Chapter Eleven
Bloodlines: Gospel of the Sheriff
I was eight years old when my daddy took me into the tunnels. That night, he stopped seeing me as his son. To be honest, maybe daddy never saw me as that. He started seeing me as an instrument of sorts. Some kind of weapon to sharpen and train. Later, to use.
He woke me late one night. I wasn’t expecting it, well, because he never did that before. I remember the grip on my shoulder, and his clothes smelled of stale tobacco. He told me to get dressed. NO questions. Just hurry.
Outside, getting into his big truck, he gave me a flashlight. It was rusted and flaked orange. This was his light, he’d had it since he was a small boy, and now daddy was letting me use it! He said it worked if I hit it hard against the truck. That was his philosophy. Break it until it works.
We drove past the old asylum. The windows were bricked up, and the place always gave me the creeps. He said the asylum was where the good work started. He said our family was royalty here, the first sheriff of Towers Valley! But there was a pact made…
I didn’t know what pact he meant. But I would.
The hatch under the slaughterhouse opened with a sharp noise that made my ears hurt. The stink hit first like dead animals and the darkness was worse. Worse than the time I vomited nothing but orange juice on the school bus.
“Get in there,” he muttered. “Gonna show you sumthin’.”
My daddy shoved me down the stairs ahead of him. His lantern spat a dull light, just enough to show me the walls and steps. Everything was damp and warm. Almost alive, like the inside of a deer when you gut it.
“Look it’s alive. All of it,” he said. “Ain’t she beautiful?”
But he believed it. And belief is a disease that spreads through a bloodline faster than any infection. Daddy just laughed and patted my shoulder like this was a Sunday stroll.
Then we reached the chambers.
Bodies were wedged into pockets carved into the walls of the place.
Some still moved.
Some whispered. One—its jaw unhinged and leaking—sang something under its breath, too low for me to understand, but the sound made my ears feel full of water.
I tried to run. But daddy caught me by the back of the neck and slammed me to the floor so hard my teeth clacked.
“Look,” he hissed in my ear. “Look at what we serve.”
That was when I saw Him.
Not clearly—the dark protected Him from any actual description that I can remember to this day—but I saw the outline. A swollen, sagging silhouette dragging a massive flesh-sack behind it, shifting as though something inside it wanted out. Limbs and torso stretching out unnaturally. It wasn’t human. It was more human than human at all.
The creature’s eyes gleamed with malice. If daddy hadn’t been there, I’m certain it would have devoured me. Suddenly, daddy dropped to his knees, pulling me further down with him, his grip bruising my arm. I realized we were bowing, faces eating the floor.
“Say the words,” he whispered.
“I don’t know any—”
But the thing spoke for me.
The tunnels vibrated with a wet, layered voice—the kind that you hear when something bad is about to happen to ya:
Crane… Crane… yours before birth… yours after death… yours always….
Daddy sobbed. I screamed. The creature reached toward me with a limb that looked like a wet rope of ‘sketti.
And like the ring of a bell, everything within me just… changed. My daddy wiped his eyes and smiled like he’d given me the best gift an old man could give his boy.
“That’s your first blessing,” he said. “You’ll get many, many more.”
Then he handed me a knife, and we slit the throats of those still alive that were buried in the walls. Their blood was drunk by the beast known as The Crawler of Saint Victor. A pilgrim who turned on his people—ate and killed them on this land—one of the first settlements in Towers Valley.
Now in this life he continues his deeds. My daddy said to us this is heaven.
When I was thirteen, the old man started taking me on “visits.” That’s what he called them. Polite word for breaking into strangers’ houses—in other counties, or hell, even in town—and dragging them into the night. He said the tunnels demanded balance. But there were so many homeless living in the more open area of it. I know, he took me out there in the patrol car often to beat up druggies and drunks.
I was the distraction. A skinny kid is easy to underestimate.
He’d knock on a stranger’s door at midnight and when they cracked it open, I’d slip in like a stray dog. Break something. Make my way to the first female I saw, and grab a tiddy before father would burst in. He would then go on to do what he did best: beat them to death without mercy.
He may have looked like a choirboy, but my old man fought like the devil!
The first time I held a man down while my father gagged and bound him, I felt his heartbeat under my palms. It was one of the most exciting things I’d ever felt. Changed me more for sure.
I didn’t feel guilt. Or relief. I felt chosen.
“You will bring her, Sheriff. You will guide her down the throat of this valley
and into my arms.
She must pass this chamber—where you kneel now, where the knees of your ancestors once broke, where your bloodline was sworn to me—and descend beyond it. She needs to find me.
Only then can I open the door
that rots between worlds.”
-Mr. Worm Tongue
At sixteen, he made me kill alone.
A fisherman by the river. Wrong place, wrong night for this fella. Father stood six feet away, arms crossed, watching like a teacher grading a test. When the man ran, I chased him. When he tripped, I landed on him. When he begged, I stabbed.
Unfortunately for him, I was a kid learning a craft. I carved until the begging turned to choking and the choking turned to nothing but gargles.
“Good,” he whispered. “Now let’s leave a message for those big city church fuckers wanting to move their god into our town.”
I don’t know what disturbed me more: killing the man or wanting my Father to say he was proud.
He didn’t kill himself. He went where he’d been summoned.
And the moment they lowered my old man into the ground, I knew the burial was a lie. Dirt couldn’t hold a man like him. Not when something older and hungrier had its claws in his soul long before I was even born.
At the funeral, everyone cried but me. I stood there listening to nothing. A silence so thick it felt like hands pressed over my ears. I knew I had to gert him to our master.
I went back to the cemetery with a shovel and a crowbar. I pried the coffin open and took his body. When we reached the hatch under the slaughterhouse, the air shifted.
I laid him near the old research door, too scared to bring my father closer to the altar. Even then, I didn’t dare look down the corridor where the darkness moved on its own. The place where I’d first seen Him.
The moment I let go of my father’s body, the tunnels quieted.
Then he twitched.
Like the ring of a bell, a wet jerk of muscle twitched and the tarp bulged. My Father was back!
He sat up slowly, head slumping to the side as if the neck had forgotten how to work. And that’s when the truth hit me:
Bloodlines can be cursed and contaminated. But everyone has a purpose.
And mine? Mine had been promised to Mr. Worm Tongue long before I ever had a name.
My daddy tough me how to lose your soul, hard.
“Do not touch him. Do not move him. Do not mourn him.
When your work is done,
I will pull fresh breath through his ribs and lungs.
And stand him up beside you once more.”
-Mr. Worm Tongue