Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)
Craig Schaefer
Prologue
The ghost of Merle Haggard kept Sophia trapped in her house for two weeks. Every time she went to the door she’d see him standing on her lawn, clutching his guitar and wagging a disapproving finger at her. She knew her medication would probably make him go away, just like she knew the real Merle Haggard was alive and well in California, but she hated how the pills made her feel. Stuffy, slow, like scratchy wool was wrapped around her brain.
Merle left one morning, and another apparition took his place. This one came inside her house, ignoring all her wards and charms and trinkets, and stood in the corner of her kitchen. This one wore a crisp vintage suit and a featureless smudge of black smoke where its face should have been.
Sophia hid in her closet until hunger got the better of her. She skittered into the kitchen with her head down and arms crossed over her fluffy pink bathrobe, making a beeline for the pantry. The smoke-faced man waved its arms frantically.
“Hie!” it cried in a buzzing voice, like a thousand flies fluttering their wings in unison. “You! On our wavelength! Carry our message! It’s heavy, made of rocks!”
“You aren’t real,” Sophia repeated like a mantra, shaking her head violently as she rummaged through the cluttered pantry. “You’re a hallucination, not real, no, nothing to see here.”
“Apocalypso dancing! Sunday Sunday Sunday! You’ll want to cut your wrists with the whole knife, but you’ll only need the edge!”
She found a box of saltines and grabbed it hard enough to buckle the cardboard before fleeing the kitchen.
Another smoke-faced man floated from her bedroom, this one dressed in an old-time professor’s smock and cap. It advanced slowly up the shadowed hallway, feet dangling an inch above the faded shag carpet.
“We know you can see us,” it buzzed.
“Go away!” she shouted over her shoulder, running for the living room.
“You must warn the Faust,” it called out. “You must carry our message—”
The doorbell chimed. Sophia scrambled to undo the deadbolts and yanked open the door, desperate for company. The woman on her porch could have been an Avon lady, dressed in a prim gray pantsuit with her hair done up in a neat bun, but Sophia’s gaze shot to the jagged scar carved along the side of her face. The scar stopped just short of one cold eye.
Sophia took a halting step over the threshold, out into the sunlight. She blinked back tears and asked in a small voice, “Are…are you real? I’m having problems today.”
Meadow Brand curled her lips into an unpleasant smile.
“I’m very real,” Meadow said. Then she showed Sophia the tiny pistol in her hand and shoved her back inside the house.
One
I jumped out of the passenger seat of Jennifer’s Prius and hit the ground like a tourist at the running of the bulls, charging across a scraggly yellow lawn. The front door of Sophia’s ramshackle tract house hung open, swaying in an errant desert breeze that didn’t begin to cut the heat. Blood spattered the white shag carpet. It sprayed out in loops and puddles like a mad Jackson Pollock painting.
We’d gotten the call twenty minutes earlier. Sophia’s “visions” tended to be ninety percent hallucination, ten percent psychic, but when she started rambling incoherently about the smoke-faced men in her house, we dropped everything and hit the highway. Three weeks ago those same smoke-faced men had damn near set off the apocalypse.
I froze in the wreckage of her living room. Static blared from the blood-streaked screen of her boxy television set, and a fallen lamp cast angled shadows over Sophia’s mutilated corpse. Her murderer wasn’t human. It was a faceless wooden mannequin with jointed limbs, like a life-sized version of an artist’s posing doll. One of its hands ended in a wooden nub, the other in a jagged, rusty knife. The mannequin hunched over her body and plunged the blade into Sophia’s stomach over and over again, a murder machine that didn’t understand its victim was dead.
Meadow Brand stood on the far side of the bloodbath. Her smug smile twisted the scar I’d given her. We’d faced off for the first time in a room a lot like this one, but it was a different friend of mine lying dead on the floor. Now I owed her for two.
The scene was too much to take in, too fast, and I forgot the hard lesson I’d learned from going up against Meadow and her mannequins: there was never only one of them. The second puppet lurched from its hiding spot behind the door. It crashed into me and grabbed me in a bear hug, its stiff wooden arms squeezing the breath from my lungs.
I thrashed my head backward. The move would have broken a human’s nose, but all it gave me was a sharp shock of pain as the back of my skull slammed against smooth wood. With my breath gone and black spots blooming in my eyes, I leaned forward and twisted my shoulder, using the mannequin’s own weight to hoist it up and over. It smashed against the floor and flailed like a flipped-over cockroach.
Jennifer was a few steps behind me. She appeared in the doorway, eyes shrouded behind blue Lennon glasses, gripping a gun the size of Texas. The hand cannon barked twice, blasts that pounded my eardrums and left streaks of light hovering in my vision. The fallen mannequin’s head exploded in a spray of wooden shards. The second one caught the slug square in the chest, and what was left of the creature fell to the carpet in a twitching ruin.