Ring Shout(32)

A giant cross of timber is propped up on the stone ground. And standing beside it on the platform is a man. Can’t make out his face this far out. But he broad and big, recognizable enough in his Klan robes. Plus it’s his voice we been hearing.

“Butcher Clyde.” I spit.

Chef nods. “That him. Talking all kinds of nonsense.”

That he is. This movie should have music blaring like an orchestra. Instead, there’s Butcher Clyde, his voice echoing through the rain, going on about the white race and the like. The crowd stands there dazed, hanging on his every word, eyes glued to that great big screen.

“Must be Klans from all over,” Chef mutters.

“And Ku Kluxes.”

They ain’t hard to spot, faces shifting and bending even through this downpour. Some spread out between the people. Others stand in long lines, holding fiery torches, the strange flames undisturbed by rain.

“So many in one place,” Chef says. “Feels like Tulsa.”

Look like Tulsa. All here to see their god be born.

Grand Cyclops is coming. When she do, your world is over.

“Something off with these Klans to you?” Chef asks. “The ones ain’t turned?”

“You mean other than standing on top a mountain in a storm?”

“It’s their faces. Don’t look right.”

Hard to see between the rain. But I lift my cap and squint, glimpsing faces in the light of the movie screen. There is something off with these Klans—different from the Ku Kluxes. Can’t say what it is, though, or what it means.

“We don’t have the numbers to take on all that,” Chef says.

I look to her. No fear on her face. She seen too much for that. But there’s an expectation that we won’t win. She’ll still go charging into the fight. Same with Emma, Molly’s apprentices, and all those resistance folk we leading. Every last one, knowing they won’t see the sun rise. Only, I’m not about to let that happen, if I can help it.

“I’m going out there.”

Chef’s face screws up. “Come again?”

“Butcher Clyde. You heard him last night. He invited me here.”

“It’s a trap. A hundred Ku Kluxes gonna come raging at the sight of you!”

I shake my head. “He want something from me. Been wanting it.”

“What the hell he want from you?”

“To make an offer.”

Chef stares like I done lost my head. I ain’t told her or Nana Jean about this. But now I take a breath and speak all of it. She listens quiet, and when I finish takes a moment before saying, “Devil wouldn’t be the devil if he didn’t know how to tempt. You know what this offer is?”

I been thinking on that. About how Butcher Clyde slipped in my head that first time. Through that memory I kept locked deep.

I nod slow to Chef. “Think I do.”

“Then you probably already made your choice.”

There’s a sudden whoosh! We look out to see the giant cross go up in flames. Just like the torches, that blaze seems untouched by rain, transforming the timber into a beacon of hellfire against the black night. I turn to Chef, catching its glare in her eyes.

“I have to go now. Maybe I can stop this.”

“Or get yourself killed.”

“Might be so. But I have to try.” I remember Auntie Ondine’s words. “Time to balance the world on the tip of a sword.”

Chef looks at me hard, then says. “All right, then. But I’m coming with you.”

I start to protest but she cuts me off. “Sadie wouldn’t let you go out there by yourself, and I won’t neither. Make peace with it, because we going over that trench together!”

I think of throwing a punch, knocking her clean out and taking off. More likely, though, she’d just whoop my behind. And I’m in no mood to take a licking before I face my possible death. I give in, guilty at feeling relief I don’t have to do this alone.

“You never asked what choice I made about this offer.”

Chef shrugs. She puts a Chesterfield to her lips, moving to light it before remembering the rain. “Got to trust the soldier next to you will do the right thing. No use worrying about it.”

When I walk out onto the mountaintop it’s still pouring, thick droplets forming pools on the stone ground. Chef beside me, in her Hellfighter uniform, the unlit Chesterfield clamped in her teeth. Don’t think I been happier to see that easy smile. The rows of Klans keep their eyes stuck to the screen, ignoring us as we stroll a wide path up their middle. A Ku Klux holding a torch the first to see us. It peels back human lips and starts up squawking. Butcher Clyde’s sermon cuts off from the platform and as one big beast, that whole sea of white turns in a ripple toward us.

We keep on, like we ain’t two colored women walking into a pack of demons, human and otherwise. But none try to stop us. Not the Ku Kluxes. Nor the Klans neither, who definitely looking not just off but wrong. A knot grows in my stomach at that sea of wrong white faces. Something here I ain’t put together yet.

I pull my eyes from them, reaching the platform.

Butcher Clyde stands there, rain-slick skin shining in the glow of the fiery cross and grinning down from under that suit of flesh.

“Maryse! We almost thought you might not come!”