Niceville

about
you
.”
    “Do you? I don’t think so. You’d be better off knowing what she really is. Knew I’d be seeing you as soon as that boy down in Niceville woke up and started asking for me. Saw it on my television here. I knew it was her work. She ask you to call yourself John, when you saw me? Just to remind me of my sins against her family?”
    “Yes. I’m here in the name of John Ruelle, and in the name of his brother, Ethan, to settle an old score. Now get up.”
    The old man smiled up at Merle.
    “Why? You can shoot me right here.”
    “She wants you to be on your feet.”
    Teague stared at Merle, looked around the room, and then back at him.
    “She uses windows, you know? She uses glass. She uses the mirrors. I figured her out, after a while. Everybody else in the families, they’re just
gone
, one after the other.
The windows
, I said. I told them all,
the windows and the mirrors
.”
    He sighed.
    “But nobody listened.”
    He seemed to drift on the memory, and then he came back to Merle.
    “So I live in this room, son, no windows, no glass, no mirrors. My window is the television. Takes me everywhere I want to go. You see, with her, young man, the trick is not to open the way.”
    He started to wheeze, and then Merle realized the old man was laughing.
    “You don’t even know the thing that sent you. You think its name is Glynis Ruelle. You think she’s been wronged by me. Clara Mercer was a real fine piece. But I already had her in my bed and there are lots of fine girls in the world. Besides, I didn’t like to be told what to do. And look where it’s got me. A prisoner in this cell. I haven’t left this room in fifty years. Think about that, young man, if you get a minute to ponder.”
    He stopped wheezing, gave Merle a sidelong look.
    “But the thing that sent
you
, my friend, that’s not Glynis Ruelle. Glynis died in ’39. What lives in her now, what keeps her going, what keeps all of this going, that power goes back as far as you can go. I spent a lot of my fifty years here wondering what it really was. All I figured out was, it lives in Crater Sink. It hates Niceville like it hated the Creek and the Cherokee before ever we came here. It
hated
before there ever was anything to hate, before the world was made, as far as I can tell. And it has to
feed
. It was riding on Clara Mercer’s angry spirit to help itself feed. Oh yes. I saw those markings on the floors, or in the dirt, or in their beds, where people had been
taken
. Over the years, almost two hundred souls got eaten alive that way. I knew what I was looking at. But it has
rules
. It will do some things, and not some others. I found out if you’re real careful, you can get it to do things for you. How I got my helpers, the ones you shot up just now. Maybe how Glynis got you.”
    “Stand up.”
    He looked at Merle more carefully.
    “You’re not
listening
to me, son. You should. You know how old I am? I am one hundred and twenty-one years old. Look at me. I can still stand up, I can still hold a drink, I can still eat good food, and I piss when I damn well feel like it and not when I don’t. Cost me a fortune to stay alive this long, and stay this healthy, but then I had a damn good reason, didn’t I? I knew
she
was waiting for me. I know about that field she has down at her plantation and what gets buried in it, what gets dug up, and what poor souls do the digging. They dig each other up, son, the dead do, and then they trade places in the moldy old caskets, and those who were waiting help the dead get out and then they lie down and take their places, and the ones who got dug up do the burying. Over and over again. Year after year. Until the sun falls and all the stars go out. Glynis, she calls it
the harvest
. She does it because the thing that lives in Crater Sink wills it, although she doesn’t know that. I’ve stayed away from that awful harvest for a long time. And if you’re a reasonable young man, with a taste for unusual pleasures, I can put it off a few more years. What do you say?”
    “I say no. Get up and come with me.”
    Teague considered Merle’s face for a while, saw nothing there that he could appeal to. He sighed heavily, leaned forward, set the glassdown on the card table, put both bony hands on the arms of the chair, and straightened slowly up.
    Merle stepped back as the man got to his feet and turned to look at Merle.
    “Here?”
    “Outside,” said Merle.
    “Why not here?”
    “Outside. In