Romero / Kraus Pay the Piper

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-83541-253-4
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

A terrifying tale of supernatural horror set in a cursed Louisiana bayou, from the minds of legendary director George Romero and bestselling author Daniel Kraus. In 2019, while sifting through University of Pittsburgh Library's System's George A. Romero Archival Collection, novelist Daniel Kraus turned up a surprise: a half-finished novel called Pay the Piper, a project few had ever heard of. In the years since, Kraus has worked with Romero's estate to bring this unfinished masterwork to light. Alligator Point, Louisiana, population 141: Young Renée Pontiac has heard stories of 'the Piper'-a murderous swamp entity haunting the bayou-her entire life. But now the legend feels horrifically real: children are being taken and gruesomely slain. To resist, Pontiac and the town's desperate denizens will need to acknowledge the sins of their ancestors-the infamous slave traders, the Pirates Lafitte. If they don't . . . it's time to pay the piper.

GEORGE A. ROMERO is often considered the greatest horror director of all time. His classic 'Dead' movie cycle began with the groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. He also directed Creepshow, The Dark Half, The Crazies, and created the TV series Tales from the Darkside. George A. Romero died in 2017 after a fifty-year career in film.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Romero, George

Kraus, Daniel

Leseproben

10

Pete Roosevelt and Spuds Ulene met four years prior. August 1, 1994, at Juicy Lucy’s, a grease-sheened twelve-seater burger joint that poured watered-down beer like a spring cloudburst, despite a liquor license that expired the same day that Squeaky Fromme tried to kill President Ford, as Lucy herself like to say. The old broad didn’t sweat it. No ATF hard-ass was gonna tramp this far south into the delta. The joint was damned to keep living, just like Lucy was damned to keep slow-murdering Pointers with the nastiest nasty-sugar around: booze.

Pete ate there a lot. He ate there a lot because he parked there a lot. He might have given his rickety Crown Vicky a nautical name—the Melbourne Queen—but that didn’t mean it could float. Road vehicles got no farther into the Point than the headland. Even four-wheelers were too wide for the trails. Some folk rode horses or mules. A few had airboats. Many had dinghies or canoes. Mostly folk walked, getting to know the terrain through the grip of their bare toes.

The Melbourne Queen was a tank soldered together in late-seventies Motown. A hundred creaks, groans, and pings. Dozens of dents furred with rust. What was left of its chrome accents pitted from gulf-water salt. Not once in all the years Pete had driven the thing had he gotten bodywork or painting done. He liked the idea of keeping the original crests emblazoned on the doors along with the foot-tall lettering: SHERRIF.

Pete had been allowed to keep the car after Bullock Parish went belly-up. Who else would drive the rattletrap?

He’d sheriffed the hell out of the Point for fifteen years. No one was going to forget that. Including Pete. He still thought of himself as holding the office of sheriff. So did the de facto leaders of the Point known as the Saloon Committee, an inebriated syndicate of elders who got liquored up every Tuesday at the Pelican. Most the Point’s forty-seven families stayed liquored up most nights. Well, forty-four since the Oil Man had started handing out contracts.

With the Saloon Committee’s blessing, Pointers kept Pete going. They chipped in for his groceries and gasoline. If Pete missed a cookout, somebody ferreted him a tinfoil-covered tray of the choicest bits. He could get a free cup of joe anywhere, and a free beer at any of his regular haunts—Juicy Lucy’s, Plum Peppers, or the Pelican, where he threw down with the best of them: Pink Zoot, Gully Jimson, Rawley Deevers, and Gerard Pontiac—the patron saint of all local drunkards.

So: Juicy Lucy’s, August 1, 1994. Pete climbed out of the Melbourne Queen, no badge, no .45, pulling on a windbreaker. Eleven years of sheriff weight had made it the only usable remnant of his old uniform—that and the Stetson. He lumbered inside with an inrush of humid air that fluttered several of the tiny, low-grade cotton Jolly Roger flags sold all over the bayou. Pirate’s Pride, the product was called.

Pete shot a hello finger at Lucy behind the bar and took a seat in the darkest booth. Didn’t feel much like socializing. He was having indigestion, and about to fight fire with fire with a grenade of greasy meat.

That’s when he spotted Spuds Ulene. He’d seen the kid before, doing what he was doing now: snorting food like he hadn’t eaten in days. The word kid weren’t real charitable, but Spuds was as small as a kid, with kid mannerisms to boot, scratching at pimples that needed left alone, chewing with mouth agape, slurping electric-yellow soda through a straw. He kept an arm curled around his grub as if a rival gorilla might try to nab it.

Four gorillas had, on cue, loped their way into Juicy Lucy’s, agitating the same little Jolly Rogers. Pete didn’t recognize them, which meant they were jobbers, edging into the swamp to transport equipment, repair a cistern, run a telephone line, something. They didn’t act like they knew one another well, yet had unified as members of a brotherhood. The Brotherhood of Good-Ol’ Normal, forever chartered to rain shit down on anyone they deemed Abnormal.

Pete threw beer after burger and watched the brotherhood’s razzing of Spuds. Pete knew the brotherhood would grow bored pretty quick. Unless Spuds Ulene stood up, planted his feet, and talked back to his tormentors. That shit might work in movies, but in real life, it got your ass kicked.

Because nothing ever went right on the Point, that’s exactly what Spuds did.

Spuds faced them. “The hell y’all over me for? I look funny or something?”

“Yeah,” said a man in an oil-stained Astros cap. “You look real funny.”

“I cleaned up before I came! Checked myself in the mirror! I look fine!”

The brotherhood’s radar wasn’t busted. This Spuds Ulene kid was slow.

Over the next four years, Pete would learn all about Spuds’s capacities—mental, emotional, physical, and, most of all, constitutional. The years Spuds spent as a jockey remained fuzzy as a baby possum, but Pete dug up Spuds’s birth certificate from Holy Charity at St. Beatrice Hospital, filled out by a Sister Parissima. Along with a birth name so heartbreakingly fancified Pete made himself forget it, the words mentally deficient had been added in the notes area.

Spuds’s ma had died from placental abruption. Spuds lived but had been damaged by a lack of umbilical air. His illiterate pa beat the daft boy for sixteen years before dragging him to the Army recruiting office in Dawes. During Spuds’s few weeks in the Army, his C.O. could find no use for him besides kitchen patrol, where Spuds earned his nickname. Far as Pete could tell, that was all Spuds came away with when he was discharged with a familiar curse on his record: mentally deficient.

Pete deduced the broad strokes at Juicy Lucy’s, where the calculus of fairness was changing fast.

“You thought you looked fine?” Astro continued. “Guess you didn’t see it then.”

“See what?” Spuds demanded.

“That shit all over you. That yellow shit.”

“You calling me yellow?”

“Naw. I’m just saying you got yellow shit all over you. This here yellow shit.”

Astro picked up a plastic bottle and squeezed with both hands, shooting a stream of French’s Mustard. As promised, the yellow shit got all over Spuds, splatting him face to foot.

“Here we go,” Pete muttered. He napkined his fingers clean.

While the brotherhood cracked up, Spuds wiped his face and got his bearings. What Pete, Lucy, and the brotherhood didn’t know was that sixteen years of taking whuppings from Pa Ulene had taught Spuds a few things. Placid by nature, Spuds could be forced into a blinding red zone, and that’s when what he’d learned came flaring out.

Spuds planted his one good leg and fired across the bar like a pinball. The mustard-squirter found himself faceup on the floor, the target of a flurry of unskilled but powerful punches. Pete was caught off guard too; all he’d accomplished was standing up. Here was the magic trick of it: the Astros cap was now on Spuds’s head.

The brotherhood attacked with the grace of stampeding cattle. A hundred-and-twenty-nine dollars worth of Juicy Lucy property went blammo in seconds. The costliest item was the chair shattered over Spuds’s head. The kid didn’t seem to feel it. He kept raging till somebody’s lucky kick sent him skidding across the floor, coming to rest longside Pete. Pete was the only Pointer who didn’t go barefoot on the regular. Didn’t think it proper for a sheriff. He wore boots—big, black, leather, shit-kicking cowboy boots.

“Nuts! Nuts! Nuts!” Lucy shouted from behind the bar.

Pete helped Spuds up, getting yellow shit on him too. He gave the four panting gorillas the Duke’s patented smirk.

“‘Fill your hands, you son of a bitches,’” he growled.

Two were helping up bloodied, dehatted Astro. The third gave Pete a frown.

“The hell’s that mean?”

Mother Mary, Pete loved this part! He put his boot heels close together, stuck out his hips, lifted arms loosely bent at the elbows, and let his torso sway a bit. Just like the Duke.

“Them’s the immortal words of Rooster Cogburn. Ain’t none of you uneducated cusses seen True Grit?”

One of the others jumped in. “Stay out of this, old man.”

“Four big fellas against one little fella.” Pete pushed back his Stetson. “Them scales seem tipped.”

“That sumbitch stole my hat!” Astro shouted, spraying blood.

Pete eyed the cap Spuds was wearing. “That right, boy? You make off with this feller’s chapeau?”

Spuds scowled at his feet, took off the cap, and held it out to Pete.

“I shouldn’t have started no fight, sir. You can give it back to him.”

Pete copied the Duke’s famous half-grin.

“Way I see it, that hat is yours, son. Seems to me it was right manly of you to go grabbin it.”

“Now wait a darn minute!” Astro barked. “Who the hell you think you are, mister?”

Pete looped his thumbs into his belt. “If you look real hard, friends, out that door yonder, you might see a beat-up old Crown Vicky with a meaningful word on it. Now, I’m not inclined to use the power of that word right now, not when I still got half a burger here left to eat. What I’m inclined to do is to put my two-hundred-and-seventy pounds on this little feller’s side of the scales. That’s what ol’ Rooster Cogburn was tryin to say. If that plan sounds good to y’all, then all...