain’t it.”

  Dicky, still trembling with anticipation, came over to stand by his dad, both of them only three or four feet in front of us. Pee Wee put his hand on the boy’s head and patted, like he was the family dog.

  “Remember what we went over?” Pee Wee asked.

  Dicky nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” He stepped over to a cloth bag that had been set against the wall and knelt next to it, rummaged inside. Then he pulled out a mason jar—full of the same amber liquid as the others lining the shelves, though nothing floated inside—and a hunting knife, the gleaming blade over half-a-foot long with a serrated edge for cutting skin and meat. He held these items up for everyone to see, then placed them on the floor, next to the bag. Then he stood up and took his place next to Dicky again. “Let’s get started. You ready?”

  “I’m ready,” the boy responded.

  I stared with sick fascination, almost forgetting the circumstances. Andrea and I still held hands, our fingers as wet as if we’d dipped them in a swimming pool. Dicky had a quick façade of fear flash across his face, but then it was gone.

  “Here goes nothing,” Pee Wee said, stabilizing his stance as if he expected the room to start shaking from an earthquake, hands held out before him. He concentrated on those hands, and I half-wondered if he was about to do a magic trick. Then he reached up to his mouth, which he opened wide, and stuck several fingers inside, pushing on his own tongue. He kept at it, grunting, shoving his hands deeper and deeper, forcing his tongue to the back of his throat. He gagged, choked, coughed, but didn’t stop whatever he was doing. Dicky looked up at him with wide-eyed wonder.

  Then something must have happened, because suddenly Pee Wee went completely silent and took his hands from his mouth, arms dropping to the side. His mouth gaped open, his cheeks a little puffed out, something obviously wrong. His face showed discomfort, and he tapped his son on the shoulder then pointed desperately at himself, pointed at his throat.

  “He just choked himself,” Andrea whispered, her voice creepily steady.

  I knew she was right, as little as I understood why.

  Pee Wee Gaskins had just shoved his own tongue down his throat.

  Chapter Twenty-Five