Steve Shell

Furniture was reduced to splinters.

The floors were soaked in blood and the walls imprinted with wide red stripes and swirls.

Almost as if a painter had attempted to render some great stylized sea creature in a mural.

Bodies or parts of them lay scattered in corners.

The bottom half of a leg from about halfway down the calf had become wedged between the two rails on the staircase.

A gooey black substance dripped from the ceiling, and a strange dark fungus was climbing its way up the walls.

Polly Barrow stepped gingerly over the devastation, mindful of her shoes, and gently scooped up the fair-haired child that Mr. Crane had left on the doorstep last evening.

The little tyke had plum-worn himself out playing with his new friends and didn't even wake on the ride back to the cabin in the woods.

So it was no trouble for Polly to strip the boy down to his nappy and carry out the ritual required to repaint the sigils that the unwitting woman had washed from his skin.

And when her task was done, Polly dropped exhausted onto the double bed and fell into the fathomless, dreamless sleep that was all she had ever known.

In the weeks that followed, Polly, Crane, and Churchman would repeat this procedure in various coal towns scattered around the region, dropping off their special delivery where he might be discovered by either the unfortunate folks on their list of reported Union agitators or by those closest to them.

A childless woman discovered the precocious babe playing alone by the creek behind her house as she was hanging clothes out on the line and rushed him inside.

A surprise and perhaps a prayer answered at last for her husband when he returned home from a hard day in the mines.

A pastor who was said to be offering up his church as a safe space for union organizers discovered the boy on the church doorstep when he came to open its doors for one such meeting, under the guise of men's evening fellowship, and so on and so forth.

Folks in Bower County were becoming decidedly unsettled.

What happened to the Capriati's had shocked the local community, no doubt about it, but it was generally assumed that the family had been murdered by some drifter passing through on the rails.

Nobody they knew would be capable of anything like that, surely.

And at first, no one thought about Romeo Capriati's union dog.

Rabble-rousers had been known to turn up dead, sure enough, but not entire families.

But as the rash of incidents continued, and the bodies piled up, the people of Beyer County began to connect the dots, and no one knew for sure what was going on, what on earth could even do that kind of thing to a human body, but everybody knew it must have something to do with unions, and suddenly nobody wanted any part of that business anymore.