It had been customary to launch novels of Justin Robinson’s noir monsterverse on Halloween. However, in a change of pace (and protagonist) A Stitch in Crime appeared on the Ides of March 2020. To keep avid fans from feeling deprived and maintain the Halloween tradition, here’s a bonus story whose spirit is congruent with All Hallows Eve, featuring the demon-riddled location and monsters of Stitch. The inspired illustration of Sugar Kane is by Fernando Caire. And if you haven’t yet delved into Justin’s inspired noir/pulp monster mash, City of Devils, Fifty Feet of Trouble, Wolfman Confidential and A Stitch in Crime are with us!
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Strange Harvest
by Justin Robinson
– a City of Devils Series Companion Story-
In the old days, someone from around here would’ve called the pumpkinhead a dude, assuming that someone could get past the fact that he was a green-skinned man with a grinning jack-o-lantern for a head. He dressed smartly in a purple three-piece suit and brightly shined shoes that were soon coated with the same cloying yellow dust that covered everything else in Quartzsite. He was slicker than anybody in town, and that included Ambrose Dullahan.
A pumpkinhead meant trouble. Pumpkinheads were the monsters of monsters, at least those monsters who went around killing and the like. Rumor was, they could sniff out guilt and take whatever vengeance they figured was due. Some of them had even gone pro, offering vengeance to the highest bidder. That summer, in the middle of what folks were already calling the La Paz War, the highest bidder had been Phobos. Sure, she didn’t have the kind of cash she did back before the Dullahans started rustling her swarms, but she still had enough to hire a pumpkinhead to do some dirty work.
His first night he came into the Sugar Shack, the same as anyone passing through. There was nowhere else to go once the sun went down, other than maybe Fort Meatstick. When the pumpkinhead moseyed into the joint, the customers sat a little straighter, talked a little quieter. They all acted like the one nun, the one who was quickest to dole out the Lord’s correction with a ruler, had sauntered in and caught them in the middle of a dice game. Sugar Kane, owner and proprietor (and human fly besides), merely took note of the visitor and calculated an escalation in the hostilities. She watched him, after three bowls of peanuts and not a single drink, wander out the back door, off into the desert. She figured he was off to take a powder somewhere peaceful. Pumpkinheads slept in the ground.
Three days later, his head was on a spear. No one saw it go up, or at least no one would admit to seeing it. Not that the law was doing much asking. No, the broken-down old deputy allegedly looking after the property and citizenry of Quartzsite didn’t want to get in the middle of a war between the Phobans and the Dullahans. He was going to wait it out and toady up to whoever won, and everyone knew it.
The spear had been put up at the corner of Main and Central, driven into the desert earth not far from the post office. Pumpkin pulp had dripped down the shaft and caked dry in the sun. The weird part was the face. Jack-o-lanterns didn’t normally change once they’d been carved, and this pumpkinhead had been sporting a gap-toothed grin when he’d arrived on his little errand. Now his mouth turned down at the edges, and his eyeholes were notably saggy. The candle in his head had been snuffed out, too, because sometimes the world works as it should.
The town, already living underneath a war no one could stop, greeted this fresh outrage with a shrug. No one knew the pumpkinhead, for one, so he didn’t have any ginned-up kin looking for payback. Besides, this was only the first desecration of a corpse if you ignored the time Tod Dullahan, on horseback, had dragged Ganymos up and down Main Street until his front half had been completely sanded off, or when the mutants had tied each one of Clyde Dullahan’s limbs to a different giant ant and made them run off in all four directions. Sure, this was an escalation, but a relatively benign one, at least to the average ghoul on the street.
Sugar Kane largely ignored it. The mutants were getting desperate, and the way the Dullahans calmly dispatched the hired gun told her who was going to win this little shindig. She might not like it, but there wasn’t a damn thing she could do either way. She owned a bar; she wasn’t a gunfighter, and the Dullahans had shown what happened to anyone who took the mutants’ side. Especially someone with an interesting head. She considered moving west, but there wasn’t much west of her other than Los Angeles, and who needed that kind of nonsense? She was more or less stuck in Quartzsite, which made her like every other monster in town. Less stuck than that pumpkinhead, but these things were relative.
On the morning Sugar saw Galateo lurking around outside her joint, she was fetching water from the pump, before the sun really started baking the wash. She probably would have squinted at the mutant, only her huge red compound eyes didn’t blink, let alone squint. She watched the mutant shambling from rock to Joshua tree to poke at the earth with the shovel he clutched over one gray shoulder. Galateo was trouble, but not the way a lot of the other mutants were. Phobos sent him when violence was on the list, but not necessarily at the very top. When it came to the mutants in Quartzsite, that made him the next best thing to a saint.
As for him poking and prodding the desert, Sugar didn’t think much of it. Mutants and headless horsemen wanted the desert for their giant ant swarms. If the mutants found a new spot for anthills on land she kind of owned, Sugar figured they’d compensate her. The mutants were a little better about that kind of thing than the headless horsemen were.
It was when Galateo was still out there well after dark that night that Sugar started thinking he might be up to something. Nighttime in the wash got dark. Very dark. Any earthbound light came from windows or the odd torch. Otherwise, it was up to the bare sliver of moon and an admittedly impressive blanket of stars. Bathed in the silver light, the lumbering mutant was almost pretty. Almost, because Galateo was still a mutant. Still a weird insect brain-thing only a mother could love. Considering Sugar’s own mug, she wasn’t going to start throwing too many stones there.
Still, she found herself watching Galateo from the alcove by the back door of her joint. It was coming on morning, and all the drunks had been swept out in the street to find someplace to spend the day. Her bouncer had shambled back to the quonset hut he called home. She stood in the dark, relishing the cold night air because the day before had been hell and the day coming wasn’t going to be any better. And Galateo was still out there. Still poking. Still prodding. Still hunting for something.
His movements had taken on a frantic herky-jerky quality, like an ant who’d been stepped on once and needed one more to finish it off. Then he zeroed in on a patch of ground that looked the same as any other to Sugar, and before long, he had carved out a decent-sized hole. He hauled something out of it and scurried vaguely in her direction, clutching a bundle to his chest. Sugar nearly called out to him, to get his attention and see what the hell he was doing. She didn’t.
Probably saved her life.
The horseman came from behind her, so she heard him before she saw him. That warning was enough for her to step back into the deep shadows of the doorway. Phobos’s mutants could be reasoned with, but if a Dullahan decided you were today’s plaything, there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it.
The headless horseman galloped in on a demon-eyed mustang whose hooves struck flames wherever they touched the desert. He held a carpenter’s hammer in one hand, the head faintly glowing with hellfire. Sugar recognized Colton Dullahan, and she was glad she had hidden. No one was as bad as Tod, but Colton did his best. That hammer had spilled more brains than a zombie convention.
“Whatcha got there, bugbrain?” Colton called out, the slur riding easy on his disembodied voice.
“Back off, Colton,” Galateo called back. “I don’t need no trouble.”
“Don’t need no trouble, but here you are in our wash.”
“Quartzsite ain’t anybody’s! It’s neutral ground!”
“That what you thought when you sent that pumpkinhead for us?” Colton laughed when Galateo froze. “We put him up right where he belongs, didn’t we?”
Sugar flinched. She couldn’t help it. When one of the Dullahans was ready to spill some blood, you could feel it in the air, like lightning that a storm hadn’t yet shed. Her flinch knocked over a glass that had been left on the table closest to the door. It tottered, and as she turned to stare at it in impotent horror, it toppled over and shattered on the floor. When Sugar looked up, Galateo’s goggle eyes were staring right at her. Colton didn’t have a head, but no god was kind enough to make him miss that sound.
“Looks like we got ourselves an audience,” Colton said. “I should probably finish up then.”
“No, hold on—” That was all Galateo got out. Colton gave his spectral steed the spurs and the mustang leapt forward. The hammer came down, then up, followed by an arc of shiny ichor. Galateo fell to the dust in a heap. The horseman hopped down from the saddle and picked up what the mutant had been clutching. Then he stalked toward the bar.
“That you, Sugar?” he called. “Don’t think I need you knowing I found this.”
It would have been a scream, but Sugar couldn’t do that anymore. It was a frantic buzz as she threw the door shut. Death was coming. She tried to calm herself. Colton Dullahan was a monster—in the old and new senses of the word—but he had to be at least partly rational. He wanted what he found; he didn’t have to kill her. She just had to convince him of that. Run to the door, take flight—she’d get away, but she could never return to the wash. She backed to the center of her bar and struck a jaunty pose she didn’t feel. Then she listened to his footsteps crunching on the dirt, louder and louder. Each one dropped her blood another ten degrees. He was in no hurry. He’d kill her on his own time.
The door splintered as Colton kicked it in. She jumped and tried to hide it.
“There you are. Wish you hadn’t seen that. Sure, you serve pisswater here, but this is the only joint around. Maybe I’ll take it after I take your head.” His boots ground the broken glass into the wood as he walked in. The hammer was loose in his hand, the mutant’s ichor sizzling on the head. In the other, he held a dirty valise. Something that had been buried in the desert for a couple days.
Sugar buzzed at him. Her hands, one human, one insect, went to the cards hanging around her neck. She forced herself not to tremble, to select the card she wanted and show it to Colton. What will you have? the card said.
Colton laughed. “Got some sand, I’ll give you that. What’ll I have? That pumpkinhead’s money for one thing.” He held up a valise shedding desert dust in a sickly aura. “Then a dead human fly. Then maybe a beer.”
Sugar took a step back. Colton was still coming. Her hands were trembling now, no way to stop them. She held the card up again and jerked her head toward the bar.
Colton paused. “You offerin’ me that beer first?”
Sugar nodded, and resisted the urge to wave the card. That would be showing fear, and predators like Colton Dullahan saw fear as their green light to charge.
Colton was motionless, and if he had a face, she might have seen him making the decision. To someone like Colton, murder and a beer were more or less interchangeable. The only question was the order he wanted them in that particular moment. Finally: “Why not? For a fly, you ain’t bad to look at. Might as well be the last fella to study what the good Lord gave you.”
Sugar buzzed softly, a sigh of something approaching relief. She went behind the bar, adjusting her top so the horseman could get a better look at her assets. As long as he was staring at her chest, he wasn’t thinking about what to do with her head. She pulled him a beer from the tap and slid it over.
Colton mounted his barstool like it was the paint outside, set the dusty valise on the bar, and lifted the mug. He raised it to Sugar in a mock salute. “Here’s mud in your eye.” He tipped it up where his mouth would be, and the liquid vanished phantom mouthful by phantom mouthful. Sugar fancied she could hear the beer hissing like it had been dumped over hot coals.
The mug came down. “You don’t have to be scared. It’ll be quick, I can promise you that.” He meant it, too. Colton thought he was trying to do her a favor, and it never occurred to him that she might not want it.
She nodded like this was the most normal thing in the world to talk about. Maybe if she kept him going, he might decide he liked his audience alive.
“Can you believe Phobos tried hirin’ a gunsel to do what she’s too yellow to?” Sugar heard the disbelieving shake of his head in Colton’s voice.
Sugar mimicked what she heard. Then she flashed the card Another round?
“Think I will, at that.” She took the mug and was about to pull him another beer when he said, “No. Get me the good stuff. I know you got some bottles you’re savin’.”
Any bartender worth her salt did. She kept it on the off chance anyone with some money to spend wanted something worth spending it on. Now she was trying to buy her life with it. She knelt, ready to retrieve the bottle of whiskey with the coiled snake on the label. Instead, she found herself staring dumbly at the whole reason she’d gone out back in the first place: the bucket of water. She had been planning to mop the place, but the day had slipped away from her. Her brain struggled to make sense of the bucket. It felt like it wasn’t supposed to be there, even though it plainly was.
“Where the hell is that booze, Sugar?” Colton demanded from above.
Colton. Colton. The headless horsemen. She knew then what her mind was trying to tell her through the haze of fear and desperation. She gripped the bucket and stood.
Colton’s hands went up. “Now, Sugar, don’t do anything stupid. I wasn’t gonna kill you. I promise. I was just tryin’ to scare you a little, so you wouldn’t tell nobody I had the money.”
Sugar’s hands were occupied. Otherwise she might want to tell him what she thought of that line. Instead, she let the water speak for her. The legends said headless horsemen couldn’t cross running water, but that wasn’t right. They were scared of it because of what it could do.
“Maybe we could split the money,” Colton said. Any further negotiation became a keening wail as the water splashed over him. Sugar, clutching the bucket to her chest, watched until the horseman dissolved away into nothing. Then she had a look in the valise.
The next night, one of the mutants came in. This was Demos, one of Phobos’s closest henchmen. The other customers tensed as he lumbered in and sidled up to the bar. Scared, but not as much as they had been of the pumpkinhead. Sugar showed him the card What will you have?
“Sugar,” he murmured, barely audible over the soft conversations in the joint. “You know that pumpkinhead, the one out by the post office? Do you know where he might have been sleeping?”
Sugar shook her head, and let the fact that her face was that of a fly hide the lie for her. Yeah, she knew exactly where, only that’s not what Demos was asking. He wanted to know where the money they had paid him ended up. Only it wasn’t there either. It was outside of town, buried where only she knew. Waiting for the day she needed a nest egg.
